In a bar, under the sea

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!

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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

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)

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!

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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.

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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!

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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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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

def.: ten years on automatic pilot.

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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?”

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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.

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...
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)

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.

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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!

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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

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!