Star of Potter film is not wild about Harry

says this Times article. His classmates are angry that a non-fan has been chosen to play the character of Harry Potter.

Germans and Grumpiness

Mira has some interesting thoughts on Germans today. She points to a BBC article that claims pronouncing “ä”, “ö”, “ü” makes you frown and thus grumpy. The article has some very nice photos of chancellor Schröder, his predecessor Kohl and Michael Schumacher. “Chancellor Schröder: Hard to smile with an umlaut in your name”. He he!

I didn’t even know Germans are known to be grumpy! Hmmm…

It would be interesting to find out if there are other “frowning languages” besides German… Mira talks about Austria (the German name for their country is Österreich!), Hungaria, Turkey and even France. Are they all grumpy, too? And makes learnin German you more grumpy, too? Garret, be careful!

Oh, it seems like Garret read the article as well and didn’t agree with German = Grumpiness.

Update: Dazu gibt es auch einen Artikel bei Spiegel Online. (via Schockwellenreiter.)

Nietzsche

Today is the 100th anniversary of Nietsche’s death.

Quotes:

“Lieber aus ganzem Holz eine Feindschaft als eine geleimte Freundschaft.”

“Is not life a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

Nietzsche was born on October 15th, 1844 in Röcken, Saxony, Germany, and died on August 25th, 1900 in Weimar. He studied theology in Bonn (Hey, I didn’t know that!) and Leipzig.

Since I’m not much of a philosopher, I refer you to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Nietzsche. (André found this site for BookNotes yesterday.) Für deutschsprachige Leser sind viele weitere Links beim Schockwellenreiter zu finden.

Today is also Sean Connery’s (born 1930) and Leonard Bernstein’s (1918, died 1990) birthday.

Lemo

Das Foto von Nietzsche habe ich übrigens auf den Seiten des LEbendigen virtuellen Museums Online gefunden. Ein interessantes Projekt, das leider für Breitbandnetz entwickelt wurde…

Technical difficulties

Um… Now I’ve flipped the page using Radio UserLand, but posting text to the home page still doesn’t work.

Now I have to write something so I don’t have an empty home page… yeah.