Deutschland über Elvis

Time to Flex Your Middle Finger.

 

The second annual International Day to Bite Me has arrived!  It's your day to flip the bird at the small-minded, the petty, the unreasonable, the insufferable.  Tell us your story in the comments, or you can blog about it, and link back here.

Whales and Dolphins are Delicious!

And to put you in the mood, here's the Tokyo Choir of Complaint.  I'm not sure whether they should bite us, or they want us to bite them.  No matter.  It's splendid discontent, if a little too polite. 

By the way, the government forbids the Complaints Choir of Singapore from performing in public.  Sounds like they need a National Bite Me Day, real bad.

I refuse to participate in your neurosis

The second Monday in January, is special.  The day-declaring people declared it National Clean Off Your Desk Day.

Odd.  Studies, they say, show people with messy desks are as productive as those with tidy ones.  Perhaps even moreso, if they produce thinking. 

People use their desks to park information they may need, but which they can't keep top of mind.  Getting people to clean up their desk gives them, according to one expert, an "environmental lobotomy".

Yet companies still enforce clean-desk rules. And a veritable industry has grown up around getting people neat and organised. 

Last year, I was so outraged at National Clean Off Your Desk Day, that I declared the following day, January 13th, as National Bite Me Day.

Because it's about more than a messy desk, IMHO.

People make moral judgements about slobs.  Slobs obviously have more important things to do than clean their desks.  They might use the time to think beautiful, original thoughts.  Do you know how uncomfortable that makes the world's meddlers, busybodies, control-freaks and Calvinists? 

Be alert to those who pass off their own hangups as "helpful". Or just plain better.

This issue is about people with nothing better to do who seek to foist whatever it is on you that they have nothing better to do than.  (Hey, grammar police!  Suck on THAT.)

HOW TO TAKE PART:

Refuse to accept someone else's emotional agenda.  Draw a boundary.  Don't let them bully you, with bogus arguments about what's best, what's right, what's more efficient, what's pretty, what's nice, what's necessary. Your emotional comfort is as important as theirs. Say so. 

Afterwards, leave a comment.  Let us hear your stinging riposte. Tell us who you told off.  How did they take it?  Not that you, like, care.

Click on the twink-link to your right to get the full story, or on this page.

You might like to post about it on your own blog, and link back to here.  You'll find some (if I do say so myself) cool graphics here, should you clever webophiles want to use them as a hotlink.  I've already paid the royalties on the images, which was rather well organised of me. Don't you think?

Park[ing] Day 2009

In 2005, San Francisco design collective Rebar declared the first annual Park[ing] Day.  In a gesture designed to liberate our streets from the scourge of the parked car, citizens claim a metered spot and turn it into a public park of the human sort; a place where ordinary people can interact.    In the words of the founders, Park[ing] Day is "intended to promote creativity, civic engagement, critical thinking, unscripted social interactions, generosity and play."

Groovy Munich communications agency Büro Gelb decamped from their offices on nearby Einsteinstraße to take part.  One of their staffers explained the creative rationale behind Gelb's 2009 Park[ing] Day concept. "Usually, most Park[ing] Day parks have trees and greenery.  We thought that was very predictable."  He then used an English word which I hear a lot in translation, when discussing high-concept affairs. "We wanted to do something unseen."

Germans, as has been observed, pursue irony with a passion.  Parking a car in a park which is supposed to reclaim the street from parked cars could do one of two things: 

• Make a brilliantly ironic statement about the role of motorised transport in our lives and culture. 
• Completely miss the point.

What do you think? 

Modern Merchandising

Through the window of a shoe store in Müllerstraße, in the Glockenbachviertel.  They wouldn't let me take a picture inside the shop, because I might scare away customers.  They probably maintain that art must be an outrage, fashion must be transgressive, and all that. 

Organised Resistance

The Headbangery, at Prominent Global Communications Firm GmbH

Today, January 12, sees the Professional Personal Organising Community aflutter over National Clean Off Your Desk Day. In a brilliant stroke of post-modernism, the day was first declared by a leader of the Professional Day-Declaring Community.

I have two words for the Professional Personal Organising Community. One of them is off.

You have read before that the Headbang clan lives in junkyards. We are slobs, with a capital ob. Yes, it's dysfunctional and neurotic, and we have some damn fine reasons, thanks.

Since moving to Germany, where Ordnung ist das halbes Lebens, Headbang8 has attempted to mend his ways.

In part, one can thank The Enforcer, our Putzfrau. Master Right is neat. I mean, like Japanese neat. Even he maintains (get this) she's too professional.

For example, since we're guys, we both used to do, um, the toenail thing. You fellas know what I'm talking about. Well, we don't do it any more.

But I draw the line at the desk. It's a joke in the ad game that every strategy planner's desk is a fire hazard of research reports and articles he intends to read. Our hard drives groan with downloaded cool-hunting. You can't think without shit around you. It's not creative.

I know EXACTLY where everything is on my desk. Yet the tyranny of the tidy means that over the years, people have looked at my office and sneered about it being unprofessional, even as I covered their asses and saved their bacons. You know who you are, my little honeys.

Time has come to resist. Do not be neatened. The Headbang Liberation Front declares tomorrow, January 13, as National Bite Me Day.

The boss. The guy at the DMV. Your mother. No matter what form of small-minded tut-tutter gives you the evil-eye, tomorrow is the day to tell them to kiss your sweet, fragrant buttcheeks. I might even design a logo for it, if I can just find my password to that online clipart site. I wrote it down, somewhere.

Photo Friday: Relationship

Frankfurt Auto Show, 2007

That's not funny, dummkopf.

All aboard for Rottenburg! Use the caboose.

I don't like to blog about work, given the obvious dooce risk. But this curious bit of info came across my desk the other day, and it begs to be shared. Someone asked the population of a number of different countries if it's healthy to have a sense of irony.

Only about a quarter of Chinese agree. No surprises. They can lock you up for irony.

The UK is in the middle of the pack, and that surprises most people. Britons are line ball with the Irish and the Americans, at around fifty percent. I believe that only an older generation practices that peculiarly British habit of ironic self-deprecation. Young Britons are naive goofballs, just like their counterparts in the rest of the world.

France scores high; over 70% agree. No surprises there, either. They think Jerry Lewis is a genius. The only way you can appreciate Jerry Lewis is ironically.

The most healthily ironic people on the planet are...wait for it...Germans! Over ninety percent agree that a sense of irony is healthy. Whoah!

Before I came to Munich, friends gave me a book on assimilating into German culture. It stresses that one should not fall for the stereotype of the humourless German. Germans have a wonderful sense of humour, it declares, but they don't feel it's necessary for communication.

True enough. One hears much laughter and plenty of jokes, particularly after a beer or twelve. But don't expect a laugh from a casual acquaintance. I mean, have you tried to coax a smile out of a Bavarian shop assistant?

There's very little lighthearted, silly, absurdist humour. Of course, there is a species of German joke called the Antiwitz, which plays on stupid non-sequiturs. It is not funny, however.

Humour is serious business. Almost every remark I've heard from a German, in jest, drips with cynicism. German humour always a negative sting in the tail, where the gag comes from thinking the worst of people and their motives. Germans, after all, are the inventors of Schadenfreude. In every joke, there has to be someone who is the butt of it. Irony is the favourite laughter of the misanthrope, is it not?

Apparently, the German sense of irony is not new, as the extract below tells us. Hmmm. Is Kafka part of the fanciful, fantastic and extravagant tradition of German irony the author describes?

I'm a big fan of irony, so I should feel right at home in Germany. I even have a DVD of the so-called "lost" episodes of Monty Python's Fliegender Kirkus. It's subtitled in Japanese, just to up the irony ante.

OK, you bicultural types. What do you reckon? Do the Germans actually have a better sense of humour than anyone else in the world?

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on

The Modern German Irony, 1835.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

" Should the Germans become Masters of Europe...

It keeps a man's mind on the job when his mind is on football.

An Alle:

Sollten die Deutschen am Sonntag Europameister werden, verlegen wir den Arbeitsbeginn am Montag, 30. Juni auf 10.00h. Bitte je nach Einsatzgebiet und Arbeitsaufwand mit dem direkten Vorgesetzten absprechen, damit trotz der Freude die Arbeitsabläufe nicht zu stark beeinträchtigt werden.

Viel Spass am Sonntag!

Viele Grüße/ Best regards,

Fritz Fratz

CEO

To everyone,

Should the Germans become Masters of Europe on Sunday, let us misplace our starting time on Monday, 30th of June, until 10.00 am.

Please, depending on your workload and area of specialty, and after speaking with your direct manager, make sure that in spite of the joy, it doesn't interfere too strongly with procedures.

Much fun on Sunday!

Many Greetings/Best regards

Ordinary-Joe Baggage

CEO

Master Right and I went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant last night, because it was the only public place in Munich that hadn't set up a wide-screen TV with the game. In fact, IT hire firms reported a run on projectors, with many private individuals streaming the game and projecting it on the walls of their party. Honking continued well into the night--check this post from Lucid in Deutschland for a video sample of Soccermania. The Grand Final is Sunday in Vienna. Might be a good weekend to get out of the country. Might be a good weekend to get out of several countries, actually.

EDIT

11.30 pm Sunday. Strangely quiet. Work starts at 9.00 tomorrow.

A few snaps from the office Christmas party

Dateline New York. The Office Christmas Party 2006. Beer, pizza and DJ in the office foyer. Yeah, it's OK.

Dateline Munich. The Office Christmas Party 2007. Each colleague and his or her partner invited to spend the night at a mountain lodge in the chic Austrian ski-resort of Kitzbuehl. The morning following the party, we can ski out the front door.

Do I miss New York? Let me think about that for a nanosecond...

Sho Us Yer Po

Munich has been a-twitter for weeks.

The office was in a funk for days. My colleagues couldn’t get tickets for the MTV Europe Music Awards, this year held in Munich.

It used to be a slam dunk. If you worked in an ad agency, you could snap your fingers and get tickets to anything. Media organizations (especially TV networks) entertained you lavishly, since you controlled your clients’ advertising dollar.

Alas, times have changed. Media placement is now handled by independent companies, and besides, nobody watches TV any more.

The comeuppance is, that the likes of me has to buy his own drinks. This makes no difference to me personally, nowadays. My hard-boozing years ended quite some time ago. But many younger colleagues have seen open bars ripped out from under their elbows while still in their prime.

I tried to console them. “Here’s an alternative. You could probably still get a ticket to the Europe’s Best Butt Competition. It’s the night before.” Using German slang for butt, the press had labeled it a search for the continent’s prettiest po.

“Doesn’t have the same cachet” replied Count von Smart, a recent divorcee and party animal. “The Archbishop didn’t try to ban Europe’s Best Butt like he did the MTV EMAs.”

The Archbishop of Bavaria, Cardinal Wetter, deplored the fact that the MTV event would be held on November 1, All Saints’ Day. Through a spokesbishop, he said that we should spend the day in peace and calm, to respect the dead. In fact, Bavarian laws declare November 1st a public holiday precisely for this purpose. Dancing is prohibited, unless you get special permission.

Christian Ude, the mayor of Munich, gave short shrift to His Eminence. “It won’t stop anyone from attending the cemetery,” he sneered, eyeing his place on the comps list. He added that the star attraction, a certain Mr. Justin Timberlake, had only one opening in his schedule. So the deceased would just have to lump it.

Now, couple of points.

First, would the bishop know the difference between dancing on MTV, and aerobics? I mean, they’re not doing any bishoppy stuff like waltzes, gavottes, or tarantellas. The Awards were held at the Olympic Village; they could pretend it’s a gym. Get Jack LaLane to host instead of Snoop Dogg—in German, Herr Schnüffelhund—and Wetter will never know.

Second, why was MTV EMA treated with such scorn and the Best Butt (whose celebrations would surely go past midnight and spill into holy moments) get off without a spanking?

Perhaps the clergy rather likes butts. Perhaps the bishop didn’t know that the reverently named All Saints were past winners at the EMA?

Or maybe His Eminence simply chose the larger target, publicity slut that he is. There’s so little a bishop can say about his actual area of expertise that will get him into the Abendzeitung.

Which affair best lived up to the Archbishop’s expectations? I vote for the Po's, sponsored by the people who make Sloggi underwear. (Many a night I've ended up with sloggy underwear, but that's another story)

Watch the video on the Best Butt website. It begins with the 46 finalist butts arriving at the venue by bus. For people who would spend the night bouncing around in someone else’s underwear, they all seemed carry rather large suitcases.

Now, fully clothed adults arriving on a bus ain’t exactly glamour, so our videographer had to arc up the tension a notch or two.

He achieved a half-notch with the arrival of the judging panel in what must be Munich’s only stretch Town Car.

The judges (model agents, fitness gurus, Gabor sisters) were not unanimous in their criteria. Some said that butt was all. Some said that since part of the prize was a modeling contract, general attractiveness and deportment should be taken into account. A British judge liked petite little bottoms. Channeling Rodney Dangerfield, an American judge said he wanted an ass “with its own area code”.

The judges, though, proved themselves thoroughly German in their taste for Third World tail—the winners were Ms. Kristina Dimitrova of Bulgaria and a Mr. Andrei Andrei of Romania. Germans find their neighbours to the east rather sexy; years of compulsory calisthenics and a diet of gruel under communism does wonders for the figure.

Now, lacking the qualifications to judge, there’s not much I can say about Ms. Dimitrova’s bottom except jolly good show and I’m sure it’s terribly nice. But Mr. Andrei—this guy has NO BUTT AT ALL. Obviously, our American judge was in the minority.

And besides, this guy has one too many Andres in his name. Or the priest had a terrible stutter at his christening.

Personally, I would have picked the gentleman from Greece. The po was nice, but the package was exceptional. Surely this, too, counts in selling underwear. That's my professional opinion.

Ms, Winehouse wows the crowd.

Actually, Europe's Best Butt looked like a lot of fun. By contrast, over at the Olympic Hall, many in the MTV audience felt the show was just a little suboptimal. A few addled performances—most notably Amy Sh…er, Winehouse—disappointed the crowd. The Munich bloggers at Pink Trash Travels left early. So did Count von Smart, who managed to score a ticket. He needn't have bothered, since it seems the event was eminently crashable.

As for me, I was at home, curled up with a glass of wine and a good book. I guess that counts as respecting the dead, no?

Videos from YouTube. Best Butt pictures from the website of sponsor Sloggi. MTV Award pic from their website. As always, should the owners of these materials object to their use, I’m very happy to take them down with an apology.