Metamorphosism

Happy birthday, Julian Merrow-Smith

It's Julian Merrow-Smith's birthday tomorrow, or today, or it was recently his birthday, depending on when you read this. Happy birthday, Julian. Julian is a painter, as you can see from his website. I have two of his paintings and chances are you don't, and won't for some time, because the New York Times gave him a nice write-up. To find the article, you must go to the "Multimedia" column on the right and click on "Currents", where there is currently a paragraph with something about 19^th century art.

I don't know how long this story will be available on-line, so here is a screen-shot:
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That is Julian on the bottom, two of his paintings on the top. Ruth, who knows Julian, has all the details here. Congratulations, Julian.

[Note: Apartment Therapy mentions him and gives this link for the NYT article, no idea how long that will last.]

Perspective

I was sitting on the toilet yesterday morning taking a crap when I heard two people outside running down the sidewalk yelling at each other. My first thought was to calculate the probability that it was another family drama, a husband (or wife) who for whatever reason decided that going after his (or her) wife (or husband) with a kitchen knife was his (or her) best option (as opposed to people catching runaway livestock or grandparent); and to examine the ethical implications for me, like is one required to help even when one is not yet finished on the john?

My second thought was how funny life is at times, how our world encompasses every scale and class of experience simultaneously, each superimposed on the other. Here was one person possibly having an unforgettable, life-changing experience, and just a few meters away someone was being chased down the street by a maniac.

Any ideas?

1. Anything out there so much better than Moveable Type 2.63 that it would be worth the trouble of changing over?
2. I'm sick of this site design but too lazy to do anything about it (and too busy) and too lazy to pay anyone else.

Orchestra I

So Beta signed me up for the orchestra. Or, rather, I was automatically signed up as a student at the music school (it's just a little amateur music school orchestra full, mostly, of kids and some adults) and Beta twisted my arm and said I had to try it this year.

So I said okay, thinking the concert was, I don't know, sometime way off, in another century. But it is in April, it now appears, which sounds far off but is in fact not too much more than a month from now.

The cello section had its first practice last weekend. There are seven celli. Two of the kids are children of friends. Two of the girls in the group are quite good, one of the boys is nearly as good, at least he can keep up. Another girl never gets yelled at, and two freckled boys appear to be worse than me, at least they kept getting upbraided and I didn't.

The way I see it, if all goes well I will learn all the parts and do okay. If things do not go well, I'll just sit in the back and fake it, as there are 6 other celli to take up the slack.

I realize, of course, that there are at least two little boys thinking the same thing, and perhaps one girl, but that leaves three, maybe four competent celli so no big worry, I imagine. Plus there are enough bass players to fill things out.

It is a real ass kicking experience, that I can tell you after a single practice of only the cello section. But I went into it without having practiced anything even once. All the notes I saw there I had seen for the first time. It was very much the holy shit this looked easier than it actually is experience.

The first practice involving, theoretically, the entire orchestra is next week. I can't wait.

Intention

There is the what do you want, and there is the breaking it down into smaller particles and placing them in bulleted lists on post-its and sticking them to your Filofax organizer and checking them off (or not) one by one.
But there is also the why do you want what you want in the first place that kicks your balls sometimes. The question of intention.
Goal: win the lottery.
Steps:

• dream numbers,
• go to store,
• buy lottery ticket.

But what do you intend to do with your lottery winnings? What will that achieve and why do you want that?

Or, goal: meditate and write in journal daily, every morning, say.
Steps:

• get up early,
• do other chores,
• meditate,
• journal.

But, again, why? Why does one sacrifice, say, forty-five minutes to an hour of sleep nearly daily for something that produces no tangible product other than volume after volume of nonsense (as some have called it) that the writer will never read and hopes no one else will either?

The intention turns out to be simple, so simple that it can be captured in a single sentence: one rises in the morning -- not an hour early, say, but only forty-five minutes early (for that extra bit of sleep, after a night of fitful dozage in which a cat scratched at the bedroom door until the spouse finally got up and did something (while one at first slept, and then pretended to sleep which said spouse claims to always be able to differentiate meaning said spouse chose to let one lie there) and went back to bed and then got up again when the cat scratched again and threw it out of the house completely, as one should have done in the first place, around 9.00 PM or so) -- and goes downstairs to let both cats back into the house and feed them and wash the mylar catfood envelopes prior to discarding them, after which guilt-free urination is possible, and then washes one's hands followed by heating tea water (after pouring old, allegedly calcified water out of kettle and adding fresh, presumably non-calcified water from the tap) and brewing coffee, which is then drunk while eating the new, healthful (according to the text on the package, which is oversized (the package, not the text, although the text is bright and bold) meaning it will not fit onto the cereal shelf in an upright position, but rather requires it be crammed in at a 45-degree angle among the other objects on that shelf) cereal and a blueberry-flavored "Frufru" (local dairy product similar to yogurt, but not yogurt, that one has always loved because the fruit is at the bottom and not stirred throughout the dairy product, just the way it always was in the good old days), or rather whatever the generic knockoff of Frufru is (because, ironically, the new improved Frufru now comes with the fruit pre-stirred while the generic knockoff still comes with it at the bottom), followed by a making of lunches for the other three family members (one cannot, for some reason, usually be arsed to make one's own lunch, resulting in lousy dietary behavior) and the decision to let someone else empty the clean dishes from the dishwasher and put them away because it would presumably be too noisy to do that so early in the morning while everyone else is still fast asleep; after this, one turns on a small light in the living room, makes oneself comfortable on the sofa and meditates, but only a few fitful minutes because, at first, one cannot decide whether to try some sort of Buddhist-style meditation (concentration on breathing?) or Transcendental Meditation^(TM) and then, after deciding, or not deciding but rather ending up sort of combining the two, one is distracted at first by the absence of the cat, where is the cat, he always jumps onto my lap when I'm meditating, and then by a quiet noise coming from the kitchen: the quiet, quiet sounds of someone sneaking around, the quietness of which tips one off to the probability that it is not one's spouse as said spouse is not the sneaking type, but rather one's youngest daughter, up now at, what time is it, check the watch, squint in the non-reading-glassed darkness, five-thirty AM, which is far too early for a child to be up on a schoolday when she normally doesn't have to get up until 7, so one gets up and talks to her sweetly and convinces her (already fully dressed for the day) to go back to bed, which she does, after which one gives up on meditating and goes upstairs to the office to write in one's journal, which happens for ten minutes, after which the door opens and aforementioned spouse puts her head inside the room and "good mornings" are exchanged and one shuts the journal, after finding a good place to stop, and joins spouse downstairs for breakfast and a listen to the news and performing various requested corrections to the lunches, such as making a third one (mentioned above, by mistake, but not actually really made until this point in the narrative) which requires that "bake them yourself" ciabattas be baked in the oven for 15 minutes, for which overly lengthy process one substitutes a few minutes toasting over the toaster (because someone else ate the rest of the lunch bread at some point) and writing something on the lunch bananas (this time leaving letters out, Hangman-style, because Hangman has become the family's new favorite game, although the kids are learning Scrabble now too, so that looks like it will soon rival Hangman for favorite family game), then showering, shaving, dressing, being rushed and hurried by spouse and eldest daughter, then criticized for not taking the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and putting them away and suggesting that the children help instead, then carrying a cello and harp out to the car and driving them to the music school to drop off for tonight's lessons so no one else has to do it, and backing out of the drive way, something like that, one's Filofax organizer covered with post-its slides off the dashboard and lands on one's lap, this distraction making driving difficult, and is in a sudden rage (triggered by the fact that no one else in the car thought it necessary to catch it, but mostly just because) picked up and dashed to the floor of the passenger side as if one had intended to kill a large rat with the Filofax, after which the rest of the drive into town is carried out in silence despite the fact that one is hurrying to town with eldest daughter so she is not late for school, not only not late, but so early that she doesn't have to rush; one does this, one rises and meditates and writes in one's journal, so that one day one does not dash the Filofax to the car floor, I suppose.

M3/5VDLC Winners

After careful consideration, here are the winners of the Metamorphosism 3^rd/5^th Valentine's Day Limerick Contest:
First place goes to Joeri

Second place goes to Michael (go congratulate him quickly, in case he has more than a cold)
Lisa wins third.
Honorable mention goes to Pam, who would have done better, except she got the "hair bands" wrong.
Extra-special lifetime achievement award goes to D.
Thanks to everyone who entered. See you next year.

AFOE SP Awards

Thank you! I had no idea so much prize money was involved! Acceptance speech on Monday.
Here is the final list of winners:

Here are the winners of the 2nd Annual European Weblog Awards, also known as the Satin Pajamas:

Most Underappreciated Weblog: Metamorphism by Mig

Best Central European Weblog: All About Latvia by Aleks

Best Expat Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite

Best Personal Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite

Best French Weblog: Journal d’un avocat by Eolas

Best German Weblog: Atlantic Review by various

Best UK Weblog: A Welsh View by Robert Gale

Best CIS Blog: Neeka’s Backlog by Veronica Khokhlova

Best Southeastern European Blog: Argumente by Dragos Novac

Best Culture Weblog: Amateur d’art by Lunettes Rouges

Best Writing: Bric a blog by the widow Tarquine

Best New Weblog: La Poulette by Poulette

Best Humor Weblog: My Boyfriend Is A Twat by Zoe

Best Non-European Weblog: 3 Quarks Daily by various

Best Expert or Scholar Weblog: Early Modern Notes by Sharon Howard

Best Political Weblog: European Tribune by various

Life Time Achievement Award: Neil Gaiman

and finally (drumroll) …

Best Weblog: Neil Gaiman’s Journal by Neil Gaiman

You can still see all the finalists and their share of votes on the award page. Do yourself a favor and go look at all of them. Last years winners are here.

Fit for human habitation

It is cold and raining here so I was thinking, where in the world is more suitable for human life than the South of France? Once you get past the fields of lavender, which sound, and look, nicer than they smell. Maybe it was the lavender ice cream that I ate at the olive fair that marked my personal turning point with lavender. It was quite disgusting, tasting as it did more than anything else like dirt. But other than the fields of lavender, the South of France is quite nice. Then I thought, yes, but I was there in the summer. Maybe it sucks in the winter. Then I remembered delivering a harp to Beta this time last year, i.e. winter and before Alpha and I left again, at about 4 in the morning, standing in the kitchen, looking out at the pre-dawn sky, drinking a giant cup of cafe au lait (me drinking), thinking, I AM STANDING IN A THREE HUNDRED YEAR OLD FRENCH FARMHOUSE DRINKING CAFE AU LAIT AND EATING A BAGUETTE! THIS ROCKS!
So I'm thinking, even in winter it could be nice there.
Then I got showered (here, this morning, not in France last year) and dressed and drove into town with Beta sleeping in the passenger seat and Vivaldi on the car stereo and the sun just beginning to brighten the sky and snow melting in flooded muddy fields and that had its own beauty.
And I remembered two days ago, talking to Gamma, trying to explain the story of Rip van Winkle to her.

He meets these dwarves in the woods. They're bowling and he sees them and they catch him and put him on trial. And he turns out to be a good guy so they spare his life and give him a wish. And before he can make a wish they read his mind and he wants to sleep for twenty years. So they put him to sleep for twenty years and when he wakes up he's an old man and no one in town recognizes him in his white hair and long white beard. And his wife is old and his kids are grown and he doesn't know where the time went. And he deals with that in one way or another.

Is it a trick?

As I may have mentioned, this weblog has been nominated for a Satin Pajama Award in the category of "most underrated weblog". Sorry, "most underappreciated" over atFistful of Euros. However, if this weblog receives the most votes, i.e. "wins", that would mean that it is, among the nominees in that category, actually the least underappreciated. In which case the award should go to the nominee receiving the fewest votes, i.e. the loser. It is a difficult situation.

We will return to our usual programming shortly

This is cool. Link found here.

Found on Amazon

Reader review: ...my kids had fun and learned a lot about how the government works in the process.

Very, very last mention of this

Mr. Sun again, this time for the children.

Gobsmacked

Just when you think the world is going all to hell, the vice president of the United States shoots a lawyer in the face. I am old enough to remember when we had to make do with Gerald Ford beaning spectators with golf balls. Believe me, this is better.

Ok, that's all. I promise to leave this alone from now on. This is like napalm birthday cake frosting, too rich and hard to dose right.

Too much material. I mean, come on. Lawyer. Face. Shotgun. Quail. Ambulance. Hunting license. Cover up. Blame the victim.

Seriously, I'm finished now.

Not another peep.

Not another peep out of me.

Although, god. You have to admire Cheney's balls, as much as I hate to say that. Weak ticker, he could go at any moment, and he still goes bird hunting, he just brings an ambulance and medical team along with him. That's the kind of thing we thought went out with the USSR.

WB Week

Welcome to writer's block week here at metamorphosism.com, celebrated whenever traffic spikes. Traffic has more than tripled this week, in large part due to thousands of people coming here via searches for various permutations of the phrase "valentine limericks". So all of you people who didn't enter this year's Valentine's Day limerick contest? Your loss, people.

Also, Francis linked me. Thanks, Francis.

And grendel. Thanks, grendel. Himself a nominee for best German weblog, he was pointing out that this site has been nominated for another blogging award. Or, rather, once again nominated for an award, because I don't think the site has received any that I haven't invented myself. Although, I got a corgi once, didn't I?

This year's nomination is for "most underappreciated" weblog. This is exciting, because I actually have a shot at that when you think about it. Consider voting for Grendel, Francis and Wood's Lot while you're there, if you should happen to go.

Jokebot

Field trip

The kids made it back Saturday. My mother-in-law praised the food I had cooked (roast turkey breast with carrots and new potatoes, and minestrone) and everyone was happy to see I'd built a fire in the fireplace.
Alpha returned home Sunday. She wasn't quite the wreck she has been following such business trips in the past, thanks in part to using her frequent flyer miles to upgrade to business class this time, which made the trip much nicer for her. She ate none of the vegetarian lasagne I had made Sunday, because she had just flown business class for hours and hours and had been stuffed with food and movies apparently.
Gamma also ate none of it, since it contained cheese, zucchini and black olives, as well as garlic and onions. I figured, since she's not going to eat it because it contains cheese, I might as well throw in other things I like. Beta didn't eat it because she had a stomach ache.
We sat around being a family for a few minutes, then I drove Beta into Vienna to catch a train. Her class is going on a field trip.
I remember going on a field trip when I was in school. I think we went to the zoo once, where we no doubt looked at animals. And I recall taking a school bus with a bunch of other kids to some game preserve, where all I remember seeing was grass taller than I was, and my teacher running around with a clipboard counting children, and no wildlife whatsoever. Then we reboarded the bus and drove back to school.
Beta's physics class is going to Hamburg to look at a particle accelerator. One friend of hers is going along, even though she is not in the physics class, because she is interested in particle accelerators.
At the train station, Beta and I went to a coffee shop where she drank some concoction, and I had hot chocolate. Then we walked around the station with our take-out cups and chatted. Then she met some other students. Then we went magazine shopping for the trip - she paid for her own magazines, with her own money. Then we went back out into the station and talked a little. Then I drove home before I got embarrassing.

Frustrating weekend

Paris Hilton looks quite ordinary up close, with none of the aura one normally expects from celebrities. You expect them to be at least alpha emitters, but Paris Hilton is just, eh. Still, a picture of Paris with me would make a great blog post, I thought, so I gave my camera, an old-fashioned film-based snapshot camera, to the guy across the table from us and asked Paris if she would mind and she said, Ehn, and I snuggled up to her for the picture and looked over at the guy, who said, This is a very important shot so I have to make sure the film is in order, and he had opened the back of the camera and spooled out the film in a long ribbon, exposing it to the light. Dude, I said. Don't do that.

Then, the next night, my wife secretly dyed my hair black. I wish she would have warned me, or discussed it with me first, because I was appalled. What will the people at work think, I thought, regarding my image in the mirror, my pixyish jet-black hairdo. All the complications this introduced to my life - the need to touch up the white silver roots daily, for example, or the way it will suggest a midlife crisis that I am so over.

I was so upset. How could she do such a thing. I thought she was just messing around with some mousse or something.

The unbearable lightness of lightness

My phone rang at work, it was my kid, Gamma, crying; they have to spend another night in the ski area, it's snowing too hard and roads are closed. Gamma is a person who likes her schedules, and they had been supposed to come home today, so she was unhappy.

Her grandmother got on the phone and explained. I hadn't heard anything on the radio of the intensity of the snowfall in their area. She said the roof of the place they were staying was being shoveled off because 1.5 meters of snow had accumulated.

It's a father's nightmare: your kids are far away, trapped in the snow. Okay, not exactly trapped in the snow, trapped in a snug apartment with central heating and a teevee, with their grandparents to take care of them. But you know what I mean: they're there, and they're supposed to be here, and they're not and you can't do anything about it. I couldn't even drive there and get them if I wanted (and I do!) because, ehn, roads closed.

It is hoped that they will return tomorrow. So until then, I just have to survive somehow. Beta phoned this evening, she was all, Some people don't want to drive home today because allegedly the roads are closed. She'd rather be home, too. It's good when the family members like each other and more or less get along. When you try to make a house the kids will want to live in, and they actually do.

But tonight, they can't. I hung up the phone at the end of our conversation and did whatever it was I did. Sat back down at the kitchen table and went back to work on the bottle of Beauxz Boojolay Boujeaulais Beaujolais I had purchased at the store on my way home, and the baguette, and the two types of cheese, and the olives stuffed with goat cheese, and the cold cuts. Read the papers undisturbed. Went upstairs and checked my email, and my statistics. Fed the cats, let them out, and in, and out, and in.

Changed my clothes. Had some more wine. And some more. Filling that empty time before bed. Still, time remains. Practice cello? Paint, finally? Write something? Read? Emptiness weighs heavily on us at times like this, but somehow we muddle through.

Retraction

It's an ambulance driven by a blind man, my understanding. Always too late and with plenty of dents. My... I... The single most... I'm just tired, is the thing. Or, rather: sleepy. I'm used to... Normally, see, I get home at like six in the evening. I leave work, race home and...

I was reading somewhere about essays, and how the best describe the common trivia of a life and make it luminescent and I'm thinking, who'd ever want to do that.

And I was thinking, on the way into work, having no Beta to distract me, although it is rarely described, we do all take craps, don't we? Except for maybe Dick Cheney, who I suppose has a sphincter that distends like a pink tapir nose and squeezes out giant hornet eggs. And then he sits around his basement talking to them; the translucent eggs are arranged neatly on his pool table, which he never uses anyway and is therefore covered with large sheets of heavy clear plastic and as they gestate and hatch he talks to them. Arranged neatly in rows, aligned vertically, horizontally and diagonally at the same time. I'm going down to my study, he tells his wife, because that's what they call the basement, his study, and he goes down there and says, I can't let you out you know. Because you're giant. If you were regular hornets, I could just let you go. But you're giant.

And then he says, Man, I shouldn't have had that spicy pork. And lays a few more.

Sleep, you see, battles with social contact in my snowy little paperweight this week.

It all comes down to, what do you want?

I was in a bus depot somewhere. I was seventeen or eighteen. Salt Lake City. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Someplace. Sitting around talking to people, or rather, listening to other people talk, somehow in this group of strangers waiting for buses. This old wrinkled up guy asked me, So what you want from life anyway? And the question floored me because I had no idea. Maybe he felt sorry for me, because he said, Just fuckin wit you man.

Different things present themselves to you at different times, don't they. Right now, it's the what do you want thing that keeps coming up in different forms for me, in various conversations, whatever. Like life asking, Are you going to listen right off or do I have to get your attention first? It pays to listen from the start, because life has all sorts of ways to get your attention.

Where was I?

Left to my own devices, I gravitate to people. This is new.

My own devices

Left to which, I observed this morning, I transform into a single cube of carrot and one of broccoli embedded in a shiny tan aspic of sloth, depression, headaches, fatigue and nosebleeds; or, rather, into Julie Andrews in her dirndl on the Salzburg hillside, arms outstretched, point of view swooping from a medium close-up showing the edelweiss and the smile on Julie's face, to a long shot revealing the amazing scenery, except it's shot from a Nazgul, not a helicopter, and it's not amazing scenery or even a hillside, but the inside of my house and the only sound is not music, it's the clock ticking, and the wind outside, and the coffee machine, maybe, finishing its perk, and the PC fan, and it's not a dirndl, it's sweatpants and a t-shirt and this stretched-out dark grey fleece sweatshirt thing and I'm not dancing and twirling and singing, just walking from room to room opening curtains, or closing them.

Left to my own devices, I think, I neither paint nor do the collages I'd planned nor play the cello nor do extra work nor write nor get extra sleep nor exercise nor anything.

My devices are:

1. Loneliness, which I like to think does not bother me, but which I actually secretly use to enter a profound state of melancholy misery.
   
2. Misery, to which I think I have a certain attraction, if not addiction.
   
3. Catatonia, which supports the first two.
   
4. Wind, which the band will be playing the day I lose my mind completely. It is my least favorite weather, below freezing rain, below even fire, brimstone or toads. You can't see it, yet it pushes your car off the road. Just like time.
   
5. Something else. I could continue this list, but it would sound like self pity.
   
6. Self pity: I wonder about this one. Is it my device? Or would stoicism and self-deprecation be? What is the relationship between the two (three)? Do they all cloud clear, non-judgemental vision of what actually is?

So I played the cello and left a little later for work. They played Maurizio Cazzati on the radio, Capriccio sopra sette note, played by Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, which just so totally rocked.
And it's sunny.

Like g00gl3, only without the advertising

scroogle

Wind

It is windy outside. The rain has stopped, I believe with little faith. It snowed this morning, the drive into work was very good at keeping everyone's attention. The snow seems to have taken the road crews by surprise. Most of them were probably in the mountains skiing with their families, since schools in this half of the country are on vacation this week. So, being skiing, they were unable to plow the roads, including the freeway, and it took us a bit longer to get to work.

I am not on a road crew, and so must work this week. My children are off skiing with their grandparents, my wife left today on a business trip. I look forward to days like this, empty days of nothing but work and sleep and various fun hijinks, such as feeding the birds, or the cats, or walking from room to empty room, alone or with a cat in my arms that watches my face with concern as I murmur things like, just you and me buddy, or, they'll be home Friday pal.

I always imagine it'll be more fun than it is, this time off. I'll paint, I tell myself. I'll play unlimited cello. Now it's nine PM and I'm already sleepy.

It's windy outside. Gusts of wind nearly blew my little car off the road tonight. But the snow has turned to rain which means less shoveling. It might mean other things in other cultures, but in the one I inhabit it means, less shoveling.

I talked to Beta and Gamma this evening. The lifts weren't running because it was so windy, Beta said. She didn't sound so great but didn't want to talk about it. Gamma was unhappy with her group at her ski school. The girls are stupid and also all left by lunch, leaving her the only girl with a bunch of stupid boys.

Outside it's windy. Inside it's quiet, only the sound of wind and my fingers on the keyboard and the PC fan whining like an industrial washing machine.

Stop me if you've seen this already

Gaagle.

3rd/5th St. Valentine's Day Limerick Contest, now with rules

Announcing the third annual Metamorphosism St. Valentine's Day Limerick Contest, which is actually the fifth annual contest of its kind here.

Important: entries will be disqualified if they don't follow this year's rules!

And here are this year's rules:

1. Entries must be proper limericks. Limerick information here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
   
2. Deadline is 14 February 2006
   
3. Entries must be submitted to comments in this post.
   
4. Entries must include something. Last year they had to include references to medical pioneers, microscopic animals and skin conditions. The year before that it was psychiatrists/psychologists, the year before that philosophers. So this year, extra points will be awarded for references to hair bands, disfiguring diseases and or types of Roman gladiators.
   
5. I am the boss of the rules, and may change them arbitrarily as usual.

Acme Heartmaker

Safe

Beta wangled me into playing in the music school orchestra this year, rehearsals start sometime this month. They are after work this time so I have no excuse. Among the things we are set to play is part of Mozart's um Mitridate. Hey, I said, I know someone who played that, I'll ask her for some pointers. Of course, I said, her version might have been a bit more complicated. Maybe, said my teacher.

Meanwhile, this Romberg sonata in E-minor or something I'm learning is starting to sound like music, rather than a painful string of notes. The music, that is, is beginning to stick its head out and look around, nervously, checking if it's safe.

Is it safe, says the music.
You bet, I say.

Alpha said last night, Hey, you're sounding a lot better lately. A person can almost stand to listen to you.

And the cats no longer run away and we have to go sticking those xeroxed "have you seen my stripey red cat" announcements to trees when I practice.

3rd/5th annual Valentine's Day Limerick Contest

Announcing the third annual Metamorphosism St. Valentine's Day Limerick Contest, which is actually the fifth annual contest of its kind here.

Important: entries will be disqualified if they don't follow this year's rules!

Acme Heartmaker

Hypocrisis

On our drive into town this morning, Beta remarked that the world is experiencing a hypocrisis. We had been talking about how Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the West was in another dark ages and how we agree with that, but would add most other countries to that, including his. (Unfortunately, checking facts now, I cannot find any evidence that he really said that; all I can find is a quote of him slamming The West for using medieval terminology against his country. I guess I should be happy, now I can say it and don't have to be agreeing with him: We, the entire world, are in the throes of another dark ages kiddo.)
Alpha and I saw a movie last night, "We feed the world." It is about the food industry - factory farms, replacing rain forest with soy plantations, Nestle blessing the world, hybrid seeds, different things.
Beta had seen it before and recommended it.

The interview in the movie with a Nestle boss was entertaining. That with a U.N. food expert was informative. The one with an Austrian guy selling Pioneer hybrid seeds in Rumania was just sad, he was so honest about what he was doing and seemed so sorry.

I dunno, what can I say? I'm waiting for part II, about corn syrup and stuff.

It's all part of the hypocrisis. That turns out to be a Latin word, meaning play-acting, so it's a perfect fit. The way we play act that we are not taking on a crushing load of guilt with our lifestyle.

By "we" I mean "us".

Q.

Why do people in movies almost never watch television, except in horror movies?