Stressed German model

No, not her.

Heidi Seal

The German health-care model.

“It took the Germans 125 years to figure out that their health-care system doesn’t work.”

“With Congress inching ever closer to passing a greater federal presence in providing health insurance under ObamaCare, let’s hope it doesn’t take the U.S. until the year 2134 to figure out it isn’t working.”

Restraining ignorance?

Yeah, there sure is a lot of that out there, everywhere you look. Nothing against Herta Müller, I’m sure she does great work, it’s just that practically no one has ever heard of, much less read her. Nope, not even over here in Germany (of course YOU have, sorry, I’m just being ignorant again).

Herta Müller

If the Nobel Prize literature circle’s only claim to fame is being predictable in making unpredictable choices, that’s fine. But if that also includes removing entire nations from the selection process (in this case the one that happens to lie between the borders of Canada and Mexico), then it doesn’t really have anything to do with literature anymore. But, then again, maybe this prize never did have anything to do with literature (ignorant, like I said).

“The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature isn’t always a bolt-out-of-the-blue surprise, a writer whose work is known only to an elite fraction of American readers. It only seems that way.”

“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States. The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Munich applies for the 2018 Winter Olympics, asks Obama not to help

Organizers in Munich have officially launched the city’s bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics.

My kind of town.

City officials sent a letter informing the International Olympic Committee of the bid yesterday.

They also sent a really nice letter to US-American President Barack Obama, who they still admire deeply and wholeheartedly, honest, in which they expressly expressed that he should not take any time off whatsoever to help them in their efforts in any way, should he have been planning to do so, which they personally doubt, being that Munich is a German city after all and he is so busy and everything all the time, which they understand and respect perfectly and completely, but they just wanted to let him know, just in case.

“Well, congratulations to president Obama and first lady Michelle. They celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary this week. Well, at first, they couldn’t agree where they should celebrate. He wanted to go to Chicago, she voted for Rio.”

Only the cheapest survive

On the top of Germany’s most wealthy list, I mean.

Aldi lonely people...

Cheapness is what Germany wants, especially these days. So that’s why the founders of the Aldi discount grocery store chain are once again on top of Manager Magazin’s annual list of the country’s most wealthy people.

The Porsche family is out, of course. They’re still not cheap enough. And this reflects a real crisis or something. The number of German individuals or families with at least one billion euros in capital fell from 122 to 99 since last year.

In the name of all things just and decent, won’t anybody out there do anything to help these poor folks out? Buy a Porsche already or something.

99 German billionaires on the wall, 99 German billionaires…

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.

Back to nature or something.

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.