Owner: Observing Hermann... URL:http://hermann.blog.com/ Join Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:50:46 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Obviously dazed and confused about Germany in general and Berlin in particular, an amnesic American (or so his claim) observes the world around him in quiet (not) desperation. Site statistics:Click here
If it’s not from China, I don’t want it! 2007-10-25 01:55:00 Made in where? American and European neighbor-made stuff is way too expensive, man. And we don’t even want to start talking about our unaffordable German “gold-plated” Qualitätsprodukte (quality products). Give me that el cheapo Chinese crap instead. Or at least that’s what one could think Germans are thinking when you look at some of the recent numbers on foreign exports to Germany.
China
has passed by the US and Britain and is now the third largest exporter to Germany, representing 6.7 percent of all products imported into the country last year. Only France and Holland shipped more to the Germans, but not by much. Ten years ago China only accounted for 2.6 of overall exports to Germany. So wow. Hey, third place is third place.
And the magic number is three here, Germany. Enjoy all of those wonderful Chinese products with gusto. Or as long as you can, I should say, because China is also expected to overtake Germany as the world’s third-largest economy within the next fe
Strike boss threatens to end his Kur 2007-10-24 01:49:00 Only in Germany, you say? Damned right only in Germany. Or can you think of anywhere else where a strike boss demanding a 31% raise for the train drivers he represents goes off on a Kur (a “cure” or a supervised series of spa treatments) smack dab in the middle of negotiations? Me neither. And I’m not making this stuff up either, people.
Manfred Schell, head of the striking train driver union GDL, has announced that notfalls (in case of emergency) he is actually prepared to interrupt the three-week Kur break he is currently enjoying at Lake Constance down on the German-Swiss border to maybe perhaps possibly consider thinking about finishing the strike he and his union have started, but only if the Bahn rolls over and knuckles under first, of course.
A Kur, as you may or may not know, is one of Germany’s favorite traditional health scams. Most Germans insist upon going on one eventually and lots of folks go regularly and the older the “patients” get, the more insist
Shortcut to the cemetery nearly becomes shortcut to the cemetery 2007-10-23 01:10:00 Germans just have this thing with the autobahn. They really do. For young and old alike it’s a no-win situation really, whenever they start discussing it that is (although driving on them can also be a big pain in the autobahn, too). Just ask Eva Herman. She recently used the A-word directly after using the N-word and got into a big heap of trouble. And she’s not even eighty-one years old and driving around in a wheelchair yet.
But the old lady who wanted to visit a cemetery yesterday was. She got lost and decided to take a shortcut over the autobahn to get there and all the drivers she was passing by who must have been locked up in a Stau (traffic jam) got mad as hell about this and called in the cops on her.
The cops escorted her to the nearest exit were they wished her a nice day and reminded her that she should never do this again as the minimum driving speed a vehicle must be able to do on a German A-word is sixty kilometers per hour. And this made me laugh out loud becaus
Turks and Kurds and cops, oh my! 2007-10-30 01:27:00 The impending Turkish march into northern Iraq/Kurdistan seems to be getting everybody nervous – in Berlin of all places. “Emotional unrest” is growing between the city’s two favorite laugh-a-minute ethnic groups and came to a boil over the weekend when violence broke out between nationalist Turks and Kurdish rebels in Kreuzberg.
The losers of the first skirmish: The Berlin police department, 18 to 15 (18 injured policemen, 15 arrests). And the cops are sure that this is just the start of something much bigger (but they always are). We are nowhere near the payoffs, in other words, much less finals.
But they should have smelled a rat ahead of time on this one, I think. These clashes took place at the end of a demonstration which had been given the taunting title of “Unity and Brotherhood between Turks and Kurds”. Talk about a provocation. That kind of unity and brotherhood crap makes my blood boil just hearing it and I’ve never even been to Turkey, much less
Need for speed 2007-10-29 01:43:00 Bringing up the subject of tougher speed limits in Germany is a lot like suggesting more stringent gun control in the United States. A polarizing issue par excellence, speedy German people react almost as emotionally to the first suggestion as heavily-armed American people do to the second. Just ask that little old lady in the wheelchair. It doesn’t really matter if it might make sense or not (I think it would), it is a subject that is emotional geladen (emotionally charged, as in loaded, as in gun) and therefore an easy one to have blow up in your face.
That is why it is all the more surprising to me that the SPD would seriously suggest the introduction of a general speed limit on the autobahn (130 kilometers per hour or 80 mph) as they did at their party congress held over the weekend. An environmentally-friendly measure meant to reduce emissions on German roads, many SPD heavyweights themselves (Minister for the Environment Sigmar Gabriel, for instance, a heavyweight
Who let the minks out? 2007-10-27 03:20:00 Elementary, Watson. The fur farm activists did it.
Residents near the small town of Grabow in Saxony-Anhalt have been warned to stay indoors and hid their expensive mink furs after some 7,500 hungry and dangerous mink escaped from a high-security fur farm camp near here yesterday (“You’ll never take me alive, warden!”).
Dozens of specially-trained mink mercenaries and some 20 soldiers from the German Army have armed themselves with hooks and nets and are mercilessly hunting down the vanished varmints as we speak, so-to-speak. Well it's better than being in Afghanistan, I guess.
Not unlike another group of prisoners trapped in another camp near here a few years back, only this time with a little more help from the outside, these marauding minks tell us a noble story about persistence and heroism and determination and baseball and pointy little teeth and hurt feelings and maybe even a little flying fur, too.
Despite their imminent recapture, I mean. Damned nice try anyw
Three down, I mean up, two to go 2007-11-03 04:08:00 What are the Germans planning to reconnoiter from up there anyway, Italian national soccer team training practice? Whatever it is, their five satellite SAR-Lupe spy system is another step closer to completion. A Russian Kosmos-3M rocket carrier successfully carried the third one into orbit the other day.
It is believed that the 1,587-pound satellite will easily be capable of detecting Fußbälle (soccer balls), I mean objects, from 310 miles away – from the 310-mile orbit it will be, uh, orbiting in. A large X-band radar dish antenna on each satellite will be able to gather precise high-resolution imagery of nearly every location on Earth through clouds and darkness and fog and swamp gas so even games played in Germany should be no problem to zoom in on.
Come on people. What are they really up to here? Where are all of the Verfassungsschutzer (constitution protectors) und the Datenschutzer (data protectors) when you need them?
Was macht der da im Mittelfeld?
Kommentare auf Read more:Three
German youth free again already at last 2007-11-02 01:39:00 Do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that Angela Merkel used to be a member? As if you could set your watch by it (this is German
y after all), the next big Ostalgie wave recently splashed in right over us, right on time for the anniversary of the founding of the GDR, and we hardly even noticed it. That’s right. Germany’s once belächelte (sniggered at) communist Free German Youth or FDJ organization has risen from the ashes to get sniggered at once again. And as if this wasn’t bizarre enough, the guy behind the FDJ’s rebirth is somebody named Ringo.
Ringo and co. believe that with unemployment in Germany now dropping to nearly 8% for the first time since troglodytes roamed the earth, the time is right for communism again, I guess. They plan to expose capitalism for the ugly, heartless and soulless thing it is and will “shake it to the core” by selling t-shirts on their website for 3 euros a shot.
At least these new unchained free Germ Read more:youth
Bulgaria comes from behind with nicest behind 2007-11-01 02:01:00 Outrageous. Shocking. It can’t happen in Germany but it did anyway. A Bulgaria
n woman left the competition’s behind
s behind in Munich yesterday and won the coveted title of Most Beautiful Behind in the World.
Butt what about Germany, you assk? Ends up that the two German contestants (four cheeks) had to take a back seat to the 28 other competing countries. A real bummer for a nation so clearly obsessed with the past, I mean, behind. And that gets us to the bottom of the problem.
My haunch is that the German contestants, like so many of their compatriots out there, were too busy moralizing about the posterior to properly concentrate upon what is behind them right now. And this is what led to their early end. It all gets back to Germany’s lack of old-fashioned rearing, I assume. It’s a sad tail, but true. You know, turn the other cheek and all that?
Fanny thing is that the Germans will never fesse up this.
Die beiden hatten auch sicherlich ihre Hinterngedanken.
Kommentare Read more:comes
Psycho terror 2007-10-31 01:21:00 Clearly disappointed about not having found a Kurschatten he can have an intelligent conversation with, and chomping at the bit to march back to the strike his union is currently in the process of losing once his well-deserved Kur is finally over with, locomotive union boss Manfred Schell (place the stress on loco here) has accused the Bahn of conducting Psycho
terror (psycho terror) in its dealings with the strikers.
Psychoterror is a popular term with Germans and is often used here whenever one is faced with irrefutable arguments during the course of an emotional discussion or downright fight. Volksverblödung (dumbing down the people) is another such popular term which is also quite useful in the same situation and, coincidentally, another one Schell used during the same conversation.
He is namely convinced that the Bahn is trying to dumb down his people by having offered them a 10 percent pay raise and a one-time payment of 2,000 euros (about $2,800), an offer he rejected. That
Germans empört about the next tricky French Alleingang 2007-11-08 00:51:00 Hey, this was definitely not abgesprochen (discussed with us first). First he and his ex-wife pull that disappearing Bulgarian nurse hat trick, then he lectures the Germans
about the blessings of nuclear energy and gets all huffy with Angie about something called Europe, now Nicolas Sarkozy has hit a French
-American home run at a joint meeting of the US Congress by hitting a French-American home run at a joint meeting of the US Congress. And this guy wouldn’t know a baseball bat from a baguette.
Yesterday’s schmooze fest in Washington turned German stomachs two or three times in rapid succession at the very least. Not only did Sarkozy mange to charm the tight-fitting pants off of hundreds of American congresspersons by expressing (convincingly) his admiration and thanks to the United States and, through this, receiving absolution for having opposed the war in Iraq, he gets a standing ovation for clarifying once again that a nuclear-armed Iran was “unacceptable” for France.
German Advance Stopped 2007-11-07 00:56:00 Just when we thought nothing could stop the massive German
Guinness Book of World Records offensive unleashed upon an unsuspecting world earlier this week, the German Guinness High Command has made a strategic blunder that has brought their breathtaking blitz to an abrupt and untimely halt. At least for now, that is.
After having broken yet another world record, this time for having an air force with the most broke weenie planes in existence, plans for another world record attempt had to be suddenly dropped. It appears that the Germans next move would have been to airlift some 40,000 Cha Cha dancers into Poland where they would then set a new world record for “defensive” synchronal dancing.
Alternative plans for Polka dancing troupes had to be scuttled, as well. In fact, mass dancing Veranstaltungen (activities) of any kind in just about any other country you can imagine other than that dance school of yours down the street have been ruled out completely as over half of Germany Read more:Advance
Surprise German Guinness Book of World Records Offensive Underway 2007-11-06 00:48:00 Talk about an offensive offensive. In less than 24 hours, two Guinness
Book of WorldRecords
records have fallen to German
forces during a surprise fall offensive that no one had expected or can explain or could care all that much about really.
Not only has an old crooked German church steeple knocked the leaning tower of Pisa from the Guinness book of Records as the world’s most leaning building (we all know that they did this with tunnels or mirrors or both), several divisions of German Cha Cha dancers, 40,000 in all at 300 participating dancing schools, have set a new world record for synchronal dancing.
These elite and deadly boring Tanzfreunde (friends of the dance) somehow managed to dance together six minutes straight while steadily repeating the same four steps again and again and again. The problem was getting them to stop once the six minutes were up. And although the official announcement has yet to be officially announced, everybody knows that they won already and we Read more:Surprise
, Offensive
, Underway
After surviving Afghanistan visit, Merkel now feels ready for Bush ranch stay 2007-11-05 00:56:00 Barely back home on safe German soil again after a dangerous surprise visit
to the 3,000 German troops stationed in northern Afghanistan
, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
has announced that she will continue to taunt death by accepting an invitation to stay at the notorious “Prairie Chapel” ranch in a place called Texas next week.
The ranch, owned by United States President George W. Bush, is a 1,600-acre chunk of central Texas land Bush purchased in 1999 which he often uses as a presidential getaway. Officially only reserved for those who Bush believes to be his closest allies, Merkel nevertheless fears, as do so many other Germans like her, that Prairie Chapel is actually a secret US detention camp located in Cuba used to incarcerate and interrogate enemy combatants captured in the international war on terror.
Although Merkel is convinced she can properly explain her visit to Afghanistan, and has in fact done her best to mend ties which had deteriorated between Read more:ready
German Taxis 2007-11-04 01:34:00
alt : http://www.youtube.com/v/ILiFA3Xyr-Y Read more:German
Playboy 51 goes for Merkel 2007-11-13 00:04:00 As if finding things to talk about with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy had not been difficult enough already (they decided to agree about saying how integration was such a good thing), German Chancellor Angela Merkel
was suddenly attacked by Playboy 51 aus Reinickendorf, in Reinickendorf (Berlin) of all places, while talking about integration, of all things.
Playboy 51 aus Reinickendorf was able to get within a few meters of the Chancellor before being wrestled to the ground by security forces only then to be driven off by police to his next appearance at whatever trashy daytime talk show studio happened to be nearest. Though visibly shaken by the attack, Merkel was not injured and she and Sarkozy continued on with their integration conversation as if Playboy 51 aus Reinickendorf had never even existed.
Shortly before his return to France, Sarkozy reciprocated by inviting Merkel to come visit him at a Parisian banlieue of her choice.
Ich hab noch nie
Communist boss Adenauer 2007-11-12 00:36:00 The next time smart German Europeans bring to your attention just how ignorant you as an American are, and they will (and you are), just remind yourself where this less than well-intended instruction is coming from. It’s been a full eighteen years after the German unification, or reunification if you prefer, and a survey taken about German history indicates that when it comes to the post-Berlin Wall generation (primarily in the East), for instance, they don’t know diddley squat about their own recent past. So you can imagine what they know about ours.
Students asked about the GDR have only a vague idea at best about the communist dictatorship their parents grew up in. Some of the gems that came out in the study: Only about one third asked knew that the GDR constructed the wall that separated the two Germanys, only half asked thought it was a dictatorship at all, the Stasi was an “intelligence service just like every other country has”, and only 17 percent of those questioned Read more:Communist
Schröder worried about China’s feelings 2007-11-10 01:38:00 Man, I have to admit that I’ve missed this guy. You know, Mr. Teflon? That ex-German Chancellor guy (he’s actually still very German), the guy behind lifting the EU’s weapons embargo to China
while he was in office? Anyway, Gerhard Schröder has made the front page of China Daily by calling Angela Merkel’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama a big mistake and expressing his sadness about how this outrageous move has “hurt the Chinese people’s feelings.”
"My predecessors and I refused to meet with the Dalai Lama,” he said while lecturing in China, patting himself on the back, as usual. “And I hope the incumbent government will adhere to it, too." Uh, a little too late for that, Gerd. But it’s the thought that counts. Or the lack of it, I should say.
Strange, he has never worried about the feelings of the people living under repressive Chinese rule in the Himalayan region, as far as I know. He certainly wasn’t all that worried about German feelings when t
Abdullah with the moolah comes to town 2007-11-09 00:39:00 So what if the guy jets in with a fleet of 10 aircraft, 30 truckloads of baggage, an entourage of 150, and 4 wives. He still has to pull on his pants in the morning like the rest of us do, right? What do you mean he doesn’t wear pants? He wears the pants in Saudi Arabia doesn’t he?
Anyway, everybody in Berlin is all hot and bothered about King Abdullah
of Saudi Arabia’s visit and Belagerung (siege) of the Adlon and fluttering around him like flies around, I mean, moths around a flame. He has met with everybody who is anybody, but that didn’t take very long of course, so now he and his wives are bored already and want to start buying expensive stuff, as usual.
When asked how much the Brandenburg Gate costs, for instance, Angela Merkel said she would have to get back to him on that one because she had already heard that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wouldn’t sell him Big Ben and that Pope Benedict XVI still demands “a much higher price” for the Sistine Chapel Read more:comes
German breaks code that broke code responsible for breaking German code 2007-11-17 00:46:00 Well, he beat it anyway. And it took him about five minutes, too. In what turned out to be not all too much of a cipher challenge after all, something called the Cipher Challenge has come to a screeching halt.
Competing against the famous British code-breaking Colossus computer, which took a full 14 years to rebuild and get up-and-running again, amateur code breakers were put up against the world’s first programmable digital computer in a contest to see who would be fastest at breaking an encrypted message generated by the original Lorenz cipher machine used by the German
High Command during World War II. Well the results were, let us say, sub-optimal. At least for Mr. Colossus they were. He got KO-ed, lost big time, got the tubes knocked out of him. And he lost to somebody using some homemade computer code, too, somebody who calls himself Joachim Schüth, of all names, who lives in a country called Germany, of all places. Why that sneaky little German computer geek freak, or Read more:breaks
, broke
Night on Freak Mountain 2007-11-16 00:45:00 Teufelsberg used to be the kind of place you avoided in Berlin (West-Berlin). “Devil's Mountain
” is an artificial hill in Berlin’s Grunewald consisting of about 12 million cubic meters of rubble from bombed-out Berlin. The NSA built one of its largest Cold War listening stations here and continued using it up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ever since then, the abandoned hill has had a bit of a ghost town touch to it, although it might be a nice place to do some kite flying, I suppose.
But now Teufelsberg may turn back into a place to avoid again (except maybe on Halloween). If David Lynch and some guy called Raja Emanuel have anything to do with it, that is. They hope to build an “invincible university” for transcendental meditation up there and widen a network of other top-notch elite and invincible universities spread throughout Europe and, through this, bring peace to the world or at least levitate it a little or something. You know, bring Devil's Mountain Read more:Night
, Freak
Knut now lazy, no good teen 2007-11-15 01:01:00 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
The beginning of the end endlich (finally) 2007-11-14 00:54:00 So let’s begin. Seemingly the only guy on the SPD side of Germany’s ruling grand coalition who was able to manage a realistic balance between the two Volkspartei rivals, Vice Chancellor Franz Münterfering has finally had enough of his party’s recent shift back to the left and has resigned in disgust.
No one doubts that he wishes to care for his gravely-ill wife, the official reason he gave for his resignation, but his Genossen (comrades) over at SPD Party Headquarters have done everything in their power to weaken Mr. Consensus Builder during their latest populist panic rush for votes from the left. And now it seems as though the grand coalition party is finally over. Or it’s about to end, at least.
And this is a good thing. Calling new elections would make perfect sense, as the SPD’s continued drop in popularity among German voters will only make their famously unpredictable sudden twitching and turning all the more likely. They don’t know where to go anymore. Even the s
German scientists discover extinct scorpion bigger than the other extinct Scorpion 2007-11-23 02:58:00 The German
science and rock music worlds were sent reeling earlier this week when scientists
discovered the fossilized claw of what appeared to be a sea scorpion bigger and even older than the fossilized Scorpions’ front man singer Klaus Meine himself.
“Holy Scheiße,” said paleontologist Markus Poschmann after having excavated the claw from an excavation of 390 million-year-old rocks in Rhineland Palatinate he had been excavating. “This turns everything we thought we knew about paleontology and German rock music completely on its head. I mean, that this thing could be bigger than Klaus Meine shouldn’t surprise anybody, but older? Come on now. We’re talking about the friggin’ Scorpions here.”
The armored giant is thought to have been 8 feet long, weighed 400 pounds and terrorized the seas a good 400 million years ago, shortly after the release of “Winds of Change”, or so scientists had thought up until the discovery. “We now have to re-evaluate everything we h
GDL Now Taking Hostages 2007-11-22 00:33:00 At knifepoint, I mean. Encouraged by the ruthless acts of sabotage their striking French counterparts have undertaken to show that they mean business, German GDL strikers have now resorted to hostage-taking in a desperate effort to push through their ridiculous demands.
An unidentified, distorted-faced union member pulled a knife on a café employee at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof yesterday and held him captive for a full two hours while demanding an improved pay offer from Germany’s national railway before German SKGDL forces (special anti-GDL forces) tackled the moron after tricking him outside with an Angebot (offer) of their own.
Clearly shocked by the senseless violence at a café he frequently visits, Bahn boss Hartmut Mehdorn then knuckled under and offered the union a “significantly improved offer”, but only under the condition that the desperate strikers move on to “the other end” of the train station and take their next hostage at McDonald’s instead.
A masked spok Read more:Taking
If Americans did this, it would be called hysteria 2007-11-21 01:03:00 And it would be blamed on the lack of proper gun control, too. And religious fundamentalists would most likely be the ones behind it, as well. And George W. Bush, of course. And Michael Moore, too. No, skip that last guy. Anyway, after the first school shooting that didn’t take place last week in Cologne caused a little confusion, it now appears that the second and maybe third school shootings that were about to happen won’t be taking place, either. Harmless air guns and broken crossbows are now being confiscated right and left. Schools have been shut down as a precautionary measure. Internet sites are being searched for questionable photographs (were there ever any other kind?). The German police have another good explanation for all of this, of course, but they are going to take their time this time and are still working on their Power Point presentation to make sure it comes out absolutely perfect, this time, like I said.
Ach wie gut, dass keiner weiß, dass ich auf die Sc Read more:Americans
German Greenhouse Gas Galore 2007-11-20 01:10:00 Nobody does greenhouse gas better than Greenpeace, or so they say. So imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth in Berlin, figuratively speaking of course, when a study of theirs has indicated that German
y will “miss by miles” its ambitious plans to reduce its share of these gases by 40 percent.
The study indicates that the current government plan can reduce emissions by 30 percent at the very most, and this primarily due to Germany’s equally ambitious plans to simultaneously increase its already large and dirty coal-burning power plant network.
The German Ministry for the Environment rejected the results of the study as being “nicht nachvollziehbar” (incomprehensible). Incomprehensible? Building more coal-burning power plants means producing more greenhouse gas? I don’t see what’s so incomprehensible about that. But, then again, I’m not an expert.
No one at the ministry was available for comment at the moment because half the building is on emergency leave in orde
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