Monthly Archives: May 2011
World Vileness Crown Threatened
I finally found my Doninique Strauss-Kahn German connection, sort of.
A German insurance company has admitted hosting a decadent sex party at a Budapest bathhouse to reward its best agents for their work (this Spiegel article was appropriately placed under the Zeitgeist section).
Hey, why reinvent the wheel? Those guys up there (picture link) put it best: “Germans Threaten French Hold on World Vileness Crown with Stunning Budapest Salesmen Orgy.”
The responsible board member and other managers have since left the company.
Hire Learning
This gives sex education a whole new meaning. A new survey shows that one in three university students in Berlin would consider sex work as a means to finance their education (which is basically free here, by the way, but that’s another dirty story).
And although no official numbers are out on this yet, I will have to assume that the other two out of three Berlin students would just prefer to watch (the lazy bums).
According to the study, about 4 percent of the 3,200 Berlin students surveyed said they had already done some form of sex work, which was defined as including prostitution, erotic dancing and Internet shows.
What’s Mine Is Mine
And what’s yours we probably don’t even want to talk about.
German households have never had as much money at their disposal as they do now = Germans have never been as rich as they are now. Private financial assets are now valued at 5000 billion euros here (is that more than a bazillion?).
Like I always say:
A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
A buck or a pound
A buck or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around
Vermehrt wurde das Vermögen vor allem in Form von Bankeinlagen und Bargeld.
Green Eco Dictatorship
Green Types everywhere out there know that this Stuttgart 21 train station thingy cannot be allowed to be built, no matter what (the rest of us out there still don’t know just why that is but maybe we’ll figure it out yet).
And now that Stuttgart (Baden-Wuerttemberg) is Green politically, Green Terror Types are starting to come out of the woodwork and beginning to take matters into their own green hands (just like Oma und Opa used to take matters into their brown ones).
Or as Henryk Broder reports it in that provocative way he does:
The Federal Republic made a great step forward toward becoming a Green eco dictatorship yesterday. The project manager for Stuttgart 21, Hany Azer (migration background, by the way) has resigned from his post.
The reasons he named were “hostility and threats” from Stuttgart 21 opponents. Most recently he has only been able to work while under protection of the company’s personal security personnel. This news item should have caused great alarm (but it didn’t).
Oh I dunno. As long as they don’t start wearing green shirts and stuff like that everything will turn out OK… Won’t it?
Jeder Fall von sexueller Belästigung in einem Großraumbüro löst überregionale Schlagzeilen aus. Aber wenn einer der besten Ingenieure der Republik, der unter anderem Projektleiter für den Bau des Berliner Hauptbahnhofs gewesen ist, aus dem Job gemobbt wird, regt sich nicht einmal Frank Bsirske darüber auf.
DSK, IMF, CSI-Yay-Yay
(DSK stands for Dominique Strauss-Kahn) And don’t forget about the DNA, USA and the AL-I-BI part now either.
As Die Welt rightly puts it, this is like something out of a CSI: New York episode. Only much more poorly done. A bit more surreal though, perhaps.
Surreal is actually French, by the way. It means having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream and what on God’s green earth could you have possibly been thinking, buddy?
This is just too weird. And no, I haven’t found a German connection here yet.
Der bislang aussichtsreiche Präsidentschaftsanwärter der französischen Sozialisten sah aus, als sei er durch einen dummen Zufall in eine Folge von „CSI: New York“ hineingeraten.
PS: Thanks for that link, A.K.
In what part of Europe is Azerbaijan again?
Yet another breathtaking performance. But the real question is “can Eurovision burnish Azerbaijan’s image (I didn’t know it even had one)?”
And sure they were predictably outrageous, but they’ll never make the top ten.
„Ich habe auf Aserbaidschan gewettet!“
Nina K.
Earth to academia, Earth to academia…
Can you read me?
Eurovision is once again upon us, which is scary enough. But now it’s also time for us to find out that it has something called a “deeper meaning.” All it took for this was 35,000 pounds (€40,000) of British government funding, a few academics and a whole lot of not having a life. Here are just a few of the revolutionary revelations and fun facts about Eurovision that none of us really wanted to know about:
For the first time, there will be a major academic review of Eurovision, including a series of workshops that will be completed this weekend in Düsseldorf, Germany, where the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest is being hosted, and culminate with the publication of a book of essays.
We have been assured that “it really takes international and multidisciplinary perspectives to even start to pick away at what Eurovision means.” Or why anyone would want to (pick away at it), I assume
Eurovision is “56 years of European pop, gender and representational history.” Not to mention the really sucky music part.
“Eurovision is an arena for European identification in which both national identity and also participation in a European identity are confirmed.” Yeah, OK. Whatever.
But of course not even seasoned academics can be expected to be experts at Eurovision geography, folks. Some of my personal Eurovision favorites, for instance, are European nations like Israel, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Morocco and Kazakhstan.
Little technicalities like these can be educational, however. “At least it gets people thinking about a country which normally wouldn’t cross their minds. Maybe they’ll look on a map to try to figure out where it is,”
And…
Eurovision is the world’s largest live non-sporting television event.
Eurovision has grown more since 1989 than either NATO or the European Union.
Eurovision is not just kitsch and lamé, it is “a night when Europe comes together symbolically” (and nasty stereotypes about national identity (in stereo) lead to animosity and symbolic surrogate war).
And last but not least, Eurovision is queer. “Another subject you won’t have to dig too deep into the academics’ footnotes to find is the ‘queerness’ of an annual event that has come to be known as ‘Gay Christmas.'”
So sit back this weekend and enjoy some European unity, televoting and really crappy music. Ho, ho, ho or something.
Not even semi-utopian Eurovision has succeeded in bridging every cultural divide.
You’re Guilty So You Go Free
Well don’t ask me. That’s just how the system works here.
Germany’s “last major Holocaust trial” had to end this way, didn’t it? A German court found John Demjanjuk guilty of a abetting the killing of 27,900 people but then set him free despite the, uh, five year sentence.
Well he did have to sit through an eighteen month trial, you know.
The trial, he said, amounted to “torture.”
Observing Hermann 