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Passing of a gentle soul
Today was Frida’s last day. Just a month after we left for Berlin, the poor purring kitty turned out to have kidney failure. Corii stabilized her for a few months, but she took a turn for the worse a few days ago. Today a needle slipped into her veins, and she shivered with a final…
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Oh yeah, the love parade
On Saturday, the Love Parade. Half a million people or so in the Tiergarten, dancing to 39 heavily adverstising-laden floats circling the main boulevard and blasting various stripes of rave music. It was fun, not as annoying as it could have been, nor as entrancing as a small rave can be. Aimee described it best:…
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Three more months!
It’s hot today, wiltingly warm, and so naturally we put on our presentable clothes and got on our bikes and rode down to the Auslanderbehörde, where we needed to get our long-term visa. We’d been warned about their coolness. Frigidity. Anything that represents unfriendliness and unhelpfulness. Our language hero Till told us a story of…
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Papergirl delivers. Don’t ask for a subscription.
Yesterday afternoon, a group of artists and writers rode up and down Prenzlauer Berg with boxes on their bikes, tossing unsolicited wrapped “newspapers” into doorways, American paperboy style. We met one of them, a woman who just graduated from LSE, but is living temporarily here, at a party on the Spree last night. Inside the…
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US decides torture is bad. No, really.
So, better late than never? Now that the world has been exposed for several years to our humane, no, let’s say genuinely vacation-like resorts at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and is currently being treated to the spectacle of an alleged brutal rape and murder by GIs in Iraq, policymakers have decided that the Geneva Conventions…
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Cup and community, the morning after
My first start-to-finish World Cup now just 10 hours and a fitful sleep past, and I am already melancholy, conscious of its absence. But its final moment’s mystery remains: Why did Zidane, one of the world’s best players, in what was probably the final international match of his life, at a critical moment, give way…
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Tuniermannschaft, flags, and chaos in the streets
Three weeks ago, whenever I talked to a German about their World Cup team, almost no one expressed much faith in their football team. They weren’t graceful like the Brazilians or the Argentinians, were young, had an inexperienced coach. Last night they beat Argentina in shoot-out. When we went to bed at 1 people were…
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To Dortmund and back, off to see the wizards
To Dortmund and back: Two slow buses and a suburban tent city located right between the airport and the highway, on the outskirts of a very tasteful office park. They spare no expense for we invading Auslanders, who turned out mostly to be Brazilians or people-masquerading-as-Brazilians, and a large number of extremely happy and drunken…
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Off to footieland, with Ghana jersey in hand
So. Tomorrow morning we get up early and take a bus to Dortmund, where we will see Brazil and Ghana play, with tickets care of Jim Hu. Needless to say, we’re excited. Overwhelmed. Brimming over with fussball anticipation! Here’s our lovely, green spielkarten:
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Eating in the dark
Last night dinner at Dunkel Restaurant, a Mitte establishment in which you are led by a blind waiter into a large dining room wholly devoid of light, and spend the next few hours guided only by your fingers, ears and taste buds. I’ve experienced complete darkness just once, and only for a moment, in the…
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Gavin’s health plan for San Francisco
Give Gavin Newsom credit for thinking big. He’s proposing a new plan that would offer health coverage to currently uninsured people who live in San Francisco. Under the current system, far too many people are uninsured, and costing the city money anyway at emergency rooms, he argues. True enough. Anyone with half an eye open…
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There is more than football in the world. Like, say, robot football.
There is more happening here than just the World Cup. Just take one example: This weekend was RoboCup, in which lots of little robots play, um, football. Maybe that’s not so totally different. But it was a blast to watch. It turns out that cheering for two pairs of wobbly little two-foot-high robots as they…
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On football, nationalism and cantaloupes
There are probably other things going on in the world besides football/soccer. Wars, Zarqawi’s death, violence in Palestine again. But around us here every day is football, which provides its own lessons in international relations. A bit of texture first: All of Berlin, at least, is dedicated to watching as many minutes of the thrice-daily…
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The World Cup, and Europe’s race and racism problem
A piece in the New York Times today that echoes much of the soul-searching that’s been happening in German and other European newspapers: With the World Cup imminent, racial tensions here are being put on a world stage. Several ugly racial incidents have dominated headlines in the month-plus we’ve been here. A Ethiopian-born man was…
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Wild West on the banks of the Spree, and Polish hip-hop
So, cultures meld instead of clash. Or blend. But that would imply delicacy and grace. Whatever. A first part of the evening: The opening of a wild-west themed beach and flea market, built to look more or less frontier-style (don’t forget the Wild West massage) on the banks of the Spree. BBQ hamburgers and beer,…