Talking to
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Had a very busy week on the road, in which I barely consumed anything fannish and was instead consumed by the two simultanously running "History: A Farce" soaps running in the UK and in the US. No, that's unfair, the US one had a serious plot thread (btw, it's really WEIRD how the Democratic Midterms victory was downplayed initially), with only ( Read more... )

Yesterday was our not-national holiday which nonetheless is one of the most poignant of days if you’re German, because so much of German history, both the terrible and the good, seems to have happened on November 9th. (BTW, this is also why November 11th usually has less impact in German as opposed to other nations, WWI-related; it’s overshadowed ( Read more... )

Firstly, congratulations re: House of Representatives in the US, and conmiserations re: Senate. But as only a third of the later was up for election, as opposed the entirety of the House, I'm choosing to regard this as a great triumph of democracy over hatemongering authoritarianism. And the over hundred new female Congresswomen are truly inspiring ( Read more... )

In the past weeks, I've been majorly distracted from US and British political crazy by our own, homegrown German political crazy, and thus I want to share the dubious joy. Also because I just read yet another article (which was about a different subject altogether, to wit, Macron) managing to get just about everything wrong about the current ( Read more... )

You may or many not have heard in recent days about former conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrested over the € 50 m he got from Gaddafi for his election campaign. I prefer to think of this as another case of a European film which will get the inevitable American remake for a global audience ( Read more... )

Old joke from my university days: German folklore owes most of its existence to the Romantic Age. (And the ones immediately before and after, but English-speaking folk lump all those writers and professors together under the label "Romantic", so for the purposes of this entry, let's stick with that, otherwise the post will be over by the time I've ( Read more... )

Browsing through Curt Siodmak's memoirs again, I was reminded again of how so many things are a matter of perspective. Siodmak - scriptwriter of many a sci fi and horror movie in the 40s, started out writing (both scripts and novels) in the last years of the Weimar Republic, i.e.those very years which in the English speaking world's imagination ( Read more... )

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You may or may not be aware we had elections in Germany yesterday. The results weren't very surprising (if you've been following news and polls), but nonetheless shocking, because Nazis in German parliament for the first time in over 70 years should be. (Let me qualify the technicalities: of course we had original flavour Nazis in the very first ( Read more... )