It's time to play dirty:
Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:You can too. Join me in Bombing for Choice.
As recently as a few weeks ago, if you typed my name into google this blog would show up at the very top of the results. Today I checked again, just for kicks, and it now shows up on PAGE 12. Adding things like the city or state I live in doesn't change anything, though when I added "art," hem|mungen showed up on the second page of results. In the same search at yahoo and altavista the blog lands at the top spot. The mysteries of PageRank.
This new invisibility could be both good and bad...On the other hand, the first result using just my name (no middle initial) does return something of mine, so it's not all other people with my name who show up. It's just the blog that's at the bottom on google.
From the FR's report on Oberschöneweide's pending big-deal contemporary art center:
"Zuerst muss immer die Kultur kommen, damit was passiert!", ruft der Direktor, und wenn alles klappt, passiert Folgendes: Die Reinbeckhallen in Oberschöneweide, eigentlich dem Abriss anheim gegeben, werden sich bis Anfang 2007 in ein Zentrum für internationale Gegenwartskunst verwandeln. Neben über einem Dutzend namhafter Galerien wie Gagosian New York und Privatsammlungen, darunter John Smith und Vicky Hughes, werden auch zwei Dependancen bedeutender Museen einziehen - das New Yorker Whitney Museum of American Art und das MMK Frankfurt.
["continue reading" for English]
Oberschöneweide is on the southeast side of Berlin, part of the region Treptow-Köpenick. Looks like it's the site of a major renovation campaign (as this slightly clunky overview of the area illustrates). The local SPD (among others) report that up to five departments of Berlin's Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Sciences) will be moving to Oberschöneweide, as well: projected completion by 2007.
If all this comes together it would be a major step towards spreading around some of Berlin's 'cultural capital.' I wonder if it'll work?
"First culture has to come in, in order for anything to happen!" declares the director, and if everything works out, here's what will happen: by the beginning of 2007 the Reinbeck Halls in Oberschöneweide, which had actually been written off for demolition, will be transformed into a center for international contemporary art. Alongside more than a dozen prominent galleries like Gagosian New York and privat collections, including that of John Smith and Vicky Hughes, two branches of important museums will also move in - New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.
Scott made Andrew and me go, "Waaaaaaah?" in our best Moe voices today. Or, "Excellent," in our best Mr. B. voice.
Hey German Readers, is this story true? Did it go through the German media? Because it's all over the "human interest" pages of certain English-language media:
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.[from the Telegraph UK story]
I find this hard to believe, and since I can't find anything through Google's German news, I thought I'd ask.
[update: good info in the comments (thanks, Armin and Scott): see Snopes and Metafilter.]