Just had a great two-hour argument with a Sueddeutsche-Journalist about the vices and virtues of his profession. And now I come home to find this article in his newspaper about how a proposed state law is about to legalise preemptive eavesdropping on journalists in Bavaria. I may be too tired to reflect on this, but I am certainly not tired enough to oppose it.
Archiv der Kategorie: almost a diary
I’m Bill Clinton.
OK you’re right. I cannot be Bill Clinton: As the most powerful politician of the world, I would not have picked Monica Lewinsky for an affair… But anyway, he’s the one the creators of this US political quiz show used as reference for my score. Ah, and let me just add that any one dimensional scale is necessarily problematic… and for Germans taking the test – US ‘liberal’ is not German liberal, it is more like German ‘left’. (via Lillimarleen.)
To Guard The American Poo
Ok, I know this place is getting progressively mono thematic. And I know there is a lot of note/newsworthy stuff going on that too many people, including myself, are forgetting about because the war in Iraq is requiring too much of our sensory bandwidth. But there’s hope: yesterday morning, for the first time in weeks, if not months, something not Iraq related – a bank-robbery-and-bus-hijacking in Berlin – was the number one news item in German media. But as no one died in Berlin today, Baghdad was back on top by 4pm. Isn’t that sending a message to all hijackers – “listen, perpetrators, the attention threshold has risen significantly. If you still want your fifteen minutes, try at least to hurt someone badly.”
Anyway. I just wanted to show you a funny good-night picture I found on www.totalobscurity.com where I was sent by Lillimarleen. I know what you think: Photoshop. I did too, but totalobscurity.com claims it is a real product…
Champagne Blogging
this is my first attempt at live-blogging, so give me some credit here… i am writing this on a public terminal in the museum fuer kommunikation in frankfurt, typing with only one hand, as i am holding a glass of champagne in the other. it is the “long night of museums” here and on of the special exhibitions in this museum for communication puzzled me – it’s an exhibition about mp3 and the digital music revolution, including terminals running the popular “kazaa.com” filesharing software.
did i miss something? i thought the revolution was still very much going on? what is this supposed to mean? is p2p filesharing already a part of history? could that be the reason no major label objected to this exhibition and it was even sponsored by Steinberg GmbH, maker of the well known studio software “cubase”.
i don’t know, but now is not the time to answer question of historic importance, so i will return to the party and leave you probably as puzzled as i am – albeit without champagne.
Gluecksbringende Schluepfer.
(Yes, there is a reason for this title.) I know it’s been a while but I went to Freedom for some days in order to drink almost all of the wine that is no longer being shipped to the US – although, let’s face it: The demographics of US consumption of expensive French wines make that Bordeaux-Boycot a rather empty threat at least as long as long as French wines are not legally banned. I wonder what the legal department over at E&J Gallo is working on right now…
Anyway, even though this blog is only “almost a diary” and I am actually a bit in a hurry to leave Freedom with the next available train, I feel obliged to write something about meeting the lovely Gentry Lane in Paris yesterday for I discovered that a few hundred of you, my gentle readers, are reading these lines because Gentry told you to read about Young Werther’s plans to rule the world (which, by the way, do not actually exist – just to reassure possible readers from various intelligence services – I’m not trying to capture your market. Neither do I wear blue and yellow suits or regularly threaten girls to kill myself if they do not kiss me…).
Well, I am only too happy to corroborate her claim of looking ten years younger – even though I never thought she looked ten years older. And the German word for “lucky panties” is, of course, “Gluecksbringende Schluepfer”, which in some way, does sound like an oxymoron, in my opinion…
So for once, there is a real reason for importing an anglicism into “The Awful German Language“, which, quite honestly, is not all that awful after all. Just ask Gentry.
Wesley Crusher is 30.
If you grew up in a world where teenage boys watched Jean Luc Picard b(a)ldy go where no one had ever been before with his “Next Generation” spaceship Enterprise while teenage girls used to follow “Beverly Hills 90210“, a series designed around the love-life of Brandon, Brenda and, of course, Donna, the virgin (it may come as a shock to those of you who believe in tv, but may I say that a rather credible source once told me that, allegedly, she was not really one…), you will certainly be delighted to be informed that Wesley Crusher, the always nerdy teenage ensign, has his own blog.
Back To Iraq. Some now, Some later.
Well, not the character, of course, but the actor, Wil Wheaton. And I suppose he would not be too delighted to be introduced as Wesley Crusher having read the introductory text to his blog in which he also tells us that Wesley is now thirty years old.
That, my gentle readers, is indeed shocking news and I don’t even want to begin thinking about the ramifications of his statement.
Spring Cold.
Sorry for the apparent lack of entries, but even though the weather is brightening up in Southern Germany, I was hit by a pre-spring/post-carnival cold yesterday and so I’m not really in screen-staring mood. And there’s so much I would like to write about – the latest developments re Iraq, my best guess for Bush’s non-war exit strategy, exciting developments in German higher education, and, obviously, yesterday’s serious economic policy bashing by the Bundesbank which is obviously as scared as it gets of a possible downgrade of Germany’s debt rating.
But above all, on the day on which the first “German Idol” will be elected by tens of millions of phone calls, I would have loved to write something more detailed about an amazing documentary on ZDF television which covered the casting for the “Arabic Idol” [link in German]. When I see expressions of the ongoing Islamic reformation as vital as that, I can’t help but wonder if the “Arabic Idol’s” life will be made easier by a war that is likely going to seriously discredit the less inhibted, western lifestyle these young people seem to have discovered on their own.
I very much doubt it.
My New Ralph Lauren Sweater.
So via Blogdex, I found this hilarious article published by USA today called “Ugly sentiments sting American tourists”.
I suppose it was pretty tough to write this article. You can literally sense how the evident editorial intention to publish yet another “peaceful American tourists tortured to death by mad and naked European pacifists”-peace made the newspaper’s European correspondents look desperately for something anti-American to write about. Their effort wasn’t too successful, even if you insist to count Bush-policy discussions as anti-American torture, as the article indicates –
“‘I am certain that a number of American visitors will be asked about the U.S. administration’s policy on Iraq. But if indeed there have been some unpleasant encounters, I strongly believe that they are few and far between,’ says Patrick Goyet, vice chairman of the European Travel Commission in New York. ‘Furthermore, speaking as a European and for the vast majority of my fellow Europeans, I consider any such behavior idiotic and embarrassing.'”
Period.
But the best part of the article is a bullet point list by Bruce McIndoe, CEO of iJet Travel Intelligence that tells American tourists how to behave when in Rome. Well, we all know what the obvious answer is, but let’s have a more detailed look at Mr McIndoe’s propositions.
Avoid American fast-food restaurants and chains.
Believe it or not, but McDonald’s and their competitors do not just cater American tourists in Europe. Like it or not, the deconstruction of traditional European eating habits is advancing rapidly, even in France, although they don’t like to talk about it for cultural and marketing reasons. So Starbucks has just announced to open more than 200 branches in Germany. And I had my last McBurger last Monday night. Remember “Pulp Fiction“? It was a “Royal With Cheese” – basically the same, but with subtle, metric, differences.
Keep discussions of politics to private places, not rowdy bars.
Well, it’s never a good idea to go to a rowdy bar anyway, if you aren’t a cowboy yourself. I seriously wonder what kind of etablissement Mr McIndoe had in mind here. What exactly are “rowdy bars”? There are hardly any cheap-western-movie-style saloons in Europe, should that be of any help. But wait, he might be concerned about the significant amount of Irish and English Pubs where it’s definitely a lot easier for American tourists to talk to Europeans as most interaction is in English….
Take a rain check on wearing clothes featuring American flags or sports team logos.
Damn. I just bought one of those Ralph Lauren US-flagged sweaters and I am not even American. And I did not even buy it for any ideological reason. And when I recently wore it during a generally leftist (read: European left, not its kinder, gentler, liberal US cousin) theatre company’s performance I was actually a bit stunned that no one cared at all. Seriously, the American flag is not something only Americans would wear in public in Europe.
The same goes for baseball caps or university logoed sweaters. If all the Germans who wear Georgetown or Harvard sweaters with Yankee baseball caps actually knew those universities and had any real idea about the baseball team whose logo they promote, Germany would have certainly fared a lot better in last year’s international secondary education assessment. But I will tell you, should I ever feel safer not wearing my Ralph Lauren sweater.
Keep your passport out of sight.
Indeed a good idea. But mostly because it really is a hassle to get a temporary one abroad.
Keep cameras, video equipment and maps tucked away.
Right – very interesting point. Sure, there are places where its safer not to be to easily identifiable as a tourist. Just like in Miami, a few years ago, remember? So this is good advice for all tourists if they choose to visit places they should rather not. But if this is an advice specifically aimed at Americans in Europe it does come across a tad bit arrogant – there are cameras and video equipment in Europe. We also have mobile phones, T-mobile hotspots and even ones with at affordable rates…
Soften your speech; Americans typically overshadow their hosts in the volume department.”
This, I have to agree, is partly useful advice. Some American tourists do overshadow almost everyone in the volume department. That is particularly true for shrieking female undergraduate students. Strangely though, it does not hold at all for all the Americans I know personally…
I wonder what Mr McIndoe’s ideas for blending in in the US would be? Maybe you, my gentle readers do have some suggestions?
American Exchange Students In Germany.
Yesterday, my sister published an article about American exchange students’ perception of the Iraq/media induced rift between the the Bush and Schroeder administrations in the local edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [it’s not online, unfortunately].
I’m glad she found some American students to talk to. There are not too many of them. At the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz, only seventy-nine Americans are enrolled. Seventy-nine out of a student body of approximately 30,000. Seventy-nine out of approximately 4,000 non-German students. But let me be clear here – this is by no means an unusually low number. All those US students here at the moment must have made the decision to go to Germany a fair amount of time before the anyone used the word rift to describe German-American relations.
Sure, talking to people is not quantitative research. But it does give you some idea of what’s going on, if those you talk to do have an opinion. I’m glad my sister found some who had. I met two American undergraduate students in Munich early in Febuary who replied to my question about their opinion of the ongoing quarrel that they were not sufficiently well informed about the issue to have an opinion of their own. That was on the day when another American, Donald Rumsfeld, was in town and was told by Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, that he had not yet been convinced of the necessity of war in Iraq.
In their defence, I don’t think the two girls were particularly interested in politics in general, so their reply also had a touch of intentional modesty, rather than just one of unfortunate ignorance. Actually, their ignorance shows that there are Americans in this country whose personal reality has only marginally been affected by the international politics, if at all.
It shows that at least those not professionally involved in shaping opinion have learnt to differentiate between those governed and those who govern. The students who were interviewed by my sister basically stated the same – they very much enjoy their stay and have never been bullied by anyone because of their being American, the only notable difference being more political discussions than before.
Those discussions, on the other hand, may not have become too heated, as the Fulbright Commission’s American programme manager Reiner Roh reckons that less than ten percent of the American exchange students who receive Fulbright scholarships support the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq.
Sure, not all American exchange students are Fulbright scholars and there are clearly a lot of possible reasons for such an extreme divergence from the general American attitude, not the least of which is the fact that these students do understand foreign media.
But personally, I believe that there likely is a significant correlation between a person’s willingness to learn about different cultures and her political acceptance of an international order constraining even the most powerful, which is fundamentally at odds with divide-et-impera policies of a Kagan-style (neo-Bismarckian) system of ad-hoc axes and alliances.
So I would like to repeat something rather important these days – there is German-American life beyond governmental quarrels. And it’s a lot more fun. I really wonder what the American students dressed up as for yesterday’s raving Monday parade?
La Marseilleise.
So “Rosenmontag“, the raving Monday, was good fun, as expected. The day started with me attending a vodkaesque “Russian-Montag”-Party – I hope my non-German readers can appreciate this subtle linguistic humour.
So most people were disguised in Soviet uniforms they had purchased either on Ebay or on some east European flee market. Naturally, the music of choice came from a CD featuring more communist songs than you will ever want to hear – and – the French anthym, “La Marseilleise”.
I suppose those compiling the CD were too busy drinking Vodka to note the subtle ideological point they were making…