German fact no.136: Germans really really do not care about bags full of rice falling over in China. (x)
It’s a metaphor for an uninportant event. If someone tells you some irrelevant story, you can add “… und in China ist ein Sack Reis umgefallen.” (”… and a bag full of rice has fallen over in China.”) to make it clear in a very blunt way
that you are not at all interested in stories like this.
Would you believe me if i told you that it’s a German tradition on New Year’s Eve to watch a British black and white sketch from the sixties that’s entirely in English and deals with an old rich woman celebrating her 90th birthday while her butler impersonates her dead friends and gets more and more drunk throughout the sketch, with the highlight being the multiple times said butler stumbles over the head of their stuffed tiger carpet? And also that this sketch is not almost completely unknown in its home and that the writer and star of that sketch actually really hated the Germans?
exactly. there’s nothing there. not a statue. not a plaque. nothing.
[drives over hitler’s death site]
Bloody amazing.
And you know what’s right next to it?
That’s right, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden, which translates to the Memorial for the murdered jews.
So if you wanna go have a look at the monument commemorating the victims of Hitler’s regime, you can park your car right on the spot he died and walk there.
GO GERMANY FOR OWNING UP TO WHAT THEY DID AND TAKING THE STEPS TO STOP IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN.
first time in forever that i’m proud of my country
I have a friend from Germany who personally admits their fault and apologizes anytime it’s brought up. She’s like yeah, we fucked up. Mind you we’re 21. She personally had nothing to do with it, and still she apologizes.
compare that to white americans who respond with “what about black on black crime?” and “not my fault, i didn’t do anything” and, my personal favorite “shut up nigger…”
A map of about every primary passenger railway in the USA for 2016, commuter rail included.
Surely there are more trains lines about than this ?!
Nope. We’re animals. I’ve only trailed by train twice in the U.S., and it was the same line, once DC to Philadelphia, and once DC to NYC for work once I discovered the train was two hours faster than flying and cabbing back into NYC.
I do forget though that you guys fly everywhere and trains might not be practical. I live on an island the size of one of your states !
Fun fact: the busiest railway station in America (Penn Station in New York City) gets fewer passengers than Liverpool Central.
I knew the US had a much less extensive rail infrastructure than us, but bloody hell, the fact that there are ENTIRE STATES that literally don’t have passenger rail is madness.
I’d still love to travel on it some time, mind.
Just imagine the jobs you could create by building a decent railway system!
Behold, the end result of graft and political corruption.
I had no idea most of the US had no regional lines? Like, I live in tiny little MA with one of those clusters of red. Does everybody else have to DRIVE???
yes. we drive. and it’s terrible.
D: This is actually distressing.
to be fair some cities do have good bus systems
but….yeah.
what the shuddering fuck? That’s IT?!
actually we used to have a lot more, but as far as i’m aware i’m pretty sure the car companies bought a lot of railways and then destroyed them to force people to buy cars
Also some of those states that don’t have rails also have more cows than people.
Also our trains are slow and it’s usually much faster to drive than to take a train. We don’t have those speed rail things.
60 year old historian Martin Bühler (who identified himself to the press, I do not identify activists without consent) appears to ‘photobomb’ a lot of media images of the G20 in Hamburg. In reality he is a long time observer documenting police brutality. In Hamburg he chose to cultivate the most non-activist ‘white bystander in a suit with a bike’ look he could manage and casually walked in front of police. As police slowed down or interrupted attacks and waited for the ‘bystander’ to get out of the way (being caught on camera trashing what look like bystanders is bad press after all), activists had time to regroup or retreat.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
