Triumph of Indifference

I made my peace with young Ivana today, dear reader. It could not be helped, for remorse was eating away at me; without provocation I had treated her brutally; and it does not do to censor the young for their honest and valuable opinions. Also, I stood in some need of her assistance because neither I nor that little brat of her brother managed to make heads or tails of the stats that came out of our experiment with Random Terms of Good and Evil.

Fortunately, sweet, sharp-witted Ivana is a merciful girl of impeccable character, who does not deem it below her dignity to forgive a grumpy old fool for his inexcusable rudeness. In exchange for a firm promise, which I herewith publicize for the whole world to witness, never again to insult, belittle, humiliate, affront, offend, abuse or edit her, she has agreed to study the stat numbers and enlighten me with her incomparable interpretation. To that purpose, I gratefully received the following break-down from her yesterday midnight (which I translate integrally from her most elegant Portuguese).

Mr Mittington,

At your request I scrutinized the statistical returns of your sorry blog for 5 and 6 March last. It needs no saying that We Are Not Impressed. It is obvious that the entire exercise was futile, and the scientific method only slightly less pathetic than the final outcome.

On March 5 last you published on your sorry blog 50 ‘random terms’ of a positive nature, such as love, peace, modesty and more such expressions with which you are barely familiar. During the subsequent 24-hour period, a mere 36 internauts (out of roughly 1 billion digitally active worldwide) took a pageview. No more than 6 of these cared to peruse your Random Terms of Good and Beauty.   

You may yelp, in anguish, that that is a miserable return. And you are right. However, it is not HALF as miserable as the returns for the 50 random terms of Evil and Ugliness which you posted the following day, March 6. Only 20 people of bad taste and vulgarity wasted their quality time on your sorry blog that day, of which NOT A SINGLE ONE (zilch, niente, nada) took a look at your rambling collection of preferred expressions.

I do not need to say more. But I chose to do so, adding some personal thoughts. It may be obvious, Mr Mittington, that you totally fail to strike a chord – or even a single string – on that grand resonant harp that is modern artistically proficient Youth. This cannot be helped. You are ancient, outmoded and vengeful of character. As such there is no hope for you or your sorry blog.

If, however, you persist in your forlorn attempts to make a name in the modern world (through fame, not infamy, I can only hope against my better judgement!) then you will have to mend your ways. This of course starts with a Positive Attitude and the intake of herbal tea instead of crude liquor (as I know you indulge in immodestly every night from 11 a.m. onward).

Beyond that, I would suggest you shorten the length of your interminable postings, find more popular themes than greasy sauces, sick humour and slanders regarding the fine Brussels men and women who are trying to save our continent from the International Monetary Complex, and promote yourself through the Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. As you will have noticed from your dismally failed experiment: hoping to attract readers by offering rude language to their search machines generates no response at all. Only recommendation on interactive websites by friends (if you have any) can do that. But then, such friends must be pleased to be associated with you and your sorry blog; they should not feel embarrassed by it.

I wish you good luck in your further endeavours.

Ivana Velikovna

P.S. May I suggest you repair one more of your mistakes? My father Igor wants to know where he can get a “Sutra Waterbed”. The other day he caught my brattish brother Hannibal, not so much red-handed as wet-handed, with that dirty book you lend him. The little imp babbled his way out of it (I wonder who he learned that from…?), and made papa believe that the “Kama” in the title is actually modern texting for “Cama” (as in Bed) and that the smut guide was a dormitory prospectus. Now he wants to buy one for mama’s birthday. I will not allow your lack of scruples to disrupt our family! So the red-hot potato is in your court!

So there you have it, reader! Good won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Evil lost, but there is no cause to cheer. In the end, the true victor was Indifference; that ‘strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn,’ as wise Elie Wiesel once spoke. Indifference, which is ‘not only a sin, but a punishment.’ 


You can say that again!

The Book of Burning Questions (2)

Ow, this one is really too rich! Surely you remember, dear reader, that in the first instalment of my Book of Burning Questions, I tackled that old riddle: ‘Which came first: the chicken or the egg?’ This generated some pretty bizarre reactions from misunderstood geniuses who figured that The Dinosaurs Did It (you know, man: just as the Martians built the Pyramids on the request of the Atlanteans…). But it also inspired some kinder, smarter souls to come forward, one of whom brought to my attention the following side-splitting website joke:

A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a delighted smile on its face. The egg, however, is sulking, and mutters to itself: ‘Well, I guess we answered that question…’ 


With that, I guess we unscrambled the chicken-and-egg dilemma! The egg got laid! Who’d have thought it?

But back to serious business! Since I know from the ‘stats’ that you love them, here are three more Cool Answers from Alfred B. Mittington’s Book of Burning Questions:

Q: Why are we on earth?

A: Because of gravity.

Q: Is it really so hard for a camel to go through the eye of a needle?

A: That depends on the size of the needle. If you are rich enough, you can buy a real big one.

Q: Why did the Magyars invade Europe?

A: Because they were Hung’ry.

Random terms of Evil and Ugliness

[An experiment into the workings of internet search machines. See the end of last Sunday’s post below for an explanation. Tune back in Thursday next for preliminary results.]

Conspiracy bondage death dominance whore blowjob anal money magic power Euro bullshit bullfight cunt fuck kill pigs Auschwitz win tits scum asshole arsehole dick prick porno gulag abuse war Brussels foxhunt sado Sodom profit Gomorrah apes idiot snuff gamble lust führer whip slave shit come cum bribe control subject nazi

Random terms of Good and Beauty

[An experiment into the workings of internet search machines. See the end of last Sunday’s post below for an explanation. Tune back in Thursday next for preliminary results.]

Joy freedom love kitten peace beauty Mayonnaise hope help purity good samaritan mama fluffy gift sacrifice humility dear sweet charity modesty sweetheart promise fondness faith trust kiss prosperity home honey share caress support devotion flower Shangri-La health butterflies soul patience paradise heart life friendship altruism solidarity tenderness nest safe pretty hug

Pageviews and Perversion

‘Okay, Hannibal. Give it to me straight. I can handle it. I’ve been blogging my head off for a month. Now how are my ‘stats’?

            ‘Your stats are a gem, Dedushka! You’re doing beautiful!’

            ‘I seem to remember that’s the last thing they told the captain before the Titanic hit some hard reality. Facts, my boy! I need cold facts and details.’

            ‘Aye aye, me captain! I printed it out for you. Lemme see… Over the last month you published 28 posts. You got 895 pageviews - that’s people taking a look at a post. There were 28 comments, some of them your own replies of course. And you captured three followers!’

            ‘What the f… are followers? You mean stalkers?’

            ‘Don’t be daft, Dedushka! Followers are superb. They are people that take out a permanent link to your web activity and immediately see everything which you do on your blog.’

            ‘Sounds like the bloody Stasi to me… Who are these freaks?’

           ‘Well, one of them is your buddy Colin Davies, of course. He also keeps plugging you on that Thoughtful in Galilee blog he does daily. Very helpful. Then there is someone called Timothy Holt-Wilson. I googled him up. He’s a Brit too, from a place called Diss. Guy as tall as the Tour Montparnasse. Six feet three in his stockings and he’s engaged in treasure hunting on the Mousehold Heath near Norwich. Fifty-three years old. Fluent French and a sprinkling of Scandinavian languages. In the last three elections he voted---’

          ‘That’ll do! Let’s stick to Need To Know, shall we? Who’s the third?’

         ‘Mysterious person with an unpronounceable 15 letter name. Couldn’t dig up too much about him or her so far. Seems to come from Austria. Married with children. The family’s engaged in organic farming somewhere up north in Galicia. I did track down what they planted last autumn and how the crop is coming along… But am I wrong or am I losing you?’

         ‘You are. Plants are somniferous. So those are my followers, huh? Bizarre trio. But I welcome them. Be they the pioneers that guide the mass migration into my promised land! After all, three followers in as many weeks… That’s pretty good, right?’

        ‘Not… particularly, godfather. If the truth be told… It’s the least successful part of the operation…’

            ‘What are you telling me boy? That I’m a failure?’

            ‘No, not at all! I only mean your other triumphs are…well, so much more triumphant!’

            ‘Like?’

            ‘You’re scoring an average of 40 pageviews a day of late! No matter what you publish! Only yesterday you got 50 for that awkward Aioli piece. Any time anybody mentions your blog on Facebook the counter shoots way over 50. You got 68 pageviews on the 10^th, will you believe it?’

            ‘What piece for?’

            ‘Can’t tell. Various I suppose. But I do have numbers for the total score of the separate titles. Wanna hear?’

            ‘Do you think I’m here to admire your honey-sweet voice?’

‘Alright… Hold your horses. The most popular one was the Book of Burning Questions.’

            ‘THAT flimsy thing? That did best??’

            ’51 pageviews! Came in way ahead of the Home Made Mayo recipe. That one scored 41. Then there’s a whole lot of nothing, and then on third you find this Homo Homeless Luckless piece, with 28.’

            ‘I’m not surprised about the Mayo piece. People love Mayo as they should. It always makes you new friends. But I’m a little miffed so few Greeks looked at Homo Homini. I stuck my neck out for them… Who knows what Brussels will do to me in revenge?’

            ‘Well, that’s to say…’

            ‘What?’

            ‘There eh… were no Greeks, Dedushka…’

            ‘There were no Greeks?’

            ‘Not a single one… But it’s not ALL bad news… There were no views from Belgium either. So the Brussels mob didn’t notice either! You can sleep quietly at night.’

            ‘There were no Greeks?’

            ‘I’m sorry…’

‘And no Brussels either? The rogues didn’t even read it??’

            ‘What can I say, Godfather? You said you wanted facts… Oh come on, Dedushka! Don’t cry! I can’t stand elderly people crying! It always reminds me of Bambi…’

            ‘You do not understand, my boy… The shame of it! The disillusion! At the end of a long harsh life a man wants to leave something behind… Something solid… Something lasting… Something he can point at and say: “There! That is what I did! I made a difference… My life was not in vain…” They already banished the whole edition of my Collected Works to Malaysia, where not a bloody soul will ever buy it. And now this! Not even my blog is read by those it is meant to help and offend!’

            ‘But others did read it, Dedushka! They do too. You can’t imagine. Not just the UK and the USA and Spain… But from all over the globe! The weirdest places. Here: look at this list!’

Austria

Belarus

Brazil

Canada

China

Colombia

Denmark

Finland

France

Georgia

Germany

Holland

Hong Kong

India

Indonesia

Iraq

Ireland

Kuwait

Mexico

Nigeria

Portugal

Russia

Taiwan

Thailand

Ukraine

United Arab Emirates

Venezuela

         ‘Now ain’t that awesome? You almost got a better audience that Ban Ki Moon when he’s shining!’

            ‘How come?’

            ‘How come he’s shining?’

            ‘No. How come someone from Nigeria, or Georgia, or Hong Kong – of all lost places - stumbles upon my blog? I mean: what’s it to them? What Iraqi is interested in Home Made Mayo? Or in the riddle of the chicken and the egg? Don’t they have other things on their minds down there? Most of them are at WAR!’

            ‘Why, I don’t know, Dedushka… I guess they fed some particular term into a search machine and then Google or Yahoo pointed them to your blog because you used the word.’

            ‘You mean to tell me that the search machines are working now?’

            ‘They do. They do beautifully. It merely took them a while to pick up your postings.’

            ‘Why?’

            ‘I haven’t the faintest. Ask Ivana. She knows about those things.’

            ‘Can’t. For some funny reason your sister won’t talk to me of late. Must be hormones. Hell hath no fury, as they say. But back to the pressing matter in hand. Random words bring random visitors.’

            ‘Correct.’

            ‘So… What words? What words are the best to use so as to built up the sort of audience that Alfred B. Mittington deserves?’

            ‘Who knows? Bad words, I suppose. You remember this one piece you did, called A Fellow from Philae?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Just an endless dialogue that said next to nothing. But it did very well for a very long time. Wanna know why?’

            ‘Do I look like I have eternal life?’

            ‘I think it did so well because you mentioned Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler at the end of it. You remember, don’t you? You threatened to-‘

            ‘I remember! But that’s perverse. Those words had nothing to do with the deeper meaning of the piece.’

            ‘Even so, Dedushka… That’s how it works on the web.’

            ‘Evil words lead to success; good words lead into the desert…?’

            ‘Pretty much…’

            ‘I refuse to accept that! Man is Good at heart!’

            ‘That may have been. It ain’t so no longer. The Stone Age has come and gone. Modern times are here to stay…’

            ‘Rubbish! You can change the world but you can’t change human nature. I believe in Man. And Woman! We shall do an experiment.’

            ‘Dedushka, are you sure you wanna waste-’

            ‘A scientific experiment! Tomorrow and the day after, we will publish two separate sets of random words. Good ones and bad ones. Then Wednesday we study the stats to see which of the two attracted most readers. I have no doubt that Good will prevail!’

            ‘Yes, Dedushka.’

            ‘Gloom is of all ages. Pessimism has always blinded our perception to the splendour that is the human spirit. We must Hope and Believe against the gales of defeatism that sweep over us from every corner of the taiga!’ 

            ‘Of course, Dedushka. So, are we done? Can I have that illustrated Kama Sutra now?’

            ‘In the kitchen cupboard. It is all yours for the weekend. But for the love of God: don’t let your parents see it! They’re over 40! They’ll die a merciless death if it falls into their hands, even if it is a happy one.’

Saturday Snapshot (4)

In case you hadn't noticed: Spain is not doing well. Huge unemployment, Bolshevik balance sheets, booming trade deficits and everybody blaming each other. The future looks grim; and the below snapshot, taken some years ago in an Asturian town, may well symbolize where the country is headed.

The painted sign on the door says: 'Please don't park here. Garage exit.'

But perhaps they've got amphibious Seats in there?

Cookbook: Aioli al Fredo

On the Levantine coasts of France and Spain, Aioli is not a sauce but a freaking cult. And due to emigration, tourism and culinary snobbery this ailment has spread deep inland. Its devotees, the Aiolians (worshippers of Aiolus, the petty Greek god of Bad Breath, who plays a cameo role in the 53^rd canto of the Ilias where he scares away a phalanx of Trojan warriors by chemical attack), do not eat the sauce, but partake of it. For them, aioli is not meant to accompany a dish, but the other way around. Aioli is the pièce de résistance; all the rest is garnish. How anybody can be so bloody fetishist about a simple sauce escapes me!

What precisely is Aioli then? Well: Aioli is simply a mixture of garlic and oil (as you would learn from the name had they not mystified the business beyond recognition by using the old French name of both ingredients), with a little salt and a lot of pompousness thrown in. There are two kinds: True Aioli and Fake Aioli. Both have their pros and their cons. But if the honest truth be told: the Cons have it.

Authentic Aioli – made of oil and garlic only - is a horridly slow and laborious affair. This comes as no surprise, since it was invented in the Darkest Middle Ages, when there was no telly, no radio, no tax forms to fill out, no rooms to paint, twitter to keep up with and no children to spoil. Then, people could afford to whip up this pap in their spare time between the building of two cathedrals. But those days are passed, dear reader, and it is not a Sauce For Our Time.

I’ve had some interesting Aioli experiences in my life. The most telling was 75 years ago, when I was on a little R&R from the trenches of Madrid with a group of Valencian anarcho-syndicalists at the village of Valsaín near Segovia. On our first afternoon, their political commissar, a young lady who eerily resembled Felix Dzerzhinsky both in character and looks, ‘proposed’ to make an Aioli that the roast could go with. Nobody in the cabin dared to refuse, and so they set to work, first peeling five whole heads of garlic, then cutting them in razor-thin slices, then slowly pounding them to pulp in an outsized mortar.

It took forever.

Exempt from forced labour for being an ignorant foreigner who knew not how to pound correctly, I went for a couple of drinks in the local watering hole. When I returned they were still at it. I then went for a stroll with a Scottish symbolic poet from the International Brigades. We admired the splendid pine forests of the valley; we visited the ruined palace; we discussed at length the works of Hakobian and Mayakovsky. When three hours later we returned…. the culinary chain gang had just begun to drip minuscule dribs of olive oil into the pulverized mass of garlic. As they mixed and mixed and mixed, I slumped into a chair and read three Lope de Vega plays. Night fell. Owls began screeching outside. The night bombardment of Madrid came on and went away. Then, at last, our Aioli had materialized, and got served with a side dish of grilled Guernica meat.

It was ghastly.

It had no body. It had no bottom. It had no taste to speak of. It was water the greasy way. You could barely notice it, except that a putrid wind, sufficiently polluted to cause a lethal bout of malaria, swept through your system every time you dared to take a breath. When the meal was over it was time to go asleep. Except: you couldn’t. Until long after sunrise, I gurgled up garlic, my bowels engaged in civil war, and I had to resist the urge to puke.

So there you have it: a True Authentic Aioli is the result of a longwinded process which endangers the health of your guests and does nothing to improve the world. What a difference, I dare say, with Mayonnaise, that Divine Manna, that Gift from the Gods of Taste and Sophistication, that Blessing Beyond Bliss! Now there you have a sauce which turns your meal into a feast, your most prosaic dishes into a mystic experience, your life into a saga! 

This undeniable truth is shared, as it happens, by what I shall call the Reformed Aiolians. These make it easy on themselves. They do not mash their garlic until it is ready for binding the oil, but do the sensible thing, and add an egg yolk to the mush after only two hours of pounding. The yolk then binds the oil and everybody happy. Unsurprisingly, such Fake Aioli is sneered at by the Authentic Aiolians. They dismiss it as ‘only Mayonnaise with garlic’, the same way the Goths derided the splendid Roman temples as ‘merely chipped marble set up straight’ (Livius, Book XXII).

However, I must agree with these grand inquisitors of cuisine in substance if not form. Indeed it is nonsensical to make Fake Aioli. It IS but Garlic Mayonnaise mixed in an excruciatingly masochistic manner! And if it is, then why not be reasonable and make instead a beautiful, Mayonnaise based, Garlic Sauce? It is easier. It is faster. It is healthier. And it is far more satisfying. Your guests will come away from the table with a better digestion and a happier mien. And if you are one of those poor souls who absolutely has to show off to their demanding invités, then simply adapt the message, my gay friend. Tell those whom you wish to impress so much that they are partaking of ‘a very rare Aioli variety’. Which is the plain truth since this is Alfred B. Mittington’s unfailing and inimitable recipe for

Aioli al Fredo

Start a day in advance. Take a normal soup-bowl. Fill it halfway with a good quality Mayonnaise, either homemade or bottled. Add to this:

1 medium sized clove of garlic (preferably run through the garlic-presser, if not: chopped and pounded)

1 thin slice of ham (not raw!) cut into smithereens

1 spoonful of chopped parsley

1 spoonful of finely chopped onion

half a teaspoon of sugar (no honey!)

salt and fresh black pepper

Mix the ingredients. Lick the spoon. Cover the bowl. Put it in the fridge. Let it sit for at least 12 hours (but 24 is better). Go watch La Grande Bouffe. There: you have just saved yourself half a day’s work for a much yummier result.

If you must lighten the sauce, you may replace up to 1/3 of the Mayonnaise with yoghurt, milk, salad cream or even water. Beware not to overdo that, however. The sauce gets awfully weak in the knees if you do.

This miraculous Aioli goes with all sorts of meat, with a variety of potatoes dishes, with artichoke hearts, and even as a dip for bread or chunks of vegetables.

Make it once, watch your guests, be their hero, and then steer clear from that diabolical invention of the dark middle ages they call Aioli!

Ali Babarroso and the 736 thieves

A couple of days ago, the Greek parliament approved another Troika Diktat. You do not want to know what it implies. But one minor fact is worth mentioning for the benefit of all those who wish to know to what Promised Land the Divine Euro is taking us.

The minimum wage in Greece is now 585 Euros per month. Before taxes. Another word for that is Gross. These are working people who spent five days a week producing something useful.

Let’s now take a look at the Representatives of the People, our MPs in the Euro Parliament. The last time I looked, these fine folks earned a minimum salary of 7,665 euros (likewise before taxes, and a fair number of them get more); on top of that they receive 287 euros for every session of parliament they attend (12 in Strasbourg and 6 in Brussels); they receive 17,000 euros each for assistance and staff (reportedly spouses and grandmothers over 90 are quite popular as personal secretaries); and 4,000 euros for ‘administrative expenses’ (which until quite recently they did not need to justify). Finally, they get airfare - I presume 4 times a month in the economy class… - to whatever distant destination they call home.

These numbers being pretty old, muddled, and incomplete, I won’t even try to be overly accurate. I calculate roughly, and conclude that every Euro MP gets some 12,500 Euros a month, gross again, and costs some 35,000. There are 736 of them. So that whole chamber, whose workings and usefulness still escape a stupid old sod like me, sends a tab of 25 million Euros to the European taxpayer every month. Which makes about 300 million a year. I hope you all feel you are getting your money’s worth.

But wait! It gets even funnier when we turn from the more-or-less legislative to the soi-disant  executive! As you all know, the EU has two presidents (for Europe needs double of every half-baked office). President Barroso of the Commission and President Von Rampage… I mean: Van Rompuy of the Council. Both of these make the same so that there be no envy between them. Their salary was fixed, after lots of extremely critical discussion in the Euro Parliament and many cruel cuts, to the trifle of 298,495.44 Euros a year. That is 24,874.62 a month. Let us be charitable and assume that they work 26 days a month for that wage (Sundays off). It then turns into 957 Euros per day. That is to say, that they nearly make twice in a day what a Greek youngster makes in a month.

I laughed loudly when I once heard Nigel Farage quip that President Van Rompuy made more than President Obama. Ah, the dear fellow always exaggerates so horribly! But guess what? HE WAS RIGHT! Barack Obama makes 400,000 dollars a year. With 1 U$ at 0,74 Euros that comes to 296,000 Euros. Hilarious? Ridiculous? Scandalous? Why… we must remember that our two Euro Presidents have a far harder job than that Washington loafer! And they don’t even get a private jet or an official residence! Yet.

This evening, Herman van Rompuy will be voted in, democratically by his colleagues, for another 2 ½ years as President. I still don’t know what he does precisely. But they say he writes beautiful Dutch Haikus in between meetings of the Council. Such a sensitive man… Such an example to our young!

[POSTSCRIPT 14.30 p.m.: Let me give credit where it is due. I just learned that the Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, following the lead of Greek President Carolos Papoulias, has waived his 7,500 Euro per month salary. There is no love lost between me and mister Papademos; but he seems to be an honorable man. NOW EVERYBODY!!!]