You write like Shakespeare (reposted)

The IHT had a column by Alex Beam about the new website I Write Like, which uses a Bayesian classifier algorithm to compare anyone's prose to that of  famous writers. Thought up by the Russian programmer Dmitry Chestnykh, the site has already generated serious mischief. Somebody submitted transcriptions of Mel Gibson's phone rants, and I Write Like concluded that he "writes" like Margaret Atwood. Atwood own prose was classified as "Stephen King." A former president of Harvard writes like the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorov, and novelist Claire Messud writes like David Foster Wallace (not true, by the way).

You see it coming. We have to find out about ourself. so we first submit Huck Finn's father's rant against the government, which we posted because of its prophetic anticipation of the Tea Party, and, yes, I Write Like returned the answer: "You write like Mark Twain." Cool.

OK, so now a text of our own. Let's take the Donna Pérignon post from March 2010, one of the countless contributions on this blog so heartlessly ignored by pundits and mainstream media. Donna pays us a visit and rekindles our interest in the Giant Wave. Have you read it now? Donna is actually our neighbor Michelle de la Sala, and she really looks like Michelle Pfeiffer.

We now submit this post (its text) to I write like, and the answer is:

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

What can we say? Buy our new book, GREEN EYES, and find out yourself:

What happened to my schlange?

What's your answer? --- a quiz (Jacki)

So you are writing a novel, or a play, about Winston Churchill, say, and somebody just said to him: "Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee." What's your answer? You possibly know the answer to this one, but that's what this quiz is about. (Answers under the read more link at the bottom)

(1) Thomas Reed vs. Henry Clay: Clay: "I would rather be right than be president." What's Clay's reply?
(2) Lady Astor vs. Winston Churchill: Astor: "Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee." What's Churchill's reply?
(3) NYM Ed Koch vs Andrew Kirtzman, after the reporter insisted on pressing a point about an inconsistent statement Koch had made. What was Koch's answer?
(4) Groucho Marx vs. a contestant on You Bet Your Life, after the contestant revealed that he was a father of 10. Groucho: "Why so many children." Guest: "Well, Groucho, I love my wife." What was Groucho's next line?
(5) Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas, after Douglas called him two-faced during a debate. How did Lincoln react?
(6) Pierre Trudeau vs. Richard Nixon, upon hearing that Nixon had called him an asshole. What did Trudeau say?
(7) Oscar Wilde vs. Lewis Morris; Morris had just been passed over for the Poet Laureateship, and said to Wilde: "There's a conspiracy against me, a conspiracy of silence buut what can one do? What should I do?" What was Wilde's reply?
(8) Miriam Hopkins vs. an anonymous singer, who had just informed her: "You know, dear, I insured my voice for fifty thousand dollars." What did Hopkins say?
(9) James McNeill Whistler vs. Oscar Wilde, after Whistler had made a particularly witty observation.Wilde: "I wish I had said that." What was Whistler's reply?
(10) Senator Fritz Hollings vs. Henry McMastor, when challenged by his Republican opponent during a televised debate to take a drug test. What did Hollings say?
(11) Reverend Edward Everett Hale vs. the U.S. Senate, when asked if he prayed for the Senators. What was Hale's answer?
(12) Edna Ferber vs. Noel Coward, Coward was remarking upon the fact that Ferber was wearing a tailored suit. Coward: "You look almost like a man." What was Ferber's riposte?
(13) Winston Churchill vs. a Member of Parliament, who said: "Mr. Churchill, must you fall asleep while I'm speaking?" What did Churchill say?
(14) Calvin Coolidge vs. some random lady at a White House dinner. Woman: Mr Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you." How did Coolidge reply?

Advanced bureaucratology (Dirk)

Good Morning!

"I'm ticklish."

Why have they stopped wearing white collars? (reposted)

Like everybody else, we're getting these letters from Nigeria. Here's the latest (from .pl, actually, that's Poland, I think, the full email address is: mrzacom@gazeta.pl --- in case you feel the need to reply):

Dear MICHAEL

Please pardon me for not having the liberty of knowing your mindset before writing you this letter without any formal introduction.My name is Mr. Zaco Mohammed I am the present branch Manager in one of the Barclay's Bank here in London I write to solicit for your partnership in claiming of $15.million usd from an account at our Head Office .

The aforementioned fund $15.million usd is my share percentage from a Gold Mining project that i helped financed, influentially.

Furthermore, as a Manager in the bank, I am not allowed to be part of such a deal, because it's against my company's professional practice policy. So I am compelled to ask that you stand on my behalf and receive this fund into

any account that is solely controlled by you. I will compensate you with 35% of the total amount involved as gratification for being my partner in the transfer.

Please contact me immediately you received this mail

Yours Truly,

Mr.Zaco Mohammed

Do we have to point out what's wrong with this letter---besides the ploy? Everything is off, style ("MICHAEL"), spelling (the first person pronoun is not capitalized), interpunction (spaces between the last letter and a dot, for example), grammar ("that i helped financed"), idiomatic usage  ("for not having the liberty of knowing your mindset") etc. And it's always thus.

Who is writing these letters? In my days, we were told with great fanfare of highly intelligent---that was always the qualifier: "highly intelligent"---individuals that were cheating unsuspecting victims out of their money by means of wit, deception, guile, and other nonviolent forms of behavior, all this while the perpetrators were wearing white collars.

Bürchen in Switzerland (reposted)

Milka milk chocolate, with the milk from happy cows---that was the slogan of a chocolate commercial during my youth in Germany. And there we are, in Bürchen, Switzerland, and it's true.

Near Bürchen, Bietschhorn in the background (peak in the clouds)

Bürchen is located on the southern side of the Valais valley, near the side valleys of Zermatt and Saas Fee, at 1600m altitude. The ski lift begins right in front of our settlement, the Chalet zone.

Did you sleep well?

"Why, oh why, have beauty spots gone out of fashion?"

Good Morning!

A brief post on style (Frank L. Visco)

Always avoid alliteration.

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)

Employ the vernacular.

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

Contractions aren't necessary.

Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

One should never generalize.

Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

Profanity sucks.

Be more or less specific.

Understatement is always best.

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

One-word sentences? Eliminate.

Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

The passive voice is to be avoided.

Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

The tragedy of the unfinished bathroom

We also do art, right? So, that's the excuse:

That's not the art, that's just the unfinished bathroom

We're sitting in a friend's chalet and the repair people are supposed to show up and finish the work in the bathroom. Don't let's get into the gritty-nitty details, we've waited all day and I finally send the following email to our friend:

...two boys showed up to install a new radiator...nobody else...so much for earlier assertions made earlier today..we've waited the whole day for them, could not go out...this is now the end of the second week we are without toilet on the floor...

(this is the entire email message, okay, the elliptical dots are very handy, no need any longer to finish sentences).

Here's our friend's reply:

Roy Lichtenstein Alka Seltzer (1966)

Shall I compare thee to a summer day?

Since we are a literature blog now, we have to do serious stuff, like posting some serious pictures, like. Like this one...

Tyson Beckford

...which brings to mind Shakespeare's 18th sonnet...


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 


...(you don't want to look at the HTML code underneath)...

...but you might want to look at this clip, eternalizing David Gilmour, the singer of Pink Floyd, when he set the sonnet to his music, because that's what aging rock stars, like us, do, when, they, have, their, reflective, moments...





...and judge yourself.

Hold on, here are a few pointers to Sonnet 18:

Guiness Book of Averages

Yes, we know. Something went wrong with the link. So we have to write our own Book on Averages now. Won't be easy. But we know already...

Average time of reading a Shakespeare sonnet: 3 minutes.

And, along those lines (you know us)...

Average length of the human penis: The average penis size is slightly larger than the median size (i.e., most penises are below average in size).

Seamus, who looks like a penis, but was not strapped to the roof
of the station wagon

Now we still don't know the average size, but imagine that we were having a phone conversation with a tele-marketeer who is selling penis-enhancers, say. You ask a direct question. Like: "You think my penis is too small?" Would you expect a direct answer? No, you are so much used to the decline of our civilization, you are completely accepting of the answer:"The average penis size is slightly larger than the median size (i.e., most penises are below average in size)" and you buy the penis-enhancer from Beate Uhse instead. That link didn't break, right? By the way, it's indicative of the Tea Party that its members don't think asides about tele-marketeers are funny.

Update, update:

Your dong as a life-style issue

Stay tuned.

Holmes and Holmes again (Dirk)

Let's promise a joke, first.

Second, let's watch the clip:



What is it about Sherlock Holmes? His wit must play a major role, so there's still hope for mankind. And now the joke:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.” “I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes” replies Watson. “And what do you deduce from that?” Watson ponders for a minute. “Well, Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. But what does it tell you, Holmes?” Holmes is silent for a moment. “Watson, you idiot!” he says. “Someone has stolen our tent!”

Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis (2) (Monty Python)

And here's the clip:



For a full transcript, see our earlier post here.

Green eyes, Prologue

Readers, the first chapter of this story describes a casual encounter of three men in the dunes behind the gay section of the beach of my town. It does so in fairly graphic language, language that might be shocking to some of you. I have therefore decided to put the first chapter into an appendix, and provide instead a flat, inoffensive summary of the events described there, events that triggered the heartbreaking, murderous, but ultimately fortuitous story of the Green Eyes.

My name is John Lee, and I live in Georgia Beach, GA. I teach French at Southern Georgia College, a small school 30 miles to the south-east.

I have issues. During my adolescence, I was diagnosed with bipolarity, a psychological condition of difficult mood-swings. As I grew up, I became arrogant, shy, and homosexual, character traits that interact with my bipolarity. At my age --- I am 29 years old --- I find myself in a downward spiral of disengagement, depression, and neglect. Whereas I was outgoing and sexually active during my youth, I am now mostly confined to my small apartment on the Roosevelt Canal, where I --- auto-erotic efforts aside --- play chess on the internet (losing), publish a blog (that nobody reads), and prepare classes (that students don't like). A side-effect of my bipolarity of relevance here has to do with my language. I am hypersensitive to certain power-point expressions ("going forward"), but use myself various forms of new-speak (e.g., the "un"-prefix), idiosyncratic turns of phrase (using "said" as a demonstrative, "wise" as a post-fix modifier), and am given to awkward metaphors and abundant bracketing (()). My mother is French, my father rarely spoke when I was young, and English is not my first language.

We're in early July when the story begins. I am waking up on a Sunday morning, feel the need for fresh air, and decide on stroll along the beach. As I saunter past the gay section of said beach, I encounter a man of great physical attractiveness. He has roughly my age, but his most remarkable feature are his green, mesmerizing eyes. We take note of each other. The man, let's call him Green Eyes, is clearly indicating his readiness for an immediate exchange of bodily fluids. I follow him into the dunes. We undress for, and engage in, a sexual act. A third man appears on the scene, undresses, and joins. All three of us reach a climax in due course. Green Eyes re-dresses and disappears. In a surprising turn of events --- surprising at least for anybody who is familiar with casual, anonymous homosexual behavior --- the third man invites me to a party at the house of a friend later in the evening. So far, Chapter One.

Readers, I urge you, I implore you, leave the appendix alone, turn the page, and continue with Chapter 2.

Halt. Hold it. I forgot. The sanitization of Chapter 1 doesn't mean you can fool around. The rest of this book isn't a cakewalk either, it's solely for mature audiences, to put it mildly. Have fun.

Opus 1 (German for beginners)

Praise for Michael Winter's Opus 1:

"Die konzertierten Harmonien dieses erstaunlichen Erstwerkes erinnern nicht so sehr an Wagner oder Debussy, obwohl sie in ihrer Transzendenz und konzentrierten Zurückhaltung gleichwohl das Interesse eines an Weltmusik geschulten Publikums verdienen..." (BaRbette Bienpensant in Fortgeschrittene Musik)

Right. We told you so.

PS: If I would show this to my mother, she would say "albern" ("silly")
PSS: Here's the Google translation:

"Concerted harmonies of this amazing Erstwerkes remember not so much of Wagner and Debussy, although their transcendence and concentrated restraint nonetheless deserve the attention of a qualified audience of world music ..."

PSSS: Not our day.

Car poetry

"You need one of these," a friend writes and sends this picture:

 "Perhaps you don't know," we write back, "but we've got a new car, well not so new, but it has a cool running board and sexy tires." He can't believe it, he needs to see a picture. Here it is:

And here's the cultural excuse for all this:

A car is a car
If it can ride you nearby or far

A car is a car
When it gets you in time to the bar.

Sylvia Chidi

(Editor's note: the poem continues for another 30 lines or so, which we edited out for obvious reasons)

Cow poetry

Please take a picture of the cows...asked Jo on the phone. So here we are, with cows right on the little patch below the parking lot of the chalet zone in Bürchen, Switzerland, where we are staying at the moment...

...but we are not yet done, since this blog is about to undergo transmogrification into a platform for Michael's writing and other cultural pursuits. How are we going to justify pedestrian cows to high-minded readers? With poetry, of course, Cow Poetry. Let's keep it short, though, you never know how this will end.

I've never seen a purple cow,
I never hope to see one,
but I can tell you anyhow,
I'd rather see then be one!

Gelett Burgess

Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis (Monty Python)

"Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis? Isn't it frightfully good to have a dong? It's swell to have a stiffy; it's divine to own a dick...from the tiniest little tanger, to the world's biggest prick! So three cheers for your willy or john thomas...hurray for your one-eyed trouser-snake...your piece of pork, your wife's best friend, your percy or you cock...you can wrap it up in ribbons, you can slip it in your sock...but don't take it out in public or they will stick you in the dock, and you won't come back. Uuh thank you very much." (Hat tip: Urban Dictionary)

Good Morning!

"What are your plans?"

From Corbin Fisher's website ACM

What would Freud say?

The Kingdom, debt, and Paul Ryan

We received several political emails from Perry (him from the Kingdom). In the first email, he writes:

Perry

On the VP Ryan front: He has our vote.

In the second, he writes:

The US problem is debt. We are floating in debt and O'b [Obama] is simply not willing to address the problem.

And in the third, he writes...

...let's interrupt briefly here, and go to a source that has shown it ability to bring a syllogism home, to quote a source correctly, and to win the Nobel price in economics, and this source writes in its latest post:

Let’s look at what Ryan's budget actually proposes (as opposed to vaguely promises) in its first decade.

VP hopeful Ryan

First, there are a set of tax cuts for higher income brackets and corporations. The Tax Policy Center estimates the cost of these tax cuts, relative to current policy, at $4.3 trillion

From dawn to dust

 From dawn to dust,

 It's such a lust,

A letter to my lawyer

Here's an unedited email I sent to my lawyer earlier today:

...thanks...I'll react tomorrow...It would be EXTREMELY HELPFUL IF YOU COULD, IN FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS, CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF AN EMAIL MESSAGE WHEN ASKED TO DO SO...

...CONCERNING SOME OF YOUR COMMUNICATIONS, I HAVE THE FEELING TO BE CONFRONTED WITH REALLY OLD-SCHOOL FRENCH BUREAUCRACY...OLD-SCHOOL ALSO IN THE SENSE THAT THE UNDERLYING ADMINISTRATION DOES NOT WORK...DATA HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATED TO YOUR OFFICE, AND ARE SUBSEQUENTLY LOST, HASTY PHONE CALLS ARE THEN MADE THAT WOULDN'T BE NECESSARY IF YOUR ADMINISTRATION WOULD BE UP TO DATE, PHONE CALLS THAT COST TIME AND MONEY, POSSIBLY OUR MONEY....AND THERE ARE OTHER PROBLEMS .... NOT GOOD...OLD-SCHOOL FRENCH BUREAUCRACY...MAIN REASON WHY FRANCE IS DOING SO POORLY THESE DAYS IN COMPARISON TO PLACES WHERE LAWYERS (and others) ACTUALLY *DO* RESPOND TO EMAILS PROMPTLY AND *ARE* ABLE TO CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF EMAILS WHEN ASKED TO DO SO...IT'S A MATTER OF PRODUCTIVITY...

I have been a professional bureaucratologist for an important part of my career (Link:

Google.Scholar.Masuch

) and from my perspective, I can tell you, you should REALLY, REALLY, reorganize in a thorough and strict way the communication flow in your office, starting from scratch, even if it means that heads rollllll---

Kind Regards, Michael Masuch

PS (Sept 7, 2012): I'm studying the way people get fired these days, and there are cases where people got fired for using to much upper case in their emails. Seriously.

Olympics (Urban Dictionary, July 25, 2012)

Word of the day

Olympics: Loose assemblage of activities undertaken quadrennially by over-ripped folk with an odd view of life and difficulty prioritising. Small trinkets on coloured ribbons and needlessly ostentatious flower arrangements are commonly given to several of the better entrants as stirring tunes play. Flags and advertising signage tend to be prominently displayed and portly men in suits shuffle about needlessly.

We couldn't agree more.

Tell me why America is the greatest country in the world

This is how Aaron Sorkin's HBO series Sixty Minutes opens, folks:

Prometheus --- film review (spoiler alerrrt)

This multiplex in Pathong's biggest mall is real nice, the shiniest black marble greets the lone visitor, and it's being polished a-more as we a-wait the beginning of the movie. We did MIB 3, and may elaborate on it later. Now we are doing Prometheus, the latest film by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator...). The movie program of this multiplex is somewhat meager, three or four movies are running now, and the humongous auditorium n° 5 is empty. We brought warm clothes to weather the air conditioning. An utterly empty auditorium, it's always impressive, especially to retired university professors, as it brings their worst nightmares to life.

OK, Prometheus. We vaguely recall having read a review in the NYT, not a bad review, right? SciFi, somebody's having visited Planet Earth 35,000 years ago, left some traces, and modern science has discovered where they came from. We're on our way. A motley crew. They've been hired on the fly by Charlize Theron, whose nose is so straight she must have had a facial. Also aboard is David, the humanoid (robot). He's so much smarter than than the rest that one wonders why anybody bothered to send authentic humans at all---except that the uppity assistant who pointed this out at the script conference got fired on the spot, perhaps because David looks too much like Lawrence of Arabia, or, more precisely, like Peter O'Toole, and he also speaks like a British actor from fifty years ago.

Sushi Express

So Chang discovers this outlet, right in the heart of JongCeylon, Patong's largest mall. And it's a buffet, which means you can eat as much as you like. For 300 bath (10 US$). Or perhaps, more precisely: eat as much as you can, because that's the idea of buffets, isn't it. And if we can mangle our philosophical thoughts at this point, if maximizing quantity and utility converge buffet-wise, we are dealing with a case resistant to Hegel's conversion law ("Quantität schlägt in Qualität um"), which, by implication, also weakens Karl Marx's case (if only Alexis Tsipras, the new, young, handsome, charismatic, Greek leader would know, it might save the Euro).



You have 1 hour 15 minutes for eating more than you like; a wall clock watches with red digital display over the proceedings, an ambulance is waiting outside.

I'll come with you (breaking news alert)

Not the girl

It's a shower first, lightning strikes, the power is cut. Rain continues, and Michael refuses to go out, instead he ponders whether he will be able to read his Kindle in the light of a single kandle. Chang, hungry, is finally forced by his appetites to leave the premises in search for take-out food. And he comes back and tells the following story:

I walk past this girl, perhaps for the third time now, and she is selling something, and always waving and smiling. I reply in some way. She asks "you are staying nearby?"

-"Yes."

-"How long are you staying?"

-"One month."

The girl grabs my arm and says: "I am coming with you."

We are not making this up. 

Tunk-Ka Café

Our longest-lasting controversy is about the river-side café, and while I sing about its charms, such as the chilled, oaky, buttery chardonnay served with chicken breast and sauce hollandaise, or the light wood paneling, or the shady riverside terrace with its muted, yet clipped conversations about Muffy who failed to make partner with Allen & Overy, or the color coding of the awnings, always dark green, preferably in the hex value #00693E (Dartmouth Green), brèf, while I am singing about the river-side café, Chang is dreaming of food markets, this Asian contraption that encumbers the innocent hungry-man between various food stalls where everything is cheap, and abundant, and smelly, and sticky, and eaten with chop sticks.

We are on our first excursion across Phuket now, and the understanding has been that we would end up in a food market, but the first food market didn't pass Chang's muster even though it was located in the Korean neighborhood of Phuket Town, because the Thai girl behind the Korean garlands didn't speak a word of Korean, and so we are driving on, and it is already past 12am, the time when Chang is overwhelmed by hunger and everything stops until he finds a place to restore himself. He suggests we turn right, but I continue straight, and we are mysteriously led up a hill when signs appear which speak of the Tunk-ka Café. The road ends in a parking lot, and everything is coded in dark-green, including the lush, tropical forest, and Chang wants to flee, but is overwhelmed by hunger now, and we, who haven't been to a riverside café in eons, we end up in the first HILL-TOP café of our life, by sheer serendipity.



The Tunk-ka Café. We have to descend a long staircase. Chang is scared. Have a look at the menu first, he cries, but the prices are reasonable, to his disappointment.

Touring Phuket

So we finally rent a car, and the next morning it is cloudy, rainy, but we don't care, and travel south.  A view from the first viewpoint informs about the western coast of Phuket south of Patong, the hedonistic center of the island:

The bay of Patong is to the north (next to the high-rise), south of it the bay of Kolon, and finally Kata. As we continue south, we reach a small, nameless beach almost on the tip of the island (Chang in the lower right corner)...

Neckermann Bumms Bomber (Learning Thai (2))

Let's get this out of the way first. Remember the 2 k-sounds from our last post? Here are a few more:

Got it?

Well,  back in the late seventies, my then-colleague Han felt the urge to take the Neckermann Bumms Bomber (his words, you'll figure this out yourself) to Bangkok (กรุงเทพมหานคร). Han had been a seminarist (studying for priest) until the Marxist wave struck the Netherlands and he took up residence in Amsterdam's red light district, where he would spend the evening checking whether he still had the 25 guilders in his pockets to pay one of the neighboring ladies of the night for the standard job (he told me). Arriving in Thailand, he met a girl, fell in love, bought a home, and learned Thai, while keeping a part time appointment at the University of Amsterdam. Thai learning is difficult, he explained with starry eyes, citing the fact that the language has innumerable consonants, among which 5 different k-sounds (there you have it; the table mentions six, but two are obsolete).

And when back in Amsterdam, Han became a pillar of the relationship community, with which I mean to say that he was hired to save gay couples, in particular those comprising a Dutch person and an imported Thai boy. Relationships, Han explained, depend on communication (this was before everybody subscribed to the Harvard Business Review), and the non-existing Thai of the Dutch and the poor English of the Thai boy would inevitably lead to a downward relationship spiral that only Han could stop by intervening as a Thai/Dutch interpreter and helping the couple to regain a new level of understanding. I don't know whether Han kept any statistics. Rumor has it he's now divorced.

Learning Thai

We've arrived safely in Thailand, but are now holed up in the bedroom, since Chang (ช้าง) ("elephant") canceled the a/c in the living room. So, we have no choice but to learn Thai (ภาษาไทย). It will be quite a slog. But the beginning is easy, as it thematizes the chicken-egg problem.


ก ไก  ko (as in) kai" (chicken) and we are pronouncing the  ก  as "k," whereas
ข ไข "kho  (as in) khai" (egg) and we are pronouncing the  ข breezely as "kh."

Cheers:

Hold your bladder, hold your bladder, there is a small problem. Our "ko" (ก), it's some sort of "g" on another web site dedicated to Thai learning.

Stay tuned.

Breaking news alert: Zurich Airport (4)

What's this?

Yes, it's the consequence of our Priority Pass, the black card that granted us access to the Swiss VIP lounge of the airport, where life is eternal and all drinks are free (mental note: need to write an essay with the title "Airport Lounge und Paradies"), whence an attempt to mix a Bloody Mary early in the morning, a mix with mixed results, since the Worcestershire bottle emptied itself like a drunken sailor into our glass. We'll drink it anyhow. Cheers. Chang frowns.

Zurich Airport (3)

So, we are in Kloten, home of the airport (this must be the first time in creative writing that somebody attributed a "home" to an airport), and we are strolling through the lazy afternoon, and the weather improves.

We are not alone, a creek strolls through the lazy downtown setting, too.

What's wrong. What's this? In Switzerland. Something in the water, that doesn't belong there? No, it doesn't.


It's an Irish licence plate, and a fancy one at that, "en guerre" (at war). Euromess in Switzerland? What else.

Fortunately, a sense of order is quickly restored further downstream, at least in a geo-topological way:

Never leave home without it

But we do, we do. (Question: " Why do you need a camara, isn't your cell-phone enough?" Answer: "I don't know how to use my cell-phone"). For example last Tuesday, we had this appointment with our lawyer in Cannes, on the Rue d'Alsace, only a few steps from the Palais du Festival, and it's the day of the opening of the Film Festival.  And we leave the lawyer's premises, and the sun shines, and we step into a street scene with two cameras (plus camera men), overhead microphones of the phallic kind, and goons, five goons, and in the middle of it all a woman in her late 50's, dressed up as femme du midi (blond, whitish clothes, bosom, gold), and she looks miserable, miserable, while the cameras zoom, and a male voice is calling --- we forgot her name, actually --- lets make it Muriel. We've never heard of Muriel, but the male voice apparently has, and the cameras are zooming, and Muriel (she answers to that name, so much is clear) looks misreable, misrable, misable, misbel, mis...it's beyond description, her whole body tumbling forward, the face facing the gutter, the rimples (that's the word, isn't it, the spell checker acts up) dancing on her forehead.  The voice ("Muriel") belongs to a stalker --- she must be famous --- who is kept at arms length by yet another goon, who is, in fact, spreading his arms so as to keep the stalker away from Muriel without causing any collateral damage. "Muriel, Muriel." We have no proof, we have no proof, but a scene like that, you can't make it up.

Zurich Airport

A friend sends this picture:

Huh? Well, we arrive at the airport, and the place appears to be dominated by wall-high billboards for brothels (eg. Club Aphrodisiac, "all drinks for free"); it's in this spirit that we reply: "If you like anal, use the rear entrance."

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An open letter to the bureaucracies of the world (Susan)

Dear Mr Minister,

I'm in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that K-Mart has my address and telephone number, and knows that I bought a television set and golf clubs and condoms from them back in 1997, and yet the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date ?

For Christ sakes, do you guys do this by hand ?

My birth date you have in my Medicare information, and it is on all the income tax forms I've filed for the past 40 years.

It is also on my driver's licence, on the last eight passports I've ever had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I've had to fill out before being allowed off planes over the past 30 years.

It's also on all those insufferable census forms that I've filled out every 5 years since 1966.

Also... would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother's name is Audrey, my father's name is Jack, and I'd be absolutely f...... astounded if that ever changed between now and when I drop dead !!!

SHIT! What do you people do with all this information we keep having to provide?

I apologize, Mr. Minister. But I'm really pissed off this morning.

Between you and me, I've had enough of all this bullshit!

You send the application to my house, then you ask me for my f...... address!

What the hell is going on with your mob? Have you got a gang of mindless
Neanderthal arseholes working there!

And another thing, look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden?

I can't even grow a beard for God's sakes. I just want to go to New Zealand and see my new granddaughter. (Yes, my son interbred with a Kiwi girl). And would someone please tell me, why would you give a shit whether or not I plan on visiting a farm in the next 15 days? In the unlikely event, I ever got the urge to do something weird to a sheep or a horse, believe you me, I'd sure as hell not want to tell anyone!

Well, I have to go now, 'cause I have to go to the other side of f....... Sydney, and get another f...... copy of my birth certificate - and to part with another $80 for the privilege of accessing MY OWN INFORMATION!

Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot, to assist in the issuance of a new passport on the same day?

Noooo! That'd be too f...... easy and makes far too much sense.

You would much prefer to have us running all over the bloody place like chickens with our f...... heads cut off, and then having to find some 'high-society' wanker to confirm that it's really me in the goddamn photo! You know the photo.... the one where we're not allowed to smile?...you f...... morons.

Signed - An Irate Australian Citizen.

P.S. Remember what I said above about the picture, and getting someone in 'high-society' to confirm that it's me? Well, my family has been in this country since before 1820! In 1856, one of my forefathers took up arms with Peter Lalor. (You do remember the Eureka Stockade!)

I have also served in both the CMF and regular Army for something over 30 years (I went to Vietnam in 1967), and still have high security clearances. I'm also a personal friend of the president of the RSL... Lt General Peter Cosgrove sends me a Christmas card each year.

However, your rules require that I have to get someone 'important' to verify who I am; you know...someone like my doctor - WHO WAS BORN AND RAISED IN F...... PAKISTAN!...a country where they either assassinate or hang their ex-Prime Ministers - and are suspended from the Commonwealth and United Nations for not having the "right sort of government".


You are all pen-pushing paper-shuffling f...... idiots!

On the cover of the Rolling Stones --- no, wrong, the New Yorker

You get it? It's about Seamus, Romney's wonderdog, the dog that was driven by the future President on the top of the family car to Canada (a country with universal health care). After that, Seamus ran away. Want to know more about Seamus? Click here.


In her NYT column, Gail Collins remarks that "Neil Swidey, the Boston Globe reporter who first broke the Seamus story in 2007, wrote recently that he had been avoiding a return to the topic for fear that some day the dog would wind up in the lead of his obituary." Haha (means: "lol").

Raisa

So let’s get this straight. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has not been riding this horse, or so his speaker affirmed yesterday. But today, at the EURO summit about the End of the World, Cameron gives another press conference to rectify his overworked speaker and to confirm that he, in fact, did ride said horse, whose name is, or more precisely was Raisa.

David Cameron, British Prime Minister

Raisa, the horse

Yes, really?

Well he got the horse from Charlie Brooks. And "Charlie is a friend since 30 years," "more than 30 years." And "Charlie is a good friend," and furthermore a "neighbor in the constituency," they "live only a few miles apart". Aahpaaht. But he hasn't "been riding the horse since the elections of 2010." Before the elections, however, yes he did go riding with Charlie. Charlie "has a number of different horses" (who hasn't), and one of them is, or was, Raisa, a former police horse, which he did ride, and "we are all very sorry to hear" "that Raisa is no longer with us," and he doesn't think "he'll be getting back into the saddle anytime soon," because his life "as a prime minister is so busy."

Aus aktuellem Anlass

It's all in the mind

Yes, it is what you think it is: click for a larger image.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Freedom Fries second anniversary

"The conference room is still occupied by these bloggers."

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