Erosion

Heavy rains washed a lot of debris into the sea this morning---the stream ends up in the left corner, next to the marina---and you can see the border between the muddy rain water and the sea water. 

Interesting, isn't it?

And while we are at it...our Korean in-laws are still visiting...

Sunday matinée

We were at such a low, we considered joining the ranks of tasteful bloggers and post this picture for the Sunday Matinée...

...instead of, say, this one...

But then we discovered this article about the X-factor applied to Italian writers (link), clearly a phenomenon we failed to appreciate when starting to write the "Green Eyes." The article has a link to a Monty Python sketch, a sketch you doubtlessly knew already, but we didn't, so here it is:

Sometimes we need some pun (1) Glenn

The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi. 

I thought I saw an eye-doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

She was only a whisky-maker, but he loved her still.

A rubber-band pistol was confiscated from an algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering. 

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

A hole has been found in the nudist-camp wall.. The police are looking into it.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Dr. Urknall

The Dutch CVB, or whatever the alphabet soup, sends us a new European Insurance Card. Because we had discovered belatedly in the ER of the Spital Visp, CH, that the old card had expired. ER? Yes, as in emergency room. Because we had gone deaf.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

We use ear plugs when we can't sleep. The wax from the plugs talks to the organic ear wax, canals get clogged, hearing gets impaired. We attempt to clean the ears but push the wax deeper into the canals until we go completely deaf. Which is quite something. You step into the street and get killed. You say good-by to Mozart and Lady Gaga and the telephone and to the relationship with your lover beyond anything but the soundless exchange of bodily fluids.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

I had hoped that some natural process would provide relief and foster a recovery of my hearing. I wait one day, two days, three days. Nada. So I give up and flee to the ER of the Spital Visp, a place I know well. Dr. Ursprung is not around, unfortunately (follow the link). I explain my case. People listen patiently. I listen patiently. It's like you're listening to the Urknall (the Urknall was silent, there was no atmosphere to carry sound).

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They ask me to rest on the emergency bed (gestures, folded hands put to your (their) left ear). I lie down. Wait. "Wait!" Where is your European Insurance Card? I don't understand. Somebody gets a piece of paper and writes "Europäische Versicherungskarte." Aha. I find my wallet and flash the card. There's a picture of Obama on the card (just kidding). Everything is fine. Somebody will take my blood pressure. The nurse looks quite concerned.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They try all sorts of things. Liquids dripped into my ear, compassionate facial expressions, electrodes applied to my testes, prayers, Alpine cleansing rituals, shaking heads. Shaking heads. It's my fault because the European Insurance Card has expired. The healing hands are raised in despair and I am sent to the local Hals-Nasen-Ohren doctor who cleans my ears with a nanoistic vacuum-cleaner and ask for 108 CHF in cash. I can hear him loud and clear and pay and call the Dutch alphabet soup and ask for a new, valid, European Insurance Card. Which arrived today, the card. I'm not making this up.

If you are still there, here's the payoff:

Read my lips

And the mandatory fragment from the Green Eyes? From Chapter 20 of course, My father and your father were fathers:  

We're talking about John's father:

You wonder whether he ever raped me? No, he didn't. My mother just caught him on the wrong side of my body, when the thing stopped. Let me explain, I'm politically incorrect here in a terrible way, I know.

History of the world --- Venice (3)

When yours truly arrived in Venice 25 years ago for a brief sojourn at the Business School, Massimo, his correspondent, picked him up at the airport and took him to a down-town café stuffed with pastries, liqueur bottles, and high tables inviting patrons to stand and drink sprits, small glasses of white wine with a schuss, a few drops of Cinzano, say. The spritz then was the stuff of true Venetians, tourists wouldn't know and drink Chianti or Campari instead---if they would drink in the morning, that is, because true Venetians had two spritzes at breakfast. Habits have changes in the meantime; the spritzes have tripled in size and been taken over by tourism, so true Venetians refrain from the stuff and drink lager instead.

"I'll spritz you."

I spent two weeks in Venice as a non-tourist and learned a lot, especially about tourism. Already then, Venice was almost completely touristicated---cool, folks, what an ugly word, "touristicated," but the spell checker doesn't recognize it so it's possibly a neologism¹---, and the locals behaved like a dying breed. They would avoid tourists like the plague, would only patronize their own restaurants (hidden away in secret alleys where the food was three times better), would not speak English, would not know about directions, would not make appointments because you only had to step into the street to meet friends, would sit on roof-top terraces and enjoy life, would spend week-end afternoons in secluded gardens (not having sex, by the way, just dozing off jointly for a few hours), would recognize the voices of the passing gondoliers at night (while still enjoying life on the roof-top terraces)...

Now you see it, now you don't --- Venice (2)

Now
(Chang's sister in the left foreground, green jacket)

you

The width of a circle --- Venice (1)

You've made it, you're wealthy now, and preferably American, because Americans are more likely to do it than other mortals. You've already donated a bundle to many causes (causes, let's face it, is now a standard entry on any celebrity's resumé), but soup kitchens and AIDS and blood diamonds get you only so far, and you're among the 53% that love art (as opposed to the 47%), you totally love it, and you totally admire artists, who need all the help they can get since Puccini told us about Mimi and van Gogh, so a foundation it is, a new foundation in support of the ARTS, because there are simply not enough of these foundations. Like. 

Now, your foundation needs to be visible since this is not about you, but about the ARTS. And you always totally loved Venice. Venice, la serenissima, the only city in the world that is in itself a Gesamtkunstwerk, the only city worth your efforts except your hometown that's already stuffed, stuffed, stuffed with a Lisa Hooksey museum (that's your name), and a Lisa Hooksey wing of the local hospital, and a Lisa Hooksey conference room at the local college, and so on, and so it's Venice. 

Venice, Grande Canale, home to the grandest art foundations

Relax (Tony)

(0.5 million page views in one week. 10k likes. Where could that be?)

Adrift from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Yes, it's San Francisco, CA, the city of our dreams.

Sunday Mornning matinée (Reblogged)

Cathy Ulrich writes on her famous blog Hollywood hates me:

This morning, I saw a baby llama. At first, I was going to gloat about it, all "I saw a baby llama and you didn't," but then I decided that everybody deserves to have a nice day, so here's a picture of a baby llama to cheer you up.

 Unless you don't like baby llamas, you monster. 

_____________________________________

Update:

It's only a matter of time and Cathy will be the hero of a forthcoming novel, titled FAC, about a girl, named Ann, who's running this brilliant blog, Hollywood hates me, which is famous for its captions. One fine day a fellow blogger, a certain Michael, suggests she "monetarizes" her talent by starting a consultancy, FAC, which is alphabet soup for "Find a caption." Her business takes off immediately, everybody needs her help, but her sudden fame attracts the attention of various agencies that have infiltrated the infamous terrorist organization Famala' al Cqaada based in Cairo, Egypt. Yes, you guessed right, Famal al Cqaada is known in the trade as FAC. Confusion reigns until Ann is abducted by said Famala' al Cqaada to serve as a bargaining chip in the war against (or for) terrorism. Ann's goose seems cooked, but the washed-up scriptwriter thought up a romantic interest, just in time, whose (a) nom de guerre is Raoul, who's (b) a quintuple agent (or some such, we all lost count), and  who (c) is really handsome. Raoul can't even speak proper Arabic, but that doesn't matter since he's really handsome and all his co-terrorist can't speak proper Arabic either --- the terrorist cell consists of nothing but counter-agents. Ann is becoming increasingly aware of this and communicates her findings per email to her kin back home. The NSA intercepts the communication and decides to protect its sources and "take her out." So everybody is after her. Ann, in the meantime, continues to build her business per internet from her cell in the basement of the Cairo dungeon. Consultancy money piles in and up (Condé Nast pays a million per caption), but the funds are misappropriated by evil Wall-Steet types. Ann is elected business woman of the month, quarter, and year, she wins the Emmy and the Oscar for captions, and the American security forces create a fake stand-in ("Ann") who will collect the awards and give speeches in Ann's stead. The plot thickens unpredictably. Sheer serendipity leads to the untimely death of many Wall-Street types, secret agents, middle-men, and Tea Party members. Lot's of Tea Party members; it will be fairly graphic ("Uuurghh"). Good will triumph over Evil, and there's a dog also called "Ann" which will  survive. Raoul, in the meantime, who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch, will fall more and more in love with Ann until she saves his life and they live happily ever after. Stay tuned.

There's some galactic metaphysics at work...

The Mercedes ML 270 CDI

Yes, we're doing some maintenance work on the house, a friend of Chang was flown in from Korea to help us. And, as you may have noticed on other occasions, it's almost impossible not to find a pretext for dropping yet another quote from the Green Eyes so here it is, the quote, from Chapter 35, Two visible spots:

Godehart is not at home, we'll descend to the basement where Alice grabs three oils on canvas without much ado, although "grabs" is not the right word since there are too many paintings to choose from, not only dotted ones (several racks are filled with plain gray canvas-squares, other racks contain large French flags, or German ones, give and take a color here and there), plus, the paintings are large and require the input of two reasonably agile men. They barely fit into the truck, we have to lower the rear seats, but—-as you may have observed on other occasions—-there's a galactic metaphysics at work in that it’s almost impossible not to fit anything into an aging Mercedes ML.

When we arrive at the FedEx outfit in Lewes, the situation has changed significantly. Alice is in trouble now maintaining her anger—-let’s throw in a really tasteless, and completely misleading analogy here, think of maintaining an erection during a faculty meeting at my hippocampus—-Alice is in trouble, there are credibility problems with her indignation, and you only have to look at Alex to understand why. Save for his eyes, Alex has disappeared. While Alice negotiates the FedEx bureaucracy, Alex is standing next to her, but not like Ben. A ghost is standing there, his hands folded behind his back, and you can sense, feel, undergo how he's forcing himself to stay in place. Women are usually more sensitive than men, and Alice is very sensitive indeed, she has trouble getting her act together now with Alex in this state.

You're still there? Then why don't you buy into the GREEN EYES saga and 

order now...

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Scorpio (Jezza Smilez)

Off the cliff

We've been discussing this with Glenn and others since a while: the American Right, we argued, is still fighting the issues of the 1861 secession; the trenches of the culture wars are more or less aligned with the Mason-Dixon line. And here's the latest from Frank Rich, the world's leading we-told-you-so artiste, to say it so much more succinctly than we could.

(Follow the link and read the whole piece, our Rich-quote here is just a pretext to hawk yet another fragment from the Green Eyes. First Rich:)

"Implicit in this bipartisan gallows humor was an assumption shared by most of those listening: The non-legislating legislators responsible for the crisis [the Right Wing of the Republican Party in the American Congress] are a lunatic fringe — pariahs in the country at large and outliers even in their own party. They’re “a small faction of Republicans who represent an even smaller fraction of Americans,” as the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau put it in the Daily Beast. By this line of reasoning, all that kept them afloat was their possession of just enough votes in their divided chamber to hold the rest of America temporarily hostage to their incendiary demands.

"Let's meet in the middle."

Find a caption (Jacki)

More or less --- read all about it

You've probably seen this, on Amazon, the opening lines of a book description, next to the image of the book cover with a Read more link underneath that yields a few more lines when clicked. So you click and read the rest of the description, perhaps 15 lines in total. And when you've reached the end, the end of the text, there's another link, which says...

"Read less"

(Just trying)

"Looks like someone out of Kenya" --- the Tea Party protesting at the White House during the weekend

And while we are at it, here's a fitting fragment from the Green Eyes, Ch. 27: I'll charge 100 dollars but am willing to negotiate:

"We're dressed, ready to roll, Ben's got hold of an inch of the fliers, how do we get hold of my father? He has a cell-phone, right? Let's hope he’s not behind on the payments. Technology works, so I tell my father my truck is broken, I need to borrow his car, right now, to drive a friend to the Greyhound terminal in Ocean View. I'll be at the parking lot in two minutes. As we exit the main entrance his back is turned to us, he's expecting us coming down the ramp, he isn't even aware we're coming from upstairs. I won't call him out of course, from behind, or touch his shoulder, I never touch him, save sometimes on the third day, when I throw him out. So I just walk around him in a semi-circle, perimeter of 20 feet, Ben-John next to me, Ben proudly holding his stack of fliers, grinning. Let a little mystery prevail. Ben is born in Kenya, right? I just extend my hand, say nothing, until it holds the car keys, hand father the apartment key (the spare one, of whose existence he's unaware) we get into his crappy, reddish, dirty, misparked Chevy, Ben waves with his hands to my father, still holding the fliers. We've not said hello, we've not said goodbye, we're good." 

It's cold outside

A tiny reptile (I think it's a salamander, not a lizard (Jacki, what's your take on this?)) on the inside of the widow pane of the bedroom, before sunrise. Real tiny, tinier than it looks on the picture, with large, bulgy peepers, eying me suspiciously as I take the shot. Coldest morning so far this autumn.

Update: I's a gecko, Jacki and Muad write in unison! (Thanks, Ladies!) And then Maud adds ominously in her email: "You're lucky, you don't have cats." It's a Hobbesian world out there, folks, even on a Sunday morning (at least higher up the hill, where Maud lives).

Back in the house

The view yesterday, Oct 8, around 7 PM

(The rental season is finally over; we moved back into the house yesterday)

Defcom, defcom (Maud)

This chainmail joke has made the rounds at least three times --- that's the number of times we received it, Maud was the last to send it. It's perhaps a bit dated now with the tension over Syria easing, but was composed by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. It's not necessarily his best joke but Cleese's so good, even his routine jokes are still worth it. So lets kill it, the joke, by trying to explain.

John Cleese

It starts thus:

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

Why is this paragraph funny? Well, because, (a) it reinforces common prejudice about the English as understated and stiff-upperlipped people (most jokes derive their fun from prejudice), (b) it reaches its aim by displacing the hierarchy of defcoms alert levels with a more fundamental ordering on the (purported) English character. 

We've created a schema for fun. Whom else is around to apply it to? Let's start nearby, one step at a time. The Scots, right:

"Always the same" --- reblogged (Lokfire)

From Lokfire's brilliant site Hollywood hates me, here's another reblog:

Lately, I've noticed a local business has a sign on their marquee that says: "Always the Same." I think it's supposed to be reassuring, but I find it rather depressing.

Look, I know nothing wonderful is ever going to happen to me, but do you have to rub it in?