Must it be so very bright?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the rest.

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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.”

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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.”

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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...”

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RTG said: “God, I look old.”

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

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Fergie sings: “Big girls don't cry”

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