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2006-03-13 09:17

On tap!

In the middle ages - those ages of middleness! - the ambient water quality in towns varied between "sudden death" and "lingering death" and persons for this alleged reason preferred to consume a special kind of bier called "small bier" of very modest strength because they wished not to die.

Haldis Gundersen, 50, vred p� vattenkranen i k�ket - och ned i diskhon rann �l.
- Jag trodde jag hade kommit till himlen, s�ger Gundersen till VG Nett.

Haldis Gunderson, 50, turned on the watertap in the kitchen - and down in the sink ran sweet, sweet bier.
"I thought I had died and gone to heaven", said Gundersen to VG Nett.

Was it a miracle, you ask or enquire? Well, while the Pope might for all we know find it sufficient grounds to beatify Milosevic, there is the little matter of the bar on the ground floor and the mixup with its many pipes and plumbings. Lawks, Saint Milosovic, who'da thunk it?

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2006-03-10 16:53

Sm�rg�spost

�1. It is the Japanese economy!

Japan's decade of deflation was officially declared over on Thursday when its central bank ended five years of ultra-loose monetary policy and moved to a regime of managing interest rates.

Oh those deflationary decades!

�2. Gravy train toot toot!

I'm ridin' on the gravy train and feelin' just fine
Ridin' on the train with only gravy on my mind
Man comes up and tells me "Hey you gotta get down!"
I say back to the man "Hey don't bug me you clown!
Gonna ride the train of gravy to the end of the line!"

"Gravy Train", Arv� Guthrie

It is the European Parliament!

MEPs should spend less time travelling the world and more attending key votes in order to raise the credibility of an institution that has long suffered from a reputation as a "gravy train", the president of the European parliament said on Thursday.

�3. It is their excellent Lordships!

Charles ["Crusher"] Clarke, the Home Secretary, has decided to overturn the defeat next Monday in the Commons, setting the scene for a tug-of-war between the two Houses. He has told colleagues he is prepared to keep MPs and peers sitting late into next week in an effort to force the legislation on to the statute book.

�4. It is the weather!

In Danmark:

Bl�st, kulde, sne i weekenden

Bl�, winds, bl�! Crack your cheeks and sn�!

�5. It is all OK!

And we didn't even know it had been a problem!

Danska kronprinsparet kan andas ut.
Marys b�stis, Amber Petty, �r p� v�g bort fr�n Mark Alexander-Erber med f�rflutet i Australiens kriminella mc-g�ng, skriver danska Se og H�r.

The Danish crownprinsesscouple have learned to breathe! [Breathe prinsess breathe!]
Kronprinsessmary's best chum has ditched her allegedly ex-gangster boyfriend.

�6. It is the weekend!

Have fun, Varied Reader! We will!

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2006-03-10 09:57

Honkbal h�las!

It is over almost before it's begun:

Het Nederlands honkbalteam is er niet in geslaagd de tweede ronde van de World Baseball Classic te bereiken. In het Hiram Bithorn-stadion in San Juan legde het team van bondscoach Robert Eenhoorn het af tegen Cuba: 2-11.

The Nederlands honkbalteam is not going to reach the second round of the World Baseball Classic. In the Hiram Bithorn stadium in San Juan nationalcoach Robert Eenhoorn's team was lost to Cuba, 2-11.

Cuba, isn't it? You're never going to get anywhere against the Havana Honkballers, for sure.

In other news, our first assessment of the year came back from the University of Openness with a mark of 86%, which is exactly the mark we got for most of our assessments last year. We suspect a conspiracy, for sure.

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2006-03-09 16:36

Sneakerisation!

It is shaving, and its ambiguous relationship with technology:

About 1.7 billion men remove facial hair, 1.3 billion of them with blade and razor. Each of those customers shaves 20,000 times in a lifetime, spending 139 24-hour days removing 27ft of facial fuzz. Seventy per cent of those 1.3 billion wet shavers, furthermore, favour Gillette over its hated rival, Wilkinson Sword, a company founded in 1801 as George III's preferred bayonet supplier.

Bayonets!

The launch of the Fusion is the latest offensive in the bitter, chronically litigious razor war that broke out in 1971 between Gillette and its sole mass-market rival, Wilkinson Sword, known in the USA as Schick. That year Gillette, with its twin-blade Trac 2, changed 67 years of tranquil shaving history dating back to founder King Camp Gillette's patenting of the safety razor in 1904.

Being a tranquil sort of chap, we favour a 1904-style single-bladed safety razor. It is vair vair nice, except as aeroplane hand-luggage. Since we are too idle to be sure of shaving every day, we especially cherish its lack of cloggable interblade interstices.

Since then, a competition in possibly bogus technical gainsaying has been played out. It's known in marketing as "sneakerisation", in honour of the panache with which the trainer industry manages to sell increasingly flimsy and outlandish designs for ever-higher prices.

Slightly to our surprise, there appears to be scientific support for the superiority of the twin-blade, although no one who is not in severe need of being beaten about the head with a copy of Bourdieu's Distinction is making any claims for more.

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2006-03-09 13:52

Of Langwidges and Lyrics

It is - as it so very often is - Belgium, man! Belgium!

Frans Bauer gaat veel betekenen voor buitenlandse studenten aan de universiteit van het Vlaamse Leuven. De universiteit zet de liedjes van Bauer, Clouseau en Doe Maar in als lesmateriaal om hen sneller de Nederlandse taal machtig te maken.

Frans Bauer is going to be well-known to Buitenlands students at the university of Belgian Leuven. The university has set the songs of Bauer, Clouseau and Doe Maar as reading material for them to get up to speed with Dutchy-Dutch quicker.

Works for us - where do we sign up?

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2006-03-09 10:21

Down to the wire

Dutchbladets - like 'bladets pretty much everywhere and everywhere else - rely on newswires for much of their news, but Dutchbladets play it straighter than most: the middlebrow mainstream Telegraaf and the poshbladet NRC cover the birdflu homing-pidgin news in a word for word identical manner. Word for word, you ask or enquire? Well, almost:

Sier- en postduiven, die nu wegens de dreigende vogelgriep verplicht zijn afgeschermd, mogen vanaf volgende week woensdag weer naar buiten.

Dove- and postpidgens, which now on account of the threatening birdflu obliged to be uplocked are, may from next week Wednesday again towards outside.

Sier- en postduiven, die nu vanwege de dreigende vogelgriep verplicht afgeschermd zijn, mogen vanaf volgende week woensdag weer naar buiten.

So, afgeschermd zijn or zijn afgeschermd; you pays your moneys and you stakes your cultural capitals.

[Additional reporting from ANP and our zweetie, and especially our zweetie.]

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2006-03-08 16:37

Jag vill spela bassviol och fl�jt!

(We didn't make that up, did we? We learnt it as the last line in a Zwedish childrensssong when we were an unchildren in non-Zweden.)

Anyway, it is a very excellent sn�-orkester!

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2006-03-08 12:57

Sm�rg�spost

�1. Scouse sn�kaos

It is Liverpool!

SNOWFALL plunged the region into chaos yesterday as one motorist died and several others were injured in a seven car pile-up.

For large values of "yesterday", at least. (Thanks, Big Sis!)

�2. Hairy lobster?

Hairy lobster?!

Forskarna har d�pt den nya djurfamiljen Kiwada efter Kiwa, skaldjurens gudinna i den polynesiska mytologin.

Researchers have named the new animalfambly Kiwada after Kiwa, the shellfish godess in Polynesian mythology.

(Is that polytical correctness gone mad, by the way? We can never tell.)

�3. A source!

It is a source:

"Nine English traditions out of ten, old Eustace Pilbrow used to say, date from the latter half of the nineteenth century" (Pilbrow is one of the college Fellows in the novel)

C P Snow, The Masters, Appendix (p 309 in the Penguin edition):

�4. Estonian Ice Cricket!

It is slightly cold:

Cricket fans in Estonia have developed a special icy version of the game to play during the Baltic winter there. [...]

Ice cricket has been played in the eastern European country for six years now, becoming a game in its own right.

Ridiculous! Everyone knows they pinched it from the late nineteenth-century S�mi game of Qriigut!

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2006-03-08 09:23

In the river of Blah, "upstreamitude" is a synonym for "sacred"!

It is a book on classics, reviewed in tehgrauniad:

The cultural legacy bequeathed by the ancient Greeks, in such diverse subjects as philosophy, politics, mythology, ethics, art, theatre, psychology, rhetoric and sport, is incalculable.

(Did the Greeks themselves invent ancestor worship, or is that a cultural legacy from elsewhere?)

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2006-03-07 15:06

What is this "flunk" of which you speak?

It is the honkbal!

''I think it will be best for our fans, because, you know, now they are going to see all of the players playing together on one team,'' added Dominican shortstop Miguel Tejada of the Baltimore Orioles.

As a result, TV ratings in the baseball-playing countries of Latin America are expected to be high, as they were during the past two World Series. But the tournament's success ultimately will be measured by how it's received in places such as China, South Africa and the Netherlands, where baseball remains little more than a curiosity.

It's not looking good in the Netherlands, if Google Froups is to be believed. We'll see if anyone deigns to cover their opening game tomorrow - the build-up has been accorded the deafeningest of silences since the Telegraaf had a did-you-evah article a month or two (2) ago.

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2006-03-07 11:29

Mmmm, bier!

It is, of course, Belgium!

De Belgische gezinnen dronken in 2005 gemiddeld 80 liter bier, zo schrijft La Derni�re Heure zaterdag. Dat is een daling van twee procent in vergelijking met het jaar daarvoor, aldus cijfers van het marktonderzoeksbureau GFK.

In ongeveer vier vijfde van de gezinnen wordt bier gedronken. Bij een vijfde daarvan wordt 230 liter bier per jaar verzet. De Belgen zijn na de Tsjechen en de Duitsers de grootste bierdrinkers ter wereld.

Bier! It is very delicious and it is made out of bier, which is probably why. The average Belgian drank 80 litres of it in 2005, which is 2% less than the previous year, which we conjecture to have been 2004 unless the Belgian calender is less contiguous than our own.

In about four fifths (80%) of households become bier gedruk. Blah blah blah. After the Tschecks and the Chermans, the Belgians are the fattest bier drinkers in the world.

EXTRA: Prinsesse Dianas d�d var en ulykke. ("Prinsess Diana's death was an accident".) Nobody tell the Express, puh-lease!

(Did you know that the Express's current tagline is "The world's best newspaper - and proud of it!" We've had some fairly daft ones of our own but we could never hope to match the moronic purity of that.)

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2006-03-07 10:12

Bitte wiederholen Sie, langsam!

It is, once again, the mighty Deutsche Welle's very mighty indeed Langsam gesprochene nachrichten.

Either our Cherman or our patience has improved, since we can now stand to listen to it all the way through. We're putting it on loop, so if we're gibbering by lunch that'll be why.

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2006-03-06 12:38

In which we do not panic, yet

It is the extraordinary Wikipedia! We were looking for one of the mock Latin names of Mr. W. E. Coyote, indefatigable adversary of the Roadrunner, but the 'Pedia has all of them episode by episode!

Why we were looking in the first place is that we feel slightly like Mr C in his trademarked position of having run beyond the edge of the cliff and just looked down to notice the absence of support before plunging into the abyss.

We have, you see, lately resigned our job, and we do not have another one (1) to go to. We have, instead, another country and our One (1) True Zweetie to go to, and we have, what is more, three (3) months' notice before we go anywhere.

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2006-03-06 10:27

People keep dying before I read their books

This time, it is the late Gordon A Craig, author of The Chermans - once a Penguin, now apparently out of print in Blighty, and possessor of possibly the finest Franz-Joseph in California.

Craig, whom Stansky described as "the most distinguished historian of modern Germany in this country [the FDR] and possibly one of the greatest in the world," was highly regarded for his numerous books and articles. These included The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (1955); Europe Since 1815 (1961; still widely used); a massive contribution to the Oxford History of Modern Europe called Germany, 1866-1945 (1978); and The Germans (1982). Politics and Culture in Modern Germany, a collection of Craig's essays that first appeared in the New York Review of Books, was published in 1999.

If I haven't read your many books, Varied Reader, and let's face it I probably haven't, please to look after yourself!

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