Observing Hermann...

So like here’s the latest and greatest only-in-Germany, help-me-because-I’m-a-victim-too-industry startup. Starting today, a group of business-savvy Berlin psychologists are opening Germany’s first advice bureau for stalkers. These guys are going to make a killing, too.



I know what you’re thinking: An advice bureau for stalkers? What, advising them how to stalk better or what? Nichts da (no way). This outreach center is actually designed to help cure those poor and unfortunate victims who have even poorer and more unfortunate victims that are still out of reach for them. At least for now, huh, huh, huh.

You know, explain to these guys, in this case during the course of 16 well-meant and emotionally-bonding counseling sessions, how it is that most people don’t consider stalking to be very polite or nice and how their obsession, although certainly no fault of their own, is often even perceived as being socially unacceptable and socially irresponsible behavior (or misbehavior if you prefer) and maybe even, as some would say, socially criminal, or criminal, at the very least.

Anyway, other countries have attempted similar anti-stalking programs in the past - in my country, for instance, we call it “jail” - but none have addressed the wants and the needs of the stalker himself with anywhere near the depth and efficiency that this one does, or should.

It’s called The Stop Stalking Office or something, by the way, but I couldn’t find their link anywhere. I do think I know where they are located, though. And now I am going to go out there and find them and observe them, long and hard, no matter what, again and again.

Neue Lebensinhalte braucht der Mensch.

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If you’ve ever felt the need to take a trip back to 1970s New York, although I honestly wouldn’t know why you would, come on down (up?) to Berlin some time. Not having much other industry to turn their attention to these days it seems, street-wise street folks do tons of their own kind of industrial design on city walls here each and every day instead. They call this design “Graffiti” here (Germans capitalize their nouns, you see).



Some even call it Art. One guy I knows even calls it Fred. Ha, ha, just kidding. Yes, Berlin is probably the most “tagged” or “bombed” city in Europe, and we’re not just talking B-17s here anymore, either. And that’s a wonderful thing, I suppose, because it wasn’t all that long ago that it used to be called vandalism, too. But that’s like just so totally negative, man. Graffiti with a capital G is actually “celebrated as street art and even regarded as an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur (street culture)”, you see, although I haven’t met anyone here yet who is doing any celebrating about it. But, then again, I’m old and gray and in the way.

And speaking of capitalization… Now that the Japanese have surrendered (another veiled reference to “bombed” again, although those weren’t B-17s) and the Sony Center has been taken over be evil American locust types, just think of all that Fläche (area) available to spray up with industrial design downtown (uptown?) now.

Graffiti ist Kommunikation!

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The vicious wave of young criminal attacks in Germany will simply not let up. Two men were placed in temporary protective custody in Berlin on Thursday after defending themselves with attack dogs they had let loose upon four Jewish students aged between 15 and 17 who had been provoking the men by being four Jewish students aged between 15 and 17.



In light of the ever-growing tension caused by what now appears to be a well-organized and concerted, nation-wide foreign delinquent rebellion, the German government, or the state of Hessen at least, is said to have now begun planning an hourly train connection to its new and quite distant “Gulag Germania” high-security re-education facility located somewhere near Krasnoyarsk, Siberia.

Berlin's governing mayor, Klaus Wowereit, called the provocation racially motivated and said it was "intolerable or something", adding “If Berlin had any money, we would organize one of those camp thingies, too. Berlin used to be leading in this field, you know.”

CDU spokesmen in Berlin couldn’t agree more but don’t really want to do it right-now-at-this-moment-publicly because the populist rhetoric re-election campaign launched by Hessen’s Minister President Roland Koch has slowly but surely begun to blow up in his happy Hessian face.

Fass Blondie! Fass!

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“Mindless, brainless and tasteless” and therefore right up the alley for most fanatical and therefore irate smokers out there who feel persecuted by the latest and first real anti-smoking law ever to be introduced in Germany, a web site is offering a T-shirt using, now get this, a yellow Star of David to compare the treatment of smokers in Germany to that of Jews during Nazi rule.



Well-known for their zany, offbeat humor, and being natural, vocal victims in every conceivable circumstance in which practically nothing is asked of them (and of course practically nothing ever is), Germans everywhere are wetting their pants in hilarity at the stunt.

“Get it?” asked one knee-slapping, smoking slob. “By exploiting the murder of Jews in order to symbolize my desire to smoke, that's, well, simply too funny for words. So that’s why they used the star instead. See?”

Certain humorless groups and other easily-offended types are said to have found the T-shirt action less then humorous and offensive, but that is only to be expected in this humorless and rather offensive age of ours in which we live, but hey, it’s a living.

That anti-anti-smoking T-shirt is a real gas.

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PS: Thanks for the black bastard and anti-tobacco links, Indeterminacy. The hoax link, too.

Thirteen bottles of beer on the wall,
Thirteen bottles of beer!
Take three down,
Pass them around,
Ten bottles of beer on the wall!

We have ways of making you talk (think Volksmusik).

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An international study comparing big city Lebensqualität (quality of living) in 215 cities has given German cities relatively good marks. Berlin only got sixteenth place, however (must have been the dog crap), placing it well behind such awful places as Düsseldorf (5), Frankfurt (7) and Munich (8). I personally can’t understand this, of course. But even if I could, I wouldn’t admit it.

And the first and rightly "best" American city is San Francisco, although it came in at a lowly twenty-ninth place, which starts to make me wonder about what these results were based upon. The cost of living must have certainly been a factor here. And that the mega cities Paris (33), London (39) und New York (47) did so poorly won’t surprise anybody. They’re just too mega.

But putting big cities aside, another study about Germany came out last month that has confirmed what a lot of eastern Germans already knew: Everybody’s still leaving. The Future Atlas 2007 Report has examined 439 towns and regions in Germany and reveals that although investment worth hundreds of billions of euros in selected eastern cities like Dresden and Potsdam has helped resuscitate their economies, large areas throughout the rest of eastern Germany have become an economic desert.

Hundreds of thousands have left the Wild East, most of them during the past ten years. "It's like the American Midwest after the gold rush,” says the report’s author. “These (smaller cities) are becoming ghost cities."

So that's the rest of the story. It's a nice place to visit, but they wouldn't want to live there. They probably all went to Paris, London or New York.

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Kommentare auf Deutsch? Her damit! 

Ich segne euch usw.

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Wir sind immer noch Papst.

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Wir wollen, dass Deutsch noch geiler wird. Geiler als Geiz, wenn es sein muss!

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