So I was looking at Der Spiegel this morning — the stories they’ve translated into English, anyway, because my German isn’t quite good enough to read the news without stopping to look up every eighth or ninth word, which would be good for me to be doing as far as keeping my German in shape goes but I have much else to do — and I came across an article about Heligoland (“Helgoland” auf Deutsch).

I’d heard of Heligoland but knew very little about it other than that it was an island in the North Sea. Well, it turns out that it’s actually two small islands in the North Sea, belonging to Germany but a three-hour sail from the mainland. (Here’s the Wikipedia article.) They were a single island until a storm in 1720 washed away the middle of the island, leaving two separate islands remaining. Over the years it’s been a base for smugglers, a German resort, a British resort, a German naval base, and a British bombing range. Now it’s a German resort again.

Heligoland is in the news today because over the weekend the residents (all 1650 of them) voted 55% to 45% against a $141 million Dubai-style construction project to fill in some of the shallow sea between the islands to increase the size of the larger island by about a quarter and connect it to the smaller island. And Der Spiegel has published a number of photos of Heligoland along with the article, and the photos go a long way to explain the vote.

Well, good lord, if you lived in a place that looked like that, would you want to tamper with it? I sure wouldn’t.

Fun facts: Early D’oyly Carte company member Richard Mansfield (he created the role of Major General Stanley in Pirates of Penzance spent much of his youth living in Heligoland, which was British at the time. And Werner Heisenberg came up with the beginnings of his theory of quantum mechanics while vacationing in Heligoland, which was German at that time.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Justice Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech in Georgia in which he stated that those who criticize the Supreme Court are either illiterate or lazy and that

… the downward spiral of public discourse from people who are “drunk on their own opinions” must come to an end.

Great, a Supreme Court justice says we need to put an end to all this unrestrained freedom of public discourse. Why did we ever bother fighting the Cold War anyway?

According to Talking Points Memo, Joseph Farah, founder/editor of World Net Daily and a prominent birther, says that the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate “raises as many questions as it answers”.

I couldn’t agree with him more.

Science expert Ann Coulter weighing in on the crisis in Japan:

Anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear
power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.

From yesterday’s Spiegel Online, topping a story about resignation of German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg over revelations that his doctoral dissertation was heavily plagiarized:

Copy, Paste, and Delete

This has been a huge scandal in Europe, but it’s hard to imagine there being a ripple of outrage in the United States over something like this. Who would care?

Looks to me like when Chris Lee told his craigslist correspondent that he was a divorced lobbyist, we wasn’t really lying, just thinking ahead a few months.

So the Tea Party types are all bent out of shape over the new airport scanners. The government shouldn’t have the right to do this to them, just because they want to exercise their constitutional right to fly. The scans are a horrible, intrusive invasion of their precious privacy, or so I read, over and over and over. My heart breaks for them, really. These are mostly the same types, mind you, who think they naturally have the right to tell me what I can and can’t do in my bedroom, and who I can and can’t marry. But that’s completely different.