It has been itching me for some time now to say this, and now that I saw a cartoon about him in the taz (Ingo, thanks for the subscription, must be insanely expensive to ship it to Tokyo every day) this morning I can no longer keep quiet: I know this man!

Bert Rürup is currently running a German government task force (named after him, which puts him en par with Walter Riester and Joachim Gauck) in charge of reforming the German social insurance systems. He is probably quite a hate figure among senior citizens at the moment. But he has also been my professor at university for a year: Everything I know about public finance I know from him. I remember I attended every of his lectures, even though he himself did not (he was already busy with government work at that time) and was often (inadequately) substituted by his teaching assistant. I also remember an embarrassing performance at the final exam, where I knew almost nothing, but still got an A, maybe because of my high attendance at this sparsely visited course.

I reckon this clearly beats my previous number-one brush with the powers, which consists in Gerhard Meyer-Vorfelder holding the speech at my army oath-taking ceremony.