Observing German(s)…

“No we’re not doing any hanky-panky,” the SPD would say turning
red (get it?) if it could talk, or at least speak with one voice but it
can’t. “It was that bad Tante (aunt, lady) Gesine Schwan (SPD)
over there who did it.” They would say. “We were inside watching
TV and throwing Wolfgang Clement out of the party when it happened.
She wants to be the next President of Germany so bad that she’ll do
 anything in her power to buy votes, even if it means kissing up to the
reddest of the reddest socks in town (in this case, Gregor Gysi).”

You must know of course that in German, a red sock is not a baseball
player who plays for Boston, but “a red” as communist-types used to
be called back in the old days when the world was in order and on
the brink of nuclear destruction.

I just don’t know. You would think a woman her age would behave with
a little more discretion. But affairs of the heart and other body organs
being what they are, they follow their own, uh, hearts and other body
organs.

Is this going to be Gesine Schwan’s swan song? And more importantly,
do any of you out there really care? Me neither. It’s not like she has a
chance in hell of getting elected anyway.

Techtelmechtel, hanky-panky, it’s all Greek to me (which is Spanish
in German, so go figure).

„Die beiden würden sich schließlich schon länger kennen, fügte er
hinzu.“

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Völlig unüblich wie üblich.

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Write this one down in your calendars: The German army took over a rapid reaction force called the QRF in northern Afghanistan yesterday which marked the first time the country has provided a combat unit for the NATO-led international peacekeeping force, uh, keeping peace down there.

And the really peculiar thing about this is 1) no one here in Germany can explain how this happened and 2) why the professional German pacifist types (and there are a whole lot of those) aren’t having collective cows right now.

My assumption is that this has something to do with the dreaded German Sommerloch (summer “hole” or summer slump - and no, it’s not what Google might tell you it is) which is only now getting underway. Like a black hole, anything (any political issue) that falls into a German summer hole disappears forever or maybe ends up popping out again at the other end of the universe, which is pretty much the same thing, so nobody really cares, in other words. Everyone has gone on vacation or is about to go. But this is only an assumption of mine, like I said.

Or maybe the Germans are finally warming up to the idea that they have to start pulling a little more of their own weight when it comes to ugly unspeakable things like hot military action against enemies who are trying to kill you and everything you believe in. Nah. I think it’s the Sommerloch doch (after all).

“Die Soldaten haben bewiesen, dass sie auch einen Kampfeinsatz bestehen würden.“

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The man claimed that he wasn’t a racist or anything and actually hates everyone equally but when “everything from the leaflets telling you what’s on in the morning to the people staying there to the language the employees spoke to the service was all in German”, and all of this in an English-speaking country like Greece, well, that took the Kuchen. And he didn’t even want to start up with the beach chairs.

In a show of solidarity with the wronged holiday maker, the new Madame Tussauds wax museum in Berlin has begun excluding Germans from entry.

“Geschmacklos und überflüssig”? Her damit!

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Anyway, returning from the grave isn’t easy for anyone I’m sure, but to do so just to slam religion like that (Hello? The afterlife?), well that’s certainly a first. But he was Einstein after all and if anyone can pull this one off, I guess he can. Not having much to offer for the traditionally faithful, he found the Bible to be childish, the idea of Jews being a chosen people silly (although they were a bit “protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power” - this was in 1954 like I said) and that although religion provided believers with a certain protective self-deception perhaps, it did not necessarily improve their morality.

None of this seems all that E=mc² these days, does it? What I find more refreshing is his attack upon atheism. Describing himself as an agnostic, Einstein scoffed at atheists as being people who do the same intolerance religious fanatics do. “They are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ - cannot bear the music of the spheres.”

Maybe that’s why evolutionary biologist and world-class atheist Richard Dawkins was among the bidders for the letter (he lost out, of course, atheists are real cheapskates you know). He probably wanted to have the thing destroyed.

Meine Ansichten sind zu gewaltig für unseren bzw. euren begrenzten Geist.

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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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Anyway, the latest news about The Mysterious Case of the Search for the Bernsteinzimmer (named after famous American conductor Leonard Bernstein decades before his birth - that’s part of the mystery) is that German tomb raiders now believe to have finally located it. Of course this is about the sixtieth time that the Amber Room has finally been located but this time it could really happen, honest.

The chamber was stolen by the Nazis from Catherine Palace in St Petersburg in 1941 and then taken to the mythical city of Königsberg, now  called Kaliningrad, where it was soon to disappear in 1945 at which point it was probably taken by train to Vladivostok where it was than placed on a Greek freighter which later sunk off the coast of Spain and was later recovered by Howard Hughes and then buried in permafrost before a Klingon warship transported it to a Czech copper mine in the middle of the night when nobody was looking. But like I said, other theories also abound. Let’s all keep holding our breaths on this one, okay?

Lara Croft konnte leider diesmal bei der Suche nicht dabei sein.

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