The Occasional Freaky Bit
You know, my gentle readers, how I am usually quite understanding of many kinds of political behavior – but then there’s the occasional bit that really freaks me out (if correct). Paul Krugman wrote last Friday in the NYTimes that – “after the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay [the Republican House of Representatives majority leader] [...]
read onDouble-check.
And why, exactly, is it that this new Blogger version always creates two posts when I post just one?
read onWant A 3G Mobile Phone For Free?
Here’s how to do it – from theregister.co.uk.
read onThe Banality Of The Good.
Sometimes I wonder how Timothy Garton Ash finds the time to talk to people given the amount of well-written, thought-provoking stuff he publishes – in “Elf” (English As Lingua Franca), to help foster a European public sphere. Today, Eamonn Fitzgerald links to his latest piece in the New Statesman. I think he is clearly more [...]
read onCan’t Buy Me Lo-hove!
So it turns out, my vote was not needed. The Czech Eu referendum is over – 55% turnout, 77,33% said ‘yes’. Done. Welcome in the EU, guys! Nonetheless, judging from the opinions those (not too many) Czech people held whom I talked to in Praque, a lot of the 3,48 million votes in favour of [...]
read onDone. For The Time Being…
The EuObserver oberves that the historic EU constitution has now been approved by the European convention. Now let’s see what the governments will make out of it…
read onI’m in Prague this weekend…
… and I really think I should be allowed to vote in the EU accession referendum the Czech Republic is holding today and tomorrow, given the apparent lack of any exitement for the community the people over here show quite visibly. I was wandering around the city all afternoon and late evening and all I [...]
read onAmerican Girls Are Easy. German Guys Are boo-ZAH.
For the better or worse, in my experience it’s the same with American girls as with girls from anywhere – some are easy, most aren’t. However, two self-proclaimed easy ones, Erin and Meghan, who are “young enough to pay an added fee on rental cars, but old enough to feel uncomfortable in college bars“, have [...]
read onInappropriate.
Very much so. In pretty much all possible respects. I wonder if this kind of service was what the mobile handsets’ manufacturers’ marketing department had in mind when developing the idea of mobile handsets with cameras?
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Here’s to the dead. And the living.
The four German soldiers who died in last week’s Kabul suicide attack, Jörg Baasch, Andrejas Beljo, Helmi Jimenez-Paradies, and Carsten Kühlmorgen – the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th German soldiers to die in a (publicly known) sort-of combat situation after World War Two – were honoured today in a special ceremony at Cologne airport. Earlier [...]
read onExpect more handshaking
Expect more handshaking Donald Rumsfeld is in Germany today to attend the 10th anniversary ceremony of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Patenkirchen (where it is much nicer when you can ski…). The German Defense Minister is also going to be there, thus the expected handshaking.
read onJane Galt on Signal And Noise
Megan McArdle has an interesting post about the difficulties of gaining useful data through polls. She correctly states that – however carefully chose your sample may be – some people will always lie, that is, she implies, a lot of people will lie. Personally, I think that questionnaire framing in conjunction with the reality construction [...]
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Living History. Deleting Posts.
After Blogger decided to shred two of my planned entries today I have settled for one involving only very little typing. I was in Washington, DC, back in 1998 when the Starr-Rreport was released, and I have never in my life seen so many journalists per square-centimeter. I only had a tiny disposable camera with [...]
read onAusstoepfeln.
Timothy Garton-Ash’s “Unplug Yourself: Media Is Matrix” essay in German. From Sueddeutsche.de
read onAkaba is in New Hampshire
Richard Chaim Schneider thinks that the the Akaba agreement is not really getting anyone on any road for peace but was in fact the beginning of the American Presidential Campaign 2004. Otherwise, he asks, why should anyone be interested in repeating the processual mistakes made in the Oslo agreements, as the Roadmap does? From Sueddeutsche [...]
read onThe Granita Deal. In writing.
The Guardian has obtained a document outlining the political deal Tony Blair and Gordon Brown struck when Brown stepped aside in favour of Blair in the Labour party leadership contest in 1994.
read onStefan Smalla explains
Stefan Smalla explains why US litigation laws are probably a serious health hazard to all of us. I wonder if it will one day be possible to sue a government for inaction about such problematic institutional set-ups?
read onBritain won’t join the Euro
Britain won’t join Euro for a quite some time. Not unexpectedly, but now it’s official… er, sort of. From EuObserver.
read onGiscard unveils new institutional deal.
Amidst more and less serious threats of non-ratification by several member states, the European convention’s presidium continues to try to broker a deal… from EUObserver.
read onEudora 5.2.1
A quick note to everyone experiencing problems to send authenticated Email from Eudora 5.2.0.9. The new realease fixes this truly annoying problem! And it works!!!
read onS&M.
When I was “tied” to the chair of my dentist today, I could not help but wonder if the fact that her initials are S&M does have something to do with her professional choice…
read onUnplug Yourself
In the Guardian, Timothy Garton-Ash is looking at last week’s news in a somber mood – “Perhaps we live in the Matrix after all. Wherever we turn, we find a politics of manufactured reality that recalls the world of that cult film. How can we, the citizens, unplug ourselves and fight it?”
read onSkydiving. The Life and Death of Juergen W. Moellemann.
There are a lot of things one could say about Juergen W. Moellemann. And I am pretty sure that the German media is going to say pretty much all of them in the coming days and hours of reporting the details of the circumstances surrounding his dramatic death earlier today, when he – in what [...]
read onMake War. Then Love.
Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy. It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a [...]
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