Europe's new climate change commissioner appears to engaging in one-upwomanship with scandal-stricken Iris Robinson.

One toyboy was all the northern Irish MP would consider.

But then Denmark's Connie Hedegaard went before euro-MPs late last week in a committee hearing about her appointment to the European Commission.

Asked about her eco-credentials, the incoming commissioner said her criteria for buying a new fuel-efficient car was one in which it was "possible you can have two teenage boys in the back." (No, really. See here and ffw to 1h37m)



These Danes, so disconcertingly frank.

Neelie Kroes has garnered a reputation over five years as a tough European antitrust regulator, taking on big companies for running cartels or for stomping on smaller rivals.

She also, however, is known for her often tortured public speaking (see one fine typical example here).

Today she did little to dispell that reputation, in a three-hour Q&A with euro-MPs over her new job as telecoms commissioner.

Her answers sounded often as though a box of magnetic telecoms and political buzzwords had been thrown at a fridge, along with another box made up exclusively of tiles bearing the meaningless "so-to-say" (or 'sho-to-shay' in her trademark Dutch drawl).

As if to cement this reknown for speaking in riddles, she also chose to sport a large sparkling brooch in the form of a question mark.






Telecoms companies beware, there's somebody new drafting your regulations - and you may not understand them ...

From today's Metrotime, which makes a lot more sense if you don't speak Dutch:


Plus an exclusive bonus for Berlaymonster readers:

When the 'Monster noted in disparaging terms the European Commission's cringeworthy campaign to get more women into IT jobs , we had no idea quite the lengths of misjudgement Brussels would go to.

The project, launched in March 2008, sought - in the kind of jaunty, cutesy terms the commission assumed would appeal to women - to attract "IT Girls."

The early rumblings from De Beauvoir's grave were already audible, even over the eager chunterings of anticipation from the IT fraternity.

But now there's a poster...

A computer-generated Barbie-esque doll has been chosen as the avatar to which women seeking a job in IT should aspire. And look, she's hip too, because she's wearing a t-shirt, and a baseball cap at a terribly fashionable angle.

The 'textspeak' (because that's how young women all communicate ye know) for the slogan also misfires, with the tech-savvyless commission officials who designed it spelling 'great' as 'gre@t.'

:-O WTF!!! LOL [etc]

Had any of them bothered to ask their teenage daughters they'd have known its correct contemporary abbreviation in the digital world is 'gr8'.

And just one more thing: nice job on adopting the term 'Cyberella' to depict these pert and presumably plastic 'IT Girls' they're trying to attract.

Had they been IT-literate enough themselves they might have entered the name into Google and changed their minds rather promptly.

After all, what self-respecting tech sector high-flying career woman would care to be associated with 'Mara, a lithe young Virtual Reality progammer' who is 'transformed into a stunningly gorgeous cyber-seductress' in tawdry 1990's soft porn flick "Cyberella: Forbidden Passions."

No, really. Maybe they were simply inspired by the film's strapline: 'The wildest fantasies become reality'...