Heard tonight, while crossing the Seine near Notre-Dame, where a guitarist was giving a [rather mediocre] rendition of Albéniz’s Suite española, op. 47:
Oh, honey! I know this one, that’s the Gipsy kings!
When she kissed me on the cheek on the way out, the other morning, she said I was prickly.
I think she meant I needed a shave.
And before I permanently close this exciting chapter of my life, I would just like to add…
[clears throat]
YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrgg
Thanks.
Moving on.
Around 10am GMT today, Unknowngenius Corp. headquarters have had to sustain yet another nasty email spam attack. This one ostensibly attempting to clog our inbox beyond recognition by sending thousands of spams to random addresses across the world, thus resulting in thousands of “no delivery” response mails being sent back to our own mailbox from hundreds different server, with no way to easily filter them out.
Do I even need to bore you with detailed recounts of the ongoing motives for this month of particularly slow blogging?
Last week we had deadline frenzy, this week was oral-presentation-and-written-exam semi-frenzy, next week is final apotheosis of exams and masters programs’ applications. By wednesday, I should be all done and back to regular blogging, assuming my computer hasn’t been turned into a smoldering pile of melted plastic by the giant bonfire I am planning to light in my courtyard, using all the paper currently littering my apartment as combustible.
Ever since and until then, I am all work, very little play, and practically no blog to speak of.
However, yesterday night, I exceptionally took a short break to conduct non-studying-related activities, the exact nature of which shall remain prudently nebulous, except perhaps to mention they bore no relations to soccer whatsoever, featured role-playing aerobics, high levels of cross-channel cheekiness and female-on-male wrestling. Also resulted in my voodoo pin doll finally making an appearance in downstairs’ neighbour special 5am collection (see about wrestling, and ensuing loud thumping noises, above) as well as getting up this morning with a worryingly purple-coloured, very broken-looking, middle toe (see about same).
Therefore, in the spirit of keeping things even with my time, I thought I’d take some to post a few scattered notes I just found this morning in a forgotten corner of my apartment, impaled on a dead rat with a sharpened stiletto heel. I reckon they might be my working notes from two weeks ago, during the finishing line of my first deadline grand slam. Do not worry if you don’t understand much, or anything at all: it might just be that you are a) slightly less psychotic than I at the time and b) somewhat below ‘pathetic’ in your general level of geekiness…
[omitting: various doodlings of dubious artistic values and possibly offensive graphic nature, certifiably random combinations of symbols not identified as meaningful in any human languages, text fragments dissolved beyond recognition by stains of what appears to be high-grade alcoholic beverages]
9:14 pm – Hmn. I wonder which month is today.
Oh my.
I think we have just entered official freak-out deadline rush season.
3:24 pm – Interesting fact about computer labs and thermodynamics: a balmy outdoors tropical-jungle temperature seems to turn into slightly uncomfortable bone-melting heat in rooms filled with two dozen cheap PCs running 24/7.
3:46 pm – Attempt to refurbish some of the older computers’ fan into more useful human-cooling activities thwarted by nosy sysadmin. Perhaps it’s time to get ssh going and work from home.
Tonight, in Paris and most other urban areas, is La Fête de la Musique
Not that there’s any point mentioning it: if you don’t live in France, you rightfully don’t give a flying rat’s ass, if you do, I reckon you are all too aware of it by now.
Exactly thirty years ago today, a large gathering of students took place in the South Western Townships of Johannesburg: then and still now, one of the most miserable place you could ever set a sight on. On that day, a few thousands black students were protesting yet another humiliating law passed by the pro-apartheid government, when armed policemen started firing real bullets at the crowd.
The resulting mayhem and deaths of many children had for indirect consequence to force the world into reconsidering its fairly lenient take on the Afrikaners’ quasi-aryan policies. The international community slowly but surely issued official condemnations and accompanying trade cutbacks. Although it should be noted that, until 1986, any UN attempt at imposing worldwide economic sanctions against South Africa was promptly vetoed by both US and UK.
Indeed, neither Maggie nor Ronnie ever deemed it necessary to have any lower an opinion of their South African (white) friends over such trifling details. I’ll let you guess which of the two, in 1987, labeled the ANC a “terrorist organization” and equalled the chances of it ever gaining power to “living in cloud cuckoo land”… though I must say the flowery language is kinda giving it away.
Worry not yourself, you may have done your part to help teenage-shooting, citizen-torturing, white-supremacist pro-Apartheid government of South Africa survive through most of the 20th century: all you had to do was getting engaged more than a dozen years ago.
Eventually, beside internal Black resistance and increasingly disadvantaging demographics, the fall of the apartheid system would seem to hang more on South Africa’s loss of credit on the financial market and ensuing economic turmoils, than any concerted efforts from so-called civilized nations to put significant pressure on its leaders. As it was, these countries were in no rush to lose their privileged trade relations with the ever courteous and oh-so-exquisitely well-mannered good old fair-skinned boys leading South Africa at the time. You know, the same countries who will jump on the first occasion to bomb moustachioed dictators back to the stone-age, out of their deeper concern for the well-being of the people and the advancement of freedom and democracy throughout the world.
Happy Soweto Riots Day.
When asked about what it is that they like most about Japan, the Japanese will often gladly inform you that one of the top reasons their country is so great is that it counts four distinct seasons in a year. Reaction upon learning that, indeed, most countries of the civilized world also do, ranges from genuinely surprised to incredulous. They also think the song you may know as Auld Lang Syne is an old Japanese ditty, so great at announcing the closing of public places that some smooth-voiced Italian-American singer decided to cover it in English…
Anyway, about the season part: I think they may have been onto something. Four seasons has become a rarity in our pre-apocalyptic, globally-warming world. As I recently discovered, places like Paris have already switched to a much easier to maintain two-season yearly schedule. Translated, they would be something like: Rainy, from September to May and Balls-Hot, from June to August.
If I might have some regrets over skipping Spring on the way, you will not hear one single complaint from me about finally leaving Winter behind. Instead, let me tell you how my first Summer evening of the year went.
Yesterday was the much anticipated downgrade from code red to code orange-ish yellow on the Deadline-o-meter. A moment eagerly awaited by my liver for the past two weeks.
All that was left between me and an entire evening of drunken debauchery were a couple paragraphs of cognitive linguistics rambling and a few chores to take care of. Of course, by the time I finally left my place with one errand still left to run, the clock was ticking 11pm. Hopeful nonetheless, I grabbed my trusty iPod, a half-empty pack of menthol cigarettes, some cash and dashed out, phoning my friends that I would be meeting them shortly thereafter. Note the cigarettes: they are important.
If, like me, you strive to achieve excellency in any field your put your mind to, be it risk assessment and investment banking or complete world domination through evil masterplan, here are a few useful pointers to being an efficient and successful Evil Overlord, plucked from the canonical Evil Overlord Guide:
2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation
28. My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which I could not accidentally stumble.
35. I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.
[...]
