Good Life
All the comforts of home.
* Television (actually legal and not-so-legal video feeds from all over the world)
* Radio (similar)
* A telephone (actually Skype)
* A toaster (with a broken timer so you have to stand and hold the bread down)
* A microwave (connected by an extension lead that's just begging me to trip over it)
* A kettle (a heating element plugged into the mains)
* A cooker (one ring and portable)
* A sound system (actually PC speakers and a collection of mp3s)
* A bed (matresses and duvet)
* A shower (...actually it is a shower...but the drain doesn't, um, drain)
I can keep in contact with most of my friends back home, by email or txt, or indeed skype, but for some reason I can't contact C. His phone doesn't answer and his txts bounce. He does have a knack of disappearing and making me worry about him, but I couldn't do anything about it even when we lived an hour's walk away.
Well, C, if you're reading this, you know my email: kapitano@btinternet.com. Get in touch, when you can.
Some more things Bulgaria has lots of: Car repair shops, FTP sites, and laws.
Montana is one of those towns that's built around two or three main roads. The road nearest me is called "March 31st Street", marking the date in 1971 when Bulgaria (somehow) gained independance after 500 years of Turkish rule.
At one end of the street is a supermarket and a signpost to the nearest town, called "Lom". At the other end, 20 minutes walk away, is another supermarket, some trendy wine bars, five banks that only businesses use, and the park with the statues of obscure local heroes. At the centre of which is a new discoteque, a new gymnasium, and an old fleamarket.
There are at least ten shops in between with the word "Avto" in the title - "Auto". One specialises in car paints, another in spare parts, but most are garages that repair cars that would be considered beyond repair in western Europe. One sells "nearly new" cars.
It may seem surprising that people who drive such clapped out old bangers should be so computer literate. Indeed, that the physical infrastructure of the internet across eastern Europe should be so much denser and more stable than even in America, while a wholly disproprtionate number of hackers and computer innovators should come from a place which is culturally backward in so many ways.
It's no mystery at all really. Germany got some of the best industry in the world by coming late to it, after other countries went through the painful process of early development. China is set to become a political giant partly because it started it's industrial revolution standing on the shoulders of an earlier giant. And it's a similar story here.
There are no end of laws against "misuse" of computers - hacking and innovation, which turn out to be much the same thing - just as there are countless laws about tax and travel, changed every few months. Almost no one understands them, and fewer obey them. It's an attitude that appeals to me, in case you can't tell.
Tomorrow I get to see an old country house. It's a bit remote, it's in need of repair, and I might be living there soon. The idea is that students might be less than impressed to know their teacher lives in the office next to the classroom, and there's a convenient place (fifteen miles away) which no one else wants.
I'll...consider it.
Small Steps
Bulgaria (or at least Montana) has a very large number of very small shops. And an amazing number of these are "Apteka" - a distant cousin of the English "Apothecary". Yes - chemists, drugstores, pharmacies. There are even roadsigns pointing to them, so I can only suspect Bulgarians get ill quite a lot.
I've just managed to complete my first spoken transaction in an Apteka. Yay! I walked in, indicated I was Angliiski (English) and that I had a Glavo-boliye (headache).
The price was five Leva - at least it was to a gullible foreigner like me; I've no idea how much it would be to a native. One leva is roughly 2.5 pounds sterling, so ten leva is GBP4.
You'd expect to pay ten leva for a good resteraunt meal, or an item of luxury food like leg of lamb, or one day's worth normal eating.
A large loaf of bread, 20 teabags, a small block of cheese, 250 grams of butter, a packet of about 25 strips of bacon or a packet of chocolate biscuits would each cost between 1.5 and 2.5 leva.
Other things Montana has a lot of includes large outdoor bins, primary schools, and people walking in the road.
I saw two of the bins merrily blazing away, belching smoke which everyone ignored. They're why I had a headache. Them and the ancient broken-down cars making their own emissions.
Pretty much everyone owns a car but almost no one can afford a new one - and they mostly only drive them on the main roads, because the lesser roads are full of holes. The pavements are also full of holes, which means pedestrians on minor roads walk on the tarmac, stepping aside for the occasional car.
In winter it's different - with three feet of snow which is only cleared from the main roads, the lesser roads are abandoned by everyone.
The schools? Exactly why a town of 35,000 needs three good sized schools for children under ten, I don't know, but it does. The good news for me is: They learn basic English there.
Change
Feelings. Not a reliable guide to action, but often a predictable one.
Saying goodbye to friends I'd already said goodbye to, and wondering why I was obliged to bother.
Making last minute arrangements and last minute changes in packing, being full of doubt over whether to take two pairs of jeans or three.
Trying to get some sleep in the hours before leaving, but being unable to and feeling annoyed at that.
More annoyance as my parents double check things I've already tripple checked, and impatience that I had to wait a few hours or a few minutes before going.
Optimism on the train to Gatwick airport, resignation at the silly ceremonies of "security checks", and apprehension that they might find some fault with my luggage.
Amazement upon looking out of the plane window that we were flying over endless snowcapped mountains.
Feeling hot and bored in the cramped plane seat...and the same heat and boredom on touchdown, mingled with a muted realisation that Bulgaria really does exist - it's not just a line on a map and an entry in Wikipedia.
Resignation as I sat through the two hour coach journey from the airport in Sofia to the school in Montana, comparing cultural notes with Tanya, the secretary, translator, teacher-meeter and the one who generally makes things work.
An odd sense of familarity on finding that, although Montana doesn't have a Lidl's, it has a Billa and an appropriately named Kaufland, which have much the same layout, lighting, products and overall feel as all ultracheap supermarkets everywhere.
Amusement at the somewhat, uh, basic facilities that I have. A matress, a microwave, a hot ring that fries my dinner incredibly slowly, and a computer that barely switches on. There's no kettle - there's an electrical element you plug into the mains and put in a cup of tapwater. Apparantly there's a toaster in one of the heaps, somewhere. On the other hand, there's a nice en-suite bathroom with shower.
And finally...choking back tears that won't quite come. What have I done? How did I get myself in this situation? What actually is this situation? What am I supposed to do?
On one level, I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.
Get this desktop computer working so I can post these words and keep in contact with everyone I'm suddenly missing in Britain. And to let them know I'm missing them, and how sorry I am I didn't take them seriously when they said they'd miss me.
Get familliar with the layout of this town, and pick up some basics of the language.
Fill out an inventory of things the school will need, especially books.
Advise on getting those new computers they want.
Come up with an outline for an English course to teach. Which in one sentence both sums up and obscures a vast amount of work.
I'm here for a month. That's the basic committment. Enough time to know whether I want to stay longer. One month - I can cope with that.
Tea / Off
"Eat, drink and say only good words"
- Bulgarian saying
"If there are no wars there are no heroes."
- Bulgarian saying
"The way back is always shorter."
- Bulgarian saying
"The vinyard doesn't need prayer, it needs a hoe."
- Bulgarian saying
“Hungary is very similar to Bulgaria. I know they're different countries.”
- Kevin Keegan
An afternoon with C, browsing bookshops and drinking tea.
An early evening with Paul T, comparing future plans and drinking tea.
A late evening with parents, marking my departure with roast dinner. And a nice cup of tea.
A night with comrades, dissecting the American elections. No tea.
And in between all the goodbyes, some slightly frantic packing. With teabreaks.
Do you like my new cyrillic logo? I'm thinking I should have a logo appropriate for each country I end up in.
Right. Just off to catch a train at four in the morning. I'll be in touch. See you.
Jen Mia Mondo
"You're gonna be a bad mothercrusher."
- Dialogue from "Robocop", as broadcast on British TV.
More delays, more stupid letters from bureaucrats, more computers to mend...and then mend again when they crashed after the first time. But there's a plane ticket with my name on it for Sofia. I leave Monday.
Or rather, I leave around 3am on what for most people is Sunday night, take a series of trains to Gatwick Airport, stand around for three hours, and spend another three hours getting cramp in the air.
And then take a two hour train journey to the school. Which is when the actual work starts.
The end of the world is nigh. Absolutely right nigh.
I was meant to meet C today, but something must have gone wrong - he hadn't been in contact and his phone seems to no longer exist. I'm a bit worried but there's not much I can do. In the meantime, I spent a happy 45 minutes in the shopping precinct, just in case he turned up.
Happy but puzzled by what was going on around me.
There was a red double decker buss draped with a message about a music festival, and next to that an off-white removals van belonging to the "Solent Dog Performance Team". Near the former a young man sang pop songs of the last fifty years (and some jazz standards) to backing tapes, flanked by a clown with a sockpuppet monkey and a half dozen people dressed for the office.
The style was "easy listening" - so easy as to be unlistenable. The musical equivalent of water that someone's boiled for a couple of months just to remove all troublesome flavour.
Outside the van mingled twenty middle aged men and women in identical blue track suits, half with dogs of various small breeds. Circling around were four cheerful types dressed as a highwayman and three peasants, handing out leaflets, all in whiteface, one spattered with stage blood. They seemed to know the dog owners, and I wondered whether there was an obscure connection between dog agility tests and...seventeenth century zombies. If that's what they were.
There were the usual youngsters in logoed jackets, collecting for one charity or another, all schooled to adopt identical faux-friendly attitudes. The manner is so ubiquitous and uniform now that it's ceased even to be an annoyance and become part of the background - it stopped being successful I'd say three years ago. One collector was teaching himself to whirl his empty clipboard on his index finger, like a fancy 1920s waiter with a tray of drinks.
A newspaper stand blurted today's slightly desperate local headline: Gran Gets Email Death Threat. And around it, groups of teenagers in low slung drainpipe jeans and antifascist badges shared ipods.
Standing in the middle of it all, glaring disapprovingly in the one direction with no people in it, a pretend-policewoman took notes furiously. "Special Officers" they're called - members of the public who get no training, no pay, no powers and no respect, but they do get a uniform that looks a bit like a police outfit, and a remit to stand around looking policey. Some of them misunderstand their role and try to "fight crime", before the relentless ridicule gets them housetrained,
This scene will be my last memory for a while of what Portsmouth grandly calls it's "city centre".
Anyway, I'm nearly gone.
Het Boy, Get Girl
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
- Hunter S Thompson
“The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism”
- Norman Brenner
“Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness”
- Seneca
Saturday Morning: Train up to London and not very happy about being asked to do so. The boss of the school in Bulgaria wanted to meet again to (a) check that my certificates look genuine and (b) tell me a lot of things an email could have conveyed quicker.
I'm running out of cash, so spending GBP20 to do things that didn't really need doing wasn't something I did willingly. Plus the weather was freezing cold. And my mp3 player broke down. And I hadn't had enough sleep. And I'd cut my finger shaving (don't ask).
And then because I managed to get lost in central London.
Still, he did reimburse me, and did say he'd buy the textbooks I recommended.
Saturday Afternoon: Sleeping on the train home. Though before that I somehow found myself in the middle of a hundred Japanese schooolgirls on a daytrip. They were greatly impressed that I knew all about Hadu Gei.
Saturday Evening: Noshing good food and mocking bad TV - always a good combination.
Saturday Night: This is where things get a bit blurred. I remember bumping into a university friend in the pub, being introduced to his friend...and the latter French kissing me. At least twice. In a crowded pub full of people who took no notice at all. This is one thing I shall miss about Britain.
I was a little bit drunk. He challenged me to snog him...we snogged...and after a full thirty seconds he recoiled and exclaimed "Oh my God you're gay!". It seems he wasn't. A minute later we snogged again, with full tongues and groping hands. And then he bought me a drink...and went off to chat up some girls. Unsuccessfully.
And I got invited to drink lots of vodka at the home of another old friend. And after seven hours of vodka and philosophy (irreconcilable ethical imperatives, egalitarianism vs leadership, revolutionary theory and practice in an insufficiently analysed world) I finally staggered home.
Sunday Afternoon: Woke up with a hangover. Went back to sleep. Got woken up again by a call from someone for who the sentence "I've got a hangover" is an invitation to tell anecdotes about hangovers, and not a hint to please go away.
I have a French admirer.
(J'ai un admirateur français :-).)
One thing. The post is archived as "Le Nant en Persone". But what is a "Nant"? Is it good or bad?
Nevermind, pretty cool anyway. Less cool though is somehow getting a link from a blog of masturbation links.
Huh? Huh! Masturbation is for wankers. And fellatio sucks.
Others have found me by searching for:
crank that curry souce
homersexul men
pear shape shag
usb masterbation [hmmm...]
do boys masterbate with each other
the great burglar-catching machine
...and three hits for "2 Girls 1 Cup"!
Oh yes, I leave as soon as the plane ticket arrives. Which may even be tomorrow.
Going, Going...
“They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive fake."
- Beverly Jones
“The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.”
- William Somerset Maughan
Sunday: Babysitting while trying to fix a computer.
Monday: Being stood up,
Tuesday: Babysitting while assembling the new computer. And being stood up again later.
Many years ago, I used a DOS program called "Langanal" for some linguistics work. It simply takes a text file and produces a list of what words are used in it with what frequency. Well I found the program again and ran it on this here blog.
And the results: Out of 22152 different words, I've mentioned "Sex" 170 times, "Money" 125 times, "Police" 112 times, "Christmas" 99 times and used the word "deglamourised" once.
Here then are 100 words at the bottom of the list:
yuppie
sugars
shedder
carreer
rationalising
lunchboxes
wristwatches
prophylactics
tank
youthful
invert
levitate
disgusting
peeks
netizens
clucked
huddled
luminous
toothache
physician
scraping
recovers
topless
laundering
bribery
overhauls
inspectors
haulage
trucker
flashy
certificates
mauled
conjugal
pissing
correlation
edges
cheek
nail
redneck
nashville
fingerpicking
downloadable
disseminating
sacking
amazement
auxiliaries
politeness
distancing
degeneracy
rituals
buddhists
eightfold
fourfold
gautama
tao
ching
meditated
behaved
clerics
moderation
confucianism
overpoweringly
wicca
jainism
cosmogony
attractions
sparked
stalinesque
elaborately
patented
tuck
ju
jitsu
missionary
sweeping
sufflate
ringtones
flattering
bonk
balloon
tasteful
decorated
mixers
clubbed
slurred
proscribed
aspergers
tourettes
wonderdrugs
pharmaceutical
valium
oppositional
defiance
bureaucracies
genus
fecally
dehydrating
contagious
immunity
stares
I did write several drafts of a post on a slightly more serious linguistics topic - phrasal verbs that usually occur in the passive voice, such as "Fed up". We say "I'm fed up (with him)", but not "He feeds me up".
However, perhaps fortunately, there's six different partial drafts of the post, and writing them has just served to make me more confused.
I'm off to London again on Saturday for "final arrangements" with the boss of the Bulgarian school. I might get to meet the other teacher too. Then on Monday (or possibly Tuesday) I catch a plane.
Before that, meet up with C on Friday (for a late valentine), and then tell my beloved jobcentre why their services are no longer required.
I've been offered another job out of the blue. Assistant Director of Studies for a school in Khartoum. Which, BTW, is a sharia city. Yes, that's what I thought.
A school in Sudan are so desperate for someone to more-or-less run the show, they're offering the post to someone with no experience - of teaching or admin.
No word on what happened to the previous ADOS, but the email mentioned a recent berevement.
The irony is, in Bulgaria I'd be effectively Director of Studies anyway - in the first month there'll be little or no teaching, but lots of designing the curriculum from scratch.
Pear Shaped
"Things get worse under pressure."
- Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
There are things that annoy me. For instance:
* Having to wait two and a half hours for a shag.
* Having to wait outside, at night, in the cold, with nothing to do except walk around the block - and then do it again.
* The bloke, when he eventually turns up, being too stoned to shag.
...and as an extra added bonus:
* Being unable to summon up the energy to be extremely pissed off. Even when he suggests trying again the next night.
Anyway, it should be an eventful weekend. My last weekend in this sodding country for a while.
Saturday - straighten out flight and accommodation arrangement with the school in the morning, meet up with C in the afternoon for retail therapy and tea, and impose upon a comrade for evening meal and night in the pub.
Sunday - packing by day, babysitting in the evening...and a damn good night's sleep in preparation for Monday's fight.
Assuming of course that nothing goes wrong or gets delayed. Not that I'm being pessimistic. Just...experienced and cautious. Which is like pessimistic, but done by older people.
update:
I missed the call from the school because...I overslept - the plan is to try again later.
I missed the meeting with C because...he overslept - the plan is to try again later.
Update:
There has been a ssmmaallll technical hitch at the school. The rooms rented to house teachers have been repossessed. It seems the owners were not scrupulously honest about their tax. The upshot of this is:
* All the furniture, equipment and paperwork there is now being hurridly relocated to the school's office.
* The temporary accommodation of myself and the lady teacher who's just been recruited will be...the office.
* It'll take a few days to kit the office out for 24/7 habitation, so...plans to go out there are being put back for a week. With the absolutely cast-in-stone signed-in-blood assurance that I will fly out on Sunday week. Or possibly Monday.
In other words:
Again!
Gggaaaaahhh!
Glut
"Hello my good friend .
How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family? [...] if you do not remember me, you might have receive an email from me in the past regarding a multi-million-dollar business proposal which we never concluded.
I am using this opportunity to inform you about my success in getting the fund released and transferred to Trinidad and Tobago bank....
Due to your effort, sincerity, courage and trust worthiness You showed during the course of the transaction.I deemed it right to compensate you and show my gratitude to you with the sum of $1,200,000.00.
My dear friend I will like you to contact my SECRETARY IN BENIN [...] for the collection of your bank draft.
Thanks and God bless you and your family.
Hoping to hear from you.
Regards
DENIS WILLIMAS.
Email: morrisije14@yahoo.fr
Tel: +22993682297"
- Mr Morris Ije, Financial Consultant
With some computers you know exactly what the problem is, and sometimes that means knowing exactly why you can't fix it.
With other computers you've got no idea what the problem is, because every test you run indicates there shouldn't be a problem. This is the more frustrating of the two.
There's a special subtype of the second category - computers that work perfectly...until quite suddenly and for no visible reason, they don't work at all. Occasionally they start working again, equally mysteriously, and they give you a look as if to say "What me? Dunno what you mean! I've always been exactly like this." This one is like dealing with humans.
I am spending this week staring at three computers - one of each type. And I am more than a little bit sick of doing it.
However, tonight I'm taking a break. Tonight will be spent drinking, gossiping, dissecting philosophical conundrums (conundra?) and eating large amounts of curry. With the owners of the computers,
Oh yes, I'm due to fly out to Bulgaria on Monday 11th. Possibly at four in the morning, if the cheapest flights happen to be then.
I'll be taking:
* Rincewind (this laptop)
* USB mouse, USB qwerty keyboard, USB midi keyboard, USB speakers, and USB memory sticks
* A small stack of DVDs containing software
* A small stack of DVDs containing, um, DVDs
* A large stack of DVDs containing music
* Some books on how to speak the insane language they have in Bulgaria
* Some books on how to teach the insane language we have in the UK
* A big bag of clothes.
And yes, they want me to fix up the computers in Bulgaria when I'm not teaching.
Last night I met a taxi driver who'd given up a career of computer maintenance to drive around the town for half as many hours for twice the pay. We spent a happy journey home comparing frustrations and hating Bill Gates.
Update the next morning: There was indeed too much good food, too much bad alcohol, and in the end too much deep sleep. I consider the night preliminary field research for life in Bulgaria.
Working My Way Back to You
Okay, more or less back on line. With an experimental new setup that was far too many eyestrain headaches in the making. And still a bit unreliable.
Quotes will be at the top again when I get my quotefile back. Yes, I left it round someone's house when fixing their computer.
It's my father's birthday. I'm not quite sure how old he is, but it's probably 72. We marked the occasion with a giant multiflavoured takeaway curry - and three hours later, we're all still immobile with indigestion.
I was supposed to meet up with MK for some amour de bouche, but he'd somehow managed to get sixteen pints of beer down his gorge, so was also incapacitated.
Here's a computer maintenence tip for anyone who, like me, has multiple operating systems on the same computer, on different partitions:
When defragmenting one partition's OS from inside another, delete the first OS's page file first. It's easily done, just like deleting any other file. That way, you won't waste time defragging the page file, and when it reappears when you boot up in the defragged OS, it'll be neat and unfragmented anyway.
And if those two paragraphs meant absolutely nothing to you, you computer could probably do with the attentions of someone like, well, me for instance.
Yes, I now have three versions of Windows XP running on this laptop. One is a third the size of a standard installation, with all the useless guff cleared out to make it run faster. One is stripped down even more, specialised for sound processing. And the third...is a standard installation, just in case the other's fall over later.
Eight days ago I asked the head of the Bulgarian language school when I could start, and he said "Definitely within the next fourteen days."
Yesterday I asked for an update and he said "When the apartment is vacant." So, I'm basically waiting on a tennant to move out, which may or may not be encouraging.
David has sent me a rather lovely book, all the way from across the pond. "Wired Michigan" is a compendium of all that's unexplained, ghostly, or just plain ideosyncratic around his home ground.
Sightings of strange animals, decidedly eccentric local folk, highly personalised architecture, rather a lot of ghosts and the occasional mass murderer.
So that's my bedtime reading - I'm thinking some of it would be good for my students, when the finally appear.
I bumped into Ralph today. Like seemingly everyone else in Britain, he's sick of the way the country's going and is casting around for some clearly identifiable cause - or failing that, someone to blame. And like a lot of people I've spoken to recently, would like to go somewhere else but can't.
His band - the nicely named "Retrobates" - should be recording soon, and I'll be interested to hear what they come up with.
Another technical tip:
If you're typing up a blog entry while your computer is doing something experimental and possibly dangerous in the background, especially if it's turning into a long and thought provoking essay...
...save it somewhere safe, or else you may find it vanishes when your computer crashes and loses all data, And then you'll have to bash your head against the wall for a bit, which no one wants.
I'm just saying.
Blog Me a Kipper
I'm going away for a little while. In the meantime, here are some profound thoughts to mull over.
If you don't know where to begin, begin at the end.
Someone once said "There is no such thing as a stupid question."
They were wrong.
Yes, cats really are mad.
Macho + 20 years = Camp
Just what is a spleen anyway?
What a difference a 0.1% of DNA makes.
Birds do it...
Bees do it...
.jpg)
Sometimes soccer referees do it.
Though sometimes it takes a little prompting.
Recycling is good.
Subtlety is good too.
The Lake of Fire.
Are mice out-evolving humans?
Or just becomming more like us?
Hello, you don't know me, but I know where you live.
Feel a little Randi.
Know what I mean?
What could possibly go wrong?
So Lucky. Lucky, Lucky, Lucky.
All this week's quotes are from Christian fundamentalists - that is, drooling loonbuckets who just happen to be Christian. And usually American. For literally hundreds of pages more, visit the site "Fundies Say The Darndest Things!". Because they do.
"If u have sex before marriage then in Gods eyes u are married to that person if a man rapes a woman in Gods eyes they are married it sucks for the girl but what can we do lol"
- Gods soldier
"A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However he should not penetrate, sodomising the child is OK.[...] The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister."
- Kirabellydancer
"Why would a heterosexual want anal sex?"
- Twincrier
"If you masturbate thinking about how pretty the flowers are and how you want a puppy, essentially that's not wrong [...] masturbation is something that people in general should stay away from because it's hard not to lust whilst doing it."
- Ben Jamin A Foote
"There will be no sex in Heaven."
- Susan
"Sex is a sin... Skiing is deffinetly not."
- Shyguy
"Oral pleasure is simply masterbation between two people.[...] Ergo, it is IMPOSSIBLE for two women to have sex with each other, it just cannot be done. All they can do is to masterbate each other."
- senor boogie woogie
And that's all the sex you're getting from me today. Also all the religion.
It looks like I was right to turn down the Wall Street Institute in Moscow. There was always something slightly not-quite-right about them that I could never define, or be sure was real.
The way they were honest about the problems they were having or the political situation in Russia - and the way they covered themselves with saintliness that they did so - but only when the problems were obvious and the situation common knowledge. The way their emails were informal and friendly - but as though written according to a book called "How to be informal".
The "groundbreaking" utterly vaccuous in-house teaching method, the somewhat, uh, formulaic website, the extensive use of "affiliates" - something you learn to be wary of.
There was the insistence that teachers enter Russia as tourists, justified - quite plausibly, perhaps accurately - by the labyrinthine Russian bureaucracy of work permits. And the way this was sprung as a surprise late in the day, with the email equivalent of an "Oh didn't you know? I thought everyone knew" expression.
And I suppose the tempting end-of-contract bonus, paid-for insurance and arranged accommodation. There's a saying about things that seem too good to be true.
All sorts of little things I should have thought more about at the time. But now I read this delightful blog, and it turns out the Wall Street Institute have a history. One that involves unpaid teachers, unsatisfied student and lots and lots of bankruptcy. Branches go bankrupt, then reappear under a new front.
I should have known, and it seems I have been lucky.
One thing: I knew the TEFL world was full of bad schools run by crooks and incompetents, but I didn't realise how full. It's like knowing there's a lot of bad films made in Hollywood, and then discovering RottonTomatoes.Com.
ANYWAY (fave word), the time has come to purify and rebirth my laptop. Yes, it's reinstallation time again. Which means it's time to post some of the intriguing pictures I've stumbled upon in the interwebs since the last one.
Coming up next...
4 Pervs 1 Kap
This week, all my quotes come from fundamentalists posting in Christian discussion forums, as lovingly collected here.
"pi changes depending upon the strength of the gravitational field involved."
- MHGinTN
"Deoxyribonucleic Acid, for example... sounds impressive, right? But have you ever seen what happens if you put something in acid? It dissolves! If we had all this acid in our cells, we'd all dissolve!"
- EnemyPartyII
"Gravity: Doesn't exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them...These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down...The more sin, the heavier something is."
- Anonymous
"All any terrorist has to do is drop large quantities of plutonium from airplanes onto American soil and it will render electricity completely useless."
- Carico
"Sorry but scientists have just shown that mice DNA is more similar to humans than human DNA."
- Carico
Now then. You may recall that seven days ago I started a small experiment. I posted some text about a certain notorious short porn video, just to see how many would find my blog by searching for it.
And I can now reveal: There were four hits! Two for "two girls one cup" and one each for "2 girls one cup" and "2 girls and 1 cup".
So, in this informal scientific experiment, four perverts read my blog this week.
Well, four plus the usual pervs, naturally, MJ.
That's quite enough of that. Here's some soothing pictures to take our minds off such pervaciousness.
In any case, the other hits though were less sensational...
gary taubes
blogs on different interpretations of sleeping beauty
asa bhosle
how do you pronounce Brno
accupressureists
Plutius identities
translate nimic into english
bein pensant definition
rhyming with relaxed
WHAT RHYMES WITH RELAX
timeline of weapon inventions
phymod realtime version
"uri geller" liar magician
non smoking rhymes
mp3 "hollywood beyond"
"hollywood beyond" what's the color of money mp3 blog
damon blows america blogspot
amorzinho translation portuguese
"have you heard it on the news"
...so I guess I'm still respectable to some folks.
My morning was taken up explaining to bureaucrats why I'm too busy for them. I'd let myself be persuaded that, if only I stopped acting hostile and appealed to their reason, they might co-operate. So I tried it, with one additional factor - I acted confident.
And it worked too. They don't really know how to deal with people who treat penpushers behind desks as functionaries to be treated with polite firmness, instead of priests blessing supplicants with their favour.
One exchange sticks in my mind, as indicative of how they think:
Bureaucrat: So you've got the job?
Kapitano: Yes.
'Crat: Can you prove it? Do you have documentation?
Kap: You want a written record of a telephone interview.
'Crat: Yes.
Kap: I'll get them to send me a confirmation.
'Crat: That should be okay. But you mustn't leave the building till you get it.
Kap: I don't have time for that. I'll be back later, goodbye.
There's a certain type of computer geek for who the cry, "Mine's smaller than yours! It's tiny!" is a cause of much envy and competition. These are the operating system minimalists - those who try to cut down Windows or Linux to the barest essentials, and then the even barer essentials, in the cause of running speed and efficiency.
There's a series of miniature versions of XP, called TinyXP and culminating in TinyXP Platinum 2, which cut out all the unused (or barely used) and antiquated from XP, leaving a rapid and stable husk of 350MB - about 1/6th the size of the "official" XP - and running with 50MB RAM instead of the 512 that's the usual minimum.
Microsoft is, of course, not amused at this sort of thing. Every time a miniature (or you might say "cleaned up") versions of Windows appears on one of the filesharing systems, they're quick to shut it down. This means it's difficult to find them, but not impossible. I've got TinyXP PE2, plus some earlier versions, and a different hack of XP designed especially for music making.
Of course, what Windows really needs is a redesign from the ground up, which is what Vista was supposed to be but absolutely wasn't. Windows could be recast at one tenth the size and three times the speed, but such a thing would be massive undertaking, far out of the reach of hacker groups, and somehow I doubt that Microsoft will have the decency or good sense to do it, even after the catastrophic failure of Vista.
Anyway, If Linux is your thing, there's several open souce miniature versions, including Damn Small Linux. If, after the next week or so, I have any spare time at all, I might give it a whirl.
Death and Rebirth
RIP Greebo.
My tower computer, Greebo the Second, has just died from an unspecified motherboard failure. Yesterday he was working perfectly, trying out his new operating system and merrily burning data backups to DVD. Today he was simply unable to switch on at all, and in spite of multiple hard drive and video card transplants, could not be revived. His components will be used to upgrade other computers.
His predecessor, Greebo the First, was a 1GHz P3 with 512GB RAM and a succession of hard drives handed down from younger systems. He now lives in semi-retirement, recording digital radio and old cassettes to mp3.
Greebo the second had 3GHz and 1GB of RAM, and when he wasn't running MSN messenger or downloading unfeasibly large amounts of smut from the internet, he was helping me compose songs, occasionally losing all the data in crashes. He had handed-down drives too.
This morning I had a choice: Wait at least two weeks (more like six) to go to Moscow, or wait at most two weeks to go to Bulgaria.
Bulgaria it is, just as soon as (a) the living quarters are finished and (b) the manager's got the cash for the plane ticket. I've just told Moscow - or rather, Istanbul, which is where the Moscow headquarters are currently located.
I will be, for a few months, the only teacher. For all student ages, levels and specialisms. And also the computer technician. So I might be a little bit busy.
If I thought about what I was getting into, I'd be too terrified to get into it. So I'm not thinking about it.
Tomorrow I get to explain to a bureaucrat why I don't have time to attend a course in elementary jobseeking. If they take a reasonable view, fine - they just mark me as "justified absence" for a week. If they don't. I'll do my best to break a chair on the way out.
One of the reasons I wish I had a working camera would be to publish photos of all the things I find abandoned on the street, and take home.
Last night it was a football shirt. Clean, untorn and even in my size, but just lying in a crumpled heap in the road at four in the morning. Last week it was a scarf and a bobble hat, sitting on a wall, just as it was turning cold and I needed them.
A month ago I was delighted to find a large, brown, floppy, stuffed toy dog, looking forlorn on an electrical junction box. The (real) dogs were just as happy with it. Around six months ago there was another stuffed toy - a three foot Daffy Duck, presumably dropped from a child's pushchair.
And of course there was the big red fleecy jacket (sponsored by Bell's Whiskey) under a pile of wet leaves in the rain - as though it had burrowed there to keep dry. It would have cost at least GBP60.
I've found a walkman, and a memory stick, and an extra battery for my (now dead) video camera. Then there's all the things I didn't take home. The beer glasses, the single gloves and socks, and for some reason a great number of hubcaps.
But why don't people leave digital cameras lying around?
Rush, Rush
“I do not rule Russia; ten thousand clerks do”
- Tsar Nicholas I
Here's the short version:
Russia's probably off, Bulgaria's probably on.
The slightly longer version:
The school in Russia have, thanks to the incompetence of various agencies and the deliberate delaying tactics of the Russian civil service, not got their paperwork ready by the promised date - yesterday.
In fact, they won't be sending out invitations for another two weeks. At least. Probably more.
So, I called up Bulgaria, and asked them, seeing as they'd expressed interest in me working for them when the Russian contract was finished, whether they'd be interested in having me sooner - like next week. They said yes, they'd love to have me, but they just need to do some of their own paperwork first.
The Russian option has a lot to recommend it - a stable school, high wages, and good student attitudes. On the downside the school is regimented and culturally the cold war is back.
The Bulgarian school has...whatever the opposite of regimentation is, but the wages are low and the local culture parochial.
I'd enjoy Bulgaria a lot more, have a great deal more freedom in teaching and a more varied job description. I'd just get paid half as much, and the job security is quite a bit less.
I should know whether they're ready for me by Monday. It would be ironic if they weren't, and I'd wind up somewhere completely different - like, for instance, Vietnam.
A lovely day out today with C, spent browsing bookshops, occasionally buying stuff and taking a great deal of good natured rubbish. Surreal word association, bad puns and scatology circa 1955 - things we're both quite good at but which he could do at olypmic level.
We had breakfast together (two cups of tea each and an amazingly sticky flapjack from a cafe), and a little later lunch (more tea and another flapjack from the same place).
Our birthdays are a few days apart so we exchanged gifts. He got a box-set of excruciatingly bad sci-fi movies (which was originally supposed to be for christmas but nevermind) and I got...some rather good sci-fi books.
We probably won't meet again before I leave, so it was good to spend a few hours together.
And in the evening, duty. In this case, that means buying food, selecting a piece of domestic junk, taking both to a fundraising event, paying to get in, eating other people's food, buying raffle tickets for other people's junk, and watching a movie for two hours about corrupt corporations, police violence and workers' struggle.
Before walking home in the cold, stopping off for promised oral sex with an old acquaintance, and finally sleeping exhausted on a wonderfully overwarm electric blanket. In other words, business before pleasure.
Well that was the plan. In fact the film was great stuff and the acquaintance cancelled.
But I did come away with four pork pies, three blocks of cheese, two salamis and a loaf of bread. And a chicken drumstick.
There's a little mouse, dark brown and not more than two inches nose-to-tail, perched on the edge of my chair, industriously chewing on half a peanut held between its front legs.
This one is (I think) Ernie. I've know he(/she) was around for the last week, from the rustlings of plastic and paper, and the occasional squeak. In the dark the noises are a bit sinister, but with the light on, munching away, Ernie is...just very cute.
A disease carrying parasite, yes, but a cute one.
Crank It Up
How is it I've never come across Alex Jones before? He's a prolific broadcaster of impassioned political presentations, archaeologist of inconvenient facts and, yes, purveyor of wacky conspiracy theories.
He's one of those people with high intelligence and moral sense, diligence and charisma...and no rudder at all.
The trouble with people who have the drive and ability to carry out an immense project without the support of a sympathetic community is...they don't have the correction of expertise and reality checks provided by a sympathetic community.
Here's a few paraphrases (and a quote) from a recent broadcast, with comments.
* Obviously non-terrorist crimes are being recategorised as "terror related", "connected to Al-Quaida", "inspired by Al-Quaida" or similar gibberish. This is quite evident, and not difficult.
* Anyone who protests against anything the government does is accused of "aiding the terrorists" or "giving succour to Al-Quaida". They are indeed.
* The media are starting to suggest the emergence of a "white Al-Quaida" - educated, well dressed folks who, being white and not having beards, don't look like suicidal fanatics. There is a creeping climate of fear that "it could be your neighbour" or "it could be a member of your family". Yep - Macarthyism worked in the same way, with the paranoia about communist agents disguised as super-respectable Americans.
* Flouride in the water has no effect on dental health, but it is a slow accumulating poison that affects the brain. Well, there have been studies that suggest that, yes.
* It's part of a conspiracy to stupefy the middle and working class. Um...oh-kay.
* "They'll go out and torture the public and have the public say they're terrorists, and then the idiot, soft, chicken-neck scum of this nation - the cheeseburger [guzzling], beer drinking, football worshipping, soft, cowardly, stupid people will buy it and cheer it on and there'll be all those proud fathers getting their sons into it, say "Oh I love your black uniform, son. Oh I love your suit and tie, son.", and then all the corruption and the drug dealing and just a mass of criminals feeding on us. Gurh! It makes me sick! Murderers! MURDERING SCUM!" Hmmm.
* The CIA are being taken over by immigrants who hate the American way of life and are using the war on terror to destroy it from the inside. Ah. Oh dear.
* And it's all because the Bilderberg group think they have the secret of eternal life, and want to first control and then kill off 80% of the world's population to leave them free to enjoy their immortality. Er...
Gary Taubes on the other hand is packaged as a crank, but isn't. His work isn't (directly) political - he's best know for writing diet books. The blurb on his latest tome "The Diet Delusion" boldly proclaims that high-fat diet and lack of exercise have nothing to do with obesity, high carbohydrate diets are completely ineffective for losing weight...and, inevitably, that Gary Taubes alone can make you thin because all the scientists in the world are blinkered and wrong.
Makes him sound like a lunatic, doesn't it? Latest in a long line of uneducated crackpots with a publishing deal that lasts just as long as the sensation.
Actually, Taubes is a respected scientist (though his qualifications are in physics, not nutrition) and what he's actually saying is what nutritionists have known for decades. He's just been promoted by his publisher as a sexily daring iconoclast and/or amusingly ill-informed crank - because that sells better.
What he actually has to say isn't quite what the blurb suggests. He essentially says:
* Eating fat isn't the major factor in becoming overweight, and therefore reducing fat intake isn't the major factor in losing weight.
* Overeating isn't the really important thing either.
* Sugar is the major factor, because of its effect on insulin levels.
* Eating lots of carbohydrates is more likely to make you fatter than thinner. This goes especially for the simple carbohydrates, which includes the sugars, and are found in the "bulk" foods beloved of weight-loss diets - bread, rice, pasta etc.
* Exercise burns fat very slowly, and increases appetite greatly - so, while it's healthy in other ways to be active, it's a false economy if you want to get svelte.
So, what's the lifestyle of the serious pound-shedder? Moderate fat intake, low sugar, low carbohydrate, high protein, moderate exercise. Which is just so controversial.
Taubes is also a historian of bad science - a subject close to my heart - and there's a good interview with him about it here.
Die Fledermaus
Like all good queens, I have two birthdays. Which is to say, the one on Thursday was so nice I thought I'd have another one on Saturday.
There were presents too. First time: Some highly useful but equally dull mains adaptor plugs - so I can plug my three-pin British devices designed for a 240V current into Russian power sockets, which have two pins and 120V. Second time: Erm...a dalek yo-yo. Which is to say, a yo-yo with some dalek stickers.
There seems to be a rack of Dr Who merchandise in every major shop. You can get magazines full of articles that offer an astounding lack of information, masks of every monster that's been featured in the last three years, plastic models of these same monsters, Dr Who lunchboxes, Dr Who geometry sets, Dr Who wristwatches...and for all I know Dr Who condoms.
If there are prophylactics in the range, they will split if used. This is because all Dr Who merchandise splits if used. This is because all Dr Who merchandise is deeply, deeply, crap.
Star Wars action figures may have been a bit of a cynical rip-off - the kind of cynical rip-off that I could now sell for a lot of money on ebay if they weren't all at the bottom of the boy next door's septic tank - but at least they lasted a month before the heads fell off.
I guess the crap of my crappy childhood was better crap than the crap of today's children's crappy childhood. Less crappy.
Stephen P took me out for a surprise birthday lunch on Friday. It was a surprise because (a) I didn't know he was back in England and (b) it turned out he'd just had a birthday too. He was 25, and couldn't believe he was buying extra-hot spicy Chinese food for a grand old man of 36.
I can't believe it either. How did I get to be 36 years old? What happened to the last ten years and can I try them again please? How come I'm suddenly half my father's age and twice the 18 year old I somehow can't remember being?
And how come my blond, cherubic, youthful 25 year old friend was being sugar daddy for the day? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Or is that what's meant by being an Invert?
C is also having a birthday, and we should be meeting up on Wednesday - with suitably cheap and silly presents. I don't want to leave for foreign climes without spending half a day with him.
I keep trying to learn some Russian, but every time I pick up the books, stuff gets in the way. Currently my Klingon is better than my Russian. Majbe' - HolHom.
My nuts keep disappearing.
On my shelf is a plate, and on that plate is a bag of peanuts. On Friday half the contents were spilled out onto the plate - next day the plate was empty and the bag had bite marks. Then it happened again.
From this I conclude two things. First, that Bert and Ernie - the two mice who I used to catch out of the corner of my eye scampering away - are back, possibly with friends. And second, that they have learned to levitate.
I'm tempted to suspend a peanut by a thread from the light, just to see if it's gone by morning.
2 girls 1 cup
Two Girls One Cup. The video you've been searching for. The most disgusting, revolting, horror-inducing video to ever go viral. The inspiration of a hundred "reaction" videos, a thousand guilty peeks and a million soul-wrenching screams of terror. You want to try it? Are you really sure...?
Okay, fake sales pitch over. Now then. How many netizens will surf to this post using that search term over the next seven days? And just how close to the collapse of western civilisation are we?
Well, let's see. Just as a little unscientific experiment. Answer next Monday.
And no, I haven't seen it, and no I'm not going to. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't ask.
The Famous Mr Head
I didn't have the use of my mouth for the first half of my birthday - a mysterious woman who never took off her mask made it go all numb and floppy.
So I spent the second half doing as much with my mouth as possible to make up. I ate and drank, talked, argued, ate and drank some more, chewed a pencil, clucked my tongue, spoke a great number of words to comrades huddled around a pub table...and you'll never guess what other exercise it got afterwards.
Oh, you guessed.
More when my brain starts functioning again, or the room stops spinning.
Aaah
"If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas."
- Mason Cooley
"For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently."
- William Shakespeare
“A physician buries his mistakes, a dentist pulls them out, but a teacher has to live with them”
- Unknown
I'm not afraid of dentists, but dental work is a lot of hassle. Most people need just one injection to get numb - I need three, or sometimes more. I have a small mouth, which some people have found advantageous, but which makes it difficult to fit dental equipment (plus dentist fingers) in there.
So today, lots of injecting, scraping, drilling and filling one of Kapitano's molars. Three hours later the anaesthetic wore off...
...and the filling fell out.
I now have a back tooth a bit like one of those medieval castle sites. The ones tourists spend half an hour walking around before spending the rest of the day in the cafe and souvenir shop. Nice strong walls, nothing inside.
It looks like I'm going to spend my birthday getting a tooth pulled. Oh yes, the 17th is my birthday - I shall be 36.
Happy Birthday to me
Now a bit less tooth-y
Painful so been
Eating codine
Dental Birthday for me
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)