“If we had known that the Egyptians would want to shoot our weapons, we would have never shipped them in the first place.”
Achtung: That was satire.
Offenbar werden die deutschen Güter in Ägypten unsachgemäß eingesetzt.
Category Archives: Habitudes
Counter-Culture Club Closed
You can squat, but you can’t hide.
Not for more than twenty years or so, I mean. Time moves differently in Berlin.
The house in the former East Berlin was occupied as Germany was reunited in 1990. Residents were given rental contracts at one stage but those were later terminated when private investors bought the building.
The German 80 percent rule
You know, like the 80 percent of all Germans (at least) who love Obama no matter what he does or does not do.
Or how about the 80 percent of all Germans who are fervent pacifists and yet clearly have no problem with their country being the world’s third largest weapons exporter (NOBODY cares here, honest)?
But this one really kills me, and it’s quite a surprise. It turns out that 80 percent of all German Auswanderer (emigrants) who demonstratively leave their homeland forever (well they do on the numerous TV shows that document their adventures) toss in the towel after a bit and come back home to Deutschland again.
I guess once you go red, gold, black (the German flag), you never go back.
Deutsche entpuppen sich als “Ich bin nur kurz weg”-Auswanderer
Germans in Davos: We’re not close-fisted because we want to be
We’re close-fisted because it’s one of our defining national obsessive compulsive disorders and the one over which we have the least control.
When it comes to the euro crisis, Germany is about to be slapped around a bit by some folks at the Davos World Economic Forum for not being willing to make more money available than it already has. There is not enough money in circulation in Europe, they believe, yet this is necessary for certain ailing economies to be able to crawl back out into growth again.
Germany’s critics also believe that more money needs to be set aside for the European “safety chute” fund, something Germany steadfastly refuses to do. This extra capital would convince financial market investors that the euro is properly “covered.”
Needless to say, the Germans will listen politely and refuse to budge an inch, their fists tightening automatically, close-fistedness being one of their defining national obsessive compulsive disorders and the one over which they have the least control.
What can I say? This is New Europe, people. Germany does what it wants and everybody else here has to like it.
Für die deutsche Delegation geht es in diesem Jahr nicht so gemütlich zu wie üblich.
If I wanted to find a friend I’d buy a dog
Bowing to excessively strict German privacy law pressure, Facebook has grudgingly agreed to allow German users to protect their email contacts from unwanted social network solicitations that could lead to possible “friendships” or other related gross infringements of privacy.
Although there are more than 10 million Facebook users in Germany, none of them appear to be particularly friendly, much less know one another, nor do they “get” the Facebood Friend Finder concept in the first place, nor want to, because we’re not kids anymore damn it and we are all perfectly aware of what these so-called “friendships” are all about and where they eventually lead to and if any one of us wanted a find a friend he or she would go to the local pound and buy a freakin’ dog like God had intended us to.
“We are pleased that we have come to a solution with the Hamburg DPA regarding concerns about Friend Finder and look forward to continue our constructive discussions and dialogue in the future,” although they weren’t particularly friendly.
Sarah Palin?
It didn’t take long for Der Speigel & Co. to determine who the real culprit behind the senseless shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Gifford is (resulting in six deaths and nineteen injuries): Sarah Palin.
It doesn’t seem to be of any importance that the suspected shooter prepared Internet videos filled with rambling statements on topics like mind control or that his classmates wondered if he might not be on hallucinogens or that “as I knew him, he was left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy” or that all of this is “consistent with the delusions produced by a psychotic illness like schizophrenia.”
The real telling stuff that hard-hitting investigative reporters have dug up here is that Sarah Palin has criticized Gifford’s politics in the past and even went as far as to place a map on her “Political Action Committee” website page in which voting districts that had supported Obama’s health reform were marked with “crosshairs.”
How sinister, or something. And how much more ridiculous can you get than that?
“It almost seemed like he was on his own planet, because his comments would have nothing to do with what we were talking about.”
Talk about coming right (I mean, left) out of left field!
OH MAA GAAAWD! Who would have ever in a zillion years expected a shocking Bekenntnis (confession) like this?
Sit down immediately and take your chill pills if you got ’em. Left Party Head Honcho of the East Gesine Lötzsch, of all people, has announced in the marxist (go look it up yourself) daily Junge Welt that she actually kind of sort of leans a bit toward communism at times if not always has and always will. She said, among other things: “We can only find the paths to communism if we go down these paths and try them out.”
And here is where I obviously missed something yet again, I guess. I never would have expected an acknowledgement like this from her in a zillion years either, but only because I was under the distinct impression that being a communist was one of the basic requirements for joining the Left Party in the first place.
No, but seriously, folks. Is this really supposed to be a news item or something?
“Wären morgen die Voraussetzungen dafür gegeben, die Linke hätte keinerlei Skrupel, wie nach 1945 die Demokratie zu nutzen, um sie erneut abzuschaffen.“
They don’t call it the S(tress)-Bahn here for nothing
Only in Berlin? I’m not so sure. Remember way back when (getting on two years ago) when the Berliner S-Bahn commuter trains had to go on a Notfahrplan (emergency schedule) bis auf Weiteres (until further notice) because of massive problems they were having with their brakes (they hadn’t been checked or maintained properly)?
Remember then about a year or so later when there was a Not-Notfahrplan (emergency emergency schedule) for the same S-Bahn system when something called “winter” hit?
Well winter has struck yet again and we now have our next Not-Notfahrplan (irregular, 20-minute intervals for the few trains that are still running–about 200 of a 500 fleet) and there’s no end in sight. Two years on, people.
It’s not all that out of the ordinary if you stop to think about it, really. German Baustellen (construction sites) are generally built to last. And to last and to last and to last. And we have to be fair here too when it comes to these difficult winter conditions: Germany isn’t a country that has ever had to deal with things like “snow” in the past, you know–or at least that’s what one must assume.
Personally, I’m confident that these trains will all be up and running on regular schedule next year. In the spring of 2012, I mean.
“Because we can’t remember the hard winters of the 1970s, we resort to the word ‘chaos.'”
“David Hasselhoff was the only one who stayed sober”
The biggest party of the year and I missed it, again.
Damn. Some procedure as every year.
Hasselhoff blieb oben nüchtern, die anderen tanzten feucht-fröhlich im Matsch.
PS: Ich wünsch Dir soviel gute Tag im Jahr, wie der Fuchs am Schwanz hat Haar.
Have a good slide!
Or so the Germans say (Guten Rutsch!), for Happy New Year!
That ought to be easy enough this winter. It’s been the coldest December here in Germany since 1969 (before global warming started screwing everything up).
So slide well into the new year–and slide responsibly.
Der Dezember war zugleich überdurchschnittlich feucht. Am Flughafen in Frankfurt fielen insgesamt 59 Zentimeter Neuschnee, so viel wie noch nie seit Beginn der Aufzeichnungen.
Observing Hermann 