The Shoddyssey part I

Well, I miss M like crazy, and his advice is ringing in my ears: "Expect things to go wrong here, and you'll be fine." As I leave there is one final herculean task involving lots of Belgians that has the capacity to go wrong, and that is getting the cat and I authorization to leave to the country of my choice. And yes, it is going wrong.

1. I need a health check for the permanent visa, part of which involves a chest X-ray. The hospital lost mine. Okay, it's something that could have happened anywhere, but the intense fucking stupidity of the follow-up is what reminds me that I'm in Francophone Belgium and not in your run-of-the-mill sort of place. My examining doctor, to whom the results must be sent, is only available by phone from 13h to 13h30. The woman at the X-ray clinic who is responsible for the deliveries to the doctors only works in the morning. And yet somehow I'm being asked by these morons - me, the only person in the situation whose fault this definitely is not - to work out why the X-ray is lost, when the doctor insists it didn't arrive, and the clinic woman insists she sent it to him.

Fuck. Morons. Fucking Franco-Belgian morons.

Luckily time isn't exactly of the essence, due to the Canadian federal police's cack-handed inadequacy in terms of providing criminal background checks (normal countries can do it in a week; the Mounties take FOUR FUCKING MONTHS; they may always get their man but they have to wait until age slows the fucker down apparently). But I am annoyed. I'm annoyed as all hell. It's not just the prospect of a second exposure to an admittedly low level of radiation, it's not just the prospect of arguing with a bunch of brain-damaged hospital Neanderthals about how I will not pay for a repeat in my daily-worsening French (when I told my brain we were moving to Australia, it just started jettisoning my entire vocabulary, as if being lighter will get us out of this stupid, dirty surrealist shithole faster); it's an utter frustration with Franco-Belgian retardation.

Now I know retardation is not a Franco-Belgian monopoly. It's just the way they're retarded that I can't stand. It's in the way they can fuck up, fuck up royally, exposing the person they're fucking up to a world of expense and bother - so far, so averagely retarded - AND THEN strive like a fucking Bosnian fighting the Roman Empire to blame the person they've fucked over, when there is no stretch of the imagination besides a frighteningly 1984-ish doublethink by which the person who they've fucked over has anything to do with the mechanics of how they were fucked over. It is fucking unbearable. It puts me in the mood for face-punching, car-keying, and crotch-kicking, and I'm a fucking Quaker. It makes me quite adore the British for their mania for apologizing for everything, which used to annoy me.

By-the-by, in my experience, this brand of retardation is a Wallonian trait - not a Flemish trait - good enough reason besides all the others for the Flems to want to seperate, in my opinion. God knows I want to fucking seperate from it post-haste.

2. Somebody in my vet's family died and he won't be able to take the rabies blood test for another couple of weeks. The problem there is that I've cut things too close to the wire, since I was expecting to give her to a friend in Canada. She needs her blood test five months before her departure, and I desperately want the freedom to leave here at the end of September, and I desperately want her to spend the minimum time possible in quarantine on the other end of things. That's just something going wrong, of course. It's not Belgium. My vet's from the south of France and sadly people in families die. But it's adding to my stress level.

I've found a shipping company that can send her there, though, and they seem to know what they're doing and they're Flemish. So things are working out. Slowly. Churningly. Annoyingly.

ARRRRGH.

Anyways, it's time for me to go try to get a tourist visa for China and be exposed to a whole new nationality of bureaucracy.

Screwed and screwed and screwed

After that trip to Istanbul last year I wrote about feeling some moral discomfort about getting naked and then getting a deliciously decadent rubdown from another woman, but committed to going to a hammam in case it was just the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement at the five star where I was staying that was killing my buzz. It turns out it was. I've been going to Le Riad in the immigrant district next to the Gare de Nord regularly for a few months and I'll keep going at least once a month until I leave. It is ace, and nothing, NOTHING like the thing in Istanbul. Communal (kids get in free and were running around all over the place, having waterfights in the rubdown room), loud (when I was there Saturday a wedding party came in and ululated, which I'd never heard in the flesh before), friendly (helpful attendants running around telling me what to do, since my hammam etiquette isn't down yet, and slapping everybody's asses) and unintimidating.

Anyways. I was there on a busy Ladies' Saturday (most days of the week, women only get half the hours, with men the other half) and the steam room and rubdown slabs were over-capacity, so I was waiting in the nice warm, sunny lounging space upstairs, wrapped in a sarong, sipping a complimentary mint tea and reading Colin Tudge's charming The Secret Life of Birds, when a lady came in to start threading eyebrows. Mine were badly overgrown so when she started loudly complaining of a cancellation, I stuck my hand up to be trimmed. I'd never been threaded before, never even seen it until I started going to the hammam and seeing these women seemingly only having threads ran across their face and emerging hairless, so I was curious.

Which brings me to the point of this post, such as it is. The lady reduced my viciously rambunctious eyebrows to a state of civilization in two minutes. It didn't hurt nearly as much as waxing or plucking and the skin wasn't irritated. It cost six euros. I had no idea who she'd done it, so I came home and read this and watched this. I got a length of darning thread, practiced for ten minutes, and then did my upper lip, which I usually bleach, but in my paranoiac hippiedom I'm sick of smearing myself with chemicals so I've been looking for an alternative that doesn't involve accepting my manly side. It worked; it hurt a bit, but not much, and even with my unpractised hands it only took a few minutes to do the lot.

Now look. This is nice, but at the same time it is absolute BULLSHIT. Let me write it once again: I used a length of darning thread. I used about 50 centimetres of a 20 metre spool of darning thread that cost less than 2 euros to take care of the hair on my face that millions of women shit themselves over, spending a great deal of time and money on; that many women in my family (of whom I'm one of the less sasquatchy members and I'm still quite sasquatchy) have decided they would handle with electrolysis due to the time, mess, expense and trouble involved in waxing. I'm not saying I was ripped off by the lady at the hammam, absolutely not; despite how easy the incredibly beautiful girl in the instructional video above makes it look, I'm more than happy to have somebody else do precision work like eyebrow plucking for me (versus upper lip when you just want it ALL off, though I did give myself an amusing half-hour walking around the house with a Hitler moustache) and I would happily pay her more than six euros, even though her overhead costs for the work she did on me probably ran about 5 centimes. But I AM saying this shit makes me absolutely sick.

Women get screwed, man. They get screwed and screwed. When you can use 5 centimes worth of darning thread to get a result that's better than what you get with with something exponentially more expensive, like waxing or one of these fucking montrosities, that's all I can conclude: we are screwed and screwed and screwed. Not just screwed by notions of beauty involving hairlessness, which is such a common theme across so many cultures that I don't see any real point to objecting to it any more, but really, unforgivably screwed in terms of how bastards try to get our money off us for stupid shit that not only do we not need, but is worse for us than the exponentially cheaper alternatives. On a slightly smaller scale, it's like the flannelette rag towels versus the disposable ones all over again. Just so - fucking - ARGH. Fuck. I really don't think men have the experience to appreciate how structurally screwed women are, on things like this, these little day-to-day things - I mean, I don't blame men, because a lot of this screwing is being carried out by other women; I would just like to communicate to men how structurally screwed we are so they can understand where we're coming from. I love being a woman but my beloved history teacher who blew his brains out a few years back was right: in economic terms women in overdeveloped countries are the aborigines of the modern age, being exploited by cynical profiteers and trading our wealth for shit.

I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench

M and I had a running stress-reliever - the word "Boner", which we made workplace-acceptable by referring to the Growing Pains character, who of course the presently missing Andrew Koenig played. Fucking best American television character name ever. Well, it's not unknown for people who were formerly famous cracking up and disappearing themselves, permanently or not, and considering it's been around five months since M disappeared it's pushing things a bit to freak out about Boner disappearing after M disappears.

But synchronicity, as an emotion or a perceived phenomenon, is a strange thing. It's there, certainly. Involved with a plain, garden variety sadness, in that I can't turn around in my office chair and say, or hear, "they can't get a Boner," "maybe Boner was dysfunctional", "I'm going to spend this weekend searching for Boner, you know, really reaching out" . . . or just "hey - Boner!" you know . . . tonnes of fucking comedy gold that aren't funny anymore because now M is missing, and even though this guy had the fucking awesomest television name ever I can't laugh about somebody being missing anymore.

No wonder adults have no fucking sense of humour. It must get harder and harder to laugh at things the more indescribably horribly shitty things happen to you and the people around you. Everything gets a little too synchronous and has this whole hollow weight of loss and sadness beneath it, which swallows up the giggles like a sinkhole. But would M have wanted me to stop laughing at Boner? Will me not giggling at the name make things better? Probably not. Anyways, who'm I kidding. The word "boner" is always going to be fucking hilarious. But I'll always remember M while I laugh at it. I guess the best way to deal with the synchronicity is to laugh enough for both of us.

Anyways. In terms of the emotionally devastating synchronicity it's not as bad as A-Ha announcing they were going to break up on the day (we found out retrospectively, thank you very fucking much, you fucking turd of a British Foreign Office - may you collectively catch scabies and scar yourselves indelibly with frantic scratching, may you find relief from nothing short of the rough side of a cheese grater, you pack of useless, irresponsible cunts; may boners always be remarkable in your beastly, functionary lives by their paucity) that M disappeared. He was the only non-Scando I've ever known who liked them a lot. Indeed, the only non-Scando who claimed to have heard a single song of theirs beyond the ubiquitous, and awesome, "Take On Me".

Speaking of, I assume you've seen it but just in case - I can still laugh at this, anyways. I guess if someone near and dear to me had been clocked in a pipe wrench fight I couldn't, so, well, carpe diem:



And to be fair, here's an A-Ha single from 2000, that M really liked and sent me as proof that they'd released things in English besides "Take on Me". Apparently Morten Harket (and it's not your imagination; the man is a phenomenal piece of ass, as, my Finnish and Swedish lady friends breathlessly inform me, an unfair proportion of the male Norwegian population is - something to remember if the F-word ever dumps my ass) holds a note for 22 seconds in it, which Wikipedia says is a British chart record, beating Bill Withers' in "Lovely Day".



Another difficult thing about synchronicity is that that song has moved in my estimation from being an example of a fucking marvellous falsetto somewhat wasted on a half-decent pop song with lyrics that make no fucking sense to something indescribably sad. I miss M. I miss him so much.

No wonder adults listen and get attached to horrible mawkish shit like Phil Collins or The Boatman's Call (I've had "Brompton Oratory" stuck in my head since Saturday and I'm getting resentful). Nothing is allowed to be funny anymore, and repellent, repellent turds like "I Can't Stop Loving You" suddenly assume this crushing emotional weight and substance. I guess I should count my lucky stars that M wasn't into anything worse than A-Ha. Well he was, actually, he was quite fond of Madonna. But frankly the fucking Nazis could have played that shit over the loudspeakers at Treblinka and it wouldn't have given it any emotional weight or substance. Fucking. Hate. Madonna.

Tai chi is a kind of martial art, I suppose

Really need the brief escape to the Ardennes this weekend. Last night in tai chi I spent about 15 minutes of what should have been pure tranquility, what should have been my mid-week détente with my professional stress, wanting to punch these dumb gallic bitches who wouldn't stop chattering in their dumb gallic high-pitched squeaky little voices during the exercises. Punch them right in the mouths. It doesn't matter that I'd cut my hand on their teeth and get an infection, I thought. It'd be worth it. I'd enjoy the memory all my life, long after the antibiotics stop making me poo funny.

Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.

Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.

Lusitanian English Television Bodice Ripping Craptacular

So a fun thing about Portugal is that almost everyone we bumped into, city and country, spoke at least a smattering - usually more - of French or English, so we weren't at a loss to communicate and indeed to have good fun. And as in Spain, in those situations where they didn't, an awkward but clear conversation could be had by speaking sloooooowly in Italian and listening to them respond sloooowly in Portuguese. But usually they were polyglots and while that has a lot to do with tonnes of them going off to France to work, I think at least on the English side (considering how much complaining I've heard about the Portuguese school system) that has a lot to do with their television being subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike France, Italy, and Spain, where people are absolutely crap at English in comparison).

And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:

1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.

2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.

3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.

You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.

The Red Dragon Will Devour Your Heart

So even though I've got nothing against seals and even though there are few things of which I'm more certain than that monarchy, even constitutional monarchy, even the representatives of a constitutional monarchy who aren't chosen by the monarchy itself, is a slap in the face of human dignity, I have to say this story warmed the cockles of my heart.

It pisses me off when Europeans, who'd rather drown in empty plastic bottles (or ship'em off to China for incineration in power plants) than drink from their taps, who can't even keep their fucking urban songbirds alive, who all seem to be convinced that conservation is something that ought to happen elsewhere (in one of the fucking colonies they're mostly done despoiling now, for instance) rather than right fucking here, where nature is already highly degraded and they're in a fucking race with themselves to fuck up what's left, and whose continental cuisine is largely based on what kind of sausage they process slaughtered pigs into - anyways, it pisses me off when they think they have a goddamn thing to say about who kills and eats what in Canada.

When these disgusting post-colonial troglodytes eat snails, frog legs, baby cows, foie gras, octopus, horse, and any of the remaining wild animals left scrounging around this fucking ecological wreck of a continent that they can get their hands on in the million-weight, I have no patience with the assholes going 'ooh-la-la' because our ceremonial head of state guts an animal whose conservation status is non-threatened, cuts off a piece of its heart, and eats it, in the tradition of a people who have been gutting seals and eating their hearts since before Europeans figured out how to wipe their own asses.

As repellent as I find it that Canada isn't yet a republic, and continues to put a portrait of that daughter of armed banditti on our coinage, her representative Michaelle Jean is the head of our nation in a sense, and that makes her the head of the Inuit as well, and if she's off visiting the Inuit and they hand her a knife and a fresh seal carcass, it is the fucking essence of class that the woman slits it open and eats its heart. I can understand why Europeans are incapable of recognizing class when they see it, though; not only are they too busy finding their way around the wealth of turds on sidewalks dog owners here are too cool to pick up, but European leaders these days seem incapable of anything classier than paying Germans to scrap perfectly good cars, fucking teenagers, and marrying washed-up supermodels or television presenters. And as for any sort of representation of minorities's interests, symbolic or otherwise . . . wrong fucking continent.

Also, I'm on the rag and haven't had a bit of meat in weeks, so the idea of gutting a polar marine mammal and eating its heart sounds really awesome right now.

The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse

Alright, marvellous, swine flu. That's just fucking fantastic. 10-to-1 odds I'm offering that the virus started in the southern US, in one of those massive, moronly inhumanely crowded and insalubrious feedlots/abattoirs where they illegally employ Mexicans in their thousands to make sure your typical North American Anglo asshole can have meat that's cheap enough to eat two or three times a day, fuelling their massive fucking waistlines and their health insurance companies' massive fucking profits.

You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.

Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).

Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.

By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.

Of truth and coincidences

'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'

Shit.

So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .

But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."

We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.

So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.

'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'

Popery dopery doooo

So let's say you're born in Germany at a spectacularly bad time to be born in Germany, and you get forced to be in Hitler Youth because that's the law in those days. And then after a stint in Hitler Youth, you're forced into support corps for a military carrying out one of history's more obviously lamentable agendas, because that's the law in those days. And then after the war you become a priest, and life goes on, and one day you want to be pope. Should the sole condition of having participated in your country's genocidal war effort when refusal to do so could have meant your death at worst and your discomfort at best prevent you from being pope? No, right? Because that wouldn't be fair, right?

Wrong. Let's try another question. Let's say you're born at any time in history with a clitoris. After you do whatever else you do, you become a nun, and life goes on, and one day you want to be pope. Should the sole condition of having been born with a clitoris prevent you from being pope? YES! Because the Catholic Church is not about fair. And Ratzinger being pope even though, as a child, he didn't resist the murderous Nazi war machine even unto death is not about fair. The Catholic Church sets its own rules, and its rules are that women aren't allowed positions of authority, and former members of Hitler Youth are allowed to be pope. Don't like it? Heretic! Because the one thing you really, really need to be a Catholic and not a heretic is to respect the hierarchy of the church. At the moment that means respecting Ratzinger, and in general terms it means respecting the fact that women cannot lead or preach within the church.

Anyways, one group of people who Ratzinger is working himself into believing respect him are the Lefebvrists, otherwise known as the Society of Pius X. Since he has decided this, and started to convince himself their rebellion against the hierarchy of the church and rejection of Vatican II might not be as schismatic as all that, some of them are allowed to be Catholics again instead of just another bunch of racist traditionalist fruitcakes who dress in frocks and vote for extreme-right parties.

Now, is that mentalist Aryan Williamson a nutcase Holocaust denier? Yes, and now that the Merkel herself has raised a stink and everybody in the world is pissed off about it, the popists are doing something about his re-admittance. But that's not all. This group that the church is working itself into reintegrating into the hierarchy didn't feature Williamson as an adherent by accident. Did Lefebvrists attempt to shelter Paul Touvier, the fugitive from justice wanted for the hands-on murder of seven Jews, and who may have facilitated murder of many more? Yes. Did they express heartfelt nostalgia for the murderous Vichy regime, calling those who threw it over 'barbarians without faith or law'? Yes. Did they encourage their French adherents to vote for the ultra-right party headed up by Jean Marie Le Pen? Yes.

Are they a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads? Look, if it shelters, expresses and encourages like a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads, it's probably a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads. But you know what? Fine. Being Catholic isn't about not being a racist, fascist shitwad, it's about respecting the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and not consecrating bishops unless the pope tells you you can. And the pope, in the case of Williamson and some other Lefebvrist 'bishops', has decided to effectively give that permission 20 years retroactively. Because Ratzinger is magic. So . . . Welcome Back, Cracker.

Like it or not, that's the nature of Catholicism; it blows. I respect individual Catholics, particularly those who love the Church too much to abandon it to its own iniquities, and who struggle as they can to make it a kinder phenomenon; the massive outcry they've raised about Williamson has got a pope, for the first time in living memory, to admit he might have made a mistake about something.

But that's the thing, there's a limit, when you go beyond these smaller squabbles. Struggle too much with the Church on a more macro level – confront it with the dictates of your conscience in terms of, say, believing that women who are fit for it should be allowed to preach, that priests would be able to serve and understand the lay community better if they were allowed to openly lead loving and reproductive lives with the partner of their choice, that women should force their husbands to wear condoms if they've already got more mouths to feed than they can afford, or that being a racist, fascist shitwad should preclude someone from having a position of authority in your church – and suddenly you're not quite Catholic anymore.

Reflections on a European voyage

Travelling in this over-ripened cheese of a continent at Christmastime is fucking penitential. We had this intensely beautiful and amusing holiday in Sicily and Calabria - more Milos Foreman than Sergio Corbucci it may have all been, and I did have the exquisite pleasure of losing my keys on the first day, but by Sunday, when we were due to fly back to Germany, I was feeling excellent. Well rested, well fed, well fucked, well et cetera. Some of the more family-friendly aspects of the fortnight will no doubt get exposed here in the coming days.

And then, Stefanito got mixed up about when I needed to be at the aeroport - two hours away on dreadful mountain roads - and decided for a marathon session in the bathroom. The entire household took turns begging him to hurry but if there is an Irresistible Force in this world, it's an Italian man occupying a fucking toilet. Anyways, eventually he popped out, responded to the situation, and fucking gunned us across some of the worst winter roads in Aspromonte. That little Fiat was going so fast I thought it would disintegrate. Intensely beautiful region we were burning through, but an absolute shithole - our (Reggio) side of the mountain is okay, or at least as okay as Aspromonte gets, but the Santa Eufemia side is where they took the northern kidnap victims back in the day and no doubt where all sorts of bad shit is got up to now, up to and including some cockless guinea motherfucker taking a bead on us with a handgun as we whizzed by.

We got to the aeroport twenty minutes late, but it turned out that was only bad for my nerves, because Italy being Italy the check-in was crawling at a retarded snail's pace. In fact, we checked in ten minutes before the fucking plane took off, and security was a breeze - all the women setting off the metal detectors with their belt buckles, et cetera, all the security men gaily , or rather heterosexually, waving them through. Not such a breeze, however, that the F-word didn't have confiscated from his hand luggage my bottle of Burt's Bees skin creme Elvis and the Vermeer Lady had mailed me from Vancouver for Christmas (not available in Belgium) which for some inexplicable reason he a) had, and b) had in his fucking hand luggage. I was pissed. I still am.

Luckily for him, Europe was about to overshadow his inexplicability by losing my checked baggage. Not much more to say about that. If it doesn't arrive I'll be fucking pissed. Aside from all the stuff typically in luggage that one doesn't want to lose, there was some olive oil soap in it my family makes from their farm, and little things for the neice, and a couple of packets of Caffe Mauro, roasted in Reggio and, once more, not available in motherfucking Belgium. Not to mention another bottle of Burt's Bees moisturizer that my mum bought me last time I was in Canada. Fuck. Uberfuck. The F-word's luggage got through, but the jar of expensive and exquisite thyme honey we'd bought in Syracusa had got broken despite careful bubble wrapping. Fucking hurrah. Three cheers for European luggage handlers, the fucking trogladyte cunts.

So speaking of Canada, northern Europe is in the grip of a rather refreshing Canadian-esque cold snap, with reasonable quantities of snow on the ground and temperatures bottoming out around -7 C. Pleasant to me, utterly chaos-producing to these incompetents. Let's face a fundamental fucking fact here: Germany and Belgium are northern countries. The last couple of years have been warm, but the winters here traditionally involve cold, snow, and, you know, fucking winter. And then in the last three days, five fucking inches of the shit falls from the sky and has the temerity to remain on the ground, and suddenly it's fucking Armageddon here. Getting from Dusseldorf to Brussels last night had me in tears. Tears of fury rather than despair, yes, but tears nonetheless.

And then, to cap the whole motherfucker off, when we ground into town around 22h in no mood to cook, I bought us some falafel from my favourite kebab shop, and they've changed the fucking recipe or supplier or something, and now it tastes like deep-fried sand. Fuck. Titfuck. Fistfuck. Truckfuck. Et cetera. And as if all that wasn't enough, now I have to go to work, because I haven't been fired yet. Call this a fucking recession? Porca troia. And fuck.

Of toys and genital comfort

Yesterday I bought a sewing machine. The F-word and I aren't big consumers; we eat like royalty and travel around a good bit, but we don't spend money on things, as a generality, in a desperate bid to scrounge as much cash as possible into the basement. But this is a fucking cold winter and we need curtains for our enormous and eccentrically shaped single pane Art Deco windows. So enormous and eccentrically shaped are they that finding appropriate curtains for them would be prohibitively expensive, or rather prohibitively expensive for us. Or at least, more prohibitively expensive than buying a sewing machine and 20 square metres of fabric.

So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.

Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.

So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.

The law is an ass - an idiot

What a strange book Oliver Twist is. I love his sentences - nice big Victorian monsters of sentences. Do love a big sentence. The coincidences were rather trying and made it difficult to suspend disbelief at every moment of the narrative, but most of the right emotional triggers were there and the death of Nancy was properly brutal and amazingly unsentimental. It was hard to believe, though, that Bill Sikes was going to get mobbed for murdering her if he hadn't been mobbed for any of the other dreadful things he'd done.

I wonder if that's just a spot of heavy literary irreality, or if perhaps there was a different attitude to murdering women back then. After all, Jack the Ripper only got through eleven or so, and that was the biggest media scrum ever, and Robert Pickton killed goodness knows how many just the other day, historically speaking, and confessed to it, and the justice probably won't even charge him with all of it. I reckon there's much, much more to that Robert Pickton shit than meets the eye. Well, fucking duh. Dozens get killed at a busy pig farm/events locale (???) and only one fucker gets charged for it - and he's sent up on second degree charges? What absolute bullshit. What bullshit.

Where's the Oliver Twist making people acknowledge what life and death on Vancouver's downtown east side is like? It needn't be so different. Ineptitude from the police and justice system, indifference from the public, and a swarming, uncomfortable scrounging life in bad rooms and wet streets only alleviated by fucking yourself up or by desperately underfunded social services. The main deviation would be that the general public isn't going to get too upset when you knock off the women like Nancy . . . not until gruesome details emerge from the slow and belated investigation about their flesh being fed to pigs and mixed up with pork. Oh, I hate it all this morning. What a comfort it is to believe in hell sometimes.

When did 'provocative' become a synonym for shitty?

Hoping for third time lucky at the maison communale today. Belgian institutional incompetence still not getting to me - much. Not as much as the economy, as I wrote about 131 more layoffs yesterday and there are strong deflationary pressures deflating things. Including the British pound, which is actually approaching euro levels. Can you fucking believe it? I can't. Do you fucking care? I do. We're going to London next week - I have a conference, and then a date with Rodelinda, and the F-word and I both want to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Skipping the Turner Prize exhibition, though we could get a bundled ticket for a mere extra GBP 2.5 or EUR 2.9. It's not that we dislike the sort of things they have on display, it's just that there's no reason in heaven, hell, or in between to pay EUR 2.9 to look at the sort of things they have on display.

And looking at the things they have on display, I must point out I do actually dislike the things they have on display. Crawling up the asshole of something that had already crawled up its own asshole and died. It would all just be a ghastly joke, except there are actual artistic endeavours rolling out all over the world that aren't unbearably boring and masturbatory, and that don't rely on relentless, unimaginative referentialism and the least intriguing and involved symbolism possible for their impact or appeal, and that would benefit by a fraction of the attention this ridiculous, expensive Guarniad joke garners for assholes so mentally and aptitudinally debile they rip off Jeff Koons.

Anyways, I'm off to queue now.

His name is Barack Obama, for fuck's sake

Madame Pariyorker weekend, and I am walking into Monday as exhausted as I was Friday night. Oh well. Madame Pariyorker inevitably has spent some time being my token American friend, because part of the reason we hit it off so well in Paris all those years ago, despite having very different brains, is that it was 2002 when we met. And all the French people around me were giving full fucking rein to how much they detested and despised Americans for their dreadful imperial foriegn policy and their consumptive lifestyle, supposing I'd be interested, I suppose, because they had mistaken me for an American and were rushing to assure me that despite their incapacity to tell the difference they could assure me 100, 1000, infinity%, by using highly objectionable language, that not only did they understand that I was not American, but that I was as 1000% better than Americans as they themselves were.

This was also the time I was choosing my academic path in international relations, however, and when it was coming home to me how corrupt, murderous, anti-democratic and repellent French foreign policy was and continues to be, and the only reason it's not talked about there as currently as American murderousness is is because they're a nation of cultural chauvinists with a media as supine in its own way as that of America. Ask your typical French person about Africa or Oceania and you'll wait through days of ejaculations about the charms of the beaches of Senegal and Tahiti before you even get a fucking word in edgewise to ask about 'defense agreements' - the nice term for arms sales to kleptocratic maniacs intent on murdering their own people in old African colonies or the nuclear bombing of Polynesian atolls. Ugh. Make me fucking vomit. I mean, the fuckers still have colonies, and they think they have anything to say about anything?

Anyways. I met Madame Pariyorker in 2002 when French people were informing me about what a big asshole I wasn't by explaining how they knew I wasn't American, and Madame Pariyorker was constantly receiving instruction about what a big asshole she was . . . and now it's 2008, and maybe she's not quite such a big asshole because possibly her nation will vote for un Noir, and mark my fucking words, by the time they let a black man run for president in France - well, look, it's just not going to happen. Even so, they're having no problem going up to her and saying, with the sort of supreme Gallic shitbrained confidence that let the Germans kick their asses irreperably twice in a row using the same technique within 25 years and the supreme Gallic chauvinistic inability to attach a human name to a brownish face that made the wars of liberation in their colonies some of the most brutal of the post WWII period, 'le Noir ne peut pas gagner. Pas dans une telle societé'.

Ugh. If I was American I'd vote for Barack Obama just to piss in France's eye. Well, there are a lot of other reasons I'd vote for Barack Obama, ranging from his reasonable positions on the issues to the fact that that's the sort of peice of ass I'd rather see on newspaper covers than a septagenarian warmonger. But that would be one of them, and anyways, I reckon the reason he'll win is that the economy has gone to shit and I can't imagine the most raving lunatic racist in the most atmospheric movie about the south of the States that I've ever seen voting Republican when the economy is this shitty. But then I have no imagination about some things. And this post was going to have some sort of point, but now it's time for work.

More like beautiful up your own ass forever, shitbird

Love-hate relationship with my prime loved, hated Robert Hughes coming down hard on the side of love following this little diatribe about the Hirst auction. Oh, those sentences of his! So damn sloppy and so fucking horrible in his stupid fucking autobiography and so damn tedious in The Fatal Shore, and yet so punchy in his art criticism, like a lighthouse beacon punching its way through the fog. Seriously, I get physical pleasure from beast sentences like this one:

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.

Obviously I love it so much because I agree. And then, I've never seen a single work by Damien Hirst whose spirit couldn't be encapsulated in 30 words or less, and if you can do that, what the hell is the point of appreciating that it has been brought into existence as an object? Especially when it has no merit as a craft or technique. I can't stand the notion it, Koon's shit, or anything, for that matter, has some intrinsic value merely because it reflects the spirit of the age. You know what else does? Events. Beliefs. Conclusions. Traffic jams. Silicone spatulas. Words. The problem is you can't pretend those are art and sell them to fuckwits for 50 million a pop, though I'm sure some Hirst-esque cunt will have a go with the spatula, given enough time. Pack of parasitic whores.

The thing is with Hirst, I get the sense his brain doesn't work well enough to use words instead of uberobvious symbols he can hire people to create for him. He responded to Hughes' criticism by calling it Luddite, which actually made me laugh out loud. I know Luddite and Philistine both sound clever, but that doesn't make them mean the same thing. How exactly is it that Hughes would like to smash the industrial machinery of the modern world, you stupid bourgeios fucker? Unless, of course, you're pointing out that your own activities are not art, but industrial machinery - much like an HP printer that provides a clear but annoyingly useless metaphor for the modern rhythm of existence by jamming all the fucking time. Which begs the 50 million dollar question . . .

Cholera, the musical

Hell of a pisser this morning, and I'm blaming it on the combination of reading the first couple of chapters of Mosquito Coast, the shitfight at work, and this ludicrous lipstick flap in the States. Let me start with the lipstick.

On leaving North America, and meeting lots of lovely yankee expatriates who've become good friends, and being constantly mistaken for a yank myself, talking like a yankee and working at a yankee company as I do, I've struggled against the widespread European notion that the United States is a nation of fucking retards. And you know what, it has been a struggle. Especially lately, speaking to Americans at work whilst in the company of Europeans, and hearing these Americans are satisfied about the way things are going in Iraq now post-surge when those poor fucking people are getting cholera - cholera! That's a sign of things going well? Holy fucking shit! What the fuck is the matter with you? Oh Lord, the depth of Your mercy, patience and mystery that You suffer such coldblooded idiocy to blight the face of Your creation and to employ me at my present company! Fucking cholera! Holy fuck! Do you know what happens to a person when they get cholera? Fuck!

Anyways. You know what some more, lots of people are dangerously under-informed or misinformed about the horrible things their countries did or do abroad. The two most anti-American countres I've spent any length of time have been here and France. And in France, despite your typical asshole on the street having a better generalist education than most Anglos and a better understanding of international, well, everything, people generally had very little idea of their own country's relationship with Africa. And here - well, let's just say that they haven't quite got around to revamping their Congo museum yet - it remains an unironic trophy case touting how they rescued the darkies from the Arabs and brought civilization to the jungle - civilization that involved rape, murder, kidnapping and slavery on a truly staggering scale - fuck Belgium, in short. So, yeah. There you are. People are all idiotic assholes; Americans haven't cornered the market. Hence my struggle against European opinions on the intelligence and moral fiber of your typical American.

However. If this lipstick thing flies - and by this lipstick thing flying, I mean Republicans winning the next presidential election - I'm fucking done. I mean, it's right there. The stupid is right there. The lie is right there, the bullshit is right there, it's right fucking there. It couldn't be more obvious if John McCain whipped out his cock and started slapping you around the face with it. And if these unabashed crybaby liars are voted into office, I'm going to have to assume all those European ideas of Americans - too lazy, selfish and stupid to do anything but go with their ENORMOUS guts, like goldfish gorging themselves to death - are simply not worth struggling against anymore. It's right there.

Anyhoo. Moving on. Shitfights at work. One thing to say: my main problem is the disgust. Similar to my disgust at the prospect of the lipstick smear working, actually. Disgusted that the two men who are giving me grief at the moment despite having left records about how they obfuscated, fucked up - lied, in short, about the two different issues at hand have a) conveniently edited the truth out of their memories: b) no relationship with the truth, but function from moment to moment like sharks swimming through the sea, doing whatever seems right at the time, or, c) the theory that if they're loud and bitchy enough it won't matter that they're full of shit because I won't want to be confrontational. And you know what? I don't want to be confrontational. Confrontations give me headaches. They fill me with disgust. They make me feel like I'm lowering myself to some sort of adolescent level. I hate confrontation. But I'll fucking do it, and be all the more pissed off they've forced me to! This isn't a presidental election and I'm not a political party tip-toeing around, trying to get a black man elected in a racist country.

Anyways. Combine the political disgust with the professional disgust, throw in Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast, and you've got the shitty mood I'm in this morning. So far (50 pages in or so) the father, the 'hero' of the book, is the sort of insane I can feel pounding against the inside of my own chest when I get over-indignant, as I am at the moment, about all the rottenness in the world. Great, I think, cholera in Iraq, threats of pandemic stupidity in the most overarmed country in the world, and apparently I'm a fucking lunatic too. Perfect. That said, the book's pretty good so far, and I hadn't been a fan of Theroux's fiction up to the moment. He has a child's voice narrating and I think it was a good choice for him. When he uses adult narrative voices or perspectives he starts writing about sex, and his way of writing about sex is one I find to be both squicky and sterile. Like ultrasound gel.

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.

Your love is like false premises, false premises I don't wanna read

I'll send a nice new shiny 2 euro coin to every newspaper in Britain if they'll only stop writing about evolutionary psychology. Women don't love self-obsessed, lying psychopaths better than they love any other sort of man. Obviously, painfully obviously, self-obsessed, lying psychopaths seduce more women because they devote more time than normal men to seducing women, in an effort to re-enforce their insecure or unclear sense of self. And they'll lie about their circumstances and their intentions in aid of said seduction, over and over again with an indefinite series of patsy ladies because, as psychopaths, they feel no guilt about any hearts broken in this desperate quest to re-enforce their insecure, unclear sense of self.

Maybe Steve Connor, the writer, was trying to be jokey, which goes to show English people shouldn't try to be funny when they're sober. But what it comes off as is Steve Connor being one of those shitheads who think they're really, really nice, and don't understand why women reject them in favour of men who aren't really, really nice, when actually the problem is that Steve Connor is probably not really, really nice at all, and is in fact the sort of cunt who hates women for being more attracted to other men than to him. I've known a lot of really, really nice men, and they've had no problem getting chicks, often including me. I've written about this before and before and my feelings have not changed. God, I'm tired of unattractive men blaming their unattractiveness on women. Why can't they just blame themselves, like unattractive women do?

Speaking of unattractive women, what the fuck's the matter with French feminists? Do the indignantes protesting the outcome of a court case that was satisfactory to both parties really think that French women have it so good in terms of domestic non-violence (they don't), pay equity (they don't), political and professional glass ceilings (they don't), and the social right to leave their homes without spending a retarded amount of time and money dolling themselves up (they don't) that now the country's feminist class can relax and concentrate on informing private citizens what is and isn't an 'essential quality' in their now-undesirable marital contract? Motherfuck, those people piss me off. 'Fatwa against women's liberty' indeed. Go to my old working-class neighborhood and see if all the white women with white husbands and black eyes were the target of a fucking fatwa. Go get a fucking job, punks, and then tell me if the people paying you less and promoting you less than your male colleagues are Muslim. Holy fuck.

Excuse the pottymouth but my Mum is coming to visit for a few days, which is fantastic. But until Tuesday morning, I cannot pop a nasty word unless I accidentally hurt myself. I may explode. It may also mean no post Monday. To tide you over, here's an excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on the Muppet Show which I first saw, in reruns I suppose, when I was a young, young thing and which may have impacted my sexual persona more than I'm wholly comfortable with:



I remember how curious I was about the consequence of that towel slipping. If only I'd had Google Image search then - no, actually, I'm very pleased I didn't. Best to let the surprise build up awhile longer, until I could get my hands on one. Man, cock is awesome.