ritas kleine welt

birgit and major. what have you done to me? this starsky and hutch fandom is lethal -- a complete wackjob. i tell ya!!! though, i have to admit, i was already into the show some 17 years ago when it was still aired on german telly. proud member of team starsky then. proud member of team starsky now! hey, i gotta stick to my beuteschema... (and, no!, that's not dubya on the right, but roland totheroh!!!)

browsing the web today, i found an insane trivia page listing all the strangest occurances on the show. like 'starsky touches hutch', 'hutch touches starsky', 'they touch each other' and 'other body contact'. not to speak of the categories 'body count', 'what time is it?' or 'booze', 'drugs' and 'literacy'. honestly! and i thought i had too much spare time in my spare time. see for yourselves.

edit: now complete with major's torino.

after six years of studying english literature, i still can't remember shakespeare's birthdate. but somehow, somewhere in the past 29 years, i have picked up that grover cleveland was the only ever non-consecutive POTUS -- which i suddenly remembered on watching the latest episode of QI as soon as stephen fry asked how many people had taken the presidential oath.

denver and the west
Parents of "chunky" infant weigh in on health insurance reform

Frustrated parents of a big infant who is being denied insurance view the system as 'absurd'.

By Nancy Lofholm

The Denver Post

so polanski got arrested 31 years after he commited the crime. drugging a 13-year old girl till she was completely off her rocker and then had sex with her -- which under the state law of california is automatically equaled to rape. the age-bit. not the drugging! personally, i wouldn't make that distinction. one is as bad as the other.

so that was in 1978. and he was arrested in switzerland of all places. polanski is now in his 70ies. his victim is in her 40s. in the past 31 years he has repeatedly said that he was sorry for what he has done. in the meantime the victim has forgiven him. only that rape is not a time-barred crime under california law.

after a very long absence of this category, i thought it was high time to reactivate it. and twitter made me do it. though i still don't see the appeal of hundrets of millions of people twittering that they just had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, only to twitter a mere five minutes later that they had just had a dump, there are at least some twitterers that are worth mentioning.

take the apollo 11 mission for example. a few days ago their account was activated and they plan on releasing single tweets in order to recreate the original mission of 40 years ago. in a way, those who were born too late now have the chance to experience apollo 'as it really happened'.

... who of you also received an email from barack obama tonight?

i know it's only a standardized message from the office and which is received by hundreds of thousands. but still. how often do you find the name President Barack Obama in your inbox, and how many of those mails close with the words, 'We'll continue to keep you posted about this and other important issues. Thank you, Barack Obama'. this takes the meaning of 'surreal' and 'weird' to new heights!

barack obama arrived in washington, d.c, yesterday. he took the train into the city and talked to some of the passengers.

two more days till inauguration. i just can't wait to witness it all on the big screen at the official party here in leipzig. in the meantime: cnn took some footage of the president elect on board the barack express.

preparing my seminar on historiographic metafiction tomorrow, i was searching the web for pictures from incidents from the 20th century that have become collective memories all over the world. the sinking of the titanic, princess diana's death and 9/11 are among those. however, one of those incidents stands out quite severely. the assassination of jfk was probably the first incident that was covered 'while it happend' in such detail. the distribution of photography as means of freezing time and the popularisation of home-made super-8 films made it at all possible to have this large amount of first hand material. unlike the sinking of the titanic some 50 years prior, the common man's and woman's hand held device created instant icons of mass recognition.

and now these records have been piled into one big archive of films and photos. that's one way of preserving collective memory, even though today we no longer attach the same meanings as our parents and grandparents did. unlike them, we have not been the witnesses, but we are only recipients of a retold story. and unlike them, this and next generations become consumers of paparazzi material as we ogle the released autopsy pictures. make what you will of it. recording history is one thing. presenting the corpse of a murder victim in such a way is quite another and just as denigrating as back in the days when cesar dragged vercingetorix through the streets of rome.