The Red Dragon comes to the tough conclusions*

*and invents a brand spanking new swear word. A big shiny prize to whoever spots it first.

San Francisca and I talk American politics a bit. Mostly we talk other things because she's been so embarrassed by what a farce it's become - Sarah Palin has tipped her over the edge. I find that encouraging because she used to be a Clinton supporter. But then San Francisca is a smart girl so I don't know if all her compatriottes who were pro-Clinton will feel the same way. I'd imagine they wouldn't be retarded enough to take up the sop that is the Alaskan yahoo, and only my misanthropy would make me say that I'm sure they're not retarded enough.

But yesterday San Francisca and I had a little talk about who would have been a better sop, which I needed to discuss with someone, because for the life of me I couldn't figure out why it hadn't been Condoleezza Rice. In image terms she's certainly come out best from this lousy shitfight of an existing administration; she has so much experience, all of it unbeatably pertinent to the job; and she can string three words together without sneering. In fact she has a lovely soothing voice. Would I ever vote for her if I was able? No. Would I invite her over for dinner? No. If I bumped into her on the street, would I abstain from pelting her with high-absorbency menstrual pads whilst screaming 'oh my god, it's leaking all the way from Iraq!' No. But if I was an American woman, I wouldn't find her nomination to the vice presidency the least bit inexplicable, condescending, stupid, or worrying.

But as San Francisca pointed out, it was just too much for the Republicans. A woman - edgy! A black woman - erm . . . A black woman who has not Chosen Life through good clean heterosexual breeding herself and who can't evade saying she's pro-choice? No. No, no, no. These are the Republicans we're talking about, aren't they? Better to nominate an inexperienced yahoo with a secessionist husband, condomless daughter, and pork barrel politics than a woman who, for all her indisputable qualifications for the job, is black, not a baby factory, and doesn't expect anyone else to be. Because choosing an inexperienced yahoo with great tits will be enough to make all the women who are upset about Hilary Clinton losing swing their politics 180 degrees. It will make them vote for two lousy shitheels who are willing to criminalize rape victims that refuse to bear their violators' children.

Conclusions:

1. Seriously, one million fuck yous to the Republicans. They couldn't shit in a pot if it insulted their mother.

2. And if their shit works, America will get the government it deserves. This isn't 1990 anymore. The last eight years have turned its dollar to mush, its economy into a repo man orgy, its military into a fragile, overstretched blanket snagged in two of the crummiest countries in the world where it's driving up the price of a commodity that makes its political rivals richer by the second, and its yuppies into indigents. All of that may be fine and dandy as far as the Republican Party is concerned, and as far as the witless fuckels who are willing to vote for it AGAIN are concerned.

But now the rest of the planet has better things to do than put up with a country run by the political equivalent of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. Even fuckin' Paruguay has better things to do these days. Empires have to fall sometime and if it's in the next four years, all of us who WON'T be getting the government we deserve will live with it. Maybe we'll even be better off.

3. And Palin's secessionist husband is a total piece of ass. State's right on top of that! I wouldn't kick him off my snowmobile. I'd fish his salmon. I'd handle his state trooper. And et cetera.

Awwwwwww, GEEK OUT!

Le geek, c'est chic.

Which is Mistress-La-Spliffe shorthand for 'I've become a fucking podcast addict.' Can't be stopped. I'm that sort of boring learner who was always pulling in the big marks in uni without being all that competent - the sort who can sit there and listen, maybe read from time to time, and learn all she has to learn to get the fuckin' As that way. All of which means I am prime podcast country and they have settled me like crazy. I fuckin' love them. Listen to them an hour a day whilst trekking to work and back, and even at work if all I'm doing is transcribing, and I swear to you no subject is too boring that I can't listen to a nice podcast about it.

The CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, has some nice ones. So does the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster, which have the added benefit of getting me used to that ridiculous accent in people other than my own sweet darling F-word, who would be my own sweet darling no matter what retarded accent he talked with - even if he talked like me, who easily has the single most retarded accent in the Anglophone world. Think one of the whores from Fargo who's been living with an Australian for a few years in a Francophone country, and you've just about got the sheer fucking ugliness of it. God, am I ever glad I don't have to listen to my own voice during sex. It must be fucking atrocious.

Anyhoo, yesterday I heard an absolutely lovely one from the IIASA that I must reccommend from heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang. Don't be scared by the 'economist'. It's a lovely talk that cuts through all the political cant about free-trade-good this and protectionism-bad that - far more of a historical than numerical focus, as it was a talk given to a bunch of non-economists. Go on. Give it a listen. For nothing else, then for Ha-Joon Chang's adorable accent. I could listen to Koreans speak English all day. Fuck the French and the Queen and Southern Belles and everybody else who's supposed to be all cute when they talk English. The Korean accent easily beats them all, both for clarity and prettiness.

The Red Dragon asks the tough questions

The American political cycle has spiralled down into farce, in-your-face slapstick that many of my friends who traditionally ignore the American political cycle can't help but comment on. I'm left with four questions:

1. Was it just a random chick pick, or is Sarah Palin the sort of thing that John McCain personally feels is both representative of and appealing to American women? A gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine who is against women's right to choose and - to me far more importantly - a girl's right to learn, and who'd even dream of allowing her teenage daughter to get married just because she got pregnant? Teenage. Pregnant or not the whole girl's life is ahead of her. If I'd married who I'd wanted to marry when I was 17 I'd have shot myself by now, and I think I'm quite typical in that.

2. Is he right? Or is he the biggest cocksucker in the world?

3. If Americans are stupid enough to vote a 71 year old cancer survivor into office whose immediate successor is the gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine whilst the country is engaged in two wars, the global economy crashes, Russia confronts NATO in its near abroad, ocean level rise threatens to create a refugee class the size of which the planet has never seen before, and China keeps being China, how long will it be before Japan just buys up everything south of the Canadian border and north of the South American leftist nationalists who don't play ball anymore and turns it into a Toyota factory?

4. And at that point, will the price of Toyotas go down? Because I sort of want one when we move to Australia. They get fantastic mileage and they're safer than my emotional choice, a Mini Cooper. I know they're already pretty cheap but I'm the world's biggest skinflint.

Lovely as a sleepy lizard

Like everybody, I could complain about my job. Really only about the hours - I'd like to work as hard as a rentboy at a televangelists' convention three days a week and then have four day weekends. I suppose I could also complain about the fact that my office is in Brussels, but that's not my office's fault, and if it was in a better city where apartments aren't so cheap they'd have to pay me more, or else I'd be complaining about my salary. So there you are. And my job has great benefits, like the way I'm being paid to fight with people on the company blog - I gave up looking at comment sections of anything a long time ago because of the contribution it makes to my misanthropy, but hey, if it's my job, cool - and knowing about what's happening in Mozambique and the way I get to go sea kayaking in Marseille in a couple of weeks.

And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.

Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.

Refreshing a tired businesswoman's brain

Lots of quite nice things happened this weekend, only a few of which I'll write about in the interests of space and decency. After getting such a lift from the preceding two weekends of countryside and kayaking, we see we have to use our weekends, and use ourselves on the weekend. My own conclusion is that I need to spend more time staring at trees and birds, and less at people, as my misanthropy threatens to become unmanageable. I'm not unhappy these days, either in my personal or professional life, but I'm starting to feel a bit like an extra-terrestrial. Not in the sense of being above it all, or being a super-evolved intergalactic voyageuse, but in the sense of just not getting it a lot of the time.

Anyhoo. Weekend extended backwards by a staff trip to an adventure park on Friday - one of those places you chain yourself to security lines and swing around the trees. I lasted three hours before my vertigo insisted I sit down and start drinking, which is three more hours than I'd been expecting to last. Not one panic attack, though I did consider it as a possibility at one point. Out in a town called Wavre, which was lovely, green and much cleaner-smelling than Brussels - helpful, considering the sudden onset of warmth and summer. I like the people I work with well enough. The ones who I'm not actively fond of don't demand too much of my attention so it's all good.

Yesterday dealt with the continuing warmth and green by going to Tervuren for some fresh air, where we had a nice picnic in the grounds of the African museum. The F-word went in to draw some of the weirdo stuff they've purloined from the Congo and I went for a long walk in the woods, reflecting on my misanthropy (set off hard by the allegorical statues in the entrance hall of the Spirit of Europe rescuing the Spirit of Africa from the Spirit of Barbarism and Arabs; I've never seen such an elegant and unabashed translation of murderous hypocrisy into expensive kitsch, but then I don't listen to American political speeches), and then settling down to read about half of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. A neat little book, suitable for tired businessmen's brains, which means it's suitable for mine. It'd be perfect for a three hour flight. Opens a window on a time when our societal paranoia was the same, but with a different object. On a time when academics and scientists were just as territorial and bigoted, but in the sphere of Royal Commissions instead of universities, broadsheets and books for pop audiences. Oh, the humanity.

So enjoyed both Wavre and Tervuren, though my enjoyment of all that fresh air in Wavre would have been tempered if I'd known there'd been a radioactive gas leak from a facility close to Charleroi (Wavre is halfway there) which the government has been falling all over itself about after trying to cover it up or downplay it for a week or so. Fuck, Belgium is a mess.

Anyways, lots of other nice things happened. For example, I invented a new technique for making tomato sauce which is so revolutionary and so delicious I think it will become a Spliffe Family Secret. I also made rhubarb upside cake in the skillet for the first time, which is a work in progress - it was good but it could be brilliant, and when it is I'll release the recipe. And custard. I've never been the world's biggest fan of it, but I discovered that if you whisk it continuously as you heat it, adding the corn starch as you go, it gets all foamy and ethereally exquisite. Expect that to be posted soon, under some charming name like Fairy Cum or Mermaid Corpse.