Tuesday, January 29, 2008

The Good, the Evil, and the all-you-can-eat buffet

It is an endless story, apparently. It's a snake going after its own tail, a coin that you can go on and flip forever. So many people have been busting their brains and their research grants over it. Is being and doing good hereditary? Are we conditioned to it? Not all abused children grow up to rape somebody, right? Has Goodness evolved through natural selection? Do we have a choice? Free will? Is there a point in being or doing “Good”?

Is there Heaven and Hell?

Is there Heaven or Hell?

And so on.

Remarkably, there are myriads of people out there, lacking stories to tell, not to mention research grants or brains, or a pulpit for that matter, who are also fiddling with such questions. The Internet, for one, is littered with their agonizing banalities. We got lectured the other day by such an otherwise well-meaning fellow. He gave us the parameters. The genes and the environment. Religion. The parents. The lack thereof. One thing was clear, there is plenty of theory around, for fellows with time in their hands and no real problems.

What's a poor blogger to do?

Start with a disclaimer. Not everything is supposed to make sense. If you can't take it from us, take it from Wittgenstein.

Then an observation, in the form of a rhetorical question: could there be anybody out there, anybody who can read this at least, who has never heard of all this? The concept of Good and Evil? If you are not interested in all this, you are in all likelihood not interested in all this.

Then forget about research and brains. We have feelings too, you know.

And then cry for help, obviously! Get a couple of specialists! Their words are out there for grabs! That's what they are for!

--

For the brain in agony, we have, quite predictably, some Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from “As I sat sadly by her side”:

When will you ever learn?
[...]God does not care for your benevolence
Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others
Nor does he care for you to sit
At windows in judgment of the world He created
While sorrows pile up around you
Ugly, useless and over-inflated

--

For the spiritually troubled, we turn to the recent movie of Craig Brewer, Black Snake Moan. The good reverent R.L. is counseling the troubled nymphomaniac Rae, who has hit a tragic low after her dearly loved boyfriend Ronnie went away to join the army. There is something about heaven and redemption she does not understand. In fact, she finds it “fucking stupid”:

RAE:You can't hurt people... and then just say, I'm sorry, and then everything just gets washed away. Why would heaven want people like that. People who... do what they want and then... switch.

R.L.:I'm gonna tell you somethin', and it's just gonna be between you and me.
I think folks carry on about heaven too much. Like it's some all-you-can-eat buffet up in the clouds. And folks just gonna do as they're told so they can eat what they want behind some pearly gates. I can go to Shoney's for that.

(R.L.):There's sin in my heart. There's evil in this world. But when I got no one... I talk to God. I ask for strength. I ask for forgiveness. Not for peace at the end of my days when there's no more life to live and no more good to do, but today. Right now.

(R.L.):What's your heaven? What gives you peace?

RAE:(struggling to speak through her tears): Ronnie.

--

For the struggling humanist, we have the confetti of Kurt Vonnegut illustrating this post.

--

We could go on forever. Because this is hot. It has been hot forever. Good and Evil, Love and Hate, Life and Death. As forever-hot issues go, we shall always keep in mind the following exchange between Blackadder and Lord Percy:

Percy: I intend to discover, this very afternoon, the secret of alchemy. The hidden art of turning base things into… gold.
Blackadder: I see. And the fact that this secret has eluded the most intelligent people since the dawn of time doesn't dampen your spirits?

Friday, January 25, 2008

Sopranos



Greece is a wonderful country. Every time we go there, we love it! We've got a cupboard full of Nescafe to prepare the real Greek frappe all year round, for that holiday feeling. We've emailed the Greek National Tourism Organization inquiring about scenic posters for our apartment (but they haven't replied***). Funny we haven't written anything about Greece yet! It is possible that by now we've got a couple of Greek friends reading us, and we would hate to disappoint them by neglecting their beautiful country. We've been busy with Pakistan and Belgium, for heavens' sakes. Not to mention, our friend Biko Azinuth the Author is Belgian, yet he prefers to set his books in Greece. We have no excuse!

So we've been trying to sort out Greek politics. Modern Greek politics, that is. It turns out is is real simple. Greek names tend to be long and complicated, but as far as politics is concerned, you only need to remember about five of them and you've covered a century, as we'll demonstrate. For the purposes of this post we will stick to initials, in order to keep life the way we like it, easy and simple. But that does not mean that same initials do not correspond to same names in what follows! They do!

The Greek Prime Minister KK (picture, center) is visiting Turkey. It's a grand symbolic event. Anything close to the Middle East is the perfect destination for country leaders in trouble, seeking a grand exit. Turkey is practically Middle East and at the same time Greece's most befriended neighbor and enemy, so KK got two in one with this. [Name count: 1, for KK.]

Last time a Greek Prime Minister paid an official visit to Turkey was 49 years ago. And that had been KK's uncle, also called KK. See? [Name count: 1 + 0 new = 1.]

The opposition leader in Greece was GP last time we checked. He inherited his party from his father, AP. Actually, there was a period between AP and GP when the party (and the country) was run by some parachutist, whose style was too German to last, so forget about him. [Name count: 1 + 2 new = 3.]

AP was pursuing a successful academic career in America, when his own father, GP (see?), ex-Prime Minister (also known as the Old Man of Democracy - it's a positive term), died, about 40 years ago. On the day of his funeral, crowds of people took to the streets to bid farewell, despite the risk of being spotted and prosecuted by the Junta. There was a 7-year Junta in Greece some forty years ago. What would you do if you were AP and as charismatic, if not more, as your father? You'd set up your own party in exile, fight to restore democracy, and then return to claim your place in the political life of your beautiful and once again democratic country. [Name count: 3 + 0 new = 3. No new names in this paragraph.]

So AP (that's GP's son and GP's father), representing the leftish, and KK (that's KK's uncle), representing the rightish, were the chief political rivals in Greece in the late 70s. GP (AP's father) and KK (KK's uncle) were rivals in the 60s. Not much has changed, except that the inbreeding has been turning the political scene into a more and more retarded mongoloid. [Name count: 3 + 0 new = 3.]

The dark-haired lady on the picture, left, is called DB. She has been mayor of Athens and a minister, among other things. She is the major rival of KK within their party. She is the daughter of KM, a senior party member, who has also been a leader of his party (and the country) in the past. KM has always been a headache to the GPs and KKs. [Name count: 3 + 2 new = 5.]

The blond lady is East German. Her name is AM and she leads Germany. Her being on the picture is an accident. We apologize. Blame Marina the Nut, who sent us the picture.

--

Next time in The Sopranos: How the students overthrew the Junta! How those who were not massacred took to politics and cashed in on the trauma! How the student movement also cashed in on its victories with perpetual protest, turning Universities into hothouses for Marxist-Leninist bourgeoisie!

--

But meanwhile, dear readers, it's weekend. Let our motto for the upcoming weekend be sung by Franz Ferdinand the group:

It's always better on holidays
So much better on holidays
That's why we only work when
we need the money.


Still waiting to hear from GNTO about those scenic posters.

***PS Jan29: Sure they did! Thank you, GNTO! For making our place feel like a real kafeneio! Waiting for the sun now.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

...but the heart and the stomach of a concrete rhino!

Dear readers, we are back. Back together, and back altogether.

We don't know what we were thinking and how we survived. Next time Roufa goes along with Mimi. By now we are like Siamese twins: We can't even walk straight when we are not together. It's ridiculous.

So Mimi could tell you about her adventures up in the mountains with the skiers and the snow. It was not Davos, but it was a professional affair nonetheless. She could make fun of all the big German men typing away on their minute Sony Vaio laptops. They looked like bears on children's bikes. It was a rather silly spectacle. Although she has but the weak and feeble body of a small non-German woman, Mimi is buying a minute Sony Vaio no more. Not after this.

Being away without a laptop, or a TV, or newspapers, she had no idea what was happening in the world. An avalanche rolling its way down the idyllic slopes would have been a hint. But there was no avalanche. Luckily!

Yeah, we could write about all that, but give us some time first to recover from the cruel separation. We are not fully ready to blog yet. We hope you'll understand.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Rhinos in Peril

[and our Leave of Absence #2]

It's been almost a year, and we should celebrate it. It's hard to believe it, but up until just one year ago, if you raised the issues of the Environment, Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and so on, you were a quaint curiosity with flowers in your hair. Or a Marxist-Leninist SUV hater - or a science-fiction blockbuster - or Sting - or a scientist about to get grilled. We were none of the above -- just old enough to remember Sting – so even as the summer temperatures in our beloved Mediterranean grew more and more inhumane (not inhumane enough to keep us away), we had to keep our worries to ourselves. It looked hopeless.

And then, at the end of January 2007, in Davos, Switzerland, the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum took place. We remember watching the TV reports in amazement. Had we missed something? Certainly those were not Marxist-Leninists with flowers in their hair, not any more anyway, but on and on they went about Climate Change. Obviously, the world's VIPs had decided they were finally ready for the Environment to go mainstream!

And so we were beamed to a miraculous new world of urgency. We got bombarded with commercials of hybrid cars, showered with heart-warming messages promising clean energy – from oil companies! The C- students – that's TV journalists -- discovered a new playground. Out they went in armies, bear spotting, taking mud baths with elephants!

CO2 emissions became the new calories!

We welcome and celebrate this wonderful development, not only for our holidays' sake, but also because we would be very sad, were rhinoceroses to go extinct. Especially Roufa! Rhinos are Roufa's favorite animals! Their extinction is not directly related to Climate Change, but all this Awareness could save them anyway, as a collateral benefit.

--

The next Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum is coming up, 23-27 January in Davos. What will it be this time? Could it be the colossal business opportunities of developing Africa, or has that happened already? We are very excited, that's for sure!

Creatures of the Emerging Markets, unite and take over!

If you have time in your hands and delusions of grandeur, or if you'd simply like to hang out in the same virtual room with a good-looking brunette, you can give the Davos Question a try:

Davos Conversation

Official Google Blog: The Davos Question

--

Leave of Absence? Yes, it's true, we will be unable to blog for a while. Not for long, about ten days only. Mimi will be away for work. Roufa will stay home and spend his days in denial, watching two movies every evening to forget.

See you when we are back together.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Couple Without A Country

It's so great to be back home! Back with Sven and RockFrog and all the other animals, in our lovely little place, downtown Zooropa, USA.

Well, now that we've got a couple of regular readers, perhaps we should show the decency to explain this last bit – without overdoing it, of course.

For better or for worse, we, Mimi and Roufa, were born in two different countries in two different years. After quite some spreading, our wave functions finally managed to overlap in a third country and they remain entangled ever since. Now we live together in a fourth country. Give us some time and we may end up in yet a fifth. In short, we belong nowhere in particular. We float.

Our countries of origin evolve without us, visit by visit our memories get scrambled and confused. Our present country of residence we will never fully comprehend. Clearly we are sentenced to lifelong tourism, to perennial stupidity. We are doomed to constantly being taken by surprise. It's not the worst thing that could happen to us.

Our household's official language is English. In reality, we have our own dialect, sprinkled with elements of all the languages that we've ever had to use. We suspect, though, that every household has its own dialect, more or less.

Have you got your own dialect?

We've never been to the Third World, strictly speaking.

As far as we know, there is no place called Zooropa in the US. So that's where we live.

We own no house and we own no car. We hope to own a puppy before the year is out.

--

Who we are is really not important. We are in the eye of the beholder. So we'll just shut up and suck our eggs, like good kids.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Nothing Changes On New Year's Day

Yes, yes indeed, we've made it safe into the new year, and the same we hope for you, dear readers!

Happy New Year!

And good luck with your resolutions! Got none? That's good. That can only mean that you're happy with your life as it is! Or that you are too busy, in which case you wouldn't be reading us.

--

The author descends from his tall tower high above the city, to mingle with lower life forms of his own creation. He drums. The men curse, the women hiss, the child perishes. He deals in verse and insult. He brings closure. The dead unshroud their cores. He washes it all out of his hair.

Yes, we've watched Ex Drummer and that's our summary. We can't even begin to outline the power of the images and the unorthodox camera work.

Mimi is addicted to the trailer and the cover song. She plays it every morning for inspiration. She must be a mongoloid herself.