Home is where Sven is

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.

-



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.

--

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

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.

---

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?

--

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.

Grrrrrrrl Power!

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!

--

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?

The Breakfast Club

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.)

--

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.

--

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

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.

Wir haben das doch gewusst!

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.