by Ahmad Fawad Lamay, as quoted in a BBC South Asia report on modern Afghan poets
I’ll ask you in the presence of God,
That in order to go to heaven
Why did you orphan my children?
Why did you widow a sick woman?
Why did you kill the son of an old lady?
Why did you kill the only brother of a weak girl?
Trouble is brewing according to news from Spiegel Online. We may soon notice a lack of beer mats:
…the economic crisis is threatening the beer mat — and unnerving its fans. The world’s biggest beer mat company, Katz Group, has declared itself bankrupt. Tucked away in Weisenbach in the south-west of Germany, Katz Group, which was founded as a sawmill in 1716, had been in the beer mat business since 1903. Katz International Coasters controlled around two-thirds of the European market and 97 percent of the US market.
It seems they were a form of advertising that started in 1880. The decline after a hundred strong years is not exactly a bad run, and seems to coincide with the decline in other print advertising. Interesting that there was no competition in America.
Every month since 2004, the market research institute Ispos has collected some 12,000 discarded cigarette packs from 24 garbage collection points in Germany for analysis. This led to the discovery that the eighth most popular brand of cigarettes in Germany is actually Jin Ling, which is not legally available. $1 billion worth is smuggled in from Eastern Europe each year and is the second most popular brand in Berlin, according to Der Spiegel. Although cigarette consumption has declined in Germany, smuggling has increased, suggesting anti-smoking taxation is shifting consumers to illegal supplies.
A quiet day in Spain…
And then the Santa Cruz version by Jer and Glen: