Sopranos

Greece is a wonderful country. Every time we go there, we love it! We've got a cupboard full of Nescafe to prepare the real Greek frappe all year round, for that holiday feeling. We've emailed the Greek National Tourism Organization inquiring about scenic posters for our apartment (but they haven't replied***). Funny we haven't written anything about Greece yet! It is possible that by now we've got a couple of Greek friends reading us, and we would hate to disappoint them by neglecting their beautiful country. We've been busy with Pakistan and Belgium, for heavens' sakes. Not to mention, our friend Biko Azinuth the Author is Belgian, yet he prefers to set his books in Greece. We have no excuse!

So we've been trying to sort out Greek politics. Modern Greek politics, that is. It turns out is is real simple. Greek names tend to be long and complicated, but as far as politics is concerned, you only need to remember about five of them and you've covered a century, as we'll demonstrate. For the purposes of this post we will stick to initials, in order to keep life the way we like it, easy and simple. But that does not mean that same initials do not correspond to same names in what follows! They do!

The Greek Prime Minister KK (picture, center) is visiting Turkey. It's a grand symbolic event. Anything close to the Middle East is the perfect destination for country leaders in trouble, seeking a grand exit. Turkey is practically Middle East and at the same time Greece's most befriended neighbor and enemy, so KK got two in one with this. [Name count: 1, for KK.]

Last time a Greek Prime Minister paid an official visit to Turkey was 49 years ago. And that had been KK's uncle, also called KK. See? [Name count: 1 + 0 new = 1.]

The opposition leader in Greece was GP last time we checked. He inherited his party from his father, AP. Actually, there was a period between AP and GP when the party (and the country) was run by some parachutist, whose style was too German to last, so forget about him. [Name count: 1 + 2 new = 3.]

AP was pursuing a successful academic career in America, when his own father, GP (see?), ex-Prime Minister (also known as the Old Man of Democracy - it's a positive term), died, about 40 years ago. On the day of his funeral, crowds of people took to the streets to bid farewell, despite the risk of being spotted and prosecuted by the Junta. There was a 7-year Junta in Greece some forty years ago. What would you do if you were AP and as charismatic, if not more, as your father? You'd set up your own party in exile, fight to restore democracy, and then return to claim your place in the political life of your beautiful and once again democratic country. [Name count: 3 + 0 new = 3. No new names in this paragraph.]

So AP (that's GP's son and GP's father), representing the leftish, and KK (that's KK's uncle), representing the rightish, were the chief political rivals in Greece in the late 70s. GP (AP's father) and KK (KK's uncle) were rivals in the 60s. Not much has changed, except that the inbreeding has been turning the political scene into a more and more retarded mongoloid. [Name count: 3 + 0 new = 3.]

The dark-haired lady on the picture, left, is called DB. She has been mayor of Athens and a minister, among other things. She is the major rival of KK within their party. She is the daughter of KM, a senior party member, who has also been a leader of his party (and the country) in the past. KM has always been a headache to the GPs and KKs. [Name count: 3 + 2 new = 5.]

The blond lady is East German. Her name is AM and she leads Germany. Her being on the picture is an accident. We apologize. Blame Marina the Nut, who sent us the picture.

--

Next time in The Sopranos: How the students overthrew the Junta! How those who were not massacred took to politics and cashed in on the trauma! How the student movement also cashed in on its victories with perpetual protest, turning Universities into hothouses for Marxist-Leninist bourgeoisie!

--

But meanwhile, dear readers, it's weekend. Let our motto for the upcoming weekend be sung by Franz Ferdinand the group:

It's always better on holidays
So much better on holidays
That's why we only work when
we need the money.

Still waiting to hear from GNTO about those scenic posters.

***PS Jan29: Sure they did! Thank you, GNTO! For making our place feel like a real kafeneio! Waiting for the sun now.

...but the heart and the stomach of a concrete rhino!

Dear readers, we are back. Back together, and back altogether.

We don't know what we were thinking and how we survived. Next time Roufa goes along with Mimi. By now we are like Siamese twins: We can't even walk straight when we are not together. It's ridiculous.

So Mimi could tell you about her adventures up in the mountains with the skiers and the snow. It was not Davos, but it was a professional affair nonetheless. She could make fun of all the big German men typing away on their minute Sony Vaio laptops. They looked like bears on children's bikes. It was a rather silly spectacle. Although she has but the weak and feeble body of a small non-German woman, Mimi is buying a minute Sony Vaio no more. Not after this.

Being away without a laptop, or a TV, or newspapers, she had no idea what was happening in the world. An avalanche rolling its way down the idyllic slopes would have been a hint. But there was no avalanche. Luckily!

Yeah, we could write about all that, but give us some time first to recover from the cruel separation. We are not fully ready to blog yet. We hope you'll understand.

Rhinos in Peril

[and our Leave of Absence #2]

It's been almost a year, and we should celebrate it. It's hard to believe it, but up until just one year ago, if you raised the issues of the Environment, Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and so on, you were a quaint curiosity with flowers in your hair. Or a Marxist-Leninist SUV hater - or a science-fiction blockbuster - or Sting - or a scientist about to get grilled. We were none of the above -- just old enough to remember Sting – so even as the summer temperatures in our beloved Mediterranean grew more and more inhumane (not inhumane enough to keep us away), we had to keep our worries to ourselves. It looked hopeless.

And then, at the end of January 2007, in Davos, Switzerland, the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum took place. We remember watching the TV reports in amazement. Had we missed something? Certainly those were not Marxist-Leninists with flowers in their hair, not any more anyway, but on and on they went about Climate Change. Obviously, the world's VIPs had decided they were finally ready for the Environment to go mainstream!

And so we were beamed to a miraculous new world of urgency. We got bombarded with commercials of hybrid cars, showered with heart-warming messages promising clean energy – from oil companies! The C- students – that's TV journalists -- discovered a new playground. Out they went in armies, bear spotting, taking mud baths with elephants!

CO2 emissions became the new calories!

We welcome and celebrate this wonderful development, not only for our holidays' sake, but also because we would be very sad, were rhinoceroses to go extinct. Especially Roufa! Rhinos are Roufa's favorite animals! Their extinction is not directly related to Climate Change, but all this Awareness could save them anyway, as a collateral benefit.

--

The next Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum is coming up, 23-27 January in Davos. What will it be this time? Could it be the colossal business opportunities of developing Africa, or has that happened already? We are very excited, that's for sure!

Creatures of the Emerging Markets, unite and take over!

If you have time in your hands and delusions of grandeur, or if you'd simply like to hang out in the same virtual room with a good-looking brunette, you can give the Davos Question a try:

Davos Conversation

Official Google Blog: The Davos Question

--

Leave of Absence? Yes, it's true, we will be unable to blog for a while. Not for long, about ten days only. Mimi will be away for work. Roufa will stay home and spend his days in denial, watching two movies every evening to forget.

See you when we are back together.

Couple Without A Country

It's so great to be back home! Back with Sven and RockFrog and all the other animals, in our lovely little place, downtown Zooropa, USA.

Well, now that we've got a couple of regular readers, perhaps we should show the decency to explain this last bit – without overdoing it, of course.

For better or for worse, we, Mimi and Roufa, were born in two different countries in two different years. After quite some spreading, our wave functions finally managed to overlap in a third country and they remain entangled ever since. Now we live together in a fourth country. Give us some time and we may end up in yet a fifth. In short, we belong nowhere in particular. We float.

Our countries of origin evolve without us, visit by visit our memories get scrambled and confused. Our present country of residence we will never fully comprehend. Clearly we are sentenced to lifelong tourism, to perennial stupidity. We are doomed to constantly being taken by surprise. It's not the worst thing that could happen to us.

Our household's official language is English. In reality, we have our own dialect, sprinkled with elements of all the languages that we've ever had to use. We suspect, though, that every household has its own dialect, more or less.

Have you got your own dialect?

We've never been to the Third World, strictly speaking.

As far as we know, there is no place called Zooropa in the US. So that's where we live.

We own no house and we own no car. We hope to own a puppy before the year is out.

--

Who we are is really not important. We are in the eye of the beholder. So we'll just shut up and suck our eggs, like good kids.

Nothing Changes On New Year's Day

Yes, yes indeed, we've made it safe into the new year, and the same we hope for you, dear readers!

Happy New Year!

And good luck with your resolutions! Got none? That's good. That can only mean that you're happy with your life as it is! Or that you are too busy, in which case you wouldn't be reading us.

--

The author descends from his tall tower high above the city, to mingle with lower life forms of his own creation. He drums. The men curse, the women hiss, the child perishes. He deals in verse and insult. He brings closure. The dead unshroud their cores. He washes it all out of his hair.

Yes, we've watched Ex Drummer and that's our summary. We can't even begin to outline the power of the images and the unorthodox camera work.

Mimi is addicted to the trailer and the cover song. She plays it every morning for inspiration. She must be a mongoloid herself.

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!

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!

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

To survive... Perhaps to enjoy...

Christmas! New Year! Almost there! Holidays! Travel! Shopping! Presents!

Well, let's face it, Roufa is not a Christmas person. It's too cold a period for him and he tends to spend it in denial. He does appreciate the lights, though. As far as he's concerned, all this fuss is useful as a distraction from the cold and the dark, a tasteless hallucination, and Spring simply cannot come fast enough.

But Mimi used to love Christmas! The carols, the snow even, and oh, the cookies, the cute decorations in red and green, the Santas, the glitter, the candy, the presents... She would blow all her money on Christmas presents!

Until, that is, she read The Corrections. That horrible, horrible book. And from then on, Christmas has become that monstrous thing that Enid Lambert lives for. A compulsive torture that Enid Lambert imposes on her unloved ones, year after year after year. The Advent calendars, the tasteless presents. The enormous ornament collection. The candles... are things that Enid Lambert lives for. There he is, a lovely wooden Santa with his cotton-white beard and his reindeer in knitted outfit, king of the store, the perfect Christmas charm for Mimi's living-room! Mimi cheers and rejoices, she enthuses like a child, she approaches,... and she chills as she realizes, this is something that Enid Lambert would enthuse about. She has been growing an Enid Lambert inside her all her life.

Damn.

And poor Enid, too! Is a little beauty and joy too much to ask?

If you have managed to escape that horrible book, well done, don't read it. Poor Mimi made the mistake. She hopes she will get over it by Christmas 2010, but for the moment she has to suffer it out. It seems like reading is not always good for you. If you are superficial enough, you may enjoy The Corrections as a soap (but then, why not just watch a soap). If you really feel you need to read about troubled families, you probably come from a troubled family yourself – real or imaginary, it doesn't matter. In that case, why perpetuate the misery?

Speaking of Christmas holidays and families, we suspect that for some of you -- like for the Lambert children -- the two make a dreadful combination. This must mean that you are not very happy, that your families treat you bad, or both. We are far from qualified to judge other people's miseries – we are just two lucky bastards, who managed to find each other, inside a brilliant diamond of space-time, many years and miles ago. We wish we could help you to take it easy, though. Let us try:

Survival Trick No. One: The Bubble Boy or Bubble Girl. If you find yourself surrounded by family members you are scared of and who make you feel bad with their behavior and remarks, imagine you are in a transparent, protective rubber bubble. Nothing can penetrate the bubble, but the nutritious vitamins and minerals of the turkey – and the sweetness of the cookies, of course. All poisonous darts (real or imaginary - most likely, complex - it really doesn't matter) that reach the surface of the bubble just bounce off. This trick works, as long as you don't shoot poisonous darts yourself. They will bounce off on the inside of the bubble and hurt you.

Survival Trick No. Two: The Talk-to-the-Hand -- or tape recorder. You need equipment for this: a small journalistic tape recorder, with a tape and batteries. You hide it on you and keep it on voice-activated mode. When poisonous darts fly around you (real or imaginary, it does NOT matter, what matters is your well being), you don't have to listen to them and follow them, because they are being recorded, so you can always play them back later (you won't, of course!). Another angle that may work better for you: while recording, you are secretly pleased that you finally have evidence of their malice/intrusiveness/mere existence, and that thought offsets the poisonous effect of the remarks. It's a psychological trick we've heard of.

Anyway, we do hope you don't need our tricks! Whatever your case, if your holidays involve cookies and warmth, you have every reason to enjoy them! Buy silly presents if you can, receive silly presents with a smile, have silly fun! It won't last long, anyway. And then the days will start to get longer again, which makes Roufa very, very happy already.

--

For further reading: Seems that our sweet friend birthing your dream has some insight and advice for you, see his Dec.21 post.

Seascape with Tannenbaums

Hallo, dear friends! Here we are again, almost two weeks later and several eurodollars richer! It was not easy to post, though we did manage to hop hop on some of your websites and leave some comments here and there, which was fun.

Have we said already how thankful we are for the Mediterranean? The climate, the ancient civilizations, which have produced nutty people who talk in songs and who know what and how to cook? Yes, we have.

During this latest trip, we've made two new and important realizations:

One. Italians don't walk; they strut. They strut their stuff, like Little Jerry the rooster. We can't tell whether it's their shoes, or if they make shoes especially to bring out the better of their strut. The development of the two, shoes and strut, must have been the result of a mutual feedback process over the ages. We, for one, don't strut when we wear Italian shoes, or at least we don't think so. Do we?

Two. Santas look silly in the hot'n'sun. And we are not talking about Australian beach girls in red bikinis. Bearded, old, head-to-toe-in-red Santas in the sun look like a bad hallucination. Seascape with Cacti and Tannenbaum's.

Now this doesn't look silly at all in the sun:



Isn't this the perfect place for Sven to be! Naaaah... Knowing him, he prefers to hang out on our coffee table with RockFrog. Too much sun and too much family would get on his nerves and bring out the pricklier in him. Sven and RockFrog also like the Reading Hero Lounge and the DAFTS Gallery. Nature's not really their thing.

Frankly, as much as we respect it, nature's not really our thing either, outside the occasional romantic walk along obscenely non-virgin paths. There must be a reason why we don't live in caves anymore - but hey, that's us. We like our electricity outlets and we show them our appreciation by feeding them beautiful lamps. That is to say, we spent the better part of our fresh eurodollars on an Italian designer lamp. Never looked back. Always in the spirit of enjoying our money and our very, very bad eyesight while we can. Needless to say, we appreciate contact lenses too.

--

The Mediterranean is all fine and well, as long as you don't find yourself amid a minor crisis, like, say, a flight cancellation due to bad weather (2min of snowfall) at, say, a small airport in the south of Italy. The local victims of the cancellation tend to raise hell in their big, round a's and o's and i's that can only spell “panic” or “you are all idiots”. Heavens forbid, they will reach Milan three hours too late with the next flight. But what if you have to connect to an international flight and you miss home soooo very much? The airport employees appear astonished that such a problem exists and that it's actually them, not the gods, that can do something to help you. The paranoia of the crowds and the seemingly lobotomized staff must have been the divergent result of a mutual feedback process over the ages. Where are the Germans when you need them? Nowhere. No Lufthansa employees to be found in the south of Italy.

Why do you think it took Ulysses 10 years to reach home? He was stuck in the Mediterranean.

Our famous cousin, Marina the Nut, had a near-Ulysses experience amid a minor crisis, namely a flight cancellation due to bad weather, at a small airport in the south of Italy.

After wedging her way through the “you're all idiots” opera, and trailing an AirOne employee “that looked as stupid as Nicolas Cage” for four hours (being a Mediterranean Nut herself, she knew what she had to do), little Marina the Nut managed to “get the hell out” of that stupid little airport and on a late flight to Rome, with a promise, via telephone, for a seat on the first Lufthansa flight to Germany early the next morning. She blew the better part of her then fresh eurodollars, to spend what was left of the night in the only hotel in Roma Airport, the Hilton “Bed and Shower”, as she likes to call it now. 180 euros, you do the math. It was the most expensive shower she's ever had.

A Leaden Cucumber for Us?

We were planning to just say a sweet goodbye-and-see-you-soon before our upcoming

Leave of Absence #1,

that's a 7 to 10-day period, during which we will be on the road and possibly not in a position to post... and then it hit us again. You may think you're done with the blog, but the blog is not done with you.

It was such a heart-warming message that the French Minister of Agriculture was conveying through our very TV set. So they do know it's Christmas after all! He was going to loosen certain restrictions and allow French farmers to cultivate a larger portion of their land, because there are people in the world who starve. They're all waiting for the French grapes to arrive!

It just so happens that a couple of days ago we read how they solved their famine problem in Malawi. After one more disastrous corn harvest two years ago, they were indeed facing serious starvation problems over there. And then the new president Bingu wa Mutharika decided to henceforth ignore the suggestions and free-market preachings of the EU, the US -- and perhaps other U's we may be forgetting and the World Bank of course -- and subsidize fertilizers, which farmers there could absolutely not afford otherwise. Alas, no more free market in Malawi, they could go straight to hell! Well, they are now exporting corn to Zimbabwe. And the food aid that arrives there is being forwarded to Uganda.

The aforementioned U's do subsidize their own farmers. They just wanted Malawi to continue to export, say, tobacco and use the money to import their food. In that way U's would get the tobacco and the money U's would have paid for it. Hypocrites? U's?

This is not a Golden Banana anymore, this calls for a Leaden Cucumber up U's.

Aaaaanyways!

Dear Very Honorable Readers, as we said already, we'll be gone for several days. Posting is not guaranteed. Have a nice time this weekend, and let us remind you that you should air yourselves sufficiently -- physically and mentally.

By the way, as all Reading Heroes know, reading is a good way to air your mind, and helping Santa is another great one too! Dancing is highly recommended as well - it seems to keep Ms Quarks sane, sometimes. If you'd fancy some brain jogging, try and memorize the name of the Malawian President, see above. If you're German, you know what to do, we call it hiking.

In any case, be sure to enjoy whatever money you're making. If you absolutely can't, at least let somebody else enjoy it.