The Capital Letter - by BerlinBear

Stuff

2006-10-20T14:36:00.000+02:00

Quite by chance, I visited my own blog today for the first time in ages and discovered that it had been three months to the day since my last post. That is truly pathetic and is a new record. Nice. And, umm, sorry.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am not blogging at the moment. The reasons for that are several, but principal among them are the twin facts that a) in recent months I have been working on my thesis with renewed vigour and commitment, and b) I have just moved to a new city (see updated sidebar) and started a new job. Those two things combined mean that my plate right now is more than full and some non-essentials, including blogging, have had to be culled ruthlessly.

However, it is absolutely 100% my intention to return to blogging regularly at some (not entirely distant) future point, so the ether need not fear that it has lost the BerlinBear forever. I will, as they say in California and Austria, be back. Just not in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, I offer for your enjoyment, a new update on bears in the news. My heart does not bleed for this guy:

Man forced to pay $1500 after killing bear.

Bastard.

Anway, I'll be back at some stage. In the meantime, there are plenty of other blogs to read. Admittedly, not many which combine New Zealand in the news with Bears in the news, but you have to take it as it comes.

Cheers,
BB

Tags:
bears in the news, Marburg

New Zealand in the news

2006-07-20T20:09:00.000+02:00

Well, news from New Zealand has made the BBC News website once again, and as usual it's an odd and faintly embarrassing story. It seems that's the only way we ever break international headlines.

In any case, it turns out that a police officer in Auckland was working a second job to tide her over some financial difficulties. That's not the problem, as secondary work is allowed in the New Zealand Police service, subject to approval. The problem is that this particular officer's secondary job was ... as a prostitute. This, according to a police spokesperson, is "inappropriate and incompatible with policing."

Fair enough, I suppose, except that prostitution is legal in New Zealand. So it's not like she was moonlighting as a drug dealer or a hit-woman. However, she has been allowed to keep her job as a police officer all the same, which is a good thing if you ask me.

What I would be really very interested to know, is how this came to light. You can bet she didn't just randomly bring it up in a promotion interview, right? So, which of her superior officers accidentally found himself one of her customers? And how appropriate and compatible with policing is that?

Full story here [BBC] and here [Stuff.co.nz].

Tags:
Auckland, New Zealand, police, prostitution

Creative sentencing

2006-06-03T10:29:00.000+02:00

Here's a criminal sentence you will not see every day: 15 days of gardening. No, really.

A British man who overstayed his visa in Zambia, has been found guilty and sentenced to 15 days of gardening at the Zambian immigration department. During that time, he will be required to mow the lawn and tend the flowers. Interesting option. Perhaps this is something that the Americans should consider for the 'illegals' from Mexico that we keep hearing complaints about. If the numbers being bandied about are anywhere near realistic, the USA would soon have the best gardens on the planet. Worth considering?

BBC News has the full story.

Tags:
immigration; Zambia; weird news

!!

2006-05-24T20:54:00.000+02:00

[Hat-tip: Cufflinks]

New Zealand not for sale

2006-05-15T22:23:00.000+02:00

I don't know how I missed this when the news broke a few days ago, but in case you missed it too, it's official, New Zealand is not for sale.

Last week, some unnamed Aussie larrikin listed New Zealand for sale on Australian EBay. Habloodyha. The starting price, apparently, was 1 cent. Cheeky blighter. Still, on the plus side, there were 22 bids and the price had gone up to $2,300 by the time it was pulled by EBay Australia.

Like all ridiculous and vaguely embarrassing news stories involving New Zealand, this one was picked up by just about every news outlet under the sun.

Thankfully, most of them just regurgitated the AP newswire story word for word, meaning they didn't report what New Zealand's ridiculous and very embarrassing foreign minister, Winston Peters, had to say on the matter. You had to go to a New Zealand site to get his insightful input:

I don't think it's fun. I think that kind of nonsensical stupidity, I'll leave to the tabloid media.

If you're at all familiar with Winston Peters and his populist, uncomfortably nationalist politics, you'll know just how funny that is. For well over a decade, good old Winnie has made "nonsensical stupidity" one of the maintstays of his political career. Sadly, the voters of Tauranga, have lapped it up and re-elected him time and time again, allowing him to remain a blot on New Zealand's political landscape for far, far too long. As for the decision to appoint him as foriegn minister, well ...

Tags:
New Zealand; EBay; Winston Peters

Bears in the news

2006-05-15T21:49:00.000+02:00

Gee, it's been a while. Let me make it up to you with a joke.

What do you call a grizzly bear crossed with a polar bear?

Actually, it's not a joke at all. You call it Ursus maritimus horribilis. And then, if you're a nasty hunter, you kill it, even though it's the only bear of its kind ever found anywhere. Bastard.

Call it a grolar or possibly a pizzly: either way the bear shot by American hunter Jim Martell last month has startled experts. DNA tests of the bear, shot in the Northwest Territories of Canada, showed last week it was a hybrid of polar bear and a grizzly - perhaps the first ever seen in the wild.
'It's a total surprise,' said Roger Kuptana, the local guide who aided Martell on his hunt, for which he paid $50,000 (£26,388). As for its scientific name, researchers have proposed Ursus maritimus horribilis, from Ursus maritimus (polar bear) and Ursus arctos horribilis (grizzly bear).

Source: The Observer.

I would post a picture, but it's way too disturbing, and the "hunter" looks way too smug and pleased with himself for me to put it on my blog. If you must, the picture is here. [Hat-tip: tengrrl]

Tags:
bears

Chernobyl

2006-04-26T22:35:00.000+02:00

It's twenty years today since the Chernobyl disaster, the world's worst civil nuclear accident. My, how time flies. I remember the news reports and the concern, even in far-flung New Zealand, as if it were, well, less than twenty years ago.

As you would expect, the world's media are full of retrospectives, commentaries and reports about Chernobyl. Here are a few interesting ones:

The BBC website today devotes an entire "In depth" section to Chernobyl, including an interesting On this day retrospective and a number of Where are they now?-type victims' stories. I also found the Q&A section on Chernobyl very informative.

The English website of the German current affairs magazing Der Spiegel also has interesting coverage. The media roundup column "The World from Berlin" offers a concise and handy run-down on what the German newspapers are saying about Chernobyl today, while Lessons Forgotten looks at Ukrainian plans to go nuclear once more and build 14 new nuclear reactors. Finally, "Accident or Catastrophe" appealed to my linguistic geekiness, in examining the different terms used in different countries to describe what went on at Chernobyl.

Deutsche Welle's English website also dedicates an entire DW-World Special section to Chernobyl, which includes informative Flash presentations of the chronology of the disaster and the nuclear fallout from it. Included in that section is an opinion piece entitled Chernobyl: an Insidious Legacy, which considers the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, in particular the political fallout from it.

Of course, there are literally thousands of other articles out there covering this subject today, but those are a selection of the pieces I found the most interesting and informative. If you've got any others to recommend, please feel free to post a link in the comments.

An anniversary like this one, especially against the backdrop of recent developments in Iran, obviously gives one pause to consider nuclear power, its pros and cons, its dangers and benefits. This is a topic I've given a lot of thought to, especially in recent years. Which is not to say that I have reached what I would consider a definitive stance on the issue.

In fact, my opinion on nuclear power has evolved considerably over the course of the past few years, from one of absolute and vehement opposition, to one of considerable concern but nevertheless the recognition that in some circumstances it may be a necessary evil, and even the lesser or two (or more) evils. In short, I would have to say I've developed into a bit of a nuclear agnostic. But that is a topic for another post, or a series of posts. Perhaps one day not too far hence I'll get around to it. No promises though.

Tags:
Chernobyl; nuclear power; media

ANZAC Day

2006-04-25T08:25:00.000+02:00

Today, 25th April, is ANZAC Day, the day on which Australians and New Zealanders commemmorate the disastrous failure of the Gallipoli landings on this day in 1915, as well as remembering and honouring all those whose have served and fallen in war. It's a day of solemn remembrance, and a day of recognition of the futility of war.

Last year on this day I was in Berlin and attended an ANZAC Day memorial service, which I reported on in detail here. This year, as I am currently in Trier, there is no service I can attend, so I will just have to recognize the day in my own personal way. For this post, I'm going to let the words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the commander of the Turkish troops at Gallipoli, who went on to become the founder of modern Turkey, do the talking for me. I find these words very moving and poignant. They give me goose pimples every time.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives...
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
Here in this country of ours ...

You, the Mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries
Wipe away your tears;
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace.
After having lost their lives on this land they
Have become our sons as well.

Kemal Atatürk, 1934

Tags:
ANZAC Day

Shoddy headlining

2006-04-24T19:15:00.000+02:00

Oh dear! The BBC news website has been hit by the shoddy headlining bug which plagues so many newspapers as well. From this article's headline we learn the extremely dramatic news that all of Peru has been evacuated:

Volcano prompts Peru evacuation

it screams. Curious as to where all the residents of Peru had been sent, I read on, only to discover that in fact it's the residents of villages close to the Ubinas volcano, which is currently erupting in Southern Peru. While this is doubtless a very significant event in the lives of the people affected, it's not remotely what the headline says.

What they meant of course is:

Volcano prompts Peruvian evacuation

or alternatively:

Volcano prompts evacuation in Peru

A subtle difference, but an important one. It means the difference between the headline telling the beginning of the story or being complete nonsense. Come on BBC, pull your socks up!

Tags:
BBC; media; Peru

Happy Birthday Queenie

2006-04-21T19:24:00.000+02:00

It's New Zealand's Head of State's birthday today. She turns 80. How nice.

So, happy birthday to

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith

or, as we say in New Zealand, where she has a different title

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

Much catchier, I'm sure you'll agree. Eighty, eh? Jolly good show.

Personally, I quite like the Queen. I don't think much of the rest of her family, with the exception of Prince William who seems a solid young man, but I do like the Queen. She has grace and style and she speaks a delightfully antiquiated and faintly ridiculous English. And she has stamina, and she doesn't meddle in politics or fancy herself a "political activist" like her son.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a royalist, by any stretch of the imagination. But then nor am I a staunch republican (in the "let's become a republic" sense of the word, not in the make-me-and-my-cronies-rich-and-screw-everyone-else- especially-the-French sense of the word). Basically, when it comes down to it, I don't really give a stuff.

Sure, having the Queen of England as New Zealand's head of state is anachronistic and a hangover from an imperialist and colonial past. Sure, it's hard to explain to non-Commonwealth people that our head of state is not a New Zealander, has never lived in New Zealand, and only visits once in a blue moon. Sure, it's pretty crazy that, if she fancied it, an 80 year-old woman in a palace in London could dissolve our parliament just because she felt like it. And sure, it's hard to make German university students grasp that a country can be a consitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy at the same time. But on the other hand, it's very cheap to have a head of state whose upkeep you only have to pay for for about a week every seven or eight years, when she and her ridiculous husband come to visit. Also, as the last 150-odd years have shown, the current system works just fine. And, to boot, it's handy not to have to bother writing a proper constitution.

In other words, I'm not in a huge hurry for New Zealand to become a republic. It'll happen in due course, sure, and when it does I'll think it's a Good Thing. But I'd just as soon watch and wait for the Australians to ditch the monarchy and become a republic first, observe carefully for a few years, watching for the things they get right and the things they get wrong, learn from their mistakes and then do it better.

In other other words, if it's only a little bit broke, wait for the Australians to show you how to fix it. They seem to be in much more of a hurry anyway.

In case you're interested, in true BBC style, the BBC website has an entire feature section devoted to the Queen's birthday today.

Tags:
The Queen; birthday; monarchy; republic; New Zealand

Bears in the news

2006-04-21T19:04:00.000+02:00

Being a bear myself, I always take note when one of my kind pops up in the news. In the past week, a black bear from China keeps getting a mention. That's because said black bear was the reason why the first face transplant ever performed in China had to be undertaken. It was only the second face transplant in the world, the first having been performed in France last year.

The recipient of the new face, or more precisely a new cheek, upper lip and nose - all from the one donor, was Li Guoxing, a 30 year-old hunter and farmer. He required the surgery after being attacked by a black bear some two years ago. Chinese media report that he is doing well, though it will be two months before doctors can be certain that his body has not rejected the new face.

While it's undoubtedly great for Mr. Li to have had his mauled face repaired, spare a thought for the bear. Given that Mr. Li was a hunter, for all we know, the mauling may have been self-defence, a matter of life or death for the bear. Perhaps he thought to himself "if I just rip half this guy's face off, but let him live, he at least won't be able to use his gun properly" or something to that effect. Or maybe it was revenge. Perhaps Mr. Li killed the poor bear's brother, or mother, or partner. Who knows? Just thought I'd throw the potential other side of the story out there, because the media reports have been neglecting it.

On a more serious note, New Scientist has a more detailed report on the face transplant operation, including consideration of ethical issues and whatnot. It's worth a read, though be warned, it contains pretty graphic images of Mr Li's new face and his old one, or rather lack of one. Not for the faint hearted.

Tags:
bears; China; face transplant

Happy Easter

2006-04-16T13:31:00.000+02:00

A very happy Easter to all who celebrate it.

Teflon John has questions to answer

2006-04-12T12:29:00.000+02:00

Also on the front page of BBC News today is a story about the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. Now, anyone who's been reading my blog since the early days already knows what I think of Teflon John. To say he is my second most disliked Western leader would be to put it mildly. Back in April 2005, I put it like this:

I'm afraid that this just further confirms my previously-held impression of John Howard as, frankly, an arrogant tosser. ... If I were Australian, I'd view him as an embarrassment to my country.

and this:

[John Howard is] an odious little man with an attitude problem and a misplaced desire to turn his country into a carbon-copy of the USA.

This is the man, remember, who unabashedly maintained that the recent race riots in the suburbs of Sydney, stirred up by white supremacists and violently targeting the Lebanese community (some of whom retaliated with violence also), did not in anyway reveal a racist underbelly of Australian society. Yeah, right! And yet he keeps getting re-elected. Go figure.

In any case, it would appear that Teflon John is in a bit of trouble over an Australian link to irregularities (= accepted bribes) in the UN-administered oil-for-food programme, which allowed Iraq to export a limited amount of oil to pay for food. He has previously publicly denied that he or his government had any knowledge that kickbacks were paid under this scheme.

There is an inquiry into this scandal going on in Australia right now. John Howard has already submitted a written statement to said inquiry, but now, as the BBC reports today, he has been summoned to appear before it in person tomorrow. Oops! Not a good look, especially since this will apparently make John Howard the first serving Prime Minister to face an official inquiry in Australia since 1983. Poor chap, my heart bleeds.

You know what they say: where there's smoke, there's fire. I'll be watching the results with interest, to say the least.

Tags:
Australia; John Howard; international politics

New Zealand makes front page of BBC News: Bad news as usual

2006-04-12T11:57:00.000+02:00

Today once again, New Zealand graces the front page of the BBC News website. As ever, though, it's bad news.

It would seem that a young British chap had been missing in the Coromandel region, after failing to return from a tramping excursion, and now they've found his body. That sucks.

Robert Atkin, from Lancashire, was only 26 and was just 3 weeks into what was supposed to be a one year long holiday in New Zealand with his girlfriend. Poor guy, and for that matter, poor girl. My heart goes out to her, and to the young man's family. What a horrible thing to have happen.

The BBC article notes:

Rescue workers said Mr Atkin had experience of hiking in the UK, but not in New Zealand.

They said last week that he may have become disoriented by using northern hemisphere sun settings and inadvertently headed further into the bush.

As a personal aside, I would think that that is quite possible. I've lived in Europe for six years now and I still haven't got my head around the different movements of the sun - or the moon, for that matter - here, as compared with back home. What chance does someone in their first three weeks on the other side of the world have, then?

Tags:
New Zealand; BBC

Italian election result confirmed and denied

2006-04-12T00:52:00.000+02:00

Further to my post yesterday on the results of the Italian general election, there has been an, umm, interesting development. The official results are in, and Romano Prodi has been confirmed as the winner, by the narrowest of margins. But that's not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that the incumbent Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, refuses to accept the result and refuses to concede defeat, citing voting irregularities and disputed ballot papers.

Strange. All I can think of when I hear that is: hanging chads. It'll be interesting to see how this develops, and whether Berlusconi actually has something concrete to base his claims on, or whether this is just some sort of last-ditch gambit designed to help him cling to power. From what I've seen of Berlusconi, my money would be on the latter.

BBC News and Reuters have all the details.

Tags:
Italy
politics

My heart bleeds

2006-04-10T19:17:00.000+02:00

Were today a Saturday, this would qualify as a "good news Saturday" post: exit polls in Italy suggest that Silvio Berlusconi may well have been ousted in the general election. No results have bee confirmed as yet, but as the BBC reports:

According to exit polls, centre-left leader Romano Prodi is on course to beat Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

A Nexus poll shown on Italian TV put Mr Prodi's coalition on 50-54% in both houses of parliament, with Mr Berlusconi's coalition on 45-49%.

All reports seem to indicate that the turn-out has been particularly high, up in the 80-85% region. It remains to be seen whether the official results will confirm these early reports, and if they do, what sort of a coalition Romano Prodi will be able to form, how long it will last, and how effective it will be. Italian governments, of course, are notoriously short-lived. Berlusconi's goverment, which now looks to be coming to an end, is the longest-serving Italian government since the Second World War.

I for one will not lament Mr. Berlusconi's election loss, should it come. Perhaps once he is no longer in power, the Italian authorities can pursue the corruption claims against him, without being thwarted at every turn and having special dispensations and laws passed especially for Berlusconi. We can only hope.

Tags:
Italy; politics; Berlusconi

Still here, honest

2006-04-10T19:00:00.000+02:00

Ugh!

I'm back in Trier for a few days. In my absence, they've had a change of state government. I'll try to knock a proper post about it together later in the day.

Well, that never happened, did it? I've been rubbish. You'd be forgiven for thinking this blog was moribund, but it isn't, I swear. You'll see.

Anyway, the Rheinland-Pfalz (and Saxony-Anhalt and Baden-Württemberg) state elections are so long past they hardly seem worth commenting on any more, except to say that in their different ways, all three state elections seemingly strengthened the hand of the "grand coalition" at state level. Three entirely different results, but all pretty good news for the coalition of SPD and CDU that is running the country as a whole.

The state election results, for anyone who's still interested, are here, but it's all old news I'm afraid.

Must do better.

Tags:
Germany
German politics

The other side of the country

2006-03-29T12:17:00.000+02:00

I'm back in Trier for a few days. In my absence, they've had a change of state government. I'll try to knock a proper post about it together later in the day.

Replica stadium coming to Berlin

2006-03-25T17:26:00.000+01:00

Germany is in the grip of World Cup fever. Barely a day passes here without some new story about the upcoming World Cup, whether it's doubt about the safety of the stadiums, concern about the abilities of the German national team, a tabloid-led campaign against Jürgen Klinsmann - the national coach, or controversy over how the army could be used to beef up security during the World Cup. (For historical reasons, Germans are very jumpy about any domestic military activity at all).

This week's big story, here in Berlin at least, was the announcement that Adidas plans to build a replica of the Berlin stadium, the Olympiastadion, as well as a surrounding "soccer park", on the lawn in front of the German parliament. Built on a scale of 1:3.3, the mini-stadium will seat around 10,000 fans, who will be able to watch games on giant screens and generally soak up the World Cup atmosphere, despite not having been able to gain tickets to the actual matches. It's apparently going to look something like the computer-generated image on the right. According to Deutsche Welle, tickets to the soccer park will cost just €1 and to the replica stadium itself just €3, with that money going to charity.

All 64 World Cup games are to be broadcast on giant screens on the grounds at the Reichstag. Adidas expects up to 70,000 visitors per day.

Yet the action will not be limited to passive spectating. Around the stadium, soccer fields will be set up. Tournaments are supposed to be held. Schools are encouraged to take field trips to the park and play soccer. Also, no World Cup in Germany would be complete without a beer garden. The public in general should have a good time.

Even on those few days when soccer players and fans have the day off from the tournament, the mini-stadium will host concerts. US hip-hop group "The Black Eyed Peas" are scheduled for June 28. English singer-songwriter James Blunt is scheduled to perform on July 7.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I might just have to head along and check it out when the time comes.

Tags:
Berlin; Germany; sport; World Cup

Good news Saturday

2006-03-25T17:12:00.000+01:00

It's been a long hiatus for Good news Saturday, but it's back. Today's good news comes from Africa, specifically Nigeria.

It has been announced that the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo (what a great name!) has agreed to hand over the former Liberian President, Charles Taylor, to the Liberian authorities. Taylor has been living in exile in Nigeria since he stood down as the leader of Liberia in 2003. He is wanted by the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone to stand trial for crimes committed during the Liberian civil war, which began in 1987. Until now, the Nigerian president had refused to hand Taylor over. His change of tack today comes in response to a formal request from the newly elected Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

It it thought that the Liberian authorities will send Mr Taylor straight to Sierra Leone to stand trial, once they have him in custody.

Good news for justice, good news for human rights.

BBC News and Reuters have all the details.

Tags:
Africa; Liberia; human rights; Nigeria; good news

New Zealand in the news

2006-03-25T17:03:00.000+01:00

New Zealand has made the BBC News website once more, and as usual it's for something weird. This story details how a man was caught speeding in the NZ town of Papamoa. Nothing unusual or weird about that, of course, except that the guy didn't have a driver's licence or, umm, any arms. He was using one foot to steer and one to accelerate. Interesting tactc.

The best part of the story is this quote from Senior Sergeant Diedre Lack about the incident:

Obviously, driving at a speed like that, arms or not, you're just waiting for an accident.

Ha! The speed in question was 121km/h. She ought to come to Germany, where noone drives at under that speed, unless they're just waiting for an accident.

One day, New Zealand will make the pages of the BBC News website for a story that is neither weird nor embarrassing. I live in hope.

Tags:
New Zealand
weird news

Question for ya

2006-03-23T16:29:00.000+01:00

In what may or may not become a regular instalment here at The Capital Letter, this is the bit where I get to ask a question of my readers and you get to help me by enabling me to cure my ignorance just a little bit, one step at a time. The title, for what it's worth, comes courtesy of Miss Behaviour, who claims to have had a friend in High School who prefaced all his questions with "Question for ya" - just so there would be no doubt. True or apocryphal, I don't know, but it makes a cracking title for a post like this.

Anyhow ... today's question is directly related to the possible (fingers crossed) onset of Spring.

Near where Miss Behaviour and I live in Berlin, there are a number of lakes. Two of these lakes are the two Wannsees, a large one and a small one, imaginatively named Großer Wannsee and Kleiner Wannsee, respectively. You can see them both clearly in this image from Wikipedia.

Yesterday, I went for a walk along to the two Wannsees and discovered that while the smaller of the two has completely thawed from its previous frozen state, the Großer Wannsee is still almost completely frozen over. Thus, whereas this sculler can already train freely on the Kleiner Wannsee ...

... this tour boat is still frozen in, barely 100m away as the crow flies.

The ice of the Großer Wannsee gives way to the open water of the Kleiner Wannsee just before the bridge under which the two lakes join. As a result, whereas the gull in the background is standing on the ice, the ducks in the foreground are paddling in the water.

In the fading light as dusk approaches, the two lakes look like this:

Kleiner Wannsee, completely thawed

Großer Wannsee, still almost completely frozen over

Which brings me, finally, to my question for ya: why is that? How can that be? The lakes are joined together; they are located right alongside each other; the weather affecting one is the same as the weather affecting the other. So why the significant difference in thaw speeds? And why does the smaller lake thaw first?

If anyone with a clearer understanding of physics and meteorology than I (not hard) can shed some light on that for me, I should be most appreciative.

Tags:
queries; ice; weather; Berlin; Wannsee

Good news from Iraq for once

2006-03-23T10:28:00.000+01:00

Wow! This is good news: three hostages, one Briton and two Canadians have been freed in Iraq after four months in captivity.

Jolly good show. More of the same for the ~~dozens~~ thousands of hostages still held in Iraq, please.

Tags:
Middle East
Iraq

Thank heavens!

2006-03-22T23:01:00.000+01:00

Germany won. Germany 4 - USA 1. The world will not end tonight. What a relief!

Not a very good game though. Still, you can't have your cake and eat it.

Tags:
sport
Germany
football

Incidentally ...

2006-03-22T18:22:00.000+01:00

... if I am not here tomorrow, and there is no news coming out of Germany, it will be because the German football team will have lost to the United States in this evening's game and the world will have ended.

Thought you should know, just in case.

Impending doom is explained much more carefully and less cryptically by Paul at A Berlin Diary.

Tags:
sport
football
Germany

Postbote Pat

2006-03-22T18:10:00.000+01:00

As a kid, I was a big fan of the children's television show Postman Pat. That childhood enthusiasm was nourished in my late teens and early twenties when I was a regular at Murphy's Irish Bar, whose house band The Dog's Bollix (mentioned in this recent post) had the theme song from Postman Pat as their signature tune.

Given that, imagine my surprise and throwback-to-childhood delight when this BBC article was brought to my attention yesterday. It seems that Postman Pat's black and white cat, Jess, is getting his own spin-off show. Sounds like fun. And better still, according to the article, the original Postman Pat is set to be aired in on German television soon, under the incredibly inventive title Postbote Pat.

It's enough to make you wish you were a kid again.
[Hat-tip to Hildypants for the heads-up]

Tags:
television
children

Maybe, just maybe

2006-03-21T18:39:00.000+01:00

I'm almost afraid to say this out loud, lest I jinx anything, so I shall just whisper it very softly.

I think maybe, just maybe, after a very long and frankly bloody cold five months of Winter, Spring might finally be springing here in Berlin.

Woohoo!

Tags:
weather
Berlin
Germany

Spamming spies

2006-03-21T14:47:00.000+01:00

This little gem was in my work email inbox when I logged on this morning. It amused me so much to be addressed as if I were the head of MI5, that I thought I'd share. Needless to say, there is not an M in my work email address, nor had I expressed any interest in anything whatsoever, least of all anything offered by Mach90 Independent Group.

Hello M ,

Thank you for your interest in the most powerful Income Generating System the Internet has ever seen. Click the link below to activate and experience a free tour:

http://www.mach90.com/a.asp?p=79a7cf4792471

M , you need to understand something. This opportunity has already spread to over 100 countries in less than two years. Thousands of people have recognized the potential.

By activating your account you will receive real-time email notifications about your new business. WARNING: Due to an overwhelming worldwide interest in Mach90, you may receive multiple daily emails as your business develops:

http://www.mach90.com/a.asp?p=79a7cf4792471

Best Regards,

Jerry Bataluna
coldmanpower@yahoo.com
Mach90 Independent Group Member

-----------------------------------------------------------
If you haven't recently expressed interest in Mach90, simply
click below to be removed from Mach90's mailing list:
http://www.mach90.com/u.asp?p=e784434792471
-----------------------------------------------------------
You can contact us by mail: Blk 4 Lot 16 EastLand Village
Yati, Liloan 6002 Philippines

Those are the contact details provided in the email. Feel free to spam them. Say hi from me.

Tags:
spam

Happy birthday, belatedly

2006-03-20T18:57:00.000+01:00

So it turns out that The Capital Letter turned one year old yesterday, and I missed its birthday. Oops! Best wishes, belatedly, for a very happy birthday, blog. Sorry to have neglected you on your special day.

When I first started blogging, over at tBlog, I had no idea whether I would be a flash-in-the-pan blogger, or would be in it for the long haul. It turns out I'm in it for the medium haul at the very least. Though things have slowed down considerably in recent months, I'm still enjoying it, and still have every intention of keeping going.

I read somewhere recently that over 80% of blogs that are picked up by the blog indexing and search tool technorati die before the three month mark. So in those terms, The Capital Letter is already a veteran. I may not be the most prolific blogger, the most controversial blogger, or even the most interesting blogger out there, but I've stuck at it, so far, and I'd like to think I've written at least a few posts worth reading in the course of the last year. (There's been some dross too, I'm the first to admit, but you have to take the rough with the smooth, don't you?)

Thanks to all my readers and commenters who keep coming back. A few of you (*cough* Lindy, Kiwi in Zurich) have been here since the very beginning, others have joined the journey somewhere further down the line. It's always nice to hear from you and to get your opinions and feedback on what I have to say. I appreciate that you take the time to read my ~~blatherings~~ musings and add gems of your own.

Just for a bit of a blast from the past, I moved my first two posts from The Capital Letter's original home over to this site. If you missed the start, or if you fancy a refresher, here they are in all their beginner's glory:

Taking the Plunge
What's in a name?

Happy St. Patricks Day

2006-03-17T18:10:00.000+01:00

I don't really celebrate St. Patricks Day, any more. I used to when I was an undergraduate at the University of Auckland. This was for two main reasons. First, my friends and I were pretty much regulars at an Irish Pub in town (Murphy's Bar - for those in the know - back in the days when The Dog's Bollix still played there). And secondly, crucially, St. Patricks Day is a celebration which principally involves drinking, which made it perfect for undergraduate students such as myself.

This year, I even almost missed the fact that today is St. Patrick's Day entirely. Only just noticed now, when I came across something by chance online. But since I have several Irish friends who I know will be larking it up today and really getting into the spirit of the thing, I thought I'd just bang out a quick post to wish anyone who feels "spoken to" a very happy St. Patrick's Day.

For more info:
St-Patricks-Day.com
Wikipedia article on St. Patrick's Day

Tags:
St. Patrick's Day

xjwfusvc - Aaaarrrggghh

2006-03-15T23:26:00.000+01:00

It's always the way, isn't it? You totally neglect your blog for over a week; you don't even swing by once to see how she's getting on; then you sneak in and make a quick, surreptitious post and bang, you're right back into it and your head is filled with dozens of things you should and could have been posting about over the last 11 days of silence. I shall limit myself to one such thing, and one such post, however.

My bugbear du jour, for instance, is blogger.com's new-fangled Word verification on posts. Any of my readers who are blogger.com bloggers will know what I mean. For any who are not, blogger.com blogs now require you to type in a random sequence of letters from a so-called captchapicture before hitting "Publish post." (See image)

How annoying is that? I know why they've done it, namely because blogspot blogs are a favourite haunt for automated spam bloggers (or: sploggers), but it still annoys me to have to prove that I am human every time I want to make a post.

Besides, what is the deal with proving you are human by typing a random sequence of meaningless letters? Wouldn't it be better if it were a human word which bots can't read? Like, I don't know, spambots suck, or human, honestly or something along those lines.

And besides, blogger.com's word verification has become so long and complex and warped and hard to read that I now find that I type it wrong at least one time in four. That is truly annoying.

Not a fan of word verification. Can you tell?

Tags:
blogger
blogging
spam

Silence

2006-03-15T20:05:00.000+01:00

Oh woe is my poor neglected blog! Eleven days without an update or post of any sort. Eleven days without so much as looking at the comments, let alone replying to them. I believe that may be a record since I started blogging almost a year ago.

Sometimes RealLife^tm has a funny way of interfering in the best laid online plans. And sometimes, the muse just leaves you for a bit. Very occasionally, the two coincide. The result is silence at the The Capital Letter.

Sorry.

Normal service will resume soon. Hopefully tomorrow.

We're sinking

2006-03-04T17:54:00.000+01:00

As a language teacher who spends much of his day trying to hammer accurate pronunciation into and mother-tongue interference errors out of German students, I just about fell off my chair laughing when I saw this advertising video from Berlitz.

Welcome to my world.

Berlitz advertising video. (MPEG file)

Tags:
language
German
EFL
humour

Three countries in one day

2006-03-04T15:05:00.000+01:00

For me as a New Zealander, one of the strangest and most enjoyable things about living in Europe is the potential for visiting or travelling through multiple countries in one day. From New Zealand, if you want to get to another country, the only options are by boat or plane, and the fastest you can possibly get to another country is the two and three-quarter hours it takes to get to Sydney. And once you get there, obviously, they speak the same language. Not so in Europe, where 4 or 5 countries and 5 or 6 language communities in one day are perfectly manageable.

So it was yesterday that Miss Behaviour and I set off from Trier for a day trip to Antwerp. Visiting Antwerp per se was not our intention. Instead we wanted to go to a specific shop in Antwerp. So we did. We travelled by train from Trier (language: German), through Luxembourg (languages: French, Lëtzebuergesch, German), to Brussels (languages: French, Flemish) to Antwerp (language: Flemish). We got off the train, went to our shop, made our purchase, had a late lunch, wandered around for an hour or so, bought some chocolates and truffles for the Behaviour parents, and came back. The whole trip took about 13 hours, of which around 10 were spent in trains. In that time, we travelled through three countries and five language communities, ourselves speaking all the while a sixth language, English. I know I'm a tragic language geek, but that to me is fundamentally cool. Even though I've now lived in Europe for over six years, I still have not quite adjusted to the easy access to other countries and languages. As a result, I still get a disproportionate amount of pleasure on the few occasions I take advantage of this proximity.

Anyway, below are a couple of photos of Antwerp. The weather wasn't great and it was fairly dark, meaning the lighting is not the best. Nonetheless, I think they still give a hint of some of the lovely buildings in the central city (click for larger images).

Tags:
Antwerp
Belgium
photos
language

No appreciation of culcha

2006-03-04T14:36:00.000+01:00

Now here's a kid who still needs to work on his appreciation of high culture and fine art. A 12 year-old boy in Detroit has been suspended from school after sticking a piece of gum to a $1.5 million dollar painting during a school field trip. They breed their heathens young in Detroit, it would seem.

According to BBC News, the offending piece of gum was found in the corner of "The Bay", a 1963 abstract ex-pressionist painting by Helen Frankenthaler after the boy and his classmates had departed. Curators are currently working on restoring the painting, but do not expect any permanent damage.

On the one hand, I reckon that by the age of 12, every kid ought to know that a painting in an art museum is not the best place to dispose of his gum, so I don't really buy the "yeah, but he's only 12 after all" argument advanced in his defence by one of his teachers. But then on the other hand, looking at the painting, I can sort of appreciate how the youngster might have thought that a piece of gum might fit in!

In any case, it sounds from the BBC article as though the whole incident has been handled pretty well both by the boy's teachers and the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is encouraging. The article notes, somewhat ominously, His parents had also taken disciplinary action, Ms Kildee said. Yikes! I wonder what the going grounding rate is for vandalising modern art? A year? More? Less?

On the plus side, I suppose, at least the school group was in the art museum in the first place. You have to start somewhere.

Tags:
art
culture
weird news

A lighter look at Bird Flu

2006-02-28T14:35:00.000+01:00

Now that the Olympics are over, the newspapers here in Germany are pretty much totally dominated by the steady advance of bird flu throughout Germany and across Europe, which I first posted about a couple of weeks ago. Reports today indicate that the first case has been discovered in Bavaria. Oh joy. So far in Germany, there have been no cases of humans contracting the disease from contact with birds, nor of domestic or farmed birds contracting the disease from wild birds. That has not stopped speculation about whether or not the football World Cup might need to be cancelled, though. Battles about who is responsible for the strategy to counter bird flu - whether it's the federal government or the state governments (Bundesländer) - are going on in Berlin as I type.

But it's all a bit tedious. Hence, for your amusement and courtesy of my good friend HSB, I offer a lighter take on bird flu:

Bird flu: the first case

How to prevent bird flu

Tags:
health
bird flu
humour

Karneval in Trier

2006-02-27T23:03:00.000+01:00

As I noted in a recent post, it's Karneval time in Germany. Today is Rosenmontag, (Rose Monday), which is the biggest day for celebrating carnival around these parts. That means, as you will see in the photos below, dressing up in wacky costumes, drinking heavily in the street at lunchtime, watching the parade go past, and yelling Helau! at the top of your voice to everyone in the parade, and indeed anyone else you see.

As a curious but really rather detached observer, I ventured out at lunchtime today to watch the Rosenmontagszug (Carnival parade) wend its way through the streets of the Trier inner-city. The photos below are a selection of what I saw.

It's not just those in the parade itself who dress up, but pretty much everyone. These clowns were waiting patiently at the end of my street for the arrival of the parade.

This year, even the police leading the parade were dressed up, either as bank robbers or terrorists, I can't decide (see face mask).

Presumably expecting trouble, the Police had also recruited some very young officers (above) and some reinforcements from abroad (below).

Every possible vantage point for watching the parade had been seized.

I think this may be the first parade I've ever seen which included a mobile bar in the parade itself. (Only in Germany!)

There was plenty of fun to be had (and sweets to be caught) for the little ones too. The goodie bag below belonged to a sex or seven year old girl. She'd been collected the sweets and popcorn and other goodies thrown from the parade floats so effectively that she had to get another bag just minutes after I took this photo.

Some of the watching crowd took their job of yelling "Helau" very seriously indeed.

A lot of work had gone into some of the costumes in the parade. From wild animals...

to fruit...

to insects. The whole range was covered.

But it wasn't just the costumes that had had a lot of effort put into them. The decoration of some of the floats was pretty impressive too.

This being Germany, the clean-up was exceptionally well organised and began less than 10 minutes after the last float had gone past.

But, as you can see above and below, there was plenty of cleaning up to do.

Tags:
Trier
Karneval
Germany

The last Olympics post

2006-02-27T20:12:00.000+01:00

Certain readers (*cough* Miss Behaviour) will be pleased to know that this is the very last Winter Olympics post,a nd it will be short. The 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin came to an end yesterday, with Germany atop the medals table.

I really enjoyed these Olympics, as you may have gathered from the preponderance of posts about them. It's the first time I have really got into a Winter Olympics. Now I'm hooked and will look forward to the 2012 Winter Olympics in Vancouver with anticipation. I've learned a lot in the last couple of weeks about sports I scarcely even knew existed, such as skeleton. I've revelled in the coverage of sports I've been fascinated by for years, such as luge and bobsled. And I've become a fan of sports I knew existed but had never really bothered to watch before, especially biathlon, but also, believe it or not, curling. I can't pick one highlight from these games that stands out above all the others, but I do now have a favourite winter sports athlete: biathlete Martina Glagow, who picked up a whole haul of medals, though none were silver.

Anyhow, to bring my Winter Olympics coverage to an end once and for all (*hears sighs of relief*), here is the final medal table from the official torino2006.org website. You will note that Germany's account of 11 gold, 12 silver, 6 bronze, 29 total bears more than a passing similarity to my pre-Games prediction of 11 gold, 19 silver, 8 bronze, 38 total. Well, the 11 gold bit does, anyway.

Rank	NOC				Total	Rank (by Total)
1	Germany	11	12	6	29	1
2	United States	9	9	7	25	2
3	Austria	9	7	7	23	4
4	Russian Fed.	8	6	8	22	5
5	Canada	7	10	7	24	3
6	Sweden	7	2	5	14	=7
7	Korea	6	3	2	11	=9
8	Switzerland	5	4	5	14	=7
9	Italy	5	0	6	11	=9
10	France	3	2	4	9	=12
10	Netherlands	3	2	4	9	=12
12	Estonia	3	0	0	3	=16
13	Norway	2	8	9	19	6
14	China	2	4	5	11	=9
15	Czech Republic	1	2	1	4	15
16	Croatia	1	2	0	3	=16
17	Australia	1	0	1	2	=18
18	Japan	1	0	0	1	=21
19	Finland	0	6	3	9	=12
20	Poland	0	1	1	2	=18
21	Belarus	0	1	0	1	=21
21	Bulgaria	0	1	0	1	=21
21	Great Britain	0	1	0	1	=21
21	Slovakia	0	1	0	1	=21
25	Ukraine	0	0	2	2	=18
26	Latvia	0	0	1	1	=21

And that's it. More in 4 years' time.

Tags:
sport
Winter Olympics
Turin
Germany

Winter Olympics - medal tally

2006-02-24T00:29:00.000+01:00

My Olympics updates had to go on an enforced hiatus for a few days as I grappled with the madness of the last week of the semester here in Trier. However, with that survived, normal (Winter Olympics) service will resume tomorrow. Normal (normal) service will resume after the Olympics, of course.

For now though, you just get the up-to-date medal tally and two interesting points to note:
1) Germany is at the top of the gold tally and the total tally. The German media are pleased. Oh, except the tabloid Bild Zeitung, which is running front-page SCANDAL splashes about how much the athletes earn (when it can fit that outrage in around scare-mongering that the World Cup in Germany is going to be cancelled because of bird flu).

2) This one will please, or at least relieve, Badaunt: Japan finally won a medal, and it was gold. From the Torino2006.org website:

TURIN, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Shizuka Arakawa glided into the record books when she captured Japan's first figure skating gold medal at the Winter Olympics with victory in the women's event, knocking favourite Irina Slutskaya to third.
The Japanese skater surged from third after the short programme to leapfrog early pace setters Sasha Cohen and Slutskaya with a mesmerising free programme.

She stormed past silver medallist Cohen by 7.98 points, while Slutskaya finished third.

Her victory prevented Slutskaya's attempt to become the first Russian to win the discipline.

Nice job. Arakawa qualifies for Olympics photo of the day:

[Source: torino2006.org]

And here is the medal tally at the end of day 13 in Turin:

Rank	NOC				Total
1	Germany	9	10	5	24
2	Austria	8	6	5	19
3	Russian Fed.	8	3	8	19
4	United States	7	8	5	20
5	Canada	5	8	6	19
6	Switzerland	5	4	4	13
7	Sweden	5	2	4	11
8	Korea	4	3	1	8
9	Italy	4	0	6	10
10	France	3	2	4	9
11	Estonia	3	0	0	3
12	Norway	2	8	8	18
13	China	2	3	4	9
14	Netherlands	2	2	3	7
15	Croatia	1	2	0	3
16	Australia	1	0	1	2
17	Japan	1	0	0	1
18	Finland	0	3	3	6
19	Czech Republic	0	2	0	2
20	Belarus	0	1	0	1
20	Bulgaria	0	1	0	1
20	Great Britain	0	1	0	1
20	Slovakia	0	1	0	1
24	Ukraine	0	0	2	2
25	Latvia	0	0	1	1

[Source: torino2006.org]

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, Germany, Germany

Winter Olympics catchup

2006-02-20T13:10:00.000+01:00

After a couple of days off over the weekend, it's time for The Capital Letter to catch up on what has happened in Turin at the Winter Olympics in the last couple of days. As ever, I'll be paying particular attention to how the Germans got on. And boy, did they ever have a good weekend, picking up medals left, right and centre.

Specifically, the German team netted two gold medals, three silver and two bronze. Not bad for a couple of days' work, I reckon.

Here are the medals they picked up:

Men's 2 man bobsled: Gold - pilot Andre Lange and brakeman Kevin Kuske blitzed the field, despite Kuske's near wipeout in the second run, almost falling off the back of the sled after the start. You can see the video here. They qualify for photo of the day. [Source: ZDF]

Women's biathlon: Gold and Silver - Kati Wilhelm easily won the 10km pursuit, followed home by my personal favourite Martina Glagow, who picked up her second silver of these games. (This one, though, she won under her own steam, rather than being promoted from third after Pyleva's drug scandal). In a slightly odd development, Wilhelm was given a thoroughbred stallion for her efforts by stud owner Thomas Mayer. She has now won three Olypic gold medals.

Men's biathlon: Bronze - Sven Fischer, who had already picked up a gold medal in the 10km sprint, boosted his account with third in the 12.5km pursuit, behind Vincent Defrasne of France, and Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen.

Men's cross-country skiing: Silver - the men's relay team of Andreas Schlütter, Jens Filbrich, Rene Sommerfeldt and Tobias Angerer fought hard to hang on to silver, behind the Italian team and just ahead of the Swedes. Quote of the weekend went to Rene Sommerfeldt, who told an interviewer after the event:

"I puked my guts out, in the truest sense of the word."

Thanks Rene. TMI.

Women's cross-country skiing: Silver - the women's relay team of Steffi Böhler, Claudia Künzel, Evi Sachenbacher-Stehle and Viola Bauer also snuck home into second place ahead of the Italian team. The Russians took out the gold medal.

Women's speed-skating: Bronze - though she had been touted as a gold medal favourite in the 1000m event, Anni Friesinger had to settle for third place behind yet another flying Dutchwoman, Marianne Timmer and Canadian Cindy Classen. The fact that 6 hundredths of a second separated the three medalists, seems to have been something of a consolation for Friesinger (and the German media). She seemed pretty pleased with the result, actually.

So, not a bad haul then. It certainly seems to be enough to satisfy the media wolves' lust for precious metal - for now. In fact, Germany is now leading the medal table and is on course to win a record number of medals. The premier of the German state (Bundesland) of Thüringen is crowing, because athletes from his state have won more gold medals than the entire Chinese team. Thüringen has a population of around 2.4 million, versus China's 1.2 billion. Still, even Thüringen can't compete with those Estonians.

The German TV channel ARD has predicted 14 gold medals for the German team at this Olympics. I was a little more circumspect, predicting 11 golds in the tipping competition I entered. Just for the record, and so that you can't claim I made it up post factum if I turn out to be right, my overall prediction before the Games began was:

11 gold + 18 silver + 9 bronze = 38 medals

That 18 silvers is starting to look a tad optimistic, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, Alexander Herr, the grumpy ski-jumper I posted about a few days ago, was sent home for his outburst. Good call, I reckon. And in much bigger, more scandalous news, the Austrian cross-country skiing team is in trouble in a possible doping scandal. It's complicated and shrouded in intrigue, involving the appearance in Turin of a banned coach, late-night raids, a car accident, withdrawal from events etc etc etc. The plot thickens. BBC Sport has the details.

After all that, here's the medal table as it stands half way through the 10th day of competition. Source, as ever, is the official Olympics website torino2006.org

Rank	NOC				Total
1	Germany	7	7	4	18
2	United States	7	4	2	13
3	Russian Fed.	6	2	5	13
4	Austria	4	5	1	10
5	Korea	3	3	1	7
6	Italy	3	0	4	7
7	France	3	0	2	5
8	Estonia	3	0	0	3
9	Norway	2	7	7	16
10	Canada	2	6	5	13
11	Switzerland	2	2	4	8
12	Netherlands	2	2	2	6
13	Sweden	2	1	3	6
14	China	1	2	4	7
15	Croatia	1	1	0	2
16	Australia	1	0	0	1
17	Finland	0	2	3	5
18	Czech Republic	0	2	0	2
19	Bulgaria	0	1	0	1
19	Great Britain	0	1	0	1
19	Slovakia	0	1	0	1
22	Latvia	0	0	1	1
22	Ukraine	0	0	1	1

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, Germany, Austria, doping, bobsled, cross-country skiing, speed-skating, biathlon, Thüringen

Dunna runna

2006-02-20T12:53:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I posted one of my weird German news stories, so I thought it was time to revive that theme. Sure enough, Deutsche Welle has come to the party once more, with a little gem of a story from the delightful Ruhrgebiet city of Bochum:

Q: You're in Bochum (been there, bit of a hole actually --ed.) and you need to visit the nearby town of Herne, making several stops along the way, and then get back to Bochum. What do you do?

A: Easy. Call a cab.

Q: Correct. You come to the end of the journey and realise you haven't got the cash to pay for it. What do you do?

A: Easy. Do a runner.

Q: Correct. After running away from the cab and its irate driver, and having fled into the packed inner city, you need to make your getaway complete by putting a bit more ground between you and the wronged driver. What do you do?

A: Easy. Call a cab.

Q: Correct. Ah, but what if, hypothetically speaking, the same cab you've just done a runner from comes to pick you up?

A: Well, then you're nicked, aren't you.

Correct. Muppet!

Some people are too stupid for their own good. That's Darwinism in action right there. Read the full story here.

Tags:
Germany
weird news

The Olympic mascots

2006-02-18T01:43:00.000+01:00

This one's especially for Cufflinks, since he requested it, and comes via the Olympics Mania blog and the official Olympics website.

The mascots for this Winter Olympics in Turin are, wait for it, Neve and Gliz. And here they are in all their glory:

Neve, left, is a snowball. Gliz, right, is an ice cube. Neve is a girl snowball, Gliz is a boy ice cube. Umm, obviously.

Apparently, they are the work of a 37 Portuguese gent named Pedro Albuquerque. According to the Olympics website, Neve and Gliz:

reflect the spirit of the Italian Olympic event: passion, enthusiasm, culture, elegance, and love of the environment and of sport. They are the symbol of a young generation that is full of life and energy.

Personally, though, I think that Neve and Gliz actually relect the fact that Olympic mascots, and indeed the mascots for all large-scale sports events, are crappy, idiotic-looking tat and are best forgotten as quickly as possible. They are a symbol of an unhealthy dependence on marketing and merchandising that caters to the lowest common denominator and a young generation that is bereft of taste and the ability to think critically. Call me a cynic, but come on, those mascots are pants!

In the interests of completeness, here's the official medal tally at the end of day 7, as ever straight from the official Torino2006.org website.

Rank	NOC				Total
1	United States	6	3	1	10
2	Germany	5	4	2	11
3	Russian Fed.	5	2	4	11
4	Austria	3	2	1	6
5	Estonia	3	0	0	3
6	Canada	2	4	5	11
7	Switzerland	2	2	2	6
8	Sweden	2	1	1	4
9	Italy	2	0	3	5
10	France	2	0	2	4
11	Norway	1	6	6	13
12	China	1	2	3	6
13	Netherlands	1	2	1	4
14	Korea	1	1	1	3
15	Australia	1	0	0	1
16	Finland	0	2	3	5
17	Czech Republic	0	2	0	2
18	Bulgaria	0	1	0	1
18	Croatia	0	1	0	1
18	Great Britain	0	1	0	1
18	Slovakia	0	1	0	1
22	Latvia	0	0	1	1
22	Ukraine	0	0	1	1

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, mascot, medals

Incidentally...

2006-02-17T20:25:00.000+01:00

... Patrick Singleton of Bermuda did not win gold in the men's skeleton, so Estonia's per capita record is looking safe as houses. Singleton finished 19th, as you can see on the official results page. Note also on that page that Kiwi Ben Sandford finished 10th in that event.

I think I'll just repeat that for good measure:

A New Zealander secured a top ten spot at the Winter Olympics in Turin.

But do you think Sandford gets a mention on the sports pages of the New Zealand websites? Not yet, no.

Not winning? Not interested. A disappointing attitude, if you ask me.

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, skeleton, Bermuda, New Zealand

Winter Olympics update - Estonia again

2006-02-17T19:21:00.000+01:00

For a country as small as it is, Estonia's performance at these Winter Olympics in Turin has been quite phenomenal. After the two gold medals won in the last few days by Kristina Smigun - which I blogged about in hushed tones of awe yesterday, another Estonian athlete has won gold today. This time it was the men's turn, with Andrus Veerpalu, the defending champion, taking out first place in the men's 15km classical cross-country skiing. That's one gold medal for every 400,000 inhabitants now. That would be the equivalent of New Zealand winning 10 gold medals, or Germany winning 200 (which is not even possible). Quite amazing! Well done Estonia.

Germany has picked up another medal today too. Bronze in the men's 15km cross-country - the event that Veerpalu won - courtesy of Tobias Angerer.

[Source: Sport1.de]

Angerer was not even considered a medal hopeful, so unlike yesterday's silver for the Nordic combiners, this bronze is being feted as if it were gold. Sport1.de quotes Angerer as saying:

This time, bronze is just like gold for the whole team. It's like a whole lot of millstones have been removed from around my neck.
...
As I was lying in the snow, I suddenly thought I had misread the scoreboard. I did a double-take and saw that there really was a 3rd next to my name. (My translation)

A bit surprised at the result, then, I take it. How nice to see a bronze so celebrated instead of mourned. Refreshing.

Those Swiss have bagged another gold today. (Whatever was Kiwi in Zurich bleating about?) Snowboader Tanja Frieden took home the gold medal in the women's snowboardcross in what have to be considered lucky circumstances. American Jacobellis was leading by a long way and then fell just before the finish, allowing Frieden to sneak through. I've seen the coverage and it looks an awful lot like Jacobellis, thinking she had gold in the bag, was showboating unnecessarily and stuffed up. Poor thing. I suspect a few tears will be shed into her beer tonight.

There's a bit of a scandal brewing in the German men's skijump team this evening. After Alexander Herr was left out of the final selection for the men's large hill, he went spare and complained loudly and acerbicly to the media, saying that the coach's decision was "laughable". There's speculation that he might be kicked off the team and sent home, but the coach is taking it in his stride and things are still developing. I'll be very interested to see what happens there. In New Zealand, an outburst like that would be written off by the public as sour grapes, the athlete would be pegged as a sore loser and it would be career suicide. I wonder if the same will happen here in Germany. We'll see.

For those who have no idea what any of these sports I'm talking about are or how they work, here are the links for you, courtesy of the Beeb:

Cross-country skiing: event guide
Snowboard cross: event guide
Ski jumping: event guide

And finally, I'm going to round this post off with a demonstration of why I love the Olympics. It's not just about winning golds. It's about being there, taking part, and competing to the very best of your ability against the top athletes in the world in your chosen sport. It's about giving it your all, even when you do don't have a snowball's chance in hell of coming home with precious metal.

The picture below is of one Rory Morrish. He is Ireland's first competitor at the Winter Olympics in Turin. Here he is captured crossing the line in the men's 15km classical cross-country earlier today. Every muscle fibre in his body must be screaming at him. He is finishing 88th out of 97 competitors, or in German media language, 9th to last. But look at the smile on his face. It's enough to give you goose pimples. That is the Olympic spirit. That's why I love watching the Olympic games. More of the same please, and well done Rory!

[Source: BBC Sport]

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, Germany, Estonia, Switzerland, snowboard cross, ski jumping, cross-country skiing, Olympic spirit

Bird flu is here. React as slowly as possible

2006-02-17T16:48:00.000+01:00

Back in October of last year, I wondered aloud how long it would be before bird flu, specifically the H5N1 strain thereof, would reach Germany. Well, the answer, it turns out was "in approximately four months, in mid-February."

Yes indeed, bird flu is here in Germany. At this stage it has only been detected on the island of Rügen in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the north-east of Germany. Presumably, though, it's only a matter of time until it spreads from wild migratory birds to local birds and from them to domesticated and farmed birds. Oh joy! There's no evidence at this stage that there has been any mutation in the virus allowing it to be passed from human to human, so unless you're hanging around or touching infected birds or their carcasses, you're fine. For now.

Given the risk of infection from bird carcasses, it's being viewed as a bit of a scandal that Mecklenburg- Vorpommern seems to have been caught with its pants down on this issue. The dead birds were left lying around on beaches for days, no satisfactory attempts were made to prevent access to the area and the "rapid detection test" to see whether or not the birds in question were infected with H5N1 took, umm, six days. Rapid, my arse.

The problem seems to be that Germany is, once again, handicapped by its federal structure. The individual states, or Bundesländer, in Germany hold a lot of power and claim a lot of responsibility in certain areas. There are clear - or at times rather fuzzy - dividing lines mapping out what the individual states are responsible for, have to organize themselves, and have to pay for themselves, as opposed to what the national government is responsible for. These "areas of competence", as they are called in German, are fiercely defended and fought over tooth and nail. For reasons that are utterly beyond me, public health emergencies like this appear to fall under the responsibility of the individual states. As a result, there is no nationwide strategy in place for how to deal with bird flu now that it is here. (Go figure! I don't reckon you'd have to be a rocket scientist to understand that a disease passed on by migratory birds will not recognise or adhere to internal state borders and requires a nationwide, even Europe-wide, strategy for dealing with it effectively. But they didn't ask me for my input, oddly enough.)

Furthermore, there are evidently huge discrepancies in how well, or poorly, each of the states has prepared itself. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it would appear, was one of the least prepared. Of course, Sod's Law meant that that was exactly where bird flu first appeared. I predict that heads will roll over Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's poor handling of this situation. It's only a matter of time.

Der Spiegel has a good round-up of the press reaction to the bird-flu news (in English), which is worth a read.

Back to the Olympics this evening.

Tags:
bird flu, Germany, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, health, German news

Well paint me pink and call me George!

2006-02-16T23:10:00.000+01:00

The Brits, at whom I poked fun but a few hours ago about not having won any Winter Olympics medals yet, have bloody gone and won one! Jolly good show! I take it all back and apologise profusely.

Shelley Rudman has picked up a silver medal for great Britain in the women's skeleton, finishing second behind Switzerland's Maya Pederson. (Hear that, Kiwi in Zurich? Gold medal for your lot! I told you they'd come.) Rudman was placed fourth after the first run, but had a blinder on the second run - apparently, I missed it I'm afraid - and managed to sneak up into second. She was clearly pretty pleased about it too:

I just can't believe it. It feels really surreal. ... I'm really gobsmacked. I really wanted to get a bronze, so I'm certainly not complaining about a silver medal.

See, German media? That's how you're supposed to react to a silver medal at the Olympic bloody Games. Not this "only silver, what a disaster" nonsense.

In case you have no idea what the hell skeleton is (I didn't until yesterday either), then the Beeb has just the page for you. It's just like luge, only head-first and therefore just a bit more suicidal. It's about throwing yourself head-first down a steep icy track at around 140km/h, lying on a piece of metal that's about half as long as you are. It is, in other words, madness, but kind of exciting to watch.

See? Piece of cake. Or not.

In other news, thank heavens, the German speed-skating ladies did win the gold medal in the team pursuit event I mentioned earlier. While I'm pleased for them, I'm more pleased for me, because I'm not sure I could have handled another German television "Woe is us! What went wrong? Only silver"-Fest. So congratulations, and thank you, to Claudia Pechstein, Anni Friesinger and Daniela Anschütz-Thoms. Well done you, you've qualified for a photo.

[Source: ARD]

So, with all that, after day five of the Winter Olympics in Turin, the medals table looks like this:

Rank	NOC				Total
1	United States	6	2	1	9
2	Germany	5	4	1	10
3	Russian Fed.	5	2	4	11
4	Austria	3	2	1	6
5	Sweden	2	1	1	4
6	Italy	2	0	3	5
7	France	2	0	2	4
8	Estonia	2	0	0	2
9	Norway	1	6	6	13
10	Canada	1	3	4	8
11	China	1	2	3	6
12	Netherlands	1	2	1	4
12	Switzerland	1	2	1	4
14	Korea	1	1	1	3
15	Australia	1	0	0	1
16	Finland	0	2	3	5
17	Bulgaria	0	1	0	1
17	Croatia	0	1	0	1
17	Czech Republic	0	1	0	1
17	Great Britain	0	1	0	1
17	Slovakia	0	1	0	1
22	Latvia	0	0	1	1
22	Ukraine	0	0	1	1

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Germany, skeleton, speedskating, Great Britain

More Winter Olympics

2006-02-16T16:22:00.000+01:00

Time for another Winter Olympics update. Much has happened since I last posted.

For one thing, in a development which will please regular reader Kiwi in Zurich, the Swiss have finally opened their medal account. Bruno Kernen picked up bronze in the men's downhill yesterday, while Martina Schild went one better, winning silver in the equivalent women's event. Nice job. But today it got even better for the Swiss team, this time on the ice hockey rink. The Swiss men's ice hockey team beat an out of sorts Czech side 3-2. The Czechs are the world champions, so that counts as something of a giant slaying. Hupp Schwiiz!

Norwegian athletes have been, if you will, the perpetual bridesmaids at this Olympics so far. The Norwegian team has won a lot more medals than any other, it's just that not many of them are gold. Poor things. I have a soft spot for the Norwegians. No reason, really, I just do. Their medal count is currently one gold, six silver and six bronze. Still, it could be worse, it could look like New Zealand's or Great Britain's medal counts. Those two teams, as if I even need to say it, are yet to trouble the scorers.

I suppose I also have to mention that Australia won its first medal of these games yesterday too. It was gold, and it went to Dale Begg-Smith in the men's freestyle skiing moguls. Yes, yes, well done and all that you Aussies. (Begg-Smith only recently became an Australian, having emigrated from Canada six years ago. Just thought I'd throw that out there for good measure.)

The Swedes had a good day yesterday, picking up 2 gold medals within 20 minutes of each other in the men's and women's cross-country skiing. That's another soft-spot nation for me right there. They've got the best royal family in the world, for one thing. Oh, and Abba.

Even at this early stage, I think I can be fairly confident in predicting which country is going to have the largest number of gold medals per capita of population. That would be Estonia. According to the CIA World Factbook, Estonia has a population of around 1.3 million. With two gold medals to their name already, both won by cross-country skier Kristina Smigun, I think we can be pretty much certain that no other country is going to equal that, unless of course Patrick Singleton of Bermuda were to win gold in the men's skeleton. Go Patrick, go! (Incidentally, Smigun is also the only athlete so far two win two golds at this Olympics.)

Meanwhile, Austria have had a great couple of days, picking up three gold medals in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, Austrians won gold in the women's downhill skiing (Michaela Dorfmeister) and the two-man luge (brothers Andreas and Wolgang Linger), and today the Austrian men's Nordic combined team (that's ski-jumping meets cross-country skiing for the uninitiated) snuck past the German team at the last to claim gold, after the Germans had led all the way. I'll give you one guess how well the German media are taking that. They do not begrudge the Austrians the gold medal, by any means - and by all accounts their performance in the last cross-country leg was out of this world - but the German Nordic combined team is getting torn to shreds. The talk is most certainly not of 'winning silver', but of 'losing gold'. Sometimes they need to get things in perspective, I reckon.

Also not entirely welcomed by the German media is the news today that biathlon superstars Uschi Disl and Kati Wilhelm did not win any medals in the 7.5 km biathlon event, just as they hadn't in the 15km event earlier in the week. Wilhelm finished 7th, while Disl - the most successful woman biathlete of all time - finished well down the ranks, low enough that the Germans aren't bothering to report the place (which in Germany is about 8th!). I had to go to an American sports website to find out that it was in fact 38th. It doesn't even seem to be much of a consolation that the other German biathlete, Martina Glagow is going to have her bronze medal turn silver, after the first doping scandal of this Olympics saw the Russian silver medalist from the 15km event, Olga Pyleva, ruled out of today's shorter race and suspended until further notice. Both her A and B samples have tested positive for the stimulant Carphedon, which is apparently very rare and has only ever been detected in half a dozen drugs tests. German websites are reporting that Pyleva has admitted taking the substance, given to her by her private doctor, after a foot injury.

With the men's Nordic combined and the women biathletes not living up to media standards and expectations, imagine the pressure that's on the women's speedskating team as they go into the semi-finals of the team pursuit. They are Germany's great white hope for this evening. The team is made up of the 4th, 5th and 6th place-getters in the individual 3000m, and in the quarter-finals they have already beaten the Netherlands (who had the gold and silver medallists from that event), so they're a good team with a good shot at a medal. All I can say is that if it's not at least silver, they are going to be hung out to dry. So, no pressure then.

I think that's plenty for one update. I may post another later this evening, depending on developments, even if it's just to give you an updated medal table. In the meantime, here's an amusing picture of German luge gold medallist, Sylke Otto. I wonder if we should tell her?

[Source: Yahoo! Sports]

(For the record, Germans always count like that, not having been invovled in the Battle of Agincourt and all that, so I think we can let her off.)

Tags:
sport, Winter Olympics, Turin, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Estonia, Norway, Australia, Bermuda, Sweden, doping

Winter Olympics update - German trifecta

2006-02-14T21:58:00.000+01:00

Well, well, well! Today has been far and away the best day so far for Germany at the Winter Olympics in Turin. In addition to the gold medal in the men's biathlon I mentioned earlier, Germany has now picked up three further medals - in the same event, no less. A trifecta in other words.

Trifecta! Left to right: Kraushaar (silver), Otto (Gold), Hüfner (Bronze)
[Source: ZDF]

Women's luge has long been Germany's domain: of 36 medals awarded in women's Olympic luge history no fewer than 27 have been won by Germans. True to form, and in a continuation of their domination of yesterday's first and second runs, the German trio of Sylke Otto, Silke Kraushaar and Tajtana Hüfner walked away from this year's event with gold, silver and bronze respectively. What is perhaps even more astounding than the 27 out of 36 figure is the fact that this is the sixth time, after 1972, 1976, 1984, 1988 and 2002, that there have been only Germans on the podium. Remarkable.

The three medals each represented a particular milestone for the winners. Otto became only the second woman ever to win back-to-back gold medals - and also the best performing woman luger of all time, while Kraushaar became the first woman ever to win three individual luge medals. Hüfner, on the other hand, who is just 22, picked up her first medal at her very first Olympics. Nice job.

Golden Girl. Sylke Otto just after crossing the finish line in the Olympic luge
[Source: ARD]

To say that the German media are excited about today's results would not be to do their frenzy justice. More like beside themselves. And, frankly, who can blame them?

So, after four days of the Winter Olympics Torino 2006, the medals table looks like this:

Rank	Country				Total

1	United States	5	2	0	7
2	Russian Fed.	4	3	2	9
3	Germany	4	1	2	7
4	Sweden	2	0	0	2
5	Norway	1	5	5	11
6	Netherlands	1	2	0	3
7	Canada	1	1	1	3
7	Korea	1	1	1	3
9	Italy	1	0	2	3
10	France	1	0	1	2
11	Estonia	1	0	0	1
12	China	0	2	3	5
13	Austria	0	2	1	3
14	Finland	0	1	2	3
15	Croatia	0	1	0	1
15	Czech Republic	0	1	0	1
17	Latvia	0	0	1	1
17	Switzerland	0	0	1	1

[Source: torino2006.org]

Tags:
sport
Winter Olympics
Turin
Germany
luge

For my Valentine

2006-02-14T17:57:00.000+01:00

[Ahem, excuse the kitsch, but a man's gotta do...]

To my darling Miss Behaviour,

Happy Valentine's Day, my dear! With all my love,

Bear

Tags:
Valentine's Day

Winter Olympics update

2006-02-14T15:13:00.000+01:00

I didn't get a chance to post a round-up of the Germany's performance at the Winter Olympics in Turin last night, so I'm making up for it now, inspired by the news that the German team has picked up its third gold medal this morning, in the men's biathlon.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. What happened yesterday? Well, it was certainly a better day for Germany than Sunday had been. The medal count grew by one (or 33%, if you're a glass-half-full kind of person) with a bronze medal for biathlete Martina Glagow. Though a medal of one colour or another in the women's 15 kilometre race was at least hoped for, nay expected, the winner was something of a surprise. Glagow was perhaps the least favoured of the German women in that race, whereas Uschi Disl and Kati Wilhelm had been expected to dominate. No such luck for them though, as they performed poorly in the shooting to finish 13th and 17th respectively. It was Glagow's sister's birthday yesterday, and the medal was dedicated to her - with tears of joy all round. Martina Glagow is delightful and was feted on all the television shows last night. She must have spent the whole afternoon and evening racing from one studio to the next, poor thing, but her smile never faded. If you're interested, she has her own web presence and even her own fan club. Lucky for some.

What else was yesterday? Well, the German figureskating pair (or are they called ice-dancers these days? I can't keep up) of Aljona Savchenko und Robin Szolkowy (good German names those) did alright, considering that they had been put through two weeks of hell before the Olympics as a scandal erupted around their trainer, Ingo Steuer. He stands accused of working for the Stasi, the infamous East German Secret Police, back in the bad old days. Accordingly, there was a big kerfuffle with the German Olympic Federation attemmpting to bar him from attending the Olympics as a trainer. Despite all the hoo-hah, the pair finished sixth and are considered a real hope for the future. Incidentally, one of the pleasures of watching figure skating in Germany is the commentary. It's not just that the commentators and presenters know what they are talking about (not necessarily the case in New Zealand, I assure you), but that one of them is Katarina Witt. Woohoo!

There were other events, of course, but none that really caught my eye or made big headlines in Germany. (This is very subjective Olympics reporting, in case you hadn't already noticed.)

Which brings me back to today and another gold medal. Sport1.de screams in its current front page headline:

GOLD! Fischer has race of his life

which should give you a clue that a) the biathlete in question's name is (Sven) Fischer and b) the Germans are quite excited about his victory this morning in the men's 10 kilometre sprint event, beating the two Norwegian stars Halvard Hanevold and Frode Andresen into second and third respectively.

The Germans are also expecting more precious metal this evening, when the final round of the women's luge is completed. Overnight, the German women were sitting pretty in ranks 1, 2 and 3.

Perhaps the most amusing Olympics "news" I've seen so far is the (unsolicited) opinion of fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana on the uniforms worn by the various teams at the opening ceremony. The fact that they described the German team as "looking like they'd had an overdose of Vitamin C" has been noted with some mirth here. It is, incidentally, an utterly accurate observation. The Chinese team came off even worse though. Apparently their uniforms are too kitschy and their long jackets made them

“look like sandwiches, even shorter than they already are.”

Delightful. D&G reserved their greatest praise for the Kazakh team:

“If casting for a fashion show, we would hire these athletes in a second: so stylish in their black coats and Borsalino hats, so Dolce and Gabbana.”

I'll leave you to decide how seriously that needs to be taken. But I will give you a little taste of what a Vitamin C overdose looks like. It looks like this:

And it looks like this:

Yes, those really are examples of the German team's standard sweaters and jackets at this Olympics. All the rest of their leisure and warm-up kit (not the racing kit, that's in traditional white, black, red and gold) looks similarly, umm, loud, in the same colour-scheme. It looks really good on some of the athletes and terrible on others. C'est la vie, I suppose.

Perhaps you'll get a further update this evening, especially if the luge ladies clean up. Let's wait and see.

Tags:
sport
Winter Olympics
Turin
Germany

Winning hearts and minds - the British way: Update

2006-02-14T08:41:00.000+01:00

There's been a development in the British Army abuse scandal I posted about yesterday. One serving soldier, from the 1st Battalion of the Light Infantry, has been arrested, and investigations are continuing. I trust there will be more arrests to follow, because there were patently more soldiers involved in that incident than just one.

Meanwhile, in a development which can surprise noone, the video in question has "caused outrage in Arab newspapers", as the BBC reports. Gee, who'd a thunk it?

Also from the "surprise, suprise" file: a leaked UN report alleges that prisoners have in some cases been tortured at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay and asserts that their treatment violates international law. Investigators are apparently going to recommend that the Camp be shut down. Whether or not the US administration will pay any heed to this UN report remains to be seen. I won't be holding my breath.

Tags:
Middle East
Iraq
human rights
Guantanamo Bay
UN

Winning hearts and minds - the British way

2006-02-13T12:58:00.000+01:00

As a general rule, I am very sceptical about anything the British tabloid News of the World publishes or says, but all the indications are that the video of British soldiers abusing Iraqi teenagers which the NotW published images from recently is the real thing.

And, oh my God, is it ever disgraceful:

Disturbing link (QuickTime format)

I can't decide which shocks me more, the thuggish and brutal treatment of the unarmed Iraqi boys away from prying eyes in what appears to be a military compound, or the perverse, almost sexual pleasure which the animal filming the scene appears to get from viewing such a spectacle. I am more disgusted than I have been in a very long time.

No wonder this is causing such an uproar in the UK.

I hope that those responsible and their superiors - who clearly either condone such actions (note that noone stepped in to stop the beatings) or have explicitly instructed the soldiers to behave in this way - will be brought to justice. Somehow I doubt it though. I suspect we'll get the usual platitudes about how the "vast majority" of British soldiers are splendid chaps doing wonderful jobs in Iraq and holding hands, passing out sweets and just generally being jolly nice blokes, while one or possibly two privates are designated as the fall guys, court martialed and let off with a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket.

Go on, Tony Blair, prove me wrong. I'd love you to.

The timing, too, is obviously excellent. What better way to calm the agitated mobs outside European embassies in the Middle East protesting about the Mohammed cartoons than to show them documentary evidence of Allied troops "bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq" in such a manner?

I wish I'd never seen that video. More to the point, I wish there were nothing to see. Nonetheless, hat-tip to Charlie Tan at Power Lunch.

Tags:
Middle East
Iraq
human rights

Football in Bearlin

2006-02-12T21:55:00.000+01:00

I don't normally just pinch posts from other bloggers. I might quote them, or refer to them, or link to them, but out and out pinching is not usually on the cards. I'm going to have to make an exception today though, because Paul from A Berlin Diary (formerly of The Berlin Review) has written a post that is so after my own heart that I can't help myself. (I am at least going to host the pictures myself, rather than stealing his bandwidth though!)

Here it is, as I say, word for word:

The Bears of Berlin have got themselves involved in a game of two halves at the arcade on Karl Liebknecht Strasse (by the Aquarium). The lifesize table football involving a team of German bears against a Rest of the World Select XI - which featured a toothy looking Brazilian up front - was attracting a fairly large crowd today, despite the fact that there was no ball. So the game became one of ‘who can spin the bears the fastest’, won by a father-daughter team from Spandau.

That is so cool. Thanks Paul. Note for the rest of you A Berlin Diary has now been blogrolled. It's a good blog with interesting well-written posts, just as its predecessor was. Go and check it out.

Tags:
Berlin
football
bears

Books that don't exist

2006-02-12T21:39:00.000+01:00

This is a cool website which is worth a look: The Invisible Library.

The invisible library is chock-full of books which don't exist. That's right: books which don't exist. What does that mean? Well, I'll let the invisible library speak for itself on that:

The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

Does it make me a sad, sad geek that I think that is an utterly fantastic idea? Since discovering this site yesterday [Hat-tip: eponymous text], I've been trawling around in the catalog, spying treasures previously unfathomed. Wonderful stuff.

Watch this space for a few posts about books I'd be keen to read if only they existed.

Tags:
books
literature
links

Winter Olympics update - Day 2

2006-02-12T20:41:00.000+01:00

After all the excitement of yesterday's golden start to the Winter Olympics for Germany, today has been rather more disappointing, with Germany picking up exactly zero medals, despite having at least three competitors who were favoured to bring home some precious metal.

In the women's 3000m speedskating, Anni Friesinger and Claudia Pechstein, of Zickenduell fame, were both considered good medal chances. But both ended the event empty-handed, finishing 4th and 5th respectively, behind a Dutch quinella of 19 year-old bolter Ireen Wüst and veteran Renate Groenewold, and Canadian world-record holder Cindy Klassen, who picked up the bronze medal. So high were the expectations for Friesinger and Pechstein that the German sports news website sport1.de headlined its front page with:

Enormous Disappointment: Pechstein and Friesinger out of the medals

and then went on to begin the article itself with the words "Entsetzen und Schock!" (Dismay and schock!) No pressure, eh? Poor things. They still have a good shot at a medal later in the games in the teams event, so all is not lost, not that you'd know that to hear the baying of the media hounds.

It was not to be for men's luge veteran and former Olympic and World Champion Georg Hackl in his last competitive appearance either. The 39 year-old was aiming for his sixth medal at his sixth consecutive Olympics (which would have been a record) but missed out, finishing in 7th place overall. David Möller (5th) was the best placed German, while gold went to the Italian Armin Zöggeler - the first gold for the host nation at these Olympics.

Meanwhile, it wasn't Germany's day in women's cross country skiing either. In the lead-up to the Olympics, two German women had been considered medal hopefuls: Evi Sachenbacher-Stehle and Claudia Künzel. However, today Sachenbacher-Stehle was watching from the sidelines after being forced to stand down for five days due to overly high haematocrit levels in her blood (a scandal which has led to the German head coach being disciplined by his own sports federation for inappropriate verbal attacks against the Olympic doping testers - whom he openly accused of lying and cheating). Künzel, meanwhile, was well off the pace, finishing over 2 minutes behind the eventual winner, outsider Kristina Smigun. Smigun took home Estonia's first ever gold medal in cross-country skiing.

Tomorrow is seen potentially as a more promising day for the German team. The women biathletes are considered to have top medal prospects, and the women's luge team are expected to dominate the first two runs of their two-day, four-run event. Time will tell.

So, after a poor day for Germany and a good day for the Netherlands, Italy and Estonia, the medal table looks like this after two days of competition:

Rank					Total
1	United States	2	1	0	3
2	Germany	2	0	0	2
3	Norway	1	3	3	7
4	Netherlands	1	2	0	3
5	Russian Fed.	1	1	1	3
6	Italy	1	0	2	3
7	Canada	1	0	1	2
7	France	1	0	1	2
9	Estonia	1	0	0	1
10	Austria	0	2	0	2
11	Finland	0	1	1	2
12	Czech Republic	0	1	0	1
13	Latvia	0	0	1	1
13	Switzerland	0	0	1	1

[Source: torino2006.org]

Bring on day three!

Tags:
sport
Winter Olympics
Turin
Germany

Karneval

2006-02-11T21:02:00.000+01:00

It's carnival, or rather Karneval time here in Germany. This means that everyone - or at least everyone not in the North-Eastern part of Germany which used to be Prussia, where they are much to serious and mature to take part in such silliness - is gearing up to dress up in crazy costumes, attend parades, call everyone else 'madman' and 'madwoman' and mean it nicely, get hammered in public, yell made-up, regionally-specific words such as "Helau", "Alaaf" and "Ho, Narro! S'geht dogege", and generally make fools of themselves on Rosenmontag (German link) which is on the 27th February this year.

One of the preferred methods for getting into the mood for Karneval is huge televised celebrations of buffoonery, political satire, ridiculous songs, dancing, comedy and general silliness, such as that which I'm currently watching on TV.

I don't know how they do it, but they actually manage to get numerous very prominent politicians, including government Ministers, opposition party leaders and so on, to participate in these things. They turn up, fully kitted out in ridiculous costumes, sing and clap along with the rest of the audience, and then laugh their heads off as the performers, satirists, singers and comedians mercilessly take the piss out of them, based on things they've done and said in the past year. It shows a great deal of good humour - so often missing from politics - but also a certain amount of perverse masochism, I reckon.

I've been in Germany for numerous "fifth seasons" now, and I don't think I'll ever get it. It's kind of amusing in a puerile sort of a way, but I can't really get into it. Maybe, like Vegemite, it's the kind of thing you have to grow up with.

I get the impression that Karneval/Fastnacht is a big deal here in Trier. There are a lot posters about advertising various parties and so forth, so when the time comes I might try to get out and take some photos of the silliness and post them here.

Tags:
Carnival
Karneval
Germany

Good start for Germany at the Winter Olypmics

2006-02-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

The German team has had a dream start to the Winter Olympics, picking up two gold medals on the first day of competition. Needless to say, New Zealand has not yet troubled the scorers! In fact, no New Zealander has won a medal at the Winter Olympics since Annelise Coberger won a silver medal in the slalom. She was, at that time, the first person from the Southern Hemisphere ever to win a Winter Olympic medal. In other words, noone is holding their breath for New Zealand medals at this Olympics.

But anyway, back to the actual topic of this post: Germany had at its 'goldest' start to a Winter Olympics ever. First up, Michael Greis claimed gold in the men's 20km individual biathlon. Then, in a real turn-up for the books, outsider Georg Hettich picked up a gold medal in the men's Nordic combination (ski-jumping meets cross-country skiing). Not bad. And look at the size of the medals!

To say that the media in Germany are excited about this better-than-expected start to the games would be a serious understatement.

After the first day's competition, the medal table looks like this:

Medals Table
	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
1. Germany	2	0	0	2
2. Canada	1	0	0	1
2. United States	1	0	0	1
4. Norway	0	2	2	4
5. Austria	0	1	0	1
5. Holland	0	1	0	1
7. France	0	0	1	1
7. Italy	0	0	1	1

Tags:
sport
Winter Olympics
Turin
Germany

Smart-arse mascot

2006-02-11T19:46:00.000+01:00

This is hilarious. The BBC Sport website has a short video clip of a Chelsea mascot who got the better of the Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard in the tunnel before the game.

Click on this link (requires Real Player) to see a little kid who is not at all daunted by the prospect of lining up before the game with some of the biggest names in English football.

The Liverpool player (in red) who the kid offers a handshake to is Steven Gerrard, Liverpool captain and England player. The Chelsea player (in blue) in front is John Terry, Chelsea captain and England player.

Classic! Respect your elders? Naaaaah.

Tags:
sport
English football
Liverpool

New pharaonic tomb found in Egypt

2006-02-11T00:17:00.000+01:00

This is very cool: archaeologists from the University of Memphis have found a new pharaonic tomb in the Valley of the Kings. By accident.

It is the first find in the valley since the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb some 22 years ago. The new tomb, which contains unopened sarcophagi, five intact mummies and pots holding food (handy for the afterlife), was found under workmen's huts very close to Tutankhamun's tomb. It is thought that the mummies may have been royals or nobles and that they may have been moved to this tomb from their original resting place, to protect them from grave robbers.

Apparently, the tomb dates from the 18th dynasty (the same dynasty as Tutankhamun himself), which reigned in Egypt from the 16th century BC to the early 13th century BC.

BBC news and Reuters have all the details. Fascinating stuff.

Tags:
Egypt
ancient history
archaeology

Winter Olympics begin

2006-02-10T20:12:00.000+01:00

As I write this, the opening ceremony of the 20th Winter Olympics in Turin is taking place. From the very brief coverage I've just seen on TV, it looks like quite a show. The Winter Olympics will last until 26th February, with events from 15 different winter sports.

As in past years, German athletes are expected to bring home a substantial haul of medals, though there have been a number of injury setbacks, retirements of former German Olympic stars and one suspension based on the suspicion of blood doping. In Salt Lake City last time around, Germany won the most medals (though not the most golds). With all the injuries and difficulties the team has faced, the feeling here in Germany is that they will struggle to repeat that performance.

I guess we'll know come the end of the month. In the meantime, take a look at the official Torino 2006 website for all the information about the Winter Olympics you could possibly wish for.

Tags:
sport
Winter Olypmics
Turin
Germany

Happy (belated) Waitangi day

2006-02-07T17:01:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, 6th February, was New Zealand's national day. Our national day is called Waitangi day, and it's the day on which we New Zealanders "celebrate" the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6th February 1840, which is, in essence, New Zealand's founding document. Celebrate is in inverted commas there, because in the eyes of many on both sides of the equation (Maori and Pakeha), the Treaty and what has come thereafter are not viewed in an entirely positive light, to put it mildly.

I missed posting about Waitangi Day yesterday because I was on a train back from Berlin to Trier. A train which was delayed for quite some time due to some hapless deer being hit by another train ahead of us on the line, which in turn resulted in my train having to take a considerable detour and my arriving home in Trier very late and too knackered to bother posting. So I'm catching up today. Right here, right now.

This post is not actually even about Waitangi Day and the politics thereof, really. Well sort of. It's more about Americans. You see, although Waitangi day is "observed" by some in New Zealand, and services and whatnot are attended by dignitaries and televised, for most it is just viewed as a handy day off in the middle of summer. Along the lines of: "I'll take that public holiday and go to the beach, thank you very much." We have a half-hearted debate about national identity in the lead-up, tut-tut about the shafting of the Maori people by the British Crown and the New Zealand government, and/or tut-tut about the "Treaty grievance industry" and how greedy the "bloody Maoris" have got - depending on which side of the dividing line you fall - and fire up the barbie. That's about it, generally. We certainly don't go around wishing people Happy Waitangi Day, or somesuch.

Why, then, have I called this post "Happy Waitangi Day"? Well, I have some former housemates in the UK to thank for that. Two of them. Both Americans. Both nice guys.

Back then, there were six of us living in the house: two Americans, two Kiwis and two Brits. One fine, cold 6th February in Oxford, the two Americans both wished me a "Happy Waitangi Day". Independently of each other, no less. I guess one or both of them must have had one of those international diaries which lists national holidays from countries around the world and noticed that 6th February was New Zealand's national day and was called Waitangi Day. I suspect they imagined it was something like Thanksgiving - hence the cheery "Happy Waitangi Day!" I was so impressed that a) they'd even noticed, and b) they'd bothered to say anything, that I didn't have the heart to let on that Waitangi Day wasn't necessarily considered that much of a cause for celebration and that we didn't really wish each other a happy one in our neck of the woods. Instead, I just thanked them and went about my business.

But it kind of stuck. So now, with no regard for whether or not it's the done thing, I cheerily wish people a Happy Waitangi Day. I don't care about the confuddled looks such a comment tends to draw. It's just, well, nice. Things aren't perfect in New Zealand, by any means, and we have our fair share of home-grown issues, especially with regard to race-relations. But we also have a pretty special and pretty unique tiny little isolated corner of the world that we have the privilege of calling home, and we have made something of it. On a national day, that is worth celebrating and being, well, happy about. Don't you think? Why it took me 25 years and some inadvertent prompting from a couple of Americans to make me realise that is completely beyond me.

Tags:
New Zealand
Waitangi Day

While this blog was sleeping

2006-02-04T12:26:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, while The Capital Letter was in a state of slumber, the Finns re-elected their woman president, Tarja Halonen, for a further six year term. Just.

Earlier in January, Halonen had easily won the first round of the Finnish presidential elections, but had failed to gain the 50% of the vote required to avoid a head-to-head run off. In that first round, Halonen had recevied 46.3% of the vote, to the conservative candidate Sauli Niinisto's 24.1%. This result forced a run off ballot between the two, which took place last weekend.

Given the very high percentage of the vote Tarja Halonen received in the first round, it may have been something of a surprise to some that she only just scraped home in the head-to-head battle with Niinisto. Halonen received 51.8% of the vote to Niinisto's 48.2%. As a result, she will remain at the helm in Helsinki until 2012.

This result, of course, means that the number of women world leaders, which has been a focus of discussion on this blog in recent weeks, remains stable at 11 (or 12, depending on whom you count) until further notice. Jolly good.

Tags:
Finland
European politics
women leaders

Pssst!

2006-02-01T22:19:00.000+01:00

Bit quiet in here, isn't it? Busy week, I'm afraid. I haven't even had time to read or reply to comments. Normal service should resume from Friday.

Sure enough: Hamas it is

2006-01-27T02:06:00.000+01:00

The reports were indeed accurate. With the final vote count in and confirmed, Hamas has won a victory so resounding in the Palestinian elections that even Hamas' own leaders appear to have been taken by suprise.

Reuters reports that, after an overall voter turnout at a very respectable 78%, Hamas has taken 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian legislature. Fatah, the party of Yassir Arafat, which had long been dominant in Palestinian politics, won just 43 seats. Hamas is said to be seeking to form a coalition government, though Fatah's leaders have said they do not wish to be involved in a Hamas-led coalition.

Further analysis of this result from me will have to wait until I've had a chance to read some more and form a clear opinion. It may even have to go into the 'too hard' basket. In particular, I wait with interest to see the following:

Whether or not Hamas will be successful in forming the coalition government it seeks
Whether or not, now that it finds itself in power, Hamas will disband its armed wing and soften its stance on the destruction of the state of Israel, as Western leaders were quick to stress the necessity of after the results were announced today
Whether or not the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, will find himself forced to resign if Hamas derails his fledgling peace efforts, and if so, who will replace him
How Israel, the US and the EU will react if Hamas do indeed disarm.

Until I've had a chance to observe those developments and broaden my understanding of the various implications of this election result, I think I shall reserve judgement. It's not difficult to fathom why many Palestinian voters have chosen to support Hamas with what must to a large extent be considered a protest vote. That said, I confess that this result causes me considerable concern, and leaves me rather less hopeful for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than I previously was. Time will tell.

Seeing a result such as this come out of an apparently free and fair dmeocractic election, I can't help thinking of Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy as a political system:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Hmmm.

Tags:
Palestine
Middle East
Hamas

Hamas win outright majority in Palestinian elections(?)

2006-01-26T16:21:00.000+01:00

Watch your news media outlet of choice in about an hour and a half, when the official results of the Palestinian elections are due to be announced. It's going to be BIG.

Indications so far are that Hamas may have won an outright majority. This is a result that no one appears to have been expecting. Hamas were expected to do well, yes, and maybe even to gain a majority of seats, but no one I know of was picking an outright majority. This would theoretically allow them to govern alone, rather than in a coalition government - though it remains to be seen whether Hamas will exercise that option or seek to build a coalition anyway. The Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmed Qurei, of the Fatah party, has already resigned. This would, of course, seem to indicate a very decisive Hamas victory.

This result, if confirmed, will throw the politics of the region into turmoil. It will make the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon seem like an insignificant ripple. Both the US and Israel had previously announced that they would not deal even with a Hamas-led coalition government, so the chances of their dealing with a Hamas-only government, should such a government be formed, would appear to be non-existent.

I need some time to digest the news reports, read around what's being said, and gather my wits on this issue. It is problematic, to say the least. I hope to be able to post something coherent on it later this evening.

At this point, I can't help wondering what the US response will be. The Bush administration will be in a bind. It's all very well to go throwing your weight around in an effort to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, but what happens when you don't like the results of the democracy you helped to bring? Can you object, obstruct and refuse to recognise without looking completely and utterly hypocritical? That's the thing about democracy you see: the people decide, and you never quite know what they might do, given the chance.

More, I hope, later.

Tags:
Palestine
Middle East
Hamas
International Relations

2007 Tour de France to start in London

2006-01-24T16:48:00.000+01:00

Exciting news for British cycling fans today: it has been announced that next year's Tour de France will start in London. In fact, London will host not one, but two stages. The prologue (a very short time trial which takes place the day before the first proper stage) will be in central London, while Stage 1 will start in London the following day and head South out of the capital through Kent.

The official Tour de France press release is short and to-the-point:

Amaury Sport Organisation announce today, Tuesday 24 January 2006, that London has been chosen to host the Grand Depart of the 2007 Tour de France.

Full details of the routes will be given at the official launch which will take place on Thursday 9 February 2006 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London.

The BBC Sport website goes into a bit more detail, including details of the two previous times the Tour has visited Britain (though never London) and some hints as to which landmarks the London stages might take in.

To those in the know, this will not be a surprise, but will be welcome news nonetheless. It has been rumoured for at least the past two years that the 2007 Tour de France might begin in London. It's nice to know that this has now been confirmed. I'm sure London will do a great job of hosting the event, and it'll be good practice for the London Olympics.

Might be worth a trip.

Tags:
cycling
Tour de France
London

Shoddy headlining

2006-01-24T13:27:00.000+01:00

Note: I dislike the terms "mainstream media" and "MSM" and the way they are bandied about on blogs as if they were swear-words, but I'm going to have to use MSM in this post. Just this once. Apologies in advance.

One of the things that bugs me about the MSM is shoddy headlining. I've lost count of the number of times I've read articles whose actual journalistic content bears little or no resemblance to the headline above the story. What particularly bugs me is when headlines make factual errors or give misleading information which the articles themselves do not. That bugs me for two reasons: 1) because good, accurate work by the journalist is being undermined by a headliner who cannot do his or her job properly; and 2) because I know that in many cases the headline is all that people read, so they never get to the actual facts, but just internalise the pithy, distilled, nonsense version.

So it is in this week's Guardian Weekly, when it comes to reporting on the inauguration of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as President of Liberia. The headline of this article, which was originally published in the Guardian on 17th January and is reproduced in the Guardian Weekly, reads:

Africa's first elected woman leader pledges to end cycle of violence

Sadly for the Guardian, that is bollocks. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is Africa's first elected woman President. She is also Africa's first elected woman head of state. But she is not Africa's first elected woman leader.

In fact, Africa currently has two other elected leaders who are women: Maria do Carmo Silveira, Prime Minister of Sao Tome e Principe, and Lusia Diogo, Prime Minister of Mozambique. Both are women, both head a democratically elected cabinet, both are African. Neither is head of state, as both Sao Tome and Mozambique are republics whose head of state is a President (both men), but both are indisputably political leaders of their countries.

The article itself actually gets it right, though no mention is made of Silveira or Diogo:

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in yesterday as Liberia's new president, making history as Africa's first elected female head of state and pledging a "fundamental break" with the west African nation's violent past.

In other words:
Journalist Hans Nichols: tick, A+
Anonymous headliner: cross, F (Find another job, or do your current job properly).

Any clown can find this information with a simple Google search. There is no excuse for factual inaccuracies from people who do this for a living. It just isn't that hard.

/media rant

Tags:
media
Africa
Liberia

Something to do in Berlin

2006-01-23T17:23:00.000+01:00

This sounds like a barrel of laughs: PowerPoint Karaoke.

On Wednesday 25th January in the "nbi" (Schönhauser Allee 36), the inaugural Berlin PowerPoint Karaoke championships will be held. Here's how it works: the PowePoint Karaoke team have plucked a series of riveting PowerPoint presentations on such gem topics as "Service as a success factor in dental laboratories" and "Innovative methods in chemical dry cleaning" off the web. Contestants will be asked to attempt to give an appropriate talk to accompany the PP presentations. A panel of judges will liven things up by making the contestants' lives as difficult as possible.

So, if you're in Berlin and at a loose end this coming Wednesday evening, and especially if you, like me, find PowerPoint presentations pretty darn tedious and regularly abused, I reckon you could do a lot worse than getting yourself down to nbi to check it out. I'd be there with bells on if I were in Berlin this week.

[Hat-tip: Die Zeit: Berlin-Journal]

Tags:
Berlin

Germany in the deep freeze

2006-01-23T16:22:00.000+01:00

The artic temperatures which have been making Russians' and other eastern Europeans' lives a misery for the past week have now reached Germany. As I write, it's -13 degrees C in Berlin, and that in the middle of the day. Overnight termperatures in various parts of Germany plunged deep into the -20s last night and are predicted to go even lower tonight. In Bavaria, for instance, weather forecasters are warning that the mercury could sink below -30 tonight. Thankfully, I'm not in Berlin at present, but rather Trier, where it is a comparatively balmy -3. Long may it last. That said, looking at the satellite weather picture, I'm not especially hopeful:

[Source: accuweather.com]

The icy temperatures have already claimed numerous lives in Russia, Poland and the Baltic states, but last night they proved fatal in Germany too. Deutsche Welle reports:

Two people have died here in Germany as a result of freezing temperatures as low as minus 24 degrees Celsius. Police said a 74-year-old woman froze to death in the eastern town of Wolfen while the frozen body of a 48-year-old man was found in a field in Salzwedel, also in the east. The snap of extremely cold weather moving westwards from Russia has killed at least 20 people in Poland. There have also been a number of deaths in the Baltic Sea states. Forecasters said temperatures could plunge to minus 30 degrees Celsius in the southern German state of Bavaria on Monday.

The death of the 74 year-old woman was a particularly tragic case. According to radio reports, she fell yesterday evening while trying to go to her letterbox. She was unable to get to her feet after the fall and, since noone heard her cries for help, she froze to death over night. Pardon my French, but what a bloody miserable way to die!

Tags:
Germany
weather

Close but no cigar

2006-01-23T16:06:00.000+01:00

If you ask me, this is pretty harsh: it is being reported today that Mehmet Ali Acga, the gunman who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, has been returned to prison in Turkey, where he will remain until 2010. This comes just eight days after he was released from prison after serving what he thought was his full term for that crime and for the prior murder of a Turkish journalist.

After all the hoo-ha in the international media the week before last about the deceased Pope's would-be killer being released from prison, it would seem that the Turkish authorities have had a change of heart. BBC News reports:

Last week Turkey's top court had ruled that Mehmet Ali Agca had not spent enough time in jail for killing a Turkish journalist in 1979. He was released earlier this month, but was returned to jail after eight days.

He has spent nearly 25 years in Italian and Turkish jails but has never revealed why he tried to kill the Pope.

Prosecutors say Agca, 48, must now stay in prison until 18 January 2010, the Anatolia agency reports.

Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek had appealed against his release earlier this month, arguing that cuts in his original jail term had been miscalculated. Mr Cicek said Agca should serve a full 10-year term for the 1979 murder of left-wing Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci, as well as two bank robberies.

While I'm fully in favour of criminals serving their rightful sentences, I does strike me as pretty cruel to release someone from prison only to re-arrest them just over a week later. Presumably, Acga must have thought he was a free man after almost 25 years behind bars and must have just been beginning the task of re-adjusting to life outside prison, only to be told "No, sorry mate, there's been a mistake, four more years for you." Couldn't the Turkish authorities have got all this palaver sorted out before releasing Acga, thus sparing him what I imagine is a pretty traumatic "close but no cigar" glimpse of freedom? What a shambles!

Tags:
Pope
justice
Turkey

British English test

2006-01-19T18:23:00.000+01:00

I have largely stopped posting those light-hearted tests from OKCupid, Blogthings and the like. However, given the subject matter of my last post, I couldn't resist posting this one:

You Know British English 100%

Well your result says it all really. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
under 35% ugly.... under 60% Bad .....61% to 100% good

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 91% on variable 1

Link: The American English Translation Test

Incidentally, this test gets a couple of things wrong. There are several questions where the British tend to say either none of the possible answers, or more than one of the possible answers. As you can see though, you can get away with educated guessing.

Tags:
British English
American English

Practice makes perfect

2006-01-19T18:07:00.000+01:00

Part of my job here in Trier involves being able to tell people how British and American usage differs. Since I've not had to concern myself with that topic since I briefly went to an American elementary school at age 9, it has been a fairly steep learning curve. I had always subscribed to the belief that, apart from the -our vs. -or spellings, one different name for a letter (z), and quite a lot of pronunciation differences, the two varieties were largely identical. Well, more fool me!

I'm in the lucky position of having several American colleagues I can check these things with as and when they arise. And boy do they arise frequently! Scarcely a teaching day goes by that I am not alerted to some minor, but important, difference between British and American English.

Last week, for instance, I discovered that Americans really do spell skilful and wilful with two ls in the middle. This, after I had spent the last year coming across those words spelt skillful and willful in comments and blogs and just assuming that the authors couldn't spell. Wrong. They were just playing by different rules.

It has also come to my attention recently that in American CVs, sorry resumés, the word reference is used to denote not only the thing which a person writes to support your application, but also the person who writes it, rather than using reference for the former and referee for the latter, as in British English. I'm still a bit sceptical (Oops, there's another one! Sorry, skeptical) about that one - it just sounds a bit far-fetched to me - so if any of my American readers could confirm or deny that, I'd be most appreciative.

Another one I've recently discovered is I couldn't care less and its variants. Over the course of the past year or so, I had seen several instances of Americans writing I could care less to express the same idea of not giving a damn about something. Whenever I came across that, I just raised my eyebrows and moved on quietly, wondering how the writers in question thought that phrase could mean what they were using it to mean. When you think about it, I could care less should really only mean that you don't care at all if you say it with a great big dollop of sarcasm, thus making clear that you mean the opposite of what you're saying. But now I discover that in American English, both I couldn't care less and I could care less are acceptable, with identical meanings. Make of that what you will.

The use of couple as a determiner instead of a quantifier is another American usage that I have real trouble accepting, even though modern dictionaries tell me I'm going to have to get used to it. In case you're wondering, the determiner usage is this one:

In a couple weeks, my friends and I are going camping

as opposed to the quantifier usage, which is this one:

In a couple of weeks, my friends and I are going camping

In American English, both are acceptable. (Ugh!) In other Englishes, only the quantifier usage is correct. Of all the differences I've discovered in the past few months that I was previously blissfully unaware of, this is the one which really gives me the heebee jeebees. It just looks and sounds so utterly wrong, damnit. I can't help thinking to myself "Yeah, I know you can say it like that, but I do wish you wouldn't!"

And now, to top it all off, I have learned that in American English there is no orthographical distinction between the noun practice and the verb to practise. Americans spell both with a c, as in:

At soccer practice, we practice dribbling, tackling, passing and running into space. (US)

versus:

At football practice, we practise dribbling, tackling, passing, and running into space. (Brit.)

In fact (I nearly wrote in practice), many British speakers do the same thing. But at least when they do it, it's wrong, and is a result of not having got their heads around the rule, or indeed not being able to tell the difference between a verb and a noun. (You think I'm joking, don't you?!) Now I find that when speakers of American English don't distinguish between the noun and verb forms, they're right to do so. Oh, woe is me!

As you can see, the very fundaments of what I thought I knew about the language are being shaken here. And I haven't even mentioned different than yet. I have enough trouble accepting that different to has become common usage, so accommodating different than may take me a wee while yet.

You'd be forgiven for thinking, after all that, that I am on some sort of crusade against American English. You'd be wrong. I'm not at all. Obviously, given that New Zealand English is closer to British English than American English (NZE has its own quirks, but that's a topic for another post entirely), and that I lived in the UK for quite some time, my own usage tends to lean heavily towards British English rather than American English. But that doesn't mean I can't accept the validity of another national variety's idiosyncrasies and individualities. I can't bring myself to like them all, and I won't be incorporating them into my own language use any time soon, but I can live with them. Instead, what I try to preach to my students is consistency. I don't care whether they choose to write British English or American English, as long as they are actively choosing to write one or the other. A somewhat unfamiliar national variety I can handle, a confused mish-mash, I cannot. Of course, in order to be able to handle said unfamiliar national variety, I have to familiarise myself with it. Hence the steep learning curve, and hence this post.

I wonder how long it will be before someone makes the (political - it's always political rather than linguistic) decision to classify British and American English as two different languages? It can't be all that far hence, though I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime. Just a thought.

Tags:
language
British English
American English

A grammar lesson for the Sugababes

2006-01-18T10:22:00.000+01:00

The Sugababes are very popular in Germany at present. (Go figure!) Their most popular song is currently "Push the Button". As a consequence, even though I only listen to the radio for a couple of hours a day, scarcely a day goes by in which I don't hear this song at least twice. I don't actually even mind the song - though I'd never buy it - so all would be well and good, if it weren't for a grammar error in the lyrics which is so bad as to make my teeth hurt.

The culprit is this two line section, which - as sod's law would of course have it - appears thrice:

After waiting patiently for him to come and get it
He came on through and asked me if I wanted to get with him

What the Sugababes mean is this:

I had been waiting patiently for quite some time to see if he'd finally get up the gumption to make a move. Eventually, he finally came over and said "Get your coat love, you've pulled."

But what their lyrics actually say is something different entirely. A third person, a man, has been thrown into the equation, thus:

Man 1 had been waiting patiently for quite some time to see if man 2 would finally get up the gumption to make a move (either on me or indeed on man 1 - that's not clear). Eventually (either:) man 1 gave up on waiting for man 2 and came over to me and said "Get your coat love, you've pulled!",( or:) man 2 came over to me and said "Get your coat love, you've pulled!" (thus leaving man 1 standing at the bar like a sad and oddly desperate voyeur.)

This is a classic misrelated participle, or hanging modifier. And it hurts.

After waiting ... is a participial phrase. Though it is possible for a participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence to have an explicit subject of its own (e.g. Her voice [subj. of part. phr.] breaking with emotion, Angela [subj. of main cl.] spoke of her son's battle with cancer), the Sugababes' participial phrase doesn't have an explicit subject. The subject is implied. That is, the participial phrase inherits its subject from the the main clause which follows. Since the subject of the Sugababes' main clause is manifestly 'he' and not 'I', this renders their lyrics utter nonsense.

The rule is so simple:

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject of the main clause, unless the participial phrase contains its own explicit grammatical subject.

The truly frustrating thing is that in this particular case, the Sugababes could get around their grammatical mangling and have their lyrics actually make sense without even altering the rhythm or number of syllables. If their lyrics ran:

I'd been waiting patiently for him to come and get it
He came on through and asked me if I wanted to get with him

then all would be well with the world and my teeth would be spared. Of course, then I'd have nothing to complain about, would I?

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Sugababes
language
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Slow slow music

2006-01-17T15:23:00.000+01:00

Call me a heathen. Say I don't understand anything about art. Tell me I don't appreciate true genius, but this is a crap idea. A piece of music played so slowly that it last 639 years? Oh please, don't waste my time.

Incidentally, I wonder what the musical symbol is for a rest which lasts a year and a half?

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music
weird news