And what’s yours we probably don’t even want to talk about.
German households have never had as much money at their disposal as they do now = Germans have never been as rich as they are now. Private financial assets are now valued at 5000 billion euros here (is that more than a bazillion?).
Like I always say:
A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
A buck or a pound
A buck or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around
Vermehrt wurde das Vermögen vor allem in Form von Bankeinlagen und Bargeld.
Green Types everywhere out there know that this Stuttgart 21 train station thingy cannot be allowed to be built, no matter what (the rest of us out there still don’t know just why that is but maybe we’ll figure it out yet).
And now that Stuttgart (Baden-Wuerttemberg) is Green politically, Green Terror Types are starting to come out of the woodwork and beginning to take matters into their own green hands (just like Oma und Opa used to take matters into their brown ones).
Or as Henryk Broder reports it in that provocative way he does:
The Federal Republic made a great step forward toward becoming a Green eco dictatorship yesterday. The project manager for Stuttgart 21, Hany Azer (migration background, by the way) has resigned from his post.
The reasons he named were “hostility and threats” from Stuttgart 21 opponents. Most recently he has only been able to work while under protection of the company’s personal security personnel. This news item should have caused great alarm (but it didn’t).
Oh I dunno. As long as they don’t start wearing green shirts and stuff like that everything will turn out OK… Won’t it?
Jeder Fall von sexueller Belästigung in einem Großraumbüro löst überregionale Schlagzeilen aus. Aber wenn einer der besten Ingenieure der Republik, der unter anderem Projektleiter für den Bau des Berliner Hauptbahnhofs gewesen ist, aus dem Job gemobbt wird, regt sich nicht einmal Frank Bsirske darüber auf.
Yet another breathtaking performance. But the real question is “can Eurovision burnish Azerbaijan’s image (I didn’t know it even had one)?”
And sure they were predictably outrageous, but they’ll never make the top ten.
„Ich habe auf Aserbaidschan gewettet!“
Can you read me?
Eurovision is once again upon us, which is scary enough. But now it’s also time for us to find out that it has something called a “deeper meaning.” All it took for this was 35,000 pounds (€40,000) of British government funding, a few academics and a whole lot of not having a life. Here are just a few of the revolutionary revelations and fun facts about Eurovision that none of us really wanted to know about:
For the first time, there will be a major academic review of Eurovision, including a series of workshops that will be completed this weekend in Düsseldorf, Germany, where the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest is being hosted, and culminate with the publication of a book of essays.
We have been assured that “it really takes international and multidisciplinary perspectives to even start to pick away at what Eurovision means.” Or why anyone would want to (pick away at it), I assume
Eurovision is “56 years of European pop, gender and representational history.” Not to mention the really sucky music part.
“Eurovision is an arena for European identification in which both national identity and also participation in a European identity are confirmed.” Yeah, OK. Whatever.
But of course not even seasoned academics can be expected to be experts at Eurovision geography, folks. Some of my personal Eurovision favorites, for instance, are European nations like Israel, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Morocco and Kazakhstan.
Little technicalities like these can be educational, however. “At least it gets people thinking about a country which normally wouldn’t cross their minds. Maybe they’ll look on a map to try to figure out where it is,”
And…
Eurovision is the world’s largest live non-sporting television event.
Eurovision has grown more since 1989 than either NATO or the European Union.
Eurovision is not just kitsch and lamé, it is “a night when Europe comes together symbolically” (and nasty stereotypes about national identity (in stereo) lead to animosity and symbolic surrogate war).
And last but not least, Eurovision is queer. “Another subject you won’t have to dig too deep into the academics’ footnotes to find is the ‘queerness’ of an annual event that has come to be known as ‘Gay Christmas.'”
So sit back this weekend and enjoy some European unity, televoting and really crappy music. Ho, ho, ho or something.
Not even semi-utopian Eurovision has succeeded in bridging every cultural divide.
Well don’t ask me. That’s just how the system works here.
Germany’s “last major Holocaust trial” had to end this way, didn’t it? A German court found John Demjanjuk guilty of a abetting the killing of 27,900 people but then set him free despite the, uh, five year sentence.
Well he did have to sit through an eighteen month trial, you know.
The trial, he said, amounted to “torture.”
This isn’t Animal House, you know.
Clearly shocked by the Northwestern University sex-toy-in-human-sexuality-class-incident in US-Amerika, German Bundestag President Norbert Lammert just isn’t going to take any chances and has banned the sale of condoms in parliament here (they sold them in the cigarette machines–uh, can they buy condoms in Congress too?).
Just in case German parliamentarians get any weird ideas or something, I guess. And I’d rather not think about that if you don’t mind so I support this guy 100%.
“Students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy.”
You know, the photos proving how Star Trek Special Operations were in fact the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. But it’s too late now. The Katze is out of the bag.
Someone at German news channel N24 who needs to have his enthusiasm curbed accidentally spilled the beans by actually producing the official logo of the “Star Trek Maquis Special Operations Seals Team VI” (one nasty bunch of 24th century terrorists), the real culprits behind bin Laden’s death, as we now know. Take him out and phaser him.
That explains why the helicopters were so quiet and stuff.
Closer inspection of the logo obtained by N24 should have turned up the notion that the skull is a little on the Klingon side.
First it was Google Street View, then Facebook, now another sinister new American data octopus is stretching out its tentacles to abuse German privacy rights anywhere and everywhere it can: Census.com!
Oops! False alarm. It looks like it’s a real German census and doesn’t even have a .com at all. But I’m nevertheless sure that the opposition to it will be massive, just like it was twenty-five years ago in West Germany when an uncountable number of Germans (think census–get it?) took to the streets to protest the government’s evil plan and even boycotted the survey.
Oops again already. Another false alarm. Nobody seems to give a hoot this time. Now everybody is lining up to get counted like sheep. What ever happened to civil disobedience? Even a little uncivil disobedience would be OK with me, people. Pitiful.
Statisticians predict that the survey may well reveal the German population is smaller than thought. The statistics office predicts that up to 1.3 million people still counted on regional population tallies may not actually exist.
Or was it Sad Mad Glad? At any rate, Chancellor Merkel is now in hot water for “endorsing a crime” after she said that she was “glad” that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US forces.
A Hamburg judge has even filed a criminal complaint against her because of this “tacky and undignified” remark that only an American could love.
In typically German schizophrenic style, Schadenfreude (the enjoyment of others’ suffering) cannot be openly expressed in The Land of Schadenfreude. It simply isn’t done here (even though it’s done here privately all day long).
The Germans aren’t glad about this issue, that’s for sure. But they’re not sad about it either. Whether they’re mad or not is certainly up to debate, however.
“The Sad Mad Glad series makes the teaching of trustworthiness, responsibility, caring, respect, fairness, and citizenship an experience that parents and mentors will never forget.”
Since 2003, EU countries have grudgingly relayed names and other information to US authorities concerning airline passangers who travel between EU and non-EU countries.
This has been complained about and protested against loudly and often(ly) by empörte (indignant) exponents of transparency everywhere who clearly don’t trust the American claim that this is purely an anti-terror measure and only in their best interest.
Now it turns out that these bad American spy policies robbing Germans of their personal freedom led directly to the capture of the Düsseldorfer terror cell last month that had concrete plans for a bomb attack in Germany.
The three alleged terrorists (who also had their personal freedom robbed) were detained during police raids in Düsseldorf and Bochum after authorities decided that they might be getting close to carrying out the attack.
You don’t have to say thanks or anything, Germany. America was just doing its job (rides off into the sunset, fade to black).
„Von amerikanischer Seite sind wir unter anderem auf das auffällige und ungewöhnliche Reiseverhalten der Verdächtigen hingewiesen worden.“
Observing Hermann 