TED Comments on the News of the Day

B&c and I were on our way to the Kennedy Center last night when he told me that he's a wanted man in Germany.

And I was all, "Hey, you're wanted here, too, but I've been working until ten o'clock every night, and then you're not in bed in the morning!"

But I had, apparently, misunderstood. That's right: I'm living with a criminal.

Don't just take it from me. Take it from the front page of the Washington Post. In Germany, apparently, it's illegal to call yourself a doctor if your doctorate doesn't come from an EU institution. The Germans are a little status conscious. No more so than us, really, but in Germany, your status tends to be defined by how much education you have, whereas here, it's defined by your financial net worth. Or maybe your abs, depending on whom you hang out with. I leave it to each individual to decide which criterion is best.


Anyway, it seems like an entirely reasonable law to me. Of course, I think it should be illegal to say "celibate" when you mean "abstinent," so maybe it's just as well they don't have me writing the laws.

B&c went on and on about how he'd spent time in Germany and had referred to himself as "Herr Doktor," and how all that time he'd been flaunting the law and could have been arrested and questioned at any moment. I, of course, could think of only one thing to say: "You know, if you wanted some German cop to bend you over and fuck you, there were probably more direct ways to go about it."


Sadly, on this trip, b&c found something of a dearth of German tops. Which makes you wonder whether that whole Deutschland, Deutschland über alles thing isn't a big load of hooey.