has flicker made posting pictures more difficult now? i was trying to do it and it appears to be a no-go without giving them the name and password of the blog.

But in BaWü the humour seems to revolve about how they speak.

Next year, I think they should award the No.bel Pri.ze for Liter.ature to someone who has given a few speeches about writing a book. (Actually, there was a fair bit of griping that Ms Müller’s oeuvre is too small to warrant her consideration for the prize.)

People in my office were pretty flabbergasted that (sick of typing with the periods, you know who) won. On the whole, they were happy with just about anybody but Kohl, but no one was terribly clear what the recipient managed to do in the two weeks be his inauguration and the cut-off deadline.

Can we trade the NPP for the 2016 Olympics?

If anybody’s looking for a crock pot – there are some available on ebay right now. I missed the opportunity in the past.

We’ll see how long this one stays up.

And so it begins. The impending foreign minister doesn’t speak English, or at least doesn’t speak it well. There was some discussion about this at our place Sunday evening.

Apparently he isn’t taking questions in English from the BBC. I wonder if it was a bit game of “chicken”-ish. I can’t believe that the beeb would send somebody over here who doesn’t speak German. Ultimately, the reporter has to understand the answers to everyone else’s questions as well. He or she may not speak it well, however, or they may just have been pushing to see how W. would react. They got a reaction!

German minister-to-be rebuffs question in English

Oh, and in case he’s here for my advice. Dude, “odd news” is not where you want to be showing up two days after a successful election. Name recognition in the US is not all its cracked up to be.

so we’ve got work to do.

We headed over to MC.don.alds this morning for our free breakfast. The UNGS was very happy with his bacon egg and cheese biscuit,  but the cashier was a bit confused. The UNGS asked if they were participating in the promotion and he said, “Well I don’t understand it either, but we’re taking [the coupons].”  Thanks for the heads up Papa Scott!

Then I went with the UNGS (for him) to vote. He was in and out before I got through reading the directions. I will have to do some looking to see under what conditions Germans living abroad are allowed to vote, because based on the info sheet, it would appear that not all of them may.

Now it’s baking and making boards for “buzzword bingo”.  I may update with the vocab we chose later.  Happy Election Day everyone!

If one can have election parties in the US, I see no reason why we can’t do it here as well. They can add it to the list of good things they don’t appreciate like Halloween and the Coc.a-Co.la Sa.n.ta Cl.au.s (just kidding). So far I have the UNGS and a co-worker on board.

Having the idea to do it pretty much sapped all my creative juices, so now I have to set to work.

Big TV – check (attention house theives – very old, very heavy TV)

There’s bin some discussion about wearing colors, but I suppose you could do food in the colors of the parties, although there isn’t much for the  CDU/CSU (black)

I don’t want to spend oodles of time on decorating. There are cute ideas with the various coalition nicknames – the traffic light coalition (red, yellow, green), the Jamaica coalition (green, yellow, black), the Tigerente coalition.

We’re out of beer at the moment, so I should look into that.

And that’s pretty much all there is new around here. I have been in a fog all day.

I learned something election related today – the discussion with the party leadership shortly after the polls close is the “Elefantenrunde”. Obviously, with out elephant and donkey firmly in place, this expression will not be making its way across the pond any time soon.

I am looking for something with shopping lists and suggestions of how to turn leftovers from meal 1 into new dishes.  For idiots.

We are ony two and I can’t bear the thought of eating the same meal all week. I also have trouble finding recipes with ingrediants I can get in the store here.  My beloved Colorado Cookbooks are useless here because half of the ingredients (Monterey Jack cheese anyone, peppers, etc.  are either impossible to get or require an extra trip to the asia shop across town.) And I am not that organised.

English or German is fine.

So there are lots of weird links between the United States and Germany. There is the perverse fascination with English songs, like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Almost Heaven, West Virginia” in German Beer Tents, the ad nauseum application of “Yes We Can” to everything from burgers to Guggenmusik Bands (a local group proclaimed their2009 “Yes We Can Tour” on their T-shirts last night), but homo sapians germanicus is nothing, if not inventive, and has established yet another connection.

In California, lies the little community of Bluewater – the unincorporated community of Bluewater. Where there is no real mayor, there is unlikely to be a town fire department, a town police department or a (get this!)  TV station, but this didn’t keep major news services in Germany from running with a made up story, from said fictional TV station that there had been a suicide bombing attempt in a restaurant in Bluewater.

All it took was a few web pages, a wikipedia entry and twitter.

The details are all here at Wired.com The story

The problem was that once the Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa) – a wire service, like AP or Reuters,  just not quite as behemoth-like, published the story, everybody else who subscribes to the service started publishing it referring to the wire story.

It gets a bit complicated. At one point, there was a story that there had been an “attack” meant as a promotional stunt by German rappers. But the attack, joking or not, and the rap group were all made up. The entire gag was the brain child of a German director promoting a film, which is to be released here soon.

Here’s a link to the Süddeutsche Zeitung article while the story was still in the wrapper, I mean rapper stage. SZ Link

This has caused the media to go into self-flagellation mode, reviewing how stories are researched and confirmed, not neccessarily a bad thing.

Bild Blog post on Lessons from Bluewater (German)

Above all the fundimental rule of journalism was ignored: A story which is too good to be true is probably just that, no true.

Videos etc. about the making of the gag at the web site of  “TV station”  k-VPK-tv