Expat@Large

Internet Nakedness

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:07:00 +0000

In regard to Edward Snowden's leak of information about the capabilities and the extent of the internet surveillance that is going on without our approval, let alone knowledge, I feel stripped naked.

The argument that "if you having to hide then why be worried about the NSA having the information on your internet travels and email correspondence" does not hold water. It's like a nudist telling us all to go naked because we are all the same (within a normal distribution curve) beneath our clothes.

Yes, that's true, but I don't WANT to be naked all the time.

Have you got something to hide? YES, my dignity, my personal habits and preferences, what I would have liked to think was my private life!

As far as criminal activity is concerned, terrorism or child pron, no, I having nothing (much) to hide in my online presence, but I don't WANT government agencies or, worse, businesses having access to what I do online or who I talk to on my phone, criminal or not.

My activity involves reaching out to things in the web or on the phone network far away, outside the dark solitude of my artist's garret, into a public arena, but it's private in all other ways. It's me, it's mine, fuck off: I don't want you and your marketing people looking over my shoulder. It's creepy if nothing else.

My land-line phone calls are public in a sense as well, but if you want to tap my phone, have something concrete to suspect me about, then go get a court order or a warrant or whatever it takes. Ditto, I would like to assume, for my mobile phone use and my computer actions and interactions.

~~~~~~~~~

But, we all know that this creeping intrusion is inexorable. But I feel its progress into our electronic selves is as pernicious as it is inevitable.

Unfortunately for those of my cast of opinion, it is only going to become more comprehensive and much more pervasive. There is so much more information than we can comprehend currently being gathered by the Telcos as well as government agencies, and when they run their mining algorithms and the private gold of your prefernential activities is extracted, you are for sale.

The essential technology to gather and to extract useful information is there, to sell the soul of you, and Telcos are making money on it already. It's up and running now in a structurally limited way, but within a few years as the bandwidth of data gathering expands, that deluge of data will be able to deliver up such a wealth (literally, for someone) of information to "interested parties" that taking advantage of it will be overwhelmingly tempting - especially as it will be in real-time!

You know how Morgan Freeman had that huge aggregated screen in Batman The Dark Night, showing how all the phones in Gotham city were being tracked with "sonar"? That is not only on the way, it's here. Well not completely 3D and transparent, but still with an extraordinary amount of detail.

This is wrong!
Yes, indeed. To an extent anyway, this is happening now, but, says E@L's secret source in the industry, the technology currently will only allow 24 hourly updates. Currently. It's true. Every 24hrs, the location of your phone has been sold to someone. In the not too distant future however Singtel / M1 / Starhub / 3 / Optus / Verizon / Telstra / etc... will be selling crucial information of astounding detail in real-time, and making enormous amounts of money (they make enormous amounts of money on SMS's already.)

Information could be as detailed as how many iPhone users are currently shopping in Plaza Singapura: within seconds all those iPhones will be beeping with spam SMS's about the latest Spotlight savings deal, about the 50% sale at Marks & Spencer, the latest 24hr-hit CGI blockbuster in the cinema upstairs; ads targeted to their owners' previous shopping history from the database that was generated when their history of on-line shopping was sold previously.

Based on WHERE YOU ARE STANDING. Now.

Some of you think that this will be a good thing, of course. You don't want irrelevant spam. The businesses certainly will love it. But it is much more than those targeted ads that pop up on your web browsers.

This is exposure to a degree that a few years ago was unthinkable, unless you were watching Minority Report*. Now we know the US Government agencies have been doing this all along. As have those Telco businesses.

I feel that I am being stripped electronically naked, but I'd rather keep my internet body covered, thank you. It's not that I have things to hide, it's just that I'm shy, and I would prefer if my non-nude lifestyle choice was respected.

I should have the rights, and the freedom, to be shy, to be demure, keep my fucking clothes on.

E@L

* and now your games consoles and your TVs and your phones are responding to hand gestures... Fucking amazing.

A Link To Someone Else's Blog

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:07:00 +0000

Terrific review of a book I really love.

John Self at Asylum reviews The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz. Wish I could a review a book this well. Wish I could read and remember what the fuck was IN the fucking book.

~~~~~~~~~~~

It is difficult to sum up the force and formal perfection of the pieces here without extracting one in full. Most contain something that felt to me like a punch in the gut, perhaps because so many link back to the patient’s childhood. One woman recalls a miserable time at boarding school, and payphone calls to her parents: “I was crying hysterically, ‘Please can I come home, please can I come home?’ and being told, ‘No, you can’t come home.’”

E@L

Old Quotes

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:42:00 +0000

After that excellent quote from Claude Levi-Strauss in the previous post, it thought it might be interesting, relevant, amusing, heart-breaking to list the quotes I had on the side column of my old blog (the layout of which seems to have fucked up of late...)

The entire first chapter of Tristes Tropiques is an extended attack on writing memoirs and travel stories BTW. I feel really motivated now! And so should you!

~~~~~~~~
We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.
Robert Walser

One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.
Goethe

We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked.
Sir Richard Motteram,British Civil Servant

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain

To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write.
Marguerite Duras

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

a) Don't lie if you don't have to.
b)Assume infinite intelligence and zero prior knowledge.
Leo Szilard

...if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naive vision of the world is already a masterpiece... As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.
Michel Houellebecq

And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My only job is to be talented.
Anton Chekhov

Boredom, of course, like any mighty force, you must respect.
Saul Bellow

He often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work will always remain true.
Arabella Buckley, (speaking of French naturalist George-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, Intendant (Administrator) of Les Jardins des Plants, anticipator of Darwin and Lyell)

It is only kings, and the nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.
Charles Dudley Warner, (from an address to the Alumni of Hamilton College, NY, 1872)

I may not agree with what you say but to your [?my, someone's] death I will defend your right to say it.
Voltaire

I may not agree with what you say so shut the fuck up you fucking fuck.
No-one will admit to this one, but I have my suspicions.
~~~~~~~~~

E@L

Tristes Topiques

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:17:00 +0000

I hate traveling... It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings?"
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955.

~~~~~~~~~~

Why indeed. I've done fuck all in the past fifteen years myself, except fritter away any self-allotted writing time on this and the old blog. Fuck all on anything serious. But I've been meaning to do a heap of things with all those blogged words - tie all the Bruce and the coffee and the taxi stories together. Thread a genuine novel (I DO have a plot) into the weft of these inanities. But I haven't.

And I've really cut back on blogging (I'm presuming you've noticed this). I guess, like the 250,000,000 bloggers who aren't Savmarshmama or Xiaxue, I've gone off the boil. I have my reasons. None of which will stand up to any tough (reasonably tough) scrutiny.

~~~~~~~~~~

But here's one - it's 12:30a.m. and I have to work in the morning. Late morning. But work tomorrow does means to chat with a Doctor over the incubator of a tiny premature baby and explain why my machine will make his task... well, you get the idea. Tomorrow's work is pretty important, so I should get to sleep now. Yet here I am.

And here's where that excuse falls into a hole. I've been going to be at 2am to 3am lately anyway. I've been facebooking, wanking (sometimes combining the two), Game Of Thronesing, reading online newspapers and books (incompletely, incompetently and superficially), and did I say wanking?

The late hour is no excuse.

~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps it's something to do with the slight ~~heart attack~~ angina incident I had in Italy last year (and the dubious celebration of its anniversary - I can come off one type the rat-poisons they feed me - comes soon). Perhaps I've hit a fatalistic slump; my despond is being held captive in slough; I have lost my way in the dark forest of my middle age. I don't know what to do, and why I'd want to do it anyway.

Actually, dedicated readers will be no doubt aware of my tendency to melancholia (and alcoholia) when I pause from chronicling the outrageous and amoral misdeeds of my buddy Bruce. And I have paused. As Bruce has paused. For medical, cardiac-cripple, shit-scared of dying suddenly reasons.

But here's where the pseudo-depression excuse falls into a hole. I've been FBing like a maniac. Lots of little pithy asides, running gags, etc... that are annoying the fuck out of the remaining "friends" of mine who have not yet had enough of the fuck annoyed out of them to unfriend or ignore me.

~~~~~~~~

Maybe I have nothing left to say here, at length.

I haven't been working on any novel.

I haven't been taking any notes.

I haven't even wanted to.

Perhaps I should get back into the habit of writing first.

~~~~~~~~

And now - it's ~~almost~~ after 1am - I do feel like typing a long rant and a raving post on god knows what unimportant cerebral ejaculation - something you don't (or shouldn't) do on Facebook. Mmmm, not such a bad idea, my kind of fun perhaps.

Ah, I wonder if I might be able to get back in to blogging a bit more reliably and pull out some more inconsequential trivia to provide a bit of light relief and amusement or to provoke deep philosophical snippets for all of us, at greater length tha FB or Twitter. Mostly for me though.

Night.

E@L

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 26 May 2013 17:46:00 +0000

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I know the feeling. Kingsley seems to be trying to resolve some (health) threat that has triggered fears of his impending death (26 years later) here. He has done this before, but within a ghost story, that is a different path altogether for Amis, and he pulls it off moderately well I must admit. A Stephen King best-seller it is not, and thank God Almighty for that.

Now dying is one thing, it must come to us all (and why we are not paralysed by this prospect is a mystery to Amis's character here) but the persistence of evil into the afterlife is another! All this washed down with a modest triple scotch and water.

There are many examples of the typical Amis-like crackling dry delivery, often at the most unexpected of times thereby guaranteeing a shock, in the mouth of the sex-obsessed, death-obsessed and misanthropic narrator, hotel manager Maurice Allington: a drunker but much more competent Basil Fawlty role. Amis often makes me burst out loud laughing with that wonderfully cynical line, carefully thought-out and poetically knife-pointed to a unimpeachable truth, in this book as much as any of the others I have read.

(My favorite quotation of all time is this, from Lucky Jim; "If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.")

Allington has to deal with a frisky mistress, a taken-for-granted (but still loved) newish wife, a dying to dead father, a drinking problem, hypochondria (that pain in the lower back is kidney cancer, perhaps, now that the brain cancer has cleared up), an mostly uncommunicative 13yo daughter, lost manuscripts, midnight grave robbing, an atheist parson, a shy cat, and all sorts of disconcerting spectral visitors in the woods nearby and in the hotel at night, at least one of whom has a rather nasty history...

He's trying what he thinks is his best in all aspects of life, but his unacknowledged selfishness doesn't help, and that fact he can't tell anyone about his search for the secret behind these ghosts as they'll only think it's the DT's. But his TV watching daughter seems not to disbelieve him...

Loved it.

View all my reviews

E@L

Orwell In Burma

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:28:00 +0000

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, "for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me".

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.

George Orwell - Ironic Poem About Prostitution (before 1936)

E@L

War on Drugs (prices)

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 06 May 2013 09:40:00 +0000

My Singapore Doctors love me, and I don't mean my customers it should have been obvious by now.

Here is the bill for a shade under four months of tablets for my painful feet (aka idiopathic peripheral neuropathy). S$3.60/tablet on average, seven tablets/day = $25 every day = ~$750 every month.

I could get a Fullers Pale Ale and squeeze of ~~tit~~ lime every day for that.

In Australia the bottom two (same medication - had to get some in from another store) on the list are A$1.00 each (S$1.30). I paid $440 for eight boxes of 56 last week - and I could have bought them cheaper if I had a few days up my sleeve for stocks to get in.

I can save about S$1,000 every four months. Almost worth a drug run to good old Geelong.

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

It wouldn't be the first [first what? drug run, you idiots], says Officer Dribble of the Kardinia Park Drug Squad.

Max Rooke 2005

Max Rooke 2009

E@L

Nobu

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000

Robert De Niro and Nobu Matsuhisa have one of their restaurants in Perth's Crown Casino, Nobu. (Not "De Niro", note.)

No booking, you turn up, no problem - you sit at the sushi bar! Irrashaimase!

~~~~~~~~~

There is a thin slice of beetroot amongst the sashimi! WTF, beetroot is everywhere. It's like wasabi and arugola and thick balsamic. Later, you see two chefs working, one reaches across to the other one's plate-in-progress and places a thin slice of beetrot on the pile of grated/julienned white radish. Next to the wasabi and the arugola.

You eat a sashimi tuna taco and a sashimi lobster taco. Of course you do, it's a fusion restaurant, you're paying enormously for this level of weird.

Beer (nice, never heard of it, some white ale), that sweet whiskey cocktail (12yo Yamizaki, green ginger wine, maple syrup), chilled sake: there was now a diffuse glow, an aura of saturated radiance, about anyone who is standing under bright lights. The four sushi chefs, in their white netted caps, glowing like aliens as they peeled leaf after leaf from the coriander stems for the salad, or stacked the maki rolls just so...

Is the waitress Filipina? Or Malaysian? Or Australian? Certainly a beginner - she was being ~~told off~~ trained about the way she described the menu to you. Hamachi with jalapeños? Mm-mm, sounded good to you.

Chef's choice of sashimi. Chef is a boring fuck. Some tuna with ginger and chives is as outrageously adventurous/expensive as you get. And beetroot.

Next. Sliced octopus and mushrooms in a citrus sauce baked in a small paella pan. Too citrusy for you. Nice tentacles though, shame about the face.

You have to go to the toilet and find it around two corners, a large open room, built for one, tough lock, but you get it eventually. The wall behind the cistern is made up of lots of small (max is maybe 4cm across), clear perspex circles, what would you call them, tablets (as in pills), various sizes, set into the gray plaster-like support material. Three ceiling spots shine down. It looks like there are disks of gray material behind, or is it IN, each of the perspex disks at the back, slightly overlapping each other, but no: it was an optical illusion; these shapes were merely the genuine colour of the solid wall behind the disk, while the shadow from the lights has managed to keep clear an arc across the top part of the rear of the disk, one for each of the down-lights. You take one hand from your cock and use it (your hand) to block the light from one of the down-lights and one of layers of posterior/interior disks has gone, this confirms your brilliant insight. It was very cool, very weird and very hard to describe, obviously. You wish you had taken a picture, but you are reluctant to take your phone/camera out in a toilet again, not after that last incident with the Masonic guy and his young piglet...

Pork belly, cubed to chopstick-able proportions with, what is that?, chopped jalapeños again? Still a little bit left on the plate, plus at most a smear of the delicious sauce, just one cube of the pork belly, but the sake mug was empty. Do you order another small carafe and look like a drunk or finish the rather dry pork with a dry mouth? Ah, mineral water. OK, you'll just look at the sake menu again. Hey, why not another whiskey cocktail? Because, is why.

And so you do look at the sake menu again and suddenly everything you've ever known about sake goes flying and you admit to yourself that, while it wasn't all that much, at least it was something, but now you may as well know nothing as what you are looking at makes no sense: ginjo, daiginjo, junmai? they don't help. It's only the regions that they show and you know nothing about that. Nothing.

The small things are in your mind:

- The Ethiopian taxi driver's story of oppression.

- The security guard who walked you all the way over from the casino to the restaurant, was he trying to pick you up?

- The chef placing a dab of (miso?) sauce on a tiny square of coriander leaf on a sliver of jalapeño on a thin slice of hamachi and it caught, and the coriander fell off and the slice of yellowtail was stained with the dripping sauce, and fuck it, that's what happens and he puts it all back together again. And then the pepper shaker is blocked and nothing comes out and he can't decorate the plate, so he goes looking for a toothpick; seriously, this happens.

- The fact you awkwardly pulled out two $5 notes from your wallet as you went to tip the waitress, but she saw you as you pushed one back in.

- The bill, no, that wasn't such a small thing.

OK, just one more whiskey syrup cocktail for the road... Oishi! Campai! Whatever!

E@L

Nothing To See Here

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:40:00 +0000

(at Newton Station, Singapore.)
~~~~~~~~~~

Just don't feel like writing at the moment, even though I have oodles of spare time. Hard to explain. Hard to understand. Jet lag? Homesickness, as in, am I sick of being home?

~~~~~~~~~~

Lots of amusing, horrifying and uber-boring incident in this three week Tour of Duty around Australia and New Zealand (and Australia and New Zealand again), although lots of fleeting witticisms were lost to documentation (memory of an axolotl) and lots of things observed were lost to wry comment as the brain is just so clogged and I can't seem to find the oomph to start writing anything... (Have been reading about Leibnitz's question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and my brain has melted.)

And today, (tonight/what day is it?), after this double jump from Auckland to Melbourne, then on to Perth, where I am now, I find that, while I have the computer open in front of me and it's relatively early (Perth time), I am too completely shagged out to share anything of interest and amusement with you... at... this... time... OK maybe this photo from Tasmania last weekend.

~~~~~~~~~~

Bay Of fires, Tasmania
Lichen on the rocks makes them bright orange.
E@L

Virgin Member

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0000

OK, this one IS a FWP.

Flying Virgin to NZ, economy class. Bummer enough, right? Virgin is not Star Alliance but has an agreement with Singapore Airlines for club lounge access. I check-in at the priority counter and the lady says that there is no Virgin lounge in International in Melbourne, but I am welcome to use the Air New Zealand lounge or of course the Singapore lounge. Huh, go with what you know, right? I find that the Singapore lounge is under renovation and the sign directs me to the United lounge. Steely looks from both the SIA person and the United person.

"Virgin is not Star Alliance."

"But the SIA lounge is closed, the sign directed me here."

"Yes, but Virgin is not part... "

" But Virgin has reciprocal lounge access with SIA."

Disbelief. Dubiety.

"Virgin is not... "

" I can get into the Virgin lounge (at Perth which doesn't have a SIA lounge.) when I am flying Singapore."

The SIA guy calls his boss. He goes red. He is under-trained.

"I am still sorry sir, but because this is a United lounge and Virgin is not part of Star Alliance, the reciprocal agreement cannot be applied."

Smug look from United person.

Go to New Zealand lounge.

"I am sorry sir, I but Virgin is not part of Star Alliance." (There is a sign outside the ANZ lounge welcoming Virgin customers.) "Your SIA membership doesn't cover the ANZ agreement with Virgin."

"Oh fuck, just let me in...!"

He did.

E@L.

(Vindicated: my ticket was sold as an Air New Zealand flight.)

In Which E@L Resists Anything But Temptation.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:27:00 +0000

After having explained to friends at the excellent bistro in the Builders Arms Hotel in Gertrude St (not the attached restaurant Moon Under Water unfortunately - no time to make an advance booking) that the most rewarding thing for him about the long-term (2 years) successful weight loss behaviour E@L has been exhibiting, is the sense of being in control, of feeling like you are in control of your life and your body. Oh yeah. Total control. Have another glass of Yarra Valley Pinot, E@L, and talk to us about taking command.

However, indeed, he says, "No thanks, no more wine."

No? Done, thanks. Desert? Nope. No more room. Not me. (Wise man.)

Hang on, is that Amaro with caramelized orange for a disgestif? Well, seeing as how he skipped the wine...

Willpower. Apart from that Amaro of course, E@L is a tower of self-control and strength and psychological power held in check. He can hold his own against a sea of troubles.

~~~~~~~~~~

But let's take advantage of getting home early, E@L, it's only 9:30. Read that China Miéville on your Kindle (Embassytown). Relax. A take-away latte from Pellegrinis maybe while you read it? Sure, it's just around the corner. Maybe have a look in the window at The PaperBack, three steps across the lane, just, you know, old habits...

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is in the lane, lit red by Pellegrinis' cursive neon, looking at his latest latent purchase - The Examined Life, How We Lose And Find Ourselves, Stephen Grosz - when a voice tries to pull him away...

"Mate. Ma-ate. Ya got some coins? A few bucks? The refuge wants $15; I need a more coins ya know. Anything would help, thanks cobber."

E@L shrugs. Resolve, steely, see it in action. He pulls out the few coins from his right pocket, in which he rarely puts money. "There ya go, mate. All I got."

That's all he is going to give the pest. Doesn't even have a drugged baby unconsious on his lap, we mean, hey, get serious here! It was 60c. Hmm. These days, when some extra steamed veg with your grilled fish at the hospital cafeteria is $4, when that shot of Amaro and its caramelized orange is $15. Yes, 60c is not a fuck lot of money, is it?

He's hardly registered their weight in his hand. "Ya got some other coins? Seriously I don't need much. Just bit more would rooly rooly help."

E@L sighs, takes a moment, then digs deep, deep, into his other pocket. Pulls up some golden-colour discs of unequal size, genuinely all he has in coins. "Here ya go. No, hang on, that one's a Singapore dollar. Won't help you much."

"Oh, cool, give us a look. Singapore? Amazing." He nods, genuinely interested, passes it back. Then, ever the professional, asks, "Do you have any notes instead, notes would be brilliant: for two nights they want ...(indistinct)... for a room. A bed, you know. It's getting cold, eh?"

"I only have $50s, mate, I'm sorry." Now, E@L wouldn't advise saying that to a person on the street anywhere else but this part of Melbourne city. Might as well say, "Pull a knife, rob me." But this guy is a beggar, not a thief. He's there almost every time E@L walks in the upper reaches of Bourke St in the evening: he's just this homeless guy, bit of a drug problem sure, maybe not his fault, maybe he's an ex-CEO who took a hit in the GFC. E@L has never felt threatened by people asking for money...

"It's OK," he says to E@L brightly. "$50's are OK. I can give you change in $20s."

... pause...

You are telling E@L you have change for a $50?

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L enters the book-store, glancing on the New Non-Fiction shelves. Can't see the book he wanted to browse through, looks across to the counter and he hears the customer there talking to the saleswoman. He looks away, then back over his shoulder and sees a tall man, maybe late twenties, early thirties, a bald patch taking over some scalp under the fair hair at the crown. He is wearing fair trousers and a has a red scarf over a fawn-colored jacket. What a fucking dork. E@L sees the bookshop lady. She is also of that age. A little bit of white throat showing down to the second button of her white shirt, then her knitted cardy. Curly hair, a bit unruly, small eyes with almost a tired squint, smiling. It's almost time to close. Long day dealing with pseudo-intellectual dip-shits.

"Well", he was saying, "you're a woman, you must've really enjoyed A Room Of One's Own! It's very good, yeah? It would be very good, I mean, you know, having somewhere to do that, you know write, or... have a room."

E@L is stunned. What are we allowed to say in the world today?

He can hear hear her laugh, though. "Yes, what is it? Five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own. Would be very handy."

"Yes, we could all do with that!" he says. Then, E@L could gather somehow, he awkwardly pays for his Mrs Woolf purchases and closes the door just behind E@L's back. (It's a small bookshop.)

E@L steps across and asks her about his book.

"I've got the Lost part down pat, but need to brush up on the being Found."

"Yes, we are all a little lost," she says, smiling. "But not this book." And she pulls a copy from a pile of unsorted paperbacks on the floor by her counter.

"Excuse me," he says, "but I couldn't help overhearing just then. Did that guy really say 'You are a woman, you must understand sexual stereotyping?' or were my ears not taking that in properly?"

She laughs again. Eyes not so small really, they're just emeralds crouching in laugh-lines, dimples (God E@L loves dimples), smiling with not too much gum, all nice teeth, curly hair, the flouncy type. Maybe E@L sees something of what made the other guy make a fool of himself for...

... See that willpower in action as E@L resists falling in love.

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L negotiates the gauntlet of hipsters (one has an oversize paperback copy of Chomsky On Anarchy in his hand) and moves down the aisle towards the back of Pellegrinis, to where the cakes are. Just to have a look. Old habits.

"What's that one?" he asks, just out of interest. E@L can only see the outside of it, thick, fruit on top.

"Almond cake. Apricot on top." Pause. "You want whipped cream?"

See his resolve, firm as a whipped cream, see his character come to the fore... No. Neither did E@L.

E@L sighs. Some charity, a book, and a cake with cream to go with that latte.

Awesome willpower, E@L.

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is in that hotel room of his, alone. The meal was excellent. His friends are good, talking about getting married in New Zealand. The Mieville book is good. The Grosz book is good. The cake and cream were good. Awesome latte of course.

He can't resist, and puts Bjork on the iPod...

... and smiles to himself.

E@L

Partayyyy!!! ZZzzzzzz...

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:22:00 +0000

The 15th year of being an expatriate hit E@L yesterday - yes April Fools Day, everybody laugh. But who is the joke on? E@L booked the pool-side BBQ area and called up 6 or 7 hundred of his most intimate friends of whom 6 or 7 turned up.

But now it's 4am and the departing guests seem to have left most of the worst parts of the evening on his dining room table.

E@L looks at BBQ cold cuts and the soggy salads and the plastic cups of - OMG what is that? These trays of snags and elaborately marinated chicken wings and spiced steaks; long anticipated soon forgotten points of Epicurean delicate essen, cooked to perfection under supremely challenging conditions in extreme situations (E@L has no hairs left on the back of his left hand). There were missing ingredients and lost sauces, but it all went down well enough one guesses. Nobody complained of not having enough chicken wings, hey! But there are the foggy times; the usual did I put my tongue into what, whom, when?...

More crucially, it's the odd "did-I-really-open-that?" bottles of vintage red, half drunk and even less appreciated, lying on their side.

What a fucking mess. Gin. Sprite. Tahini. Ugh.

Sigh.

The Aussie Rules football replay is finally finished and E@L staggers up to looks around. How to sort out this fuck train-wreck? Without his fall-back position - Call The Mouse! - he reaches for Bruce's Rules for Tidying Up Efficiently, viz:...

"If, within the next 24hrs, you are not going to drink it, eat it, or fuck it, throw it out."

~~~~~~~~~

Chin chin!

E@L

Moral Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 02:55:00 +0000

"Look at the creep with the tattoos. What is he, Russian Mafia?"

"Probably."

"She's going to go with him if I don't make a move. Get your hands of her tits you arsehole."

"Don't tell me, tell him! Make your move for Christ's sake. I want to finish this beer and go back and see if Plan B is still there."

"The chubby Burmese? You like her?"

"She has a cute face."

"Whatever. I'm getting to know too much about you. Here she comes. Shut the fuck up now."

"Just pay the bar-fine, she has to go with you."

"You think I should? She's gorgeous. But, you know, will I respect myself in the morning?"

"I won't respect you if you don't take her, isn't that enough? Pay the bar-fine! Rescue her from the evil Russian white slaver. It's the moral thing to do."

"Hmm. I can feel a categorical imperative rising in my trousers."

"Do your duty, Superman. To deny your will to power is to deny yourself."

"Thanks Nietzche."

"Go you stupid Kant. Take the woman home!"

~~~~~~

E@L

Smell's Like...

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:20:00 +0000

Bangkok seems particularly noisome today.

Not just the usual gulley-trap-mephitic clouds steaming out at Soi Zero to whack you in the olfactories, but it's all up and down Sukhomvit. It's like the whole town has been cooking, it has a kitchen closeness. But there's something almost sulphurous baking in the unclean oven of the city. It's the bubbling traffic fumes and roiling dust, the sweating asphalt, the baking concrete, the balls-scratching listless soi-dogs, the stale breath of air turning on itself under the hot tarps of the footpath-market stalls, the farts and belches and bromhidrotic sandals of the sexpats in the Nana bars, the glistening people up close in the crowded Skytrain.

34° feels like 42°, says my weather app. Smells like 150°. Smells like...

Bangkok.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Some old photos.
E@L

I Am Epicurus - Fulda

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 07:08:00 +0000

E@L's friend The Bludger was having trouble with his Internet connection (his flat-mate had done something). The solution was at hand with the typical geek response to such issues: Turn everything OFF, wait for the electrons to sort themselves out and turn it all ON again. This, unsurprisingly to an experienced geek like The Bludger, worked perfectly and connectivity was restored.

Now E@L is in an hotel room in Penang.

(He was by the pool this afternoon. It'll do.)
He wants to watch the next few episodes of House Of Lies (soft corn-porn, Don Cheadle back in Boogie Nights, but definitely without the insecurity) so he took the DV > HDMI adapter and connected one end of the HMDI cable here and the other to the input of the room's TV. He expected the TV to take that digital video signals now streaming down the copper wires at the speed of electricity, to read its encoded Descartian matrix and to paste it, pixel by pixel across the LCD panel to show pretty much the same thing as the laptop was displaying, or an extended desktop to the right of it. The laptop recognized the TV (according to the Graphics page) but there was still nothing on the TV screen.

He was not as much of a geek, but still he tried The Bludger's methodology. E@L turned everything OFF and then ON. But this time, because it was E@L and not The Bludger, such an otherwise reliable maneouver failed. Nothing seemed to help him: plugging, replugging, shaking, fiddling (with the HDMI cable! You people!). He even started to play the video on the laptop and then sneak it across to the extended screen, which should be the TV. Maybe, he thought it will burst from nothingness into wonderful existence. Of course not.

Now listen: the SOUND of House of Lies ("ooh, aah! oh baby!") was coming from the TV, but no matter what he did, the TV would not display the video image.

Sigh. Why?

~~~~~~~~~~

Why do electronic/gadgety things screw up? Obviously people other than E@L have this problem. I recall someone, was it Benny Profane in V, having all sorts of issues with inanimate objects, which E@L does as well; dropped screws rolling into the most inaccessible places, toast and the butter-side, etc... ("...inanimate objects and he could not live in peace." Thomas Pynchon. V. (Kindle Locations 517-518). HarperCollins)

Why must semi-sentient things like electronic gadgets, computers, modems, TVs, etc..., things that are designed to behave according to the long established laws of physics, things the rely on the atomic forces like electricity and magnetism, why do they work perfectly well one minute and then go berserk the next? Why do attached parts not talk to other from the word Go? This is a deep and fundamental problem that has bedevilled those of us who get hit all the time by these vagaries of electrons and the unreliability of atoms in general. As I explained in my reply to his FB whinge:

Postventative maintenance, like turning a recalcitrant something OFF and then ON, may sometimes reset the local atomic structure of the universe in the vicinity of the electronic device(s) that is(are) not behaving according to Maxwell's suggestions or Faraday's guidelines, but Murphy's Law instead. There is nothing you can do beforehand, no PREventative attention that will ensure your laptop will talk to the projector. But you know the chances of it NOT talking to the projector correlate inversely to the product of the importance of the presentation, the importance of and the number of people in the audience.

Ah Jesus, why don't things work properly all the time? The wires are connected, the silicon chips are constructed correctly, the coal is being burned to heat the water to pressurized steam to drive the turbines to spin the magnets to induct the electrical potential to get it to the plug, which is turned ON at the outlet, and everything is fucking in its place... yet all is not right with the piece of shit gadget. The TV is blank. The Internet cannot be reached.

Jesus, electrons go in straight lines right? Just fucking GO, you negatively charged arseholes!

WHY?

~~~~~~~~~~~

The answer lies in the ancient Greek philosophy of Epicureanism. Yep, it's a Greek thing. Like defaulting on loans, buggering young lads, moving to Melbourne and cooking fish'a da chips. (Fish and chip shop were operated by chubby, surly Greek men with three day old five o'clock shadows and hairy fingers in Melbourne. The also ran the produce markets - great trouble ensued... Look it up.)

OK E@L, describe in simple sentences what you know of Epicureanism.

Let me tell about Epicureanism...

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L purchased an intriguing book a while ago, and in his usual manner, set it aside. He only started reading it seriously after he listened to a recent podcast on Epicureanism on In Our Time with the awesomely well-read Melvyn Bragg last week.

Poggio Bracciolini was a particularly neat writer. Sr Mary Briga at St Margaret's would have given him heaven knows how many Holy Cards and gold stars - E@L recalls getting "the cuts" for something like getting more India ink on his shirt than on the page, that or being in a fight. He and a few other scribes practically invented readable script in transcribed books, something like modern italics. For this skill, and his sins (he had 14 children with his mistress), Poggio became enmeshed in the shifting gears of political/religious machinations which eventually saw him swing through the cogs to rise to a top job as a personal secretary (man it use to pay to be a neat writer) to Pope John XXIII . Now this is a classic case of "Choice of Pope - FAIL." See (as it were) The Great Schism which is where... oh, look it up.

The Swerve tells of how our medieval manuscript hunter (said Poggio) discovered a particularly precious text, serendipitously, while looking through the lonely, wind-swept, hilltop (setting the scene here) monasteries of medieval Europe, searching in their libraries for precious texts, proactively.

As the Renaissance just getting under-way, rich people, in particular because they had money and therefore time, and who considered themselves Humanists, became fascinated with the ancient world of Greece and Rome (well, many did, but not all could afford to do anything about it). Those ruins and jewels that the workers kept finding as they dug up the fields, those carved pillars and decorated and inscribed walls they had previously used for integration into their own buildings, such as retaining walls, and second-hand marble floors..., these were now Works Of Art, and Precious Treasures to be, you know, treasured.

Not only these statues and jewels, also the writings of the old philosophers, dramatists, critics, grammarians, historians, and accountants were fascinating to them. These texts offered a personal glimpse of a world not hidebound (as it were - leather-bound, like books, ha ha) by the strict Stoic/Platonic/weird/Religious ethos that had prevailed since the Dark Ages had commenced almost a thousand years before.

The Dark Ages offered only suffering in this world - self-flagellation was encouraged - and, after death, either even more heinous punishment or the faint hope of the glory sitting next to God. Just sitting. Boring! These rich people were not all that keen on the pain and suffering part, thank you very much, and were happy to hear of culture were you could relax, check out the amazing art, take a load off, chill and not suffer for eternity. While they followed the high-church in external demonstrations of faith, going to church, etc..., the Humanists were as close to modern atheists as you could get in those times. The fires of the hell did not worry them so much as the fires of their impending auto-da-fe. (See Nolan: Giordano Bruno The,) The confusion in the church - three popes for heaven's sake - didn't help.

Poggio must had been moderately well off himself after his escape from Pope John XXIII's ill-fated entourage in Constance (where he was deposed) and he was now free to get around Europe on the hunt for those forgotten manuscripts in the libraries of those monasteries. For most itinerant scholars and teachers at that time, wages were shite and they were continually on the look out for "patrons" to offer the ready, people we nowadays call Venture Capitalists. Poggio also had the advantage of being able offer those much-desired and ergo expensive texts to his rich Humanist, text-hungry patrons.

When he pulled a certain dusty codex (an early type book, more likely to have previously been copied and survived than a scroll) from its shelf, he saw that he had in his hands a long poem, written by a name he would have recognized. Then his heart must have skipped. Here was a jewel, he quickly realized. Not exactly Aristotle on Laughter (c.f The Name Of The Rose), but the complete (almost) and intact manuscript of a long poem which detailed the philosophy of Epicurus, and the author was Titus Lucretius Carus (Lucretius to you, folks) and the book called De Rerum Natura.

On. The. Nature. Of. Things.

E@L has had the recent translation (above) of De Rerum Natrua already in his library for a year or three. He had read up to halfway through Book II, until somehow he became distract... Oh look, every second woman in this hotel (Holiday Inn resort in Penang) is completely covered by their black or near black burkahs. How ridiculous in this heat!

That (the book, not the burkah) is the reason he grabbed The Swerve (not a really brilliant title, is it?) when he saw it in Singapore's awesome Kinokuniya (Khino-khun-ya) bookstore.

~~~~~~~~~~

Epicureanism started with the philosophy of Democritus, and it was 200 years later, that along came Epicurus himself to refine and popularise the core of Democritus. is ideas came down to us through many short quotations in other writers, critics and supporters (the great orator Cicero was one of the top critics) and in fragments from the damaged scrolls found under the ash of Herculaneum post the great eructation, sorry, eruption of Vesuvius. But mostly, certainly most elegantly, from that poem of Lucretius.

What are Epicureanism's main features? Glad you asked. E@L will endeavour to explain what he sort of gets. (There may be other things, and these things may be better catalogued and explained elsewhere, such as in The Swerve, in the podcast, in Wikipedia.)

a: Increase pleasure and decrease pain. (Not to excess though, that's Hedonism or Sybaritism. Unhealthy, unnecessary.) How hard can that concept be to grasp?

b: There is nothing after death, nothing to fear of damnation in the after-life. Chill.

c: There are no gods (are least there may as well not be, as they are obviously non-interventionist). Relax.

d: We are not the centre of the universe, which is infinitely large and it stands to reason, there must be many worlds like the Earth in it. It's not your fault the world was created. There is no pressure. You don't matter. Take a load off.

e: Nothing cannot come from nothing. Everything must have been somewhere else previously. Like Expats and beer.

f: If there is a god that ever did anything, it was Venus. She set the whole reproduction thing going and made it so damn nice to fuck. So lets fuck! (The end of Book IV** - you'll wet yourself laughing. Or get an erection.)

The opposite of all this was Stoicism advocated by the dour, proto-Calvinist, Zeno. Then Plato and Socrates. The world is ordered and pre-ordained; there are other, supernatural, things we cannot understand; death is something terrible; we are tossed on the sea of fate. Take it on the chin and try to be virtuous against the odds. Life is shit, deal. Sex is a duty, not a recreational pastime. Religion in a nutshell, right? But the key item in Epicureanism is...

g: The atomic theory. Indivisible small parts of the universe form which all things are constructed. A concept that goes back at least to Democritus. We are all made of the same things. Seed of things. Everywhere there are atoms, or if not, the void. Because if there was no void, atoms would not have anywhere to go, right?

Previously, they thought everything was made of a mixture the four "elements"

Democritus said fuck that patent bullshit. It's atoms!
Key point 1: As literally everything is made of atoms, the soul too must be made of atoms. And as things cannot be created or destroyed, atoms must move from one manifestation to another - today a person, tomorrow a tree - same atoms. As Joni Mitchell would say a millennium or two later, "We are starsdust, we are golden." When we die, the atoms of our souls dissipate. Puuufffff. No afterlife. No ghosts. No Heaven, no Hell. (Complete annihilation, yay!) Priests are full of it. It is safe to ignore their rantings and ravings.

Key point 2: This means that a wafer bread remains a wafer bread unless there is physical change, such as digestion, or toasting and a slathering of Vegemite. Bread cannot be The Body of Christ because the atoms haven't changed. It's still bread. Uh-oh. Catholicism is not going to like that.

Aside: There has a been a recent discovery of some court documents that appear to say that the real, suppressed, reason for Galileo's trial was actually his advocation of atomism (ergo, the above mentioned impossibility of trans-substantiation) and not only, perhaps not even principally, the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus. Lucretius also speaks about the uniform speed of falling objects, independent of their weight. Was Galileo an Epicurean*? Hello!!

But atoms you see, move. Makes sense: we move, everything is in motion. However. Democritus's atom concept had a flaw. Democritus said the atoms travel in straight lines. This meant that in a billiard ball scheme of the universe, those straight lines could be traced back to a first cause, and all the world stemmed from that. This implies that everything was preordained, predestined, from that first billiard ball bump. Didn't the Stoics and ensuing predestinators love this! They saw it, correctly, as a contradiction.

(This vid doesn't talk so much about atomism or predestination, but it's funny.)
The initial theory of Democritus implies (he didn't use this example) that if you plug an HDMI cable into a computer, the video image will appear on the TV that the other end is plugged into; that the modem will connect you to the Web; that the projector will present the powerful points of your stunning PowerPoint presentation.

But this is not the way of the world, obviously. So Epicurus said to the Stoics - "You didn't let Democritus finish!" It can't be that way, because, look around you, it just isn't. Things are different, even things that are almost the same.

Atoms, you see, do not travel in straight lines, for if they moved in straight lines, they would not bump together and if they did not bump together they would no be able to clump together and create complex structures like chocolate souffle, or the smell of crushed ants, or people. There is this random thing, patently because the world is essentially random (E@L deserves to be rich, but he is not, only moderately well-off) and because things, while many are alike, are different (scaly fish, herds of cattle, pack of wild beasts).

Philosophical Implication: We can choose to do this; we can choose to do that. The Stoics were wrong, as were the religions of the Dark Ages. There is no predestination. We can strive towards Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness! (Thomas Jackson was a self-proclaimed Epicurian - "... As you say of yourself, I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."

This random movement, let's call it a swerve or a wiggle accounts for these variations in form. Sometimes atoms swerve, just a little bit, for no apparent reason. (Negative and positive charges on the atomic particles hadn't quite been discovered at this time. Weak force, strong force, gravity force, mesons, yousons, Hogg's Bisons, etc... still to come. Still.) That's why things exist. That's why we cannot predicate what will happen next, that's why we may as well make do what we can to enjoy life, because we are here briefly, and just one time. (How's that for a rationalisation!)

The Swerve (sorta) in Thompson's and Rutherford's atomic models.
This is what Lucretius says about Epicirus's swerve:

Lightning crosses the skies from the rain clouds and its bolts
constantly strike downwards from their heights to the earth below.
And yet it cannot be altogether that simple, for atoms
as they are carried down from the void by their own weight
do not proceed in an absolutely unswerving line
but apparently must wiggle, swerving sometimes from their course
and changing their direction - for if they fell like raindrops
through the emptiness of space there would be no collisions,
no blows that they could exchange with one another, and therefore
no occasion for nature to produce more complex structures.
~~~~~~~~~

But this swerve of the atoms falling in the void, these slight variations in direction, not only do they disprove the existence of god and demonstrate the vast superiority of reason over superstition, they also stop the image from E@L's laptop getting to his TV.

They stop The Bludger's modems from letting him get to his favorite pron websites (and maybe his TV - I am not a perticularly interested where he plugs his HDMI).

Blame The Swerve. Blame...

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

In associated news, at the Pub Quiz last week, a question came up about European war history and most/all of the people in the crowd were stumped. But we had within our motley crew a war-game fanatic, Big-T, a guy who likes to paint little soldiers and tanks and guns and re-fight this battle or that war-campaign. He is therefore something of an expert on the historical aspects blowing people up for fun and, more important, mostly, profit.

The question the quiz-master posed was something to do with the most likely site of a Russian tank invasion against NATO during the Cold War.

Anyone?

Not even a heartbeat from Big-T - "The Fulda Gap".

E@L has, naturlich, studied plenty of the various lumps and bumps (and gaps) of the human body in his past career of a person who stands next to a doctor during embarrassing examinations, though in the utmost of a professional manner, and he has only ever fantasized about the Fulda Gap. This particularly endearing anatomical quirk, which I believes is near the saxafragia-mitosa gland... then E@L realized his error! No E@L, it's not the ... It's...

Big-T was talking (softly, so the other teams wouldn't hear) of a geographical feature on the Rhone, a gap (duh!) which would be the where the Russian tanks would come... oh, look it up.

Fulda.

~~~~~~~~~~

Back to Lucretius...

Meanwhile, E@L's continued to read The Swerve, and followed with fascination as our good (and ugly) Poggio traveled through Europe in search of new (as in old, lost, forgotten) texts, unremembered, uncopied but as yet undiscarded , until he pulled a certain dusty codex (a book) from its shelf and saw the name of the author of a long poem he would have at most vaguely recognized it, Lucretius.

Guess what part of Germany Poggio was in?

He was in the Monastery of...

Fulda.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Swear to Epicurus - E@L had never heard of the place in his entire life, and now he had learned TWO new important facts about Fulda in the space of three days.***

Monday; never heard of it. Tuesday; pub quiz. Wednesday; The Swerve. Thursday; E@L is fucking expert!

E@L

* Galileo might have developed his proof of the uniform pull of gravity from Lucretius. Without friction, heavy objects fall just as fast as light objects - which is described by Lucretius beautifully in Book II - "Now if anyone supposes that heavier elements fall faster than lighter ones through the void ... he departs from logical thinking." Not counting resistance from things like water and air, he continues. I paraphrase.

** Get this, in David Slavitt's modern translation:

The erotic gymnastics of hookers are of no use here [in getting your wife pregnant]
for the whore's purpose is in giving the most pleasure while running
the least risk of getting herself knocked up. Blow jobs
and taking it up the ass are good for the working girls
in the brothels. Either way, they don't have to worry much
about the bother of having a child, and they drive men
crazy in ways our wives don't need to know about.
(Could have been written by Bruce.)

*** It was mentioned in the podcast, but that went over E@L's head.

Weight - The Carrying Thereof

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:36:00 +0000

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

2006

I started a blog with a Singaporean buddy, PC (Paul), back in 2006 which was intended, well let me quote...

"This is intended to be a chronicle of gut-busting proportions.

Two generously proportioned Singapore based guys share their fun and frustration, ha ha, as they attempt to deny themselves one more helping of Chili Crab and enter the previously forbidden realms of puchasing off-the-shelf clothes,
ha fucking ha..."

I had already dropped a lot of Kgs to get to my best weight in many many years, in order to not look quite so morbidly obese for my high-school's 20th anniversary back in Geelong. For some unfortunate reason, my belly seems to be annoyingly non-participatory when it comes to getting it off. If and when I do lose weight, it preferentially comes of my legs and my arse. I have a dreadful fear of turning into a toffee apple - a fat bellied, shiny old perv with skinny legs and a skanky arse.

At the reunion, one of the guys, now taller and moderately trim, whom we considered in school to be a nerd and a chubby non-sportsman (but in retrospect was probably normal) said to me:

"E@L you've got so... fat!"

"Yes, thanks," I replied. "I have lost a lot recently. Thanks for noticing." Cunt.

9 February 2006

4 April 2006

9 May 2006
Well that didn't work out too well, did it?

~~~~~~~~~~~

2007

Start again?

4 April 2007

8 April 2007

11 April 2007
And...

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

2008

This year mysteriously left blank.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

2009

Hmmmm. Tut tut, E@L.

14 December 2009 -

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

2010

10 April 2010
~~~~~~~~~~~

2011

2 January 2011
Holy mother of shit! 10 days post Christmas and look at this! (I was above 130Kgs when I returned form Geelong, so 2kgs came off in just a few days/ No doubt that last shit helped a lot.)

5 February 2011

13 February 2011
~~~~~~~~~~~

2012

I had a horrible time skiing in Nagano, where the powder was waist deep in late January of this year (2012 I mean). Certainly I couldn't walk up in ski-gear to the lift and had to take the shuttle-bus for just one stop. I was exhausted after two runs and my muscles kept locking up in the most dangerous of situations... After day three when the weather set-in, that was it for the rest of the week, even when the sun came out. I was in the coffee-shop all day. I could only just make the slight walk up the hill to the onsen in the evening.

I decided that skiing next year (maybe Austria in 2013) was going to be different. 2012 was going to be the year of turning it around.

12 March 2012

21 April 2012
Was working hard at it: gym, swimming, smaller meals, greatly reduced alcohol* (let's not get silly), just chipping away. But not entirely comfortable in the chest department. GORD? Or the atrocious genes (terrible, don't ask about my family's cardiac history) making their sub-endothelial presence felt??

22 Jun 2012 -Woohoo! Broke the 115 barrier!
Not just walking, I was now doing 2min bursts of jogging on the treadmill interspersed with my incline and pace modulated walking, and I could easily jog for the bus now, or dash across the flashing-green-turns-red pedestrian crossing without getting short of breath, but there was that occasional and transient pinpoint of retrosternal annoyance...

So, I was a bit worried becasue I had a trip to Europe with Izzy et al coming up, and sought out a cardiologist (had to go third choice, everyone else was on leave) he sent me for a PET scan and stress test. Result? ... ALL CLEAR!

10 days later? I climb that high San Gimignano tower in the heat, feel that pinpoint grow, become like an enlarging spring winding up tighter and tighter. Heart attack, oops, I mean Angina Episode.

11 September 2012
Yep my strict regimen isn't all that strict and isn't all that effective. In fact I am concerned that too quick or too drastic a change in lifestyle will not be sustainable and will set me yo-yoing again, as the numbers above reveal.

~~~~~~~~~~~

2013

13 Mar 2013
Slowly. Essentially I have been on a moderately strict low-carb (in particular very low sugar and fruit juice - i.e. minimal fructose), low alcohol, protein rich, fibre-rich, normal/high fat Atkins-style Diet: low GI essentially. Note the minimal recidivism over the last 12 months. On this variation (recommended by another cardiologist, one of our clients), and on Lipitor and BP medication, last time I saw said cardiologist, he was concerned that my cholesterol was TOO low and that my blood pressure was TOO low. I just need to lose more weight, he said.

And today, I was accidentally dragged out to what turned out to be pre-St Patrick's Day drinks and, under protest, knocked back, as I said against every good intention, two delicious pints of creamy, chilled Guinness. I had started with soda water, but at $8 a pop (ha! Singapore!) my back-hairs bristled. I was not happy with my lack of resistance, though I fought off the puerile goading of my health-harmful friends ("Have another drink, ya big giiiiiiiirrrrl!" Because girls don't drink, do they, Evil K?) and, for a variety of other reasons as well, decided to head home.

I will wait until next week to weigh myself again and I see the cardiologist in a fortnight. Two Guinness, how pathetic am I? (You can read that two ways I think?)

~~~~~~~~~~~

Weight?

You've got to carry it a long time, trust me.

2:45 - 3:17
E@L

* Don't suppose any cares but my lower gastro-intestinal system seem to have developed something of an intolerance for alcohol as it passes through, red wine in particular.

In Reference To Last Post

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 05:04:00 +0000

It's all about dignity, as the philosophers would have us think.

But would the guy in the bar, seeking his happiness and not giving a fuck about other's opinions, is that "the moral thing to do?", to care only for one's own happiness? Or is he offending the dignity of those he is sitting at the bar talking to? Surely, rather than working at the bar, they would prefer be out digging rice in the paddies for a dollar a day?

Ah, yes, he's a hero: our man is a saviour. You can't rescue them all, but he's doing his bit, one lady's drink at a time.

Or one could take the whole living in Asia and "gone troppo" thing seriously, as it were, and do more than lounge in Pattaya bars, but just, like, live there...

Does the responsibility for judging our retired bar-lounge gecko's dignity reside in the moral judgements of those who criticize him, or is it the double-speak within himself that hides his lack of self-respect. Or is there something inherently wrong in seeking out a quiet, restful place to live out one's remaining days in more happiness and contentment than you ever had, or could ever expect in what others, on your behalf, might call your home?

Look into your heart, place yourself in a situation of just enough resources, limited obligations, where the weather is mostly nice (a tad humid), beautiful beaches, delightful companionship and the odd backgammon game or a Tuesday evening Pub Quiz...

Yep, exchange backgammon for bingo and you've got Queensland.

E@L

Shy And Retiring

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:21:00 +0000

At a large table with a subdued Thai-patterned table-cloth in a Pizza restaurant in Chiang Mai [that's in Thailand] sat six ageing, balding, male farang, in shorts, short-sleeved shirts and sandals with white socks. Nice rattan chairs, very comfortable - OK, four were sitting, two were standing. They were playing a board-game, which as E@L realised as he looked over discreetly, was backgammon. They seemed to be at the crucial stages of the game with most of the pieces in the home positions.

It was something of an interesting tableau for Chiang Mai. Backgammon. Pizza. The old city; moats, temples and ruins.

The two men playing were taking the game pretty seriously, in their own ways. Pieces were coming off and going on in the typically extended endgame of good players. [E@L hasn't played Backgammon for ages, excuse any naivety as he describes what he thought was happening.]

The farang facing more or less towards E@L was slender, with a long face accentuated by receding fair hair swept back from his already high forehead. He was wearing dark framed glasses. He seemed to be frowning all the time and obviously took it the game very seriously. He took the leather cup and rolled the two dice with a brisk, short shake, let them fall onto the board. All the farang looked at the resulting numbers and murmured. He clenched up a bit, his whole body tightened, or so it seemed, and he frowned again. He slowly reached across and moved a piece that was sitting on the edge of the board back IN onto a spare space of his opponent's Home. Then he picked it up and moved it again, four spaces out into the next area. A brief conversation started and after a pause he moved the piece back two spaces, admitting he had made a counting error. He struck E@L as having once having been a history teacher, had that mien of someone keen on certainty, accuracy and significance and quietly angry at himself by his mistake. He spoke clearly in an English accent, not formal but not broad or working class either, but as if he was used to talking to those less educated or a lot younger than himself. No doubt, from that subtle tone of voice and the way he held himself erect, he considered himself the intellectual of the bunch. The collar of his check shirt was ironed crisp, it was buttoned to the hole below the top and he sat bolt upright throughout his moves.

His opponent was in the ironic way of things, his opposite. Solid, round and calm, arms held slightly out, perhaps because of man-boob fat rolling under his armpits [doesn't E@L know that] in his easy-care check-shirt (E@L couldn't see, but there were probably two or three buttons undone): with elbows propped on the table he sipped his Diet Coke and he played with a pleasant, relaxed ease. As E@L watched he kept holding back the certainty of his determined opponent's victory with a cheerful goad after this mistake, or when he was able to make a frustrating block with a lucky throw of his own. When he rolled the dice it was a more open shake, larger in stroke, and when he released them, the dice clattered around, nearly going off the table. His accent, when joked about the dice running away, revealed his origins from a different part of England, somewhere they scorned toffee voiced snobs. E@L imagined he would once have taught metal work or car maintenance to the working class lads in a forgotten era when not every one wanted to be in finance (or history for that matter). And he would have been brilliant at it because it came easily to him, as did most things that interested him. For example, he knew how to play a good game of backgammon.

Sitting at that same side as the history teacher, with his chair turned slightly towards the game, leaning forward every now and then to watch each move with a slightly slack-jawed interest, sat a third farang, balding, perhaps a bit younger, with another British accent: E@L's guessing they are all Poms. He smiled often as he offered his commentary about the miscounting, the scattered dice, and it all seems directed at the History Man. But the history teacher either ignored him, perhaps concentrating so as not to make another mistake, or just plain ignored. He took this (assumed, E@L is projecting maybe) negativity in his stride, and seemed almost happy just to have them acknowledged. E@L could not help thinking about the small cartoon mutt skipping along side the great British bulldog Ralph. "We'll go chase dem cats, huh Ralph? Huh?" "Ah shaddup!" and a brisk back-pawer sends the little guy flying, only for him to come back panting for more.

The others man at the far end of the table, sitting back, hand on chin, watching or chatting to the standing two, discussing the football on the TV, was not always 100% on the game. E@L could not hear much of what they said, but it seemed to be a bout the football.

And then E@L's pizza came, handed to him by the English accented Thai man who ran the place.

"Looks like fun," said E@L, indicating the table and smiling.

The manager/owner smiled back and lifted his eyebrows briefly. "Sure does."

E@L took his pizza (not bad) across the road to his hotel (there's a pool in the room! Amazing!) and set up his computer with the large screen TV by HDMI cable, and watched two episodes of Elementary (excellent).

~~~~~~~

"... the tradition of the connoisseur tourism that had been around since the Grand Tour [...] still predominates today; its paradigm as we have seen is the gourmet who selects certain dishes (places, people) without any motive but the satisfaction of the palate. It is a form of travel that may increase knowledge and refine taste but that leaves the traveller's basic assumptions undisturbed. To a large extent the tourist remains insulated within a national bubble that preserves intact the familiar distinctions of language, class, race, wealth, education and so on. 'Many English travellers remain four or five years abroad,' wrote John Moore in 1779, 'and seldom, during all this space, have been in any company, but that of their own countrymen.' Bishop Hurd had observed the same tendency of the English 'to flock together into little knots of their own countrymen'. In similar vein Lord Chesterfield satirised the young Englishman abroad who complains that his bearleader is 'always plaguing me to go into foreign companies'. In truth, he suggests, these tourists never leave home, for 'they go into no foreign company, at least none good; but dine and sup with one another only, at the tavern'. To Lady Blessington it appeared that the English travelled 'not so much for the purpose of studying the manners of other lands as for that of establishing and displaying their own'. "
Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates - Travel and Sex, Da Capo Press, 2001.

~~~~~~

The 15th anniversary of E@L's Tour Of Duty in Asia will come up soon. He started his tentative expat-dom in Hong Kong on April 1st, 1998. An impressive stint? Well, impressive for some, but hardly that of a true Old China Hand, those lifers who are propped against the bars in Wanchai still would consider. His recent (9 months ago now) heart troubles (The Great Angina Incident of San Gimingano) have successfully instilled the moment mori attitude in him (part of the reason for the lack of blog postings - a couldn't give a fuck attitude he hopes is ending). Those medical interventional intimations of mortality; he knew they were coming; but of course not quite so soon. You are never ready for it, never seriously expecting it, never expecting it to be all that bad, never expecting to, like, find yourself coming close to, you know, hard to say the word... Dying…

With The Ever-Sensitive Nurse Odette
And so a man's thought turn to the contemplation of taking it fucking easy for here on in. Doing a David Bowie and resting on your laurels for 10 years.

E@L wonders where he will doing that ease-taking, should he live the Bowie years, deo volente. Would he end up in Chiang Mai, playing backgammon?

~~~~~~

All sorts of things to consider about retirement, not just the scenery. Health care being a major area of interest, d'uh. Where you want your bypass done, E@L? Cebu, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Brisbane (just a thought - no, it floods all the time) or Melbourne? And why? For the medical skill or for family support? Or is it the "English spoken here", unlike say, Sienna, his resting place after San Gimingano? Non parlo Inglese.

It's not that he's so cheesed of with work that he wants out as soon as possible, it's just hey, if an opportunity came up that could make him really financially comfortable, he'd take it.

Like, someone buys my shares for $10million...

Like, work's not that tough...
And the cost of living has to be considered. And the preferred weather. And an easy lifestyle. Nice food/restaurants? What about family, if he should he become a grandfather? And friends like the good old-fashioned flesh and blood, shake real hands, kiss real cheeks friends from the good old days in Victoria ( Australia that is). Sure he has great friends here in Singapore - but the expat world is a transient world and relationship are quickly quite deep, just as quickly they might end. Like a night-market - it's here; it's gone. Friends? They're here; they're gone.

So should he go back where he came from, as the Singaporeans wish?

But money? Without any big boost, it's a worry because Melbourne is one of the most expensive places in the world to live: it comes in at No.5. His income would be low for Australia, and the Australian pension...? Ha! He'd be forced to live off savings and that would drain away very fast, particularly if (when) he becomes sick again and doesn't want to wait for the public health system.

But if he stayed in Asia? Firstly, obviously he couldn't stay in Singapore or Hong Kong - see Melbourne re:cost of living.

So where? Would anyone care if he married a Philippino or Burmese, or a Thai lady [he is not getting married to anyone by the way] and bought a bar in somewhere like Pattaya and lived in Asia? Would he care what people think (and he does, believe it or not)? But where would he be happiest? Where the food is fresh, brilliant, delicious and cheap?

Som tam and gai tot - S$3. Awesome
Why shouldn't he get married again? He's single, of goodish fortune; he must be in want of a wife? But they'd say, "Dirty old man, gone troppo, look at him, such a young girl. Why doesn't he marry an unattractive, un-sexy, bitchy old woman who would give him hell and tie him down to a household of boredom and psychologically induced erectile dysfunction?" Just for someone to look after him in his dotage?

"Why not marry a pretty, sexy younger lady who would also give him Viagra-supported hell-fire and tie him down with fur covered chains and lightly whip his wobbly white butt?" he asks back. Joking! He doesn't want the spanking: he is not English. [And then have her real husband toss him out the window of that Pattaya condo three years later, once she has control of all his money.]

So, would he end up joining the History Teacher and crew? Would he find a benign, cheap place where he could live out his diminishing days on his substantial cash reserves? Could he survive in a culturally isolated enclave near tropically lush golf courses, with his well-ironed shirts, his backgammon and his cheap pizza? And other great food? And then he could fill the rest of his time with trips all around the world with SPG and family and friends? (Barcelona and then ~~Brussels~~ Belgium and Holland this year)

Or could he live in rain-drenched Melbourne in what amounts to another culturally isolated, racist, enclave where the restaurant are great if expensive - and though everyone speaks English, of a sort, but where intelligent conversation has in general shifted substantially to the left of the bell-curve from that which he is used to here (where the employment filtering allows in moderately to highly successful expats only. (Not, of course with E@L's friends back home, but go outside into the pubs, the streets and the malls - or the hospital staff tea-rooms - OMG the banality!). Back to where entertainment means TV, and that means reality TV and Add-Cheese-For-Instant-Fame-And-Riches shows. And the golf-course are public and under-tended, and at night what he plays is Word With (Facebook) Friends on whatever gadget passes for a computer in those times.

Soufflé at Woolies, not exactly Melbourne yet...
But there is also Aussie Rules football, the excitement it gives him - watch the ticker, E@L ! - and he could use his membership of the MCC (did E@L mention he was a member) more fruitfully - membership came through after a 12 year wait almost to the day he left for Asia, d'oh! April Fool, all right.

He has no idea what to do. None whatsoever. E@L is confused, as you can tell by the thoughts leaping around randomly in these sentences, and he is conflicted.

So he'll ride it out for the moment - he's feeling fit enough to live for a long time yet - and hope something pleasant comes along to force his hand.

E@L

(No doubt a lot of typos there in draft no.1 - I'll come back tomorrow)

Lie Down, You're Dead

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:05:00 +0000

This game started in September last year... Admittedly it's a 7day/move game because things like the occasional heart attack might interfere with my opportunity to make a move. (I lost 10 games by default and dropped my rating from 1397 to 1260, in July/August when I was in the Siena Hospital with no internet connection.)

So, time passes. Oozes like the moments, molasses slow, on a melting Dali clock-face. I have been waiting nearly 4 days for this guy to either resign (like a gentleman - it was obvious what was happening about 10 moves a go) or make another futile move in his inevitable loss of this match. Swear to Zombie Jesus. Just make some move. Any move. Just fucking well resign. Look, your Pawn is blocked. You can only move your King into the choice of a few ineffectual squares, none of which will protect your Pawn from my Rook. You will only have your King left after my next move. Your King, that's all! What are you hoping to achieve? What are you trying to prove?

WILL YOU FUCKING WELL RESIGN? I HAVE WON! LIE DOWN, YOU'RE DEAD!

~~~~~~~~~~

I have a idea... I will convert my two Pawns in Queens and run them all over the board with the Rook and see how long I can go without Checkmating you. That'll be fun.

Even, if that is possible, more fun than this.

~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, look! The grass is growing, let's check it out!

I think I saw the elephant move!
E@L

The Price of Everything

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 07:36:00 +0000

E@L is on the hunt for a good kopi in C* General. The hospital has two food areas, each awkwardly and annoyingly placed across the width the campus: one on this side, one on the other. We'll try this first one, as its, well, duh, the nearest…

~~~~~~~~

E@L had arrived a bit early, with time for a kopi before putting in an appearance (but does he really need to be here? He knows he'll be sitting on the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room for hours before they tell him to go home, there are no cases), as he had walked across Bukit Timah to the train station rather than wait on Dunearn for the 960 bus, which only seems to come every 20 minutes and therefore is always sardine-can full – and no, people will NOT move to the back of the frackin' bus so that E@L, if he had waited (and waited) for it, he would have been forced to kick and punch his way into the crowd on the steps and scream at the blank-faced, unmoving sheep in the aisle. Why don't people fucking move? Can't they think of the times that they were themselves in E@L's situation, teetering and tossed at the doorway? Ang mohs are included, just as guilty, look at this guy, brain stereod-out with white earphones and iPhone5. Wanker, look at me, MOVE! No empathy in the marrow of their bones, these people. Or is it some internecine cultural feud, revenge for the times they were in E@L's situation and no-one moved back for them. Is that what ensures this level of callous indifference?

Anyway, train, kopi. Train first. Damn, E@L left his ez-link card (like an Octopus card in HK, or a Myki in Melbourne - except it works) at home. Cash jangling in his pocket, always have plenty of coins. New single ticket system. Previously you paid a deposit of $1 for the hard-plastic ticket which you'd get refunded if you fed it back into the ticket machine at your final destination. If you remembered. Countless tourists have gone back home, several dollars forfeited, the green tickets still in their pockets, purses or on E@L's table. (Take these in lieu of rent, thanks man!) Now there is a thin paper card, no deposit required, it's reusable and promises a 10c discount after the sixth recharge. Hardly worth it, may as well throw it away.

And… He approaches the platform doors and sees the usual crowd of miscreants and ignorant idiots standing in the middle of the plainly marked exit channel…

"Please Allow Customers[sic] To Exit The Train"
And the ensuing stenosis is inevitable, the trickle flow (think almost blocked artery in, say, the heart) of those who rush first to get in against those who are trying, what the fuck, to get out. The back and forth of bodies pressing, the rolling wave of will and against won't. No-one going anywhere. It takes forever to get on, traffic-jam at the door, everyone held-up by the uncles and aunties who have never learnt the rules. Wrong generation, unable to learn manners and courtesy now (but knowing not to spill water on a red cheong-sam as it is bad luck and means money will flow away this year of the dragon…)

E@L is reminded of the experiment someone did to time how long it would take to exit a plane after an emergency landing (a pretended emergency). When the airline staff (presuming they survived the crash) ushered the travellers (presuming they too weren't churned into mincemeat) off the plane in an orderly way, with everyone following instructions and exiting row by row it took 2 minutes to empty the plane. Good. Let's mix it up a bit, thought the experimenters. With the incentive of a $5 prize for the first 20 people off, it was hell unleashed… There was shoving, there was climbing over seats, there was the carnage one would expect. There was 10minutes or so for the eager participants to be deplaned. Oh what a fun game that was. So what if there was a real emergency, a crash-landing, a bomb, a fire, a dumping at sea and what's left of the plane is sinking? How's that for motivation? $5? Not interested, get out of my fucking WAY! The motivation was that the rear half of the plane was on fire and the aisles bestrewn with unidentifiable or, worse, identifiable body parts and that certain death was imminent unless you get out of the mangled wreckage first (carrying any body parts that looked like they were once yours?)

Yeah, well, like that. It's not that this line is so particularly congested, it only takes a few over-eager dumb-fucks to clog the bottleneck. A handful of people manage to get on (E@L included), but some who wanted to get off have achieved it, some not. They'll have to try to exit again next stop and then, if they can get on, return that one stop to try exit yet again. The commute. Sisyphean chaos.

E@L has a lot of history with train doors. Yep, lots.

But with the buses it's the same (see above), so why not drive yourself E@L, you're rich, buy a fucking car and shut the fuck up, you suggest, innocently. But the fact that he's hardly ever here, for one thing, makes E@L baulk at this. With the outlandish car market here, the COE (a 10 year registration-like charge that you bid for) currently at S$92k, added to the price of the car (with taxes and other mandatory charges, a car worth $40k will cost you at least $88k before you add the COE component) and then there's finding parking and paying at the ever-expanding placement sites for the ERP (toll-roads = Every Road Pay, the taxi drivers smirk) and the already 5km traffic-jammed expressways, who'd have a private vehicle? The ultimate value of going through this bullshit? It's just not worth it. A car - say $170k. A return bus/train ticket to Tampines - $6.40. If E@L takes the commute to work whenever he is in Singapore, say 100 work days a year, that's $640 per annum. How many years to catch up with the price of the car? 230 years. And that's just one car to cover those 230 years. Granted, public transport prices may rise over that time however, we'll ignore this. (As we do most inconvenient truths.)

So E@L prefers the trains for the moment.

But as it is getting so crowded in Singapore - as it is in BKK - maybe what is needed is a significant portion of Singapore's anticipated 6.9million PRC and Bangladeshi foreign talents to work as the white-gloved, military uniformed platform pushers, as we once had in the good old days in Japan. At least they were polite enough to say, "Sumimasen. sumimasen…" as they forced rapist-comic-reading salarymen, elephantiasis-socked school-girls and you into the jellybean-jar of the now bulging carriages on the Shinjuku line.

(

So long as they don't push too hard...(

Lost in physical translation?

Singapore. How hard can it be?
~~~~~~~~

"Kopi, upsize. Take away." A young man, slightly chubby, black-hair loose and no doubt in half of the meals. E@L say "Please" to him? Not likely; a) he wouldn't understand the concept, and b) this is Singapore, get real.

The yellow sign above his head has pictures of laksa, bee hoon, nasi lemak, and the price list - Set A is $3.40. Unsure of the quality of the kaya toast here, and not feeling like coddled eggs, he goes for just a drink. Kopi Lg $130, Reg $1.10.

It comes pretty much instantly - he expected a wait, but no. The paper cup, with its dangle soft plastic handle, looks suspiciously regular sized.

"Upsize?"

"Only one size." Straight-faced.

E@L hands over $1.30 and turns away, takes a step, then halts and looks around, up to the price-list, at the server, who looks back, still unsmiling, at E@L. Indifferent. Callous. Callously indifferent. Or is this another blank sheep-like look? Is he a cheating bastard or just stoopid? A fraction of second is all it takes for E@L to understand that, either way, he has just been duped. It's not worth arguing over.

~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
Next day, different server behind the counter, little old lady with a scarf tied back, like DFW again.

"Kopi, take away, please auntie." Respect your similarly aged.

The same proportioned paper-cup as yesterday promptly placed on the counter.

E@L hands over $1.10.

(Kopi not too bad, to answer the initial conflict that set-up this post - it was not worth crossing the hospital to get to the other Kopitiam after all. The kaya toast however, he found out later that day, is execrable.)

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

Planning a trip in Europe for June/July, E@L needs to get from Barcelona to Amsterdam (he has given up on the Vienna leg, it's impossible to get there from Barcelona for some mysterious Stoppardian* reason) and so he does a flight-search using Expedia.

… searching, searching… a line of orange dots pulsing…

Up the top of the extensive list, it seems that there are NO direct flights. You must go through London, or Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva and/ or Zurich and stop-overs become sleep-overs - between 3hrs and 13hrs. WTF?

The return ticket costs a minimum of S$324, up to $554. But, you ask, why are you returning to Barcelona? Because, E@L replies, he is flying in and out of Spain as the return to Singapore from Amsterdam, or Frankfurt for that matter, is 30% extra. Plus he needs the points to stick his PPS club membership to the wall again)

$334 seems a bit steep, let alone $554, and fuck that one-stop shit. There MUST be a direct flight.

Yep, E@L scrolls down. There ARE direct flights with KLM, but, it seems, only for one leg of the trip. Either there or back, but not both.

Hang on, that can't be right. If you can go direct to Amsterdam with one combination, and direct to Barcelona with another, why the fuck can't Expedia combine these two direct flights into a single, simple combination. Nope, E@L scrolls to the bottom of the page - there are a lot of matches as he mentioned, and no, not one direct here and there set. And the prices down at the bottom are a mystery. It says "Select to Price". He selects. No price available.

E@L closes the Expedia page and clicks across - wringing hands in pleading and desperation - to the KLM website itself. Bang. A choice direct return flight. Straight up. Top of the page, a matrix of options - depending upon week-end or week-day, only €121 or €175.

What? How does this work again? A direct flight costs S$200, and an indirect flight, drag E@L all over Europe please and dump him on uncomfortable chairs at the airport gate for 12 hrs thank you very not, costs nearly twice as much. This is bullshit.

Expedia is now the E@L ex-flight-search-tool, it adds no value, but is instead misleading. It's not expedient: it's just not worth it.

E@L

*Mrs Drudge: Yes, many visitors have remarked on the topical quirk in the local strata whereby there are no roads leading from the Manor, though there are ways of getting to it, weather allowing.
(The Real Inspector Hound. Tom Stoppard, 1968)

Unintentionally Blank Look

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:09:00 +0000

My copy of Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald (Vintage Classics, translated by Michael Hulse, 2002), has four completely empty leaves after the last written (typed) page of the novel, which is on the right hand side. That means that there are nine blank pages. I haven't seen a printed book like this for a while. Yes, I do know how books are constructed, thank you very much.

After discovering this rather endearing quirk, I left the Starbucks (nothing better nearby, not having brought my Nescafe premixed sachets) and I hop-scotched up Soi 2, where the paving has been repaired to such an extent that it verges on being almost not as terrible as it was prior to having been torn up for several months and then carefully thrown down, I can only assume, as part of his a day-job, by that poor blind man who can be seen every night slowly walking the length of Sukhomvit, and up and down all its main sois, squealing Thai love songs to the annoying and, compounding the pain, annoyingly loud screech of his back-pack amplifier all the while being guided, with her hands on his shoulders, by his suspiciously young "mother", and my head was filled, inevitably, by thoughts on the once common practice of printers of placing their oft-mocked, self-contradictory comment, printed on an otherwise, please note, blank page, that the page in question has been left blank intentionally: blank, that is, on, but not for a, purpose. Blank, with the exception of deblanking the page with the notice itself, to the contradictory effect of its intended message. For, patently, it is no longer blank.

What if the page had been left blank unintentionally? What would be their notification on the page in such a case? This was the sort of questioning that was swirling frothily and maculate post cappuccino, around in my brain.

Of course, I reasoned (sic), it would make more sense to print any notice about the blank page on another, best adjacent, not necessarily initially, blank page.

Viz:

Contradiction expunged. Problem solved.

The mystery of what should have been printed on the page had it not been left blank, unfortunately, teasingly, insomnia-inducingly, remains unknowable.

Just like

E@L

Wings To Fly

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:12:00 +0000

“Curiously enough,” he added, “Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.”

Vladimir Nabokov, on Kafka's story The Metamorphosis, in a lecture to his students at his Cornell class which was published as Lectures on Literature.

via Futility Closet

~~~~~~~~~

Which brings me up to my favorite INXS song, one of my favorite rock songs of all time, indeed.

~~~~~~~~~

Something Michael Hutchence might have appreciated is the following quote. [If someone wants to ask me for some stunning secrets not revealed in the report of Hutchence's autopsy, please send me an email, or promise to buy me a drink at the pub.]

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

~~~~~~~~~

In fact, despite the existential despair we think of when his name is mentioned and, while Kafka's death was horrific (he slowly starved because TB of the larynx made it almost impossible for him to swallow {ironically, tragically, the final crisis came while he was trying to correct the galleys for his story "The Hunger Artist"}) he didn't want to die. He was otherwise happy and he was in love. He even proposed to his new(ish) and bestest girlfriend, Dora Diamant, not long before he passed away (as she stroked his forehead with a damp cloth.)

Sad.

Then she burnt a great wad of his papers...

“I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka

E@L

[Also an enormously entertaining read is Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature - available online]

Tic Tac Taxi

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 08:24:00 +0000

I was even thinking when I was in the taxi this very morning that all of this crazy shit was behind me now. Taxi-drivers have become normal. (Up to a point. They still can't understand Australian.)

I haven't had a nervous jumpy guy for ages now. No accelerator pumpers and clutch riders, no twitchers and shruggers, no wheel swingers or greasy-hair brushers, no gear-stick must-touchers or steering-wheel strokers*. It's been good.

OK the guy who brought us back from the airport last night was singing under his breath, but it was "Hooked On A Feeling."

(Unca-chucka, unca-chuka...)

Understandable; and much more forgiveable that the four of us who couldn't get Goyte out of our heads - because AirAsia had been using "Somebody That I Used To Know" on heavy rotation while we were taxiing and sitting at the gate. Swear to god...

[Somebody... (used to know)... Somebody...]

*********

You know what happens just after I was congratulating myself on having successfully used this blog to shame taxi companies into screening their drivers for Tourrette's syndrome, something I have been lobbying heavily for since I got here, holy shit, eight and a half years ago? You know, don't you?

*********

I notice that the driver, about 45 or so, not really an uncle to me, keeps placing the tip of his left thumb gently against the back of the wing of his not insubstantially prominent left ear. That's twice now. He rubs it softly, tenderly. He is holding his hand lightly clenched and his elbow out, almost as if he were answering an imaginary phone call.

He does it again, maybe three minutes later. Now he is using the cleft between his index and middle finger knuckles to caress (there is no other word for it) his delicate and shell-like. He gently folds forward that elephantine auricle and lets it flip back - where the curve of the cup at the rear of the cartilage had been convex, outward, it went concave, popping inward while he does this, then, when he lets it go, it pops back - is there a sound only he could hear? Ffp... Pph...

This is in slow motion. I swear.

Then, I think he has caught me looking. I think he is aware I am watching him out of the corner of my eye. I can sense a slight tenseness in his head movement. He is trying to bring himself under control; he is self-conscious, but he can't stop himself, and he does it again.

It's the elbow sticking out that gets me; so obvious, but casual and therefore unremarkable. He may have done this once or twice before I did indeed notice.

I am typing a draft of this report into my phone for the rest of the ride so I have made myself look busy and distracted - relaxed, he does it three more times. Like I said, it was a caress, a slow sensual massage.

Weird. Where do they find these people?

E@L

Flutter

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 02:09:00 +0000

I was killing time in an Indie/hipster coffee shop, the type you're more likely to find in an arcade off Flinders St than, you'd think, in Hobart. The young man busily fussing at the espresso machine had blonde, matted deadlocks. One of the three young women (may I call them girls?) who were squeezing between the tables and chairs of businessmen and back-packers with drinks and wholemeal muffins - all of these girls lovely to my eyes even though none were Asian - had undercut dark hair, shaved up high to her parietal bone on the left side, short and bobbed on the right, and her small breasts were braless under a tight black top. I immediately considered her a lesbian - right or wrong? Sue me.

The staff all wore plain black t-shirts, I noticed. This year's black is black.

I was free to sit here because the morning cases had finished at 10, and they did not need me back in the hospital until after midday. I still had 20% of a latte, now cold though, in a French glass (correct!) on my table - distressed wood with auntie-style cloth place-mat. The crumbs of toasted banana bread sprinkled on it betweeen a 50's wedding present bread plate and my mouth. I was coopting one of those glass sugar-dispensers with a chute that goes deep into the jar, this one 75% filled with raw sugar, to hold the front half of my new book down so that I might read the right hand page more easily, hands-free.

(Dead Europe, by Christos Tsiolkas. The strangely motivated narrator is attacking the menses-drenched crotch of a Greek prostitute [check this] with his hungry mouth. Eek! I haven't watched the movie yet, to see how they cope with this scene. Anyone?)

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

A fluttering tickle, a ghost's breath against my right ear. I looked around, expecting to see a fan, just turned on: perhaps its draught was being reflected from the chalkboard, art and menu filled at that side of my table. Nothing. As I turned my head back down to my book, I caught sight of the dancing marrionette flight of a moth in the dustmote-rich beam of sunlight that streamed from the corrugated plastic of a small skylight. Light-brown plain-patterned and about 10cm across, it jumped within the light, left, right, towards and then, in a leap that appeared intentional at last, away from me, up towards the service bar.

The lesbian (I was presuming) girl was about to step down from the raised service bar to the floor, directly in front of me, when the moth flew at her. She saw it coming, and paused. It landed on the lower edge of her black teeshirt. It spread its wings, and rested. This image is burned into me.

It was perfectly placed on her pubic region, stretched across where her hair would be (no doubt she was in fact shaved or electrolysed), where her kite-shaped uterus would be, folded slightly forward, inside. I had an erection immediately. She saw the moth there, shocked, amused, amazed, paused, a vision, an immortal and iconic statue. Slowly, she cupped her left hand in front of it, demurely almost, and began to walk, slowly, step by deliberate, delicate step, safely towards the door and there she set it free.

I ached to kiss her cunt.

E@L

Guns and Social Reactions to Massacres and Killing.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:05:00 +0000

Yes, having massacres in schools is the price Americans are prepared to pay for their 'right' to own ridiculously powerful weapons and to take concealed weapons into places like schools. I put 'right' into quotes because the amendment could just as easily not been approved back in the day, and that would have left the NRA, and the gun and ammunition lobby and the victims of their reprehensible propaganda hanging out nowhere legally, logically or what they might call 'morally'. There is no cowboy on high ground in the gun argument.

I hate to sound like a reactionary here, but movies and other media which not only celebrate extreme violence but also teach, sometimes subliminally, sometimes blatantly, and that such actions are the best way to solve social and even private problems must also take some part of the blame as they pull us into a circle of craziness where reality copies the movies, and movies corroborate reality.

There was also a good article in NYT yesterday or the day before, with a line about Americans preferring to have assault rifles than generally available health care and proper access to good education. Fucking crazy country.

As for the frontier mentality about winning the West with guns as a reason for owning these weapons in the modern world, surely it was the controlof weapons that made the frontier safe and liveable. The iconic Gunfight At The OK Corral as the famous example was a dispute about the bad guys not handing in their weapons as required...

E@L