recently at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, courtesty of Flickr user Slake B

Well, that was fun. A long two-week bridge between years known as "the holidays" -- that time of unpluggedness, family-ness and, maybe if you're German, fondue -- have come to an end with reality raging onward. Herewith some items of interest you might have missed while you/we were away.

Helen in Germany takes a look at Christmas in Germany.

John Laughland at The Brussels Journal lays out Why the “Anglosphere” Is No Alternative for the EU. "Pro-Europeans in France (the majority of the political class) argue that European integration is necessary to make Europe independent of the Americans, while anti-Europeans in Britain argue that it is precisely the danger of European integration that it will undermine the Atlantic alliance. This was one of Margaret Thatcher’s principal beefs with Europe and it remains a cornerstone of British Tory Euroscepticism to this day."

Michael Scott Moore marvels at the Kulturgut that is Dinner for One, an 18-minute black-and-white British comedy skit that rules deutsche TV on New Year's eve, as it has for the past four decades. Thing is, it's utterly unbekannt in the US and UK.

The Wall Street Journal looks back at 2007 and sees the German stock market alone in weathering the US credit crunch: the DAX gained by a solid 22% while France's CAC-40 flat-lined to 1.3% and UK's FTSE climbed an anemic 3.8%. Why? FT says Germany has undergone "a series of external and internal factors: economic growth, currency developments, corporate restructuring and takeover activity." Unemployment also reached a six-year low recently, good news for a country that's been plagued with it.

Paul Jenkins at The Huffington Post finds the prospect of a black presidential candidate (Obama) inconceivable to Europeans because "the prospect of an ethnically Arab French president or of a German foreign minister of Turkish descent would currently be laughable, in a sad kind of way. And so the fact that a man named Obama is a contender in America is still hard for many in Europe to fathom." True? Untrue? Discuss.

Hugh Kennedy at the PJA Blog wishes everyone a more German 2008 (read: efficient) with some words from a teutonic coworker, "I’m amazed at how much time Americans waste on meetings! And how much we bother each other all day long. In Germany you would never get up and lurk around people’s desks to exchange news. We go into work, we work all morning, and then we have lunch together and talk. That’s when we really exchange information, over lunch. Then in the afternoon we go back to our desks and work again, so we can leave at a reasonable hour.”

Frisco's DJ Earworm (who's name, we suspect, comes from the German Ohrwurm) has tackled the 2007 pop zeitgeist with a 4-minute mashup of top 25 pop songs of the year in United State of Pop. It's for free, here.

R.I.P. Davids Medienkritik -- Egad! Now German media will run rampant with anti-Americanism without your scornful stare. We'll miss you all the same.