OHIO STATE UNOFFICIAL MOTTO: HI IN THE MIDDLE AND ROUND ON EACH SIDE
Right now both US Presidential are swarming all over Ohio, the swingingest of the swing states, with McCain announcing his VP pick today in Dayton and Obama set to hold forth in Dublin tomorrow with his new trusty sidekick Joe “Biden His Time” [...]

like I did — getting married and whatnot — you could do worse then read The New Yorker’s movie critic Anthony Lane’s week one and week two Letters from Beijing. They’re rambling, irreverent, highly subjective, highly entertaining and, naturally, full of canny film references. “Even when Yao Ming, whose status in China is roughly equivalent [...]

Making folly of my declaration (below) that China ‘won’ the Olympics anyway you look at it, the US and A in the eleventh hour pulled up their medal count to 110, 10 medals ahead of China, while China rocked the gold medal count to put them arguably at the top of the pile. So everybody [...]

Speaking of oversampled songs, Dionne Warwick’s You’re Gonna Need Me, a b-side from 1973 and a song with it’s own Wikipedia page, was praised last week by Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li as one of her favourite older songs of the moment. “She’s not great all the time, but that song I really like. She’s down [...]

Get it? I was combining fashion with fascism. Nevermind. But so I spotted this advert on Stockholm’s famous car-free shopping boulevard, Drottninggatan, featuring people holding signs of famous designers, parading along toward the big summer sale. The folks holding the sign for Karl Lagerfeld, Germany’s most famous clothes designer, are goose-stepping. I understand modern advertising [...]

The standard Olympic ranking method on American sites like TSN is uniformly by total medal count instead of gold, the Chinese preference, which has put the United States on top since the Beijing games began 12 days ago. Chinese sites like the portal 163 (中国 = China, 美国 = USA) prefer to count by gold [...]

What’s going on here?

Seeing this week’s Der Spiegel cover story, “Macht Das Internet Doof?”, I immediately thought of Nicholas Carr’s cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” What’s the deal? Not stopping at using what is essentially the same title (in the context of information, how [...]

Germany’s bargain basement supermarket likes to roll out special weeks offering, for limited time only, cartoonishly ethnic foods from far-flung lands like Italy, England and “Asia”. Tomorrow, it’s America’s turn. Get ready to line up for star-spangled McENNEDY AMERICAN WAY brand Rib Burgers, Hähnchenfiletstreifen Amerikanos, Amerikanische Sauce (gross?), American Mustard, Erdnusscreme (including crunchy!), Soft-Ice, Getrocknete [...]

Maybe you heard about the fire on Saturday that took 18 hours to put out. It started in an old tire warehouse in Altlandsberg, just east of Berlin. Well, this is what it looked like from the air. We flew right through the smoke column (welcome back to Berlin, right?). I don’t know much, but [...]

That’s what I calculate from BILD’s super scientific borough-by-borough Berlin walking study, whereby literally hundreds (!) of people were timed strolling across a specific distance at spots all over the city. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg pedestrians came in second fastest (6.64 km/h) after Reinickendorf (6.77 km/h) and before middle range Pankow, Mitte and Neukölln (5.87, 5.31 and 5.04) [...]

There’s something about this abandoned amusement park in Treptow that meshes well with this beautifully devastating ambient track from Polish profundo Jacaszek, from his new cinematic longplayer Treny (”Laments”).
Jacaszek - Zal
Think of Biosphere but more melancholy. Feeling too glib and extrospective? This oughta do the trick.

He also tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. After scorning the scientific work of the colonel who headed the institute, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” At Ekibastuz, any writing would be [...]

The German media is beside itself with the China Fever this week in the run-up to the Beijing-hosted Olympics next week, with every other daily paper, tabloid and twice-monthly mag offering their own special take on the ‘middle kingdom’ (a trope oft employed) and its connection to Germany or, in the case of the Berliner [...]

Now if they just had one for baseball, I’d have the foreigns covered.