Fun with ethnic stereotypes

1. 6 am, in a dark kitchen. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Want coffee?

F-word: Yeah. 

Mistress La Spliffe: AHH! (backs away from stove) The flame is freaky high!

F-word: Yeah. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Maybe the Russians turned the gas back on. Maybe people all over Europe are burning their eyebrows off this morning.

F-word: Yeah. The Russian practical joke of the decade. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Hah!

F-word: (Eastern Promises-ly) You want gas? We'll give you gas, imperialist swine. Hah. Hah. Hah. What a gas. 

(Ah, but no.) 

2. The Family Guy is a shitty daisy chain of a series. I don't like it. But when it's dubbed into Italian (I Griffin) it's actually really funny, because the guy they have doing Peter's voice sounds like a complete fucking retard instead of like an American voice actor pretending to a complete fucking retard and obviously doing a much worse job than Dan Castellaneta. My cousin told me that's because he has a Roman accent. 

3. Seven years ago, I asked one of my Korean students how I, a pie-eyed Westerner with no understanding of anything Asian, could tell Korean people from Japanese people at a glance. Credit to her, she took the stupid question seriously, and considered for a moment before she said, "if they're ugly, they're Japanese."

It's not bad, it's good tucker

Yesterday we were going to go to Antwerp, get high, and look at Russian dolls. You know, that sentence is the answer to a bunch of questions about female preferences right there, notably, 'how do struggling artistic types (in this case the F-word) manage to score women who you'd think would be going for rich types because they have more resources and we are ruled by our Selfish Genes?' Here's one answer: the artistic types' aesthetic sense is such that they are not only willing to, but propose getting high and looking at Russian dolls. Squeeeee! Dolls! But we didn't go. We started in the wrong order, getting high before going to Antwerp, and then it just didn't roll out - I wanted a woodland ramble in the nearby Dudenpark, as well as to catch up on my own life here by cleaning out our shithole of an apartment a bit, and go for a lovely long grocery shop on the Parvis and the big Delhaize next to the Porte de Hal, and then to bake some bread, and then to do a little light social visiting.

So I or we did all that, and the soda bread I made was a fucking winner - extremely good. The first time I've made a heavy multigrain bread that really worked instead of seeming like a murder weapon. It will be hard to go back to yeasty breads now, particularly as this only took 10 minutes to prepare and 20 to bake. I worked off of this recipe but made some changes:

- we don't have any buttermilk so I used normal milk with a squirt of white vinegar stirred into it
- instead of using only oats, I used mostly oats and some rye flakes
- I used maple syrup instead of sugar
- instead of sprinking sesame seeds on top, I sprinkled cumin seeds, thinking in my height that they were caraway seeds. But the cumin was actually really fucking good.

This weekend was also notable for the quantity of Australian television that we watched. Not sure why. I think the F-word is getting nostalgic as the fucking stupid northern European winter sets in, and I'm probably just looking for a replacement for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, now that I don't care about the American election anymore. Three shows: Bush Mechanics, Bush Tucker Man, and The Chaser's War on Everything. Call me a stoner but I loved them all. Bush Tucker Man was probably my least favourite, not for the concept, but for the way the Steve-Irwinish Australianisms made the F-word cringe (one of them being the title of this post). He tried to tell me it would be like a Canadian television host using 'eh' at the end of every sentence and saying 'aboot' in an exagerrated fashion, but I'm hard pressed to see any problem with that.

Anyhoo. The Chaser's War on Everything is great. I can't compare it to much - it's a satirical show whose stunts are simultaneously cuter, edgier and, as the title suggests, more scattershot than one is used to from Canadian and American satirical shows. Here's their most famous stunt to date, and the one they only cleared up the legal trouble from earlier this year . . .

But the clear and absolute fucking winner was Bush Mechanics, which I'm tempted to call the best television show ever. I don't like using language enervating or prejudicial to our gay brethren and sethren, particularly after the brutality that's been done to them and their ability to swear their fucking lives away to their lovers in a bunch of American states, but what can I say, it seems my education has failed to provide me with an adequate simile beyond this one (yes, I'm blaming society): Bush Mechanics makes the protagonists of Pimp My Ride look like a bunch of fucking mincing fairy queens. Have a quick judge for yourself with this little teaser.

And on that note, I'm off for the final lesson before hopefully getting my provisional license . . .

Men aren't only good for fucking

I can come off as sexist from time to time because of my belief that the only thing that seperates us from other primates is the rhythm of female life, featuring as it does menopause - the cessation of childbirthing duties and the transformation of Woman into the repository of her group's acquired knowledge and artistic consciousness - and of my belief that if you segregated men from women, putting each group on an island by themselves, the men would universally revert to pan trog behaviours within a month, and women would carry on basically as usual except with a great deal more complaining about how there's no cock to be had.

So maybe I am sexist. Fine. But. From time to time boys say things that surprise me with my own stunning lack of insight. For example, about six years ago Bluebird and I were sitting around eating rösti and smoking his cigarettes, talking about nuclear holocaust, and I sez to Bluebird, I sez, 'nuclear armament is too dangerous because you saw how the Americans flew off the handle and blew up those Japanese cities to end that war quicker and that wasn't good, was it?' And he sez no, the Japanese had already lost, and the Americans blew up those Japanese cities to show the Soviets they could and would, and that was the rather hot beginning of the cold war.

'Oh,' I sez. Bluebird and I never saw eye to eye about much in terms of how the world works but trust a broken Swiss to tell the right time at least twice a day.

I'm far more accustomed to agreeing with the F-word about almost everything, but nonetheless I was a little shocked this weekend when we were talking about the upcoming American presidentials and the global economic downturn. 'I don't know if the Democrats can lose,' I sez to the F-word, I sez, 'they always win when them yanks are more paranoid about the economy than about the hostile world around them.'

'Yeah,' he sez, 'well, last May, when we listened to that show about Georgia, you said you never thought a teeny tiny country like that would risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO. And now four months before the presidentials, something made Georgians think it was okay to risk pissing off Russia by trying to reclaim a breakaway territory before getting into NATO. What made them think it'd be okay? I don't know, but they had 2,000 troops in Iraq. Their military is supplied through American contracts. They're a big recipient of American foreign aid. Why would they be stupid enough to risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO unless their biggest partner had told them it was okay? And why would their biggest partner have told them it was okay, when it so obviously wasn't, four months before an American presidential election wherein heretofore the main preoccupation of the electorate has been the economy?'

'Oh,' I sez. The F-word is probably about 4 more degrees paranoid than I am but let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened, would it?

Anyways, if the American media wants a break from breathlessly waiting for that lousy pork barrel fiend from Alaska with the fuckable husband to talk to them about her 'positions', and if it wants a break from desperately basing the slant of its reporting on unscientific opinion polling about how much people want to fuck each of the candidates, maybe they can look into why this bullshit is happening now. But any mention of how maybe, possibly, there was some American complicity in all this is always tied to some idea of Russians being conspiracy theorists - even in an article about how America is dumping a billion dollars on Georgia in the middle of its own economic meltdown. Fucking tossers. The fourth column has erectile dysfunction.

Ensorific

Living in Europe is great in a lot of ways. Even living in Belgium is great in a lot of ways. But you may have noticed by this point that Belgium also drives me apeshit. One way it drives me apeshit - a whole new way I discovered yesterday, during a trip to Oostende with Mum to get some fresh air - is its lack of appreciation for one of my favourites among its sons, James Ensor.

Oh sure. There's a bust up of him in the town there, and a twee little 'Ensorhuis' with reproductions of his work, and some of his paintings have been stuck into the Royal Gallery here in Brussels. But Oostende has not yet managed to pull its thumb out and re-establish its own modern art gallery - an idiocy that left us gawping at a post office in the downtown central square that my Crappy Planet had insisted was its new location as of 2007, and then gawping at a Tourist Information lady who said that since the plans for the new location had fell through there was no timetable or information about when those Ensors would be viewable again. They've been sold off to Russian oligarchs, I fucking know it. Bloody Belgians.

Anyways, here's 'Christ's Entry into Brussels', which the bloody Belgians sold off to some American twat who at least is showing it:

Anything Sarkozy can do Putin can do better, he can do anything better than him

You know how I thought that the marriage of my eeeeurgh-I'm-gross-crush Nicholas Sarkozy, to the aging professional-slut Terminator was the joke of the year? Well, it just got a little funnier. The Russian press is reporting that Vladimir Putin, an evil, evil man who's got more sex appeal than the entire French cabinet in his index finger (which, by-the-by, can be used to push a much better nuclear button than Sarkozy's - eat your heart out, Carla), has been divorced from his wife from some time, and that when he leaves the presidential office in June he will marry this woman.

That's right. A young, unethical, world champion gymnast. She can put her feet behind her head and then walk to the fridge to fetch you a beer like that. Anytime I need to enter an empathetic mental state to help myself understand the heterosexual men in my life, I will ponder her. And she looks like this:






It's too good. The morning just got a little better as I imagined Sarkozy crying himself to sleep. Every. Night. "Why did you settle, Nicholas? Why did you settle?" All I'm waiting for now is for Silvio Berlusconi to hook up with Paris Hilton, and Angela Merkel to dump that out-of-the-spotlight scientist for Nancy's hot dead husband from Weeds, or possibly Viggo Mortensen, and the circle will finally be squared.