You know what's always cute? Kids doing crazy adult stuff. Like these German tykes who wanted to get married in Africa. We smell a movie deal.

Here is your flat-world global economy: Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, just paid $1.6 billion in fees for all the bribery they've been up to since the end of World War II, back when they were Nazis.

Remember when you were in like sixth grade and your teacher asked you to read Number the Stars and you quietly thought to yourself, "jeez Louise, how many of these Holocaust books are there?" and then you felt terrible and never said anything to anyone? Well I do, and Page Six certainly does! They did a bit today about how there are just so many Holocaust movies this winter. There are a lot!

Thousands of Germans wave lanterns today for the ecumenical festival Martini (heh!), which honors the Catholic St. Martin and the Protestanty of the Protestant, Martin Luther. A little odd that it's the anniversary of Kristallnacht. But, um, we just think it's pretty, is all. [via AP]

What if you started reading a friend's private diary, and in it he took great pains to say how pathetic you were? That's pretty much the feeling you get reading the anti-American issue of Der Spiegel. The America hatefest starts with an angry Uncle Sam, and asks such pertinent questions as "Can Condoleezza Rice Emancipate Herself from Bush?" and "When Will America Collapse?" The German vision of America is a racist, broken country, and they're not afraid to pronounce us dead. Click for the full eulogy.The German problems with America aren't limited to our recent economic collapse. We have a host of faults to atone for, and while electing Obama would be a good start, we suck in so many other ways:

As a born Californio who proudly packs my "U.S. out of California" tee from Mule Design whenever I leave the state, it comes as no surprise that Cebit conference organizers have, for the first time, selected a state instead of a nation as a partner in the world's largest information technology conference and trade show. Like many Americans, I could use a few euros and some free healthcare right about now. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped by Intel yesterday to promote the relationship with his deutsche sprechen comrades. And while the conference is held in Hanover, I recommend stopping by Berlin, which I hear is cheap, kinky and open for business. The state and conference are even offering financial assistance for first-time attendees. California uber alles, indeed.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security says that Google's new browser Chrome "should not be used for surfing the Internet." The problem, according to a translation from Blogoscoped, is that joined with email and search, Chrome gives Google too much data about its users. The government also said Chrome should be avoided because its still in beta. Here's the real deal, though: Germans hate Google because like Microsoft with Windows and Apple with iTunes, its a big American company that's so popular it seems like a monopoly. For those keeping score at home — or trying to use the Web in Germany — that rules out Chrome, Apple's Safari, Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox because it runs on Google money. What's left? The Opera browser, conveniently built in Europe.

Just like you can block pop-up ads on your computer, you can also buy software to block porn, if you wanted to do that for some odd reason. But that very software has to have its own ads—preferably ads that incorporate porn, for clarity's sake! You can see the quandary. One German porn-blocking company solved the problem with some strategic Photoshop work [UPDATE: A concept pioneered at Something Awful], and the result is so creative you almost want to buy their purifying product just to applaud the effort (not really). Two of the company's ads, via Copyranter, are after the jump. They're perfectly SFW, as long as you don't use any imagination.

"You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer." The whole documentary is a lot of fun to watch — famed British thespian David Jacobi even makes an appearance in a dramatization as the legendary Alan Turing. Zuse and Turing were on opposite sides of World War II, with Zuse's machine mostly used to crunch numbers for the Nazis' rocket projects. Helping to keep track of the undesirables intended for slaughter in the concentration camps? That was IBM's job.

Deutsche Telekom, the dominant telephone and communications provider in Germany, has been caught using private phone records in a scandal reminiscent of Hewlett-Packard's industrial espionage. During a spell of layoffs in 2005 and 2006, the company hired a data-mining firm to scan the records of supervisory board members in the hopes of matching the numbers to those of journalists as it looked for the source of leaks about the company's downsizing. New CEO René: Obermann wasn't there at the time, but is stuck cleaning up the mess. [NY Times] (Photo by AP/Frank Augstein)

Seriously, don't go to air shows. What good ever comes of it?

Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany's Federal Police Office, told reporters that Skype "creates grave difficulties for us" because of its strong encryption. A traditional land-line phone can be tapped very easily, as can a cell phone — but voice-over-IP calls are routed over countless paths across the Internet, making them difficult to intercept. Ziercke said they were not asking eBay to leave "back doors open" to Skype for law-enforcement authorities. Of course, it's likely the National Security Agency has already done that and passes along any significant intercepted calls to U.S. allies. The other theory? That this is merely a headfake to criminals. If the Polizei does have Skype wiretapping abilities, they'll want to encourage evildoers to speak freely. That's it: I'm switching my secret communications back to smoke signals.

Look familiar? Frazr, a new German blogging service, is a complete rip-off of Twitter, right down to the design and pitch, as Venture Beat notes. "What are you doing?" Frazr asks. I've heard that question before. Foreign clones of US internet concepts are nothing new, but their nimbleness is.