Those clever Chinese!

 

 

There was a time, not all that long ago, when, if you saw someone walking towards you who was talking to himself, you crossed the road in case he was a nutter who'd escaped from the local looney bin. These days, they all seem to have escaped from a looney bin or they're talking on their mobile phones. Not knowing which, I still cross the road, only to find myself among a similar lot on the other side.

You'll never catch me reading a Kindle but only a real paper-and-ink book, and you'll never catch me looking like a looney bin escapee talking to myself. Instead, when my mobile phone rings, I talk into a proper handset just as Graham Bell did on March 10, 1876 when he uttered these first words, "Mr Watson, come here – I want to see you".

 

 

I bought my "retro" handset from temu.com for $9.29 postage paid all the way from China, and it was here in ten days. Those clever Chinese!

 

P.S. I had ordered a second one for Padma but then cancelled because there's always the age difference, and Padma isn't "retro" enough yet!

 

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Please tell me this is a Monty Python sketch

 

Please note: No real horses were harmed in the making of this video clip

 

While Russia is invading Ukraine and China is displaying its miltary might in the Pacific, the rest of Europe is "hobby-horsing" and competing in the recent Finnish Hobbyhorse Championships. And they do it all with a straight face! It gives new meaning to the phrase "horsing around".

If I saw one of these girls on a hobby horse in a forest, I wouldn't mock her - I'd asphyxiate with laughter! They may be physically fit, but mentally? Is there a parallel universe somewhere where real horses prance around with a half a human mannequin strapped to their backs?

 

 

May I suggest we play this 10-hour YouTube clip while we wait for a giant asteroid to put us all out of our misery? Surely, it can't be soon enough!

Please do not reply to this post until the full ten hours are up!!!

 

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A sign of the times

 

"Other shoe @ counter please ask staff"

 

It's been another quick dash into the Bay for some essential grocery shopping. Unfortunately, I was in such a hurry to also drop in at Vinnies in case they needed to have some more books rehomed, that I completely forgot the milk. So, no milk today, but Clive James' book of his BBC Radio 4 series "A Point of View" should comfortably see me through until sometime tomorrow.

 

 :

I also picked up "The Voyage of Their Life" which is the story of the SS DERNA and its passengers, which is another migrant stories except under far more uncertain circumstances than my own, and a ROGET'S SUPER THESAURUS which I never knew existed because this one also includes sample sentences and enlightening quotes. What a find for two dollars!

I am always surprised by the things I find at Vinnies, such as the above sign sticky-taped to the underside of a shoe. The nice lady at the check-out explained to me that even op-shops are now on shoplifters' hit-list, so instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop, they keep it behind the counter. So if you see someone with an unmatched pair of shoes walking towards you, lace up your own and hold on to your wallet!

The rest of the afternoon I spent at the Catalina Country Club in the company of someone I had not met before but hope to meet again. It's been an enjoyable day followed by a peaceful evening. As Winnie-the-Pooh rightly said, "At the end of the day all that really matters is you".

 

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Life was so simple then

 

My office on the top floor of the Al Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

 

I've previously reflected on my past stripped-down working life. I liked it that way and my employers did too as it meant that no domestic chores distracted me from giving my full attention to their business affairs.

 

My office was behind the window on the top floor on the far right

 

My work was my life and my office was my home, and there was little else besides. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was how I coped with life in the world's largest sandbox (a.k.a. Saudi Arabia).

 

Note my portable OLYMPIA typewriter, bought in Kieta in New Guinea in 1972. It travelled the world with me for many years

 

Not that there was much to play with: the television reception consisted of little more than re-runs of Walt Disney's "Bambi" and so-called 'newsflashes' of members of the royal family travelling to or returning from the fleshpots of the West denied to their own citizens. As for alcohol, there was none - but you could get stoned anytime.

 

 

My hotel room was equally spartan, trimmed down as it was to the basics of sleeping, eating and work brought back from the office.

 

The view from the room with no view

 

It was a room with no view and the only diversion was the men-only swimming pool, as long as the scorching sun had set behind the Red Sea and the hot desert wind didn't sandblast the skin off your face.

All up, it was an assignment that came at a huge personal cost to me and yet it contributed to what I am today. Thanks for the memories!

 

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Und Jägermeister war dabei!

 

 

 

Heute in 1969 trat Neil Armstrong auf den Mond - "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - und Jägermeister war dabei!

 

 

Go Trabi Go

 

 

In the 1991 German comedy film, "Go Trabi Go", a family from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) goes on a road trip to Italy in their beloved Trabant 601—the most popular car in East Germany before the collapse of the Iron Curtain. At one point their vehicle's head gasket blows, and the father makes an emergency phone call. When he tells a mechanic over the line that he’s driving a Trabant 601, the mechanic chuckles and says, "I hope you’ve got some sticky tape."

Over the years, the "Trabi" (as it's affectionately known) has been the butt of endless jokes associated with East Germany. With its bare interior, oddly-designed stick shifter, and an exterior made of Duroplast—a rust-resistant, cotton-reinforced resin plastic that's lighter and stronger than steel (and more importantly, could be manufactured in the GDR)—the standard four-seater Trabi sedan has been referred to as one of the "worst cars ever built," and "East Germany's terrible car that will never die." Add to this its two-stroke engine, the same kind used in lawnmowers and Asia's tuk-tuks, and it's understandable why there are quips like "Why does a Trabi have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm while you push."

Produced from 1957 until 1991, the Trabi has earned the nicknames "spark plug with a roof" and "cardboard racer" because of its seemingly shoddy design. To many Westerners, Trabis remain a prime example of East German repression and the governing Socialist United Party's archaic ways. Trabis had no fuel gauge, air conditioning, no indicator for turn signals or brake lights, and could only reach a maximum speed of 62 miles per hour. Once the Wall came down, Trabis just couldn’t compete with Western vehicles, and seemingly overnight East Germany’s most coveted car became almost obsolete.

Having learnt how the Trabi was made, you may want to move onto lighter things, and watch GO TRABI GO:

 

 

... and its sequel "Das war der wilde Osten":

 

 

If you want to follow Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Italian Journey", click here for the German original, or here for the English translation.

 

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Dr Johnson, I presume?

 

 

Yes, Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, is in urgent need of a decent haircut, but apart from that, I could listen to him for almost as long as it would take to "read" Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.

Published in 1755 and two volumes and 2,300 pages thick, it marked a milestone in the English language which had more desperate needs for standards than Jack Lynch has for a haircut. Although now that I look at it again, he must have let his hair grow in honour of the good doctor.

 

Dr Samuel Johnson as a lookalike of Jack Lynch, or vice versa

 

No English dictionary before it had devoted so much space to everyday words and been so thorough in its definitions. It had 42,773 entries and 140,871 definitions. It defined the English language for the next 150 years, until the arrival of the "Oxford English Dictionary". It was used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontes and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. And it even became the subject of this hilarious sketch by Blackadder:

 

 

My favourites?

Backfriend, noun: a friend backwards; that is, an enemy in secret.

Cynanthropy, noun: a species of madness in which men have the qualities of dogs.

Mouth-friend, noun: one who professes friendship without intending it.

Shapesmith, noun: one who undertakes to improve the form of the body, a.k.a. a personal trainer.

Urinator, noun: Johnson defined a urinator as “a diver” or "one who searches underwater". We might not agree today, but he wasn’t wrong: urinator derives from urinari, a Latin word meaning “to dive.

I have a good friend in Cooktown - or is he just a "mouth-friend"? - who is a great "urinator"; but enough of this, I'm off to see my "shapesmith".

 

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Can you see that sticky tape on my computer?

 

 

It's not to hold the computer together - although it's almost as old as I am, which is why I'm going to buy a new one quite soon before MICROSOFT withdraws its support for WINDOWS 10 - but to cover up the computer's camera after I received this threatening email:

 

Click on image to enlarge

 

What does he mean by "I made a video showing how you satisfied yourself"? Since when has overeating on Monte Carlo biscuits become a hanging offence? That five hundred dollars he demands - US dollars, no doubt - would buy be a truckload of Monte Carlo biscuits, so my answer is "no". Still, he had me worried, hence the sticky tape over the camera.

I mean, I don't want anyone else see me without my partial upper dentures. They're still a recent addition to my anatomy and I feel uncomfortable with them, like a horse with a bit in its mouth, so I don't wear them at home when I'm satisfying myself with Monte Carlo bisuits.

 

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Can a stand-up routine rise to the level of “art”?

 

 

Enter John Mulaney. He is assiduously non-political — right up until the moment that he isn’t. And then he embarks on a metaphor for the Trump presidency that has been hailed by many as genius: "Here's how I try to look at it, and this is just me, this guy being the president, it’s like there's a horse loose in a hospital ..."

The aesthetic connection between Donald Trump’s golden coiff and a horse’s mane is, of course, immediately pleasing. As is the invocation of something heedless thundering through a finely tuned environment.

There’s the added benefit that Trump’s name is not mentioned once, and yet the entire simile works. The question is ... why? It's art!

 

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Stay-at-home weather

 

 

It's a sunny but cold weekend. Perfect stay-at-home weather. Then again, every day at "Riverbend" is perfect stay-at-home weather: if it's sunny but cold, I want to stay at home because it's cold; if it's sunny and warm, I want to stay at home because there's no nicer place to be than by this bend in the river.

Being a bookish person with two left hands when it comes to home repairs or anything mechanical, and with both thumbs missing when it comes to gardening, it didn't take me long to realise that my move to the country wasn't going to be easy, and so already in my first year here I entertained thoughts of selling up again. My best friend Noel, who probably knew me better than I know myself, and feared I would revert to my footloose days and wander the world again, wrote, "Whatever you do, don't sell Riverbend; that would be the ultimate sin."

Somehow I never sold "Riverbend", and somehow I learned to live with my shortcomings, and even managed to make a few repairs and add a few improvements, although I still don't grow my own veggies and, instead of keeping chooks, buy the eggs from a nice lady in the village.

Thirty-two years later, "Riverbend" has become my home like no other before. Thirty-two years! Ever since I'd left home, I had never stayed put in one place for even thirty-two MONTHS! DULCE DOMUM.

 

 

"The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome." [Chapter V. DULCE DOMUM "The Wind in the Willows"]

If only you could be here today, Noel, and share a Glühwein with me!

 

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I'm a dawn watcher

 

 

There was a time when I stayed up to watch the sun rise; these days I get up for it: often as early as four, or five, but never later than six o'clock. I am addicted to sunrise, that mysterious still time before reality is revealed, before shapes emerge, when everything floats nebulously in that queer light that makes you think of the beginning of time.

Long before the huge garbage truck comes hissing down the lane on a Friday morning, long before the efficiency of the plumbing in the house is put noisily to the test, I sit on the verandah with a big thick mug of tea and watch the world reveal itself to be pretty much what it was yesterday.

I am lucky to have watched the sun rise from atop the Shwedagon Pagoda, from the top of Table Mountain, from tropical islands in the South Seas and bobbing fishing boats in the Aegean Sea, and I shall never forget watching the sun rise from the Temple of Poseidon.

I don't know whether it is true that dawn is the time when the majority of people choose to enter the world or to leave it, but it does seem to be a suitable hour. I should count myself lucky to push the   Publish   button on my last blog as I watch the sun turn the Clyde into a river of gold.

Until that happens, I shall continue to be a dawn watcher. It's why I'm so hopeless in the afternoon.

 

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Braunschweigische Spaziergänge

 

 

Meine Besuche zu der facebook-Seite meiner Heimatstadt Braunschweig - im Wandel der Zeit bringt immer neue Überraschungen. Heute las ich zum ersten Mal von dem Herrn Eckhard Schimpf, Journalist, Rennfahrer und Buchautor, der bis zu seinem Ruhestand stellvertretender Chefredakteur der Braunschweiger Zeitung war, und heute noch, mit 87 Jahren, journalistisch aktiv ist.

Auch seine Bücher waren mir gar nicht bekannt - obwohl ich annehme dass sie erst nach meiner Auswanderung herauskamen - und ich würde sie gerne kaufen falls ich sie an einer Stelle kaufen könnte, denn die Portokosten nach Australien sind zu hoch um sie einzeln zu verschicken.

 

 

Ich habe schon ein paar Buchhandlungen angefragt; eine hat keine seiner Bücher, die andere verschickt schon gar nicht nach Australien.

 

Folge 3   Folge 4   Folge 5   Folge 6

 

Also wird weitergesucht! Aber in der Zwischenzeit folge ich seinen Braunschweigischen Spaziergängen durch die (k)alte Heimatstadt.

 

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Let's get covfefe about covfefe

 

 

At 12.06 a.m. on May 31, 2017, Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, tweeted a word that would change history. Well, maybe not History with a capital H, but certainly the chaotic media-political circus we lived in then - and still live in today.

"Despite the constant negative press covfefe" No punctuation, no context, no apparent meaning. While the world tried to decipher what the hell covfefe meant, Trump left it there, allowing the absurdity to do its work. But covfefe wasn't a joke. It was a symbol of what Trump represented: a brand of politics that didn't need logic, just spectacle.

 

 

Was this just a thumbus interruptus - and who among us hasn't been guilty of that! - or, according to Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, bears a secret meaning which only a select few special people know? It has now emerged as a book which, I am informed, "is not available for purchase in your country", which leaves me only with its introduction:

In 2017, just 100 days after the elections to end all elections, a has-been Reality TV Star living in New York planned a pamphlet to be called 'Settling Covfefe'. In it he intended to attack the ineffectiveness of the dominant political parties in America which were opposed to the new National Socialists. In May 2017, Donald Trump tweeted his followers for the meaning of "Covfefe" along with men willing and able to assist him with his writing. With the help of these collaborators, chief among them Rudolf Hess, his twitter feed became a book. 'Settling Accounts' became 'Mein Covfefe', an unparalleled example of muddled economics and history, appalling bigotry, and an intense self-glorification of Donald Trump as the true founder and builder of the National Socialist movement. It was written in hate and it contained a blueprint for violent bloodshed. When 'Mein covfefe' was published in 2015, it was a failure. In 2016 a second volume appeared - it was no more successful than the first. People either laughed at it or ignored it. They were wrong to do so. As Trump's power increased, pressure was put on all party members to buy the book. Gradually this pressure was extended to all elements of the American population. Soon 'Mein Covfefe' was even being passed out to newly-wed couples as a gift. Ironically, and frighteningly, by the time Trump came to power on March 4th, 2017, what has been considered by many to be the most satanic book ever written was running neck and neck with the Bible at the top of the American bestseller lists. In his excellent introduction to this definitive American translation of 'Mein Covfefe', Courtney Driver writes: "For years 'Mein Covfefe' stood as proof of the blindness and complacency of the world. For in its pages Trump announced -- long before he came to power -- a program of covfefe and terror in a self-revelation of such overwhelming frankness that few among its readers had the courage to believe it. That such a man could go so far toward realizing his ambitions, and, above all, could find millions of willing tools and helpers; that is a phenomenon the world will ponder for centuries to come." We would be wrong in thinking that such a program, such a man, and such appalling consequences could not reappear in our world of the present. We cannot permit ourselves the luxury of forgetting the tragedy of World War II or the man who, more than any other, fostered it. 'Mein Covfefe' must be read and constantly remembered as a specimen of covfefe demagoguery that people whenever men grow tired of thinking and acting for themselves. 'Mein Covfefe' is a blueprint for the age of chaos. It transcends in historical importance any other book of the present generation. In her translation Courtney Driver has taken particular care to give an exact English equivalent of Trump's highly individual and often awkward style of tweeting, including his occasional grammatical errors, into consideration. We believe this book should stand as the complete, final, and definitive English version of Trump's own tweets, his political philosophy, and his thwarted plans for world domination. Translated by Courtney Driver with an introduction by Donald Trump. A compilation of Trump's most famous tweets of 2017 -- the bible of National Socialism and the blueprint for the Third Covfefe.    [Order your Kindle edition here]

 

 

Of course, we've already had the prequel to "Mein Covfefe" which ended in a lot more than tears. Let's hope "Mein Covfefe" ends up just in tears.

I'm taking a late-afternoon nap now. I hope everyone stays #covfefe".

 

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