Listen to the wind b*$#

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!

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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.

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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.

Such a Belgian!

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 Perfect Headache, The Ideal Crash, ...

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?