“Of the roughly 3,300 comments left on the virtual wall, around 1,500 have been in Chinese, said Carsten Hein, coordinator of the “berlintwitterwall.com” project.”
Category Archives: History
You ain’t nothin’ but a Schmierfink
Come on, you know you are, deep down inside. You’re a wanna-be scrawler, scribbler, graffiti artist, I mean. It’s just that you’re way too polite or law abiding or inhibited or whatever. So here’s your big chance. I think.
The Berlin Twitter Wall, online now, actually encourages people to schmier all they want. It has something to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall that took place way, way long ago on Nov. 9, 1989. I think.
“No one has the intention of constructing a Twitterwall,”
Nostalgia grips city, no vaccination in sight
Swine flu was gestern (yesterday). With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall rapidly approaching, residents of Berlin are now being faced with a much more formidable viral infection: Cold War Nostalgia.
It’s infected hundreds of thousands here already, quite some time ago actually, and although it tends to strike harder at those living in the so-called “East”, it can hit anyone at anytime, even non-German types like you, whoever you are.
And it’s gotten much worse these days too. Or at least I have to assume as much, having read that article up there.
“It’s hard to believe that on one side of the wall there were Mercedes, and on the other side this.”
Waiting for Godot
Obama in Berlin? That was then, this is now.
“Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?”
“Barack is Too Busy”
Real women wanted
Sometimes it takes a real man to make a real decision like this: Editor-in-chief Andreas Leberts has announced that starting next year, Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, will ban those skinny professional model types from its pages in favor of “real women”, whoever and wherever they are.
This decision is seen as an attempt to combat an unhealthy standard of unhealthy looking thin and flat I mean thin beauty and could also be seen as being the first step toward finally turning Brigitte into the men’s magazine it deserves to be.
Brigitte isst wieder.
Hitler more than a wussy
American researchers have set the scientific world and everybody else in an uproar by determining that Adolf Hitler’s bullet-punctured skull fragment actually belonged to a woman, thus making the evil Nazi dictator one of those herself.
“This explains a lot of those bizarre hysterical outbreaks of his, I mean hers,” one researcher said. “And that half-ass mustache. And being a vegetarian. Like it all fits together now or something.”
“Ist der Schädel überhaupt echt?”
I thought they’d never leave
The SPD.
“The SPD’s decline exemplifies the crisis for Europe’s once-mighty center-left parties, which are in disarray in the U.K., France, Italy, Poland and other countries amid divisions over how to balance social protections and business freedoms in an era of rising global competition.”
“The SPD is paying a heavy price for its own boldness in trimming Germany’s welfare state and partially deregulating the labor market under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Those pragmatic moves lost the SPD many of its traditional working-class voters, and have left the party deeply split between centrists and left-wing traditionalists.”
“The voters have decided and the result is a bitter day for German Social Democracy.”
Berlin’s Mysterious U55
9.72, 9.69, 9.58…
9.72 Usain Bolt May 31, 2008
9.69 Usain Bolt Aug 16, 2008
9.58 Usain Bolt Aug 16, 2009
It must be the Berliner Luft or something.
“Astounding, seemingly impossible, unreal.”
It’s all in how you say it
And only if you say it in English, of course. A German court has ruled that bad Nazi words, although still bad, are not nearly as bad if they are translated to English first and then said “there”, so-to-speak, making them legal, sort of, but just barely. There is a certain logic here, of course. Please tell me once you find it.
Meanwhile… Elsewhere in the English-speaking world… A signed copy of Mein Kampf (signed by you-know-who) was sold in England for a record $35000.
The guy who bought it was a Russian, however, which makes this okay, I think. If a Russian who can’t read German buys a bad German book signed by you-know-who in England then you could take the whole thing to court (here in Germany) and nobody would really much care, I think.
“In memory of our time together in prison in Landsberg.”
Observing Hermann 