Send Roman Polanski to jail

There’s one thing that I don’t understand about the Roman Polanski case.

If a man anally rapes a child, and is caught, tried and convicted, he goes to jail.

But if a man who happens to be famous anally rapes a child, and is caught, tried and convicted, yet flees the country before he can be sentenced, all of a sudden people are asking not to send him to jail.

Why are there two standards of of justice here?

If Roman Polanski was just some stereotypical child rapist loser, someone with bad hair, worse teeth, no life and 15 terabytes of child porn, he’d have been hauled back to the States faster than you can say paedophilia and life would have moved on.

But Roman Polanski is Roman Polanski, the famous film director and friend of friends in Hollywood.  Give him a break, they all say.  He’s already had to skulk around the planet for half his life just to get away from all this.  Besides, his victim has already revealed herself and asked the State to forgive him and move on, just as she has.

None of that matters.

I really don’t care who he is, where he is, how old he is, or how many decades he’s been dodging the consequences of his crime, the fact remains that this man raped a 13-year-old girl.

That’s the only thing that matters.  He should finally go to jail.  He should also take up a collection among his apologist friends for generous donations to rape relief centres.

As if that’ll ever happen.

yuppie scum go home

Believe me, there are times this yuppie scum really wishes he could go home.  Leave Germany for good.

But you know, I’ve signed up for too many things here to just chuck it all away and start over again for the fifth time in 25 years.

Things like a family, a job, friends, a life.

The job!  Isn’t that funny?  Do you know how much income tax my wife and I pay each year?  Probably more than 15-thousand euro, enough to buy a containerload of spray cans, I’m sure.

Or looking at it another way, each time you spray yuppie scum go home, at least three droplets get sucked out of my paycheck into your welfare account so you can waste it on shit like this.

You make a lot of assumptions about us when you spray on our property and call us yuppies, so now I’m going to make a few assumptions about you.

I guess you hate us because we have money.  Or is it because we used that money to buy an apartment off-plan on a junked-out and abandoned industrial site that had sat idle for more than a half-century?  Either way, you have to admit we made the right move.  Because money, a job and a home are what lie at the other end of that long and difficult chain when you start to realise the world doesn’t owe you a living, Princess, when you decide to suck it up, get over yourself, grow up and think about what you’re going to do with the rest of your life instead of where the next bottle of booze or hit is coming from.

Damn, that is so cliché, but some things have been true forever.

You may call us yuppie scum, but I’m sure you’ve got a friend or relative somewhere who’s glad we gentrified your shitty little hole in the wall.  Maybe he’s a plumber, stonemason, hotel clerk or waiter, any one of the hundreds of people who worked to build something out of this place and maintain it over the past decade instead of sitting around on some chunk of downtown pavement trying to scrounge a few pennies out of selling used CDs and comic books while your slobbering, flea-bitten excuses for dogs get into fights and make a stinking mess everywhere.

It’s such a pleasure seeing your artwork, too.  You really leave a lasting impression when you deface the only patch of greenspace for miles around where I can spend a few precious minutes a week with my daughter teaching her how to throw a frisbee, kick a soccer ball or catch a real football.  You know, the pointy kind.

But if you want to make a real impression, why don’t you get off your asses, grab some balls and burn some vehicles while you’re at it?  Just steal some barbecue starter or lighter fluid – dead easy!  I’m sure there are a few Porsches, Beamers, and Mercedes parked out on the street just waiting for you to come along.

What’s that you say?  Oh right – you’ve already torched more than 30 in Hamburg since the start of the year.  How lame.  In Berlin they’ve set hundreds alight.  Good thing there are those you can still look up to.

I would go on and on, but I’ve got to get to work.  Late shift again.

How to keep a bike thief at bay, if only for a while

This is for Yelli in Berlin, who, like the best two of the three of us, had her bike stolen.

Remember how we made the little red-haired girl’s bicycle too crappy to steal? We sent away for some stickers that make a new bike look all rusted and splotchy, so that a thief passing by wouldn’t give it a second look.

Last time I looked, she still had her bike, so it must be working.

But a bicycle that we thought really did look too crappy to steal got ripped off sometime after we came back from our lovely weekend of cycling along the banks of the Elbe.

It was my wife’s bike and we’d bought it the week we moved to Hamburg after leaving Hong Kong in mid-1997.

I wonder if this is a sign of the times, a signal that things are getting so dire even for thieves that they’re willing to steal any bike that doesn’t have weeds wrapped around a rusty chain. I mean, the bike was 12 fucking years old!  It did have new parts on it, but not many, and the frame looked scratched up and sloppy.

Sometimes you hear a story where a stolen bike is found for sale on craiglist and somehow recovered, or like the commenter whose neighbour called out for Chinese food and was astounded to see the delivery guy riding her own bike which had been stolen a year before, but those are huge exceptions.

Most stolen bikes are never recovered, so how can you make sure you can lessen the chances of having your bike stolen?

In my opinion the best way is to make sure you have a damn good lock – or two – and no matter what you’re using, never leave it outside overnight.

So which lock to buy?

I’ll tell you which one not to buy, and that’s any lock with a wire cable like the one in the photo. Even the best ones can be snapped through with a set of bolt-cutters. We were dumb enough to assume my wife’s old bike wasn’t worth stealing, and so only had an Abus security level 8 cable lock on it, the same kind of lock which had been snapped through six months before on the little red-haired girl’s new one.

The U-shaped locks made famous by Kryptonite are perhaps the best choice, but they have their limitations. They’re heavy, you can’t put them around both wheels unless you remove one, and they’re awkward to work with.

That said, the Kryptonite New York Fahgettaboudit U-lock rated highest in security in a Slate.com survey. Bikeradar.com also raved about it, saying the small size makes it nearly impossible to lever apart.

Though they are probably less secure I prefer a chain, especially the Abus line, because they’re easier to work with. Abus grades its security on various levels from 1 to 25. A level 25 lock is the heaviest and made for securing motorcycles, but cyclists can also use them for locking them up overnight inside if you’re careful not to bend spokes working it through the wheels. This chain is extremely heavy though, and not meant to be lugged around on a bicycle. It’s also really expensive.

The next step down is the one I have – the Citychain level 15. It’s a good compromise between ease of use, weight, price and security. I bought one for home and one for the office. I leave one at the office locked up around a post and one at home so I don’t have to haul it back and forth.

If you have a place in your building to install one, pick up a wall anchor, because simply locking even the best lock around the frame and wheel is no good.  The lock must be around a fixed object – especially if you have insurance on it, which I’ll get to later.

You need a decent hammer drill to install the bolts, but once it’s in, it’s in for life. I suppose you could remove it with a jackhammer, but if a thief is going to use a jackhammer it’s going to attract a bit of attention.

For those who can’t avoid locking up their bike in a high-traffic area, it helps to have two different types of locks. That way, a thief who specialises in breaking open a certain type of lock will pass yours up, unless he has both the expertise and the tools to break into the combination of locks he finds on yours. Worth thinking about if you really value your bike.

Another thing to seriously consider is bicycle insurance, because you can practically forget everything you’ve read up to now. ALL bike locks can be broken into.

A very short clip:

In Germany you can insure your new bicycle against all perils including vandalism, misuse, breakage, wear and tear, sheer stupidity, and of course theft. The monthly rate you pay is based on the retail price of your new bike. As long as you buy a lock worth at least 20 euro – which seems to me like a rather cheap lock – and the bike is locked up to a fixed object through the frame, the bike is insured 24 hours a day. The price is based on a sliding scale according to what you paid for the new bike and lock, which is also insured.

Check it all out – in German – at wertgarantie.de.

It may look expensive to pay, say, 15 bucks every month for insurance, but when you consider how much it costs even to get a blown tire repaired at a bike shop, let alone replace worn brakes, chains, sprockets, bearings and chainrings, it’s probably worth it in the long run. And you have the peace of mind that if the bike is stolen, something that seems to be happening way too often these days, you can get it replaced no problem.

And with someone else doing all the repairs, no black grease to clean off your fingers anymore, either.

PS: There is simply no end to the debate over which lock to get.  Check out the bike forums and get spoked.

German justice: you may be the victim, you may be right, but you still have to pay

This is a story about how a newcomer to Germany was given a first-hand look at racist rednecks in this country, and how the law is set up to protect even them.

Steve, whose family is from Sri Lanka, is one of the nicest fellows I’ve met in a long time. Easy manner, loads of friends, always down for whatever. He arrived in Hamburg three years ago to take a job with a major German retail company. After a couple of weeks on the job he was sent to deliver some documents to work colleagues who lived in a small town just east of Hamburg.

It was a warm summer evening, so Steve was driving his sporty BMW Z4 with the top down.  He drove around the town a bit trying to find his colleagues’ place, but soon got lost, so he stopped in at the local police station to ask for directions, and was soon on his way again.

That’s when things started to get twisted.

Fifteen seconds after asking for directions, a skinhead jumped in front of his car and blocked his way.  Soon a half-dozen rednecks surrounded him, swearing at him and yelling that he should just get the fuck out of town instead of driving around their place. One of them even climbed up on his hood and wouldn’t get off, another tried to wrench off his side mirror.

Feeling seriously threatened, he hit the door emergency door lock button, but the windows and the top were still down, so one guy was able to reach in and grab him by the collar.   Luckily Steve was wearing a seatbelt, so he couldn’t be dragged out of the car.

With a half-dozen men – and one woman -  still braying at him to get out, he did what I think anyone in that situation would have done.  Using the gears and the wheel in a nifty swerve to knock the guy off the hood, he tore off out of there, chased by one of them in another car.

After Steve finally got to his destination, his colleagues came out to look at his car.  Just then the same group arrived to hassle him again, this time with reinforcements, as a group of 10 were now threatening to beat up not only Steve, but his colleagues as well.

Again, he did what I’d do: got the hell out of town, jumping into his car and speeding away.

Steve was angry and upset, but didn’t pursue it further until he received a summons to give a statement with the police.

In the meantime, the man who’d been knocked off the hood had gone to hospital complaining of various ailments, and was charging him with bodily injury.  He said Steve run into him with his car as he was driving like a madman through the centre of town.

In the ensuing court case Steve, who speaks very good German, was able to convince the judge in his testimony that he could not have been driving fast or erratically through the town at the time, because he was trying to find an address in an unfamiliar town, and that’s not how one would be driving if looking for an address.

The judge also dismissed the testimony of the man who accused Steve of running into him.   The man had no answer when asked why, if a car had slammed into him, he’d suffered no leg injuries.

So the judge chose not to convict Steve, but in the twisted way German justice works, he still had to pay.

His tormenters got off scot-free, but because Steve failed to go to the local police that evening to report the incident, he was forced to pay a fine of €1,200.

“I was not found guilty of anything,” Steve says, “No criminal record – but in the ridiculous hodge-podge and horse-trading of German law, I was still asked to pay a fine.”

Steve wanted to appeal the fine, but his lawyers said all he’d do  is rack up more legal costs.  His lawyer’s bill with the fine had already climbed to more than €4,000, so he just paid it.

Another twist:

Steve’s charges of assault causing bodily harm against the rednecks are still due to be heard after the case against Steve is resolved.

But instead of convicting him or throwing the case out completely, the judge chose to shelve the case against Steve indefinitely.

Because the case has only been shelved, and not conclusively ended, Steve cannot turn around and charge his tormenters. The case against him has to be officially ended before he can proceed, so his case against the rednecks will probably never be heard.

“It’s a completely bonkers German law which lets criminals slip through the loophole, provided they make the first accusation,” he says.