As you probably know, Michael Jackson passed away recently. This has been a great shock for all of us. Well, a lot of us, anyway.

When you think about it, that is slighly peculiar. The death has slapped even my generation, grown in the 90s, living in the 00s, hard in the face. This is not because we greatly admired the man. This is not because we love the music he made. Even though my generation also knows that he created great music, his days as king are not something we remember or can relate to — he had a much greater value: he had become a kind of constant. His superhuman appearance, like a conservational shell, and constantly in the news in some dodgy way. His days as “King of Pop” long gone, he still remained as a kind of media ghost. And since Harry Potter, we all know that ghosts can't die.

To most of us, Michael Jackson was a kind of odd fact of life in the universe. An ever-resting quirk, an easter egg in the great game of life. That someone like that could die is just overwhelming.

Today, Wednesday November 12 2008, about 100 000 German students skived off too march for better, fairer and cheaper education. And, mind you, it was the young kind of student that goes to school, not university. Yeah, the people you thought were apolitical knife-wielding mobsters.

The 16 German school systems are a mess. The way it is designed, you'll probably never go to university if your parents aren't either rich or academics. In Bavaria (where I'm from), we are required to do 2 lessons of religion (Christianity, that is) a week. There is an alternative course, ethics, which is quite obviously designed not to teach kids stuff, but to legitimize state-supported almost-mandatory theology classes. The flip side is that we only get to do politics in one year, one lesson a year. Best preconditions for the near one-party system we had for decades: keep people stupid, or, if that doesn't work, make sure few understand what the government is/does. What is worse, there is an enormous teacher deficit, and there is way too little money in public schooling. There are many more problems, some of which I put into writing in German.

There were demonstrations in many German cities with thousands of students at nearly every one. They were nearly completely peaceful, though, in Hannover, some idiots stormed the state parliament, and in Berlin, the city with the largest demonstration (predictably), the Humboldt university was temporarily invaded.