Yeah, they stink on ice!

- Mel Brooks, “History of the World”

Comedy in a foreign language is a tricky business. Take this Italian joke. "Perche' gli inglesi portano i gemelli?" it begins. Even if you know that this translates as, "Why do the English wear shirt cuffs?" you still might not understand the punchline: "Perche' hanno paura che i francesi gli entrino nella Manica!" This means: "For fear that the French enter the Channel!"

Others were inspired to take up standup only after coming to the UK. The Italian comic Giacinto Palmieri has never actually performed in Italian. "My niche is that not only can I show British culture in an unfamiliar way, but I can do the same with the language. I can show how absurd English idioms sound to the Italian ear." These include "Bob's your uncle", which apparently derives from the nepotistic practices of 1880s PM Robert Cecil. Palmieri proposes an Italian alternative: "Silvio fucked your daughter." He also reveals that the Italian version of "Have your cake and eat it" is: "Have your wife drunk and the bottle still full."

“You got the Belgians running Europe?”

...before shaking his head, “now aghast at our stupidity”, Mr Blair writes.

AKA buffoonery:

Shortening working time by 1% reduces the environmental impact by 0.8%, according to research carried out by Jörgen Larsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

"This indicates that reduced work time would limit energy use," he said.

Larsson argued that shorter working time helps to combat climate change in two ways. It reduces the energy use of individuals while changing their consumption patterns by limiting their income.

Shorter hours are also seen as key to getting to grips with rocketing unemployment figures triggered by the economic crisis. In the US, 11 million new jobs will have to be created to return to pre-crash levels, Schor pointed out, adding that the euro zone has not escaped the crisis either.

She argued that the standard approach of creating jobs by increasing GDP growth rate is not working and no stimulus is forthcoming amid political austerity measures. Moreover, the required increase in energy use would not be acceptable due to the ensuing greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

"We need to reduce the rate of GDP growth or we won't be able to reach climate targets," she said. "The other way to think about it is that we're pulling some of this demand out of the system."

Growing vegetables, generating renewable energy or manufacturing goods in small laboratories are just a few examples of how people and communities can provide for themselves or spark the emergence of a new green business sector, the researcher argued.

This would be justifiable as people would not be getting lower incomes - instead simply receiving some or all of their productivity gains in free time instead of higher salaries, Schor explained. "People are far less attached emotionally to income they haven't yet gotten than to income they have," she added.

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!

11. You're also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war

I can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead

THIS photo collection and this book’s website may be the best collection summarizing a sense of a style and time that I’ve seen so far. Discount the weather, the ubiquitous Berlin graffiti, and the effects of time on these buildings, and the futurist’s-"optimism" inherent in the outlook from which they were built seem to radiate off of the precast concrete and Portland cement plaster that most of them are garbed in.

Despite that, as much of this work is found today, one gets the sense that you find yourself in a modern form of a bleak, abandoned ancient ruin: the dry husk of the near distant ago, and on the set, perhaps of A Clockwork Orange.

Normally in Europe, it’s a simple function of being cast a rotten exploiter, locust, or thief when an economy does well. That is, when those doing well part of Euroland, and aren't part of some specially designated symbolic victim group.

USA: the Risk (to them.)
Is America ruining our recovery

Universal solidarity is demanded for no actual reason. The proletariat must march in unison for no plausible cause.

We are now, however, all expected to boink alike.

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners.

Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question: "What happened to GDR [German Democratic Republic] sexuality when it was confronted with the sexual mores of West Germany?" "The answer," she writes, "appears to have been an explosion of discourse surrounding sex."

The report ends with a deflating comment from journalist Regine Sylvester, who tried to sum up both her own experience and that of the entire nation. The supposed "sex boom" that happened right after unification, Sylvester opined, "did not turn the Federal Republic into a noisily copulating society, nor did the official taboos turn the old GDR into an ascetic one."

- Link shamelessly ripped off from Observing Hermann