The world needs more hostages like this!

[Count Chocula]

I guess this means that an SAS "advisor" will get captured by Muslim fanatics, escape to his embassy, then order a chilled Carling.

One gets you five La Legion Etrangere will frame this guy for a crime he didn't commit, thus forcing him to join the Legion. Or he'll join the DGSE and become Jack Bauer's European sidekick.

[LaCroix]

Except... he is Austrian.

And we jailed him for his bullshit. The Germans made him chancellor. I'm sick of their excuse of "But he was Austrian-Neener-neener!"

But with Mozart, they try to claim he was German - like wanting to claim Mallorca and Ibiza as German territory, even though they can't even spell the name correctly.

[Oskuro]

Please. I think we all already know exactly who this Frenchman was.
<pic snipped>

What, you mean there's someone out there who didn't picture this guy as Jean Reno?

[Thanas]

Except... he is Austrian.

And we jailed him for his bullshit. The Germans made him chancellor. I'm sick of their excuse of "But he was Austrian-Neener-neener!"

He was the revenge for Königgrätz.

But with Mozart, they try to claim he was German - like wanting to claim Mallorca and Ibiza as German territory, even though they can't even spell the name correctly.

Jokes aside, Salzburg was german during Mozart's birth, so yes, legally he was german.

[Anguirus]

And we jailed him for his bullshit. The Germans made him chancellor. I'm sick of their excuse of "But he was Austrian-Neener-neener!"

Wasn't Hitler jailed in Munich?

[paladin]

How come he was French? I thought international law only allowed Americans and British special agents to escape from captivity?

This must be seriously investigated. Why, macho Americans won't be able to claim all French are pansies! A true international crisis in the making!

Only the French government are pansies.

[Terralthra]

Ok for the people who don't get the chilled red wine, think of Bond's favorite drink. The Vodka Martini is considered to be a very low-brow uncouth drink by martini aficionados, additionally the act of shaking a martini "bruises" its flavor by causing the droplets of vermouth to pop. A vodka martini shaken not stirred is a very ungentlemanly drink to order in a classy joint. Ordering such a drink is an oddly civilian idiosyncrasy for someone who demonstrates a great knowledge of '50s Dom.

Thus the joke is that being so badass he would order chilled red wine and the server would serve it to him without complaint, like the stuffy server do in various Bond movies.

James Bond in the novels said "stirred, not shaken." It was changed for the movies because it was felt that the reverse had a better spoken rhythm, and the person who changed it didn't know about the distinction. Also, "popping droplets of vermouth" isn't the real reason the flavor is bruised; shaking breaks up the ice used in the cocktail shaker, which makes it melt faster, watering down the flavor of the drink. Stirring does not. A really "upper-class" martini wouldn't even have droplets of vermouth. It would have maybe one droplet of vermouth, or more commonly, a bit of vermouth would be swirled in the glass and then discarded before the martini was poured into it.

[Imperial Overlord]

Please. I think we all already know exactly who this Frenchman was.
<pic snipped>

What, you mean there's someone out there who didn't picture this guy as Jean Reno?

*raises hand* I was thinking more Tcheky Karyo.

[Serafina]

And we jailed him for his bullshit. The Germans made him chancellor. I'm sick of their excuse of "But he was Austrian-Neener-neener!"

Wasn't Hitler jailed in Munich?

He was imprisoned for the attempted putsch in munich. His jail was in Landberg.

Note that he should have been sent to Austria, according to the law, even after he was found guilty for treason.
However, the judges of that time tended to be extremely generous to right-wingers. Hitler actually insulted his judge for being jewish, but he still got only 5 years for high treason!

Now that was one messed up system.

[Hawkwings]

Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but apparently he did not kill three guys as he escaped.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — In the end, it all came down to a single forgotten bolt.

Marc Aubrière, a French security adviser who was held hostage in Somalia for more than a month, said he simply slipped open a lock on the inside of his cell door — a lock his captors had somehow overlooked. He then tiptoed past the sleeping guards, who are part of an extremist Islamist group that has threatened to behead all infidels, and dashed out the door barefoot, “so as not to make noise,” he said.

He surfaced on the streets of Mogadishu, one of the most perilous cities in the world — a place where a lone bearded white man like him would immediately draw attention, and where there is no shortage of thugs, opportunists and religious extremists eager to capture a foreigner and try to sell him off for millions.

“It was like being in a prison inside a jail inside another jail,” Mr. Aubrière said. “Everybody will try to catch you. You have no friend.”

With fresh, puffy scratches up and down his arms from the cactus bushes he scurried through, Mr. Aubrière somehow made it to the presidential palace shortly before dawn on Wednesday and was free. He managed to regain his sense of direction, he said, by following the stars, and he was shot at several times.

“This is a fair game; they play, they lose,” he said of his captors. “They can’t complain about me. I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t kill anybody. You play, you lose.”

Mr. Aubrière, 40, recounted his daring midnight escape in an interview on Wednesday afternoon at a dilapidated African Union military base in Mogadishu, where he was awaiting a flight back to Paris, via Nairobi. He and a colleague — who is still in captivity, being held by a separate radical Islamist group — had come to Somalia on behalf of the French government to help train the security forces of Somalia’s fledgling government. But the two were snatched from a Mogadishu hotel on July 14 by rogue security forces who had defected to the insurgency.

Mr. Aubrière insisted emphatically, several times in an excited voice, that his half-dozen heavily armed captors treated him like a gentleman, never hitting him, always feeding him and making sure he had plenty of water.

“They were young guys, but good guys,” he said.

He talked about what he ate — “spaghetti, rice, meat from sheep, you know, the normal Somali stuff” — and how he trained for weeks in his cell, cranking out push-ups and walking for hours back and forth, always barefoot, “to toughen up my feet.” To kill time, he read the one book he could get his hands on, Dan Brown’s “Deception Point.”

“I read that book eight times,” he said. “I hate this book now.”

Mr. Aubrière batted down rumors circulating in the city that the French government had paid $2 million for his release, saying, “If they gave money, would I have escaped myself?” A French Foreign Ministry official also stressed that no ransom had been paid and that, contrary to some reports, there had been no violence or shooting connected to the escape.

Mr. Aubrière looked oddly fit for a man who had been confined to a cell for the past month and had just emerged from a death-defying experience. He has narrow, dark eyes, thick arms and a wooly black beard with a silver chin. He was wearing a striped shirt someone had given him, white pants and sandals.

He said that now that he was free, all he really wanted to do was “kiss my wife.”

Would he ever want to come back to this country?

“Maybe next life,” he said.

For many people here, his yarn was too much to believe, with doubters contending that Mr. Aubrière made up the story after being released for cash. The most unlikely part, they argued, was the five-hour odyssey through the bullet-riddled maze of central Mogadishu, where hundreds of thousands of people live in the ruins of a city that has been relentlessly strafed and bombed throughout 18 years of civil war.

But while such a journey would be dangerous, it does seem possible. At night, Mogadishu is deserted. The streets are blank. The houses are dark. Because there is routinely heavy fighting between the government and the insurgents, most people shutter themselves in at sundown and do not come out until dawn.

Mr. Aubrière said he had prepared his breakout plan for weeks and made his move early Wednesday, when it was windy and the noise would allow him to slip away undetected.

“You have a choice,” he said. “Either you wait and be killed. Or you try and be free.”

He called the neighborhood where he was being held “the stronghold,” and he chalked up his escape to sheer grit.

“Smart? You don’t have to be so smart,” he said. “I was just telling myself, ‘Never stop, never stop walking, never stop.’ It’s just simple. It’s strength, that’s all.”

Mr. Aubrière said he worked for the French Foreign Ministry, though French diplomats in Nairobi had said last month that he worked for the Defense Ministry. He denied that he had ever posed as a journalist, as several Somalis who saw him at his hotel had said the Frenchmen did. And he insisted that his escape would not further endanger his colleague still in captivity.

“If I had killed, maybe,” he said. “But it was technically impossible. If I had used a weapon, I would have been caught, immediately.”

[LaCroix]

Jokes aside, Salzburg was german during Mozart's birth, so yes, legally he was german.

And who was the emperess of the german empire? Maria Theresia, so in fact, you all where under Austrian rule back then...

[Thanas]

Jokes aside, Salzburg was german during Mozart's birth, so yes, legally he was german.

And who was the emperess of the german empire? Maria Theresia, so in fact, you all where under Austrian rule back then...

The dynasty does not change the fact the he was part of the Heiliges Römische Reich deutscher Nation, not the Heiliges Römische Reich öterreichischer nation. And Salzburg was not a part of the austrian part of the empire at that time.

[LaCroix]

Jokes aside, Salzburg was german during Mozart's birth, so yes, legally he was german.

And who was the emperess of the german empire? Maria Theresia, so in fact, you all where under Austrian rule back then...

The dynasty does not change the fact the he was part of the Heiliges Römische Reich deutscher Nation, not the Heiliges Römische Reich öterreichischer nation. And Salzburg was not a part of the austrian part of the empire at that time.

That ignores the fact that the whole 'germany' was more of a loose group of friednly nations then a state. So he was Salzburg-ian, and nothing else. 'Germany' didn't even exist back then. You can't have a nationality without a nation. But since the Bild tried to claim him 'german', everybody jumped that bandwaggon. Per definition you could call him a ROMAN, too. Doesn't change the fact, that his ruler was the austrian empress, as patient as paper might be to historians.

[Thanas]

That ignores the fact that the whole 'germany' was more of a loose group of friednly nations then a state. So he was Salzburg-ian, and nothing else. 'Germany' didn't even exist back then. You can't have a nationality without a nation.

But you can have an ethnicity without one, and that one is definitely german, not austrian.

But since the Bild tried to claim him 'german', everybody jumped that bandwaggon. Per definition you could call him a ROMAN, too. Doesn't change the fact, that his ruler was the austrian empress, as patient as paper might be to historians.

His figurehead of a ruler was austrian, his true ruler was a german prince ruling Salzburg. Otherwise you might just as well claim Frederick the great to be Austrian as well.

[LaCroix]

The Ruler of Salzburg was Archbishop Sigismund III. Christoph von Schrattenbach.

It was a Archbistum, created 1328, so Salzburg was a state of it's own, in the holy roman empire.

Said archbishop was born and raised in Styria... So he was Austrian before he became the Salzburg-ian archbishop.

The wording "Deutscher nationen" only related to 'speaking german', and was called Holy roman empire, so there is no 'Germany' to belong to. These two words were only added late in the 15th century. ANd there were lots of italian and french territories in this Roman empire, and even swizerland was included.

You see there is plenty of evidence for both interpretations. To claim that Salzburg was part of Germany, you must be able to proove there was a real claim, and there isn't one, neither for austria. He was Salzburgian, and nothing else.

Maybe this should be split, because it has become a serious highjack..