Worse things can happen to people!

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

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

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!

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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)

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

... 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

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

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

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

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

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: