It's that Belgium time of the year that makes me want to die, and will one day be something I look back on in such a way that will make whatever sun-soaked paradise I move to in a year or two seem that much more paradisaical. Dark. Frigid. Rainy. Infectious. Like an extremely untalented dirty whore. I have my first cold of the season - made it to October this year. Fuckin' great. At least it's now, before next week's driving lessons and TRIP TO FUCKIN' CANADA! Wheeeee!
Speaking of big dirty whores, check out this story about Italy's Equal Opportunities Minister. Sometimes there are just no words. It did get me thinking about what constitutes being a big dirty whore, though. Ask me a year ago and I would have said letting people fuck you for money. Okay. But what about Craiglist handjob artists who only let you come on their tits to help them pay their university tuition? Still whores, obviously. There's an orgasm some sad sack of a man has to pay money for in there somewhere. But what about people like Mara Carfagna, who sell men's mags photographs of their tits and to help 'readers' prep for dates with non-whores through a quick 18h30 rub-a-tug? How's that qualitatively different from being a Craigslist handjob artist, besides knowing you're not going to get pinkeye from any splashback? Well, it makes it one degree less scandalous when you get your ministership by sucking off your goddamn penis of a prime minister. Fuck, what a big dirty whore.
Oh, and here are some more words. You know what I hate the most about hypocritical, filthy Italian bitches like Carfagna, besides the unhygienic way they shit on other women? That they make the male gender look like a bunch of fucking useless morons when they get involved in a nice mutual exploitation sting with nasty cunts like Berlusconi. And nasty cunts aside, I love the male gender. They have sexual organs that compliment my own, and they can open jars really well, to name just two uniquely wonderful things about them. But now there'll be a generation of Italian girls who'll look at the self-described antifeminist their penis of a prime minister has chosen as an Equal Opportunities Minister, and that'll either make them think that men are too moronic to bother with, or that men are too moronic to have any relationship with except as credit card holders. And that will continue the Circle of Life that has become gender relationships in post-modern Italy - massive mutual disrespect. And then everybody will have equal opportunities to be miserable and unfulfilled in their emotional and sexual lives. Brav-fucking-a, Carfagna.
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martedì, settembre 30, 2008
domenica, settembre 21, 2008
They're all laughing at you because they're scared
Home again home again. It was hard to leave Marseille because after the conference ended, or rather after my patience ended and I did a runner, I fell deeply in love with the city.
I've never been so relieved in my life to do a runner, I think. You have to understand, and I consider it a problem beyond the credit crises and political brouhahas (but I'm being paid in euros and most of my savings aren't on the stock market), that our Kings of Industry are damnable cunts. They know some things are right and some things are wrong in moral terms, but they choose to do the wrong things. That can't be pointed out often enough. I think they're often presented as being the agents of the invisible hand of the market that really wants to help us all out . . . but the way the international financial system runs in terms of companies with publicly traded stocks is a deeply flawed one - very deeply, very fundamentally flawed.
In terms of my industry, that means a complete disregard for sustainability as anything but a half-hearted marketing tool, and even that wouldn't play any sort of part in their thoughts unless consumers weren't getting more clever about entire life-cycle, chain-of-custody issues (so you are making some sort of difference, angry people, just get angrier, and keep being angry). . . but of course the most illustrative example was the Yes Men prank re Dow Chemical and Bhopal. The text in the link is interesting for the omissions Routledge lawyers demanded, but for me the whole key to the story, the whole interest is here:
"We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of $2 billion on the Frankfurt exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day. Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow make its share price rebound by mailing out a more formal retraction on its behalf . . ."
I love the Yes Men. They do brilliant things. Seriously, Morgan Fucking Spurlock, you may be more famous but eat your heart out in terms of quality. That is, if your kitchen slavey vegan girlfriend will bend her principles enough to cook it for you they way you reckon women should.
Anyways. I did a runner from the conference and fell in love with Marseille because the final speech on Friday started sounding like a Yes Man prank, but I knew it wasn't as I'd heard the guy before at conferences. The level of contempt for consumers, for the people these companies rely on to keep the profitable, is just staggering, just repellent - I don't know if that's because the link is indirect or not but I'll tell you it even makes me miss the moral bankruptcy of television - at least television execs care what you think over time, even if they are willing to exploit the very worst parts of you.
Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how lovely Marseille was, and how lovely the sea kayaking was, and about how I reckon I'll have to sea kayak even in Australia despite the sharks because it's just so fucking awesome. But now I have to go to the office and do a monumental amount of work. Let's just say that part of Marseille faces west over the sea and the sunsets are tear-jerkingly magnificent from the promenade; when I arrived back in Brussels, happy to be heading home to the F-word but inestimably sulky to be away from the raawk that is Marseille and saw the sun setting over the repellent Gare de Midi, it was like some sort of covenant between me and the world that I would keep being able to see beautiful things.
I've never been so relieved in my life to do a runner, I think. You have to understand, and I consider it a problem beyond the credit crises and political brouhahas (but I'm being paid in euros and most of my savings aren't on the stock market), that our Kings of Industry are damnable cunts. They know some things are right and some things are wrong in moral terms, but they choose to do the wrong things. That can't be pointed out often enough. I think they're often presented as being the agents of the invisible hand of the market that really wants to help us all out . . . but the way the international financial system runs in terms of companies with publicly traded stocks is a deeply flawed one - very deeply, very fundamentally flawed.
In terms of my industry, that means a complete disregard for sustainability as anything but a half-hearted marketing tool, and even that wouldn't play any sort of part in their thoughts unless consumers weren't getting more clever about entire life-cycle, chain-of-custody issues (so you are making some sort of difference, angry people, just get angrier, and keep being angry). . . but of course the most illustrative example was the Yes Men prank re Dow Chemical and Bhopal. The text in the link is interesting for the omissions Routledge lawyers demanded, but for me the whole key to the story, the whole interest is here:
"We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of $2 billion on the Frankfurt exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day. Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow make its share price rebound by mailing out a more formal retraction on its behalf . . ."
I love the Yes Men. They do brilliant things. Seriously, Morgan Fucking Spurlock, you may be more famous but eat your heart out in terms of quality. That is, if your kitchen slavey vegan girlfriend will bend her principles enough to cook it for you they way you reckon women should.
Anyways. I did a runner from the conference and fell in love with Marseille because the final speech on Friday started sounding like a Yes Man prank, but I knew it wasn't as I'd heard the guy before at conferences. The level of contempt for consumers, for the people these companies rely on to keep the profitable, is just staggering, just repellent - I don't know if that's because the link is indirect or not but I'll tell you it even makes me miss the moral bankruptcy of television - at least television execs care what you think over time, even if they are willing to exploit the very worst parts of you.
Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how lovely Marseille was, and how lovely the sea kayaking was, and about how I reckon I'll have to sea kayak even in Australia despite the sharks because it's just so fucking awesome. But now I have to go to the office and do a monumental amount of work. Let's just say that part of Marseille faces west over the sea and the sunsets are tear-jerkingly magnificent from the promenade; when I arrived back in Brussels, happy to be heading home to the F-word but inestimably sulky to be away from the raawk that is Marseille and saw the sun setting over the repellent Gare de Midi, it was like some sort of covenant between me and the world that I would keep being able to see beautiful things.
martedì, settembre 16, 2008
Evil under the sun
To paraphrase the proverbial Irishman's foreplay, brace yourself, Marseille, I'm coming! Two days of the same event I attended last year that gave me my first glimpse of the way the rich and powerful tick pleasantly along. Looking forward not to it, per se, but to Marseille. I won't have a vast amount of time to explore the city, aside from where our event will be shuttled to - another series of beauty spots, judging from the brochure - because though I'm staying in town afterwards, it will be on the water for my first foray into sea kayaking. Fuck, I'm excited!
Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.
Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'
Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.
Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.
Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'
Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.
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