TresSugar

Flashback: Keanu Reeves Is a Liar

GiggleSugar — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:00:00 -0700

Poor Keanu went on some German talk show and got hooked up to a lie detector. Watch him struggle through the host's questions (and her heinous dentist-office-wallpaper jacket). He's totally cute though. Wouldn't you believe anything that comes out of his mouth?

Nude Sky Diving

GiggleSugar — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:00:00 -0700

When I think "wild and crazy," Germans don't come to mind first. But in this NSFW-ish clip, let's just say some of them let it all hang (and flap) out.

East vs. West: Berlin Wall Divided Two Attitudes Toward Nudity

TresSugar — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:00:49 -0800

When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago last week, East and West Germany had to integrate two very different cultures. Freedom may have spread quickly through the East, but nudity - the East's favorite and perhaps only freedom - never caught on in the West.

Freikörperkultur (FKK), or liberal body culture, was really the only way to rebel in the East, where the most quotidian details of people's lives were observed by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Though the East German government forbid FKK at first, many government officials were into walking around nude, so they protested with the argument that "doing FKK" did not mean you weren't a good communist. Good point - don't they put kids in school uniforms to level the playing field? What's more egalitarian than wearing nothing!

Yet on the west side of the wall, the attitude toward nudity was more on par with America and its don't-even-discuss-it-in-public ethos. A West German interviewed a former East German for Vice magazine to find out what's so great about wearing nothing. Check out some of the highlights after the jump.

Say What? Karl Lagerfeld on Moms and Models

TresSugar — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:00:00 -0700

"No one wants to see curvy women. You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly."

- Karl Lagerfeld weighs in on the never-ending debate about thin models. The once-overweight designer was responding to German magazine Brigitte's decision to use only "real women" as models. He disapproves. Based on his comments, it seems Karl doesn't think fashion is meant for a mom who might be carrying a little weight.

This isn't the first time a fashion icon has come to the defense of thin models by shifting the attention to overweight people. Anna Wintour said America should focus on obesity, and not anorexia, following a visit to Minnesota where she said people resemble "little houses."

Are you surprised Karl is so quick to discount the opinions of average women?

Front Page: Obama Set to Deliver Big Gay Rights Speech

TresSugar — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:00:53 -0700

After appointing the country's third openly gay US ambassador, Obama plans to deliver a "big gay rights speech" on Saturday. - Huffington Post
Romanian-born German Herta Müller has won the Nobel Prize for literature for her novels, poems, and stories depicting repression in Romania. -
New York Times
Harvard has been ranked the world's top school. - Times Higher Education
France's culture minister Frederic Mitterrand is facing calls to quit after he wrote in a book, published four years ago, that he paid young boys for sex in Thailand. The book is making headlines following Mitterrand's support of Roman Polanski. - BBC News
An Australia TV show has come under fire for allowing contestants to perform a Michael Jackson "tribute" wearing blackface. - CNN

German Ad: AIDS Is the New Hitler

TresSugar — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:00:00 -0700

Did you just lose your lunch looking at this ad? I almost did when I first saw it. The creators of the nightmarish German AIDS awareness ad say that they "knew the face we gave to the illness could not be a pretty one" - and what's uglier than having sex with Adolf Hitler?

The video version, which will soon be played in cinemas and on television, shows a couple having sex. At the end, the man's face turns into Hitler's and the screen reads "AIDS is mass murderer." As you can expect, many people are outraged. Some say the campaign further stigmatizes people living with AIDS, while others argue that the sensationalized message fails to offer any preventative advice.

Do you think using Hitler in this ad is a necessary evil that will wake people up to the risk of AIDS, or is this ad unnecessarily offensive?

Fate of Germany's Most Wanted Nazi Found in Egypt

CitizenSugar — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:00:53 -0800

The hunt for Germany's most wanted Nazi, Aribert Heim (aka Dr. Death for his "medical" procedures) began in 1962 after he barely escaped capture. It only ended recently when a briefcase containing the details of his post-Nazi life and death was found in a hotel where he lived in Cairo.

The New York Times and the German television station ZDF obtained the briefcase and found the following:

An article about his own manhunt and trial in absentia (underlined and annotated)
His medical and financial records
Drawings by the children he left behind in Germany
An application for Egyptian residency under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, who had the same birth date and place of birth as Heim.

Investigators now know Heim fled to Egypt, converted to Islam, and died in 1992 as Tarek Hussein Farid. The Middle East has been an oft overlooked hideout for exiled Nazis, but countries like Egypt actually welcomed them for their military technology knowledge after World War II.

Until the briefcase discovery, Heim was believed to be alive in South America. In fact the Simon Wiesenthal Center - a Jewish human rights organization - had searched for him in Chile last year and was about to raise the reward for information leading to his arrest from $400,000 to $1.3 million.

Below, check out where Dr. Death lived until his own death.

View 4 Photos ›

Source

Izzy Gets His Opera On

GiggleSugar — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:00:00 -0700

Izzy the dog was just lying around one day when suddenly, German opera on television moved him to join in. You will laugh your ass off, but your ears may never forgive you. (It's practically dog day here at GiggleSugar. Imagine that! Don't worry, cats, I still love you!)

Flashback: Harry and the Hendersons

GiggleSugar — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0700

If you ever wanted to hear the Harry and the Hendersons theme song in German, you're in luck! This television show was a spin-off of a movie starring John Lithgow about a family that stumbles into the Sasquatch on a trip and decides to take it home and let it live in their house. (Who says it's hard to break into Hollywood if someone got this screenplay green-lighted? This should give all us aspiring writers hope.)

Whoops! Best News Corrections of 2007

GiggleSugar — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:30:00 -0800

Mistakes are funny. Mistakes made by reputable newspapers, news agencies, and television news programs are even funnier. You know those "We regret the error" messages you see sometimes in newspapers? Here are some of my faves of 2007. Click here to read more.

CNN and the New York Post call Barack Obama . . . you guessed it - Osama.
The Houston Chronicle writes about Anna Nicole Smith's' early days: "When Redding, a longtime scout for Playboy, discovered Smith, the model could barely right a sentence.”
The Mirror UK has to apologize for saying that English-singer Bryan Ferry was "singing the praises of the Nazis" when he was in fact discussing contemporary German art and architecture in the Nazi era.
A 13-year-old Finnish boy noticed that a photo from the film Titanic was being used as an image for a news story about a Russian voyage to the arctic. This is after Reuters and other reputable news agencies picked it up from a Russian television station without verifying it.
Reuters calls the Muttahida Quami Movement (one of the largest political parties in Pakistan) the “Muttonhead Quail Movement.” Hey, it's close!
The New York Daily News writes that Richard Marino, the subject of a YouTube video, was sorry for an incident at a Brooklyn post office. Well, guess what? Marino was not sorry, so the paper had to regret that he didn't regret anything.