Ziggy Stardust meets Marketing Whiz

The Atlantic reports on a scary new trend in playing with your hair from the most unserious place on earth. Skandinavian style peddler offers Vintage Video Games, Retro Haircuts and a generalized air of wierdness.

Bobby, a hybrid hair salon-toy store in Copenhagen celebrates the games and geek culture of the 1970s-1990s. Bobby Ågren, who sports a mushroom-meets-mullet hairstyle

This goes some length to explaining their anomalously high suicide rate.

Piraten! Move out of Your Parent's Basement!

I've never heard of a political party become so adept at repelling women without, say, making them wear veils or binding their feet:

Just after walking the German Pirate Party plank due to exhaustion, ex-Pirate political manager Marina Weisband dropped the boom on her mobbing male marauders by outing them as being just as chauvanistic and sexist as male types everywhere else are, political or otherwise.

The response she got from these thoroughly modern males amounted to "whatever you say, sweet cheeks."

What? You've Never Heard of the Paupers' Research Centre ?

What are they good at? Making broad, proud, sweeping summit-closing declarations on stuff they will never actually do:

The European Commission has presented plans to boost spending on scientific research by tens of billions of euros.

EU science commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn on Wednesday (30 November) announced the bloc's new €80 billion envelope, up from €50.5 billion for its previous seven-year funding programme.

In fact it's SO visionary, (after all, who would ever think to do "research" or get the taxpayer to fund some of it,) that they had to come up with a new name for this phenomical invention.

The new scheme, dubbed Horizon 2020, will run from 2014-2020.

"We need a new vision for European research and innovation in a dramatically changed economic environment," said Geoghegan-Quinn.

Wait! Wait! I think I'm having a vision!

The Swedish Miracle Mullet

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local.

"I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

Whenever you see news coming out of Sweden, why do feel compelled to ALWAYS ask "is this a joke"? It’s a stupid question, because it never is.

Sweden: Man gets sick benefits for heavy metal addiction

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

So on the occasions where he DID show up to work, he employed psychiatry to try to compel his employer to listen to metal for what is likely a 6 hour a day job. This despite the fact that he was getting paid at all.

Eventually his last employer tired of his absences and Tullgren was left jobless and reliant on welfare handouts.

But his sessions with the occupational psychologists led to a solution of sorts: Tullgren signed a piece of paper on which his heavy metal lifestyle was classified as a disability, an assessment that entitles him to a wage supplement from the job centre.

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

Winners and enterpreneurs seem rather hard to come by after 6 decades of deprogramming people of common sense.

Post-Nuclear Germany, Beware

Beware of fooling yourself most of all:

However, without these subsidies not one of the "world famous" Danish wind farms would be profitable. But not even the government largesse, courtesy of the taxpayers/consumers seems to be enough to keep wind power profitable in Denmark; Scan Energy, one of the major wind and solar energy companies, with production also in Germany and France, has finally called it a day. Among the major shareholders are a number of the biggest Danish farming estates. Now there is, according to the Danish daily Jylland-Posten, a real risk that some of these family estates, built up during centuries, will have to be sold as a consequense of the Scan Energy bankruptcy.

"That was Quite an Outburst"

The Rather Distant Ago

When Britons used to still occasionally give birth...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 1946

Henpecking in the Near Distant Ago

Some Things Could Never be Distant Enough

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\12-A

Germany unveils plans to tighten internet privacy
Monsters and Critics.com

Berlin - Germany unveiled plans Wednesday to regulate the internet, including opt-out rights from Google Street View.

Google Street View capturing child birth is a hoax
San Francisco Chronicle

That's what people were asking last week as this Google Street View< image capturing the birth of a baby in Berlin circulated around the Internet.


A law for every occasion, as usual:

'The Internet Is Not a Lawless Place'
Spiegel Online

First Came the Bail Out

And then came the bale out.

Unintentionally Funny Wonks ?

Crime Doesn’t Pay. Or Does it?

I just love these stories that induce hysteria in Germany... A 19 year old German citizen by the name of Christopher Mettin decided to join his Ami girlfriend back to Sioux City. They forged a driver’s license and birth certificate. His forged identity, though, was tripped up when he tried to vote.

Behaving as though they live in a far away village where nothing dramatic is supposed to happen, expect Germans to be hysterical anyway, but the apoplexy will come from the fact that he’s going to be deported and, horror of horrors, wasn’t asked for his passport when he voted as they would in the land where nothing unheimlich even happens. As in, the opposite of their usual datenschutz style hysteria when they discover that there are Americans who are concerned that non-citizens, inhabiting the US legally and illegally, are voting.

Of course they can go back to the old “the US justice system is so cruel and severe”. This, from a country where you can legally be held in preventative detention after you’ve finished serving your sentence in the crowbar hotel. Yeah, whatever you say, Udo.

Mettin made a false statement or claim that he was a citizen on a voter registration form, according to the indictment. The indictment also alleges on October 12, Mettin falsely represented himself to be a U.S. citizen to agents of the Department of Homeland Security.

Right before they pop a blood vessel in their eye, they might think back to the annual German-press ritual of “declaring the American Dream dead”, something that they’ve been doing for decades, as far as I can remember. Strangely enough, Christopher Mettin didn’t think so, enterprising as the zit-faced punk was.

Mr. Wen’s Rendezvous with Density