In the News

Germany gets too much solar power
Actually, solar power makes up only a small fraction of energy produced/comsumed in Germany. The problem is that you get a lot of it when the sun shines, and none when it doesn't, and the current power grid won't be able to deal with that if solar energy keeps growing this quickly.

Cannabis on police badges
Looking at more current German sources, it seems like someone decided to give special badges to experts for recognising drug influence in traffic. Their colleagues that handled dogs or explosives had own badges already. Seems like no-one has taken credit for starting the whole thing yet. The ministry of the interior of Lower Saxony, which has authority over the police organisation in question, was surprised and not amused.

... and the world stops to look. Or something.

The waves this is making are pretty amazing. I probably shouldn't be as amused as I am.

My favourite wrinkle: The UK sends an aircraft carrier to France to bring tourists home? Now that'd be a cool surprise to end your holidays with.

That there on the right is Jayne from Firefly, here in a screenshot from The Train Job.

The badge on his sleeve shows the parka belonged to a police uniform of Rhineland-Palatinate, the German "state" I live in. I wonder why and/or how that happened.

Jayne of all that crew... XD

Some things police deal with are... somewhat weird (old stuff I saved on my delicious account):

• Naked swimmer evades police in Tokyo
• Drunk badger disrupts traffic
• Drunken tractor driver leads police on slow chase
• Bride spends first night with crate of vodka
• Speeding player thought police were fans chasing him
• Handcuffs, Taser used to catch emu
• Crocodile thrown in jail cell for loitering
• German police investigate kebab sauce after attack

Because some people take drink recipes including kerosene and battery acid far too seriously

In other "news", I really regret leaving my camera at home today. I could have taken a nice one of a power pole and titled it "everything is full of starlings".

There was a landslide near a former brown coal strip mine, which swallowed a few houses.
It is a tragedy, what with three people dead and over forty people having to leave their homes because they are so close to the new edge now, but I find the photos strangely fascinating. The house that used to be semi-detached and now is detached looks so surreal, particularly in the last-but-second image, where you get a decent view of the garden.

My apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but they had the best (or possibly "best") selection of photos I could find in the time I was willing to spend.

On the radio news there was something about the emergency help the USA have planned against the financial crisis. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson supposedly said he'd "put pressure" on his international counterparts to take similar measures as the USA, and he'd "go about it aggressively".
Now, that is translated to English from German, which was was translated and shortened from English, so, has anyone in the US heard what he actually said? Or what I have to feed into google news to find American articles that do not talk only about the USA, or where else I could find the untranslated statements.

Completely unrelated, in the last week two 250kg WWII bombs exploded.

One did so spontaneously, leaving a crater 6 metres deep and 14 metres across in a field of a plant nursery in Vienna (Austria).

Another explosion was triggered by construction work in Hattingen in the Ruhr area (Germany). The cab of the hydraulic shovel was solid enough and there was enough luck involved that the worker got away with nothing worse than some cuts from splintered glass. 16 other people suffered blast trauma, and buildings and machinery up to 300 metres from the bomb were damaged. Estimates of damages are a "high six-figure number". Parts of the bomb flew as far as 1,5 km.

I also looked for "Blindgänger" in google news, and for the last week found articles about one 250kg bomb disarmed in Villingen-Schwenningen - with photos - one the same size in Ingelheim - with photos - one dud in Lake Starnberg being destroyed in a controlled blast producing a tens of metres high fountain, a 125kg bomb disarmed near Mainz, and attempts to precisely locate a bomb that is getting in the way of extending a bridge near Bielefeld.

Just a bit of a habit spreading the word; I think stuff like that is part of the reason why most Europeans are not as keen on bombing countries as the last American government.

Police take snake into custody
Drug shop shut down - note the last line

[...] Josef Schlarmann, Vorsitzender der Mittelstandsvereinigung der Union, [kritisiert], dass “die Bundesregierung mit ihren Mindestlohn-Plänen den Rückfall in Planwirtschaft und Dirigismus beschlossen hat”. (Handelsblatt)

Germany has no laws about a universal minimum wage. Since that means a lot of people work full time and still don’t get enough to live, there’s a discussion about introducing them. Josef Schlarmann, chairman of the association for small and medium sized businesses of the CDU claims this is a step back to "planned economy and statism”.

Considering that most countries in the EU, as well as the USA, and I don’t know how many other countries, have laws dictating minimum wages, I really wonder where he gets those ideas.

Imported from an older blog, on Ultimate Spider-Man 107 - Ultimate Knights pt 2

On the topic of killing the leader of an organization being pointless because someone else would step in, Daredevil says, "Not necessarily. They killed Hitler. And that was that for the Third Reich."

In the real world, Germany was bombed until most of the cities lay in ruins. The armies were beaten. Then Hitler committed suicide.

I'd like to go off on a tangent here: Do you know when the last time someone in Germany was killed by a WWII bomb?

November 2006.

He was killed during roadworks when the machine he operated struck a bomb that had been buried since about 15 years before he was born.

It happens only every couple of years that someone is killed (which is bad enough), but every year in Germany alone hundreds, if not thousands of tonnes of WWII bombs that failed to explode are found.

It might sound pretty self-centered, but, honestly, I think me being used to having about once a year roads blocked for bomb removal somewhere in my hometown or its suburbs is a big part of the reason why I react badly when someone makes light of war.