Calling All Baseball Fans

November 28, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Higher Education, History, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: Baseball, Berlin, Berlin Brigade, German, Germans, Germany, Politics, Sports, Sports Fields, Tempelhof, Tempelhof Airport, US Army 2 Comments

In Berlin (all two or three of you?). Please sign this petition in support of the old baseball fields on Columbiadamm at Tempelhofer Feld (click the picture).

The Berlin Senat is planning to get rid of one of them to make room for a Friedhofserweiterung (cemetary expansion)? That about says it all, doesn’t it?

Thanks for the link, Indeterminacy. And yes, an ape may just have been keeping score there.

Ein weiterer Softballplatz in Zehlendorf wurde aufgrund zahlreichen Protestes eines Bewohners eines Einfamilienhauses vernichtet und steht ebenfalls nicht mehr zur Verfügung.

Pretraumatic Stress Disorder?

November 26, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Helplessness, High Art, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria Tags: Afghanistan, Bundeswehr, Disease Mongering, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Mental Health, Soldiers Leave a comment

Please tell me what I don’t understand here. I just have to have missed something. I reread this article several times, too.

According to a German report about posttraumatic stress disorder, about one fifth of German soldiers suffer from psychische Vorerkrankung (pre-existing psychic strain) BEFORE they are deployed abroad.

I mean, I know Germans are super efficient and all that. But how the hell do you get posttraumatic stress disorder before you ever even make it to the post?

Laut einer Studie zu posttraumatischen Belastungsstörungen (PTBS) haben 20 Prozent der Soldaten eine psychische Vorerkrankung. So ist ihr Risiko größer, nach der Rückkehr unter Problemen zu leiden.

Germany Soon To Get The Government It Voted For

November 26, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: CDU/CSU, Elections, Gabriel, Humor, Merkel, Parliamentary Systems, Proportional Representation, Satire, SPD Leave a comment

Not. In other countries you usually get the government you vote for. But not here in Germany. At least not this time.

Close only counts in horseshoes and dancing (and hand grenades). And Angela Merkel getting close to having an absolute majority in the German election two months ago just wasn’t close enough. So let’s hear it for proportional representation! The FDP is gone. The Greens are still licking their wounds. What’s left? The SPD and the Left party are left, that’s who’s left.

So now the losers are dictating the agenda. In more ways than one.

No, it’s not good news. And it gets worse. As part of his pivot to the left, Gabriel has promised that the Social Democrats will be open to coalitions with the Left party, the heirs of the East German Communists. Since the SPD, the Left and the Greens already hold a majority in parliament, the temptation for Gabriel to break with Merkel in, say, two years to form a “red-red-green” coalition with himself as chancellor could become irresistible.

Deutsche Sprache Schwere Sprache

November 25, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, High Art, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: Babo, Chabos, Deutsch, German, Germans, Germany, Haftbefehl, Humor, Language, Satire, Turkish Leave a comment

German’s a bitch. That’s why German kids are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore and have begun to simplify it by introducing a new form of German that is, well, more like Turkish.

This year’s Langenscheidt-Verlag German youth word winner is “Babo” and is Turkish for boss, sort of.

Other recent not so memorable winners include “Yolo” (2012) for “yolo” and “Swag” (2011) for “swag.” Neither of these have a Turkish connection, however. But they are kind of on the short and sweet side.

Chabos wissen, wer der Babo ist.

Uppity In Your Face

November 24, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, CDU/CSU, Coalition Governments, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Political Parties, Politics, SPD, Voting Leave a comment

My, how time flies. It’s been two months now. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Time for new elections, I’d say.

The SPD got 25.7% of votes compared with Mrs Merkel’s 41.5%. Mrs Merkel’s supporters are growing frustrated…

The bizarre situation has arisen because Mrs Merkel, her strong showing notwithstanding, fell just short of a majority of seats…

Mr Gabriel made another concession to the SPD’s left wing: a formal resolution on November 14th to be open in future to coalition talks with Die Linke. The two “red” parties used to detest each other, Die Linke considering the SPD sell-outs to capitalism and the SPD viewing Die Linke as a chaotic troupe of Marxists nostalgic for East Germany and dangerously hostile to NATO and America. Now, however, there is speculation that the SPD could break a coalition with Mrs Merkel in mid-term and go on to form an all-left government, unprecedented at the national level, dubbed “R2G” for red-red-green.

Just get it over with already, already, and call for a new election. They’ll never stop wasting your time otherwise.

The most important country in the European Union is thus being run by a caretaker cabinet, unable to take important decisions.

German Of The Day: Zweckentfremdungsverbot

November 22, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Home Cooking Tags: Berlin, Dumb Deutsch, Free Market, Gentrification, German, Germans, Germany, Government Control, Government Waste, Housing, Humor, Language, Rents, Satire, Tourism 2 Comments

Now that’s a German word for you. And no, not just because it has Verbot on the end of it, although that certainly helps.

Zweckentfremdung means misappropriation, and in this case the Verbot has to do with using apartments for something they were not meant to be used for; for renting. Well, actually, this particular misappropriation Verbot means renting them at a high rate to those awful and dreadful tourists who come to Berlin for a limited time instead of renting them out for much, much less to people who will be paying that much, much less for a much, much longer time. Which is, uh, better.

You guessed it, we’re back here in Berlin again and trying to rent your property for the most the free market will give you is an absolute sin in these parts and must be stopped immediately. And that’s what the Berlin SPD is now trying to do with this here new-fangled, old school Socialist-type Zweckentfremdungsverbot. And you and I both know that it will be yet another roaring success. Until it backfires and gets quietly repealed a few years down the road again, that is.

Experten setzen große Hoffnungen auf das Verbot. Denn dann sind Vermietungen an Touristen und Firmen künftig nicht mehr möglich.

PS: That picture up there kills me, too. Being willing to pay 500 euros (roughly $675) to someone who finds an apartment for you is considered a complete Skandal here so that’s why “the state” needs to jump in and take those 500 euros from somebody else to pay, so-to-speak, only it will be more like 5000 euros then, which is then OK.

Taxing Nuclear Fuel Rods That Aren’t Being Used?

November 19, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Courts, Electricity, Energy, Energy Turnaround, EU, Europe, Fukushima, German, Germans, Germany, Green Shirts, Justice, Law, Nuclear power, Taxation, Taxes Leave a comment

You can never be too rich or too thin, I guess. And if you’re Germany, you can never tax too much, either.

Germany’s biggest utilities, still reeling from the country’s early exit from nuclear power, scored a major victory Tuesday when a Hamburg court said the national tax on nuclear fuel rods may violate European law.

The Hamburg finance court said it “cannot assess beyond any doubt” whether the tax on nuclear fuel used for electricity generation complies with European law. It will now ask the European Court of Justice to decide whether the levy conforms with rules that prohibit member states from creating new taxes on electricity for “general budget financing purposes.”

The tax was introduced at the beginning of 2011 and came as part of an extension of nuclear reactors’ operating lives that the government had agreed on. However, the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima power plant in March of that year triggered a U-turn in German energy policy, with Chancellor Angela Merkel ordering the immediate shutdown of the oldest plants and the early phaseout of nuclear energy by 2022. Out of 17 reactors that were in operation in March 2011, only nine are still producing power. But the fuel-rod tax remains in place, to the utilities’ annoyance.

Das Hamburger Finanzgericht will vom Europäischen Gerichtshof (EuGH) in Luxemburg zentrale Fragen zur umstrittenen Brennelementesteuer klären lassen.

Dumb Deutsch

November 18, 2013 By Hermann Observer in High Art, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: Books, Deutsch, Dumb Deutsch, eBooks, German, Humor, Jokes, Languages, Satire 9 Comments

Dumb Deutsch, Absurd German Language Errors (auch für deutsche Leser geeignet). Apple, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, etc.

Have you ever ordered leather cheese? Have you ever told your cab driver that your hotel is located on One-Way Street? I doubt it. But English speakers trying to speak German say bizarre things like this all the time and I, for one, feel their pain. Acutely, even. They are speaking Dumb Deutsch. And they have no one else to blame but themselves.

The German language is complex, treacherous and terribly difficult to learn, you see. Dumb Deutsch, on the other hand, is relatively straightforward and can be learned in about fifteen minutes. This is the problem, of course. And here are some of the shocking results.

Please sit back and enjoy this short collection of bloodcurdling blunders, frightful faux pas and grisly gaffes, all in the Dumb Deutsch original. For the sake of fairness, a number of ridiculous errors Germans make when trying to speak English have also been included.

Bitte Beachten: Diese Sammlung von peinlichen Ausrutschern und haarsträubenden Fehltritten ist selbstverständlich auch für Deutsche Leser geeignet.

If It Works, Fix It

November 17, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Bureaucracy, Crime Fighting, Drones, Fluglärm, German, Germans, Germany, Graffiti, Humor, Satire, Security, Surveillance, Terror, Terrorists, Vandalism 1 Comment

This is another one of those “only in Germany” numbers. Or maybe it isn’t (I’m slowly losing track of what’s going on out there in “the real world”).

The Deutsche Bahn’s program to use small drones to patrol railyards by night in a bid to fight graffiti spraying graffiti terrorists has suffered a setback. Although the test flights worked out just wunderbar, the German Luftsicherheitsbehörden (air security authority) has stopped the program for now as no night flight permits have been permitted – for drones designed to patrol railyards by night. Ordnung muss sein already.

This is actually a bit of a relief for me, to tell you the truth. Before reading the article I was convinced that the flights had been cancelled due to Fluglärm issues. Fluglärm (aircraft noise) is a big honking major awesome all-important obsession for all Germans at all times in all regions and all locations all over the country (and tomorrow the world) and I was sure that I was about to read how these mini-drones were simply too loud for the Anwohner (local residents), whoever or wherever they were.

Whew! That wasn’t the case, like I said. At least not this time. But let’s just wait and see what happens when/if these things are ever actually allowed to fly.

“Die Tests sind exzellent gelaufen, ein hervorragendes Einsatzmittel. Jedoch erteilen die Luftsicherheitsbehörden der Länder derzeit keine Fluggenehmigung für die Nachtstunden.”

I’ll Bash Germany With The Best Of Them

November 15, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Heconomy, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Austerity, Debt Crisis, Economics, EU, Eurozone, German, Germans, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Paul Krugman, Portugal, Spain, Zero-Sum Fallacy Leave a comment

But… How is it that its critics blame Germany for the high unemployment, declining living standards, and riots to their South?

If this were a football game, the referee should call unnecessary roughness for piling on Germany. The American Left led by Paul Krugman (The Harm Germany Does and Those Depressing Germans) excoriates Germany for forcing austerity on the rest of Europe. The U.S. Treasury – and others – (no newcomer to spending) demands that miserly Germany spend more to pull the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) out of their economic doldrums…

I interpret the liberals’ German bashing as having an entirely different motivation – their inherent dislike of economic success… In the liberal mind set, success must be equally shared. If one person, company, or country is better off, it must be at the expense of those who are less well off. We need to even things out in their zero-sum world.

PS: And I’m going to go even further out on the limb tonight defending Germany by predicting that they will finally – after 19 encounters? – beat Italy.

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

Category Archives: Home Cooking