Where's the Bunny?

While I was gone, a minor scandal in Germany happened: A German soap opera star of Turkish heritage, Sila Sahin, posed naked for Playboy magazine. Near-naked. It is a huge issue, because Muslims usually don't like to see their daughters naked in public, so conservative Turkish men are not that thrilled. Sila has already apologized to her mother. Most Germans, however, see that as a step towards integration.

Anyway, it is the right answer to the Burka ban in France. About the soap she's playing in, that pretty much sucks.

Mad and Cheese

I‘m back from Madison, Wisconsin; back from a six-day trip actually, that brought me to Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the latter city only in passing, since it was heavily snowing. Snowing! Wisconsin, so I learned from the local history museum in Madison right across the Capitol, is basically a German state, so much German that it was considered a traitor state in World War I, and German-language schoolbooks were burned. That's where the museum's history stopped, so I have no idea what happened in World War II. I hope nothing too bad.

I met some progressive people, no coincidence, since Madison has a fairly progressive tradition. Wisconsin once had a progressive Governor named Robert La Follette, not German, evidently, but French; still Old Europe.

Also, I participated in a small rally asking banks, mostly JP Morgan Chase, to pay taxes (or I would have, had it not been snowing), bought a T-shirt that called for solidarity with Madison workers, a piece of  cheese in the shape of the state, read the main local paper, The Onion, had lunch in the Union building (crab bisque), and frequented a coffee shop that served alcoholic beverages, namely Peppermint Schnapps. German indeed! This is how I usually spend my vacation.