Live from the *ahem* conference

Despite high-quality support from the in-laws, last and this week's coincidence of the convening of the *ahem* conference on *ahem* and abandonment by my wife (allegedly she's coming home on Friday, but seeing is believing) has proved more fatiguing than expected. At my cello lesson yesterday evening, my teacher couldn't believe it when I told him how little sleep I was getting by on. I told him it was okay, I didn't really feel like sleeping anyway and it was partly research for a story I'm writing about a guy with sleeping problems. And he told me about how tired he would sometimes get on tour (so tired you'd have to drink a cup of coffee before a concert!) and I told him about sitting at the conference yesterday, taking coherent notes, and simultaneously dreaming: it dawned on me after a couple minutes that these were not normal background thoughts I was having, but actual dreams.

So I went and got a cup of coffee.

What can I tell you about the conference? Style-wise, the Africans are once again setting the pace. The shoes on the female delegates! The hats on the men! Wonderful. And several of the women are still doing this thing with their hair, wearing it in long, thin braids that are natural-colored at the top, and get lighter towards the ends, say the last six to eight inches, said light ends of braids being worn open as well, so these black/brown braids gradually turn into loose brown/blonde hair. It looks really cool, I might try it myself.

Also, in general, the delegates -- male and female -- are about 25% hotter this time than the ones at the last convention I attended. I fell asleep only once, next to one of my bosses unfortunately, but fortunately he fell asleep too.

Anyway. No one is hanging out in the press gallery, which means I can't either, without looking like the last fish in an aquarium because although quiet, comfortable and climate-controlled, said gallery is a sort of big glass box hanging up in one corner of the ceiling of the conference room, and a lone person sleeping up there would be too conspicuous.

So, yeah. Lots of work getting done at the conference.

No one has written asking what progress I'm making on the quitting smoking. This morning I filled the tank of my car and when I was paying I bought some Altoids, some Fisherman's Friends, some mints and several packs of gum. The cashier gave me a look that I figured required explanation, so I said, "quitting smoking is expensive." She said she'd tried to quit once, she knew. I said, that's nothing, I've quit several times. She said customers had recommended those fakey plastic cigarette things. I said I'd give them a try if the mints didn't work.

They weren't working earlier this week. Yesterday I was like, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. I got so disgusted I threw the pack of smokes into the garbage can and said, That's it, no more cigarettes.

Five minutes later, of course, colleague walks in, sees me rooting through my garbage and is all, "lose something?"

"Somehow my cigarettes fell into the garbage, imagine that. Gotta light?"

Apokamon

Apocalypse, Pokemon-style.
Via Joeri, who makes me wish I were Belgian, or at least want to go there and eat fries with mayonnaise and drink beer.
And to whom I am thankful for reminding me of one of my favorite posts here, (because of the comments).

Get your war on #35

"Why don't we just cut to the chase and say the first side to rape a thousand retarded donkeys is the winner?"

The cursor blinks in the "title" box, and blinks.

Somedays one just has nothing to say, and isn't in the mood to write about cats, turtles tortoises or children.

This is when we quote Rumi:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There never was any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance.
Always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity.

Just yanking your chain, that was Whitman. You knew that, right? I just found that while looking for the Rumi poem I want to quote. An Irish friend once asked me why, exactly, Americans are so crazy about Whitman. No idea. I'm not crazy about him, although I do like some of his poems. But then I like some of a lot of poets' poems. Right now I'm into the writing of Malcom Davidson, I think is his name. He rocks. Emma's not bad, neither.

Anyway. Where the hell is this fucking Rumi poem? You know the one, the "meet you in the field beyond the knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil" one.

“Little by little through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self.”

No, that's the (Copy, Paste) Bhagavad Gita.

I left my book at home, you see.

Continue reading "The cursor blinks in the "title" box, and blinks."

spatulator

Alpha is out of town until the end of the week which means I had a great opportunity to get some quality time in with the girls. Low point was the circus, although I managed to get out of there without spending more than 27 Euro including popcorn and a pony ride for Gamma (stupidly I tried to be polite and wait in line for that while all the other parents took cuts and so my kid was the last one to ride a pony, sheesh. The high point of the circus was a chubby 11-year old girl doing something with a bunch of hula-hoops; the five-foot tall 200-pound lady in a glittery off-the-shoulder evening dress doing animal tricks was entertaining, though, especially when her doves got loose.

The high point was the Roman festival in a nearby town. The town was founded a couple millennia ago, give or take a couple centuries, by Roman forces as a military base and they still have Roman ruins around. The fest featured an authentic Roman encampment where they demonstrated the various uniforms and equipment including a catapult (narrowly missing some audience members when a large arrow they fired bounced off some pavement) and a bunch of archers (who shot a bunch of arrows despite kids sitting in the line of fire - obviously the liability laws here in Austria are not quite as strict as in the United States). The best part, though, were the gladiators.

The gladiators were a group of people from Hungary, men and one woman ("Enya") who staged "mock" battle (I use the quotation marks because all of them had bruises and welts from getting hit with real, but dull, swords, tridents, shields, and other stuff) wearing authentic equipment. There were different types of gladiators, you know, and they represented the most common ones. Enya was a retarius, for example. That's the one without a shield or helmet, with a net and a trident. They also had a secutor, a murmillo, a hoplomachus, a provocator, and I forget what else.

According to an article I read this weekend, they used their shields a lot. The article was about errors in gladiator movies, such as "Gladiator" with what's-his-face from Australia. Judging from that article, these Hungarian gladiators were rather authentic, because they whaled on each other with their shields a lot.

When we got home, we had dinner (grilled chicken on curly hollow noodles, which are most delicious) and various other things. No, wait, that was lunch. For dinner we had cheese and stuff, which Gamma refuses to eat, so she had left-over noodles. And I had a glass of wine, or two. Then, to get the girls calmed down for bed, we had a little gladiator fighting in the kitchen and living room. Since we have a new cabinet in the living room -- with glass doors -- (assembly was easy this time, it came in only two pieces) I tried to concentrate fighting in the kitchen, though.

Gamma was a pillatrix, which is a lot like a retarius (i.e. no shield or helmet) except with a sofa pillow instead of a net. Beta was a spoonatrix, which is like a provocator only with a long wooden spoon instead of a sword, and a pot lid for a shield. And I was the spatulator, with a spatula for a sword, and a small round cooking pot lid and first a large pot for a helmet, which was soon traded in for a large plastic mixing bowl which had the advantage that it didn't entirely cover my eyes, and didn't make so much noise when hit with a spoon.

After they were all calmed down, I put them to bed where they of course fell right to sleep. This single-father stuff is a cinch.

Continue reading "spatulator"

Orders

"...we don't feel like we were doing things that we weren't supposed to, because we were told to do them."

"the order was issued by superior authorities,"he said, "the question of illegality could not arise ... for they had sworn obedience to the people who had issued the orders."

Meanwhile, in broad daylight, two does up to their shoulders in sweet, green grass

Once upon a time I had a photo, clipped from a newspaper, taped to my PC monitor. It was a picture of a young entrepreneur in some conflict region, former Yugoslavia I guess, sitting behind a big stack of open cannisters of black-market gasoline, a lit cigarette dangling rakishly from the corner of his mouth.

I threw it out along with a bunch of other crap when I moved offices, but I've been thinking about that picture a lot lately.

Also, complete change of topic, I've been wondering when we stopped calling them "mercenaries" and started calling them "contractors". My mistake, I know, but when I first read that expression, I imaged guys with shovels, bulldozers and cement mixers, rebuilding Iraq, you know? And it turns out they're mercenaries. Why does the US military need mercenaries all of a sudden? And what are they doing in US-run "prisons"? Rhetorical questions, I guess.

I try instead to think about the decent young soldiers who reported the abuse to their COs.

nostalgia

remember the good old days when sn*ff movies were just a horrible rumor?

Dong's back

I love how these republicans are all so law and order/ responsibility-for-one's-actions until they get caught out. Then suddenly there's a whole lot of "complexity."

Guest post: Mig's turtle

First off, I'm a tortoise, you moron: Testudo hermanni. Not a fucking turtle. Get it straight, finally: Greek land tortoise. Protected species. That's why I have my own freaking passport, and papers proving I was born here in Austria and not, say, Greece and smuggled into the country in someone's kid's luggage. If I hear "turtle" one more time, I'm going to take another giant shit in your kitchen and step in it and do another Jackson Pollack all over your white tile floor.

Have you ever had one of those days that start out nice, you know, the sun is shining warm and a human puts you in the flower bed out in front of the house but unfortunately they put big rocks in all the holes by the fence so you can't book the hell out of there and escape, so you make the most of it by nibbling the lettuce and catching some rays on the sun-warmed slate tiles, and then a little shade under the wilting tulip leaves or the thicket of helianthus growing wild and then you see it: the world's biggest protein pellet? And you stretch your beak as wide open as it'll go and take a big bite thinking, man, week's worth of protein? Only it turns out to be someone's dessicated turd, a dog or more likely one of those fucking cats that keep waiting for the human to turn his back so they can see what this camoflagued shell on legs is all about, or maybe that rodent-like thing that nibbles the cars' electrical wiring systems at night? Only by the time you realize this it's too late, and you have this rock-hard piece of shit stuck in your beak and you can't spit it out, and you can't bite it off and swallow it, and you can't open your beak any wider to get rid of it and you can barely retract your head into the shell while you think about what to do other than choke, and once your head's retracted you can't fucking get it back out again so there you are wandering around blind, head stuck in shell, mouth stretched as wide as it'll go around this huge piece of dried turd, bumping into things until you're stuck there finally between a rock and a tulip stem with a red cat two paces away, watching? Let me tell you what it's like: as much as you hate being picked up, when a human finally notices that you're not just fooling around, but choking, and picks you up and carries you into the kitchen and starts trying to pull the turd back out, and pieces break off instead but he keeps trying and finally the whole damn thing comes out finally, you know what that's like? It's a good feeling, let me tell you. And when you can finally stick your head back out, and he tickles you under your throat and puts you back out into the lettuce patch, fucking priceless. The moral of the story is, if a delicious-looking protein pellet is bigger than your head, it's probably a turd.

mission accomplished

Looking for this picture, I found this.

101 aristocats

Pretty much everything the Bush administration has pulled so far has failed to surprise me, except for how fast it happened and how much approval it's met with at home. Afghanistan surprised me a little, since I'd expected him to march into Iraq directly. But Iraq itself, and reestablishing the budget deficit, and hurting education etc, no big surprise. Torture, though - I can remember when the United States used to be the good guys, and stand for things like democracy and human rights. I am speechless at the moment, so will spare you any more words on that, reserving the right to pipe up at a later date, though. Still, though - torture and rape, wasn't that what the Iraqis were going to be "liberated" from? Has anyone involved claimed, yet, that they were "only following orders"? Because claims that "we didn't know what was happening" are really ringing historical bells, with me at least.

Anyway.

Change of topic. Here's a fun creativity exercise next time you read a book to a kid (Gamma is sick and I got the opportunity to read a few over the weekend): when you read the book, read each page in a different voice, which the kid(s) get to pick. Yesterday, for example, I read "The Aristocats" in the following voices, as far as I can remember:

• a mouse
  
• a cat
  
• a horse
  
• a cloud
  
• a stone
  
• a bell
  
• a horse
  
• a heart
  
• a cow
  
• a dog
  
• a fish

Then my wife asked me to do something so I had to quit, which was good because the dog voice really made me hoarse.

Speaking of princesses

I'm not saying Gamma is a girly-girl, but pink is the shortest coloring pencil in her pencil-box.

Speaking of Gamma, the other day I was shaving and she came in with a smile on her face and reported that she'd just heard a report on the radio about a woman who slipped and fell in her bathroom, fatally, after which her two-year-old child went to the fridge and brought her first some yogurt, and later a sausage. Trying to take care of its mom. Found hours later by someone. And it took me a minute to realize that Gamma's smile was not one of humor, but the smile a person sometimes might get upon realizing that there is horror out there, bad things from which no one can protect us.

Maybe it needs a princess...

Disney blocks distribution of new Michael Moore film.

"...Sleek and lightweight despite its battery-powered sensor, microprocessors and electric motor..."

In a front-page article by Michel Marriott, today's International Herald Tribune reports that Adidas plans to market high-tech running shoes that adapt to running conditions mid-stride.

"...The shoes will have push-button controls, light-emitting diodes to display settings and an instruction manual on a CD-ROM that will advise wearers on, among other things, the battery change needed after every 100 hours of use..."

This means that people will finally know which runners have teenagers at home, since the shoes of those without teenagers will be blinking "12:00".