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!

Such a Belgian's Mother!

Last day of the year. The anticipation is killing us. Will we make it to the next?

Meanwhile, what better opportunity than this, to remember and catch up with some of the things that have preoccupied us in this rather young bblogg.

(Some links may not work, temporarily, presumably because the google geeks are playing again - or not. No wonder we are not charmed by computers or impressed by geeks, to say the least.)

We watch many movies and have commented on some of them, from a silly scary movie about carnivorous sheep, to a pretentious nonsense, to Marie Antoinette. We read many books, but haven't written much about them.

We are intelligent for no obvious reason.

We are not the only ones who like to poke innocent fun at the beautiful little Germans. Garfield shares our weakness. Here is a recent strip featuring Greta the pet sitter.

The situation in Pakistan was a cliff hanger on the 28th of November. It is still troubled. Benazir Bhutto regained her freedom and people's support, but lost her life. Don't worry, though, her son will lead the party -- after he completes his studies. Meanwhile, his widowed father will take over. The crowds cheer, etc. Not only Musharraf and the military, but also the Bhutto Dynasty verify what the King of Jordan once said, that "democracy will mean different things to different nations".

We appreciate Italian design, as does our petite cousin Marina the Nut. Our wish to her for the new year: to find her dream shoes in size 34 1/2.

We are fun-loving people and many readers seemed to have enjoyed our household jokes.

Our friend Biko Azinuth, the non-neurotic Belgian writer who loves animals, visited his mother for Christmas. She is a funny woman living with a sweet dog at an insignificant Flemish village. She embodies Belgian surrealism as much as any Belgian. She went out with a younger friend, and as the sun shone behind the friend, outlining her profile from an unfortunate angle, Biko's mother noticed a long curly hair growing on her friend's chin. She said so. The friend panicked, "pull it out", she begged. "I can't", said Biko's mother. "I'm not wearing my glasses."

Remember the Azinuth's coffee addiction? His mother has now also picked the habit of having a cup of coffee after dinner. Poor Biko was so worried when he first saw her do that: "What if you cannot sleep!" he protested. "Well," she said, "at least I've had my coffee".

Our nephew says he is studying math right now. We don't believe him.

Can talent kill you? There were two children once. The youngest, a
boy, pointed his water pistol to his head and said "I'm trying to destroy my brain without dying." The girl remarked: "That's the best way to kill your ideas without dying for them". Bless them, wherever they are.

In 2007 we gave one golden banana, one leaden cucumber, and one golden apple. Sven, our beloved cactus, and his friend RockFrog made it into Frog's DAFTS gallery.

We have offered free advice.

We get easily disgusted and appreciate the company of other disgusted persons. But we can be very thankful too. We are thankful for our new friends! And we thank you for reading us!

It is fitting to close with something funny that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, as a moral lesson:

Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent, aren't everything.

Hurrah!

Get Yourself Some Educay-shaaaaan!

Our teenage nephew used to dislike school. He went to a rather decent primary school, where he was diagnosed hyper kinetic whenever he did not do his homework. He claimed he was bored. When he turned 12 his parents did not send him to just another decent high school, but the best school in the region and the most conservative one too – Roufa's famous Alma Mater! How he blossomed! He is now not only a handsome and social young boy, but the best student around, assigned to tutor other students! He's assuming all kinds of responsibilities! In his previous school he had indeed been bored all along. Now he's all enthusiastic about school! What had been soup to him is now knowledge! He is really learning how to learn!

He is not learning how to learn by fiddling with his laptop.

The person typing these lines, that's Mimi of course, or almost her, was not taught to use computers, but the Internets were too tempting, so she had to learn how to operate them. Evey idiot can learn how to use a computer, computers are stupid. When the computer crashes, Mimi turns it off and then on again. It seems to work. Tell her to do something more sophisticated, and she will look at you like you just told her to build a car from scratch. Who knows how many computers she would burn before she got a grip. Besides, she prefers to use her valuable time to understand the world, which is much more interesting. Let the geeks fiddle with the stupid machine.

You think we have something against computers? No, not really. Mimi is not proud to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. We have something against poor education enforced by stupidity and vice versa.

Our notorious cousin, Marina the Mediterranean Nut, regrets that her formal education “was full of holes”. Perhaps, we suggested, those holes produced the nut that she is, much like holes give swiss cheese character. She did not like our joke. She had been full of holes that she'd had to fill in herself if she wanted to do something in her life.

Marina went to a decent primary school, then a mediocre high school. Just like Mimi, when she entered University, she had never even touched a computer. And she was going to study Science! Somehow she managed her way through a tough but chaotic University. Her grades were mediocre to excellent, depending on her mood. But she made it! She's now getting paid to solve scientific problems on kitchen-sized computers using three different languages! By Germans, mind you! And she learned it almost herself!

But then again, she is a stubborn and ambitious nut. Her IQ is something like 154. She had learned how to read by the age of 3 – and that was Greek, mind you. She's a singularity. Only C- students – that's TV journalists – would use her exceptional story to make a generic point.

At least we are using three stories to make our point, and we are not even getting paid for it!

The C- generic point could be: give a child a laptop and they will learn how to learn. They will learn not only how to charge its battery, but also to write the code to go with it! Because all children are potential genius geeks, like Herr Professor Nicholas Negroponte, of MIT and Wired. Not only that, they would download textbooks that their stupid teachers wouldn't even know they existed! They would read those textbooks! They would finally receive the education they deserve!

Nicholas Negroponte succeeded in producing a very cheap yet decent laptop, that consumes very little energy and is tough enough to survive the conditions prevailing in remote rural areas in the developing world. He wants every child to be able to have a laptop, no matter how poor. He's been trying to sell the idea to country leaders, get them to buy the laptops massively, with not much success. He's been trying to find sponsors in rich countries - hence the Give One Get One initiative.

The idea is this. The children that the laptops are aimed for are expected to maintain them themselves (that includes adapting the open-source code). No teacher required. When a virus hits their mean green learning machines, they will learn how to fix it themselves. (And we are talking about children in "remote rural areas", who presumably play basketball with their laptops – hence the machines had to be tough!) Project adviser and education specialist Seymour Papert assures us that it's the best way for the children to learn how to learn. Learn what, anyway. Who needs to know where their country is on the map when there's Google Maps? His point exactly! Google knows where the country is, not stuffy people behind desks.

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American politicians are also learning how to learn by fiddling with other countries' internal affairs. They take uneducated guesses and when failure occurs, they call it “learning”.


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Children need much simpler things than a laptop to be healthy and happy and even literate. A bed-time story for example. Our friend Frog the Reading Hero will explain – we also placed a link on the right!

Those Sinister Dinner Deals, Those Alleged Mysterious Ways

We -- that's Roufa and Mimi -- have reached an age where we can finally enjoy our being intelligent. We can't complain. There was some trouble coming to terms with it during the Age of Ignorance, but no more. For one, it's great to hear our teenage nephew say he's proud to have “two professors” in his family. (We are not professors.) When he had to interview someone important for school and realized that athletes, singers, actors and actresses were not very reachable, he came to us. We explained nuclear physics to him in two neat paragraphs, made him happy and his teacher very impressed. This is what we are intelligent for.

No matter what your IQ, you will not make sense of life and death and love and evil in a million words. Maybe in a few of them. If you are any lucky, you will produce the Purest Nugget of Green. Sell it to the locals for Gold. Tomorrow you may die. Your words still lingering to spook your family and friends, like a vacant pair of slippers next to your bed; an orphaned package of cigarettes, dirty laundry – will they wash them?

While we are writing this, the white noise of the Internet is consuming itself, a multiverse of flaming lips bellow at the firmament:

Fire! I am fire! I am on fire!

A million babies push their way out to the world, girls and women become mothers, mothers become mothers again, mothers lose their children, mothers reject their children, childless mothers stall in confusion, their cradles still unfilled. A nun is dead.

Someone out there is dealing his world for some change. And would you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

Of course you would.

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We are not going to die tomorrow. What are the chances anyway. Sven will sting us a million times, on many days to come. We will buy a French Bulldog, preferably black with a white stripe across the muzzle. We will give her a funny name.

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The first reader to guess right the names of everybody famous or rather famous that we have quoted in this post wins a FREE! subscription to our blog. And a FREE! visit from us.