Hamburg car burnings hit close to home

A wave of car torchings that started in Berlin a couple of years ago and spilled over to Hamburg hit close to home over the weekend.  This burned out lump of charred Mercedes was sitting just around the corner from our place when I came across it this past Sunday afternoon.

There have been well over 300 car burnings in Hamburg so far this year.  It’s even worse in Berlin, where more than 500 have gone up in flames.  Police are powerless to do anything about it because it’s completely random who’s doing it and for what reason.  Putting an extra 200 Hamburg police on night patrols didn’t work out, so now they’ve scaled them back to 20, with just as much effect. 

Some say there’s a political motivation behind the attacks, that it’s the marginalised of society roving around getting their kicks watching fat-cat Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches reduced to scrap.   But there’s no pattern to the burnings or their timing, and there are never any notes left behind.  A couple of yahoos here and there have been charged and thrown in jail, but it just keeps on happening.  

We always thought we were living a decent life in a safe and modern country.   But having once again been the victims of theft and adding up everything that’s going wrong right in our midst, sometimes we get the feeling we’re living in some besieged Middle Ages village, its citizens left to fend for themselves and wondering when the next attack will hit.

Polar bear cub Knut’s cousin killed in New Year Riot

Definitely Not The Daily News freelance reporter Daisy Confuse spent most of New Year’s Eve in a Hamburg bunker in an effort to keep from getting shot, emerging shortly before midnight into what appeared to be a war zone. We salute her work in filing this story despite the most difficult of circumstances.

by Daisy Confuse

Hamburg (DNTN) A cousin of Berlin Zoo polar bear sensation Knut has been found dead this morning, an apparent victim of German New Year’s Eve mayhem.

“He must have been shot through the chest with a stray rocket,” said Hamburg police spokesman Helmut Askew. “There was no point in even trying to revive the poor bastard. He was done for.”

The loveable Knut’s brown yet still cuddly cuz fell victim to a New Year tradition in Germany, which consists of setting alight an entire year’s pent-up environmental hypocrisy in an orgy of fire, smoke, noxious fumes, noise and filth. Efforts to convince Germans that polluting their neighbourhoods with toxic waste which eventually seeps into groundwater and fouls lakes, streams and rivers have fallen on deaf ears.

“Just fuck off, OK?” said one reveller three minutes before midnight. “I spent €300 on this overpriced crap, and I’ll be damned if anyone tells me I can’t have a little fun and help make this place look like the aftermath of…uhh…. World War Two.”

Germans spend hundreds of millions of euros every New Year on fireworks, firecrackers, screamers, sparklers, twirlers and various other items that go whizz-bang and make the kiddies go ooh-ahh. News reports of idiots shooting off their fingers or losing an eyeball are as traditional as waking up with a hangover. In addition to the human cost, taxpayers foot the bill for city workers to come out on overtime to sweep up the debris, but they never get it all. After the ice melts, for example, the garbage stays in lakes forever.

In a telephone interview from his pen at the Berlin Zoo, Knut said he was saddened by the death of his cousin, but added he took solace in knowing his fake furball friend died for a good cause.

“If this brought fun to someone, and some profit to someone else, what’s the problem?” he said.

Asked if he was going to be able to attend the funeral, Knut said he had other plans.

“Contact my agent,” he said, harfing down a dead fish. “I’m going to be in a movie soon, so I’m brushing up on my lines. I really don’t have the time for stuff like that.”

The editors and writers of Definitely Not The Daily News would like to wish you a Happy New Year anyway.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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Travelling to Germany? Stick to felafel

It took the world’s largest news organisation Reuters a few days to get off its duff to report the fact that truckloads of rotten meat have recently been sold and eaten in Germany, but at least they’ve finally done so. Spiegel magazine in English has ignored it completely. What, are you guys asleep? Why have an international edition if you’re not going to tell readers outside the country what a scandal this is? Have you passed the task on to English-speaking bloggers in Germany? Or are you tired of reporting on it because this has happened before, and not just in Germany as a women who left a comment on Saturday’s post points out?

If you read the Reuters article through to the end, you’ll see it isn’t just the Döner Kebab joints that you have to worry about. This meat – variously described as smelly, stinking and putrid – could be hiding in plain ordinary sausage meat and (corporate alarm bells anyone?) hamburgers.

What they don’t point out is the lax rules that allow waste meat to be disposed of without an inspector checking to make sure it doesn’t end up as lunch.

My advice if you’re looking for a quick bite on the way between here and there in Germany: stick to felafel. It’s fatal only in Australia.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Rotten food nation: putrid meat in Germany re-sold for profit

Please don’t read this if you have a weak stomach or vivid imagination.

Sometime over the last year or so, the following conversation took place behind a meat-packing plant in Bavaria:

Jeez, we’ve got a mountain of rotten meat here. Guess we better start throwing it out.

Are you kidding? All that meat? We can make money off it!

Make money off rotten meat? How?

Look. All we have to do is grind it up a bit more, stuff it in a new package with a fresh label and ship it to Berlin! Or we can just ship it in bulk somewhere else and let them do the re-labeling. Same thing – we still get paid.

But there’s 160 fucking tonnes of this garbage! Won’t the inspectors notice or something?

Inspectors? Are you kidding? Where you been? They only inspect fresh meat in Germany. After it’s out the back door, you can do what you like with it. Nobody looks.

Won’t the Berliners notice that it’s shit?

Naw, it’ll be stuffed with spices and other crap. You know. Döner fast food. Berliners are always in a hurry anyway.

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I wish it were only fiction, but it’s not. I wish it were the first case of its kind, but it’s not. The Bavarian firm is suspected of having made over the past year from eight to 10 deliveries of meat unfit for human consumption totalling 160 tonnes to dealers in Berlin. The meat has variously been described as smelly, stinking and putrid.

Yum.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Berlin zoo: we’re into cute and cuddly, so who needs ‘em?

In a break with format Letters Home to You publishes the first issue of THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT THE DAILY NEWS, a regular feature of irregular happenings.

by Special correspondent Some guy we hauled in off the street
Berlin (DNDN) Officials at the Berlin Zoo say they fail to understand the uproar in the scientific community in the wake of plans to destroy a breeding pair of Aye-aye, a rare Lemur equipped with an unusually long middle finger it uses to dig for grubs and maggots.

“Look, we asked around, and pretty much everyone we talked to agreed that these things are just too ugly and have too many disgusting habits to keep them on display any longer,” said Dieter Doozer, executive director in charge of waste removal. “They have these buggy eyes, scraggly hair for fur, paddles for ears, long skinny fingers – and their breakfast! It makes you want to toss your cookies, I tell you.”

The animals were brought to the zoo three years ago as part of a conservation effort undertaken in cooperation with the government of Madagascar, where loss of habitat is threatening the animals with extinction. The Aye-aye (pronounced eye-eye) used to live in the eastern part of the island nation off southeast Africa. Excessive logging over the past two decades in addition to being stigmatised by the local population, who kill them because they are regarded as a harbinger of death, has added to their plight in the wild.

“Nobody wants to pay good money to see an animal as horrible to look at as this one,” said zoo director Helmut Askew. “We thought of playing up their mating habits and using that as a selling point,” he added, “because they hang upside-down from a tree branch and it takes an hour for them to finish copulating. But this being Berlin, you see that sort of thing all the time.”

Askew added that the zoo has made every effort to get the public to take an interest in the animals, and he’s left with no alternative. “It doesn’t help that they’re nocturnal, either. We used to set an alarm clock for noon every day to wake them up so they’d crawl out of their nests for everyone to get a good look, but that just pissed them off. They’re hard enough on the eye when they’re sedate. You should see them in a fit of screaming rage.”

Zoo officials say the animals will be carefully and humanely dispatched to Butt-Ugly Heaven to ensure they suffer no pain. Their pens are to be demolished to make room for the zoo’s latest addition, a polar bear cub named Knut the media and public just can’t seem to get enough of.

Officials played down any role the presence of the playful, small, white, loveable, cuddly ball of fur that just make you want to say “awwwwww” at the mere mention of his name may have had in their decision to say ix-nay to the Aye-aye.

“OK, let’s put it this way. It was a choice between spending additional resources to expand Knut’s area while keeping this repulsive creature around but out of sight, or just saying, ‘what the hell, nobody cares anyway, let’s save a few euros,’” Askew said. “You can’t blame us, really. it’s market forces, and besides, they fling their poo. It gets on your clothes and stinks like hell. My employees bitch about them all the time. Our cleaning bills are going through the roof.”

The zoo has been thronged with visitors since Knut was first shown to the public. A trashy newspaper has even offered 1000 euros for the best photo of Knut sent in by readers.

“Knut is just so plushy and cute, I want to take him home with me,” gushed zoo visitor Greta Lessa, an employee with the Berlin city government. “As soon as I read that they were going to show him, I called in sick — wait, that thing’s not on, is it? OK? Good. Anyway, let’s just say that I rushed down as fast as I could. I just love him.”