Holy Scheisse!

That was my immediate response after reading this post at The Spine:

I thought that a Ph.D. in the sciences having been bestowed on scholars from distinguished American universities would permit these men and women to call themselves doctor. Not so, at least in Germany.

Now seven scientists at the Max Planck Society's Institutes for Chemical Ecology (Jena) and for Gravitational Physics (Potsdam) with American Ph.D.s from Stanford, Caltech, University of Texas (Austin) and Cornell are facing charges under German federal law that might land them in jail for one year and sock them with a large fine. You see, under German law, the only Ph.D. that can certify a person as "doctor" is one that comes from an academic institution in the European Union. If your degree comes from a Maltese university (if there is one) you are a doctor with all the pretense and privileges that come with it. But if your doctorate comes from Caltech you are stuck.

This is, if I may say it, batshit crazy. Effectively the German government has decided that it can simply yank scholarly credentials from people who have earned their PhD. I do not even understand the rationale for this law. And I certainly do not understand imposing it against American scientists.

Representing the Lollipop Guild

I'm not sure what to make of this article in The Believer. Basically, it's about a fetishism for cute, little things and particularly for the marriages (real and mock) of these wee ones. Little people -- your midgets, your dwarves, what have you -- feature prominently. But so do pet weddings and other weird aspects of this bizarre fringe of quasi-erotica.

Someone help me figure out what to think of an article that has a paragraph like the following (and if you think I'm not using my puzzlement to promote this teaser, you really don't know me after all these years):

All royal courts of the day had their dwarfs. King Sigismund-Augustus of Poland had nine dwarfs while Catherine de’ Medici had only six but actively encouraged those six to engender more. Vitelli, a Roman cardinal, amassed thirty-nine to serve as waiters at a special dinner. But it was during the reign of Charles I, king of England from 1625 until he was beheaded by his people in 1649, Leslie Fielder claims, that “the erotic cult of the Dwarf” reached its peak and was perhaps most sumptuously embodied by all eighteen inches of Jeffery Hudson, whom Charles presented to his young bride hidden beneath the crust of a cold pie.

Mmmmm. Pie.

A Wonderful, Magical Refrigerator

A beer tossing fridge? As the Thunderstick says, thank God for this kid. He says it with more than a hint of pride, for this young genius is, like Thunderstick, a Duke alum.

Afrikaner Spookstories

The Mail & Guardian has a weird, creepy, and disturbing story involving the "Boere Nostradamus," prophecies of Nelson Mandela's death, right-wing Afrikaner race war fantasies, email hoaxes and assassination attempts. This bizarreness follows closely on the heels of new revelations of right wing organizations Boeremag and Suidlanders, both of which continue to wave the white supremacist flag.

Oh, That Age-Old Story Again

Hey, who hasn't had it happen to them? A guy's watching porn with the volume up, a neighbor believes something untoward is going on with a victimized woman, and the neighbor takes action, sword in hand. (But check out the eyes of the neighbor. Not a man who ought to be allowed to own medieval weaponry.)

Hat Tip to The Plank.