Deutsch: Arsch; English: arse; American: ass
Nov 1st, 2007 by Paul Moor
Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer himself, when Yaleman Cavett insouciantly set German-American relations back a notch by blandly proclaiming: “In America we say the thinnest book in the world has the title The Best of German Humor.”
Well, consider the brief news-agency story that’s just landed in my virtual lap from Germany’s eagle-eyed dpa (short for Deutsche Presseagentur, which manifestly comes close to marking the sparrow’s fall), about an international competition that took place down in Bavaria last week with unfairly little fanfare.
According to dpa, this avant-garde “International Bottom Championships” competition gingered up life down in Munich last Wednesday. The dpa account salutes Bulgaria’s Kristina Dimitrova, 19 and female, and Romania’s Andrei Andrei (sic), 24 and male, as the gala event’s winners, each of them taking home a prize of 10,000 Euros ($14,400 in what proud American shoppers abroad back in better days used to call “real money”), not to mention an insurance policy that also came as an additional part of their prize package.
Munich, the beer-guzzling capital of the onetime kingdom of Bavaria and for many years now a Freistaat (Free State), has a widespread reputation for stumpfsinnige residents and daily routine. Well, make up your own mind.
You can read dpa‘s unabridged report by merely clicking here.
