banana

Worse things can happen to people!

2008-10-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

Mimi started learning a new language some time ago. She thought she had to, it would make her life much easier. Big mistake! Huge! She discovered that age has on her the same effect, that blond hair has on Kelly Bundy: the more she learned of the new language, the more she forgot of the ones she spoke already, including her mother tongue. Her linguistic capacity is finite.

Roufa, meanwhile, set out bravely to learn the guitar. He thinks in notes now. But he can't write in notes.

In short, we lost it. We got sloppy and helpless. Our prepositions got slippery. It could take some time to sort things out.

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This banana-not is one year old. A rotten banana? Sven will wear a funny hat to celebrate.

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Dear readers, we've had great fun with this banana-not. But now, we have to take a break and go for fresh fruit.

We will continue to look at the world in perpetual astonishment and the same we hope for you too. We will continue the trip in both marvel and disgust. And silliness.

We love sweet, marvelous, talented, silly, and disgusted persons.

All this is not to say that we shall vanish along with the fruit! We will continue to visit you, because we love the company. And we'll always enjoy comments and emails.

Don't forget to visit Sven now and then! He only pretends he doesn't care!

Seven Up

2008-10-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

I am a little stick of dynamite / wishing you'd die / wishing I'd die / until I found you / and there was a place we could call home. / Cute miss sensibility / high on big ideas / depressed / and deprived / until we found a place we could call home. / Under our twinkling star.

Not so fast, I can't keep up; Then you go ahead; OK.

Air

2008-10-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

I will not mock you, I will not trick you, I will not poison you, but I will serve you the best meal I can prepare for the life of me. I know what I know only for you to savor it.

Still looking for the meaning of life? Here it is!

--

Still looking to resolve the financial crisis? We'll tell you what:
Shut down the markets for a couple of weeks and let everybody clear their heads. If a whole country (be it Belgium) could function impeccably for months without a government, surely the world will not end if we stop trading air for a while - and the talking heads stop airing their ignorance like a trophy.

We, for two, sold everything in time, and spent it all too. And we bought the best there is!

--

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Weekend, friends. Airing time. Time for music, time for Rainbows and Hope. Thanks to our coffee- and chocolate-loving friends, Bimmy, Obi-Sven, Frank, who took the time to respond to last week's quiz. It's not a school, so responding is enough. The correct answers have been posted, see comments!

I kissed a boy (and I liked it)

2008-10-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

It is that kind of day again, when Jim the schoolteacher (not to be confused with one-legged Jim the fat pigeon) would concede defeat in the morning battle against fatigue and laziness and the moody blues and, between sips of hot black coffee, he would devise the following task for his students -- or is it our readers?

Let us play: Who said what?

Here are the Quotes:

1. The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

2. The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its economists will have its thinking done by snobs and its economy run by morons.

3. I detest war. It spoils armies.

And here are the Voices in Time:

a. Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, c.1820
b. Thucydides, 5th century B.C.
c. Tentacles, 2008.

Can you match the Quotes and the Voices? The correct answers will be posted next week!

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So you think men and women are the same? We dare you to try and sell a producer the following idea for a song and promotion video:

a young, masculine, straight guy surrounded by gorgeous, masculine, straight men at some kind of fraternity party singing:

I kissed a boy and I liked it
I hope my girlfriend won't mind it!

Actually, it might sell! After the Metrosexual and the vastly underestimated Asexual, please welcome the Antisexual!

Raising awareness of the extinction of the Real Man, Ladies! Another brilliant idea, RTGML20081002.

P.S. Does "I kissed a guy" sound better than "I kissed a boy"? Please let us know! You opinion counts!

Humanity is Underrated

2008-09-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

... just balancing things.

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At last: Women have gradually and definitively fulfilled one of their greatest dreams, perhaps the greatest: conquered the world with their humps and turned men into their private impotent clowns. If you have been following the MTV VMAs the past few years, you will agree with us. Where have all the men gone?

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Super frogtastic financial opportunity for all you programming freaks out there! Big bucks to be made! Here is the brilliant RTGML idea that will make you rich and famous! We expect generous thank-you gifts.

We have a project to outsource.

Suppose you've sent an email message without thinking. Everybody has! You clicked "send", and before you could begin to realize the magnitude of your blunder, the message has already arrived at its destination! Everything goes so fast with email! Wouldn't it be great to have a little code in your mailer, which you can send to the same person and it would delete or scramble the latest message that you sent to them? Or you could even customize it, have it delete all of your messages with a particular subject, and so on. As long as the message has not been downloaded yet to all kinds of devices yet, problem solved!

Patent no RTGML20080924.

Shoe Porn

2008-09-15T08:12:00.000-07:00

We thought we were life-respecting people, until we slowly came to realize what that truly means. Apparently, it means to plunge into the Darwin soup and pray you are fit enough to float; take care of your own, and prey on the rest, or let them die; (just as long as you don’t say Darwin, that's a sin.)

Apparently, the Hunter is the Son of Life; takes it as it comes. Plowing the earth and grafting trees constitute hubristic intervention. Nature has given us plenty of animals to shoot.

Those retarded farmers. Those villagers, they love their animals more than they love their own daughters, who they’d kill for the crime of falling in love.

Language, like statistics, can prove anything.

We stand corrected.

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Has somebody called you a loser? Insult them right back:

You are not even a loser; because amongst losers, you are the winner.

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Our streak of brilliant ideas continues!

What do women love unconditionally and above all and couldn’t have enough of, around them, on them, and on the computer screen? Shoes!

And men? Sex! Naked women! So the cliché goes and so Internet traffic patterns confirm! So if you want to see you revenue sky-rocket, here is your business: Shoe Porn. Women wearing nothing but beautiful shoes, doing things to each other. Both sexes would be delighted. They could even start doing nice things to each other too.

And if you really have to give the women in your business tattoos, if you really, really must, this is what you will give them: there on their lower back, where the tasteless would carve dead-black wings, you would give them a pinkish, fluffy-looking bunny tail!

Patent No RTGML20080915.

Home is where Sven is

2008-09-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

For the hard-working people we are, we've praised laziness and vacations and easy money quite a lot through this bblogg. That’s because we can appreciate them fully!

What’s the alternative? Do nothing else but praise work? I love work! I can sit and watch people work for hours!

We are back from our lovely vacation, dear readers. As some of you know, we’ve been back for a week already. But Frog Ted needed some time to sort out the photos. We still need some time to bond with Sven properly, so we’ll now give the mike to our Frog Ted, who can’t wait to tell you all about his adventures down in Greece.

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Hey friends! It’s me, Frog Ted!

I followed Roufa and Mimi to Athens and Ancient Olympia! I have some fun pictures to show you from our trip! I have to warn you though that I didn’t take any pictures in archaeological sites, because 1) I had to buy a ticket to enter, but 2) I could not because I am not human, so 3) I was hiding in Mimi’s bag.

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Here I am, on my way to the airport! The sun is shining already!

We've just landed in Athens and Metaxa is already beckoning!

Here I am at the noisy KTEL station, from where coach buses leave to the farthest corners of Greece! And that includes a couple of islands! Don't ask me how they do that, perhaps they are amphibian buses?

In five hours Roufa will be lighting a cigarette in Ancient Olympia! No, silly, not with sunlight!

Peloponnesos, here I come!

The sea is so blue! You think it's bad for my fur?

Ghost Frog!

The best thing to fight the morning heat, and the high-noon heat, and the afternoon heat, is not Metaxa, but cold coffee, with plenty of ice: espresso freddo (left), or nescafe frappe (right), which is a half-century-old Greek invention. You can even have them without milk! That's great because cream and milk can weigh you down in the heat! You can find these things everywhere you go for 2-4 euros!

You can even find miniature ice-cream cones at the local pastry shop. Perfect for my size, Mimi told me. (What am I punished for, again, Mimi?)

I gave this new friend of mine Sven's email address.

Back in Athens, more fans of Sven!

These gals were organizing a Sven's bride competition!!

Tentacles the Wise (but Reclusive) Octopus is very highly regarded here. Take a closer look...

See?

We spent many days in Athens. Here I pose in Plaka, the old neighborhood at the foot of Acropolis! We had delicious food at the square behind me!

And here I am in Glyfada, a seaside suburb a few km south! You can see the St Constantine church on the right and behind me you can see the FNAC! Where Mimi and Roufa browsed books and DVDs, as usual. I think they are composing a world map of book and CD stores. Mimi was very happy to find the CD-single of Nickelback's Rockstar here at a bargain price! She says it's the “best, most feel-good song ever”. They've posted the lyrics on Banana's Appendix. They're nuts. (They'll give me miniature ice-cream if they read this.)

Now all this has made me very very hungry! Some baklava with kaimaki ice-cream on the side sounds perfect!

Before I go, here's a nice video we shot in the center of Athens, as the city bus was approaching the National Garden! There's some antiquity for you!

Going for Octopus

2008-08-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

Here is another tip for staying young: being perpetually astonished!

And another one: have younger people visit you now and then.

And here is how to survive them.

In fact, it's been great fun having the nephew around. We told him we didn't have Internet in the house, so he had to make do with all our daily routines, from the grocery store to watching Seinfeld on DVD. We selected episodes of Seinfeld very carefully for him and now he is a fan! The Pony Remark. The Whirlpool. The Soup Nazi. And so on. What other 16-year-old has such life-changing opportunities?

We also watched The Long Way Round with him (Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman around the world on motorcycles). Two episodes at a time (three, eventually), because he became addicted. The slapstick of that series turned out to be perfect entertainment for him (the Mongolian ball soup; Claudio's Russian haircut; the guy who shot a Kalashnikov as a welcome gesture; Ewan the Manimal. And so on, and so on.)

As for going to bed with the chickens? Not a problem. He arrived exhausted from his family vacation and a long trip with his friends. In our place he's had to wake up early in the morning like we do, since he's been sleeping in our living-room, so he stayed tired. He begged to sleep. Problem solved.

We did let him drag us to numerous shoe shops. Shoe shops? Yes, shoe shops. This generation, they are worse than Carrie Whatsername from Shoes and the Clitty. He was on the phone for a half hour the other day, trying to convince his mom that he needed more football shoes. We learned a great deal about the negotiating might of a teenager.

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And now, your banana moment of zen:

Condoleezza Rice said:

“This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” There will be consequences!

A real journalist would have asked:
Can you be more specific, ma'm??

Her Russian colleague Mr Lavrov declared:

“We understand that this current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States,” he said, “but one day the United States will have to choose between defending its prestige over a virtual project or real partnership with Russia.”

What can we say? Indeed, if you can be partners with the real macho, who gives a dime about the shitty little balalaikas in between?

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Leave of Absence #5

Dear readers, it is time for our long deserved vacation. This bblogg is going to take a long break! We are going to have ourselves baked in Greece, the birthplace of Tentacles the Wise Octopus, as well as his retarded brother Tentacles Tentacles, his cousin Testicles of Sypholos Island, and Icicles and Bicycles the conjoined twins of Mount Colymbos! But don't you worry! Come September we will be back with many silly pictures of Frog Ted in Athens! We'll try to convince Tentacles to pose with him, but we can't promise.

The billion dollar question

2008-08-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

Here we are again, and here you are again, in our cozy little corner, in the backstreets of this big, noisy, overinflated cyberjungle. That such wonderful singularities can emerge from such chaos is astonishing. Singular friendships. Quantum billiards.

Welcome! Banana split, anyone? Colorful cocktails? Refreshing smoothies?

Life can be sweet.

So let's chill out and dream away...

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They say that great wealth allows people to be exactly who they really are. If you had a billion Eurodollar pounds, what would you do?

For example, would you still want to have a 24/7 job?

Or would you – for example -- build your dream house (small enough to find your spouse in it) some place nice? And fly your favorite family and friends over once in a while? And pay their Internet and phone bills so they don't have any excuse for not keeping in touch? And the rest of the time enjoy whatever it is you really enjoy and makes you happy? Yes, you have to update your investment portfolio now and then to make sure you can keep it up. But otherwise, really, you can do anything you like! You can even do things people get paid to do! But solely cause you like them! Go canoing. Read. Solve equations. Travel. Have five children. Buy five more. Raise them yourself!! And twenty dogs! Knit. Cook. Go shopping. In Paris. Learn the piano. Write books. Songs. Publish them. Blog, if you must. Feed the children. Save the world. It's up to you!

There are people who see things differently, of course. Typically CEOs of gigantic companies with creative accountants. And talentless, vain superstars with no taste, not even in stylists and interior decorators. There are people who must have more billions. More phony fans. People who just can't quit bossing people around.

Poor them.

They say if you are poor, despite your best intentions and hardest efforts to find a decent day's work, you really don't deserve being poor. Isn't that right? Well then if you got all the riches in the world and you don't know what the heck to do with them, you are really not worth it either.

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For one week, starting today, our silly and charming teenage nephew will be visiting us. Finally! A third human in our house! We will have to strike a delicate balance between inappropriate silly behavior, which is a daily occurrence in our household, and what appears (to the untrained eye) to be the dull life of two married people who regularly go to bed earlier than the chickens do.

How did you think we stay young? See? No wrinkles!

The secret to our gorgeous, youthful looks and spirits is very simple indeed: good sleep, delicious food, plenty of water, vitamins, our daily abs, music, movies, books, silliness, using our legs, and sun protection SPF 50 (20 in the winter). Elementary.

And coffee. And no alcohol. Except when we have cyberguests.

A new round of Blue Margaritas then!

SvenStadium

2008-07-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

Relativity is not for octopuses.

Tentacles the Wise Octopus of Sopholos rarely looks up in the sky. But when he does, his disdain for the Theory of Relativity takes the better of him. He observes:

They say that if my vision was infinitely sharp and I waited long enough, I could look far into the sky and see the back of my head. If I turned around, I would still see the back of my head. Left and right and in between, the back of my head is ahead of me. I am surrounded by the back of my head. This can't be right.

And who can argue?

And the reason is allegedly that space is curved. So if I walk straight ahead I will arrive here. Not in my lifetime! Not on these tentacles!

Certainly not.

If space is curved, then time must be curved too; and the arrow of time is bended and taking us back in time!

He has a theory as to why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe:

... assuming that the Big Bang did happen, antimatter moved backwards in time and into a backward Universe!

Greek philosophers are not what they used to be.

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The first journalists arrived in China to cover the Olympic Games. Only to discover that their Internet activity is being monitored. These people are responsible for keeping us informed and they had to google “how to get to Tien An Men Square from Hilton Hotel” to find out that – if you can believe it! -- Internet in China is censored! We don't have enough leaden cucumbers to offer them.

We do have a very informative article to recommend.

Speaking of the Olympic Games, we have a suggestion as to what the London Olympic Stadium for the 2012 Olympics should look like.

This is Bird's Nest, the Olympic Stadium in Beijing that looks like a Bird's Nest:

And this is our suggestion for the 2012 Olympics:

Empty Nest Syndrome

2008-07-24T05:44:00.000-07:00

As you all know, Marina the Nut lives and works in Germany, Europe, Third Rock from the Sun.

So many of her co-workers are Cancers and Leos, apparently, that for the past two or three weeks there has been cake almost every day on the occasion of somebody's birthday. They've been pulling a Laney on her! (That's short for Elaine Benes, obviously.)

Not that she minds!

Anyway, yesterday morning she received this e-mail from a colleague, sent to the whole floor:

Subject: Can it be true??

Yes it can!
Cake today at 3 p.m. at the usual place.

By 3p.m. the following sign had appeared hanging on the door to the “usual place”:

Cake we can believe in!

Who said they didn't have a sense of humor?

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So the price of oil has been going up and up and up and tumbling down and up and down. Ask any smart-ass like us and they will tell you that, obviously, there are forces at work using aggressive speculation to push some players out of the market and create some kind of powerful elite or whatever. Nothing to do with real-time supply and demand. So now we told you and the world is smarter. So what? So what?

Can we do anything? No. Can you? We didn't think so.

Does this sound uncharacteristically depressing?

Oh, don't mind our moods. Something else is bothering us, really.

Nine months of labor on this blog to make Sven famous and... voilà. Mission accomplished. As you know, he has his own blog now. He's out there on his own! He doesn't need us anymore! ***sniff***sigh*** We need a purpose.

Should we give a golden apple to George W. Bush for saying Wall Street was a binge-drinker in a bad hangover? When he thought the world was not listening? Naahhh.. That would be like giving U2 a leaden cucumber for a second-rate bootleg recording.

Blessed

2008-07-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

Blessed are the meek. And the heterosexuals.

What? He didn't say that? Everybody says it's in the Bible! Perhaps in different words!

Unsure, we asked Tentacles of Sopholos, the wise octopus, for his opinion.

Tentacles's pipe blew and puffed. He gave us his oracle,

The Bible is the interpretation of the Bible.

We looked at each other. Mimi spoke up. And let me guess, God is the interpretation of God and a tree is the color of plants.

Tentacles blinked his tiny eyes very slowly. That sounds more like Tentacles Tentacles, he said, referring, of course, to his brother the cretin, who always says things twice, but in different words.

Then he put out his pipe and tip-toed away, mysteriously.

Tentacles Tentacles, who had been eavesdropping all along, popped up and said.

I guess what my brother is trying to say, what he wishes for you to understand, is that the Bible is more than a list of rules, a collection of guidelines. It's ...

a loud splash interrupted our exchange, and thankfully so.

--

Tentacles took a dive into the deep blue sea, where secret treasures go on glimmering in the dark.

We would like to thank our Mom...

2008-07-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

Kirsten says:

“I am an only child. The whole world revolves around me. This is a fact.”

Well, we are happy to reassure her that it doesn't show (in a bad way) on her very entertaining blog, the SoccerMom Files!

We, on the other hand, happen to be the youngest children of our respective families. In accordance to Uncle Kurt's theory, based on his personal experience as the youngest child in his own family, we just aim to entertain. We are used to not
being taken seriously. Not all people like to be entertained, though, or not by us anyway. At the end of his days, poor Kurt was lamenting that he had no family left to entertain. As for us, our respective families live far away – or we live far away from them. So we entertain each other silly on a daily basis.

But now it seems we have managed to entertain Mom Kirsten too! As we announced last Wednesday, she gave us an award!!

And what a beautiful one too!

by Arte y Pico.

OK, here comes the copy-paste part (the weird grammar is not ours):
Rules:
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community, no matter of language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winning, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y pico”blog , so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) To show these rules.

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And now comes our part!

We are very fond of all the blogs we list in our blogorama – see right side of this page, not to mention a couple of others that we just haven't gotten to include yet. So this is a bit tricky.

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First we'd like to acknowledge a couple of finalists that didn't make it, but we love them nonetheless.

Frank Widman, from Simple Man Simple Thoughts, for his excellent other blog Strange News for a Coffe Break Chuckle. Don't be turned off by the ad posts now and then, there's some hilarious news in there! Go look for them!

Our dear Monica, and her Quarks and Bosons we'd love to honor, but she keeps a low profile to protect her privacy. Charming!

Jeannette (her doctor calls her Lynn) still eats Spaghetti and she is beyond nuts. Very silly, pointless blog that promises exactly what it offers: Jeannette Eats Spaghetti... then blogs about Whatever. You have to love her, but why?

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And the winners are:

ONE: We can not not give an award to FrogBlogDogLog!!!, by Bimmy the Bookish and Co., which happens to be an excellent blog for children, which we still are, according to our families. Now you have to understand that Bimmy may not be able to follow all of the rules above, because the blog is read by underage children too, who are not supposed to surf around following links all over the place. So Bimmy may choose to comply with the rules selectively, or not comply at all, or transfer the whole procedure to her adult blog, the Reading Hero, which we could have awarded as well.

Recent post example.

By the way, Bimmy, something tells us you might enjoy the Doodle Week project we just found out about!

TWO: Next comes Catpaw, the angry cat from Toronto, because we like grumpy cats, even when they are not grumpy any more. And we hope he will not disappear again, like he did last January! Cats tend to do that...

Recent post example.

THREE: Another one who does not have a lot of time to blog these days, because she's found a real job, is Jillian, the Verbose Slacker and slacker no more. Her blog JillianApproved is very popular already, but it can be so stupid, we really have to. To be perfectly honest, this is also a bribe for her to approve us.

Recent post example.

FOUR: Speaking of bribes, how could we forget LordLikely! We hope to always be granted access to your lavish lounge, your Obscene Magnificence!

(Any post will do as an example.)

FIVE: So we have two Brits, one American, and one Canadian, so let us switch to a different language and give our fifth Arte y Pico Award to Lotofagus, and his Greek blog Land of Oblivion, so that he doesn't forget us with all those lotuses he's been eating. He too tends to be grumpy and we'd like to cheer him up. Actually, he is on vacation right now so he will not hear the good news for a while. Hopefully he will not forget to come back.

Recent post example.

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Hope you'll enjoy some of our picks! Well, thanks again to all our readers, and as Lord Likely would say,

Toodle-pip!

And have a very nice weekend!

You look glassy-eyed!

2008-07-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

Oh, some good news.

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First of all, Ingrid Betancourt, the French lady and former Colombian presidential candidate, who had been kidnapped by FARC rebels and was held hostage for years in the Colombian jungle, is free!

Along with her, three American paramilitary contractors and ex-marines were rescued. These adventurous freelance exterminators held a press conference to let us know that the FARC rebels are Terrorists. Thanks for sharing this, fellas.

Well, that's it? No details, no juice, no insight? Where is the story?

These excerpts from the diary of a Dutch woman, who joined the FARC rebels to serve a good cause (oh the Age of Ignorance...), are precious.

Also precious is the silly movie chronicling the adventures of Woody Allen as he joins the ranks of a similar group, decades ago, for a good cause of his own – namely, to impress a girl. What movie? Bananas, of course!

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More good news!

Sven has his own blog! Thanks to Bimmy, Frog the Dog, and Co! Are you ready for his frogtastic adSventures?

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And more great news! We've been awarded an award! Thank you, Soccer Mom! This is the related post. We'll post the award and pass it on in a couple of days. For the moment, you will excuse us. So much to do, so much to read, so much to write... As we were telling Bimmy the other day... We really gotta run. Luckily we don't have to literally run. Do not read and run.

What do they smoke under the sea?

2008-07-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

Tentacles of Sopholos, the wise octopus, discovers a new phenomenon:

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What are an octopus's tentacles? Are they limbs? If so, are they arms or are they legs? Can't they be both? This is obviously a case of arm-leg degeneracy!

Or are they fingers? Or toes? They can't be fingers or toes. (If they were, what happened to the other two?)

--

Roufa asks: If you dig a hole to the other side of the Earth, at some point around the center of the Earth you will have to turn upside down, right?

Tentacles warns:

If you dig a hole to the other side of the Earth, you will have all your questions answered by a giant moronic octopus. Beware of the giant moronic octopus!

--

We felt like pulling his arm-legs. So we asked him: If you work out in the rain, do you have to shower afterwards?
He said there was no rain in the sea.
There's no soap either! observed Mimi. Roufa insisted: Really, isn't rain water the purest you can get? For humans anyway?
...And fish stink! continued Mimi. But only dead fish!

Tentacles said: You are silly, all right. Then tip-toed away on all eight toeless tentacles.

[-Are you the Wise Man on the Mountain?
-What mountain?]

Tentacles' tentacles

2008-06-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

You have seen the devastation caused by natural disaster...
Witnessed the atrocities of war...
Listened to world leaders.. and leaders who want to rule the world.
You have heard from men of God...
and men who kill in God's name.
Gazed into eyes filled with hope
and seen hearts consumed with hopelessness.
Together we have followed the facts around the world!
Come with me! And see where the story takes us next!

This is, more or less, how Christiane Amanpour advertises her show on CNN. With such a record, honestly, we are too scared to follow Christian Amanpour. If Christian Amanpour is within arm's length from you right now, you must be in a rather unenviable situation. Unless you are a man of God.

Christiane Amanpour has been to North Korea and to the very tower that they have just destroyed, the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor! She has been filmed there! We have watched her interesting item, chronicling the visit of the New York Philharmonic to Pyong Yang, not long ago.

You think the North Koreans are getting rid of the tower to show the world they are not pursuing a nuclear program? Yes, but no, but yes, ... but No: It's because Christiane Amanpour has visited it, and obviously that's bad luck. Don't give us the evils!

It's a cement construction. They can complete a brand new tower before the dust settles of the old one's demolition.

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Forget Christiane. A much more enjoyable way to explore world news is, we've just discovered, Spiegel International's on-line quizzes! We recommend, for example, “Plastic Obama and the Lost Gnomes” and “Something's Burning in Germany”.

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Next on cecinestpasunebanane: Tentacles' tentacles.

Who is Tentacles?

Tentacles is an ancient Greek philosopher, who happens to be an octopus. Don't confuse him with Tentacles Tentacles, who is his brother. Tentacles Tentacles is just an idiot who likes to say everything twice in different words (he didn't get to choose his own name). He believes it makes him sound clever and lends him an aura of authority. He's right.

Grrrrrrrl Power!

2008-06-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard about the so-called pregnancy pact: rumor has it that a number of schoolgirls, from Gloucester High in Massachusetts, had “a pact” to get pregnant as soon as possible and help each other raise the babies! The rumor was sparked by the observation that the number of pregnancies among the school's students had quadrupled the past year, and that, according to the school nurse, the news of the positive pregnancy-test results were invariably received with triumphant smiles and high-fives!

And everyone's shocked now. Why? Oh why? Bravo to the girls! What they are effectively saying to their parents is “guess what, if you won't give me a little brother/sister, I'll just go out and get one myself!”. Not to mention: “More labor hands to secure your retirement plan, ma!”. So save the drama!

Now that's pure girl power. No boy could ever do this!

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Our Frog Ted is participating in the Frogjob Week(s) on FrogBlogDogLog! Where he shows how he helped prepare soup for Mimi when she was sick. His story and pictures have just been published! See their post of June 25 and the very special Frog Chef page!

Frog Ted's next assignment will be to help us raise a puppy properly. We are going breeder-hunting next month! So he's reading all about it, as you can see.

Yes, of course, he's a dog, but that doesn't mean he knows how to raise a puppy! All those people who read about babies, haven't they been babies themselves?

Isn't it amazing that you need a license to do virtually anything, but they let you walk out the hospital (if you've been there in the first place) with a new born, just a couple of days after delivery, with nothing but best wishes and the bill?

There's something about Sonia

2008-06-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Our collection of quirky or otherwise interesting performances of Sonny (Bobby Hebb) is expanding.

The Mexican movie Sin ton ni Sonia is a silly movie. Not as silly as Aaltra. But like Aaltra, it features its own unique version of Sonny! It's actually called Sonia and it's in Spanish. We were very happy to find it on You Tube! Here is the full version (and a cropped one), with fragments from the movie!

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The following is from As good as it gets, where Jack Nicholson plays a grumpy, obsessive-compulsive author of romantic novelas:

Smitten fan: How do you write women so well?
Author: I think of a man... then take away reason and accountability.

One half of this banana is female and nevertheless found this very very funny.

--

Back to Sin ton ni Sonia, where our hero, Orlando, has been pursuing and stalking René for days and nights (and tequilas) in a row. She finally leaves her steady ex-boyfriend and before long Orlando and René are making hot, passionate love in a hotel room. As soon as they're done, though, he turns his back to her and crashes for hours. She is not pleased of course and when he wakes up she starts complaining: Yada yada yada, “I just needed a hug!” she concludes. His eyes still trying to adjust to the light, and his brain to reality, he delivers this hilariously honest protest: “I'm sorry, I haven't slept for days! I need a hug too, you know!”

But who's Sonia? Sonia is Orlando's steady ex-girlfriend. He doesn't stand for a lot of reason or accountability either.

--

Somebody we know very well has been going through an early midlife crisis:

“I am a blond trapped in a brunette's skin. I am an idiot, burdened with a nerd's brain!”

She should be glad that having your hair dyed is rather standard procedure and does not require a psychiatrist's evaluation.

In at least one state in the U.S., though, it might require the husband's approval, since legally the hair belongs to him. Neither of us can recall which state(s), unfortunately. Can anyone help us?

Well, it's not urgent. Save the research for the office bore-out and enjoy your weekend!

Sven the Cactus and Lenny the Wise

2008-06-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

Great news!

Sven the Cactus is now also Sven the Cartoon! Sven C: such a Cool name! Here he is, the new star on FrogBlogDogLog!!!. If you ever need wise advice, on any topic, you can ask us, or you can ask Sven the Wise Old Cactus. He has his own e-mail address and his own blogger profile, thanks to our dear friends from Team Frog.

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Yes, we know, it has been Father's Day, and everybody's wounded.
As everybody knows, though,
Blood is thicker margarine than grease.

Is Sven C as old and wise as Lenny? The one who's responsible for the slanted words above? (That's Leonard Cohen, of course. But when you've known him as long as we have, you call him Lenny.)

Here's a little something from Lenny, ideal to repeat like a mantra when you feel there's somebody wishing you harm:

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I'm very sorry, baby, it doesn't look like me at all

---

This is Lenny savoring his coffee:

... and his banana:

He must be a fan.

--

Mimi is feeling a lot better. Many thanks to our Team Frog friends at the beach house for the e-card, which definitely helped! As did Roufa's soups, of course.

To suffer in style

2008-06-11T05:06:00.001-07:00

Where have we been? Where we still are, most of the time: Mimi in bed and Roufa in the kitchen. Mimi is sick and Roufa is busy preparing a variety of soups for her.

Although she feels lousy, Mimi gets up every morning, has a decent breakfast, and then a shower, before crawling back under the sheets. She finds being dirty and sick a hundred times worse than plain sick. She'd rather stay sick longer, if that's what it takes to stay clean. She's such a silly kitten.

--

Have you ever been given advice on how to suffer in style? If not, worry not, it will come. Just keep on reading lifestyle magazines. What can it possibly mean, to suffer in style? It must mean something photogenic: Think film-noir heroine. And then the question arises. What would you prefer: to suffer in style or to be happy out of style? That's not a valid dilemma. If you can stay stylish while suffering, surely you can keep it up when you are happy too.

--

Too much soup.

--

And now, a little exercise. Let's try find alternatives to the famous piece of wisdom "What does not kill you, makes you stronger."

What does not kill you ...

...leaves you paralyzed.
...leaves you crippled.
...leaves you deformed.
...gives you a hell of a pain.
...will kill someone else.
...does not come in powder form.
...loves you.
...makes the jokes a lot better.
...will make you laugh, eventually.

Any more ideas?

Save the drama for your mama

2008-06-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

... said the T-shirt of a man on the street.

We both found it very funny. Roufa was somehow reminded of somebody:

- Your mother has a very funny way of arguing... She starts it off like a game, like a little dance, kind of acting the emotions...

- Bend it like Beckham

- ...until she eventually gets angry for real. It's very weird.

- Yes, she can waltz herself into the emotions and then there's no stopping her.

- She's like a character out of a movie... Or an Azinuth book.

- Save your mama for the drama!

--

- Your father, on the other hand, if you let him be, he's so calm, so reasonable... Without your mother, if he had married a normal woman, he would be so easy going!

- He wouldn't have married at all.

- Right...

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It's weekend! Again? Time flies! (Alas, during weekends too.) More coffee and waffles, anyone?

Amelican Plesidential Elections

2008-06-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

Our notorious friend Biko the Azinuth, as much as he loathes blogging, he can't keep his mouth shut. You know that already. But we love his silly stories – fictional or not. The other day, for example, he was telling us what it was like to watch soccer – football, if you prefer – on TV in his home country, Belgium. Suppose you are watching on Belgian TV a Dutch team play against a German team and score a goal. The speaker will, as usual, rave about the beauty of it or highlight some dumb defense mistake or whatever. You can then instantly switch to a Dutch channel and watch the jubilations and then to a German one for some moaning. Sounds like good old innocent fun over little neighborhood rivalries! It's even better if, as a Belgian, you are watching a Belgian team score against, say, the Dutch, because you can switch to the Dutch channel and indulge in the misery you've just caused them. Unfortunately, you can do the same exercise when your team loses. If you are a masochist, that is.

A Belgian with good language skills can also follow the news that are broadcast in different neighboring countries – but that's less interesting, because there are no wars anymore. Who cares when the French are on strike and whether the number of registered unemployed Germans has dropped (because many sank into poverty instead)! As long as these two bits of information have nothing to do with each other, the entertainment element is lost and you'd better stick to the affairs that really affect you.

The extinction of war should account for the success, within Europe, of football and the Eurovision thong contest (or is it song contest?), at least to some extent. Hurrah and cheers for both of them then!

--

This bblogg, meanwhile, has been trying rEAl hArd to avoid talk of the American elections. Because there can't possibly be anything we could say that has not been said already. All day long, molning and evening, on TV and the pless and all alound us, Amelica votes, Amelica is plepaling fol elections. It's been years already, let's get it over with, please! Oh, it will be so great to finally have an American President again on this planet! We've been sitting on golden bananas -- and other fruit and veggies -- for ages! Why not award some already? For fear of inflation, that's why!

--

We've invented a new syndrome. The PMS, as in Pre-Menopausal Syndrome – the one that makes you enjoy Shoes and the City – or is it Sex and the City? Something like that. (Sorry, fans. Couldn't hold it back.)

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Yes, we had some good coffee this weekend and we're ready for more! The only kinds of coffee that can do the trick in this heat are Italian freddo, for the refined palates, and Greek frappe, for the brutes whose top priority is really to stay conscious as the world melts into blazing numbness around them. Cool!

Prickly Bit

2008-05-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, one of the main purposes of this bblogg is to make our beloved cactus Sven famous!

Well, it seems we are getting there! Do visit FrogBlogDogLog!!! - and read the comments to the May 22 post! A star is born?

--

It's weekend, almost. Time for fresh flowers in the vase, and for music and for fun. Free time for coffee at nice places. Coffee, coffee coffee - it doesn't contain vitamin B, but then again, what do we know about coffee?

Time for the computer to go to sleep. See you!

Bite size

2008-05-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

What will happen to our love when our life on this boisterous planet expires? Will it vanish, ether to ether? Or perhaps it will linger here forever, making the sky this bit brighter, the grass this bit greener, and the life of a tiny ladybug this bit jollier?

Oh, the banality, you say? Not if you believe it!

--

Misfortune doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's just so evil in its randomness. Slapstick!, the master of Slapstick would say, who left this planet about 13 ½ months ago.

-You all looked like ants to me down there, or like germs under a microscope.
-That's what we felt like, too.
-If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you.
-That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million other germs, Wilbur.

--

Look at this hair! It is actually only one hair, full of split ends. The ultimate overcomb!

A full head of healthy hair can be a source of great pride for the owner (that's the person growing the hair or their spouse, depending on the local legislation). Daily overdoses of vitamin B are highly recommended! Beer is a good source of vitamin B. Does this mean that if you drink a lot of beer you will get a big hairy beer belly?

Whatever happened to Harris

2008-05-21T05:23:00.000-07:00

He is no better for her than heroin or crack. She is nothing more to him than thin air, or a tennis ball bouncing at his feet (wouldn't you idly kick it?). A story of poisonous passion like the French tend to make – only this one is not French and it takes place in Israel. And it's painful!

She says: “My whole life is falling apart and you are just bored.”
He observes dryly: “You are hungry and I am full.”

Jerusalem as a love battlefield – that's something new! The title of the movie is Love Life (and you should stop watching it 5 minutes before the end, because then a rather unfrench conclusiveness takes over).

Another movie we watched recently is Princessas, from Spain. Where a Madrilenian prostitute of middle-class upbringing has trouble balancing herself on this fast spinning planet – quite literally.

Both movies feature powerful mother figures. In American movies, by contrast, the Absent Father tends to be an even stronger presence than the present mother - and by that we mean the kind of workoholic maniac that fails, for the umpteenth time, to cheer his junior during his weekend swimming contest. Interesting! The cornerstones of the American Psyche: the Absent Father and the prom night! Explains a lot about how politics is conducted – on TV at least.

Some fathers you are better off without, of course. In any case, this is a great thing about being an adult: good parents will always be there for you; parents' badness, on the other hand, becomes irrelevant – or at least you can easily pretend it does! (Unless you are still locked up in a basement.)

A lot of things become irrelevant as you grow old. There are no mistakes, as another, American movie famously puts it: Evening, with an enviable cast – and quite some mothers in there too!

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Amazing! Our previous post received at least four visits by people who had been googling “undetectable poisons” and “hard to trace poisons”. Now they stand warned! So we've actually assisted them with their evil plans?

“Spaghetti in a coffee pot” is admittedly funnier!

Hard science

2008-05-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently our spying activities have been very inspiring! In revealing them online, though, we are running the risk of blowing our cover! Our computer remembers everything we do and announces himself at every place we visit; the dastardly bastard would rat on us without a second thought or the faintest trace of remorse.

If you ever engage in illegal or otherwise objectionable activities, do not let your computer know. Look what happened to poor Melanie McGuire of Brick, New Jersey.

MacGuire was convicted last year of murdering her husband William by shooting him with a gun obtained in Pennsylvania. The following search terms had been entered into Google and MSN search engines “on a computer belonging to her family” (we could be quoting Harper's magazine here, May 2008 issue, p.30, or maybe we followed the trial – it doesn't matter, does it?):

instant poisons
undetectable poisons
instant undetectable poisons
pesticide as a poison
insulin as a poison
insulin overdoses
toxic insulin levels
fatal insulin doses
euthanasia
tranquilizers
barbiturates
state gun laws
purchase guns
how to purchase guns illegally
how to purchase guns illegally in nj
how to purchase hunting rifles in nj
where to purchase guns without a permit
how to purchase guns in pennsylvania
how to commit murder

--

Luckily The Atlantic's articles are available freely online. But maybe they are less fun. In any case, in the spirit of espionage and international dealings, if you would like to read long articles regarding how to and more importantly how not to, say, smuggle enriched uranium out of Russia, that's the place to go. But not on your own computer, obviously!

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Could you help us resolve a little dispute?

Today Roufa declared, for some reason: If science was like sex, we would have solved everything two thousand years ago. Which Mimi countered with: If science was like sex, we would be living in caves to this day! What do you think?

You don't have to cast your votes yet! Let's all ponder this over the weekend! Have fun!

Espionage, shaken and stirred

2008-05-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

Our vacation was lovely, Dear Friends! Life can be kind -- almost as kind as you and your sweet messages! The sun was bright and the air was warm. The waffles were delicious, vanilla ice-cream on the side. Scottie was crazy, as usual. All she cared for was her tennis ball. She uses it to communicate. Play with tennis ball = Love. Scottie is a black Labrador that belongs to relatives. She bounces her ball like a basketball player, and balances it on the tip of her muzzle like a seal! And she is very patient, just like Frog. She'd lay there waiting outside the bathroom for Mimi to finish showering (and hair styling and the works) and come out and play with her. And her ball.

What else did we do? We watched U2 live in Latin America in 3D – four cities in one afternoon. We put on our magic glasses and were just beamed there, rendered invisible intruders on the stage! We took off the glasses and found ourselves back inside an empty theater. We walked out into the afternoon heat. We had coffee.

The next day we visited a science museum together with [other] kids. Mimi lay on a bed of nails; Roufa powered a TV by pedaling. And then we played in the spy section, where we saw real mikes hidden in fake olives, antennas in toothpicks. We crawled our way through booby-trapped corridors, trying not to intersect the laser beams.

--

And then something funny happened. Roufa was studying the Enigma code and Mimi was fiddling with some wires. Roufa had just deciphered an eight-lettered word – Istanbul! -- when Mimi urged him to come and listen, for she had intercepted a telephone conversation! Well, she assumed it was a recorded conversation waiting for kids to discover it. Interestingly enough, it was being conducted in Terrible English – the official language of international dealings. It sounded so real! But, curiously, not very spy-related. What we could hear was a no-nonsense manager, representing a major European electricity supplier, and some counterpart from a small country, discussing the possibility to install a nuclear plant in that country. For peaceful purposes. Big deal!

It turns out though that we've spied for real! This was a real conversation, believe it or not – and what a scoop! You see we did a little further research and discovered that in that little lignite-devouring country nuclear energy is fiercely opposed and nobody seems to be remotely aware of any plans to introduce it! So: was the manager being misled, or are the little country's citizens being fooled to believe that Russian natural gas is the future?

Where are the real journalists when you need them? Recycling each other's garbage.

Dear journalists, here's the deal: The beautiful little country is Greece, home of the beautiful little Greeks. Now, if you want us to name more names, you will have to pay: Full immunity in writing and an all-inclusive three-week holiday in Santorini for two adults and a dog should do! No, wait, make that a house downtown Fira with a volcano view plus a generous budget so that we can decorate it ourselves. We have a very exquisite taste.

--

As far as we know, we will not be traveling for a while. Not before August. Finally, we can start looking for a French Bulldog! Preferably black with white spots! Like this cuty here! Oh, we've waited too long.

Goin West

2008-04-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

From Freud to Herr Fritzl, Austria seems to have a very mental mentality. If we were the Austrian authorities, we would promulgate (finally, Bimmy!) monthly Raid Your Neighbor's Basement Days. Just in case. After a couple of months, another 3 million Austrians could be produced! Imagine the logistical nightmare!

What a country. You ask them what is going to happen to the victims of rape-imprisonment-incest next, and all they can think to say is that they will need to get them social security numbers.

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Yes, our Dear Readers, this will be our Leave of Absence #4.

For almost two weeks, posting is not guaranteed. Forget us not!

Garfield, 080307

The Breakfast Club

2008-04-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

Now that you've grown up, do you still believe that? That when we grow up our souls die and we become like our parents? (Do you care?)

Will you stand above me?
Look my way, but never love me?

A soul may die if you don't feed it. And nobody really becomes like their parents. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

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We are all adults here, most likely, so there's no problem if we post a picture of Knut the Sex Tourist -- see previous post! Behold the good friends Knut and Frog Ted -- along with our Vonnegut collection and some poetry.

Knut was named Knut after Knut the Berlin Zoo bear, who was rejected by his mother and so he was raised , cuddled, and played with by a Zoo employee, an adult man. Hopefully, this hasn't screwed up Knut's mating orientation. Is it possible? Biologist, anyone? In any case, Knut the bear, for some reason, will have to travel far to find the girl of his dreams, and thus become a sex tourist, according to a popular German newspaper. As for our Knut, he claims he's a well-traveled fellow already.

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We are having talks with Ferrari regarding the production of our new patent, if we can call it that, RTGML080423a: Designer Air-Drying Kits! Consisting of designer clothes lines and clothespins, and even screens, to conceal your drying laundry – depending on how anal your Homeowner Association is. For more details on the issue, see Catpaw's post and the comments there. Our clothesline would be Ferrari-red and the clothespins would be black, in the shape of the Ferrari horse. (Alternatively, yellow triangular crests with a black Ferrari horse.) The inside would be rubber (in order not to damage Tiggy's sensitive lace smalls).

Get the Ferrari Drying Kit NOW for ONLY $9,999.99 and let the Joneses try and keep up with YOU!
The waiting list opens NOW!

Freedom of Expression

2008-04-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

We don't have an opinion anymore. We've set it free.

Quoting a cartoon by Kamagurka – Belgian cartoonist and impolite servant of magic surrealism.

You want change? I'll give you some change if you dance naked in front of me!

Quoting an impolite Biko Azinuth stream of consciousness.

--

Wouldn't it be great if we could fly south now?

South where? South of what?

We could go to Santa Fe. Where we could have coffee with an old native, who would remind you: This thing that you have achieved for yourself, nobody will ever take away from you. We could go to Marseille, unwind in the sun, savor the sea flavors.

We will go West instead. And then return North. Worse things than that could happen to a person.

--

Sven is doing great! We gave him his minerals and his vitamins again. Bundles of baby prickles are sprouting around his crown! If he blooms, though, we will have to reconsider his name and/or sexual orientation.

Our Frog Ted has a new friend, one to exchange endless traveling stories with: Welcome Knut the Sex Tourist! Oh, it's just a pet name. Knut belongs to an endangered species, you see, and he will have to travel half around the globe in order to mate and reproduce.

In a bar, under the sea

2008-04-17T07:57:00.001-07:00

Q: What do Dutch beer and making love in a canoe have in common?
A: They are both fucking close to water.

(Was this good enough?)

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Dutch people, beer, etc, are people, beer, etc, from the Netherlands, also known as Holland. Dutchland does not exist, but Deutschland is Germany in German. Netherlands means Low Countries -- as in below sea level -- which, we learned at school once upon a time, are Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. Sounds like the Dutch are claiming all three countries' territories for themselves, by calling themselves the Netherlands! Shame on them!

--

Kamagurka is a Belgian cartoonist and this is not his best joke, but Jillian will understand:

Can't we just stay friends?

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Still accepting ideas, what to call our invention, see previous post! Meanwhile, we hope we won't need our umbrella for a while (with or without lights, music, water cooler, coffee machine installed). We hope for a wonderful, sunny weekend, for us and for you too, of course! One more day to go! Hurrah!

The Green's Functions Blues

2008-04-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

The sun finally poked through the clouds on Sunday and we went for a long walk in nature. We saw colorful flowers and blooming trees, we saw ducks and other birds. We saw funny insects and even horses. And humans.

Yes, now and then we encountered another wandering couple and they said hallo and we said hallo back. Later, downtown, we saw many more people, but we didn't exchange any hallos with them.

It was cloudy and dark when we were back in the city. It started raining and we opened an umbrella. It felt even darker under the umbrella.

So here's our Brilliant Idea of the Week. Or of the Day, as we've been rather prolific lately. You know those birthday cards that start singing when you open them? How about umbrellas with spokes that light up when you open them! They would make a dark, rainy day so much more bearable. Patent No RTGML20080414a.

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It's been a while since we last treated you to some of our household jokes! Let's see what we've got for you...

We watched “Paris, je t'aime” this weekend. It's a movie consisting of 18 short movies, mostly love stories, set in Paris. Quite predictably, Gérard Depardieu the Ubiquitous was co-directing and appearing in one of them.
RTG said: 'Somebody should make a movie called “Gérard, je t'aime”: eighteen short movies starring Gérard Depardieu.'

Here we were just BS-ing and improvising:
...
RTG: I've put all my money in stockings.
ML: You mean stocks.
RTG: No, stockings.
...
ML: Stocks are dropping.
RTG: I wish stockings were dropping.

We are allowed to outsource now and then, so this last one comes from poor Marina the Nut. Another attempt to bake a decent cake had failed or something, inducing her to lament her geeky self thus:
“All I can do properly in this life is calculate Green's functions. Green's functions is all I am good at. It does bring bread to the table... I don't even like bread.”

That's close to Woody Allen's “The food here is so bad... And such small portions!” or another Marina: “Gortz shoes are so ugly – and they're always way too big for me!”

Torch-Relay Hurdles (and other novel Olympic Disciplines)

2008-04-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

On the 24th of March, the Olympian beauties of the Peloponnese assembled again to dance their ancient ceremonial dances under an ominously wan early-Spring Sun. And then, as tradition has it, or should have it, or as we'd like to think anyway, the most beautiful virgin amongst them lowered the torch in the hollow of the parabolic mirror, whereupon it received the blessed fire of the (almost impotent on that day) life-giver. And then the fun began.

Hail Torch-Relay Hurdles as the newest Olympic discipline!

--

What the International Olympic Committee were thinking when they assigned the 2008 Games to Beijing is hard to say. Certainly their bribes must have included more than yet-to-be-built luxury apartments in polluted sweat-shop cities swarming with desperate peasants. Well, as the official story goes, the Summer 2008 Olympic Games are a great opportunity for China to show her new, modern, human, welcoming, etc., facade to the world. A legitimate political reason actually.

Too bad then that, according to the Organizers, the Olympic Games are about sports, not politics.

They are also about money, and it will be fun to watch the Olympic sponsors trying to save face, in the mess our loyal readers were warned about months ago. It could also be a matter of time before the first bunch of obscure athletes realize that boycotting China can give them more and better publicity than hopelessly going for it.

--

In any case, a smooth torch relay nowadays requires shielding measures more radical than a US presidential procession through a Middle Eastern capital.

What a shame this is, seriously. What a dishonor for the Olympic flame to suffer, what a disgrace! From the idyllic olive groves of Ancient Olympia to the battlefields of our globalized world, snatched, shoved, desecrated! We have to save the Olympic Spirit. And to that end, we have a cunning idea that we wish to share first with you, our loyal readers.

It is very simple, really, and has many advantages: let the Olympic Games return to Athens forever. The facilities are already in place, since the very successful 2004 Games. They are sitting there rusting, actually. Greek politics rarely cause any global stir. Who would ever boycott the Games in Athens? A Balkan neighbor with a beef? Who cares! And everybody loves to visit Greece! The whole world is welcome there! To party, relax, bake in the sun, pretend they can say kalimera like a native. The ever grumpy and overworked Athenians would get the chance to exercise that lovely smile of theirs every four years! They did it once, they proved themselves. Of course, as soon as the Games ended, they were pushing each other's buttons again. Well, it doesn't have to be this way!

--

Athens, Beijing, whatever: rather than Torch-Relay Hurdles, a far more fitting Olympic Discipline would be: the Cross-City Triathlon. Cross the city from south to north, or east to west, whatever is longer, as quick as possible, using all three kinds of public transportation (bus; streetcar; subway; but no taxi or rickshaw; are we forgetting something?).

Another brilliant idea tossed out into the blogosphere.

Manneken Poo

2008-04-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Dear readers, we have wonderful news regarding our crazy cousin, Marina the Nut. Two and a half months after placing her order, she's finally received her first Gucci shoes, size 34.5, 9.5cm heel. Pheew. No, we mean, Hurray. Our new-year wish to her came true. We'd love to watch her work the cobblestone paving in those. That's why you need a man by your side! In any case, for her colleagues' sake, we've urged her not to wear those weapons of mass distraction at work. We don't know if she will listen. Being surrounded by socks in sandals can do things to you brain.

Speaking of cobblestone, Belgium boasts hectares upon hectares of it. Speaking of Belgium, we just had a brilliant marketing idea for its tourist office. Their most famous attraction is Manneken Pis, the “famous statue of a little boy peeing in a fountain”. How about installing also a Manneken Poo! A little boy – or girl for that matter – pooing little Belgian pralines for the tourists! Voila. It's copyrighted now. The date is April 4, 2008.

Aaanyways. Weekend is almost there and, apart from airing ourselves as usual (our friends Ms Quarks and Kimba the White Lioness have been airing themselves too), we'll also be watching movies. We would so much love to watch a silly movie based on this true story! The schools from which those college students graduated should be closed down for failing to prevent such stupidity pollution from leaking into higher education. Oh yes, the April issue of Harper's was the best entertainment ever. We'll be reading some of that too.

Banana's Appendix

2008-04-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

Anybody out there suffering the après-Easter egg coma? In the Unorthodox Christian world? Talking to you, Frog?

Before we continue, a little quiz: do you think a banana can have an appendix? Can it get appendicitis? Any ideas? Yes? Ok, you may continue reading.

So we would like to dedicate this post to Jillian, who expressed the wish to have one million dollars. Jillian, be careful what you wish for. Here is a link containing excellent advise on the matter, as well as the answer to our quiz.

Our greetings also to Ms Quarks who almost stopped blogging. She was almost finished with people. We were almost finished with people while watching TV. The news was that, according to witnesses, a stranger had thrown a beautiful, adorable one-year-old boxer dog off an overpass and down on a busy highway. No particular reason. We don't know what fruit, vegetable, or pie the person who could do this deserves to be awarded or thrown at. He's beyond our capabilities. Any suggestions? We do have all our golden apples to offer to those who saved her and took her to the vet! One asshole, a dozen angels! We are not finished with people.

The boxer had just strayed from home. She survived with a broken jaw and is reunited with her loving mistress Haley Savage.

In any case, our Hero of the Week is Seven the Boxer dog and her helpers. Seven! George Costanza for once not jinxed.

So you think you have a mansion

2008-03-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

Poor Marina, the little Nut.

She's had a White Easter. It's been snowing for days, as it hasn't snowed the whole winter, she said. And the traffic jam this morning was a killer. She was stuck for two hours. And she didn't even want to get there! She was heading to the dentist. Root canal.

Would you like to be Marina today? No? But she's pretty, intelligent, one could say successful,... No? Ok, we understand.

How about one-legged Jim the pigeon? No? But you could become famous! One-legged Jim is a friend of our friend Biko Azinuth the Belgian author. (He may have made him up.) He claims he encountered the one-legged pigeon during a stroll in the park, while contemplating his next book. He was considering to rewrite and improve a previous, unpublished book of his, which is very dear to him. A love story! A story about Love and Insomnia! There are not enough love stories written nowadays, is his feeling. Too much cynicism, too much naval-gazing and neurosis. He may be right. “Enough with contemporary friction.” he says. “It's high time for literary fiction!”

There is a pigeon in the book. It visits the young heroine every single time her friend is on his way to her house, as if to announce him, or worse, to vie for her attention first. The pigeon always precedes his visit by ten minutes or so, and she has noticed. "You jealous rat”, she says.

So Biko spotted the fat one-legged pigeon during his stroll in the park. It was a sign to him. He called the pigeon one-legged Jim on the spot and decided to use it in the book. A pigeon so obese, he cannot possibly fly anymore. It can't run fast enough for take-off, Biko says (which doesn't make sense, but don't forget he's Belgian).

“That's what I like to write. Magic realism – that's what I love! And isn't it a great idea? Funny, symbolic, magical... The one-legged pigeon? Eating and observing and spying and getting fatter and fatter?”

We've read the unpublished book and found this would serve it well. “Why yeah, it's brilliant” Roufa said. “The more I think about it, the more I appreciate it!” agreed Mimi. “Are we allowed to blog about it? Or are you afraid somebody would steal it?”

“Oh, no, of course you can! It's ideas, they are flying around, drifting in the air... Unlike poor one-legged Jim, who has eaten himself too fat to fly.”

--

Hopefully you are who you want to be already -- more or less!

We can't complain.

--

Dear readers, we are going to be very busy the rest of the week. You won't see a lot of us. So we will leave you with a fun suggestion – it's really super: Cribs with Louis XVI (from the extras on the Marie Antoinnette DVD, and now on YouTube).

If you are a celebrity and you think you have a mansion to boast about on MTV? Think again, because Versailles trumps it all!

Mullet II: The resurrection

2008-03-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

This is a world where you can invest in an investment institution and where you can buy stocks of the bank that safeguards your assets. And you thought quantum gravity was absurd. Well, we won't be writing about quantum gravity any time soon!

Remember the days when the following joke was valid?
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. -Bob Hope

The warning signs have been clear, dear readers. We, for one, or two, sold all the stocks in time, even the hearing aid company, damn it, such a promising little secret. But hold on to your deafening MP3s and your iPods, people! We shall not despair!

On the positive side, once the interest rates become negative, we'll be able to return less money than we borrow.

--

We don't use MP3s and iPods, we are rather the CD and DVD types. And we are convinced that we represent the future.

Yesterday we watched a very silly movie: Highlander II, The Quickening! Based on the movie, we can predict that in the year 2024 the 80s will be back in fashion. Brace yourselves for the resurrection of the shoulder pads!

We can also foretell that by 2024 we will have tired of our cell phones and iPods -- but there will be pay video phones! Really, why don't we already have pay video phones? It's like the fifties here!And the flat screen will be a thing of the past in 2024 – in the spirit of the '80s revival and the retro look, screens will be curvy again.

Alas, Sean Connery will still be out there flirting in his usual corny manner.

What? You have not seen Highlander II? We didn't even know it existed until yesterday. Here is what a Mr David Frames has written about it (from the IMDb database, user comments):

“ ... everyone who felt any enjoyment during this picture is consciously and deliberately complicit in its evil work. As a purely commercial enterprise with no respect or consideration for the 1st film or its fans, we can only hope that all involved lost millions and that having lost their deposit they were forced to sell themselves into sexual slavery. ...“

We had a great time, though. If only we had noted down the stream of jokes this movie induced, we could easily make Highlander IV – the spoof.

--

We were googling images about the 80s to illustrate this post and came upon this lovely scetchblog. That's where the image we used came from.

Timequake

2008-03-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

def.: ten years on automatic pilot.

--

Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov.

He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with a mate that cracked?

“Anything interesting happen at work today, Honeybunch?”
“Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?”

--

Thus spoke Kurt Vonnegut during the Timequake, ten and twenty years ago. We are quoting him, so that we don’t have to judge and be judged.

In any case: Nobody, even Kurt, ever asked Sakharov’s wife if she was planning to leave her husband. That would be ridiculous.

And when a blue-chip company CEO effectively steals from his employees and drinks their life savings for aperitif, nobody asks his wife if she could bear to stand by him, or if she was planning to leave him.

But when a politician uses his own money (until proven otherwise) to have luxury sex with a consenting, non desperate, and adult set of limbs, don't let the apparent lack of a victim deceive you: things change drastically! To quote our dear friend Biko Azinuth, It's everybody's business now! It's not hard to imagine the faint spark of life inside the mummified bellies and mucus membranes of the Desperately Cruel, upon uncovering the titillating (?) details. Those C- students who have dated themselves to lobotomy, only to end up having instant soup every evening alone in front of the TV, and on the phone, and the computer, finally get the chance to dance their ecstatic dances of boredom-avenging around the “Harvard educated wife” - in a moment of glory they have to ask: Are you going to leave him?

And we were not quick enough to zap away in time.

But things could be worse. At least according to the quintessential Disgusted Person, Phillip Roth. In other words: it's been 10 years since 1998. Below we are giving you a piece of Roth to indulge, dear readers!

And do have a lovely weekend! If you really have to use the TV, phone, computer, etc, at least please try to use one at a time! Otherwise, really, you don't know what you are doing.

--

...
Ninety eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s national security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne [] identified in the incipient country of long ago as “the persecuting spirit”; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.
...

Oh Nay! (The Passion Continued)

2008-03-10T03:13:00.000-07:00

So that business took a while.

But here we are again, talking about MOVIES!!!!

Yeah, let’s say it once more lest we forget: Will Ferrell is a genius and we can’t imagine the world without him. Mr Burgundy, you have a MASSIVE e&*%#)n. A single plop!

Now, any idea as to what makes a good biographical movie? How about what makes ANY movie good: story, script, actors, direction… Or at least great images and music - look at Frida! What, that’s all? That’s why we haven’t written for so long? No, of course not! Read on!

If you want to make a biographical movie about somebody and are looking for a fool-proof recipe to avoid the documentary without voice-over effect, here’s an idea: let the story be told, felt, judged, by the right observer! That would be the secretary (Hitler), the doctor (Idi Amin), the secret rival (Salieri), what have you...

… the young lover who survived (Jackson Pollock), the admirer and husband’s lover who too killed herself (Sylvia Plath). We aren’t in the movie business, but we are in the FREE!! advice business. Yes, we urge you people to let the lover and the husband’s lover tell the story of Pollock and Plath – respectively. They already sound like excellent movies.

--

And we’ve been sort of punished for our ramblings. As we were saying last week, we had ordered a Pollock reproduction for on the wall, an unmatched jungle … etc. and were expecting it to be delivered on Thursday by UPS. Thursday we decided to check the tracking number of the delivery. Turns out the package had been delivered already since days! The online receipt said: “Signed by: NAY”. Dysxelic though/as we are, we took that to mean that NOBODY had signed upon delivery and that the UPS had some nerve to hide their incompetence behind archaic expressions.

To cut a long story short, we now know that we have a neighbor called Nay. It was hard to trace his apartment, since it’s not on his name, but on the name of his sect. He tried to convert us, but we already have our sect.

As you know, we belong to an unholy disorder, we call ourselves Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.

Kind Mr Nay gave us our Pollock, despite our inconvertibility. But our new Pollock doesn’t fit in the living room, it’s too much. Ain’t that a bugger? No, it’s great! We needed something for above the drawer chest in the bedroom and this turns out to be perfect!

--

And now, some brand new lyrics, from DIG!! LAZARUS, DIG!! that Roufa claims were stolen from him, and Mimi confirms that they sound familiar to her:

One day I’ll buy a factory & I’ll assemble y/

On a production line

I’d build a million of y/ baby
& every single one of them will be mine

I will fill the house w/ y/ stack y/ up

In every room/ we’ll have a real good time

Lie down here & be my girl.

The Passion of the Biographer

2008-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

It is still Tuesday. Interesting.

Or rather, it is already Tuesday! So let's roll!

We watched Pollock, the movie, this weekend. Big mistake. Huge. And right after we had ordered a Pollock reproduction for on the wall, an unmatched jungle of high-order gravitational strokes, denser than Sven's prickles and Florian's leafy sprawls (that's our other plant). Luckily one of us at least – Mimi – has read Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut and can still appreciate the Abstract Expressionists and their potato barns. Fiction is a much more interesting – not to say, plausible - version of reality than facts. The movie about Jackson Pollock was like a documentary without the voice-over. Biographical movies are prone to this disease. There may be a few things better than a good read or a movie – not many. But there are certainly a lot of movies better than biographical movies.

We've been working on a little theory as to what makes a good biographical movie. One thing is clear, it's not the biographee that makes the movie: There exist perfectly good movies about unknown, mostly fictional people.

Here are some very good movies based on the lives – or important moments in the lives – of real, more or less famous people:

“Amadeus” (W.A.Mozart): Where dedicated musician Salieri is consumed by his envy and admiration towards the repugnant genius.
“The Downfall” (A.Hitler): The last days in the bunker through the eyes of a naïve secretary.
“Last King of Scotland” (Idi Amin dictator of Uganda): A young doctor overwhelmed by the gravitational field of insanity.
“Ali” (Mohammed Ali): Dances like a butterfly, stings like a bee!
“Frida” (Frida Kahlo): The passion of the painter through, well, paintings and wonderful music.
“Marie Antoinnete” (Marie Antoinnette, Last Queen of France): Reckless youth.
“The Hours” (V.Woolf): The writer has to kill, or die, or both.

And here are some embarrassing movies that we wouldn't recommend to anyone we like:

Pollock (Jackson Pollock): An autistic painter, whose paintings somehow make everyone swoon but don't sell?? No? Hmm...
Ted and Sylvia (Sylvia Plath): Sylvia falls in love, cries, cleans up after Ted, cries, is jealous, cries, ...??
Everything about Marilyn Monroe: It always seems to be about a blond with a back problem and a very particular make-up style.
The Aviator: Some epos about somebody.
The Journalist: Cate Blanchet amongst adults is always a bad idea.

So, have you seen any of the above movies? Do you agree with us? Any additions to our lists?

And what's the theory?

Well, right now we have to leave you - we'll continue tomorrow or sometime. This session is open for discussion!

Wir haben das doch gewusst!

2008-02-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, we are back! Hurrah! And yes, this is still an English-spoken bblogg. And yes, we still have a vision: Television.

On TV: a filthy-rich person, no pun intended, strolling about his vast veranda, looking over his vaster garden, being interviewed. He regrets, he says between cigar puffs, or blows, the existence of poor and ordinary people: He runs into them during his holidays in less vast places and that annoys and disgusts him. And why should ordinary people care? Contrary to germs, poor and ordinary people's existence is currently pretty well protected by law. And not all wealthy people are such sociopaths. What most wealthy people have in common is not arrogance, just a very protective attitude towards their wealth, often bordering to criminal negligence. What, you didn't know that?

When TV journalists (aka back-row C- students) don't count the blinks of, and innuendos between, presidential candidates (as opposed to, say, pay attention to what is being promised by said candidates, and keep the elected ones on the tip of their toes), they take baths with elephants to raise awareness -- and to display their muscular anatomy in wet T-shirts. We knew that already. We now also know, that when German journalists don't solve the world in long, fancy sentences and long, fancy words, they get easily shocked. So it turns out that thousands of rich Germans have been smuggling their money to bordering little tax havens. Oh, what blinding, deafening shock! Men from Mars, women from Venus, and journalists from unparallel universes. To their defense, it must be tiring for journalists to have to pretend they're clever all the time. They constantly have to defend themselves as they fail to remain within – let alone be ahead of – reality. That's when the big, loud, blinding headlines come: we are as shocked as you are!

OK, we understand. Pat on the back. The good news for the “ordinary” Germans is, there are enormous fines to be collected. The prospective magnitude of those well deserved fines is to drool over! The good bespectacled turtleneck's job is to propose constructive usage thereof. No? No. Stuck with principle and moral and daily witch quotas. Oh, lord. Platonic ideas won't put bread on the table and platonic love won't give you children – IVF aside. It's no secret, everybody knows, come on back to the war, etc.

--

Back to us!

We did not win the poster competition, but we are very proud of our creation. For more posters and the results go here!

Sven and RockFrog have a new friend, as we've mentioned already some time ago. His name is Frog Ted and he's quite the story teller! He kept Sven and RockFrog and other curious animals awake for two days and two nights when he arrived! Here's the evidence:

You can invite your own Frog Ted from Frog's Shop. Read more here!

Cheers!

--

PS: If you ended up here by googling “IVF+Germany”, our sincere apologies. Next time please try Yahoo.

Listen to the wind b*$#

2008-02-19T07:26:00.001-08:00

Tuesday morning. Back to Black, the song, was on the radio and Mimi was putting her black mascara on, and wondering, what retard would censor such a brilliant line as “You love blow and I love puff”? Somebody felt the word “blow” was not decent enough for their respectable listeners and erased it from the radio version. Puff and blow reminded Mimi of smoking, actually. She now craved for a cigarette, although she's never put one in her mouth. She never has, because if she did it once, she could never stop, she can feel that. How can such a control freak be an oral person? Is “oral” a decent word?

Such scattered thoughts were going through her mind, when Roufa's cute head appeared at the door, to announce that there were breaking news on TV:

RTG: Fidel Castro!
ML: What, he died?
RTG: No, he resigned!
ML: OK, that's better than dying.
RTG: I guess so.
ML: It's probably good that he resigned before he died.
RTG: It would be difficult to resign after he'd died.
ML: He would never resign then. They would have to overthrow him.

So our genius poster of “Banana: The Movie”, published last Wednesday, proved prophetic, in a lose sense. We are very proud! Now we shouldn't care if we win the contest or not! We are obviously the best!

--

We would love to write more, but we are running out of time. We have to buy presents. And then we have to pack. For soon we are flying south! We are going to visit our chattery relatives, the ones we hung on the wall the other day. We are going to see our little niece, who must have doubled in size and decuplied in vocabulary since our last visit. Time for her to learn “uncle” and “aunt” in three different languages. If she can't, nobody can!

This qualifies as our (not too long) Leave of Absence #3.

But you don't have to miss us: You can rent “Bananas”, the real movie of Woody Allen, and have almost as much fun as here. We also recommend “Aaltra”, another Belgian movie, French-speaking this time. Featuring our new Silly Hero, Bouli Lanners. If you haven't seen his performance of “Sonny” (from the movie), based on Bobby Hebb's “Sunny”, you don't know what silliness is. If you are above 18, you can also enjoy the adult version and have a look at Bouli's version of the the lyrics.

--

We'll try to drop by before we leave, but if we don't, see you sometime next week, dear readers! Movies or not, have fun! And don't forget to eat your fruit and drink plenty of water: The secret to a shiny fur and a lustrous coat, whatever species you belong to.

Fool Mental Market

2008-02-15T05:33:00.000-08:00

Time's up! Yes, the moment has come! The correct answers to Monday's homework have been published as a comment to the post. Have fun! Those entertaining pieces are just as deep into the subject matter as we are willing to go right now. Perhaps after some holidays we would have the courage to forge further down the abyss of the Slavic soul.

Although Czar Putin was on the news, fussing over a piece of property in the bowels of Serbia. Half Kosovo wants independence and the whole of Kosovo is declaring it. But the proper respects were not paid and the Czar will not put up with an independent Kosovo. That would be “immoral”. What's next, Bernanke accusing the Chinese of being greedy?

--

OK, now we have a quick vocabulary test for you.

When you lend money to somebody who, to the best of your knowledge, is unable to give it back, what do you call it:
a Charity
b Stupidity
c Financial opportunity

If you answered a, keep up the good work. If you answered b, you could probably convince us to trust you with our finances. If you answered c, you are in the wrong institution, considering your mental condition. Pretty dangerous.

Which reminds us. It's been almost a month since Davos and we haven't written a word about it, despite the excitement with which we were anticipating the event. That's because we were disappointed! It was not interesting at all! The world's VIPs were all set to venture to unexplored opportunities, tap untapped potentials, discover the next big thing. But the party was pooped, the brass balls bruised -- by fears of an otherwise not coming recession? Sissies. It's all China's fault.

--

Weekend, finally. Time to turn off the computer. Time for some air and natural light! Time to lounge! Have a lovely time, friends!

Back Row Giggling

2008-02-13T07:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers, we'd like to report that we are still rather busy. Besides our regular work, we've had some practical matters to attend to. Not necessarily boring: We framed and hung some family members on the wall, for example. Their pictures, that is. We cleaned Fritz the Fridge. We booked a short trip. We watered Sven and gave him his vitamins. He's been very easy lately, because he now has a new friend who keeps him and RockFrog busy – but more about that some other time.

The “homework” is still available, see previous post! See how East-Europe savvy you really are! We'll post the correct answers on Friday, most likely in the form of a comment to the original post.

Why are we writing, then? Well, we may be busy, but that doesn't mean that we don't visit other people's blogs! It can be very relaxing. We want to thank you all for that! We hope you have as great a time as we do! Most of all, we'd like to give our special thanks to quirky Ms Quarks, aka Monica, for reminding us what it was like to be university students and sit in the back row stifling giggles generated by silly jokes, born of boredom or desperation. The quintessence of University Education! A pity the two of us, Roufa and Mimi, never got to do that together. Be students together. Sneak out of class together, defy sleep together, solve the world in smoky pubs together (it was before the prohibition), party all night together, then go straight to class together. But hey! We've had our fun in our separate times and places, we can't complain! And what else is this bblogg, but making up for lost time and fun?

Let the Silliness go on! Hurrah!

--

True to the cause, we have prepared a poster to illustrate "Banana: The Movie", i.e., our bblogg as a movie, in the context of Digital Sickbag's competition. Here it is (click to enlarge a little):

We would like to thank Woody Allen and Don DeLillo for their invaluable contributions to the Artwork.

The Xenophobe's Guide to Bed'n'Vodka

2008-02-11T06:12:00.000-08:00

We've got a friend who's a high-school English teacher. Let's call him Jim. Motivated and passionate as Jim may be, he's also human. He too has his Manic Mondays, when he's tired and moody. But he still has to teach! He can't just slack at his desk and switch to Second Life, no, the show must go on for Jim. What does he do then? Well, he lets his students do the work. He gives them something to read, for example, and then they have to discuss it in class.

The above should give you a clue as to what today's post will be like. To be precise, we are not moody, but we have been too busy to finish our planned post. Although no contract is bounding us, we have to post something, because it's been a while and we've missed you, Dear Readers! So we've decided to give you some homework: a mix of Reading Comprehension, Geography, and Public Relations. But don't you worry! Since you are readers with free will, not students, we've tried to make it intriguing! So here it is.

If you think your country has an image problem and you are East European, you probably have a case. The following are excerpts from travel guides to East European destinations. Some of them are fictitious and were maliciously made up for fun (not by us!), but others came from real tourist guides.

So can you tell fact from fiction? Give it a try! If you classify at least half of the excerpts correctly, or if you can name at least one of our sources, we will click on all the commercials on your website – if any! We'll post the correct answers and our sources later in the week. Some of the material is copyrighted -- please don't rat on us!

The excerpts are numbered for convenience. All locations and names have been replaced with initials.

--

Where To Stay

1. Claimed to be the first hotel ever to open in D, JP is a beautifully restored chateau right in the heart of the Old Town district. Rooms here are not exactly cheap, but a full breakfast [cereal, toast, eggs, sausage and vodka] is included in the price. The hotel also features one of the oldest working elevators in Europe.

2. The Hotel V in K is another Soviet-style cement behemoth – but it occupies the finest real estate in the city, and has splendid views of the river. Staff members may display shocking indifference until they spot your foreign passport. Book either a “deluxe” or a “semi-deluxe” room in the fourth or tenth floor, which have been renovated to international standards.

3. The VR Hotel is located right on the picturesque main square – a delight for guests but a shame for the square itself which is marred by the hotel's concrete-bunker design. Rooms at the back are described as “Mountain View”, which is only partially misleading, in that they do overlook a mountain of crushed car bodies piled up at a nearby auto wrecker's.

Where To Eat

4. B is a casual eatery, just a few doors up from the Town Hall, popular with locals and visitors alike. Freshness is a feature here, with all meals defrosted on the spot. In summer this relaxed bistro spills over onto the cobbled square outside, where patrons will often break into song or hand-to-hand combat, depending on how much they've drunk.

5. Just off UV in the heart of Old G you'll find the stylish B dining hall. With more than 50 main course meals to choose from, this is not the place to go if you have trouble making up you mind. Fortunately, 48 of the dishes involve pickled herring, so it makes the decision a little easier.

Getting Around

6. Renting a car, though expensive ($100 a day), will maximize your flexibility once there. The roads north of M can be challenging: keep an eye out for aggressive truckers, axle-breaking potholes and – even on the highways – the occasional horse-drawn cart.

7. You can call to book a taxi, take potluck with those at the taxi rants or flag down any passing taxi with a green light. Always check the table of fares, since some have ridiculously high rates (they usually sit outside the hotels or embassies waiting for foreigners). Another trick, which you can't really avoid, is pumping up the bill (literally they have a pump near the pedals which makes the metre go faster). [...] Avoid getting into any arguments with the taxi driver even if you know he is cheating you, or at least be sure to get yourself and your belongings out of the car first before things get nasty.

8. Taxi drivers should be tipped at least 10% unless you are prepared to exit a moving vehicle. It is also not unusual for air passengers to tip their pilot following an incident-free landing.

Caution

9. Organized crime in B is not much different from anywhere else in the world and does not generally affect law-abiding citizens. There have, however, in recent years and months been some high profile assassinations of “gangster bosses” and top businessmen, which have taken place in broad daylight in crowded cafes or on main streets in S or in tourist resorts. Although to date no innocent bystanders have been caught up in these shoot-outs, it may just be a question of time. The generally accepted advice is that if you are in a restaurant or cafe and somebody enters surrounded by four bodyguards, it's not a safe place to be!! Generally it is best to avoid establishments frequented by “thick necks” and obviously you don't want to get into any dispute with them over petty things like right of way when driving or waiting their turn in a queue, etc. Be consoled that their days may be numbered!

The Mantelpiece Fruit Guide

2008-02-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

...for dogs, cats, children, and other curious creatures.

We interrupt this blog to bring you a special feature: The guide to our fruity awards. You know, the metal fruit we give now and then – you can find the laureates on the right column on this page. Golden Bananas and Leaden Cucumbers have been confusing to Frog the Dog, who did not hesitate to stand up and courageously ask for explanations. Many adult people pretend they understand things and then you ask them to explain something and they get angry and call you stupid, just to conceal the simple fact that no, they themselves don't know.

So let's start with something easy. The Golden Apple. A golden apple can only be good, right? An apple is an interesting round fruit, very nutritious, and some would say seductive. And it smells lovely. A golden apple is an apple made of – or coated with – gold, which is shiny and expensive and looks gorgeous. A golden apple can also be an orange, which is very tasty and juicy. We can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to have a Golden Apple! If we give one to somebody, we must have liked or approved of something about them.

A cucumber is a very silly vegetable. Some would say offensive. Children rarely like its taste and adults tend to object its shape. Unless you are into silliness, like we are, bearing a cucumber is not very pleasant or decent. A leaden cucumber is a very heavy and dark cucumber. Nobody wants to display a leaden cucumber on their mantelpiece or to have to carry one down to the basement. The Leaden Cucumber award can only be a form of punishment.

And what about the Golden Banana? Is it good or bad? It's not very clear, is it! A banana has a beautiful color and smell, it is very nutritious, and everyone loves the taste! But like the cucumber, the banana also has a silly and some would say offensive shape. To peel and eat a banana in public looks very stupid indeed. Only apes do that and nobody wants to be associated with apes. Well, a golden banana, although expensive and shiny, has all the shape of the banana, but none of the flavor and nutrients. And it's deceptive too: Gold is a very tempting thing to own!

If you've earned yourself a Golden Banana, chances are that you've said or done something you thought and probably continue to think was very clever and cunning and would serve your purpose or your image, but actually, to us at least, appeared like an ape biting into a golden banana in public, breaking his teeth on it and giving us a broad, ugly smile. You will be tempted to display your Golden Banana on the mantelpiece. Because it's Gold! Are you supposed to be ashamed of Gold??! Since when is Gold an embarrassment?

Well, that, our friend, is your drama, and the genius of it all.

--

We hope this has been helpful, Frog! In any case, do try and have your five servings a day, but make sure no metal has been added to the fruit by humans! Or dogs. Or Obi-Sven.

In Bed With Chevron

2008-02-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

It's weekend, dear readers – almost. We are lazy. Laziness cannot produce a good post. Like goodness, it is a reward in itself and we will indulge. So we leave you with some more one-liners, made in our household. It's been a while! If you don't like them, scroll down, we still have some fruit and veggies to give away!

--

On TV: A cricket player's hand is injured and he needs surgery.
RTG: What happened? He burnt it on a cup of tea?
ML: A heavy cup of tea?

A movie on TV, the Matrix-genre. Looks crappy.
ML: What is this, Matrix 215?
RTG: Matrix – the Inverse?
(It was The Matrix.)

CNN: “To close Guantanamo would be a logistic nightmare for the US. Especially, what to do with those detainees, who the US believe to be senior Al Qaeda members?”
ML: ...based upon?...
RTG: They are older.

London, the sign reads: New Scotland Yard.
RTG: What's that: Scotland Meter?

--

Finally! The moment we've all been waiting for! Another Golden Banana! Our fresh Golden Banana goes t o Chevron. An oil company, who is proud to be “part of the solution”, pioneering alternative energy, because “we live on this planet too”! Plans to manufacture their own planet failed badly and now they have to keep this one clean.

Chevron's advertisers are not content with a golden banana, so they had to take it one step further. The ad voice-over, a male, is aware that it's all about everyone's future, “for YOU [image of 11-year-old pretty girl in nightgown] and for ME [man in his 30s taking shower]”.

Leaden Cucumber along with the Golden Banana. Bon appetite.

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

2008-01-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

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?

Sopranos

2008-01-25T07:29:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2008-01-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

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.

Rhinos in Peril

2008-01-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

[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.

Couple Without A Country

2008-01-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

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.

Nothing Changes On New Year's Day

2008-01-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Such a Belgian's Mother!

2007-12-31T06:58:00.000-08:00

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!

Must it be so very bright?

2007-12-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

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.

--

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.

To survive... Perhaps to enjoy...

2007-12-23T03:23:00.000-08:00

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.

Seascape with Tannenbaums

2007-12-19T01:55:00.000-08:00

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.

A Leaden Cucumber for Us?

2007-12-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Beautiful Little Germans #1

2007-12-04T07:16:00.000-08:00

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.”

Ohne Komment:
-Sprechen Sie Englisch? Mein Deutsch ist ein Bisschen kaput.
-Aber kaput Deutsch sprech'ich doch! Kaput Deutsch ist kein Problem!

Such a Belgian!

2007-11-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

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!

The Flying Lawyers of Pakistan

2007-11-28T01:18:00.000-08:00

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!

Thank you for the Music

2007-11-23T06:29:00.000-08:00

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!

Get Yourself Some Educay-shaaaaan!

2007-11-19T02:49:00.000-08:00

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!

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

2007-11-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

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?”

Great Blunders And Golden Bananas

2007-11-09T07:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Those Sinister Dinner Deals, Those Alleged Mysterious Ways

2007-11-07T06:58:00.001-08:00

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.

Angels stole your missing socks

2007-11-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

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!

The Perfect Headache, The Ideal Crash, ...

2007-11-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

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.

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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?

The Man Feet Conspiracy (for Marina the Nut)

2007-10-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

Today, dear readers, we shall talk about shoes. It’s a light enough subject for everyone's hangover, and most important, if we don’t, we will receive a letter bomb from our cousin Marina. Marina thinks that every blogger is famous and powerful – which proves once again that you need more than a high IQ to understand the world – and therefore relies on us to “further” her “cause”.

Marina has “had it with shoe manufacturers, from Gucci to Gortz”. (Presumably the latter is a crappy German shoe manufacturer.)

Marina the Nut, you see, is a self-described “petite southern beauty” who lives in Germany. She wears a minute and permanently sold-out shoe size of “35 - and even a little smaller!” She claims, that she can have a fair chance to find a shoe that fits, only when she visits the children’s department.

And for years she has been buying “any relatively decent pair that fits” (including insoles) out of insecurity that it will take years before she finds another “decent pair that fits”. The availability situation got worse and worse year by year. Eventually there was not a single shop in her town that would sell adult shoes of size 35 (US 5.5?), “not even Gortz”. (“What do you expect when there are children’s shoes of size 47? What the hell are they feeding them? Is it the sausages?”) She was compelled to look for shoes every single time she traveled. When she went to France, she trusted that Paris would be the paradise of petite elegance. Oh how her hopes were shattered! Et tu, Printemps?

She was doomed to wear out her small, weird collection, having it perpetually repaired, till the end of time.

Until, that is, she discovered that Gucci had launched their on-line shop in Germany! Starting from size 34! Finally, her Visa Gold would be put to noble use! She ordered her first truely decent pair of shoes at exactly the right size (“34,5! Smaller than Kylie Minogue!”) as soon as the new winter collection came out – in the middle of a heat wave in July. Wise of her. The waiting list closed in the blink of an eye.

Alas, her dream shoes never arrived: three months later she was informed that her order was not available any more. Furious and frustrated, she went back online to discover that the “Absolute Average size 37” remained available in all models. Her high IQ could not conceive why any company – be it Gucci or Gortz – would produce too much of one size and too little of another and create such disparity of demand vs offer. Haven't their business strategists noticed the desperate market of little women out there who remain hungry and loaded?

And that’s how she turned paranoid – and very, very rude. In her words:

“I’m telling you, this is a conspiracy amongst those ugly, big, asexual towers of women, who are envious of their petite sisters. They want to destroy our looks. They are out for us. I Hate them and their ugly bony faces and their enormous lumberjack shoulders and their disgusting spider toes.”

She must have been in tears when she emailed us:

“I can take it from Gortz, but from Gucci? Do they really think it serves their image to produce shoes for my boss and her likes – and that includes Godzilla? She has man feet for chrissakes! Does Signora Giannini have man feet too?”

--

As a not-so-big woman with no man feet, Mimi (who is typing this, in case you're wondering), sympathizes by default. But Roufa (who is mumbling out his thoughts next to her), isn’t indifferent either. His wife’s little stiletto can stand on the palm of his hand. He can’t imagine there’s anything sensual about holding a freighter in your hand. And who would like to drink champagne out of a Viking’s clog? (He said that.)

In any case, we agreed to tell our cousin's story, and if anybody out there is reading, we would encourage you to write a few words of support for Marina. And who knows, if she is right and there are enough of you out there sharing her drama, maybe you can fight, impose your terms, turn the tables.

And if you have any tips for her, as to where, if at all, she can find shoes in Germany, in Europe, and neighborhood therof, you are welcome too. She isn't going to Singapore any time soon (a Burberry sales assistant in Frankfurt advised her to look there).

You Exhibitionist!

2007-10-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

When WWII ended, in one of our grandparents' birthplace -- a spartan, battered mountain village in the Very Old World (now a ski resort) -- international help arrived in the form of powdered milk, chocolate, clothes, and other necessities. The children loved the chocolate, and our then-child grandparent (now a well-to-do retiree) still raves about it. The women of the village, on the other hand, were mesmerized by the clothes. Those beautiful garments had arrived, camisoles and 'combinaisons' in sleek fabrics and wonderful colors (donated by rich bourgeoisie from the city, who the black market had gracefully seen through the hard times). The tough village women were not immune to beauty. They had had a tough life, alright, but that doesn't mean that they did not produce marvelous embroidery or that they did not like to dress up on Sunday for church. The war was over! The women fought over the shiny underwear like the children over the chocolate – and made sure to show off every Sunday, wearing them above their normal clothes.

Superman has a similar approach to underwear.

Call us happily married, but we prefer to show our underwear to each other only. If you must show yours in public, as long as we don't have to put up with your crack, your vast derri`ere, your Hairy Monster, and/or naked flesh of butchershop-display texture, we will keep an open mind. In any case, you may end up immortalized in your grandchildren's blog.

Have a lovely weekend, our dear readers, and don't forget to air yourselves sufficiently. We won't be blogging, as usual.

I Want Candy

2007-10-24T01:29:00.001-07:00

It is understandable. It was scandalous to show all that candy to the Atkins generation. But Marie Antoinette was not booed at Anorexics Anonymous, but rather at the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Times Readers Reviews Online and places frequented by the Cult of the European Beret. Come to think of it, there was probably not enough sex for them in the bloody movie. Hardly any, actually!

Loosen up, darlings, don't look like you've got candy stuck up your Arsch! It's a movie, not Au contraire: A Revisionist's disdain for the French Revolution.

(Well, it sounds like a volume that Nova Publishers should publish – a trilogy: Egalite', Fraternite', Sexualite'.)

--

We spent a few days in Paris recently. We stayed right at the Place Pigalle, a minute's walk from the Museum of Erotic Art on one direction and from the Dirty Dick Club on the other. Two minutes from the Moulin Rouge. We walked along a street with numerous sex shops every day. Inspiring as this setting was for our private life, it threatened our sense of reality. One morning we spotted this complicated bodice/belt in a shop window, in some dirty skin color, and complete with elaborate fastenings and buttons. Roufa's eyes twinkled, “Look how kinky!” he exclaimed. The shop was actually a pharmacist's. The belt was an orthopedic back support.

You didn't hear it from us

2007-10-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

...but if you have invested in China, it is about time to start preparing your exit strategy. We know because when we don't watch movies we watch the news. And we are very considerate people, so we had to tell you.

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Monday. We have to water Sven – or the tension on his angry prickles will grow extremely dangerous.

Blogging was not invented in France

2007-10-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

The French railway workers are on strike, this time because the new government wants to strip them of several benefits; some of them retire at age 50. The German railway workers are on strike too; they retire at age 67. Who's got the fastest trains? The French! Vorsprung durch Technik! It is obvious to us that the Germans have something to learn from the French here. It is obvious to the Germans too, that's their struggle. But Americans and their likes are really baffled by the French, they are jealous of them and lovehate them, because the French appear to enjoy life -- even when they are not at work.

In the following we quote the new finance minister of France remembering her good old days at Baker & McKenzie with nostalgia:

"The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra."

Well, she's now in a position to work her frustrations on the French people. This Delphine-Roux-success-story – who still cannot argue with a cabdriver, let alone the French unionists -- went on to deliver the following punch-line and find her place in stand-up politics:

"What was really striking to me when I came back from Chicago in 2005 was that the law on the 35-hour week had passed and [...] had produced disastrous effects. [...] People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends."

Anyway, this week's Golden Banana goes to Christine Lagarde and Roger Cohen for this.

--

With this and with that we wish you a lovely weekend. Of course we won't be blogging during the weekend, we keep it for when we suffer the office bore-out. So here's your homework: recite ten times and upload to your blog the following Blackadder moment:

"I've no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes' work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my - hang on..."

Who's Afraid of Virgin Wool?

2007-10-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

Do parallel universes exist? Of course! We get to peek into them when we watch movies! In the world we peeked into yesterday, genetically engineered sheep attacked and bit people, who in turn mutated instantly into carnivorous sheep and so on. That was in Black sheep from New Zealand. Tough place to suffer amnophobia. What an idea! Hilarious.

Not all movies are legitimate, though. Look at Babel. What promises! What premises! What pretenses! It's about prejudice, clashes of civilizations, illegal immigrants, terrorism... Well, LA crash was not a revelation and much less was Babel. Babel is not a movie. The characters do not have free will. They just do what the Masterplan says they should do. They don't even die when they bleed to death, for crying out loud, unless perhaps they happen to be Moroccan mountain boys and somewhat retarded. Spoiler! Ok, here's the real story: A deaf and very unhappy Japanese teenager (and volleyball player -- only her name is not Lynn and her father is not deaf, but he may still own a Samsung) goes about her business around Tokyo wearing a nano-mini pleated skirt (her school's uniform, presumably) and no panties. Now we got your attention.

The movie we still have to buy on DVD is Brick. And probably Little Miss Sunshine. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Now, those are worlds worth beholding.

--

Sheep, sharks, bats, teenagers... The mightiest beast of all is our cactus Sven. He is a dark-green ball with long, curved, yellow prickles. He looks like a tanned Viking, so we call him Sven. He lurks on the coffee table and attacks careless resting feet and coffee-picking hands that intrude on his territory. He deserves to be famous.

Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment

2007-10-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment

Hurrah! A new blog! You are delightfully welcome! This is actually a bblogg: whetever it is, it is maintained by two people. That’s myself, Mimi, and my husband, Roufa. And we are as silly as our names suggest.

What can you expect from our elaborations? Well, we can hardly predict. What do we expect? Ditto. So let's open a book at random:

--We practice a disoriented religion. We belong to an unholy disorder, we call ourselves “Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.”--

There you go.

Let our motto for today be the teachings of Brian – the one with the Holy Sandal:

--You do not need people to tell you what to do! You are all individuals! --

To which we must reply aloud and in unison:

--Yes! We are all individuals! --

Hurrah!