Kierkegaard once remarked that luck is a perfectly legitimate route to genius. Therefore I must say that I am quite happy with the new proverb that forms the title of this entry. It is a machine-translation from german of Die Schimmelreiter auf dem brechenden Deich - which was a sentence used in Die Zeit in a commentary on this sundays election for chancellor. The translation was from Googles translation beta. I wanted to see if they had improved on babelfish in any significant way but it is hard to judge from a few experiments. Services such as this always look impressive at first sight.

For instance the translation "Pitch for Hans's acorn" for "Pech f?r Hans Eichel" is funny but not so meaningful.