Pölen with the VfL.

WARNING: this blog usually carries no advertising, in order to save your souls and because the income would be laughably small. If you go on to read this post, you could end up fat as fuck, addicted to green food colouring, overdosed on caffeine and supporting a football club for whom UEFA cup qualification is a sure-fire sign of approaching relegation. I'd leave now if I were you.








Ah, I see you're still here. Let us begin.

German TV advertisements are notoriously bad. They usually involve some Bavarians prancing around a meadow consuming beer or milk or sausages. I was thus surprised whilst watching the ZDF Sportstudio last night to see them feature the new advertisement for the VFL Bochum.



It contains no Bavarians at all, and carries on my good work of bringing the concept of Pölen (or Pöln, nobody seems to know the official spelling) to a larger audience. At 0:39 the guy in the white vest exclaims "Hömma... pölen is wieso aufm Hof verboten, weiße, ne?". This translates to

Please listen carefully. You are, I'm sure, aware that playing football in the yard is, irrespective of the present circumstances, not allowed.

This advertisement has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but is great: Fresh from the sewers to you. If you're convinced, why not sign this petition? Top reason for signing so far: "I am diabetic and need the turtle pies to survive."

Having first poisoned the youth of america with their pies and cereal (with Ninja Marshmallow!), at least the Turtles tried to save them from Marijuana and preemptively deal with the munchies.

(Sorry for the third link in. It's below the level of this blog, and I don't wish to promote some shitty coffee stuff by viral advertising, but I found it whilst looking for traditional Bavarian-style adverts and I'd just watched the two Milka ads. It got me completely.)

Vfl Bochum 2 - FC Schlake 05 1

The best ways to annoy fans of FC Schalke 04 are

1/ To ask when they last won the title.
2/ To misspell or mispronounce their club name.

Credit must therefore go to Carmen Thomas for a now legendary slip of the tongue, and to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, who today reported the Bochum full-back Oliver Schröder as asking "Do we feel sorry for the Schlaker?" (his answer was no, by the way).

Ob uns die Schlaker [sic] ein bisschen leid tun? Warum? Ich glaube nicht, das sie andersrum mit uns Mitleid gehabt hätten. 39 pubkte [sic] sehen in der Tabelle nciht [sic] schlecht aus.

Vfl Bochum 0 - 1. FC Nuremberg 2

I thought there was something symbolic about this football match, seeing that I've left Erlangen (which is close to Nuremberg) to go to Bochum. Seeing as there was nothing else I really wanted to do on a rainy Sunday in Bochum I decided to go along.

The fist goal for Nuremberg came in the 88th minute, the second shortly after, but the Bochum fans standing next to me sort of knew what was coming, having seen an impressive display of comical finishing from their team in the second half. The players had the good grace to fall to the floor having lost the match and the fans seemed to accept that they had lost due to a lack of skill rather than lack of effort.