Are you looking for employment? Do you like to do jigsaw puzzles? No, I mean do you REALLY like to do jigsaw puzzles, like REALLY, REALLY? For instance, do you have just incredible patience, to keep trying to plow ahead even as the task seems gigantic? Oh, and perhaps a sense of pleasure in setting injustice right could help here, too.

Finally, can you read German? Then maybe Germany’s federal government has a job for you! Die Zeit now has a piece about it, called Those who glue together the Stasi files. The former East German State Secret Police (formally the “Ministry for State Security”) got really busy with their shredding-machines in October and November of 1989 as it became increasingly obvious that the regime was tottering and probably about to fall. They had a just incredible amount of incriminating documentation to worry about, miles & miles of files & files (the vast majority in traditional paper). After all, the former East Germany might have set some sort of record for percent of the population informing for the government – spouse spying on spouse was hardly unheard-of – and the Stasi were interested in almost everything.

Unfortunately, those shredders were given the time and lack of interruption to do a pretty good job, resulting in 16,000 sacks of . . . confetti, basically, the shredding machines’ output, each sack containing 50,000 to 80,000 little bits of document.

Nevertheless, the re-unified German government wants to recover as many of those as it can, and has already had people at work since 1995 trying to piece them together. Soon – thank Heavens! – they will be assisted by computer software developed by Germany’s renowned Fraunhofer Research Institute, designed first to scan all the little pieces electronically and then to use automatic algorithms to fit them together.

Until then – and, surely, afterwards as well – there will be a continuing need for human application. This Die Zeit piece is really not any sort of article but a brief photo-series. Yes, the first few are of some unexciting paper-shreds, but then there follow a couple shots showing the puzzle-workers on the job, contemplating the pieces before them, with yet more available in a seemingly-endless procession of sacks. They look stoic; what could be going through their heads? Anything more interesting than a yearning for that next cigarette/chocolate break?

The next Russian election, the one that will inevitably elevate Vladimir Putin back to the presidency, is not until next March, but from a Czech source we see the political machine is already hard at work.

tiscali.cz: Předvolební kampaň na ruského prezidenta má první skandál: http://t.co/QasPJgmv

January 9, 2012 10:43 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Preliminary campaign for Russian president has its first scandal.” Yes, it’s scandalous, if not quite entirely straightforward, as explained in the accompanying article about the discovery made by opposition activists in Moscow of the wholesale fabrication of signature-petitions being perpetrated in local universities. (more…)

Annals of Tone-Deaf Advertising – Check out what “Polska The Times” has dug up:

Auschwitz w reklamie… klubu fitness. “Obóz koncentracyjny dla kalorii”: Zdjęcie torów prowadzących do obozu ko… http://t.co/4f4aQBhV

January 7, 2012 9:33 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@polskathetimes

Polska The Times

OK, maybe you don’t know Polish, but nonetheless you can see the “Auschwitz” there . . . and the word “fitness” . . .

A rather strange combination, no? Well, the payoff is really the Polska article linked to here, to which I would encourage you to click through since it shows the poster in question for a recent advertising campaign undertaken by a fitness-place called The Circuit Factory: a long, low shot of a railroad track leading to a bleak building (with the label “Auschwitz” off to the left, in case there is any confusion), and the catch-phrase below “Kiss Your Calories Goodbye.”

Let me hasten to add that this “Circuit Factory” place is by no means Polish – it’s apparently to be found in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. In his response to initial press inquiries, though, its owner – one Phil Parkinson – tried to explain the campaign as an effort to demonstrate that his club was “a concentration camp for calories.” Somehow that seemed to contribute nothing further at all towards stemming the waves of opprobrium that headed his way via the Internets and social media.

Then again, on-line there is no such thing as bad publicity. The Polska article ends by citing comments Parkinson made to the Arabian Business website about how beneficial the Auschwitz campaign has been for his firm’s Google/Facebook/YouTube results – “and we have had about five times as many enquiries [presumably about club membership] as before.”