UFOs over Bremen and cocaine at the supermarket: This day in WTF? news

The first full January week of 2014 seems to be shaping up into a period for WTF? news items.

For starters, Bremen experienced an UFO incident on Monday evening, when a flying mystery object was spotted by the air traffic controllers at Bremen airport as well as by a police helicopter. A Lufthansa flight from Munich was diverted to Hannover, another Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt/Main was cancelled and the landing of an Air France flight from Paris was delayed, all because of the UFO.

Of course, speculations are running high. The most likely suspects are some kind of drone, a balloon, an ultralight aircraft or even a helicopter, though this article from the normally respectable (for a Springer paper) Welt mentions aliens, though the bulk of the article claims it was a radar disturbance.

The police is investigating the incident as a “dangerous disturbance of the air traffic”, though the spokewoman of the Bremen police said half-jokingly on TV that “if it was aliens, they will be difficult to prosecute.”

BTW, my first reaction to the news was, “Crap! Finally, there is an UFO sighting in Bremen and I miss it.” Because as a teenager I was rather UFO obsessed and always hoped to see a UFO one day.

Though I may still get my chance, for yesterday’s incident wasn’t the only UFO sighting in Germany this year. Because on Sunday, another UFO was spotted in the East German village of Neumarkt near the town of Zwickau and that one even landed. Alas, when the police investigated the landing site, they only found a model Zeppelin, which had escaped its owner and landed when it ran out of fuel.

***

People throughout Europe as well as in the US and Australia have come to associate the discount supermarket chain Aldi with low prices, good quality and special offers on pretty much every product under the sun.

However, on Tuesday a few Aldi stores in Berlin and Brandenburg had a very special offer, because banana crates delivered to the stores were found to contain 140 kilograms of cocaine. Luckily, Aldi employees found the cocaine and notified the police before the bananas could reach the public.

The police is investigating and was able to trace the banana crates to the port of Hamburg and beyond that to Columbia. Most likely, there was a mix-up and somewhere, the world’s least competent drug smuggler just found himself stuck with a bunch of banana crates and is wondering how the hell to explain losing 140 kilograms of cocaine to his bosses. As the Berlin police spokesman said with barely disguised glee, “Someone has got a big problem now.”

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

First Linkdump of the new year

First of all, WordPress has released a neat annual report for this blog. You can see it here.

Frank Zubek, another contributor to the charity anthology Something for the Journey, in which I have a story, has been interviewed at Fabulosity Reads and talks a bit about the anthology and how it came about.

At The Book Smugglers, Foz Meadows writes about female beauty and its problematic role in popular culture. Foz Meadows is definitely on my nomination list for this year’s best fan writer Hugo BTW.

At A Trick of Light, Sunny Moraine writes about how difficult it is to persuade SF readers to pick up her novel Line and Orbit, because it has a strong same-sex romance plot to go with the SF. Found via Radish Reviews.

Ann Leckie has a great rebuttal to the whole anti-nostalgic novelty mania that reigns in certain quarters of the science fiction community (where anything that even vaguely sounds like it might harken back to earlier SF is vehemently rejected – see last year’s Hugo nominee debate or the “SF is exhausted” debate of 2012, for example) and points out that every writer must forge their own path and that sometimes, just being allowed into a genre clubhouse you or people like you were traditionally excluded from can be enough. BTW, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice will very likely end up on my Hugo nomination list as well.

Posted in Books, Links | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Year 2014 and photos of Teufelsmoor

I hope you’ve all reached 2014 safely.

I’ve never been much of a New Year’s person and this year, I was not happy at all on New Year’s Night for a variety of reasons and in fact, I would have preferred to just stay at home and write or watch a DVD (since TV is crap on New Year’s Night anyway). Alas, I had already made arrangements to go out for dinner at a local Italian restaurant on New Year’s Eve. They had two set menus. The fish menu, which I had, consisted of bruschetta, sole with truffle pine kernel sauce (which actually contained more than a homeopathic dose of truffles) and panna cotta, all of which was delicious. Afterwards, we shot off the obligatory fireworks, even though one rocket got stuck and failed to launch and thus exploded while still sitting in a flower bed. Not recommended, though no one suffered worse than a minor shock.

On New Year’s Day, we always visit some friends in the Teufelsmoor region. We had lunch at a very good Greek restaurant and afterwards coffee or respectively tea at our friends’ place in the middle of Teufelsmoor. For lunch I had baked feta cheese with onions and chilli peppers, followed by baked trout with vegetables and Greek rice (yeah, I really like fish).

Teufelsmoor (Devil’s Moor) is a boggy moorland region just North of Bremen. Teufelsmoor was colonized in the 18th century and is nowadays mostly farmland for raising livestock, since the area is too wet for growing anything. There also was a lot of peat cutting well into the second half of the 20th century, but that has slowed down a lot. In the late 19th century, the Teufelsmoor region also became home to the artist colony of Worpswede, where several painters of landscapes and rural scenes gathered. The most famous among them are Heinrich Vogler, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Modersohn, Fritz Mackensen, Fritz Overbeck, Carl Vinnen and Hans am Ende, who captured the distinctive Teufelsmoor landscape in many of their works. Picture postcards of several Worpswede painters (Heinrich Vogeler, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Carl Vinnen, to be precise) adorned the walls of my student pad in London BTW, probably a form of homesickness.

New Year’s Day was a glorious clear day and so I took my camera along to capture some landscape shots of Teufelsmoor as well as some photos of our friends, but I’ll spare you those. Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Last Linkdump of the Year

At Locus Online, Kameron Hurley has a great post about how focussing exclusively on all the big ideas and cool worldbuilding might not be the best way to sell your SF or fantasy novel to a general audience and that maybe focussing on the characters and/or plot might be a better idea.

Indie SF author Jack Lusted replies to and agrees with Kameron Hurley on his blog.

I am inclined to agree with her as well, if only because I am far more interested in the characters than in big ideas and cool worldbuilding as well – and I am a longtime SFF reader. Take for example, this explanation by Charles Stross about the background of his duology Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. Now I read both books ages ago and disliked them a lot, because while they had some really neat ideas, the characters were thinner than cardboard and their supposed emotions did not make any sense. If I’d read this explanation before I tried reading the actual books, I’d have known not to bother, because the explanation makes it clear that the books were all about the big ideas (half of which I couldn’t even recall a few years later) and that the characters were an afterthought.

Meanwhile, at Fantasy Fraction, Leo Elijah Cristea weighs in on the ever popular subject of women in SFF. And for the record, is it too much to hope that 2014 will pass without a race- or genderfail incident? Yeah, I guess I just answered my own question.

For those who still aren’t aware that these things happen, Kelly Barnhill offers yet more examples of the crap women get for daring to speak up on the internet, particularly on feminism related issues. In this case, Kelly Barnhill got crap for daring to criticize a children’s movie called Mars needs Moms for perpetuating some nasty misogynist tropes.

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on whether Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol was influenced by the writings of female textile mill workers from Lowell, Massachusetts. Found via Jay Lake.

Finally, here is a bit of cuteness: Photos and a video of the newborn icebear baby in Bremerhaven’s Zoo by the Sea

Posted in Books, Links | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

In the Misty Winter Woods

Since the days between the years are spent mostly cooped up inside with the occasional shopping excursion, I used one afternoon to go hiking in the Westermark woods near Syke (the same spot where the photos in this, this, this and this post were taken). We didn’t have snow this time around, but it was one of those perpetually foggy days, so the woods had a dreamy, spooky quality, which I tried to capture with my camera.

Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Christmas 2013

First of all, my short holiday romance Christmas Gifts is currently featured at the Short Story Symposium, so drop by to read an excerpt.

And just in case you’ve been wondering about the reading order of the Silencer series, wonder no more, because this post over at the Pegasus Pulp blog has all the answers.

Finally, I promised you Christmas photos and a Christmas update, so here they are:

Apart from some really stormy and wet weather raging outside, our Christmas was largely peaceful. We had pork curry for lunch on Christmas Day and coq au vin with Brussels sprouts for lunch on Boxing Day plus Christmas pudding and mincemeat tarts for coffee (and this time around, my Dad did not manage to incinerate them). My uncle visited us for lunch on Christmas Day and a neighbour of my parents dropped by for coffee one afternoon.

Unfortunately, I was tired for much of the holidays, since my body seemed to be fighting off a cold. Though I did manage to get some writing done and finished a short story as well as a novelette, so expect more new releases soon.

Talking of which, you may remember that I have a story in a charity anthology called Something for the Journey. Up to now, Something for the Journey was only available in e-book form, but now you can also purchase the anthology in paperback form at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon India, Amazon Japan, Amazon Mexico and Amazon Brazil, so grab yourself a print copy. As mentioned before, all proceeds go to charity and benefit a children’s hospital in Bristol.

And now for some photos: Continue reading

Posted in General, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Foggy Christmas Morning

More Christmas pictures coming tomorrow, but for now enjoy this dreamy shot of a foggy Boxing Day morning:

Foggy Christmas morning

A foggy Christmas morning with streetlight and Christmas lights across the road.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Christmas Eve 2013

Banner Merry Christmas

It’s a wet, stormy and way too mild Holy Night here in North Germany. At least we’re not having any power failures unlike the people in France and the UK as well as in the German town of Kleve, probably best known because Anne of Cleves, fourth wife of Henry VIII, hailed from there.

I’m still at my parents. We had filet of hare with red cabbage and apple cranberry sauce for lunch, red herring salad (which contains dozens of other ingredients and three salted herrings in one big bowl) and my crab rangoon cheese spread for dinner and Christmas cookies in between. My uncle is coming for lunch tomorrow, since he’s all alone. There will be pork curry then and more herring salad for dinner.

I’ll post some photos tomorrow, but for now enjoy the Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays banners I made for the umpteen thousand Christmas e-mails I sent out. Happy Holidays for those who are either of some religion other than Christianity or who are bothered by Merry Christmas and Merry Christmas for everybody else.

In general, Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays isn’t a big deal here in Germany and most people, whether religious or not, will wish you a Merry Christmas. This also includes Muslims, Buddhists and Jews BTW. Though some businesses such as big supermarkets have switched to Happy Holidays to accomodate their increasingly multicultural customer base, which is perfectly okay with me.

Meanwhile, the really religious people distinguish themselves by wishing you a Blessed Christmas rather than a Merry Christmas.

Banner Happy Holidays

Posted in General, Personal | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Pre-Christmas Update

I’m at my parents’ at the moment and have been since the weekend.

On Sunday evening, I decorated the Christmas tree, which isn’t all that pleasant, since I am mildly allergic to fir trees, which means that decorating the Christmas tree gives me swollen joints and reddened fingers.

Today I went for some last minute shopping with my Dad, while my Mom made pork curry and red herring salad for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I made Crab Rangoon – well, only the cream cheese cum crab filling – as a dip and/or cream cheese spread, which royally confused my Mom who kept complaining, “But why did you buy so much cream cheese? We need cream, not cream cheese.”

I also wrapped presents – my own as well as Mom and Dad’s for each other. I took a break to watch Arrow, which I have come to enjoy quite a bit. Though is it me or are the scenes on the not-so-deserted island the least interesting bit of the plot? Because whenever the show got back to Oliver on the island, my Mom and I yelled at the TV, “Oh, skip that crap and get on with the plot already?” Because I honestly don’t care what happened to Oliver on that island. Coincidentally, I also felt that the island bits were the least interesting part of Lost, in the first one and a half seasons when I actually enjoyed the show. I bowed out halfway through season 2, came back for a bit in season 3 and then stopped watching for good. I guess deserted island tales just aren’t thing. As for why so many Americans seem to like them, personally I blame Gilligan’s Island.

No pictures of the Christmas tree yet, but I leave you with this image taken in January:

The Hobbit, as reenacted by Christmas tree ornaments:

Christmas tree ornaments representing Hobbit characters

The Hobbit as reenacted by Christmas tree ornaments. In the top row we have Gandalf and Bilbo, in the bottom two rows we have the thirteen dwarves. The dwarf just underneath Bilbo is Thorin Oakenshield. I’ve never been able to tell the others apart.

Alas, we still don’t have Smaug or Gollum, though some of the angels could stand in for Tauriel (who is played by Evageline Lily, who was in Lost) and the other elf characters Tolkien invented.

Posted in General, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

New Silencer story available: Elevator of Doom

Yes, it’s another new release announcement, but I promise that this is the last one for 2013.

Besides, this announcement marks the return of the Silencer, my 1930s style masked pulp avenger. After narrowly escaping the electric chair in Countdown to Death, thwarting a terrorist intent on blowing up Zeppelins in Flying Bombs and saving his fiancée Constance from the clutches of the villainous Baron Tormento in The Spiked Death, the Silencer returns in Elevator of Doom. This time around, Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the Silencer captures a burglar, gets into a fight to the death in a falling elevator and saves a kitten.

Elevator of Doom
Elevator of Doom New York City, 1936: The Radcliffe, a luxury apartment building on Central Park West, is terrorised by a string of burglaries. The police suspect an insider, but there is no hard evidence, because the burglar comes and goes like a ghost.
At first glance, it seems like a simple enough job for Richard Blakemore, the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer. Stake out the Radcliffe, nab the burglar and be back in time for dinner with Constance, his beautiful fiancée.
But even small-time criminals can fight back. And such a fight can quickly get out of hand, once Richard steps into the elevator of doom…

For more information, visit the Elevator of Doom page.

Buy it for the low price of 2.99 USD, EUR or GBP at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Casa del Libro, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Der Club, Libiro, Nook UK, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Sony, Page Place, Flipkart, e-Sentral and XinXii.

You can also get all the Silencer adventures to date in one handy bundle over at DriveThruFiction for only 6.00 USD.

For more story bundles, check out the Story Bundle page right here on this site.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment