Fuck the ß Contest!

Hello!  Before we begin, here is the stack of letters you guys have sent me since I've been here.  I keep every single one of them, in the order I received them, in a giant envelope marked "Letters from Friends."  Thickness-wise, they are roughly the equivalent of  one Lord of the Rings trilogy:

one Bolivian and one Swedish hat, stacked on top of each other:

and one box of German Q-tips:

I love you guys.  I love your letters.  When I'm lonely or bored or missing people, I go back through the letters and I laugh my head off.  So without a doubt, my favorite part of your letters is, obviously, the content.  But my SECOND favorite part is turning the envelope over to see how you wrote the ß.

I am kind of in love with the ß (Esszet) because it's the only letter in German that isn't instantly recognizable to English speakers.  At least with Ö, Ä, and Ü, you can be like "Hey, look at those strangely placed dots over perfectly good letters," but when you're hit with the ß, you just kind of go, "Ahhh...fuck."  

Therefore, I thoroughly enjoy watching you guys attempt to write the ß, because no two of you do it in exactly the same way.  I've had a couple uppercase B's, a few lowercase b's, one or two cheaters who know the ß is pronounced like a double s, and substitute it as such.  There's also been a bunch of people confuse the ß with the Greek letter β, or who have just invented their own versions of the ß that involve curls, whirls, or just a general crossed-out scribble.  Then there's Sam, who has the distinction of writing the ß differently every single letter.

Before I show you how to write the ß, let me break it down so that the weird B-thing sort of starts to make sense.  The ß used to be written as an sz, and the s itself, back in the day, was a ſ.  Thus you had typesetters attempting to grapple with the blockprinting T-Rex that is the ſz.  So they saved space, and from there you can kind of see how ſz turned into ß.  Nowadays on most signs you will see it written as "straße," but in Berlin and some other places, you'll still see it as "straſze."

Now here's how you write it!

Now that you know how to write the ß, don't do it!  Because I have decided to host a Tina's Blog Is Having A Contest! and it is called:

Tina's Blog Is Having A Contest!

and it is called

FUCK THE ß

!!!!!!!!!11

DA RULEZ!

--Send me a letter

--Come up with the most awkward, creative, bizarre, or unintelligible ß possible

--The winner is the weirdest ß that still gets recognized by the post office as being my house.

DA PRIZEZ!

--German chocolate!

--And I'll probably photograph your weird ß so everyone can marvel at how strange my friends are.

DA DEADLINEZ!

--Christmas! 

Aaaaaaand...LET THE FUCK THE ß GAMES BEGIN!