Rubénerd!

An interesting (or at least, I thought it was interesting!) report from the Guardian:

The Bundesbank plans to bring back to Germany some of its 1,500 tons of gold stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York, and the 450 tons stashed with the Bank of France in Paris, reported the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Economics aside, why was it all there?

Most of Germany’s gold reserves have been stored overseas since the cold war amid fears of a Soviet invasion.

While a fascinating idea, the official press release from the Bundesbank website makes no mention of the cold war or the Soviet Union as a reason.

The image above is of the Deutsche Bundesbank building in Frankfurt, by MBisanz on Wikimedia Commons. A classic Brutalist design. The building in the photo, not the photographer. You're weird. KRQRG636ED2W

Perhaps our first unintentional pun on PunWatch:

Deutche Welle - European Union News

EU commission is loosing patience with Greece

Either they've made a classic loosing/losing typo mistake, or they really mean loosening. I'd like to think it's a Freudian slip with regards to European Union policy... giving them the "slip" perhaps? ;)

UPDATE: They've fixed it, darn! Fortunately, I made a screenshot!

An advertisement for Park Inn Hotels on a cute Germanwings A319. I reckon when the promotion is over, they should paint over the white letters but keep the livery as is!

Photo by Nikiforov Konstantin on Airliners.net.

Huge hug to all my German friends and relatives :). Suck on it, Margaret Thatcher!.

At the same time I'm preoccupied and sad at the thought of Korea still divided when I see how Germany and her people are now. Why didn't the Cold War powers fight themselves instead of doing it in innocent proxy states? Or even better... act more like adults? Ah politics.

Credit to Thomas Wolf on Wikipedia for that amazing photo of the Brandenburg Gate. I've been to Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Stuttgart but still not Berlin.

I'm not really into sport, but Germany were amazing again tonight. 4-0 against Australia, 4-1 against England and 4-0 against Argentina. We agreed on Twitter that Germany may not be the most artistic side, but they're amazing team players and have the best defence. @TylerMassey put it best:

#arg Argentina look increasingly frantic and #ger Germany have stayed calm. SO patient. Careful, well-researched German football. Not flashy. Clever.

My dad and half my family are German :)

Our latest Europe trip has rekindled my interest in Germany, which I'm sure my old man will appreciate :)

In some of my spare time I've been reading up on modern German history, and given the 20th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall (and the Iron Curtain in general) there seems to be a resurgence in interest.

Of note for me was just how nervous the Western powers were with the prospect of a united Germany even as late as the 1990s. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps the least keen, going as far as telling Gorbachev:

"this would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security."

Did Thatcher do or say anything right? Whoa, I'd better step away from that loaded cannon, I'm not touching that Pandora's box! Seriously though, you didn't read that. Pretend that question was never asked. What question? Very good, I like you style.

She should have followed the marks (marx?)

Two terrible puns, in one heading? A new record!

What interests me isn't how such doomsday political and military predictions turned out to be unfounded, for one both Germany and Japan have been on their best behavior since World War II. What they did manage to do was go from literal ruins to being the forth and second largest economies in the world. People often attribute this economic success to the Marshall Plan as the US bailing them out, but Germany received only a fraction of the funds both France and Great Britain were given. As Baldrick from Black Adder would say... "I have a cunning plan!"

Apologies for the terrible grammar, it's late at night and I'm half asleep but I just finished reading a book on the German reunification and I have all these ideas floating around inside my head.

I often wonder what would have happened if the Iron Curtain hadn't come down, if Reagan hadn't taken all the credit for himself, and whether East and West Germany still existed just as Korea remains divided today. Why did wars over political ideologies have to be fought in innocent proxy states?

Credit to Thomas Wolf on Wikipedia for that amazing photo of the Brandenburg Gate. I've been to Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Stuttgart but still not Berlin.

Along with all the talk about IKEA decking out Paris Métro stations with couches and lamps as an advertising stunt, there have been a ton of comments that pretty much follow this formula: "That'd never work in New York, the subways here aren't clean like the ones in Europe!"

As someone who recently zipped around in Paris on the Métro, the word clean wouldn't be one of the words I'd use to describe it! Intensely interesting, reliable, fast, affordable, comprehensive, yes. Clean? Eh, maybe not ;). The photo I took above shows one of the few good ones, but often there's litter everywhere and... certain odors which we won't discuss here.

As a matter of disclosure...

• Everything's relative, expensive private hospitals in Australia seems dirty after riding the Singapore MRT.

• I'm a self confessed IKEA nut because it's like Lego for adults, which allegedly means I'm a loser with too much free time. Yeah, thanks again Dave :P

• On our latest Eurotrip we also spent time in Munich before heading off to Paris and the Munich U-Bahn is beautiful. I'll upload my own photos eventually, for now check them out on Wikipedia and see for yourself :O

• And because it's St Patty's Day, don't mock Dublin's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luas">Luas system for its silly name (that probably means something which means I just made myself look like an arse), it's pretty cool too!

• Oh yeah, and my father's side of the family is also German, which means I'm biased ;). I kid, Paris is amazing, but Munich is a nicer place. I think I'll stop now before I get myself intro trouble!

I like to think one of the things I inherited from my beautiful late mum was her absurd, ridiculous sense of humour! Mmm, grilled cheese sandwiches.

With this in mind, last week I noticed someone on eBay in Germany was selling a set of those "Intel Inside" Xeon processor computer stickers for a couple of Euros. For those of you who don't know, the Xeons are Intel's server class CPUs that are found in the Mac Pro and other high end desktop and server hardware.

My first reaction was to snap them up without question, with the intention of affixing them to... my 600MHz Pentium 3 Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook! Genius right?

Well they just arrived in the mail this morning complete with stamps from Germany! My father is from Hesse and he was quite the stamp collector in his youth so I imagine I inherited part of his fascination with them.

As for the stickers themselves, if you know you're shameless Intel advertising these stickers here are the second generation logos using the new Intel logo, before they moved over to those new crystal or landscape-oriented holographic ones. Wikipedia has a photo comparing the the styles. I reckon the ones I got are the classiest.

I'll wait until I have some more of that foaming computer cleaning product so I can give the case on the notebook a quick once-over before putting the Xeon sticker on. I don't know why I find the prospect of putting a Xeon sticker on such old hardware so hilarious, but it just is!

For an introverted guy, I could think of plenty of worse places to work than the deck of an German ICE train, or any other HST. Looks comfy. For what it's worth I did put in many hours of Train Simulator years ago. Thank heavens I'm not a loser... right?

The sporadic memories and bottled water episode!

You've joined me at a tremendously exciting moment; unabashedly ripping off IntoYourHead; microwaving coffee after I said you shouldn't; Family Guy; Germans can make better Christmas food than the French; family trip to Europe in 1998; asking for the bathroom with sign language; Frankfurt am Main; time speeding up as you get older; Melbourne since 1990; remembering primary school; flag carriers and whatnot; Tom Keene talking about ridiculously expensive bottled water with David Zetland on Bloomberg on the Economy; the political compass thingy; and a Paul Shaffer smoke alarm!

UPDATE: The date for this episode has been fixed to show 2009 instead of 2008 after I received a smartarse comment ;-)

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