Friday, November 30, 2007

Such a Belgian!

Our friend Jeannette Eats Spaghetti did it again. With this innocent post she reminded us how, besides oxygen, coffee is also essential to life in our Silly World.

Our notorious Belgian friend Biko Azinuth is also a proud member of the coffee club. And because he's Belgian, he really has to take that one extra step further: Biko needs coffee to wake up, to stay awake, AND to go to bed. He has the strongest coffee of the day right after dinner, or he can't drift out of the day and fall asleep. (We don't think he needs it to stay asleep – that would be impractical, unless he installed a caffeine IV next to his bed.)

We would love to go on forever about coffee, but we could not do a lot better than this article, so read that. It should do for now. We need to rest too, we have just explained Pakistan to you, after all. To prove you we are really lazy today, here are some Garfields from our enormous collection (if you click on them, they will appear larger, hopefully):







If you enjoyed them, ask us for more, we have many! The complete archives you can find on the official Garfield site -- click on "today's comic" and from there to "the vault" and from there any date you want! As long as it's after Garfield was born. For the above, we picked: August 7,2000; February 17,2007; August 7,1994.

We should add that chocolate is also an essential element in our world. All kinds of chocolate, but if it only contains cocoa butter rather that crappy fat, even better. Like real Belgian pralines! By the way, our special Belgian friend the Azinuth can only eat chocolate with pure cocoa butter, otherwise he gets enormous pimples. At his age! What a man!

If you also love chocolate but you worry about pimples, whatever your age, there's a tip for you too!

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The Flying Lawyers of Pakistan

Today, dear readers, true to our commitment to understand the world and explain it to you – which is the same thing, actually – and despite the risk of sounding boring, we will try to understand the situation in Pakistan. Feel free to correct us. It's an exciting story.

It's a bit tricky, because we have to keep in mind that a president and a prime minister are two different things. But let's try.

President General Musharraf ran into trouble with the international community, that's basically the US, because he can't contain the tribes in his country. His country consists of tribes, not the other way around, but that is not an acceptable structure for the international community. His preventing tribes from assisting terrorists was the only thing that helped us forget that he was not a democratically elected leader or even a civilian one.

He was, of course, elected last October, which was inevitable, since the opposition boycotted the elections, only to challenge the outcome afterwards. When the judges tried to annul the result, they were sent home. Auf wiedersehen.

So Musharraf announced parliamentary elections (where a prime minister is elected), at the same time looking for a way to hijack those too, as anyone would do, or would wish they could do. To begin with, he gave potential candidates very short notice to prepare their papers. And then he needed a scapegoat. And he found it in Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto had been living what seemed a nice and quiet exile's family life, her days as the prime minister of a corrupt government almost totally forgotten.

Not by her, it appears. When your father has been killed by politics, it must be difficult to let it rest. It's probably that sense of obligation to the dead. So she fell in the trap and negotiated an alliance with former enemy Musharraf, for the good of Pakistan. He pledged to step down as head of the army and be sworn in as a civilian president [that should be happening more or less as we speak]. Bhutto returned to Pakistan. The crowds cheered, the bombs exploded, the dead multiplied.

So Musharraf did not step down as head of the army at that moment, because the situation was getting out of control. He imposed state of emergency and sent Bhutto home.

He is a genius! Such a magnificent bastard!

Bhutto ended up in house arrest. All she had left was her phone. She called CNN every day at World News o'clock to denounce the actions of dictator Musharraf. But nobody cares anymore, because after her alliance with Musharraf her credibility is null.

Tu es foutu.

Oh yes, we saw the demonstrations. Who demonstrated? The lawyers. Academic education, you can't beat it. It was funny to watch how the police carried the protesting lawyers away by grasping them by all fours, and having them face the ground rather than the sky. They looked like little airplanes. It's the new thing, and it is genius, because it disables all important muscles that would allow the carried person to fight back with their arms, or by kicking. Not to mention, it makes the close proximity to the ground (and the possibility of a roughed up face) all too palpable.

Anyway, the new savior of Pakistan, we hear, is Nawaz Sharif, the person responsible for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Another exile wants to come back and save his country. Crowds are an addiction. Crowds rock. The estrogen rages, the testosterone flows, and we all are One – the loneliest number no more. The masses cheer, the bombs explode, the dead multiply.

Sharif is considering to boycott the parliamentary elections, where he will be a candidate. Go figure. Like the King of Jordan once said, Democracy means different things to different people. He probably knows what he's talking about.

Musharraf hasn't solved the Sharif problem yet. We have no idea what he'll do. It's a cliff hanger!

--

Speaking of thrillers, we've got two gorgeous movie suggestions for you!

In the tradition of Hitchcock one might say, a classic: “Gloomy Sunday” must have been (or should have been) sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Tourism. Takes place in Mallorca, which we thought was a German colony, but it turns out to be a super gorgeous Mediterranean island. The song Gloomy Sunday is perfect and eerie.

May not be a Who Done It, but you may call it a How Done It and therefore a classic in an Agatha Christie sense: "Fracture". Roufa figured it all out mid-movie, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Both projects have been excellently realized. Great camera too!

Friday, November 23, 2007

Thank you for the Music

And for the coffee. And for the comedy. And for the beauty. And for hot showers. And for dijon. And for dogs. And for the Mediterranean. And for idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page! Thank you for the roses.

In the spirit of the days – and since we're no artists, just two silly people -- let us make some suggestions for further reading:

For the beat and the bitter and the disgusted persons, William S. Burroughs' “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, as in:

Thanks for the Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.


For the reborn, Alanis Morissette's "Thank U", as in:

the moment I let go of it
was the moment I got more than I could handle
thank you nothingness
thank you clarity
thank you thank you silence


For the irreparably thankless, some Johnny Cash - no, it's Egbert Austin Williams, actually: "Nobody", as in:

When Wintertime comes
With its snow and sleet
And me with hunger
And cold feet
Who says "Here's two bits, go and eat"?
Nobody


For the battered traveler of life, the bipolar, or the bad hangover, a mellow "New Morning" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds seems fitting, as in:

Thank you for giving
this bright new morning
so steeped seemed the evening
in darkness and blood
there will be no sadness no sorrow
there'll be no road too narrow
there'll be a new day
and it's today
for us


Google them, YouTube them, what are you waiting for!

Monday, November 19, 2007

Get Yourself Some Educay-shaaaaan!

Our teenage nephew used to dislike school. He went to a rather decent primary school, where he was diagnosed hyper kinetic whenever he did not do his homework. He claimed he was bored. When he turned 12 his parents did not send him to just another decent high school, but the best school in the region and the most conservative one too – Roufa's famous Alma Mater! How he blossomed! He is now not only a handsome and social young boy, but the best student around, assigned to tutor other students! He's assuming all kinds of responsibilities! In his previous school he had indeed been bored all along. Now he's all enthusiastic about school! What had been soup to him is now knowledge! He is really learning how to learn!

He is not learning how to learn by fiddling with his laptop.

The person typing these lines, that's Mimi of course, or almost her, was not taught to use computers, but the Internets were too tempting, so she had to learn how to operate them. Evey idiot can learn how to use a computer, computers are stupid. When the computer crashes, Mimi turns it off and then on again. It seems to work. Tell her to do something more sophisticated, and she will look at you like you just told her to build a car from scratch. Who knows how many computers she would burn before she got a grip. Besides, she prefers to use her valuable time to understand the world, which is much more interesting. Let the geeks fiddle with the stupid machine.

You think we have something against computers? No, not really. Mimi is not proud to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. We have something against poor education enforced by stupidity and vice versa.

Our notorious cousin, Marina the Mediterranean Nut, regrets that her formal education “was full of holes”. Perhaps, we suggested, those holes produced the nut that she is, much like holes give swiss cheese character. She did not like our joke. She had been full of holes that she'd had to fill in herself if she wanted to do something in her life.

Marina went to a decent primary school, then a mediocre high school. Just like Mimi, when she entered University, she had never even touched a computer. And she was going to study Science! Somehow she managed her way through a tough but chaotic University. Her grades were mediocre to excellent, depending on her mood. But she made it! She's now getting paid to solve scientific problems on kitchen-sized computers using three different languages! By Germans, mind you! And she learned it almost herself!

But then again, she is a stubborn and ambitious nut. Her IQ is something like 154. She had learned how to read by the age of 3 – and that was Greek, mind you. She's a singularity. Only C- students – that's TV journalists – would use her exceptional story to make a generic point.

At least we are using three stories to make our point, and we are not even getting paid for it!

The C- generic point could be: give a child a laptop and they will learn how to learn. They will learn not only how to charge its battery, but also to write the code to go with it! Because all children are potential genius geeks, like Herr Professor Nicholas Negroponte, of MIT and Wired. Not only that, they would download textbooks that their stupid teachers wouldn't even know they existed! They would read those textbooks! They would finally receive the education they deserve!

Nicholas Negroponte succeeded in producing a very cheap yet decent laptop, that consumes very little energy and is tough enough to survive the conditions prevailing in remote rural areas in the developing world. He wants every child to be able to have a laptop, no matter how poor. He's been trying to sell the idea to country leaders, get them to buy the laptops massively, with not much success. He's been trying to find sponsors in rich countries - hence the Give One Get One initiative.

The idea is this. The children that the laptops are aimed for are expected to maintain them themselves (that includes adapting the open-source code). No teacher required. When a virus hits their mean green learning machines, they will learn how to fix it themselves. (And we are talking about children in "remote rural areas", who presumably play basketball with their laptops – hence the machines had to be tough!) Project adviser and education specialist Seymour Papert assures us that it's the best way for the children to learn how to learn. Learn what, anyway. Who needs to know where their country is on the map when there's Google Maps? His point exactly! Google knows where the country is, not stuffy people behind desks.

--

American politicians are also learning how to learn by fiddling with other countries' internal affairs. They take uneducated guesses and when failure occurs, they call it “learning”.


--

Children need much simpler things than a laptop to be healthy and happy and even literate. A bed-time story for example. Our friend Frog the Reading Hero will explain – we also placed a link on the right!

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Hold them for me, will you, my Boring Husband?

Winter. The price to pay for money. Make money in the North, go spend it in the South, that's how it's done. Let us call this the Swedish Retiree Model. A great invention of the 20th century that must be protected by all means, so that we can enjoy it too.

We are posting late, because indeed we had taken a trip south to charge our batteries. Our brains are still soft and numb, plus we had to bond with Sven again, so today we hope to get away with a couple of one-liners. Made in our household. You know how it is with couples, they invent their own universe of jokes and a few of them seem just decent enough to publicize - anonymously.

Seriously, there are even insider jokes that can be shared without problems. Look at our friend Jeannette E. Spaghetti and the story of how she acquired her middle initial. Jeannette belongs to the graceful kind of ladies who do not refer to their husbands as DH. What is this DH, anyway. DH, Ph, BH... BH is what the Germans call a bra – cf title above.

Enjoy the rest.

--

The other day a colleague treated us at work with home-made cake. Very nice of him. Another colleague, A.P., did not touch it, because there was some coffee in it. This young generation, they can be such hypochondriacs. OK, smoking we can kind of understand, but coffee?

RTG said: “And I'll bet he irons his condoms too.”

--

Another C- student on TV pretending to be a journalist. He just discovered that the deforestation of the Amazon region is proceeding “at a breathtaking pace” (breathtaking literally, shall we add).

RTG said: “This was going on 20 years ago already, when Sting was still popular.”

--

Recently there was quite some fuzz on the news regarding the recognition of the Armenian genocide. Independent historians estimate that the number of Armenians who were killed or massacred by the Turks during deportation in 1915-16 was around 600,000. Armenian sources claim that more than 1,500,000 were killed during that genocide. According to Turkish claims, about 300,000 Armenians died in that period.

ML said: “Always haggling...”

--

RTG said: “God, I look old.”

Then added: “Oh well, who wants to die young.”

--

Fergie sings: “Big girls don't cry”

ML/Lucille Bluth said: “They can't spare the moisture?”

Friday, November 9, 2007

Great Blunders And Golden Bananas

We are still alive indeed, and we sincerely hope the same for you, dear readers.



More than three weeks on line and we realize that we have given only one Golden Banana through this blog, and that was in this post. We had great fun writing that! Since then, we have watched Sarko's awkward attempts to pat Bush on the back in front of the cameras – like Bush had done to him a couple of times (making him look like a shy and rather touchy self-conscious débutante, the height difference working against him) – and his love declarations to the US made on behalf of the French people. And he still has to push his reforms at home. We are really worried about his welfare. We shall spare him the Golden Banana. We will even give him a tip for free: Talk to Merkel instead! The American Century was Last Century!


We almost had another perfect Golden Banana candidate. We were watching the DVD of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The road to God knows where (by Uli M. Schueppel). Touring America in black and white, with a really useless manager. That was before the Kylie Minogue duet. So Nick Cave is in LA and he's waiting to be interviewed for LA Weekly. What a disaster! This indie-llectual airhead enters, the lights are on but you're not home. Tries to make small talk. She even declares she has “a list of exciting questions” for him. We feel embarrassed in her place, but we don't blame her, she doesn't know better. And then the interview begins. Here is an excerpt:


Journalist (staring at her notes): Seems like there's interest in... I guess inspirational qualities... this kinda like... southern white trash kinda guy that goes... that kind of image of that kinda guy that so many songs are written about... seems like you have that kinda... sometimes that vein kinda comes up in different songs... some particular... just one of the things that you find interesting or...

NC: Well, yeah, I guess I do find that interesting.


Here she is, having the chance to interview the greatest poet anyone she ever knew will ever shake hands with, and this is what she comes up with. Again, this is a tragedy, not just a blunder. Sad. No Golden Banana.


Do you homework, do your homework, do your homework. That's what we say.


The next interview on the DVD looks more professional and we get to hear Nick's voice for a change:


NC: ... I'm not really comfortable with that sort of labeling, actually. I think these songs are written with a fair amount of disgust for things, yeah.

Journalist: Why's that?

NC: Because I'm a pretty disgusted person, really.


In short, we will sit on our Golden Bananas for now, no pun intended. And remember: If you too are a disgusted person, don't suppress it or feel guilty about it. It's healthy, harmless and can produce great art.


Happy Weekend!


--


The contest is still going on, see previous post and comment therein. Tip: Start by trying to guess right Nick Cave's contribution.


Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Those Sinister Dinner Deals, Those Alleged Mysterious Ways


We -- that's Roufa and Mimi -- have reached an age where we can finally enjoy our being intelligent. We can't complain. There was some trouble coming to terms with it during the Age of Ignorance, but no more. For one, it's great to hear our teenage nephew say he's proud to have “two professors” in his family. (We are not professors.) When he had to interview someone important for school and realized that athletes, singers, actors and actresses were not very reachable, he came to us. We explained nuclear physics to him in two neat paragraphs, made him happy and his teacher very impressed. This is what we are intelligent for.

No matter what your IQ, you will not make sense of life and death and love and evil in a million words. Maybe in a few of them. If you are any lucky, you will produce the Purest Nugget of Green. Sell it to the locals for Gold. Tomorrow you may die. Your words still lingering to spook your family and friends, like a vacant pair of slippers next to your bed; an orphaned package of cigarettes, dirty laundry – will they wash them?

While we are writing this, the white noise of the Internet is consuming itself, a multiverse of flaming lips bellow at the firmament:

Fire! I am fire! I am on fire!

A million babies push their way out to the world, girls and women become mothers, mothers become mothers again, mothers lose their children, mothers reject their children, childless mothers stall in confusion, their cradles still unfilled. A nun is dead.

Someone out there is dealing his world for some change. And would you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

Of course you would.

--

We are not going to die tomorrow. What are the chances anyway. Sven will sting us a million times, on many days to come. We will buy a French Bulldog, preferably black with a white stripe across the muzzle. We will give her a funny name.

--

The first reader to guess right the names of everybody famous or rather famous that we have quoted in this post wins a FREE! subscription to our blog. And a FREE! visit from us.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Angels stole your missing socks


Good day, our dear readers! We hope you had at least half as lovely a weekend as we did. And that you've aired yourselves sufficiently. Always important. We'll keep on telling you until you have to run out for air.

We had a visitor in the weekend, our friend Biko Azinuth. He's quite a character. And Belgian, which is how we got hooked, see previous post. Biko is an aspiring writer, and full of stories. But he wasn't there to impose on us with the characters in his fiction, he's not the obsessive-neurotic type of author. (Not that we would mind. Those guys maintain very popular blogs about how they cannot sit down and write. Traffic guaranteed.) What he talked about was his childhood pets! Dogs, cats, turtles. As a result, it's impossible for us to post anything sharp today.

We started talking about dogs, because we are planning to have one. Biko is a fan of boxers and has had almost half a dozen of them up to now. Sweet, playful, funny creatures – we are enchanted ourselves. One of his boxers would get so melty when he cuddled her, that she fainted. Another one was extremely stubborn, impossible to train, a very strong personality, but still sweet. She wouldn't let him pack for a trip – she would poke into the suitcase and steal his socks all the time. All boxers were fascinated with the birds in the garden. They would watch them attentively as they chirped around the bird house.

Biko has also owned a cat, Prutz. A crazy creature, really crazy. She would attack you out of the blue, while (you thought she was) napping in your lap. When she died, the doctor discovered her brain was full of sugar crystalls. She had been a diabetic nut. Prutz was a merciless hunter too. She would give the family a scare by bringing in a bug or a mouse, proudly laying them dead or half-dead at their feet. She'd take a nap on Kika the boxer, planting her claws in her skin so as not to slip off. Kika did not mind.

He's also had a German Shepherd, Tina, when he was a very small boy. He used to lay on her in the garden and watch the sky. At the same time he owned a turtle, Piet. Piet would listen to his name. You could call him and there he would set off slowly to nibble on his tomato. Later he would take a stroll in the garden, dumping his excess all along, so that next thing you knew, tomato plants would sprout all over the place. They didn't know what to do with all the tomatoes.

Piet was not afraid of coming down the stairs. He would go for it. Jump he'd go, land on his back, and then wait for Tina to arrive and turn him over, back on his feet. Time and again.

In the winter it was hibernation time for Piet. He would lay in the basement, inside a box cushioned with leaves.

--

Our brains soothed by these stories, we slept like babies. And that's the best way to sleep. I, Mimi, dreamed of a heaven, where all our thought-to-be-dead pets and animals of all sorts played happily together, sniffed and cuddled, jumped in ponds, examined the cacti over the hill; skipped around poking toys, chasing one another, some waiting for their owners, some already spoiling theirs. Biko's joyful boxers ran after tennis balls and wild birds and chickens, and funny heavenly creatures I could not quite make out, then rested in their nests full of his missing socks and underwear. That's where all your missing socks have gone! The heaven of boxers.

--

Our new landlord does not allow big dogs – heaven knows why he should prefer us to have a handbag-sized, neurotic bundle of barking hell -- so instead of a boxer we will settle for a French Bulldog. Aren't they, after all, “a big dog in a small package”? Looking forward to it! We'll let you know!

Thursday, November 1, 2007

The Perfect Headache, The Ideal Crash, ...


Have you got a blurry world map stored in your brain, where foreign countries float slowly on intelligible coordinates, behind thick fog (unless they share borders with your country, in which case the map becomes more stable and reduces to one dimension)? Where is Belgium on that map? Does it even have a place? Is it a mere specter of medieval eeriness, where fat peasants grill wild boars and gulp down thick black beer, and sly-eyed princes seduce their pale ladies with divine chocolate bon-bons, inside ornate cushioned carriages pulled by yeti-booted horses through the idyllic green land and into dark towered castles? Is it an insignificant pancake of space surrounding Brussels, wherever that may be?


We will tell you. The first thing to know is that Belgium is a cartoon country - cartoons are to be found and obeyed everywhere, from airport corridors to children's salami. It has been functioning without a human government for months. It receives TV channels from England, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Spain, so it must be someplace close to them. Even before TV, all these countries – among others - had put a foot on it, or walked a boot on it, one way or the other. The process has produced the very special Flemish breed, residing on the west part of the country (you can actually divide the place into ever smaller parts, it's like a fractal – but let's keep it simple). It's blunt, surreal, refined, and subtle all at the same time. And now it seems to have produced the quintessential Belgian movie too.


So if you are above 18, you are curious to know what the famous Belgian culture is all about, and Kamagurka is too difficult a start, despair not, for Ex Drummer will be out soon. We have not seen the movie yet! Loved the trailer, though, and then this scene that we found on YouTube (with english subtitles) corroborated our suspicion that this is it. A pity it was written by that bastard, Herman Brusselmans, but hey. Let's give him credit, you can't get more Belgian than that.


---


On Monday we forgot to water Sven! We blame Marina the Nut for that. Boy, was he angry! Now we'll never get him to pose for a picture! So we spent the last few days trying to bond again and we couldn't blog. We apologize for that. Maybe we should reconsider our blogging routine. Twice a week should be fine, no?