Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Obama's sister on German TV

Apparently, there was a major stand off the other night on German TV between Barack Obama's half sister Auma and ridiculous former punk Countess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis - who, after spending the crazy 1990s with pink hair and dressed in a latex dirndl has turned to prim propriety in recent years (good Vanity Fair article on her "conversion" here). According to her Royal Whatever, arranged marriages are a good thing and condoms do not prevent HIV infection.

You don't want to know. This is Germany in 2008.

But - We have a remedy (We have .... a remedy):

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ridiculous (you have a gift for understatement) isn't the only r-word I which describes the arch-catholic Mrs TuT.
BTW wasn't there a bishop who recently claimed that condoms were deliberatly infected with HIV?

Anonymous said...

How do you translate "der Schwarze an sich schnackselt halt gern" to English?

Nele

https://obscenedesserts.blogspot.com/ said...

"You have a gift for understatement" - Thanks for the compliment, Christoph: one tries to maintain a certain level of decorum in one's writing!

Which other r-word are you thinking about? "Rumbustious"? "Rabied"? "Rotunds"?

I don't know about the jiffy-bishop, but it would appear that he and Gloria would find an apt compadre in Michel Foucault. In her review of a book on poststructuralist philosophy in the current LRB, Elif Batuman mentions allegations that "Foucault initially discounted Aids as a mythical homosexual-targeting disease invented by the medical superstructure to control male homosexuality".

I have the feeling that certain colleagues of mine, too, would go so far as to believe that human beings are interpellated into illness.

Nele,

I was wondering whether we shouldn't ask our students to translate that line in one of our next state exams. Would be fun, no?