Monday, December 31, 2007

Such a Belgian's Mother!

Last day of the year. The anticipation is killing us. Will we make it to the next?

Meanwhile, what better opportunity than this, to remember and catch up with some of the things that have preoccupied us in this rather young bblogg.

(Some links may not work, temporarily, presumably because the google geeks are playing again - or not. No wonder we are not charmed by computers or impressed by geeks, to say the least.)

We watch many movies and have commented on some of them, from a silly scary movie about carnivorous sheep, to a pretentious nonsense, to Marie Antoinette. We read many books, but haven't written much about them.

We are intelligent for no obvious reason.

We are not the only ones who like to poke innocent fun at the beautiful little Germans. Garfield shares our weakness. Here is a recent strip featuring Greta the pet sitter.

The situation in Pakistan was a cliff hanger on the 28th of November. It is still troubled. Benazir Bhutto regained her freedom and people's support, but lost her life. Don't worry, though, her son will lead the party -- after he completes his studies. Meanwhile, his widowed father will take over. The crowds cheer, etc. Not only Musharraf and the military, but also the Bhutto Dynasty verify what the King of Jordan once said, that "democracy will mean different things to different nations".

We appreciate Italian design, as does our petite cousin Marina the Nut. Our wish to her for the new year: to find her dream shoes in size 34 1/2.

We are fun-loving people and many readers seemed to have enjoyed our household jokes.

Our friend Biko Azinuth, the non-neurotic Belgian writer who loves animals, visited his mother for Christmas. She is a funny woman living with a sweet dog at an insignificant Flemish village. She embodies Belgian surrealism as much as any Belgian. She went out with a younger friend, and as the sun shone behind the friend, outlining her profile from an unfortunate angle, Biko's mother noticed a long curly hair growing on her friend's chin. She said so. The friend panicked, "pull it out", she begged. "I can't", said Biko's mother. "I'm not wearing my glasses."

Remember the Azinuth's coffee addiction? His mother has now also picked the habit of having a cup of coffee after dinner. Poor Biko was so worried when he first saw her do that: "What if you cannot sleep!" he protested. "Well," she said, "at least I've had my coffee".

Our nephew says he is studying math right now. We don't believe him.

Can talent kill you? There were two children once. The youngest, a
boy, pointed his water pistol to his head and said "I'm trying to destroy my brain without dying." The girl remarked: "That's the best way to kill your ideas without dying for them". Bless them, wherever they are.

In 2007 we gave one golden banana, one leaden cucumber, and one golden apple. Sven, our beloved cactus, and his friend RockFrog made it into Frog's DAFTS gallery.

We have offered free advice.

We get easily disgusted and appreciate the company of other disgusted persons. But we can be very thankful too. We are thankful for our new friends! And we thank you for reading us!

It is fitting to close with something funny that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, as a moral lesson:

Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent, aren't everything.

Hurrah!

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Must it be so very bright?

What kind of artist will not throw themselves into the fire? It is not a rhetorical question. You can't define talent any more than you can define the divine. You just know it when you see it. (So here's one reason why we could not become art critics: We only care to write about what we care about.)

Artists are God's creations too. And it seems as though, more often than not, they need to set themselves ablaze, to destroy themselves, before they can become creators. They do it themselves, or somebody else does it. A rite of passage. We should be praying for them to survive, so that they can continue to report from the front. Or from the other side. Not scoff at them.

Many artists don't seem to have experienced a hard rite of passage, and we appreciate them just as much. Some people are born with a third eye, a vision, and the details of their Bildungsroman become irrelevant. (Conversely, booze and drugs alone don't make you rock'n'roll. The headphones are on, but the planes won't land.)

So we're back to where we started this post. Typical! Well, it's a blog, not the Notebook section of Harper's!

--

End of the year! It is statistically safe to say, the worst is over.

Still no sight of a second Golden Banana award on this bblogg. That's good. In fact, we have a sweet Golden Apple to give to Liam Gallagher, of Oasis of course. Saw him on TV and he was in a great mood! He can be very convincing when he says he's as big as Elvis. He was also very convincing when he explained his generation's attitude towards politics: The biggest figure of British politics in the past 30 years, no other than Margaret Thatcher, crushed the working class in the 80's. And when the Labor party came to power, what did they do? Squeeze what was left of it. No wonder people save their votes for where they count, namely reality TV shows. Hail Little Britain.

This is the right moment for us to declare: We would be glad to have another, preferably single-digit, percentage of our decent income taken away for us, if that's what it takes for every one's health, income and retirement plan to be insured (including ours - still dreaming of the Swedish Retiree Model). Sure we can survive with one designer lamp less. Unfortunately, the way democracy has been giving way to plutocracy as of late, it's not very likely to happen. We stay tuned, but meanwhile, designer lamp it is.

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We've seen another celebrity on those TV Annual Reviews: Heather, Ex-Mrs Paul McCartney. The fascination with the Sir himself we don't get, but the fascination with his divorce must be due to the amounts of money involved. She was in tears, trying to defend herself against all those bad people who wrote all those bad things about her.

One piece of advice for all the Heathers out there: Take the money and run. Go some place exotic and enjoy it. Enough with those vultures. The accountants of motives and truths, of eyes and teeth. They will never enjoy anything.

--

And now, back to the cookies for us! Happy holidays everyone, if you have any! Whetever it is you're celebrating, not celebrating it would be a sin indeed.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

To survive... Perhaps to enjoy...

Christmas! New Year! Almost there! Holidays! Travel! Shopping! Presents!

Well, let's face it, Roufa is not a Christmas person. It's too cold a period for him and he tends to spend it in denial. He does appreciate the lights, though. As far as he's concerned, all this fuss is useful as a distraction from the cold and the dark, a tasteless hallucination, and Spring simply cannot come fast enough.

But Mimi used to love Christmas! The carols, the snow even, and oh, the cookies, the cute decorations in red and green, the Santas, the glitter, the candy, the presents... She would blow all her money on Christmas presents!

Until, that is, she read The Corrections. That horrible, horrible book. And from then on, Christmas has become that monstrous thing that Enid Lambert lives for. A compulsive torture that Enid Lambert imposes on her unloved ones, year after year after year. The Advent calendars, the tasteless presents. The enormous ornament collection. The candles... are things that Enid Lambert lives for. There he is, a lovely wooden Santa with his cotton-white beard and his reindeer in knitted outfit, king of the store, the perfect Christmas charm for Mimi's living-room! Mimi cheers and rejoices, she enthuses like a child, she approaches,... and she chills as she realizes, this is something that Enid Lambert would enthuse about. She has been growing an Enid Lambert inside her all her life.

Damn.

And poor Enid, too! Is a little beauty and joy too much to ask?

If you have managed to escape that horrible book, well done, don't read it. Poor Mimi made the mistake. She hopes she will get over it by Christmas 2010, but for the moment she has to suffer it out. It seems like reading is not always good for you. If you are superficial enough, you may enjoy The Corrections as a soap (but then, why not just watch a soap). If you really feel you need to read about troubled families, you probably come from a troubled family yourself – real or imaginary, it doesn't matter. In that case, why perpetuate the misery?

Speaking of Christmas holidays and families, we suspect that for some of you -- like for the Lambert children -- the two make a dreadful combination. This must mean that you are not very happy, that your families treat you bad, or both. We are far from qualified to judge other people's miseries – we are just two lucky bastards, who managed to find each other, inside a brilliant diamond of space-time, many years and miles ago. We wish we could help you to take it easy, though. Let us try:

Survival Trick No. One: The Bubble Boy or Bubble Girl. If you find yourself surrounded by family members you are scared of and who make you feel bad with their behavior and remarks, imagine you are in a transparent, protective rubber bubble. Nothing can penetrate the bubble, but the nutritious vitamins and minerals of the turkey – and the sweetness of the cookies, of course. All poisonous darts (real or imaginary - most likely, complex - it really doesn't matter) that reach the surface of the bubble just bounce off. This trick works, as long as you don't shoot poisonous darts yourself. They will bounce off on the inside of the bubble and hurt you.

Survival Trick No. Two: The Talk-to-the-Hand -- or tape recorder. You need equipment for this: a small journalistic tape recorder, with a tape and batteries. You hide it on you and keep it on voice-activated mode. When poisonous darts fly around you (real or imaginary, it does NOT matter, what matters is your well being), you don't have to listen to them and follow them, because they are being recorded, so you can always play them back later (you won't, of course!). Another angle that may work better for you: while recording, you are secretly pleased that you finally have evidence of their malice/intrusiveness/mere existence, and that thought offsets the poisonous effect of the remarks. It's a psychological trick we've heard of.

Anyway, we do hope you don't need our tricks! Whatever your case, if your holidays involve cookies and warmth, you have every reason to enjoy them! Buy silly presents if you can, receive silly presents with a smile, have silly fun! It won't last long, anyway. And then the days will start to get longer again, which makes Roufa very, very happy already.

--

For further reading: Seems that our sweet friend birthing your dream has some insight and advice for you, see his Dec.21 post.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Seascape with Tannenbaums

Hallo, dear friends! Here we are again, almost two weeks later and several eurodollars richer! It was not easy to post, though we did manage to hop hop on some of your websites and leave some comments here and there, which was fun.

Have we said already how thankful we are for the Mediterranean? The climate, the ancient civilizations, which have produced nutty people who talk in songs and who know what and how to cook? Yes, we have.

During this latest trip, we've made two new and important realizations:

One. Italians don't walk; they strut. They strut their stuff, like Little Jerry the rooster. We can't tell whether it's their shoes, or if they make shoes especially to bring out the better of their strut. The development of the two, shoes and strut, must have been the result of a mutual feedback process over the ages. We, for one, don't strut when we wear Italian shoes, or at least we don't think so. Do we?

Two. Santas look silly in the hot'n'sun. And we are not talking about Australian beach girls in red bikinis. Bearded, old, head-to-toe-in-red Santas in the sun look like a bad hallucination. Seascape with Cacti and Tannenbaum's.

Now this doesn't look silly at all in the sun:



Isn't this the perfect place for Sven to be! Naaaah... Knowing him, he prefers to hang out on our coffee table with RockFrog. Too much sun and too much family would get on his nerves and bring out the pricklier in him. Sven and RockFrog also like the Reading Hero Lounge and the DAFTS Gallery. Nature's not really their thing.

Frankly, as much as we respect it, nature's not really our thing either, outside the occasional romantic walk along obscenely non-virgin paths. There must be a reason why we don't live in caves anymore - but hey, that's us. We like our electricity outlets and we show them our appreciation by feeding them beautiful lamps. That is to say, we spent the better part of our fresh eurodollars on an Italian designer lamp. Never looked back. Always in the spirit of enjoying our money and our very, very bad eyesight while we can. Needless to say, we appreciate contact lenses too.

--

The Mediterranean is all fine and well, as long as you don't find yourself amid a minor crisis, like, say, a flight cancellation due to bad weather (2min of snowfall) at, say, a small airport in the south of Italy. The local victims of the cancellation tend to raise hell in their big, round a's and o's and i's that can only spell “panic” or “you are all idiots”. Heavens forbid, they will reach Milan three hours too late with the next flight. But what if you have to connect to an international flight and you miss home soooo very much? The airport employees appear astonished that such a problem exists and that it's actually them, not the gods, that can do something to help you. The paranoia of the crowds and the seemingly lobotomized staff must have been the divergent result of a mutual feedback process over the ages. Where are the Germans when you need them? Nowhere. No Lufthansa employees to be found in the south of Italy.

Why do you think it took Ulysses 10 years to reach home? He was stuck in the Mediterranean.

Our famous cousin, Marina the Nut, had a near-Ulysses experience amid a minor crisis, namely a flight cancellation due to bad weather, at a small airport in the south of Italy.

After wedging her way through the “you're all idiots” opera, and trailing an AirOne employee “that looked as stupid as Nicolas Cage” for four hours (being a Mediterranean Nut herself, she knew what she had to do), little Marina the Nut managed to “get the hell out” of that stupid little airport and on a late flight to Rome, with a promise, via telephone, for a seat on the first Lufthansa flight to Germany early the next morning. She blew the better part of her then fresh eurodollars, to spend what was left of the night in the only hotel in Roma Airport, the Hilton “Bed and Shower”, as she likes to call it now. 180 euros, you do the math. It was the most expensive shower she's ever had.

Friday, December 7, 2007

A Leaden Cucumber for Us?

We were planning to just say a sweet goodbye-and-see-you-soon before our upcoming

Leave of Absence #1,

that's a 7 to 10-day period, during which we will be on the road and possibly not in a position to post... and then it hit us again. You may think you're done with the blog, but the blog is not done with you.

It was such a heart-warming message that the French Minister of Agriculture was conveying through our very TV set. So they do know it's Christmas after all! He was going to loosen certain restrictions and allow French farmers to cultivate a larger portion of their land, because there are people in the world who starve. They're all waiting for the French grapes to arrive!

It just so happens that a couple of days ago we read how they solved their famine problem in Malawi. After one more disastrous corn harvest two years ago, they were indeed facing serious starvation problems over there. And then the new president Bingu wa Mutharika decided to henceforth ignore the suggestions and free-market preachings of the EU, the US -- and perhaps other U's we may be forgetting and the World Bank of course -- and subsidize fertilizers, which farmers there could absolutely not afford otherwise. Alas, no more free market in Malawi, they could go straight to hell! Well, they are now exporting corn to Zimbabwe. And the food aid that arrives there is being forwarded to Uganda.

The aforementioned U's do subsidize their own farmers. They just wanted Malawi to continue to export, say, tobacco and use the money to import their food. In that way U's would get the tobacco and the money U's would have paid for it. Hypocrites? U's?

This is not a Golden Banana anymore, this calls for a Leaden Cucumber up U's.

Aaaaanyways!

Dear Very Honorable Readers, as we said already, we'll be gone for several days. Posting is not guaranteed. Have a nice time this weekend, and let us remind you that you should air yourselves sufficiently -- physically and mentally.

By the way, as all Reading Heroes know, reading is a good way to air your mind, and helping Santa is another great one too! Dancing is highly recommended as well - it seems to keep Ms Quarks sane, sometimes. If you'd fancy some brain jogging, try and memorize the name of the Malawian President, see above. If you're German, you know what to do, we call it hiking.

In any case, be sure to enjoy whatever money you're making. If you absolutely can't, at least let somebody else enjoy it.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Beautiful Little Germans #1

In Don DeLillo's “White Noise”, Jack has named his first son Heinrich, in order to render him invincible. A person with such a name, he felt, nobody and nothing could ever touch. Jack is a Professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the hill and, if we are to accept the view of a colleague of his, with his very choice of subject Jack hoped to defy death himself.

There is something about the German language. Once you've made your statement in German, it is final, and nobody can challenge it any more. One can agree, or try to refute, but clarity is not to be escaped, if the Teutonic exchange is to carry on. Having built your thought in German means you have made sure, that all your carefully chosen words have fallen into their age-old places in the sentence, bearing the gravitas of ancient rocks, of monumental meteorites emplaced on a dry river bed a thousand years ago.

Jack could not speak German for sour apples.

But our notorious cousin – who lives in Germany and whose name we shall not reveal this time, because we have received threats – can! She actually claims that the Germans are very sweet people and very tolerant towards her grammar mistakes. When she expresses a request in a shop, for example, the sales assistant will repeat her request in correct German and then proceed to fulfilling said request with the utmost efficiency. Because being correct is more important than being polite. Besides, a correct request means better chances to reach a correct result – and on top of that, thanks to all those corrections, she-who-we-shall-not-speak-of gets the chance to improve her German. Win-win!

Of course we visited our cousin during the Weltmeisterschaft 2006. It was great fun! Even the weather was unbelievably great! And every time a match ended, part of the population took to the streets honking and waving flags of the winner country in joy and granfaloony! Because you will find people from all nationalities living in Germany. Germans appear to be a minority in their own country. There was a funny spot on German TV (they are fun loving people too): a German went to work at a Turkish kebab place, but it was a disaster, because he couldn't tell his tash-kebab from his sish-kebab, his chicken from his lamb. The gloomy voice-over warned: Did you know that more than 60 million Germans do not speak Turkish?

Our cousin reports that hosting the 2006 FIFA World Cup did wonders for the psychology of the country. Opening up to the world for all the right reasons! Finally, World War II could stay where it belonged – the Last Century. Finally, the black-and-white documentaries that haunted state TV night after night after night, were brought to a halt. Hurray!

We have very fond memories ourselves, but now and then we like to make fun of the little Germans, out of impetus, momentum, compulsion if you like, and we don't mean harm. The old clichés are itching. After this disclaimer, let us share with you a few related one-liners made in our household. Enjoy! And if you are German, remember – it is out of love!

--

RTG said: “German is not a language – it's a martial art!”

RTG on a wild improvisation spree about a dermatologist: “As a German doctor, his specialization is whip scars. In fact, latex allergies and whip scars!”

and continued: “he also has a surgical specialty: tattoo transplants!”

Woman on TV: “This depression gave me the strength to work” RTG said: “This is just the German business model.”

From The Xenophobe's guide to the Germans: “In Germany, humor is no joking matter.”

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