h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm sorry.
I misunderstood when I read the Mayor of Dresden was protesting the construction of the memorial. In my whirled the mayor of city can only speak to issues and events in his own city. I assumed it must be in Dresden. Otherwise it's none of his goddam bizness.

How wrong I obviously am. And yet I still feel compelled to say the Mayor of Dresden can go buck a fuffalo. If I had known it's to be built in London I never would have considered his feelings or opinions. Sheesh.


~jwf~

from the Dresden mayor article:

'Such a monument . . . damages the mutual reconciliation process of the past few years between Britain and Germany.'

I'm a little distant from all this, but maybe someone in Britain or France could fill me in on how much damage is being done to British-French relations by that big pillar with the sculpture of the one-armed guy on top in Trafalgar square.

And maybe someone in Germany could fill me in on whether there are any war memorials in that country.

Was it tasteless of us Canadians a few years ago to dedicate a monument to merchant marine sailors who were killed in German U-boat attacks? Should we have left their deaths unmarked?


Personally, I think it is tasteless to protest any memorial to war dead: no matter how righteous or unrighteous the war, the fallen are a tragic loss, on both sides.

on a different subject, but distinctly of interest to those British who have an interest in their history . . .

'An Inuit family says a box that was hidden for over 80 years in the Arctic contains logbooks linked to the doomed Franklin Expedition.

Over the weekend, the Porter family in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, dug up the small box with the help of an archeologist.'


http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/09/07/franklin-records.html#ixzz0yucVIM6W



This could be profoundly interesting.

It certainly promises some interest, ~anhaga~.

A sand-filled box. Does that tell us something?

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0908/charity.html

A study by the UK-based organisation, Charities Aid Foundation, indicates that Ireland is one of the most charitable countries in the world. Australia and New Zealand topped the index.

The research also found that happier people were more likely to give money to charity than those who were wealthy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11217772

In Afghanistan women are not allowed to dance in public, but boys can be made to dance in women's clothing - and they are often sexually abused.

"In Afghanistan women are not allowed to dance in public, but boys can be made to dance in women's clothing - and they are often sexually abused." Hmm, a bit like the 15/1600's in this country, whee women could not act or perform in public and women's roles were played by boys. And particularly pretty boys had to dodge the attentions of the King downwards (one of James VIth's boyfriends liked dressing his boys up in drag.. Earl of Duncan, I think, or sdome other Gay Gordon in the entourage of James VIth of Scotlannd/James ist of England)

German war memorials? Well, there's that 120foot high Celtic warrior on an equally high plinth somewhere on the Western border, marking where three Roman legions got chewed up into sauerkraut sometime around 0 AD. Herman, or Arminius, the German king and general who united his people and made it very clear to the Romans that Germany was not going to be part of the Empire. As this now faces France, you might ask if this has soured German relations with the French over three major wars since it was built... (1870, 1914 and 1940). Considering how well Germany and Italy got on in 1940, it didn't sem to damage international relations there...

There's a startling new report recommending surgery for fatties.
But...

"The report was funded by health firms Allergan and Covidien, which make medical equipment used in weight-loss surgery."

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/100908/health/britain_health_obesity


~jwf~

well... they would, wouldn't they?

AP, yet another step closer to leaving premod.

I expect that German war memorial causes a lot of tension between Germany and Italy.

On the subject of Renaissance English transvestism, I was surprised recently while reading a short text published in 1531 to see a briefly cross-dressing man referred to by what I thought to be the modern term 'he-she'.

er...an-hega. If my post hasn't officially been released by the mods yet (15:11), how come you know - accurately - about its contents? I won't embarrass you by asking if you are a mod yourself, but this is mist odd!

Fighting out of the premod swamp...

Well there's a U-Boat memorial - http://www.ubootehrenmal.de/en/index.htm

I don't recall any grief whores getting all prissy about that over here. Their country, their servicemen, their memorial, their business.

But quite frankly, trying to give the burghers of 1945 Dresden victim status is pretty sick considering Germany was effectively a genocidal state at the time. The earlier attempt on this thread to shift the blame onto a few at the top of the Nazi Party totally ignores the degree to which the entire German State was involved in the systematic murder of nearly 13 million innocent people.

From wiki - "Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag (IBM Germany) company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators ... Germany's greatest achievement."

Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews."

There are memorials in Germany but they are not making such a song and dance about 70 years since the Blitz (or German equivalent) which I find tasteless (even while understanding why people don't want to let it go)

And before I get jumped on again for saying that: I did my bit in the military. You're welcome.

We have a memorial to the dead of 2 world wars in my village and it's beautifully looked after. But I'm not aware of any memorials here to anything like Bomber Command, Fighter Command or what have you as you have in the UK. I'm not too sure that Germans would like that kind of thing.

Hermann's Denkmal is in Detmold and it's way cool. I've flown round that in a helicopter and it's very impressive.

Have we had a link to the Robert Fisk article yet, the one about "honour" killings?

simulpost with SWL

we're going to have to agree to disagree. Have you read Slaughterhouse 5? Just because the leaders of a country are the most corrupt depraved sorry excuses for people the world is ever likely to know, and even if some of the population of Dresden (in a dire strait already before the bombing) were more than mitläufer that kind of bombing of a civilian target is not acceptable.

In the same way that bombing Coventry wasn't. Or the dams or Hiroshima.

My mother's family lived on the flight path of the doodle bugs in Kent. The family were far too poor to afford an air raid shelter, and there were no mass ones in Maidstone. For months the whole family had to sleep under an iron table in the kitchen. My mother as a very young child still talks about the absolute terror she felt when you heard the engine cut out and then heard with relief it had exploded somewhere else. Many many of those flying bombs fell in Kent well before London.

Its entirely up to the Germans what they want to mark or not about WW2. But I don't find any of this stuff 'tasteless' whilst there are still plenty alive who remember that period with absolute horror and fear.

Its like none of us can imagine today.

As I say we do things our way. The Germans can do things there's. But remember the absolute terror British citizens must have felt with a run down armaments situation, knowing the Nazi hordes had poured into half of northern and eastern Europe. It must have been absolutely terrifying, and lots of people gave their lives to stop it happening here. Certain policies were enacted at the time in a desperate bid to defeat the Nazis. If such a despicable regime ever came to power again and threatened the UK, I like to think we again would have to make tough decisions to defeat such people.

Nah. We'd probably be told to respect their culture and not to risk offending them.

Iraquis demonstrate a black sense of humour

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/7988631/Iraqi-prank-television-show-condemned-for-fake-bomb-stunts.html

An Iraqi prank television show has taken the 'candid camera' format to a new level after planting fake bombs under celebrities' cars.

AgProv:

It wasn't hidden when I posted.


And, I'm certainly not one of the mods. I don't think the BBC is outsourcing to Canada at this point.

very nice sho, herman the german in detmold.....helicopter

try running up and down the hill its on

Been there, done that. With boots and pack...
But I was never brave enough to tackle the Hermannslauf from Bielefeld to the denkmal