Xtranormal offers cartoon versions of historical figures, so the trailer features Napoleon Bonaparte himself who is not at all amused about El Carnicero, since the titular villain is one of his officers.

I’ve also edited the Silencer trailer, since I wasn’t happy with the automatic camera positions. If you want to watch the trailers again, I also have a new page for videos and book trailers.

I’m really happy with how those films turned out, so check them out behind the cut:

Napoleon Bonaparte is not amused about El Carnicero
by: CoraBuhlert

Who is the Silencer?
by: CoraBuhlert

My hometown paper Weser Kurier ran a semi-critical article about Gauck and his positions today.

Regular commenter Laran points out this post on the blog of the International University Karlshochschule in Karlsruhe, in which the author wonders whether some or all of Gauck’s problematic utterances have been taken out of context.

Writer and politician Jutta Ditfurth explains her issues with Gauck’s candidacy in Rote Fahne (Red Flag), the magazine of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, a left splinter party which claims to pursue true Socialism (unlike all of the other left/Socialist parties). The magazine is not exactly an unbiased source for anything, but Jutta Ditfurth was a highly respected politician in the 1980s and founding member of the Green Party (which supports Gauck). She left in the 1990s, when the Green Party started deserting its original positions and began supporting wars and welfare cuts.

Deutsch-Türkische Nachrichten (German Turkish News – name says it all, really) has a very measured article about the reaction to the Gauck candidacy in the German Turkish community. The German Turkish community supported Christian Wulff, because Wulff called Islam a normal part of Germany and because he vehemently spoke out in support of the victims of a recently revealed Neo-Nazi terror group (turned out that this group had been murdering immigrants, among them several Turkish small business owners, for years and the authorities knew nothing and blamed the victims – Spiegel Online has plenty of articles about the whole nasty case). They are uncertain about Gauck, because he spoke out in support of Thilo Sarrazin (racist ex-politician who believes that muslim immigrants are destroying Germany) and remained silent on the subject of the Neo-Nazi murders and is from Rostock-Lichtenhagen, a hotbed of Neo-Nazi activities in East Germany (which doesn’t mean anything – plenty of people live in Lichtenhagen who are not Neo-Nazis). On the other hand Gauck is in favour of Turkey joining the European Union (which I for one didn’t know).

Regarding the 10 known victims of the Neo-Nazi terror group (mainly Turkish and Greek small business owners, but also a female police officer), Gauck has allegedly spoken out against the official memorial service for the victims, because they were all killed several years ago and therefore the time for a memorial is past. In contrast, the official memorial service was very important to former president Christian Wulff, so important that he explicitly expressed his regrets about not being able to attend the event and urged the government to go ahead with the service without him in his resignation statement.

According to the Katholische Nachrichten (Catholic News – name says it all… again) the Catholic church, at least as represented by the archbishop of Bamberg, is satisfied with the candidacy of the former Lutheran priest Gauck, because Gauck is in favour of the ethical and moral renewal of Germany, a goal for which the archbishop plans to pray. Now religious figures of any sort talking about “ethical and moral renewal” always makes me ill, because ethics and morals usually means repression of women and gays and a return to the dark days of the 1950s. But the comments are interesting, because plenty of the commenters have decided that Gauck does not measure up to their idea of a moral life, because he left but never divorced his first wife and has been cohabitating with his current partner for twelve years without either divorcing his wife or marrying the new partner. Now Gauck’s personal life is not an issue for me – if we only accepted longterm and happily married politicians, we would still be ruled by 90-something year old Helmut Schmidt, because none of the others measure up. But I know that Gauck’s personal life is a problem for many older people – it’s my mother’s main argument against him, for example.

Die Zeit, a politically moderate national paper, does list the various complaints against Gauck, but debunks them with “well, that only bothers those people over there” (Leftists, Occupy activists, the unemployed, hysterical internet freedom activists) and seems to rejoice in the fact Gauck will be an “uncomfortable president for citizens and parties” and a “conservative troublemaker”. Sorry, but I for one have had enough of uncomfortable conservative troublemakers. I couldn’t stand the last president who matched that profile either.

The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, a regional paper from Halle in Sachsen-Anhalt in former East Germany, reports about the aborted non-representative internet poll on the website of the TV and radio network MDR. I linked to a screenshot in yesterday’s linkdump. The reason given by the MDR for taking down the poll is that they feared the poll had been manipulated. I suspect the reason for the unwanted result is far simpler. Some Gauck opponents noticed the poll and started tweeting and urging their followers the vote against Gauck, hence the No votes started to explode. Don’t underestimate the power of the internet.

The Nordbayerischer Kurier, a regional paper from Bayreuth in Bavaria, reports about a possible counter candidate against Gauck supported by the Pirate Party and potentially Left Party, namely comedian Georg Schramm. However, so far nobody knows whether Schramm, who is likely very baffled to find himself a potential head of state (I know I would be), actually wants the job. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Schramm was reluctant to accept the candidacy, particularly considering what happened to actor Peter Sodann who was the Left Party’s presidential candidate in 2009. Peter Sodann had planned to run for German parliament as a member of the Left Party in 2005 and withdrew his candidacy, when the TV network ARD (a public and license fee financed station like the BBC in Britain) threatened to suspend Sodann from his starring role in the non-political crime show Tatort, because a parliamentary candidate playing a cop on TV apparently constitutes an illegal political ad campaign. Interestingly, no one had any issues with politically active actors of other parties.

Because I wasn’t sure whether my aphthous ulcer would still impede my speaking abilities, I preordered a DVD player and watched a movie with my students today. The kids have been well behaved the past few weeks and they’re not due to write a test anytime soon, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t get to watch a movie as a treat.

By popular demand, we watched Jurassic Park III, because parts one and two were too long to fit into the 90 minute, two lesson window.

I had seen all three Jurassic Park films at some point, but they all blur together somehow, because frankly they all have the same plot. But what struck me about watching this one again was how it hits absolutely every movie cliché in the book. Tea Leonie’s character, the only female character with any significant screentime in the whole film, is too stupid to live, annoying and screams all the time. I actually used her as an example to explain the concept of the “scream queen” in old B-movies to my students. And while I used to think that Aliens is one of the very few movies where “The black guy always dies first in action and SF movies” actually applies (plenty of black characters die in such films, but they’re rarely the first to go. Mostly, they die via noble sacrifice in the last third of the film), I was clearly wrong, because Jurassic Park III is a textbook example of a film where the lone black character is gobbled up ten minutes into the movie, so they can make a lame joke about a satellite phone ringing in the stomach of a dinosaur (and a pile of dinosaur shit later on).

The kids were completely enraptured (or maybe en-raptored) by the film, but I still found the race and gender politics grating. Indeed, halfway through the film I started cheering for the pterodactyls to eat the cast, but then I’ve always had a soft spot for Torchwood‘s Myfanwy. Indeed, I have the theory that every pterodactyl who has ever appeared in any movie is actually the same pterodactyl. Hence, Myfanwy has had a long and varied career in the film business including parts in the original King Kong, Citizen Kane (there are briefly glimpsed pterodactyls in the background due to reused footage from King Kong), the Jurassic Park series, Torchwood, Primeval (she was a busy pterodactyl that year) and dozens of other films and shows.

In other news, the 2011 Nebula Award nominations have been announced today.

It looks like a good spate of nominees to me. The gender mix is balanced with women nominated in every category except Best Dramatic Presentation. I see several writers of colour nominated as well.

In the Best Novel category, the only “Huh?” nomination is the Jack McDevitt novel. But then Jack McDevitt is an author I have never read and whose name I only notice on awards shortlists, so I can’t really comment. The other four have all gotten a lot of buzz and excellent reviews last year, even though one of them wasn’t to my taste at all. I guess my favourite in this category would be Among Others by Jo Walton.

I haven’t read many of the nominated short stories, novelettes and novellas, but it seems to be a nice mix of rather traditional hard science fiction and more lyrical slipstream or magical realist work.

Finally, I’m pleased to see some love for the wonderful but vastly underrated Attack the Block in the Best Dramatic Presentation category. Though it will probably be creamed by Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife (which was a great Doctor Who episode, even though I have officially given up on the show) and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Though it will be interesting to see whether Scorsese can win against Neil Gaiman and the Doctor. I don’t think the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris has a whole lot of chances here, because the SFF community doesn’t seem to overlap with Woody Allen’s fandom (even though Allen has made some fine SFF films like Purple Rose of Cairo or Sleeper). On the other hand, Allen did rob Star Wars of its well deserved Oscar with Annie Hall, a silly film about neurotic people in Manhattan.

I should perhaps say that at least part of the reason why I think Gauck is the wrong man for the job is purely visceral dislike. Something about Gauck has rubbed me the wrong way since he was head of the Stasi file archive back in the 1990s. I simply find the man unsympathetic. But then I find plenty of politicians unsympathetic and still think that they do a good job (secretary of finance Wolfgang Schäuble would be one example). However, there are good reasons why Gauck actually is the wrong person for the job. The links below give some of them:

The Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the major German daily newspapers, reports about various groups and individuals who oppose Gauck’s candidacy. This includes several members of the Green Party which is one of the four parties nominating Gauck.

At the leftwing newspaper tageszeitung a.k.a. taz, columnist Deniz Yürcel offers his opinion on Joachim Gauck and calls him a “smelly boot”. What I find particularly interesting about this column is what Yürcel writes about Gauck’s East German civil rights hero past, namely that Gauck only joined the East German opposition shortly before the fall of the Wall, which matches my memory that I didn’t hear his name back in the fall of 1989. I’d like to find a more reliable source about this, though.

The Junge Welt, a Communist newspaper which is actually one of the few surviving East German papers, is naturally opposed to Gauck’s candidacy. The photo accompanying the article is interesting, since it shows Joachim Gauck standing between investment banker Carsten Maschmeyer and his wife, actress Veronica Ferres at some public event. Maschmeyer was one of the wealthy friends whose favours got former president Christian Wulff in trouble. Not that this means a whole lot, Maschmeyer and Ferres attend plenty of glamour events, so it’s probably difficult not to be photographed with them.

Nachdenkseiten, one of the most respected German political blogs, explains how the right-wing media conglomerate Axel Springer AG pushed Gauck’s candidacy.

Clemens Heni, a political scientist and anti-Semitism scholar, worries about Gauck’s equating Communist East Germany with the Third Reich and thus relativizing the holocaust. Interesting about this post is that – at least based on a brief glimpse at his blog – Clemens Heni is not leftwing.

F!XMBR points out that Gauck seemed very eager to be nominated as a presidential candidate and may have exerted pressure on Angela Merkel.

The Metronaut blog offers good reasons against Gauck.

The blog Exportabel thinks that Gauck’s nomination was a very bad decision.

monopoli, a political blog written by an East German, sums up the case against Gauck’s candidacy. Of particular interest given Gauck’s reputation as an East German civil rights hero and Stasi victim turned Stasi hunter is the article by Peter Michael Diestel, last secretary of the interior of the GDR, excerpted at the end.

And just because it’s so important, here is the article again in its entirety. It’s old and was originally published in 2000, but extremely interesting given the current situation.

The MDR, a TV and radio network serving parts of former East Germany ran a poll about Joachim Gauck on its website and took it down, when the result was not as expected. Here is a screenshot (not mine). Of course, these online polls are in no way representative and there is the possibility that Gauck opponents encouraged people to vote. Nonetheless, the result is interesting and far different from the official polls which claim that approx. 69 percent of Germans are in favour of Gauck.

Here is a great political cartoon about how we ended up with Joachim Gauck as presidential candidate.

The German Pirate Party has collected a whole lot of links on Gauck and his problematic statements.

Radio Utopie has a collection of problematic statements made by Joachim Gauck in the past.

And just to be fair, the Süddeutsche Zeitung addresses the various problematic utterances by Gauck and attempts to explain what Gauck really said.

What annoys me most about this and many other German presidential elections – apart from the fact that the population is not allowed to elect its own head of state – is the lack of other candidates. I hated this even as a young girl, when Richard von Weizäcker (a very good president in retrospect) was nominated in 1984 and memorial coins were already being minted before Weizäcker had even been elected, even though there was another candidate, Luise Rinser, a writer nominated by the Green Party (most likely, she would have been a good choice as well). I saw those memorial coins advertised somewhere and got angry and asked, “Why? The guy hasn’t even been elected yet. That woman might win after all.” – “She has no chance, dear”, was the answer I got. This made me angry then and it still annoys me today. Because an election where there is only one candidate is not exactly democratic.

The Left Party may yet nominate its own candidate, like they did with actor Peter Sodann in 2009 (and Sodann would likely have made a fine president). And the Pirate Party, which has a whopping two delegates in the parliamentary assembly electing the president, is also looking for a candidate of its own. Suggestions include comedian Georg Schramm, Hans Jürgen Papier, former president of the German supreme court, and Götz Werner, owner of a drugstore chain and in favour of granting a basic income to all citizens.

The New York Times tells the fascinating story of Dolores Hart, a Hollywood starlet in the late 1950s and early 1960s who starred in several films with Elvis and then left Hollywood to become a nun. Dolores Hart will be returning to Hollywood for the Academy Awards, where she took part as a presenter in 1959, because a documentary about her life is nominated as Best Documentary.

Language Log wonders why the system of irregular verbs in the English language is so chaotic that even journalists and native speakers get fairly common words like sing, sang, sung wrong. My students will be relieved that even native speakers have problems with irregular verbs. And I must confess that I sometimes look up rarer verbs like “to moonlight” (Regular or does it follow the light, lit, lit convention?) or “to sneak”. Still, English is pretty harmless as opposed to the irrgular (and regular) verbs that other languages fling at their speakers.

At the Book View Café, Sherwood Smith has a great post about bad writing advice.

The Stoker Award nominations have been announced. I haven’t even heard of most of the nominated books and many of the nominated writers. But then, the horror side of SFF has never been my genre. I did write down the titles of two of the non-fiction nominees, though, because they might just come in useful for the PhD.

At Salon, Michal Lemberger explains why she is through with Downton Abbey. So even Americans are getting inpatient with the inexplicably popular dull as dishwater Edwardian/WWI soap now. Though the weird trend towards reheated 1970s TV about the not too distant past continues, because the BBC broadcasts a new series of Upstairs, Downstairs set just before World War II. “Why, for goodness’ sake?” is the big question here. Not that I am averse to Keeley Hawes in full 1930s get-up, but didn’t we watch all of that already in the 1970s?

However, sometimes you do have to say something. For example, when four of five parties in the German parliament collectively loose their minds.

Warning: German politics under the cut.

So yes, Christian Wulff was obviously the wrong candidate, though I wish someone would have found that out before the man managed to get himself elected as minister president of Niedersachsen twice (not by me). And he actually made a decent president, before he descended into a banal scandal of low interest home loans and free of charge Skodas.

And now Joachim Gauck, former Lutheran pastor and East German civil rights activist, who already ran against Christian Wulff two years ago, is most likely the next German president, unless someone finds out he got a free of charge Skoda from someone.

Now I have said before that I think Gauck is not the right person for the office. The German president is basically a figurehead with very little political power. He or she must be a uniter and integrater, not a divider. And IMO the worst presidents – apart from the guy with a Nazi past, of course – were those who didn’t understand what their job was and who made divisive political statements. Christian Wulff, for all his faults, at least tried to be a uniter.

Gauck, however, is a divider and has never been anything else. He never really managed to let go off his past in East Germany and doesn’t let anybody else forget either. He divided 16 million East Germans into evil Communists and Stasi agents and poor victims with nothing inbetween. I kind of doubt that those East Germans who were not persecuted by the state will be very happy with a president who lumps them in with Stasi informers. Never mind that nominating Gauck as a presidential candidate means that the Left Party, which was democratically elected into various state parliaments and the German parliament, cannot possibly vote for him, since he think their party is criminal and a threat to democracy (The Left Party is the successor of the East German Socialist party, but many of its members today are West Germans or people in their twenties and thirties, i.e. too young to have been involved in the old East German regime). Gauck also equates Communist East Germany with the Third Reich and views both as equally evil and repressive systems, which is frankly an insult to all victims of the Third Reich (The GDR was repressive but it was no Third Reich). Gauck has spoken out against the opening of talks with the GDR in the early 1970s, which was what started making little cracks in the iron curtain. Gauck also spoke out against the Occupy movement at a time when the Occupy movement had some 80 percent public approval, because he is completely in favour of Capitalism, as unfettered as possible. Gauck is in favour of continuing the war in Afghanistan, while the overwhelming majority of the population opposes the war. Gauck supported the disgusting racist Thilo Sarrazin, a local Berlin politician who wrote a book about how those nasty muslims were outbreeding good Germans, so the 3 to 5 million muslims in Germany will not be particularly pleased with a president who’d rather see them gone. Gauck is still in favour of nuclear power and thinks that the shut down of nuclear power stations is silly and sentimental, while the overwhelming majority of Germans is against nuclear power. Gauck is in favour of cutting welfare and social services. Oh yes, and apparently he once stated that he thinks accepting the current border with Poland (Germany used to be a lot bigger before WWII) was a mistake, which is a sentiment usually only found among the far right.

In short, Gauck is your candidate, unless you are:

• poor and on welfare
• politically left in any way
• a member of the Left Party
• opposed to nuclear power
• opposed to the Afghanistan war
• a member or supporter of the Occupy movement
• a protester against the Stuttgart 21 project (hugely expensive and highly controversial train station in Stuttgart), because Gauck doesn’t like those protesters either
• an immigrant, particularly a muslim immigrant
• a former East German who got along with the system
• anybody who ever held any official government job in the GDR
• anybody whose name is in the Stasi files as anything other than a clear observation target
• a West German who doesn’t like two East Germans in charge of the country
• an atheist, Catholic, Muslim, Jew or believer of any other faith who is not happy with a former Lutheran pastor as president

That’s a whole lot of people whom Gauck does not represent. And unless he drastically changes his tone upon becoming president and tries to be a uniter (hey, it happens), he will likely piss off large swathes of the people he is supposed to represent.

Not that it really matters whether Gauck has widespread public support or not, since the German people do not elect their president directly (Deutsche Welle has an explanation of how the process works).  In 1949, it was decided that we could not be entrusted with the responsibility of electing our own head of state, because our grandparents elected Paul von Hindenburg, former Prussian general and name giver for the famous Zeppelin, back in 1925 and Hindenburg then went on, at the age of 84 and likely in the grip of dementia, to name Adolf Hitler chancellor and sign many early acts expanding Hitler’s power and thus facilitated the rise of the Third Reich. So yeah, Hindenburg was obviously the wrong person for the job. But it’s not as if the choices our political representatives made since 1949 have been that much better.

The media seems to be in favour of Gauck (and frankly, the role of the media in the Wulff resignation and Gauck nomination was hugely problematic – who died and made Bild supreme ruler?) and shows polls which are in favour of him as well. And perhaps Gauck is the right candidate for a certain Christian, conservative and neo-liberal (in the European sense) demographic. Plus, his past as a civil rights hero in East Germany gives him an automatic moral authority in the eyes of many, though I personally cannot recall hearing his name in the fall of 1989 (most of the actual heroes of 1989 never had political careers).  I only became aware of him later, when he took over the Stasi file archive (which was badly handled IMO, but that’s not necessarily his fault). Gauck, however, never moved on from his civil rights hero past and is still stuck back in 1990, while the rest of the world has moved on. An 18-year-old today wasn’t even born in 1989 and couldn’t care less about the GDR and the Stasi. But they do care about ACTA, nuclear power and the Occupy movement.

When Gauck ran the first time for president in 2010, I wondered why the Socialist party SPD presented him as their candidate, because Gauck was always a conservative in my eyes. And that’s exactly what he is. A 72-year-old Christian conservative who is mired in the past and out of touch with large swathes of the people he is supposed to represent. Really, couldn’t they have found anybody better?

Anyway, you don’t just have to take my word for it, so here are a couple of reactions against Gauck’s candidacy from around the web:

The Austrian paper Der Standard reports about anti Gauck sentiment as expressed on the internet. Of course, we all know how most older politicians feel about the internet.

This article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung from back in 2010 lays out in detail why Gauck always was a divisive figure. Lots of hugely problematic stuff in there that I didn’t know. Of particular interest is the fact that the author was a member of the East German civil rights movement herself back in 1989.

The political blog Spiegelfechter calls Gauck out on his stance against welfare and social security and wonder how a pastor of all people can have so little empathy with the poor. In another post, Spiegelfechter wonders how the SPD and the Green Party could push an explicit conservative like Gauck in 2010 to embarrass Angela Merkel and thus end up with a president who is pretty much diametrically opposed to most goals of both parties.

Nachdenkseiten, another excellent German political blog, can understand Gauck’s positions with regard to his life story, but still feels that he is too mired in the past to be an effective president today.

Jakob Jung states that Gauck is being presented as the candidate for every party (except the Left Party), but that he still is out of touch with large parts of the population.

Machtelite, yet another political blog with a left bend, reminds us of Gauck’s affiliation with questionable, neo-liberal think tanks.

Publikative, an anti-fascist blog, criticizes that Gauck signed a declaration which equates Communism with Nationalsocialism.

Nics Bloghaus wonders why all presidents and presidential candidates, actual or potential, so far have been very outspoken Christians and whether it’s not time for a candidate who won’t alienate atheists and members of other religions than Christianity.

Here is an Gauck, no thanks blog and a Gauk, no thanks Facebook group.

One drug that allegedly helps against aphthous ulcers is Thalidomide a.k.a. Contergan. I’m almost desperate enough to take that stuff, though doubt that I’d ever get a prescription.

Tonight the Berlin film festival ended with the awards ceremony. The Golden Bear went to an Italian film called Cesare deve morire (Caesar must die) by two extremely likable Italian brothers in their 80s. This film was barely mentioned in all of the festival reporting so far, which continues the tradition that the film that eventually wins the Golden Bear is rarely the highly touted media favourite. Indeed, this year’s highly touted media favourite – yet another East German Stasi drama called Barbara – only won a Silver Bear for best direction, a classic consolation prize.

The good thing about the Berlin film festival is that offbeat films from non-traditional film countries have a chance to win. We’ve had one of those wins this year, when the Silver Bear for Best Actress went to 15-year-old Congolese actress (at least I think she’s Congolese – neither IMDB nor the Berlinale website gives her nationality) Rachel Mwanza for her performance in Rebelle, a drama about child soldiers.

Indiewire has a nice article in English and overview of all winners, including the short film categories, children’s film categories and the Teddy awards for GLBT cinema.

I should probably say something about the Christian Wulff resignation, but I don’t feel like discussing the whole issue in depth, so here’s just a short summary.

I have never been a particular fan of Wulff and I live in Niedersachsen, the country where he was minister president from 2003 to 2010. Nonetheless, I think he actually made a decent president, one who understood that his job is to shake hands and further integration and unity, not to make divisive political statements, something that many of his predecessor did not get. Plus, his admission that Islam is a part of Germany was long overdue. Calling the Pope out on the Catholic church’s stand on divorced couples was another highlight (Wulff is Catholic and divorced).

What also strikes me is how unremarkable this whole scandal really is. A low interest loan for a unremarkable single family home, a Skoda provided free of charge, a holiday on the island of Sylt paid for by a film producer whose main outputs are ad clips, invitations to a most likely very dull event called North South Dialogue, free clothing for Wulff’s wife Bettina – it’s all so petit bourgeois and pedestrian. If this had been a proper scandal, the house would have been a giant villa, the car a Ferrari, the holiday an orgy with five supermodels in the Caribbean. But to be forced to resign over a Skoda and a home loan, that’s just so anticlimactic. Never mind that Wulff’s salary should be high enough that he shouldn’t have a problem getting a home loan and should well be able to pay for a bloody Skoda. As for the free clothing, does anybody believe that Carla Bruni buys her own clothes? The wife of a head of state is a showcase for the local garment industry.

I’m not too happy about the role of the media either, since the Wulff scandal was very much media driven and largely initiated by the tabloid newspaper Bild after Wulff had a fall-out with Bild‘s editor in chief. Of course, that’s partly Wulff’s own fault, since he was the one who got into bed with Bild in the first place to smooth over the effects his divorce and remarriage to a younger woman might have on his political ambitions. He should have known what sort of rag Bild is.

So now he’s resigned and that was really the best thing he could do in this situation. Though we should not forget that some of Wulff’s predecessors were involved in worse scandals, including one who was a former member of the Nazi party and involved in death sentences at military tribunals in WWII. They named a bridge in Bremen after that former president, because he was born here. No one calls the bridge by that name – it’s Strawberry Bridge to all locals.

Besides, I wonder why nobody was ever bothered by those scandals when Wulff was still minister president of Niedersachsen, at the time when those scandals actually occurred. If Wulff had been forced out then, we would have reelections and perhaps a better government in Niedersachsen (though Niedersachsen is cursed with awful politicians, regardless of political orientation).

As for his successor, most of the potential candidates named so far would be worse than Wulff IMO and I wasn’t a fan of his to begin with. I wasn’t in favour of Joachim Gauck the first time around (he’s too divisive and stuck in the past IMO) and his anti Occupy statements make him even less of a suitable candidate now. The rest of the candidate roster includes one politician I absolutely hate and with good reason, too, and a couple of people who would send the wrong message. There are political and public figures who would make good presidents IMO, but their names are not on the list. And the best I can say about any of the candidates named so far is “He or she would be tolerable”.

Finally for something cool: The Composites is a Tumblr site trying to recreate the appearance of famous literary characters using police sketch composite software.

Check it out below the cut:

Who is the Silencer?
by: CoraBuhlert

I get aphthous ulcers from time to time and usually I can manage them pretty well. This one, however, is not just inconveniently located but also extremely painful and makes eating or drinking difficult, because pretty much everything irritates the damn thing. It doesn’t respond to any of the usual remedies either, so all I can do is smear numbing gel on the thing, which gives me maybe twenty minutes of relief.

So instead of a longer post (because I’m really not in the mood), here is a neat link:

The Awl has a great article on romance novels, particularly vintage category romances, as well as the stigma still attached to romance readers and writers. Found via The Passive Voice.

Anyway, because the noisy and annoying students gave me one hell of a headache, here are some links, largely romance related, because the media always trots out the love, relationship and romance subjects around Valentine’s Day:

At the Guardian, there is a mini-war about chick lit going on, kicked off by Decca Aitkenhead’s condescending profile of/interview with Sophie Kinsella. The point of the whole interview is basically, “You went to Oxford and are a smart woman, so why do you write this trash?”

Jenny Geras, editor at Pan MacMillan, responds here and says that the main problem with chick lit is the unfortunate name and the fact that it is primarily written by and for women and thus falls victim of what Joanna Russ called “the double standard of content”, i.e. men’s concerns are important, women’s concerns are trivial.

The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin has a good post about romance subplots in speculative fiction. The examples he gives are not the ones I would have chosen, but his points are nonetheless interesting.

Business Week has an interesting article about the cover photographers for Harlequin’s category romances.

Jim C. Hines discusses the link and whether there is one between the Church of Scientology and Writers of the Future. I never submitted to Writers of the Future precisely because of the link with the Scientology. For in Germany any sort of connection to Scientology can have disastrous career consequences, particularly if you work in education. And that’s a risk I’d rather not run.