He's building a Lego mistress.

I quite agree. I don't think there's any inherent flaw in character of the German people. I find it a little queer that the question can even be asked with a straight face, much less answered affirmatively three-to-one.

Let me go way out on an idealistic limb here, though: I'd like to think that reflection on the horrors of the past can help lessen horrors of the present and future. Even if the conclusions reached by those reflecting are often little nonsensical. At any rate, it certainly better than whitewashing atrocities, or sweeping them under the rug.

Germans have been held to task for WWII's military aggression, xenophobia, and genocide. Other nations, even those with atrocities of similar scale (though talking about the "scale" of genocide seems petty), have not. There are still plenty of war-waging bullys in the world, but Germany's not among them. I'm not trying to say that Germany's all rainbows and butterflies, we know better -- plenty of racial problems, etc. But the general disinclination towards war and violence is real, and if it takes a guilt complex, so be it.

(Oh, and I can second the recommendation for Die Welle!)

I visited the Holocaust Museum in Berlin about 5 years ago. This is a fascinating place, and even though some bits seemed a little silly to me (some weird "what is a Jew?" infographics that looked like they'd be more at home in an intergalactic zoo), I'd recommend a visit.

The vast majority of those in attendance were German. There were about a half-dozen little interactive polling kiosks scattered around, and the one that struck me most asked "Do you believe that the Holocaust was a result of an inherent character flaw in the German people?" It was tallying at around 75% Ja, 25% Nein.

So yeah, I believe what you say about an enormous guilt complex. But IMO it's better than constant denial, excuses, and back-blaming -- that's what most prevalent in other nations, including my own, when their various collusions and atrocities are discussed.

Sounds like the makings of a good DEVO song!

Very true, it will probably be round 4 in 2014 before the outrage fatigue sets in and the MPAA gets about 60% of what it's asking for. By round 6 it'll be up to 135%. By 2025 your children will be required to name their children after an Oscar winner, and pay monthly license fees accordingly.

And yet somehow it's legal to run an insurance company!

Suddenly I'm picturing a Deep Blue Big Dog. It will probably return in my dreams tonight.

GTK in PHP is very brave, but in my experience PHP makes a very capable local scripting language. Free, open source, cross-platform, debuggable, good database support... I end up using it often, and if it weren't for perl and python I'd probably use it a lot more.

Not in my new scheme; the short month would be down to 13, or 14 on leap years. I don't want February to be short though -- it's been short long enough. Calculations would be a lot simpler all around if the *last* month were the short one.

That's right -- a war on Chistmas!

Great, for the 6% of months that are 28 days. Otherwise, not so much.

Actually I'm pretty fond of the 7-day week, but maybe months should be a nice round number of days, like 32. Then we'd get an extra day of weekend.