A Bavarian Farmhouse

He thought he had bought and Austrian Horn on ebay.de. Germany: World Importer of Didgeridoos . Well it does look a bit like an Alpine horn, and in much the same way as all those nob ends at Stirling High used to carry around a dog eared copy of Lord of The Rings, the same nobends here carry a didgeridoo. I had to pay this layabout 1 euro to take this snap and I promise you, whatever sound was coming out of that pipe, Paul Hogan had never heard it. Another one of the professional busking scam artists pretending to be, in some way ethnic, third worldy and educational. Notice that he has a spare in case of a blowout.

So what part of ethnic authenticity don't you understand? 

A Native South American, from the lost tribe of Govan. It's hard not to think about that episode of Rab C Nesbitt when it turned out that the Peruvian Indians turned out to be a bunch of Scammers from Govan. These "Peruvians" above do a remarkably succesful job of spoofing the locals into thinking they are fresh from the Andes. However a few moments of Rational Thought helps when you remember that every non-euro citizen has a limited stay visa and that people who perform on the streets require a license or schein - probably in triplicate. So it is hard to imagine that a bunch of illegal aliens would have no problem at all busking on the streets of Ulm. Wrong! The other thing is that the names and costumes are a weird combination of a) everything off the telly and b)The Stereotype of indegenous North American peoples. I mean, doesn't that headdress style sort of stop around Wyoming and the Sioux Nation and isn't that guy at the back wearing a sporran? Shouldn'

A Lost Spoiler Ever since I looked up a spoiler for the intensely stooooopid movie The Butterfly Effect, I am sort of considered the font of all wisdom on which movies to watch - well with the help of Sean McBride at rottentomatoes.com of course. Even more so since Sean said War of The Worlds was great and he was so right. So with all my obvious googling abilities on the subject of movies, Susi asked me to look up a spoiler for Lost - and anyone reading this is invited to try googling that, but while you do, here's the answer. Lost isn't about anything Lost isn't about anything. They aren't dead, they aren't in purgatory and they aren't Lords of the Flies. They are in La La Land. La La Land is the place where movie and tv companies make money and stars large or small go crazy or become weird. David Lynch demonstrated all this very stylishly when he made that weirdly marvellous show, Twin Peaks. Who the hell was Bad Bob? Again the answer is very simple, Bad Bob

Don Colione 

What are those European poster stands called? If you ever woke up with amnesia like Matt Damon in one of those Bourne movies, and you saw a poster stand, you would almost certainly a) know you were in Europe and b) have a good chance of it being Germany. They are called Litfaßsäule which has no proper English meaning but I guess poster column is close. The interesting thing is that, certainly here in South Germany they are always used and the City doesn't appear to have the sorts of fly-posting problems that Edinburgh and Glasgow have. I suspect that the German penal code allows retribution across the entire distribution chain and no doubt printing firms have to take names and addresses and have a valid set of id cards before any transaction takes place. I don't have a problem with this and it is quite pleasant to observe that there doesn't appear to be a poster mafia in this part of the world. The Liftßsäule are rather charming although I guess I notice them a lot more th

Who will win the German Elections? Germans are of a frame of mind we last saw in Britain and USA in the late seventies, just before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became leaders of their respective nations. It is hard to properly remember what Britain was like before the Thatcherite revolution, moribund, old fashioned, leaderless and heavy with bureacracy in both state and capitalist industry and burdened with high taxes and ridden with the class system. At that time no one could imagine the unimaginable, no one could do anything but wince at the thought of Mrs T devasting the old inefficient heavy industries and throwing millions of people on the dole. Nor could they cope with her decision to create a propertied class by selling council houses at a discount to the tenants. But she did all of that. I know because I was there in the forefront of many campaigns against these Tory policies. Despite this, by the end of the century, I owned my council house and I had gone to universi

A Romantic Wedding in Scotland. German gossip magazines are surprisingly numerous and like television no one actually admits to reading them. I realised this when were in the Doctor's surgery a few days ago and Susi said there was nothing to read. Well there was quite a lot to read including Bunte ( a woman's name?) and Goldene Blatt, which I think means Golden tongue but I could be wrong. Another curious thing is that these magazines are distributed by a small army of semi- retired people who sell subscriptions. More importantly they have a special distributors dust cover so that no one can tell whether you are reading a gossip mag or the Harvard Business Reveiw. I can't really understand that sort of labour intensive business model but it fits in well with all the other strange methods of newspaper and magazine distribution. I happened to mention to some participants among many things, that Kylie was the most famous Australian in the Known Universe, after the koala bear.

The storm that blew away a President. It is a fairly popular misconception that people, parties or presidential candidates win elections. But this isn’t true. History demonstrates that where Western democracies are concerned, it is regimes who lose power, lose support and lose the confidence of the people. The Soviet Union collapsed when there was no longer a single soul capable of wielding power or making any practical use of the available resources of the state. Mrs Thatcher’s conservative government in the hands of her heir, John Major, collapsed spectacularly when the corruption, the immorality and the straight forward arrogant stupidity left them exposed to the mob. George W Bush was a man who won, because Al Gore was so stupid and arrogant that he firstly wasn’t prepared to take advantage of the democratic voters affinity for Bill Clinton and secondly that he was incapable of making his mind up. What were the democrats thinking supporting a preppy, money lawyer