"Adios" Translated: Mexican to Australian.

When the Australian PM gave departing Mexican businessman, Sol Trujillo, his fondly ethnic farewell, as I mentioned this morning, it was not, I repeat, NOT a case of racism, as Trujillo later claimed. OK it did recognize that the slimy little grease-cojone is a Mexican, but it was not denigrating him because of that fact. Trujillo (and many of the denizens of the dark heart of the American continent [expat Americans often excepted] but North and Middle mainly) just don't get the Australian national sense of humour. [Aside: this does not mean that Kath and Kim is funny. It is not. Same for Paul Hogan. Or Mel Gibson. In fact as soon as a comedian is famous or popular or goes to America, he or she isn't funny any more; it's axiomatic.]

Instead of being racially denigrating, the PM's jibe was denigrating because the lizard thinks he is some fucking Gordon Gecko-type, some Master of the Business Universe. As it turns out, he is merely an incompetent rip-off merchant who bled AUD$36million from our major telecommunications company in the form of salary and bonuses and rather than rescue said company, as promised, he left the once proud off-shot of the PMG (which my dad worked for in the 50's, until he died) even more bruised and battered, barely on its knees*. In fact, after only four years of confrontational mismanagement - "a ham-fisted, amateur-hour, antagonistic approach"- he has "all but killed Telstra." (Quotes from Adios, Amigo SMH.)

Mr Rudd's hilarious and ironically dismissive "Adios" shows that our man in Canberra has the Aussie sense of humour after all. For everybody in Australia, from Granny in the garden shed to little Johnny on the school-bus, knows exactly what he really meant:

"Fuck off you GREEDY little cunt, and NEVER EVER think of coming back to our great southern land, girt, as it is, by sea... Australia! Oi!"


E@L


* I know in the greater world of big business out there, this is considered the EPITOME of success, but by the terms of the Great Australia Moral Code (formerly aka Fair Go, Mate!) if you fuck something up, you are a loser no matter how rich you get from the deal.

E@L Correctly Divines Divine Motivation For "Wretched American"

Those close to Daw Suu Kyi refer to John Yettaw, the fucking religious nutter and alleged "illegal swimmer", who flippered his way into her home by one of the fetid swamps of Rangoon at night the other week and stayed illegally claiming to be tired, as "that wretched American".

His weird act has really thrown a spanner into the works of Aung San Suu Kyi's hopes for release and hopes for the Burmese military junta's easing of its violent repression of minorities and illegal jailing and torture and murder of those who have spoken out against its illegal rule, ever since its held onto power despite losing an election to Daw Suu Kyi's coalition party in the general election of 1990. [phew, remind me to rewrite this paragraph!]

Last Saturday, E@L broke the time barrier of the blogosphere by being the first to correctly refer to Yettaw as that "fucking religious nutter".

Harsh, some might have thought. Admittedly E@L was on a bit of a limbic rush of ex-Catholic vitriol there, but Vindication has arrived!

The UK Telegraph confirms that Yettaw believes he was on mission from God, having had "a vision" of her assassination by terrorists. Hallucination, dream, wank, are other words for his mental movie. He only wanted to warn her and the Government, which he claimed would be set-up as responsible for the killing.

E@L's opinion of Yettaw now?

Wretched fucking American religious nutter.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BTW Australians are not racist! When PM Rudd gave Mexican ex-Telstra boss carpet-bagger Sol (isn't that a curveza?) Trujillo his generous verbal "Adios" to complaints of Australia being "backwards" and "racist", it was merely sign of his familiarity with the second great language of the cheap labour markets, the Mexican (Philippines, Spanish) language to complement his fluency in Puttonghua, and if Mr Trujillo had the 睾丸 or cojones he would admit that.

E@L

You Didn't Really Believe Me Did You?

Somedays I just want to get in the lift, take control of the buttons and start playing freaky-deaky percussive guitar.



But don't we all...

Love, love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Fearless on my breath
Gentle impulsion
Shakes me, makes me lighter
Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath
Water is my eye
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire
Of a confession
Fearless on my breath
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath
Ooh ooh ooh
You're stumbling in the dark
Stumbling in the dark
Ooh ooh ooh

I never had the faintest IDEA what Liz Fraser and Massive Attack were singing with their malarkey, not one single word.

E@L

Last One Today I Swear

Singapore has its first case of Swine Flu. A 22 year old woman came in from New York and went through the Changi Airport temperature scanners and did not trigger them.

Those scanners, they never caught anyone with SARS either.

WASTE OF TIME, WASTE OF MONEY. Mere show.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You want to stop the spread of these bugs in Asia?

1: install soap dispensers in all toilets. (I am assuming you will use the toilet.)

2: USE the soap!

3: ensure toilet paper is available in all toilets

4: USE the toilet paper!

5: ensure PAPER TOWELS are available in all toilets (one inefficient hand blow-drier for 15 sinks is not going to do it. Even if you had 15, they take too long, when they work at all... Don't start me.)

6: USE the paper towels to properly dry your hands!

7: DO NOT touch the toilets doors or handles with WET HANDS!

8: DO NOT use the WET is CLEAN approach to personal hygiene, nor to bathroom maintenance. New paradigm: Wet is DIRTY - Dry is CLEAN. These bacteria THRIVE IN WATER!

9: Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue if you have to cough or sneeze. There is no need to wear a stupid expensive hi-tech mask if everyone is sensible... Um, OK better get a mask... (In HK during SARS time, I used to see people take off their expensive N95 mask in order to sneeze into the open air!)

10: Don't use your own chopsticks or utensils for a common plate at a restaurant. In HK this is strictly observed now, it quickly became entrenched etiquette but in Singapore, it was like SARS never happened.

11: Call off next week's training and go lie by the pool.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Types of Acceptable Swine Flu Mask For Asia (recycled jokes from SARS):

Pink Hello Kitty Mask - more effective than other cartoon characters, but only when pink.



Digital Mask: on right - stops gravel-size bacteria from entering respiratory tract




E@L

Because I Know You Won't Click If I Say Go HERE.

Go HERE.


E@L

You Have To Laugh

The interview with Christian (get-out-of-my-fucking-face) Bale in the Straits Jacket this morning had almost identical answers to the Esquire interview I read in PageOne yesterday lunch-time (obviously it was a group interview), except for (a) one described him as chronically serious, the other as schoolboyish and jovial, and b) this great exit line. If he didn't say it, he should have.

What about a comedy then?
"I already did one. It's called Amercian Psycho," he shot back. "If you have the right sense of humour, it's pretty funny."

Damn right it's funny!

I've always wanted to say that last line to some customers...

Laugh like you mean it.

~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, it's all about this:




E@L

p.s. We were doing Predator lines all through the golf game on Sunday. Pisser.

Quote Of The Night

VOUS? Talking to MOI?

"...monkeys with a gift of speech, a gift which brings us suffering, we are its minions. We belong to suffering; when we misbehave, it tightens its hold on us. We have its fingers always around our throats, which makes it difficult to talk; you have to be careful, if you want to be able to eat... The merest slip and you're strangled... Life's not worth living..."

"But there is still love, Bardamu!"

"Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride," I answered him.

L-F Céline, Journey To The End Of The Night

Books this poodle is attempting to love working his way through... Hit page 83 of the DFW, the first with real mathematical notation and, simple as the formula was, it was brick-wall, eyes glaze over time for E@L. It's just a total alien language, and also please remember that I did maths (poorly) in the 70s, and probably used a different way to do (and write) these things from the way most of you poodles of latter generations did, Wallace included.

However, by the end of this journey into the night of this exercise I hope to be able to explain lucidly why there are just as many whole numbers as there are squares of whole numbers even though there are fewer of them. Or the other way round. Or not. Something to do with "equals" not REALLY meaning "equals" anymore when it comes to infinity, as Galileo described it, then wisely moved on.

No wonder I'm as grumpy as Dr Destouches (above) without his pussy (Bébert) to stroke.

E@L

p.s. Why? You gotta have a hobby.

SM Goh Does Comedy Routine

To elaborate his variation of that classic Lee family joke, The Aristocrats (the first effort was made by PM Nathan last week when he amusingly admitted the Darwinian theory of evolution and that new "tools" were required to replace the current tools in Parliament), Senior Minister Goh took the spotlight at the Istana Open Mike Comedy Night on the weekend with this far-fetched routine:

CHANGES to Singapore's political system [sic - do not adjust your set, this is not a typo!] are in the works and on Sunday, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong spelt out three principles that will guide these amendments.

One, they must be fair to all political parties; two, they should result in a strong, effective Government after an election; and three, they must ensure diverse views are represented in Parliament. [Emphasis, what emphasis? mine]

Allegedly, they were rolling in the aisles. Some people were even turning in their graves.

In chilling ironic reflection of the Cult of Personality Stalin thing, at the end of his routine, the first person to start clapping was executed/bankrupted/air-conditioned.

Laugh, I really would like to.

E@L


p.s. someone recently asked me how I get after I've been in Singapore for a week or more. Do the last few posts answer that?

I Don't Understand Singaporean Law

If you're going have the death penalty, use it for people who really deserve it.

Like this fucking prick:

AN UNEMPLOYED man repeatedly punched the face and slammed the head of his girlfriend's three-year-old son against the door frame, causing him to suffer a head injury.

For three days, Firdaus Abdullah, 27, turned his rage on Muhammad Izzul Salihin Muhammad Farzid whenever the boy cried.

On the day he slammed the boy's head, he had also grabbed, shaken and bit his genitals. Two days earlier, he had forcefully hit the child's head with his fist when he kept crying and refused to let him towel dry him.

The boy was certified brain-dead on Jan 18 last year - four days after he was taken to KK Women's and Children's Hospital where he died. He was found with multiple injuries of varying ages on his face, head, trunk, limbs, abdomen, genitals and back. There was widespread bleeding in the eyes.

Firdaus was originally accused of murder, but was subsequently charged with causing grievous hurt and ill-treating the child between Jan 12 and 14 last year.

Result? Seven years and 12 strokes of the cane.

Only seven years? For having the mind of a gorilla? This is heart in your throat brutality... Hand me that fucking cane, I'll show the low-life scum what he deserves for treating a child like that... Monster.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whereas:

A 29-YEAR-OLD Ghanaian has been handed the mandatory death penalty for trafficking in 2.6kg of cannabis.

Chijioke Stephen Obioha was convicted and sentenced on Tuesday by the High Court, following a 21-day trial which stretched from February to September last year [21 days? Check your calendars? E@L]. Under Singapore's drug laws, the trafficking of more than 500g of cannabis attracts the mandatory death sentence.

On April 9, 2007, officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) trailed Obioha as he left his rented Choa Chu Kang flat in a taxi for a Geylang hotel.

Dead... for a coupla big bags of dope, about what your average Sydney 20-something suburbanite bong-monkey chuffs through in a 3-month or so.

Man, I could have used that dope for some really nice medicinal purposes!

Yes, yes, I know marijuana is not harmless, but neither is alcohol, neither is tobacco. Neither is that horrible Oxycontin.

Anyway, this cock up in the morally consistent application of the death penalty here in Singapore strikes me as just plain wrong. I am not a big revenge person, at least I've never considered myself to be (though I am human, and would no doubt conform to the patterns, just as you would, despite your protests), but the way mothers let step-fathers get away with this just so they can have someone to fuck... doesn't she take a great weft of the blame?

Shit, I'd hang the girlfriend, the child's mother, as well, the slut.

Hang it, I'd hang everybody, the judge included.

In fact I'd nuke the entire planet from outer space.

It's the only way to be sure.


E@L

Political Shit

"Sorry for the delay but that was a rather political shit," said E@L as he rejoined Matt in the golf buggy from the 16th hole comfort station at Horizontal Hills Golf Estate in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

"..." (Matt looks at E@L)

"..." (E@L looks at Matt)

Matt parked adjacent to the white tees and took his driver, tee and ball up the to the tee-box. After a practice swing he relented to the pressure of his curiosity, even though he knew he would regret it. He owed E@L for that tip about moving his body position relative to the ball at address. At least he wasn't hitting the ball so high in the air now and his slice had practically disappeared. For the moment.

"OK, I give up. What do you mean by "political shit?"

E@L was struggling to remove a tee from his "convenient" belt golf-ball unit and tee holder. The long tees had been digging into his flesh. He stared up the distant hyper-green fairway. Everything was so lush, so fertile, so fecund, so brimming with the malignant desire to overgrow. So over-fertilised and over-watered, for the sales-brochures. He saw how the reservoir cut in on the right, how a pair of bunkers guarded the left just little beyond his usual driving distance.

"Well, as you may have noticed on the last few holes, there was a lot of hot air around."

"Right," said Matt struggling to insert his long soft tee into the ground with sharp hard jabs, finally pushing slowly with a gentle advance for success.

"So, lots of hot air. Then: there's the compromise," explained E@L.

"Compromise?"

"Had to take it slow... couldn't push too hard or I'd meet resistance, had to back off."

"OK, understand. Don't want to pop a blood vessel." Matt set his ball on the tee. He'd had to push slowly to get his plastic tee into the firm ground of the tee-box, he understood. Then, as he stood to line up for his swing, the ball fell off. He replaced it.

"Correct. One," said E@L. "The shit that killed Elvis. Bad thing. So, hot air, compromise. But the clincher? For all that hard work and big build up, the outcome was not impressive at all. It was not substantial and it didn't really satisfy anybody's needs."

Matt took another practice swing. The rush of air flying past the ball upset it from the tee again. He ventured a small laugh. And another.

"Then," said E@L, "the amount of paperwork required was totally disproportionate with the actual achievement in the first place. It just never seemed to end. Reams of it. Two"

"Reams. Legal issues, no doubt," suggested Matt, still laughing a little bit after he replaced the ball again.

"Perhaps. And of course, finally, as is typical for most half-arsed political bungles, it will have to done again quite soon as there is still a lot of unfinished business up there, and of course to fix up the loopholes and clean up the dangley bits."

"Indeed, loopholes, " said Matt who, with a whoof of a giant swing, smashed his golf ball into a high slice. And they watched it arc gracefully into the middle of the reservoir. Keeersplash!

"Crikey, Matt" said E@L, calculating. "Your next stroke will be... five."

E@L hit his straight at the bunkers; it drew slightly and threatened to bounce on and in, but ended up just short. A perfect lie.


~~~~~~~~~~


Golf Report:

Horizon Hills - some quite good fun golfing here - not too long a course, not too challenging layout, but not boring either. Enjoyed the 9-lunch-9 format, though our teksi driver had to wait an extra 45 mins!

As it is a new course, the sand and clay underground can be a bit soft in spots, so they won't let you drive a buggy onto the fairway which was a nuisance as far as my foot-pain is concerned. So I tried (and often succeeded, accidentally) to hit near to the buggy path! My chipping let me down, but the greens are true, I only 3 putted twice. Two snowmen, and a toal of 106 - not having played for three months or so. I just need to play more, get back to threatening the 90-89 barrier.

The main problem with golfing in Malaysia is just getting through that bloody immigration queue at Johor Bahru! The APEC card doesn't help when you're in a teksi! (If we had our own [rental?]car we could come through at Tuas, the second bridge and checkpoint, and that would be much quicker.) It was a long day, changing taxis in JB, negotiating. We left at 8am returned by 6pm.

And it was not a cheap course, so in the end the day cost us S$200 each all up, meaning we could have played in an established Singapore club for that price (OK, excluding drinks and lunch) and had time left over to go shopping in Orchard Towers Rd in the afternoon! Next time!

BTW; note to certain friends (speaking of fecundity): if you have insist on having multiple children, don't expect to play too much golf either!

E@L

Move US Troops Out Of Afghanistan and Iraq - Invade Burma And Do Something Bloody Worthwhile

The people of Burma have been on edge for over a dozen years, expecting the US to invade and do their much much vaunted "Let's Restore Democracy" thing pretty much ever since Aung San Suu Kyi was first placed in detention. So much was made clear in Secret Histories : Finding George Orwell In a Burmese Teashop. Many consider this thinking was the cause behind the junta's move out of Rangoon into its new fortress-like governing building in the jungle.

As the current trial of Daw Suu Kyi drags on, and the junta rejects the recent ASEAN statement condemning the arrest and trial which apparently puts the "honor and the credibility" of the Burmese regime [...] "at stake", I wonder how many Nobel prize winners have to be illegally incarcerated before the western powers do anything?

I had this terrible premonition that even if she were to die in this stint in Insein prison currently, no-one would do anything.

~~~~~~~~~~~

But if there's a sniff of oil... if there's a sniff of blocking China'a access to the Arabian Gulf... if there's short-term mega-money in it... If there's some mega-politics in it...

~~~~~~~~~~~

One wonders, also just how many atom bombs have to be tested before something is done up about the "oh so ronery" Kim Jong Il and his merry band of anorexics up in bitter cold North Korea.

But hell, we don't even have to declare war as technically it's still ongoing (South Korea refused to sign the armistice). Mind you the reason we never finished it is because it was pretty much un-winnable in that terrain and weather and because you couldn't tell North K's from South K's in the light, let alone in the dark. And of course, kimchi makes everyone bullet-proof. Or maybe we've had enough episodes of M.A.S.H, thank you very much.

But, no we're going to keep fighting to prevent China running oil supply pipelines through from the Pakistan coast and keep Iraq going to allow Blackwater to honor their employment contracts with the mercenaries on their books.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why are we always fighting the wrong wars?

Or is that war just metamorphoses into something horrible no matter how well intentioned it was at the start.

Yeah, second thoughts, no invasion. I'd hate to see another My Lai in Mandalay.

E@L

Simplify Your Life

Start with the cables on your freaking desk, man.

Note the two iPod/iPhone connectors (one is going into the back of the iPod dock). Why? Because you can't charge the iPhone adequately from the USB hub of your laptop while you are doing things, like playing Sudoku, as the power out (particulalrly for the screen) is greater than the power in. So if you want to actually CHARGE the iPhone, you have either not use it while it is connected, or unplug it from the laptop and charge it seperately from a power outlet.

Can you buy an iPhone dock that takes power from the outlet AND lets you connect to your laptop? No, of course not, what the fuck are you thinking? That might be useful, that might be how people actually operate. I looked in the eStore last night, the closest thing was part of a mini-speaker set and it was on special too, for $120. Hey, just turf the no doubt crap speakers! But of course it didn't accept the iPhone 3G, only the iPod. Sigh.

So, yes, you noticed. Despite its frustrations, I'm back on the iPhone for the moment. The Nokia E71 is great but the freaking font is so small I can hardly read it. Man. Deaf, blind, aching feet, somebody shoot me. I took the iPhone in to Singtel to complain about the battery life and they tested it, found a corrupt file in my Contacts and said, "There you go!" How does a corrupt file drain battery power?

On the desktop (the real one, not on the laptop), notice also the two portable HDDs. I broke one by pushing the small USB plus into it upside down! Whoops! Had to buy a new case, but it doesn't support all the Seagate back-up functions, etc... It was only 80GB too, so I grabbed a 320GB one for like, nothing, and I will put all my songs from my iMac on it and make it my secondary iTunes library to share between the iMac and laptop when I travel. I got halfway with this once before, and decided just to use the iPod, remember?

Other cables are the network cable, USB hub cable (which has the wireless mouse and keyboard dongle otherwise there'd be even more cables), the USB cable to the fan of the laptop cooling stand's fan, the power jack for the E71, some headphones (using the fucking Sony pod things I bought in Bangkok for next-to-nothing after all that shite about fancy ones from America) connected to the iPod, speaker cable to the ALtec-LAnsing desktop speakers...

Sigh. Why do you care? Are you mad? Why am I telling this? Am I mad? Or am I just trying to distract myself?

Maybe I should just get on with those three presentations I have to give for the training week after next.

Ah, no, it's lunch-time. Down tools. Let's get sushi and pay bit-time!

E@L

Bigfoot Walkin' Blues

Bigfoot walks smoothly!

This stabilized multi-frame-gif version of the shakey-cam original makes the gait of the supposedly mythical creature seem remarkably un-remarkable.

Methinks man in gorilla suit not even pretending.

Cool!

E@L

Are YOU Talking To ME?

Taxi Driver: What is your final destination?
E@L: Sorry?
Taxi Driver: Where you want end up?
E@L: Huh? Harbourfront Centre. Not Vivo - Harbourfront.
Taxi Driver: Sure, OK...

~~~~~~~~~~~

Taxi Driver: How are you this morning, Mr Fare?
E@L: World-weary, cynical and misanthropic, not that you really care.
Taxi Driver (Nods. He really doesn't care.): Where are you from?
E@L: Geelong.
Taxi Driver: Jurong?
E@L: Australia
Taxi Driver : Ah, you not so far from home then.
E@L: No, not all, I suppose.
Taxi Driver : Australia, not so far to go…

The driver must have been looking in the mirror or whistfully dreaming of some empty imagined Outback vastness with Nicole Kidman raising an arm against the harsh sunlight and Hugh Jackman slapping the red-ochre dust out of his chaps with his Akubra, because when he turns his attention back forward there is an extremely harsh red traffic light unexpectedly ahead and a lane of stationary cars right in front! He brakes hard, throwing E@L forward in the seat, swerves the car into the lane on the right (which fortunately is free), tossing E@L to the left towards the door, and manages to pull up to a halt just before the pedestrian crossing. E@L's eyes were shut initially (ping, wide open!) so he didn't have a concept of their initial speed, but the force with which he was tossed forward as they decelerated told him that they were coming down from pretty much sub-light velocity.

E@L: ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Swear to Darwin, I put the responsibility for my entire transportation requirements into the hands of all of these strangers.

Everyday.

Taxi-drivers, bus-drivers, train-drivers, tram conductors, hot-air balloon operators, colleagues, colleagues in other countries, the drivers of colleagues in other countries, tuk-tuk drivers, pedi-cab or tricycle-taxi peddlers, and such a range of variously qualified pilots in some whacko countries with awful safety records.

I have to trust them. I have to.

And near misses. So many near misses. And I don't just mean being in the last plane to land at Schipol before it was closed (20mins from London - a record) and bumping down on one wheel at a 45degrees angle, or having to abort a landing as there was another plane on the runaway, I mean real FATE stuff, too.

I was once offered a job that would have involved flying to and around Fiji, to give basic ultrasound training on the islands. I was going to be doing a 50/50 share on the training schedule with my potential boss. Sadly, I turned down that lucrative (not financially!) job to take the one in HK that lead to this one.

My potential boss from that first job... you guessed it. He died in a plane crash in Fiji.

Sigh. Not that I believe in that Fate and Karma crap.

E@L

Can't We Just STOP?

Isn't there, like, enough paper in the world already that we have to destroy forest that has been used for the resettling of orangutans whose habitats are threatened elsewhere?

Can't we just fucking stop with all this expansion and destruction?



Story Here (Slightly weird page - AP copyrighted story, goes to a advertiser's frame. I tried to do the right thing to get the story into my blog as per their instructions, but as usual it screwed up on me and did not display as they claimed it would. I might try again later. Sigh.)

E@L

Where Was I Again?

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Lost in space.

E@L

Tai-Tai Quote Of The Day

"Oh no! I've lost two diamonds from my Swatch!" Jacquie.

~~~~~~~

E@L: No you haven't.
J: Yes, I HAVE! Look! From HERE and from HERE.
E@L: Diamonds?
J: ... Get back to your Sudoku, Mr Rain-Man.


E@L

Religious Nutter Dons Platypus Feet - Sets Human Race Back 2 Million Years

Yet another seditious post from E@L, striving to get himself kicked out of most countries in South East Asia before he has saved enough stashed enough away in a tax-shelter to retire!

~~~~~~~~~

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
  - Eric Hoffer

~~~~~~~~~~~

I have a great deal of religious tolerance. I tolerate most atheists, for example.

So long as they prove their dedication to their belief in the absence of any god, spirit, demon, faerie, whil-o-the-whisp or transcendent being whatsoever, by walking slowly over a bed of hot coals in my BBQ area while feverishly chanting, "This fucking burns like crap, this fucking burns like crap", then jumping into the pool, showing me the blistering flesh, sending me their skin transplant expenses and suing the fuck out of me afterward.

I also accept those atheists who tell me, when asked to commit to the above test, to fuck off, pour another glass of shiraz and put a thick slab of endangered species (cow) on the coals instead.

Agnostics I once tolerated, but only for personal reasons. I empathized with their lack of conviction. For, though life is too short to sit on the fence of not giving-a-fuck, I have been there, have the fence-post indentation in my arse to prove it. (Any excuse to get some hits to that video!)

But not any more. Those with even the tiniest, eensiest, weensiest bit of religion...? Metaphysical gamblers with that smug swagger of a Pascalian wager, accepted...? Fuck off!

"Religious nutters", is how I classify ANYONE WHO BELIEVES ANYTHING these days. I realize this may be a tad extreme in itself, but it's the only way to be sure, as James Cameron once had someone say.

Let's take some examples of E@L's current position.

~~~~~~~~

Statement: The universe is an immense, amazing, beautiful place: we respond to its Hubble images in awe and call its beauty the handiwork of God. The mechanism of it works so well, it rolls on like clockwork (at least on the Euclidian schoolboy level), someone must have designed it, right? and of course it must have started somehow. Let's call that start of things, that biggest of all big bangs, the coitus that created us - 'God'. Ergo, God, or something, was there before the universe began to will it/us all into existence.

E@L's Response: Let's call the men in white coats for you. (Similar to Einstein's response to a similar argument: "Yes the stars ARE pretty tonight.") Let's call it the set of sets that contain nothing. Does that set contain itself? The universe is Russell's paradox. The universe began when it began. Time began when the universe began. To say "before the universe began" is a contradiction.

Let's say there was nothing. Let's say there was God. Is there a difference? No. Let's not debate any further. You're an idiot. Fuck off.

~~~~~~~~~~

Statement: I think we need to acknowledge that without God there would be anarchy. People need rules, a source for authority, a standard for morality.


E@L's Response: There is no God and yet there is no* anarchy. QED. Fuck off. Is there ONE moral standard that holds good in every circumstance? Just ONE? Name it, please. (Was reading this in a Chekov story the other day - how all moral codes devolve into exceptions; exception after exception.)


* Well, not as much as you'd expect.
~~~~~~~~~~

Statement: I am afraid of death. I am suffering awfully from the piles/cancer/bad feet and I want peace after death. I want vengeance on those who wronged me, yet they have escaped the legal system - I want them to burn in hell forever for lying on their expense claims form. Plus I want to live forever - I want this consciousness, this me, this I, to be eternal and I want the entire 13 billions years and inestimable distances and unmeasurable masses of this universe to have been created specifically for me and for the other 143,999 white Anglo-Saxon humans who are saved or OK anybody who lived in the past half-million years or who are living now.

E@L's Response: Nope. Consume, procreate, shut-the-fuck-up, die. get eaten by worms.

That silence... for all those eons before your birth, contemplate it, it's coming back.

You humans are less than a blip in the radar of our Alturian Sentient Creature Detector. Ants, with their superior biomass*, however...


* Or was it worms?
~~~~~~~~~

Statement: A member of the Church Of the Latter Day Saints, an American named Yettaw, constructs some artificial platypus feet, straps himself to some empty plastic bottles and swims through a fetid swamp towards the house of Burmese political detainee, Aung San Suu Kyi, where he gets cramps, asks for Thai foot massage, camps overnight, pulls out a Bible, says some Mormonistic prayers which are of course wasted as all are Buddhists, and promptly is arrested and sent for severe and hopefully unrelenting torture in the notorious Insein prison in Yangon, thereby compromising a) the entire Burmese/Western reconciliation process in the lead up to the forthcoming elections, b) Aung San Suu Kyi's health, as her Doctor is arrested for being there at the same time, c) her life, due to her being arrested, with the possibility of being placed in said notorious Insein prison, where many political prisoners die due to either the said severe and unrelenting torture (often unjustified, unlike the case of Mr Yettaw) or due to just plain neglect of their standard health needs, or both.

Daw Suu is of course a devout Buddhist, like most Burmese and, rather than holding Mr Yettaw's head under the water of the fetid swamp with the hand-crafted sandal on one of her dainty feet until the bubbles stopped and then some, which is the correct American CIA procedure in such circumstances and permitted under their democratic reading of the Geneva Convention, she instead allowed him onto the grounds of her house out of the pure Christian* charity of her Buddhist upbringing, thereby fucking it up for everybody, herself mostly.

OK, maybe this was a set-up by the Burmese Junta to create an excuse to keep her locked up during the election process, or maybe it wasn't. The rumours are rife. But the point is, although Mr Yettaw is something of a "vulnerable" individual, maybe made susceptible to manipulation by his shocking typical (atypical? You just can’t tell anymore) American trailer-home background and recent emotional damage, the Mormons certainly have him now, as well, perhaps as the Burmese secret police.


E@L's Response: If Mr Yettaw did not believe in his version of God, none of this would have happened.

Before reading the above linked article I thought "Hey, the man is genuine religious nutter, not just a mildly perplexed person, trying to find harmony and reason in a world of contradiction and woe" (such as I have satirized above). If he had just stayed at home and prayed, all would have been well. If he been an atheist, he might have just read the New York Times and written something on his blog, as I have done.

As it stands, I still think he is a religious nutter.

Why did he fuck it up? What was his motivation?

He wanted to convert Aung San Suu Kyi to Mormonism. A woman who doesn't even believe in hi concept of God!

The fucking … oh shit… the fucking religious nutter!

Why did swim? Because he couldn't knock on her door, smile and ask, "Have you been talking to Jesus lately?" as quickly as he could before she told him to go fuck himself and slam the door sharply in his face.

What has he fucked up? The junta which some say had been slowly relaxing its throttling grip on the trachea of free speech since it killed all those monks last year, might have allowed something closer to free and fair elections in order to boost tourism in these harsh times, and after such results, Aung San Suu Kyi might have ridden down the streets of Yangon in triumph to her newly created theme-park and integrated resort! (Hey, as Singaporean support for the Junta expands, anything could happen.)

People would be able to talk freely in the tea-houses again. The walls of insane Insein prison would crumble, Burmese rice would once again feed the people of the fertile crescent, there would be joy in the streets rather than monkish killing and two-legged dogs could frighten touristic passers-by with their kangaroid lepping, unfettered and angry, once again.

I don’t know whose prayers have been answered by Mr Yattaw's efforts, but it certainly weren't those of us who wanted to seem some improvement in the situation in Burma and freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi!


* Anything good is "christian", by definition: it always irks me how this word has been twisted.
~~~~~~~~

Now you see why I am exhibiting zero (0, count 'em) tolerance for people who place the word God near their genuine and unalienable right to be spiritual and fuzzy brained. I am not denying them that - heck, I go quasi-existential all the time, just ask my boss...

It's just that if you start equating God with spirituality, you start to get the idea that you are right and that other people are wrong, and that's where the trouble starts.

I have a much easier way. Everyone is wrong.

And all Cretans are liars.


[Addendum: I'll let Pascal, whom I sorta abused earlier, have the last word:

"Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions"
-- Blaise Pascal]


E@L

Desperado

It never failed to amaze Bruce how much RNicky (not his real name), the manager at the infamous Eden Club reminded him of Antonio Banderas in Desperado. Well guess what was on TV the last night Bruce ventured into that infamous establishment? "Swear to God," the notorious atheist has written here as I further peruse his disc.

At least some scenes were on TV, being discussed in some local Thai TV show, maybe not the whole movie. (Later, tonight in fact, I attempted to cross reference the dates of Bruce's writings with the internet database of old TV schedules in Bangkok and... hey, that was a total waste of time. Surprise!)

~~~~~~~~~~~

(From The Chronicles Of Bruce)


"Thelma Hayek tiths man! Firm, rich, full, amaything," RNicky said.

"I expect nothing less from your ladies tonight!"

RNicky looks at me. "Maybe, maybe not. But look at thith!" RNicky has pulled off the rubber band that held back his hair and has let it fall forward, all floppy, black and greasy, over his face, over the top off of his black Eden Club t-shirt.

"Fuck yeah. Spitting image of Selma Hayek," chirtled moi.

"No, man! You teathing me! Antonio Banderath! Ith me! Theven yearth ago, you couldn't tell uth apart, man!"

I was in a difficult spot now becasue I was pretending he DIDN'T look like Banderas, but in fact he could've doubled for him, 5"7" height and all. I looked from the TV screen to RNicky and back. I looked back and forth between the a**l-sex bar-owner in Bangkok and the famous Spanish actor in Hollywood, and then forward and back again and really I was unable to tell them apart. They were absolutely identical.

"OK, OK, RNicky, you win. I'll admit Banderas *does* have some of your good looks, but only a fraction of your wit, charm and sense of humour!"

He slaps a palm against mine. "Bruthe, Bruthe, Bruthe! One of my betht cuthtomerth. But alwayth, the motht cheeky! I love you man! Stay healthy, yeah! Pick your girl good buddy. Thame prithe as alwayth. Hey man you want thome, you know, thome thigarette?"

"Special? No, no. I have to fly to Singapore tomorrow - they can detect it in your eyeballs man. They have this special scope at the airport these days. Says it's for SARS, but we know better, right?"

"Right!" laughs RNicky, who has no idea what I am talking about. SARS? Some new sort of drug?

I choose Moo, a transexual (I find out later) from Ayuthaya and the other side of the yellow line, and she chooses Arn from Isaan as her special friend. We duck out the back door (ironically), skip through some rain to the rear entrance (ironically) of the adjacent hostel. This is so stupid. Surely RNicky can rent some rooms from the pub next door, where they have a lift?

Will I live to see that day?

[Ironically - Ricky, fuck, Nicky, BOUGHT the pub next door and now has rights to the hotel rooms and the lift, or so I am told. Plus he makes a shitload on the pub-takings. Eden Club would sell pretty much zip alcohol. E@L]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And so I close the disc.

Some people may wonder why I only ever open the disc of Bruce's chronicles about Thailand when *I* also happen to be in Thailand... To those people I can only say...



I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel,
I was staring at my empty coffee cup...

Except in dreams, you're never really free...

(WZ- RIP)

E@L

The Pharmacologia Of Melancholy

Without my painkillers I am one grumpy toe-fucker.

With my painkillers I am another grumpy, if somewhat dull-witted, tired all the time, toe-fucker: a different person. Not necessary a better man either.

Well, actually it depends upon which painkillers we are talking about. The Cymbalta, which as an anti-depressant, was supposed to make me happy as a (pleasant) side-effect, didn't, as I wasn't on it long enough this time for that effect to kick in. The Oxycontin doped me seriously stupid, like I was smoking opium (without the enhanced social benefits) but it didn't come anywhere near stopping any pain, so I stopped it too. Sigh.

Now I am double dosing on Lyrica and getting weird dreams... and sore feet still. The Tramadol is pretty pathetic, but I need it too. Without it AND the Lyrica the pain is much more electric. So I take either Panadol or Ibuprofen now during the course of the day to reduce the ball-of-the-foot ache (which is seperate from the nerve pain). Ever the socialist, I alternate the latter two in order to spread the damage across my organ systems more equitably.

Then there is the absence of libido, which came on with the Cymbalta once I started on it again in Boracay, and that seems to have to been enhanced, both in effect and duration with the Oxycontin. It has yet to "lift", even after being off both medications several weeks now.

Surprisingly, this has had little negative effect on my mood. I feel a more rational creature if anything. I spend less time hunting up porn. I can joke with bar-girls, I don't get flustered, nothing is at stake.

Maybe I should spend more time writing. (Or reading. I've gone and bought up big on mathematical books for some reason. Books on the Infinite, and on Descartes. As well as some Fantasy stuff, inspired by my gambling buddy, Mercer Machine, who is blogging again every so often, thankfully, and not just as Gar The Merciless and his hilarious handbook for Evil Overlords.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The problem remains: my feet hurt and that single fact STILL is giving me the metaphorical, metaphysical, philosophical, melanchological shits.

"I can't even get comfortable." (Prince Blackadder, on the pyre of his auto-da-fe.)

I've spend $600 on drugs here in BKK tonight, but as there are no generics for Lyrica I am still pfilling pfucking Pfizer's coffers. This makes me grumpy as well, as that is only 2 months worth. My BP medication is much cheaper fortunately...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It just so happens that when my late mentor in all things Falstaffian, Hale-Sire Well-Met Mr Bruce, was taken over by his final courses of therapies, things were fading away for him as well. His legendary appetites were absent, thanks to his medications and treatments. Poor old sod. I recollect that there was a brief thing he wrote during one of his more misanthropic stages. I'll see if I can find it on that disk he bequeathed to me...

(cue sounds of clicking and whirring as of someone opening a disk-drive ...)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(From: The Chronicles Of Bruce)


I step out from a rain burst and into a popular bar on Soi 4, to let the precipitation wear itself out, as it soon will do, wearily.

My medications have knocked me flat. I can’t drink. I can’t fuck. I have no desire to eat ever again after an atrocious spaghetti bolognaise a friend recommended.

There is someone at each table, but they are girlie-tables, these are girls looking for men tonight, to cadge drinks from. I am supposed to chat in pigeon-Thai with some of these girls for the evening, get myself pissed, buy the girls lots of drinks, maybe pay the bar-fine and take one of them home and attempt to have several episodes of sex with her. But I have zero libido. Zero. I haven’t had an erection in months.

The table I allow myself to be led towards has girls of different morphologies on two of the stools. I am offered a free stool, which I accept. I order a Coke Light, place my blue bag of cheap drugs and pirate DVDs on the barrel-top table. The girls look at me. Coke? I tell them I am gay. They introduce themselves. Nem, from Isaan. Noo, from Krung Thep (Bang Kok)

So, I look at these girls. Really look at them. Why would, in normal circumstances, I choose one girl over the other, I ask myself.

What code of DNA has so altered the way the framework of their bones has been constructed and wrapped the supported connective tissues around it to make Nem preferable to me over Noo, or vice versa? Why would the distinguishing structural distributions of meat, fat and hair make me want to deposit my drug-depleted sperm in this one's vaginal mucosal folds and not that one's?

For the miserable, nearly-ended life of me, I can't see it. And I know that should my desires have been functioning, even stupider consequences would ensue. Not only would I prefer one over the other, I would gain the potential to grow possessive of my selection! I could become jealous!

It can't be beauty, for none of them are classically attractive. No Golden Mean in those far too wide apart eyes, those much too high cheek-bones, that wider than natural mouth.

I sip my Coke Light and continue to joke about being gay to explain my lack of interest. They seem to know of course that I am kidding them, but the conversation is by its nature, limited. Language is of little use. Gesture. Facial expression. Body position. These are the words.

I cover my glass. "I no truss you. Put ya-ba in coke, rape me!" Nem smiles, pulls a face that reveals her small teeth. Nem's mouth is smaller but her lips are very thick, with a bee-stung sensuality. Noo's teeth, in contrast are too numerous and large for her already large mouth. Noo has breasts. Nem has none. I don’t care. Somebody might find this interesting.

A retrograde wave of bolgnaise sauce builds in my stomach. Nausea, my drugs, when will it end? The meal threatens to rise up and this of course interrupts the downward spiral of my thought process. No more pessimistic philosophizing tonight.

I hold up my hand to plead for forgiveness. I call for my bill, tip the disappointed girls a disappointing 20Bht and leave for my hotel.

The rain has ceased.

~~~~~~~~~~~

But still it falls.

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L

Oh........... Fuck!

E@L's days as a beer-slurping, overly-lush-golf-course playing, high-cash-flow, tax-dodging, Philippino-village-supporting, neo-colonial sex-tourist days might be drawing to a dramatic and abrupt close...

Hasty and superficial reading of some missives from a bunch of genuine hard-line, right-winger, tax-dodging, wine-swilling good buddies of his are a bit scary.

Those bastard, commie, lefto, pinko, moralistic, anti-fair-go-ripping-off-the-3rd-world socialists in the Australian Socialissimo (Che/Mao) Rudd Government are allegedly ramping things up to make us Expats (sending shitloads of cash home, supporting the economy) pay our Australian tax equivalence for monies earned overseas, even though we live our life entirely overseas...

Just like those poor Yankie bastards have to do, even to the point of their school fee reimbursements and their meager housing allowances for those villae in Napier Rd.

Time for E@L to consider re-establishing that shelf company in Hong Kong (which currently doesn't have a tax agreement with Australia, whereas Singapore does, believe it or not)!

Of course, sober (SOBER!!??) re-reading of the background documents indicates that (at the moment) such proposals only apply to Australian RESIDENTS temporarily living overseas, not to those of us who have flown the shit-soiled coop of nascent violence, petty small-mindedness ["In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness..."]* and still rampant and exuberant 19th century style racism, and who are flirting instead with relative permanence (for of what can we ever be sure?) in a bargain golf-side 8 room residence by the turquoise-tinted sewage effluents at some dodgy Phuket marina, 51% owned (but 0% capitalized) by someone who claims (yeah, right!) to be married to us, un-like the last one, who didn't even bother to pretend.

~~~~~~~~~

Ah, isn't it refreshing how easily global xenophobia replaces one's subdued anti-nationalism** then morphs into a general misanthropy, freeing one's mind from the specific reminiscences of one's personal misogyny. Not.

E@L

(Yes, btw, my feet are hurting and the Bangkok restaurant I wanted to go into for dinner tonight wouldn't serve me as it was 9:40 and they close [hands crossed at the wrist] at 10. Fuckers, no wonder the tourist numbers are down. Or is that the murders and violent demonstrations of the last few months?)


* "In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves." Patrick White

Stretch Thin, Live Long and Prosper

After standing for the King and sitting for Star Trek I can tell you it all doesn't make any fucking sense. Take a few self-referential gags, some horrendous science (you CAN change the laws'a physics Jim!), some good ole' American let's-bomb-the-gravity-machine-fuck-out-of-the-English-speaking-Alien-bad-guys and fuck whatever subtlety and morality-play ambiguity we might have tried to sneak into our science-fiction with the Battlestar Gallactica series (or the original Star Trek series!) and go for the cheap thrill, the short ride, the corny and superfluous CGI (WTF, with the ice-planet monsters - point thereof, Mr Plotman?). I think we should stop making single movies like this, where everything has to be rushed and used just once, and make more series like BSG, where we can stretch things out, make the most of all those props and sets... Hang on, weren't those escape pods used in about 250 other Star Trek War movies? Waste not!

Spoiler alert. (Oops that was for the above as well.)

It's stupid.

End Spoiler alert.

Big physics question. How can you contain, what? 400 gallons of thick gooey red liquid black-hole/worm-hole generator, which must have the essential nuclear density of several galaxies, in a glass container and not have yourself, your ship and the entire space-time continuum within cooee warp itself around said extremely high density matter like a giant 1980's computer animation going all toe-fucking berserk... And yet if you put (in a BIG syringe so it's, like, safely contained) just one tiny drop of the corn-syrup shit into the core of a planet (let alone into the fluff off a supernova's cappuccino) it implodes back into itself and creates a (or another in the possible case of a supernova) black hole?

Oops, missed that Spoiler alert thing!

~~~~~~~~~~~

I actually have a theoretical physics visualization problem (well, who doesn't?) about this entire worm-hole thing of Hawkins. (Was it Hawkins or Heinlein?) That warped Cartesian 2D map of the universe under the gravity field thing they churn out every so often on TV is supposed explain light bending around a star, like the sun at eclipse, like the way a billiard ball bends on cloth untrue, right? But it is just a metaphor, troops! The elevation plane distortion represents an increase in the density of the gravitational field caused by the mass of the adjacent planet or star (or blob of corn-syrup). It doesn't occur in just two dimensions, but, oh no, in three (3), count 'em! And the density actually advances towards an azimuthal point that is situated NOT somewhere down below, and NOT somewhere up above, as the metaphor (see pic) would have us visualize, but in the centre of the mass object itself; in the sun, in the planet or in the tiny blob of corn-syrup. (This concept of advancing toward a threshold or limit is very Zeno, to say nothing of Weierstrauss!) So there is no skate-boarding the half-pipes of worm-holes to new (or old - as these worm-holes are also time-holes) places in the universe for the Christmas hols kiddies, I'm sorry.


(But of course as I have no conceptual skills for visualising things beyond the eight dimension, it could be my fault for just NOT GETTING IT... Anyway, the waffle continues...)

This dimensional displacement would approach its threshold in the very convergent heart of the gravitational body, be it star, neutron star, black-hole or jar of red corn-syrup. There too would be further infinitesimally small loops of dimensional threads, folded mathematically back into themselves, like the shear forces on a planes wing-tips (depending upon the density of the gravitational field of course.) (But of course!!) String-theory is something about this, but OK my mind has way glazed over, as no doubt yours did many sentences ago...

~~~~~~~~~

Hey while we are all on this merry mind-meld...

In case you hadn't guessed from some of the above mathematobabble, I am reading (OK listening to) a book about Infinity called The Mystery Of The Aleph.. Never seems to fucking end. Ha ha. Must turn off LOOP on the iPod. (Have I mentioned all this?)

Listen. Poser of the logic of infinity.

If'n you took all of the infinite number of REAL numbers from the *complete* list of numbers between zero and one, it would be infinitely small set. Do I hear someone ask, why? Do I? No? Someone? Go on someone, ask. Sigh. OK, why? Because the infinite number of UNREAL numbers between zero and one is so uncomprehendingly infinitely large, that the removal of even that infinite number of REAL numbers would have no effect on its infinitude. (Or so I am led to believe. I think this is something that explains the red corn syrup in the above mentioned Star Trek movie.)

By the way, Dr Hilbert, your room is ready now.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Where were we? Star Trek. OK, the kid who plays the very young Kirk does a good job of aping Shatner's casual, arrogant slouching and lolling about in the Cap'n's chair, etc., but that's about it. Entertaining, yeah; stupid, yeah; hate yourself for liking it, yeah...

~~~~~~~~~~~

And I knew Chopper was a bit of a bad lad, but since when did he we want to fucking kill everyfuckingbody, eh? Harden the fuck up, young Spock!

[By the way, the mini-bio of Nero is wrong there on IMDB. Nero comes, not from an alternative future, but from the future that is the natural and real future, sequential to all the other Star Trek movies and TV shows. Because he has come back through the corn-syrup worm-hole and fucked things around, it is all the subsequent travels of the Starship Enterprise that will be in a new version of the present, and hence a new future will unfold, one presumably, where his planet will be saved (because the supernova hasn't happened yet, only 126+ years in the future and young Kirk now knows about it, thank to his mind meld with old Spock) and Nero won’t get angry and need to come back... "Hey Doc, my picture is faaaading!"]

Oh fuck! Can we do that Spoiler alert thing restrospectively again?

~~~~~~~~~~

However, after watching the trailer tonight I wanna see the new Terminator Salvation movie, because that is one hot looking show! And I know Arnie won't let me down! He's in it, right? I think they should stop making stupid TV series like The Sarah Jessica Parker Chronicles, and just make more Terminator movies!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Aw fuck I'm sick of this playing with this scatterbrained post already, I'm putting it up, typods (my new computer!), stupidities and all.

E@L

Alive But Busy

The numbers in E@L's life:


Draft 4 of a 30 min presentation, due to be presented in 12 hours to 30 docs using 32 slides culled from 5 other similar presentations and 3 onlines pdfs, with 1 stolen competition company's video (to show how we should be doing it, but aren't). Saved 20 minutes ago.

Draft 247 of 400 word cover note for a letter to potentially 12,000 docs. (Made that last number up, but it is for international distribution). Emailed 2 hours ago.

Draught under door blocking 2 nostrils. Breathing through open mouth last 3 hours.

E71, $595, 3 days ago.

1, to my sister in Australia.

About 45 minutes, but I used a local SIM card.

A 500Bht card.

Can't find the card - wouldn't publish it on my blog anyway.

1115, 1 day ago, for 6 nights.

9am. (11:47pm, thanks for asking.)

7:30am, with 5 min snooze.

763954128
541628397
298731654
935268741
612497583
875413269
429375816
386129475
157846932 completed in about 45 miniutes.

~~~~~~~~~

Ooops, this seems to have morphed into something of a questionnaire sans questions in a rather light-hearted Ballardian tone. Sorry about that. Or am I? Only sorry that I am too tired to continue the fun until I find something nasty and dystopian with which to end it...

Sigh. No imagination, see? Night.

E@L

Excuse Me...

iMac Help Desk? Great. Just one quick question. You see, I've only been using computers for 24 years pretty much non-stop, so I am probably still new to some features.

I've got this picture file, right? I've modified it, right? I want to save this new version, the one I've modified, under a new name, OK?, so that I can find it again later (in the same directory by default would be great!), so that it is separate and distinct from the original version, ha ha... That way I can, like, use the new one in another application without confusing the two.

I don't want to EXPORT it with some 450 options (including my passport number and a letter from my 5th-grade teacher).

It don't to create a new PROJECT.

I don't want to hide it some VAULT.

I don't want to make a new BOOK.

I don't want to OUTPUT it anywhere.

I just want to change the name of the picture to a new name (without changing the name of the the original picture!)

How hard can it be?

Yes, you're right. Very hard sometimes.

What? I need to go to some iMac Beginners Course and/or have a new chip implanted and/or totally quite kidding myself that this is fun?

OK, thanks for your help.

No, YOU have a nice day, right there in Bangalore! How's the cricket?

Really? Is it? Well, not in Lahore, not for a while no, I suppose not! Yes... Yes... Hello? For how many? Go on, so fast? The man is a legend, a legend! Well, actually it WAS a rhetorical question, but I appreciate the run-rate statistics nevertheless. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry? I'm single. Sorry? My personal number?

~~~~~~~~~~

It seems, with a Mac, using Aperture as I am trying to do (why???? because a Mac is good for gwaffics some idiot told me thirty years ago), that this "Save As..." thing is not an option the table-tennis playing floppy-haired business-casual designer-freaks who got $50million bucks for choosing the color scheme on the iMAc (white) had ever market-envisioned as being a potential-rich, protocol-maximised, profit-generating, tool-feature, latte-muffin, penis-subsistute, cocaine-addiction, word-substitution thing they had even considered...

All I am saying is, the simplest thing... Where the fuck is "Save As..."

Or even something that even resembles "Save As..."

Sigh...

~~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile in Kiddies Room of the E@L House of Horrors, playing 2 (two) games of Sudoku on the iPhone exhausts its battery.

E@L

(Less Is) More On Bicycle Seats

Thanks to JP for directing E@L in this direction.

Using No-nose (Noseless) Bicycle Saddles to Prevent Genital Numbness and Sexual Dysfunction


Over 40,000 workers in public safety occupations ride bicycles as part of their job. They include police officers, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and security staff who patrol by bicycle. Anecdotal reports from bicyclists had indicated that genital numbness, erectile dysfunction, and impotence are a concern.

The traditional bicycle saddle has a narrow nose or horn that protrudes under the groin as the cyclist straddles the bicycle. Ideally, the weight of the cyclist supported on the saddle should be under the pelvic sit bones. However, 25% or more of the body weight is supported where the groin contacts the saddle nose. This percentage greatly increases as the cyclist leans forward in more aerodynamic positions. Bearing weight on this region of the saddle compresses the nerves and arteries in the groin. These nerves and arteries run through the groin between the sit bones to the genitals. Research has shown that pressure on these nerves and arteries over time may lead to a loss of sensation and a decrease in blood supply to the genitals. This can contribute to the sexual and reproductive health effects that have been reported with bicycling.

From the CDC National Institute For Occupational Safety And Health Science Blog.

Download the pdf so you can print it out and shove it under the nose of the snooty bike-shop owner who said, "No, we don't stock those fancy saddles here, not much call for that sort of esoteric stuff here..." (Read: We're in Singapore, we don't think out of the marketing box.")

~~~~~~~~~~

Anyway....

I mean how uncanny and jumping with spooky mystic weird synchronicity is all that! E@L posts about weird bicycle seats because he gets a sore bum when he rides on normal ones, and all of a sudden President Obama releases a $700bn rescue package for his buddies with sore balls from sitting on slightly worn Aeron chairs in their Wall Street board-rooms...

Man, E@L does have his finger on the pulse of the balls of the men in power, or what!


E@L

[link fixed]

Do You Like Genting? I've Never Gented!

E@L is going to persist with this "joke" until someone laughs.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Genting Highlands Malaysia is where Kafka and E@L went for their holidays...

~~~~~~~~~~~

"Must take leeceet to counter for bus travel agency len you alive at hotel," said the helpful travel agency girl to E@L and K as they sat in the exclusive front seats of the Platinum bus.

"Kokay," said K with his thick Polish accent. His deep-set eyes and dark floppy hair seem attractive to the girls despite his gaunt, bony frame. E@L's high round eyebrows fool nobody.

Up the high hill, in the chill, they dragged their bags to the crowded desk of the bus travel agency travel counter and pushed through the queue, pretending to be lost so that they could ask if we were in the right place and therefore jump past those waiting in line.

"You in long place," the girl said, leering into K's eyes and twirling her pen suggestively. "Must be hotel check-in. Preese, go up to there." She pointed into the mist-swathed heights of the First World Hotel where the howling winds tossed newly formed clouds across the car-parks and the covered walk-ways. Hundreds of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian tourists dragged their baggage back and forth between the counters and queues, their copious and essential but always inadequate paperwork desperately clutched in chilled hands. The longer queues, those to important counters in the bus stations and in the hotel(s) lobby(ies) were routed into short paths by means of red bands staggered on short chromium poles. Baggage stations with chaotic queue-less crowds took bags and gave back a coupon with a number on it.

They dumped their bags first.

K and E@L then fought against the random statistics of the crowds (as they would later against the fall of cards) to find a path to the right counter at the right hotel. Again they used the Slightly Lost Expression paradigm (one they would try later on, against the rumour of hookers) to jump those queues that led to the allocation of numbers for the selection of desks at which be assessed for the possibility of being checked-in today.

The lady sat silently for a minute, reviewing K's documents, turning them over once, twice, a third time as if there was another, secret side with even more redundant stuff written on it.

"You must take this not to here," she said. She lent forward, towards K, as if trying to smell his after-shave. Man, the power of floppy hair, E@L thought.

"Must to Bus Travel Counter. Back Starbuck," she indicated with the wad of papers.

Again, only in reverse, K and E@L fought their way out of the hotel against sea of oncoming tourists and their kids, past the Starbucks, past the Strawberry Tea shop, past the Monkey-Brain sushi stand. Just where the crowd was thickest and noisiest, K turned into a room that E@L had not noticed. A man sat at a desk alone. He, like the others, had a machine that produced tickets with numbers. But this room was silent, somehow it existed between the walls of the other rooms, yet was quite spacious, if forgotten. The room had many seats but they were all empty. K showed the man their paperwork. He quickly assessed it, stamped three of the pages and pressed a button on his machine which printed out a piece of paper with the number 10047 on it.

"Come back, 2 o'crock," he said to K, handing him the freshly printed page.

After 3 hours, it was 2 o'clock, and the sign over the counter said, "Now Serving 11077 and when they returned to the room K said to E@L, "Where is your passport?" He would need it to prove he was who he said he was in order to sleep in his room. It was in his luggage, E@L said, back at the hotel. He hurried back to the hotel where the baggage was, with the coupon with the number on it from the chaotic baggage men. He rescued his passport easily enough. Many of the people who had left their luggage had already come to retrieve it as their buses had been scheduled already.

Going in both directions, back and forth past the the Starbucks, etc... E@L had to fight again against the crowd; it was the same TYPE of crowd, it was the same TYPE of fight - their random acts of acceleration and deceleration, their directional drift, their moments of indecision and lives of quiet desperation, their whims of hunger or thirst prompted by deftly positioned marketing ploys, their fears of the fleetingness of things and the needs to capture the moment digitally in blurry, overly bright ghost images or chiaroscuro moody silhouettes of loved ones partially obscured by indifferent people passing between the camera and the focused object, those who have no time for this shit, such as E@L, who was in a fucking hurry if you don't fucking mind!.

K had let several people go past him in the queue while he waited for the out of breath E@L to return. Which, eventually, sooner rather than later, he did.

"No need see passport," said the man behind the counter as E@L plonked his on the desk. "See yours, is OK," he said to the mysteriously charming K. Everything was in K's name. That was true...

E@L put his head in his hands...

He took a deep breathe...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And the time in the internet cafe expired...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rumours that if you cut and paste Expatatlarge.blogspot.com into Google Translate it just gives you "blah blah blah in German", or "blah blah blah in French" are NOT to be believed, OK!

E@L

Prostate Punishment Paradigm Must Not Persist! E@L Buys A Bicycle Seat

Q (Questioner A): E@L, what, in your traditionally humble opinion, is wrong with bicycle riding?

A: Not to put too fine a point on it Regis, the crux of bicycle riding evils, the bit that it all comes down to eventually, where all the weight is borne, as it were, is, in fact, the "taint".

Q (Questioner A): The what?
Q:(Questioner B): The "taint"?

A: Yes, Britney, I am referring to that delicate piece of not quite public flesh (except in your case, ha ha) situated between the Fun Park and the Sewer Outlet, as we used to say in our Primary School Religion Class when disproving the existence of God using our favorite "The Design Of The Human Body Is Counter-Intuitive" argument. The medical term for this piece of skin, which I learned later when cramming for an "Enema 101" exam, is the perineum. I think I've already told you, it's one of the few areas of the body which faces downward in standard human Anatomical Position.

In the male's body, it is the only external area directly over the prostate gland, which can be found using either very long needles (I used to do this for a living!) or more commonly, the pointy-pointy end of the typical bicycle seat. In the female, we are talking about the longer and much less fun way to stimulate the G-spot, but in my particulars, having been born a man, that's not so important.

Now, my Primary Issue with the riding of bicycle is that bicycle seats manufacturers have been operating under this pointy-pointy prostate paradigm for centuries, ever since Latvian proctologist Sir Rectmund Diretribe patented his first external prostate rupturing device, which he, in a fit of remarkable prescience, called The Bicycles, in 1789, after writing his Goethian masterpiece, The Originals of Young Werther's Sorrows - The Two Cycles Of Prostatism!. I do not use the word prescience lightly either, because it was a PRE-scientific article, in the sense that he had fortunately not tested his prostate machine in a randomised control trial of double blinded volunteers who had overdosed on sugar tablets. I do not use the word fortunately lightly either because blind diabetics are not the most appropriate users of the bicycle even in modern day Singapore, as there are no specific cycle lanes on any of the roads you'd need to ride on to go anywhere useful, however Dr Rectitude certainly made recta full of money when recalcitrant patients reversed the prostate probe section of his device through 90°, seated themselves upon it and fled from the mad doctor's obsessive reproductive theories and then sold the Bicycles on as a singularly successful method of transportation, creating a demand which the good Dr, ever the keen observer of market trends, capitalized on quickly with his efficient and loyal factories in Huangzhou, China.

Q (either one): So?

A: I bought a bike today, but I really hate traditional bicycle seats as they cause my arse to ache something chronic. So I looked up new designs on the internet and ordered one. It will be delivered in two weeks. In the meantime I'll try turning the conventional seat 180° around, point the prostate intruder out the back and make do.

So instead of the typical post-ride pointy-pointy prostate ritual - an anointy-nointy thing - I will be comfortable and relaxed in the pub, regaling all keen listeners with risible tales of my prowess and bicycular dexterity, of aunties and uncles sent scattering, of kiddies screaming in fear and/or amusement, of how many kilometres I journeyed and how many litres of fluid supplement I eschewed, of the sweat-absorbance characteristics of various brands of padded-crotch lycra shorts, etc... In short becoming a typical, totally boring Singapore expat loser with nothing else to do on the weekend except invade East Coast Park or Paluan Ubin. Which is precisely what I WILL be doing! It's matter of whether I'll really be loving it, or gritting my teeth and frowning like a true cynic the whole time I enjoy myself...

Q: Which freaky, weird, unconventional, have-to-be-different seat did you buy, Mr Smarty Arse?

A: I sent off an order for "The Seat" from Comfort Seat, which is a pretty much normal seat with a fairly wide arse support area but with the front bit, the prostrate puncher, just chopped off.



I've also made enquiries about having this one sent across as well, the Spiderflex Seat, a bifid affair, consisting of two pads for the ischial bones and that's it! That's the one I really want.




Really, you only need to carry your weight on your buttocks (the ischial tuberosities) if you're riding at anything less than Olympic level. Think about it, you don’t rest your weight on your symphysis pubis when you sit anywhere else except when you get your fat glutes onto a freaking bike. It's just unnatural. It's just a meme, a long-standing fashion habit, it's a paradigm.

In fact it's an entrenched, fucking painful paradigm… We really need a Thomas Kuhn to come along and have people STOP kicking themselves up the bum when they ride bicycles with these horrible unnecessary prostate/G-spot killers...

E@L

(And Knobby, I am sure you'll have some counter argument to this.)

Frightening Disorders Of The Arse

Another frightening disorder of the mind involves suspending your entire bodyweight onto a small projectile of rubberised material placed between the creases of your already tenderised perineum (a period of gym cycle abuse) for several hours in the freaking hot noon-day sun of an equatorial island and traversing vasts tracts of stupidity on two circular momentum devices of independent directional goals in search of lunch somewhere at the end of a crowded insanity.

Freaking 2 hours and 20kms (we had children with us) or so, with a bicycle seat trying to fuck me up the bum. We are calling this fun are we?

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.... (hysterical laughter until *cut*)

~~~~~~~~

Highpoint of the trip - I caught the 7 year old using my iPhone to sneak photos of her underpants. She thought this was hilarious. I could just imagine trying to explain THOSE photos to the Judge...

REAL highpoint of the trip - lunch at Cafe @ Changi. Very nice fish and chips, steak sandwiches.

OTHER real highpoint of the trip - the beer I had after gettting OFF the bike with the knowledge that I didn't have to get back ON!

E@L