Now I know why the West is going under…

This morning, dear reader, young Hannibal and fair Ivana stumbled into my kitchen study in search of sanctuary from parental supervision, and as I carefully put aside the brittle cuniform clay fragments of the Gilgamesh Epos which I was translating for breakfast (they break things, these youngster, they break things of invaluable worth…!), they settled down into the more comfortable chairs at the kitchen table and opened their survival kits.

Both took out their tablets; Hannibal one of chocolate, his sister one of Apple. They opened their priced possessions and went to work. I refrained from looking at the boy (Hannibal chewing is one of the less pleasant sights this universe offers), but I did shoot a passing glance at Ivana’s digital activities. And as these new-fangled gadgets no longer have a top which blocks the outside view (as the old, paleolithical ‘laptop’ at least still had) I could not help but perceive what was on the screen. This what I saw:

Now, ever since I helped my good old buddy Oswald with the preliminary chapters of his Untergang des Abendlandes (God, that man was a bad stylist! He would never have made it to his persisting fame without my skilled editor’s help!) I have been a sucker for numbers and mathematics in general. So you’ll understand, dear reader, that this picture fascinated me immediately.

            ‘Dear girl, what in the world is that?’ I asked the fair Ivana.

            ‘Facebook,’ she answered with the unmistakable tone of ‘mind your own damn business old jerk’.

            ‘No, I mean the numbers… Those numbers there…’ I said, pointing cautiously towards the picture (for all I know these screens may explode on touch…)

            ‘Ah, thát. That’s a stupid riddle some dork posted. Says most people will come up with the wrong answer. But it’s simple comme bonjour… A child could do it. Why: even an utter imbecile can do it! You, Hannibal! Stop smearing chocolate all over them shards and calculate this equation…!’

Hannibal dropped my now totally illegible baked clay Gilgamesh, hopped over to his sister’s spot, and studied the Facebook page for 30 seconds over her shoulder.

            ‘Why, that’s easy!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘The outcome is 111,111!!’

            ‘Oh you stupid nerd!’ the fair Ivana exclaimed. ‘Can’t you do anything right? It’s 63, you moron de la frontera!’

I frowned, dear reader. I frowned like nobody frowned ever since they told old Chris Columbus he had not landed in Japan but on the coast of Columbia…

            ‘Mind if I look at that a moment?’ I asked.

            ‘Be my freaking guest,’ the fair Ivana spoke, and turned her tablet 180º towards me.

Well, what shall I say, dear reader? Two immense Oh Weh Erlebnisse were mine in the course of a mere ten seconds. The first was that neither Hannibal nor Ivana had discovered the correct answer. That was small surprise, since they go to school in Spain. But worse still: beneath the posted picture were 131 answers, and not only did these answers vary incredibly and astonishingly, but out of the 131 replies, the correct solution GOT ONLY 32 VOTES!!! With which it came in third!!!

Would you believe it? Can it really be true…? I now understand, dear reader, why the West is sinking. Why its 2,500 year culture is finally going down the drain, swept into the sewers of oblivion by lousy education, Hollywood morality, the Musical Industrial Complex and the tongue of Miley Cyrus… The word ‘mathematics’ has its origin in the Greek for ‘That which is learned’. And there’s the crux: it is learned no longer! Our digital young are almost totally ignorant of even the barest numbers!

Bitter, bitter tears did I shed over lunch, dear reader, thinking of the Hochkultur we inherited from Imhotep, Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Brahmagupta, Khayyam, Galileo, Gauss, Descartes, Schicklgruber, Newton, Leibnitz, Euler, Einstein, Gödel, Escher, Bach and many, many more… And I am almost ready to throw in the towel and give up my belief in Human Kind.

But perhaps you can help me, and save me, and solace a sad old man. Perhaps you, my dearly beloved readers of taste, sophistication, maturity of years and old-time education WILL score better than the Facebookies who performed so dismally this morning?

So here is the challenge I put to you: calculate the outcome of

7 + 7 : 7 + 7 x 7 – 7

and post it below in the comments (preferably under your own honest name). As soon as I have 25 answers, right or wrong, I will tally up the outcome, and publish the correct solution, with its (simple simple simple) explanation.

And, just for your amusement, here is a summary of the answers I found on Facebook:

0 – 1 – 7 – 14 – 47 – 49 – 50 – 54 – 56 - 91 - and last but not least ‘Albania’.

One of which is actually correct. And one of which I found hilarious (guess which?)

Yours, MathemathicAl.

Of eggs and fruitcakes, a kitchen trick

            ‘Hannibal, what the F… did you do to that harmless egg?’ I asked in astonishment as I opened the lid of the pantry reed basket and beheld an egg which, for all I could tell, had unsuccessfully tried to commit hara-kiri.

            ‘I was making an omelette, Dedushka,’ the little guttersnipe spoke as if this were not an obvious occasion for shame, embarrassment and humble prostration. ‘So I broke two eggs in the bowl, and then I tried to break the third… But it was boiled. Hard boiled!’

            ‘Of course it was boiled, you oaf! Easter is just behind us. This one was left over from your dismal attempt to paint the Sistine Chapel on a round chalk surface!’

            ‘How was I to know? A boiled egg looks just the same as an un-boiled egg!’

            ‘No, it doesn’t! There is no gloss on a egg that’s been boiled!’

            ‘What’s a gloss? I’m only in 4^th grade. We don’t get agronomical engineering until 6^th grade.’

            ‘Oh, for crying out loud. What a bunch of useless undereducated Facebookies you young folks are! You mean to tell me you don’t know how to tell a boiled egg from a raw one?’

            ‘In the absence of a Gloss I have no idea,’ the nincompoop spoke with unabashed self-confidence.

            ‘Amazing… How will you jackanapes ever eat once the European Union forbids fast food on the whole continent? You couldn’t so much as boil water the correct way! Here, hand me an egg. One with gloss. And don’t drop it on my immaculately clean kitchen floor! Okay. Now watch and learn. You put the raw egg on a flat surface, and you twist it. And this is how it turns…’

            ‘Nothing doing, right? The thing won’t even turn twice around its lateral axis. Now give me that Nipponese egg you mistreated so badly. We try to do the same to that one, and look what happens…’

             ‘Beautiful spin, ain’t it? That’s how you tell a boiled egg from a raw one when in doubt. Simple comme bonjours.’

            ‘What a neat trick, Dedushka! The things you know! And it comes in so handy, too. You see: that omelette I made came out completely slurry because I fried it to little. Next time I know how to figure out if it’s done. I just take the frying pan and I give it a twist and if it really spins the tortilla is done! What a find!’

            ‘Oh cruel Gods in Heaven… Why do you punish me so horribly…!!!’

NOTA BENE: It turns out that the two videos posted above do not, well, turn well. To see a smoother version, kindly visit the Facebook page of my dear friend young Mr Missler, at  https://www.facebook.com/peter.missler?fref=nf

Immortal Immanuel

To my shocking horror, dear reader, I was confronted, shortly after the publication of last week’s blogpost ‘Sex upside down under’ (see below), with a pair of sullen, insolent youngsters from the near neighbourhood (I will not mention names but those of you who are curious can check their identity here…) who – in between yawns, rattling on iPhone keyboards and checking their insidious Halloween make-up – enquired in an utterly bored tone of voice: ‘Say, Alfred… Whose this Cant fallow you mentioned knocking down your attick door for the polies??’ (The grammar and orthography are THEIRS, dear reader! And so is their summary of the second paragraph of my splendid blogpost!)

‘Oh for crying out loud!’ I cried out loud. ‘Don’t they teach you ANYTHING no more in in those modern schools except how to mentally masturbate your mediocrity by mobile phone…???!!!

‘We cant all be geniouses like U, Ddushka,’ spoke the female half of the anonymous pair. ‘So Y don’t U just Xplain & get IT over with?’ After which she yawned once more and nearly dropped off to sleep over her digital homework.

It was then that I grasped, dear reader, that Education Of The Masses has come a long long way… A long long down-ward way towards the bottom of the murky abyss… And that any author of taste, sophistication and eruditeness better explain a thing or two if ever he wishes to be understood by the average blogvisitor…

So today I will quote  - for your instruction and amusement – the pertinent paragraphs on Herr Immanuel Kant from my famous ‘Flashguide to World Literature’ (the whole of which may be found in part 1 of volume xiii of The Collected Works of Alfred B. Mittington, pp. 103-167).  

 Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a complete oddball, and – as the phrase goes – a prolific writer. And that is putting it mildly. In fact, Immanuel Kant was such a prolific writer that nobody, except for his mother, ever read the complete works of Immanuel Kant. It is humanly impossible to read the complete works of Immanuel Kant, all 38,453 close-set pages of it (not including the voluminous supplements, addenda and commentaries added to the later editions).

Fortunately for science, Mitzie Kant (yes, you guessed it: his darling mum) kept a meticulous notebook about her reading efforts, since she earnestly tried to keep track of what little Manny was doing. It is this notebook – known among insiders as “Mutti´s Lektur Notizen (subtitled: Nicht ‘reinkucken, Manny!!)”, of which strictly reserved copies are being kept in the strongboxes of the more prominent Faculties of Philosophy around the globe – which ever since its discovery in the library of the Bohemian antiquarian Václav Hanka, has served as the basis for all subsequent Kant-studies. As a matter of fact, there is a whole – secret – branch of philology specialized in Mitzie Kant´s handwriting and semantics.

As said: Kant was a funny little bugger. He was born and died in Königsberg (these wayward days called Kaliningrad, unless the Ruskies have the changed that again in the meanwhile) and never left the city but once, when called to Berlin. To get there he took a stagecoach and got so violently sea-sick that after only a few miles he forced the driver to turn back, threatening him with a complete explanation of his latest views on the Categorical Imperative if the man continued another minute.

Kant was a man of strict habits. Every afternoon, he took a constitutional through the town centre, always by the exact same route, at the exact same time, taking the exact same number of steps. So much at the exact same time, as a matter of fact, that the inhabitants of Konigsberg, instead of using the church tower clocks, set their portable watches to the far more reliable calibration of Immanuel Kant strolling by.

Another of his Kantics concerned matrimony. Having decided that a Man, once he has made his way in the world, by duty bound ought to marry, Kant looked around for a suitable bride and soon found an eligible girl. However, before declaring himself and taking the big step, he decided to calculate the consequences of marriage to his household purse. He set to work on that task with his usual thoroughness. By the time he was finished, his bride-to-be had been happily married to another man and borne her husband three children.

In his philosophical system, which does not concern us here, Kant maintained, among many, many, MANY other things, that if your best friend comes panting into your apartment and tells you he is wanted by the police and could he please take refuge in your bedroom, the sacrosanct duties of friendship prescribe that you should hide him. But if, perchance, the police then comes knocking on your door and asks ‘Is your friend here?’ you are supposed to answer: ‘Yes sir, he is. You will find him in the bedroom’. For what would become of this world, Kant dares us, if everybody started lying to the police?? 

With philosophers like that, who needs Vidkun Quisling?

The sensible thing to say about Immanuel Kant at a cocktail party is therefore: ‘Purely in a Category of his own!’

Mayonaise Label Collection: Horrible Hair Mayo and African Pride

Yes, dear reader! As we said yesterday (1): it was Hair Mayonnaise in which Hannibal entered my kitchen!!! The brainlobeless oaf had smeared some repugnant concoction of egg yolk and kerosene into his curly locks, wrapped his head in a turban of cellophane and ran over to my house so as to… so as to… well, I guess so as to cause me a massive heart attack at the sight of an immoral abuse of gastronomic delights, with the object of getting his hands on my considerable collection of Erotica by way of a heirloom… (He knows I have no children of my own and would never leave it to the loutish Louvre…)

            ‘WHY Hannibal…? WHY….??’ I groaned in despair once I had regained my breath.

            ‘It’s an Afro-American thing, Dedushka,’ he explained enthusiastically. ‘I’m going Gettho-in the-hood, like all my brooozers. I’ll be Hannibal X from here on!’

            ‘Oh for crying out loud,’ I exclaimed, as I felt bitter racist emotions unknown to my liberal mind bubble to the surface of my cortex. ‘Why – if you must go on a Black Pride binge – can you not become a Black Panther? Or Angela Davis in male drag? Or a Blues Singer, and at least sing for your supper instead of smearing it all over your face???’

            ‘Because he can’t sing two notes in tune!!! And he’s colour-blind on top!!’ screamed the awful Ivana from below the kitchen table, where she had curled up in euphoric convulsions, between her hilarious gurgled giggling. ‘He couldn’t shift blues from greens or yellows!’

            ‘Shut up, you horrid little-- …’ I did not speak the word that elder sisters always deserve. Instead, I swallowed, and addressing the boy as calmly as I could: ‘Just tell me, Hannibal… What is it supposed to be good for? Why do you abuse perfectly good Mayonnaise that has done you no wrong? Does it make you smarter? More Afro-American? Sexier??’

‘It makes my hair soft and moist, Dedushka,’ he explained. ‘Girls love that. Especially Beyoncé… I do it for her…’ (2)

Sometime, dear reader, I wonder why God has been so cruel as to let me live this long and see the Untergang into which our modern decadent Abentland is inevitably sliding. Good old Spengler had an easy time of it. He only had to predict these horrors; I have to live them. For yes indeed: it exists! It is no fantasy of Hannibal’s, this Hair Mayonnaise. No sick culinary phantasmagoria he picked up from evil Facebook pages. I checked, googled and imagesearched… and it is all over the web and all over the globe. To give you but a few examples, here are some (invariably organic, ecological, new-age, aquarius and sustainable) brands of the despicable invention:

And here is an advertisement that promises innocent young women the looks of a… of a… Beyoncé let’s say, if only they pollute and contaminate their perfectly fine physiognomy with such parodies of the Golden Sauce… (And I am too old, educated and decent to imagine WHERE ELSE they possibly smear this stuff so as to be Soft and Moist...!!!)

Nay, nothing is holy in this perverse world! Not love. Not beauty. Not liberté, egalité et fraternité. And not even Mayonnaise…!!

And it is always the young that get ensnarled first, and easiest, by such devilish perversions. Hannibal, oh my Hannibal! He used to be such a fine lad when the Velikov’s adopted him 7 years ago! Cheerful, upright, simple, contend with a handful of injira. Authentic. Unspoiled. Natural. It would never have occurred to him then to fool around with foodstuff. And he deeply respected Mayonnaise, as any normal healthy child will when kept away from the evil influence of television sets, commercials and Spanish education…

It was with tears in my eyes, dear reader, that later the same evening, as the insufferable Ivana Suffragette had led the young victim of moronic modern fashion away to their parents’ home down the hill, I stared at and turned around in my trembling hands this heart-breaking snapshot of young Hannibal, still unspoiled, still pure, still a true African, showing off the one Ethiopian brand of Mayonnaise that we had been able to secure in a Greek-owned supermarket called Bambi in Addis Ababa… And I cried, dear reader. Alfred B. Mittington cried, the bitter tears of old age that realizes it cannot protect the young from the travesties of Progress…  

Eth1. Coroli. Addis Ababa, October 2006. Birr 9,97 (€ 0,90) for 250 ml.

Ethiopia is a splendid land, of countless marvels. Ethiopians are most amiable people, who surely belong to the friendliest folk on earth. But – Oh, Unity of Opposites! – Mayonnaise plays no role of importance in their lives or their cuisine. The closest we ever got to the Golden Sauce during two weeks of steady, elaborate, thrice-daily meals in bistros and restaurants was a single teaspoon of lank tartar-sauce, dropped indifferently on top of a dehydrated sliver of fried Tilapia “English style”. It was a gastronomic Ach-Weh! Erlebnis. One sometimes does wonder how certain nations survive…

Obviously, the root of the problem is a long-established lack of interest. Granted: Mayonnaise does not sit well with the traditional Ethiopian dish, Injira, which is, essentially, a pancake of huge dimensions baked from Tef, the smallest cereal on the book, which grows on the highest plains of the earth, and whose spongy mass gets eaten collectively by the group, garnished with a little meat, some vegetables, some spices and some very hot yellow stuff in powdered form. Since this staple dish is eaten by hand, the addition of Mayonnaise would surely turn one’s social event into a sticky mess… Yellow sauce would cover the carpets and the sofas. Oily substance would drip down elbows and shirtsleeves… One would not only BE what one eats, but LOOK it as well (which is considerably worse…)

And yet, to speak the truth, we cannot blame the Ethiopians for their lack of interest: for what chance is offered to this fine nation to learn to appreciate the Golden Sauce? Almost none whatsoever! Take the Mayo in question: this Coroli 250 ml was indeed a most common product, one which a shopper might discover and acquire in any of the 175 countries on the globe, in any two-bit supermarket on any backstreet of any plain old town. Colour, taste and texture were all correct – but where was the soul?? Small wonder, with catering such as that, that developing nations never develop a taste for the few worthwhile aspects of Western Culture!

The only notable feature of this brand is that – with its unmistakable Italian name (a must for any “luxury product” in Ethiopia; another brand we saw, but did not taste, was called Calypso, for crying out loud!) – it was produced in, and got imported from, the plain old town of Zwolle, in Holland, where Thomas à Kempis came from. Which was a long way for so weak a sauce to wander…

(1) For the very few illiterate baboons among you who have no ideas what this refers to: it is a most subtle historical hint to an marvellous episode from Spain’s lively 16^th century. In the latter part of that century, Fray Luis de Leon (1528 – 1591), a Salamanca theologian who held some rather daring opinions and did some daring deeds of translation, was arrested by the Inquisition and investigated on charges of heresy. He spent 5 years in jail as the trial crawled forward, and was then released through the intervention of powerful friends. As he started his next lecture in the Salamanca university, he simply resumed where he had left of, with the phrase: como decíamos ayer, i.e. ‘as we said yesterday’. The man has a sense of humour…!

(2) I had never heard of Beyoncé either, dear reader, and at first I took it for the name of a sauce (as in Béchamel or Velouté). It turns out, however, that this is an Afro-American lady singer of some fame and talent, and considerable ‘feminine assets’ if you don’t mind me saying so, whom young Hannibal has had a crush on ever since he turned 8… Unfortunately she won’t return his calls or answer his emails so far… But Hair Mayonnaise is supposed to change all that…