Mascot for Berlin unveiled

[croflash]

http://www.iaaf.org/WCH09/news/kind=100 ... 48999.html

I like it.

[DentyCracker]

I too, like it

[tandfman]

I do too, But it really doesn't matter whether we here like it. What matters is whether Berliners and their children like it. I haven't the slightest idea of how it will appeal to the people it needs to appeal to. (That having been said, I should add that I have no reason to think that it wouldn't appeal to them--it seems like an attractive mascot.)

[Marlow]

But the question is: does it surpass the inimitable appeal of this bad boy?

[Flumpy]

What on earth is that?

It's hideous.

[tandfman]

What on earth is that?

It's hideous.

http://www.slate.com/?id=2075293

[polevaultpower]

I pity the intern in Indianapolis who has to go around wearing that costume. I don't think I saw him in Eugene, did anyone else?

[polevaultpower]

Lukas pointed out to me that a bear is also the mascot for the city of Berlin.

[Paul Henry]

What on earth is that?

It's hideous.

http://www.slate.com/?id=2075293

Marlow, I have not laughed as hard all year until I looked at that "bad boy". As if the masoct weren't already butt-ugly, check the ridiculous bargain store
dollar-sale pose. Dr. Seus could not derive that thing!!

[lonewolf]

Certainly not the worst major meet mascot we have seen in recent years.

[ed gee]

The runner up was a jelly donut.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/histor ... rliner.htm

[gh]

Len Deighton passes off the jelly donut story as gospel in one of his spy books (the Game-Set-Match series I think).

[AthleticsInBritain]

I was told the gaffe story in history at school (but then our teacher was a bona fide communist), but that that a Berliner was a type of German sausage.

[gh]

No, people from Vienna (wieners) are a kind of sausage :-)

[ed gee]

Len Deighton passes off the jelly donut story as gospel in one of his spy books (the Game-Set-Match series I think).

Since Berlin Game was w/in arm's reach and I remembered the above reference being fairly early in the book, it did not take long to find the following:

'Ich bin ein Berliner.' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.

Cannot immediately recall any other JFK Berliner references in Deighton's three Bernard Samson trilogies.

My significant other is from the former West-Berlin and thus speaks Berlinerisch.
She insists that JFK's Deutsch was correct and her perspective is essentially the same as in my earlier link.