Underground Fashion Goes Underground

Now if only it would stay there.

Damn. This is becoming quite a ritual (yawn). But this is just what folks at Berlin Fashion Week do, so deal with it. Thirty-four models, four hundred passengers and seventeen labels on one subway train, what’s that get you? An underground catwalk – for the seventh time now already. Sheesh.

“This year is all about kitschy kitsch.”

What Germans Want

An online German government poll has just found out that Germans want legalized dope, a ban on sex with animals, more home births, a ban on genocide denial and more affordable artificial insemination, although not necessarily in that order.

Of course nobody asked how they would feel about the possibility of getting rid of online polls like these one day, but give them some time.

The online poll is part of an ongoing government initiative called “Dialogue on the Future” that aims to get ordinary Germans thinking about how to improve life in Germany.

PS: And in another survey it turns out that 57.6 of German women asked would rather watch “Sex and the City” (TV) than have sex.

Inferiority Superiority Complex

North, south. Inferiority, superiority. It’s all the same to me.

Germans export more to their European partners than they consume, benefiting from this asymmetrical situation even as they expect everyone else to be exporters and savers like them.

You Gotta Have Swine

And the Germans didn’t have much swine last night when Italy trounced them in the Euro 2012 semi-finals 2:1.

Having pig (Schwein haben) means to have a stroke of luck, you see. And Emma the pig up there (no relation to Arnold Ziffel) knew it all along, if you can beleive that. Which I don’t.

In the race to emulate Paul the Octopus’ World Cup predicting perfection of two years ago, Emma the Mangalitsa pig from Freiburg, Germany, vaulted into sole possession of the lead on Thursday evening.

Circumcision Decision Causing Division

And may need a revision.

Leaders of Germany’s Jewish and Muslim communities have criticized a court ruling they fear could make circumcision a punishable offense in the country.

Talk about having short vision.

German courts need more tight supervision.

There was no provision for all the derision now caused by that little incision.

“This is an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the right to self-determination of religious communities.”

Are We Having A European Lifestyle Yet?

Is this the end of “the European way of life” as we know it?

European leaders have been muddling through instead of properly tackling the debt crisis. Now it threatens the very foundations of the European Union and could destroy a lifestyle that millions of Europeans take for granted.

Funny. I thought taking things for granted was what the European lifestyle was all about.

“We need fiscal discipline because we have a debt problem… No euro bonds as long as I live.”

I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots And Your Motorcycle

Is it termination time yet? For the booming German economy, I mean?

The Spiegel says: German manufacturing activity has hit a three-year low and export orders have also seen a big drop. This data suggests that the crisis is starting to hit the previously robust German economy.

Hasta la vista, baby? Maybe.

Forest Boy Asked To Live In Forest Again

This time for real, though.

Berlin officials say the 20-year-old Dutchman who posed as a “forest boy” caused some $25,000 in unnecessary public expenditure during his nine-month hoax and are so pissed off about it that they are booting him out of the cushy public housing scam he had going.

“This was welfare fraud,” said one irrate municipal official. “Which is perfectly normal here, of course, but not when it’s such a big deal in the news like this. It makes us look like, I dunno, fools or something. So I’d say it’s time to hit the road, Ray. And never come back no more.”

The man arrived in Berlin in September, speaking English and claiming to be a 17-year-old teenager named Ray who had lived in forests with his father for five years, sleeping in caves or a tent, after his mother died in a car crash.

No Flag Waving Here

Flag waving still leaves a bad taste in many a German mouth, I guess. Especially if the flag in question is 220 square meters in size.

EM 2012 nor not, Berlin officials have refused to let a Turkish store owner mount a huge German flag above his storefront in Neukölln. Ordnung muß sein (order must prevail) again already. “It was not connected properly and covered up a few windows.”

Go Germany!

“Die Entscheidung lag im Ermessen der Beamten vor Ort.”