There’s a girl behind me on the bus right now who is a member of that sub-species of twenty-something females who believe themselves to exist inside an episode of friends.
She’s talking loudly on the phone with plenty of forced enthusiasm and contrived amiability. She has that put-on slight transatlantic twang and is actually talking about how she and the cretin at the other end should “like, totally bond over coffee”.
I wish I had a masonry drill and a jar of concentrated carbolic acid.
Ooooh, I know.
If I read the word ‘totes’ as a synonym for ‘totally’ one more bloody time I’ll commit hara-kiri with my IV cannula.
Totes=
a] an up-itself word for the more prosaic ‘shopping bag’
or
b] the brand name of a range of mid-priced accessories.
I bet the Totes salesdroid department started this meme running as a marketing exercise, damn their eyes.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is launching an investigation into some of Wall Street’s top firms to determine whether they provided misleading information to credit rating agencies.
A total of eight firms are part of the probe, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse (CS), Citigroup, UBS, Credit Agricole and Merrill Lynch, which has since been acquired by Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500).
The fossils prove that the famously bizarre creatures of the Cambrian (542 million to 488 million years ago) didn’t die out at the end of that period — something that fossil hunters had suspected, but could not back up with evidence until now.
Gurus Should Spend Less Time Talking, More Time Listening : Passing of Gang Starr Iconoclast Brings Supposed Experts of Marketing Matters Into Sharp Relief
Ah, but when I say ‘you’ who do I actually mean? The generation that blitzed Britain, invaded most of Europe and exterminated nearly all of European Jewry is almost gone bar a few aged relicts gumming their Iron Crosses in very clean senior facilities, and the Germans of today bear no responsibility for past horrors.
Rational people realise this. Nevertheless, negative feelings towards Germany and stereotypes about Germans persist, both in the US and in Britain:
Not that there isn’t a kernel of truth in some of the stereotyping; this video is one of a series from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle‘s YouTube channel called The Truth About Germany and explains the concept of speißigheit:
As if being labelled petty bourgeois, obsessive and dull weren’t enough, one of the most persistent stereotypes of Germans is that they have no sense of humour.
Oh ja? Is dat zo? German comedian Henning Vehn has made it his mission to turn that particular stereotype inside out and give it a good shake:
Here he is trying to entice visitors with his guide to (West) Germany;
…and boggling at the British tabloids’ obsession with the Nazis and WWII:
Yes, our papers are a bit obsessed, aren’t they ? You’d think the German armed forces were some kind of mechanical death whirlwind rather than fallible human beings:
Less mechanical death whirlwind, more Windy Miller.
So what have we learned from this brief foray into German culture and humour? Bugger-all really, other than the Germans are just like us really, and stereotypes (whilst sometimes having at their core a teensy-weensy little seed of truth) are just mental constructs that serve to distance us from our common humanity. It’s much easier to kill a humourless kraut than it is to kill a fellow human being who’s quite nice really. Let’s not be beastly to the Germans – we’re going to need them soon anyway, when the economy goes to shit.
The Public Whip (via Charlie Brooker on Twitter) reveals that Theresa May, Britain’s new Home Secretary and Secretary for Women and Equal Rights (including gay rights) has voted ‘moderately against’ gay rights during her career as an MP.
Is it even possible to be ‘moderately’ homophobic? Homophobia strikes me as the height of immoderateness, in and of itself, whatever qualifiers are appended.
