Taking a few days off…

Gonna enjoy the Fall of the Wall Anniversary festivities and stuff. Hope you do too.

U2 too?

Nobody has the intention of building a wall unless it’s a U2 concert

There’s freedom and then there’s free, OK?

Who says that the MTV generation folks (and those generations that have followed them) don’t have a sense of history or very much sense of any other kind of sense at all? Clearly aware of the historical significance of the venue they have chosen to hold tonight’s big-time flashy and designer-drugged MTV Music Award extravaganza, organizers have erected a wall around the area to keep the unchosen many out.

Or is to keep the 10,000 lucky free ticket holders in? You know, like from, well, escaping to the West? Then maybe they do have more sense than I thought.

“The Brandenburg Gate is the symbol of our unity, the view should be open to all, at all times.”

Back in the DDDR

China blocks Berlin Wall Twitter page?

“Of the roughly 3,300 comments left on the virtual wall, around 1,500 have been in Chinese, said Carsten Hein, coordinator of the “berlintwitterwall.com” project.”

You ain’t nothin’ but a Schmierfink

Come on, you know you are, deep down inside. You’re a wanna-be scrawler, scribbler, graffiti artist, I mean. It’s just that you’re way too polite or law abiding or inhibited or whatever. So here’s your big chance. I think.

The Berlin Twitter Wall, online now, actually encourages people to schmier all they want. It has something to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall that took place way, way long ago on Nov. 9, 1989. I think.

“No one has the intention of constructing a Twitterwall,”

Nostalgia grips city, no vaccination in sight

Swine flu was gestern (yesterday). With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall rapidly approaching, residents of Berlin are now being faced with a much more formidable viral infection: Cold War Nostalgia.

It’s infected hundreds of thousands here already, quite some time ago actually, and although it tends to strike harder at those living in the so-called “East”, it can hit anyone at anytime, even non-German types like you, whoever you are.

And it’s gotten much worse these days too. Or at least I have to assume as much, having read that article up there.

“It’s hard to believe that on one side of the wall there were Mercedes, and on the other side this.”

Waiting for Godot

Obama in Berlin? That was then, this is now.

“Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?”

“Barack is Too Busy”

Real women wanted

Sometimes it takes a real man to make a real decision like this: Editor-in-chief Andreas Leberts has announced that starting next year, Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, will ban those skinny professional model types from its pages in favor of “real women”, whoever and wherever they are.

This decision is seen as an attempt to combat an unhealthy standard of unhealthy looking thin and flat I mean thin beauty and could also be seen as being the first step toward finally turning Brigitte into the men’s magazine it deserves to be.

Brigitte isst wieder.

Hitler more than a wussy

American researchers have set the scientific world and everybody else in an uproar by determining that Adolf Hitler’s bullet-punctured skull fragment actually belonged to a woman, thus making the evil Nazi dictator one of those herself.

“This explains a lot of those bizarre hysterical outbreaks of his, I mean hers,” one researcher said. “And that half-ass mustache. And being a vegetarian. Like it all fits together now or something.”

“Ist der Schädel überhaupt echt?”