Observing Hermann...

Just when you think NASA is finally getting back up on its feet again… Sheesh. Then some Klugscheißer (smart alec) 13-year-old German schoolboy comes along and double-checks their math (always a good idea, I think) and finds out that the Apophis asteroid does not in fact have a 1 in 45,000 chance of whacking our planet in 2029 or when it comes around for a second try in 2036, like we thought it did. No, no. The chance is more like 1 in 450, the little smartass and his smartasteroid calculations say.



Thanks for clearing that up for everybody, Nico.

This really pisses me off, you know. My calculations on the Apophis asteroid had been more like around 1 in 47,000 (how were yours?) so like what the hell does this little dweeb know that I, I mean, you or even we, don’t? The German school system is in a shambles, you know. Just go and ask any German and he or she will tell you so. This isn’t supposed to happen. Just like that deep impact of Apophis somewhere near Las Vegas wasn’t supposed to happen, either. Not until Mr. Schlaumeier (smarty-pants) came along and started recalculating everything, that is.

Well, there is a bright side to all of this, I suppose. Both NASA and Nico have agreed that if Apophis does collide with the Earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridum which will be 320 meters wide and weigh 200 billion tons and that the tsunamis and/or dust clouds it will create will pretty much wipe out pretty much all of the people you may know pretty much, yourself included, which ain’t pretty, but at least their numbers jived on that one. So NASA is back in the ballgame.

“Put your head between your legs and, well, you know the rest.”

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In what was up until recently thought to be purely impossible for German teachers to achieve, numbers now indicate that the cases of Dienstunfähigkeit (disability for service - not to be confused with inability of service - really early retirement, in other words) for German teaching mandarin-type class profession professionals has dropped considerably and that the majority of German teachers actually makes it now all the way to the age of 63 before taking your every day regular run-of-the-mill early retirement then.



Many experts who do not wish to be named believe that this miraculous recovery is directly attributable to an increased number of visits by German teachers to Lourdes in recent years but nobody wants to say where they got these numbers or even what these numbers might be. Others believe that German teachers have come to understand that they have an obligation to the society in which they live and that they should give at least the minimum if not more than that which is demanded of them in order to make the world a better and more wonderful place to live, uh, in.

Needless to say, both of these ridiculous theories are being scoffed at by other more expert-type experts who are convinced that they know the real reason why: Ever since the German government decided not to pay out the full retirement benefits for Dienstunfähigkeit retirement, German teachers suddenly and miraculously decided that “hey, disability ain’t so bad after all.”

Disability, datability. You gotta do somethin’, you know?

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Just because you live in East bum you-know-where doesn’t necessarily mean that you know anything about it. Or it’s history, I should say. Which might just be for the better, come to think of it, oder (or maybe not)? It seems that the kids in Brandenburg (one of the new German states old/new Berlin finds itself planted within) don’t fare any better than any of the other kids tested in the Near German East, at least when it comes to recent German history.



Of the 750 10th and 11th grade students surveyed by Berlin’s Freie Universität recently, more than 80 percent admitted to knowing practically nothing about the former East German GDR Brandenburg belonged to for forty long years. Nor were they able to properly explain the difference between such complex concepts as democracy and dictatorship, a relative majority holding the pre-1989 West German BRD for being no better than its GDR counterpart.

But before everybody gets all too hot and bothered about what appears to be some new form of old-fashioned communist plot, keep in mind that students throughout the rest of Germany don’t seem to be doing all that much better. Nearly 8 percent of all students attending Germany’s antiquated Hauptschule (the lowest level of classless Germany’s three-layered and strictly class-oriented education system), for instance, don’t even finish up there.

And this could eventually pose a problem for the rest of those German kids out there, too. For as far as I can tell, the classless Hauptschule kids are supposed to be the ones who start working with 16 (the classless middle layer kids begin working in their early twenties) and pay the way for the classless top level Abitur kids so they can study until they are thirty-five or so and then become the history teachers and other academics who will not know anything about the GDR, either (although they will not know it with class, of course).

But strangely, all of these kids, across all levels of the classless German education system, are incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to negative aspects of or events in American (excuse me, US American) history, real or imaginary. So I guess this means that some things still do get taught at home, thank goodness. Or maybe they just drink this stuff up with mother’s milk.

Honnecker war doch der Typ von VW, oder?

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Spoiled rotten by his negligent human foster father Thomas Dörflein, Knut the polar bear has developed into a whining, moody and indolent adolescent rebel who has now been placed in solitary confinement until he cleans up his cage for once gosh darn it and I mean business this time young man, says Berlin Zoo director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, or would have liked to.



Dörflein, too, has been reprimanded and ordered not to cuddle around with the once so cuddly and white Kuscheltier (stuffed animal, only still alive) after zoo experts came to the conclusion that the two hundred pound Knut could now very easily, though presumably still unintentionally, rip Herr Dörflein from limb to limb to limb, etc.

Blaszkiewitz has also threatened to restrict the bear’s television viewing time in the evening should he not straighten up his act pronto buddy, and violent computer gaming and chat room activity for hours on end is expected to be the next thing to go.

Dörflein could not be immediately reached for comment as he has at the doctor getting some stitches removed from an earlier cuddling session, but animal rights activists have threatened legal action should Blaszkiewitz continue with his cruel and inhuman punishment.

Gimme a hug!

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About half of all German public school teachers are currently worried about their private as in privacy rights being violated. It seems that their students have been grading them for a change and posting these assessments on a popular web site, and this without the teachers’ approval, needless to say. And the reason why only half of these teachers are currently up-in-arms about the situation is because only about half of them ever go to work at any given time. The others are usually either written up sick (“Ich bin ja voll im Endstress eh und du kommst mit so ne’ Scheisse!”), on early retirement or out on vacation like right now. Die Jammerlappen (cry babies).



More than 150,000 users have registered on the site so far and have graded over 100,000 teachers. The site’s staff has also had to defend their idea in court. But judges ruled in June that grading teachers on the Internet is covered under the basic right to free expression. At least for the moment, it is.

So now some of the official teaching talking head types are trying to play their concern down publicly. “In the end, these silly evaluations do not really reveal very much,” said one spokesman for the German Teachers Association. “They are just as inaccurate as the silly evaluations we give the kids.”

And some of these teachers are actually quite clever and, having so much time on their hands as they do, are now starting to get ideas and open up to the idea. One guy recently registered himself as a pupil and then posted high grades for himself and his buds and managed to place some of them on the Germany's Best Teachers Top 10 rankings list.

Well, at least the home-schooling types don’t have anything to worry about here. There aren't any. And I wonder how they rated her?

Mit ein Bisschen mehr Disziplin könnten Sie auch viel mehr leisten.

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PS: How much do you want to bet that she's one of the few good teachers up there, too?

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Bildung ist das Schlüsselwort. Und dabei bleibt es.

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Private calculations are never wrong, it seems, and their efficiency at dealing with their own money like this leads, in my view, to a certain degree of personal stinginess. It’s another one of their secret, unspoken obsessions, in other words.

And now someone has figured out (this time someone hired by the government, I think – they have obviously conceded that they can’t figure it out themselves) that the worsening demographic situation here = the pyramid turned upside down (fewer kids on the bottom, more old people on the top) is actually a good thing. At least as far as coming state expenditures for German universities are concerned.

The simple lack of native students in the year 2020, for instance, could lead to savings of over 100 billion euros and nobody in the government is factoring this into their current calculations. They’re blowing it again already, in other words. Jeez, these guys can’t even seem to get it right when they hire somebody to do the calculations for them.

Sound familiar, American brothers and sisters?

Wer 1 sagt muss auch 2 sagen.

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