Hey Stan - Colonize any Good Towns Lately?

The east German town of Löcknitz, about fifty kilometres inland from the Baltic Sea, has witnessed a minor miracle in recent years, as one of the few cities of East Germany to halt the decline in population a few years ago; to the contrary, people have started to move in. What’s quite unusual about this is that the local kindergarten and school classes have begun to fill up. There is one “fly in the ointment”, though: the new residents are not Germans, but Poles, coming mainly from the Polish port city of Szczecin, a city of more than 400,000 inhabitants some 20 kilometres from Löcknitz.

The renewal of the former-GDR is afoot. The Poles that Brits don't like are movin' in:

The population of Poles in the town is already at 15 percent, and every fifth child in a local kindergarten has Polish nationality. Even the local Germans are happy for the Poles. “Without them the town would die out,” says the German owner of a local upmarket restaurant. Most of the former East Germany, however, hasn’t had the same luck as Löcknitz. When the East German Communists put up the Berlin Wall fifty years ago they were trying to stem, among other things, the exodus of their citizens to the West. Each year before the Wall was built over a hundred thousand people abandoned the East for the West, and the Communist GDR was facing the threat of a country with no people in it.

Keep on rocking in the free world...

Quietly, the Central Europe of yore is tiptoeing back, where national borders have often been very hazy. And it’s entirely differently from what we feared – which is another reason why we could and should overcome our national inferiority complexes towards Germans and Germany.

Recipes from the Near Distant Ago: „Housewife” Style Soljanka

Don’t get all “reactionary” on me, bro - I didn’t come up with the name.

A RECIPE FOR 4 TO 6 SERVINGS

INGREDIENTS:
3 onions
40 g margarine
4 tablespoons of tomato paste
1.5 liters broth (or even from powder or paste)
Leftovers from cooked meat and sausage
1 pickle
1 teaspoon capers
lemon
sour cream

PREPARATION:
Chop the onions and cook in the pot with hot margarine. Fry to a golden brown.
Add the tomato paste and the broth
Chop the leftover meat and sausage in another pan, and fry.
Chop the pickle into small cubes. Add them along with the capers to the soup.
Let simmer thoroughly.

Add a slice of lemon and sour cream to each bowl prior to serving

Hurricane Snark

Alexandria, Virginia, USA, 28-AUG-2011, 1100UT





Fallen chimney brick here and there, a chimney-top spark arrestor, shutters, misc. tree limbs... All told, not that bad.

Bonus: former seismic damage!

And you Thought You Just Needed More Fiber

Don’t expect a Kindle edition any time soon.

The Workers' Party of Korea Publishing House brought out Vol. 10 of "Selected Works of Kim Jong Il" (enlarged edition) which comprehensively deals with immortal classic works of leader Kim Jong Il.

Accounts Receivable will Never be the Same

Poetic Injustice at the Haiku Hilton

Oh, dear client,
Invoice in arrears.
Allergic to it?

Recipes from the Near Distant Ago: Meat Solyanka, DDR Style

A RECIPE FOR 5 SERVINGS

INGREDIENTS:
500 g cooked beef
1 carrot
1 parsley root
1 onion
1 bay leaf
2 onions, finely chopped
margarine
3 tablespoons tomato paste
2 pickles
500 g of meat and meat leftovers such as sausage
5 grains of allspice
Salt & pepper

GARNISH:
Lemon slices, seeded
sour cream
Parsley, chopped

PREPARATION:
Cook onions in margarine until golden yellow.
Add tomato puree and sprinkle immediately with some of the broth.
Slice cucumbers into thin slices,
chop meat scraps and small amounts of onion.
Bring to a boil the meat broth with the carrot, onion, pepper or peppercorns.
Add allspice, bay leaf and salt. Fill with hot broth. Let simmer for 10-15 minutes,
Season again to taste.

Garnish before serving with lemon slices and a dollop of sour cream settle in the middle. Sprinkle with parsley.

The Mullet: A Man's Rite of Passage

Woodcreek High Alum Eric Berger Pitching His Way Through Minors

The handlebar mustache and wavy, almost mullet-like hair is vastly different from the look Eric Berger sported at Woodcreek High School. That guy could never have grown such a 'stache. "I was planning on being Captain Hook for Halloween,..."

Radio kooks and crazies, such as your correspondent's faithful readership may delight in trying to bag these obscure transmissions.

You Know them by their Blank Stare

Berlin's eternally dyspeptic "Wutbürgers." Their intellectual heft makes one nearly want to evacuate in situ.

The DDR's Manchurian Candidates

They have returned to Namibia, grown up, and some have moved on. They were GDR-Children of Namibia.

GDR-Children of Namibia are a group of approximately 400 black Namibian children that grew up in GDR. During the liberation struggle of SWAPO against South African occupation of Namibia they were relocated from 1979 onwards from various refugee camps to GDR and only came back in 1990 at the onset of Namibian independence. They were mostly unprepared for their return.

As recently as 2005, they have appeared on the German media radar. Where some would think that their fate in return would have been impossible, they overlook the nature of traditional German culture of faith and compassion: their transition back to Namibia as young adults was enabled by the ethnic Germans of Namibia.

In autumn 1989, as Germany rejoiced at the end of the country's 40-year division, many of the students at the "High-School of Friendship" in Stassfurt, near Magdeburg, felt their hearts sink.
For over 400 children and teenagers dispatched to East Germany from Namibia over the previous decade, the collapse of communism meant one thing: an uncertain future in a country they could barely remember.

What began as an airlift of refugees was exploited by the East German regime as an opportunity to construct the elite of what they hoped would be a nascent pre-Soviet Namibia colonized by Marxist-Leninism.

Erich Honecker's government earmarked what it called "Solidarity Funds" to support the Marxist movement with aid and military supplies, and also hatched a plan intended to be of political and military benefit to both countries. But 1990 marked an abrupt end to the Party-led project to take in and educate Namibian children, with the ultimate aim of creating an elite class to lead the SWAPO liberation movement.

Their fate, it seems was mixed.

The self-proclaimed "Ossi" Africans -- referring to the nickname for eastern Germans -- have experienced mixed fates. Some are now working as lawyers and businessmen, while Lucia herself is training as a journalist. Some, though, were less fortunate. And few returned to live in Germany.

Hair Crimes!

A SERIAL bank robber has been dubbed the Bad Hair Bandit after carrying out more than 20 successful raids in an array of dodgy WIGS.

The woman's disguises have included blonde dreadlocks, a stringy mullet, a badly fitting bob and cascading chestnut waves.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\08B

Every fake crisis needs its' orators

The international bee crisis needs to be addressed before we are really stung, says Green Party MP Sue Kedgley.