ankewehner.de

Thought I’d dump a bunch of links here I found funny or otherwise worth sharing. People who follow me on twitter will probably have seen most of those already.

Airline pickpocket strikes as passengers sleep – My mental picture was a pickpocket declaring he was on strike because his job was too easy this way.

Swandog in reply to a poll, about the roads in winter in Norway: “the main danger is running into moose licking salt off the road”.

Oil spill photo

A German student “mooned” a group of Hell’s Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer

Broccoli looks like fireworks if you take an MRI-picture. (From a blog dedicated to MRI-pics of food. Note that their main page (not the individual post linked to) can take a while to load, since it has a lot of those animated images.)

Recently there was an exhibition of various Elvis memorabilia at the shopping centre in Koblenz, so I got to see his last car, among other things. As far as memorabilia go, tools used in Elvis’ autopsy are pretty weird, though.

Counter-protest against Westboro Babtist Church picketing at Comic-Con

You heard about the Octopus predicting FIFA World Cup results? Here’s an explanation. (Link via drhoz)

The Difference Between a Door-to-door Sales Orc and a Door-to-door Sales Elf

… and the world stops to look. Or something.

The waves this is making are pretty amazing. I probably shouldn’t be as amused as I am.

My favourite wrinkle: The UK sends an aircraft carrier to France to bring tourists home? Now that’d be a cool surprise to end your holidays with.

Because some people take drink recipes including kerosene and battery acid far too seriously

In other “news”, I really regret leaving my camera at home today. I could have taken a nice one of a power pole and titled it “everything is full of starlings”.

On the radio news there was something about the emergency help the USA have planned against the financial crisis. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson supposedly said he’d “put pressure” on his international counterparts to take similar measures as the USA, and he’d “go about it aggressively”.
Now, that is translated to English from German, which was was translated and shortened from English, so, has anyone in the US heard what he actually said? Or what I have to feed into google news to find American articles that do not talk only about the USA, or where else I could find the untranslated statements.

Completely unrelated, in the last week two 250kg WWII bombs exploded.

One did so spontaneously, leaving a crater 6 metres deep and 14 metres across in a field of a plant nursery in Vienna (Austria).

Another explosion was triggered by construction work in Hattingen in the Ruhr area (Germany). The cab of the hydraulic shovel was solid enough and there was enough luck involved that the worker got away with nothing worse than some cuts from splintered glass. 16 other people suffered blast trauma, and buildings and machinery up to 300 metres from the bomb were damaged. Estimates of damages are a “high six-figure number”. Parts of the bomb flew as far as 1,5 km.

I also looked for “Blindgänger” in google news, and for the last week found articles about one 250kg bomb disarmed in Villingen-Schwenningen – with photos – one the same size in Ingelheim – with photos – one dud in Lake Starnberg being destroyed in a controlled blast producing a tens of metres high fountain, a 125kg bomb disarmed near Mainz, and attempts to precisely locate a bomb that is getting in the way of extending a bridge near Bielefeld.

Just a bit of a habit spreading the word; I think stuff like that is part of the reason why most Europeans are not as keen on bombing countries as the last American government.

Police take snake into custody
Drug shop shut down – note the last line

At the Olympic Games and other sports events, an athlete taking “medicines” to enhance performance is a scandal.

In Pokémon (third generation) it’s normal and expected that before a contest you dope the contestants with pokéblocks, and you have “medicines” that will temporarily raise performance during a fight, or even permanently.

I wonder if stuff like that confuses children when it comes to doping. XD

[...] Josef Schlarmann, Vorsitzender der Mittelstandsvereinigung der Union, [kritisiert], dass “die Bundesregierung mit ihren Mindestlohn-Plänen den Rückfall in Planwirtschaft und Dirigismus beschlossen hat”. (Handelsblatt)

Germany has no laws about a universal minimum wage. Since that means a lot of people work full time and still don’t get enough to live, there’s a discussion about introducing them. Josef Schlarmann, chairman of the association for small and medium sized businesses of the CDU claims this is a step back to “planned economy and statism”.

Considering that most countries in the EU, as well as the USA, and I don’t know how many other countries, have laws dictating minimum wages, I really wonder where he gets those ideas.