Passport to China Again

Mark Your Calendar

Today’s random thought: If Mayans were so good at predictions why did they not see the Spanish coming?

Giving Thanks

I have been to a few Thanksgiving dinners and it always reminds me of many of our festivals. Pray, eat, recover. And there is always more than enough food left for tomorrow. I especially like the pumpkin pie. That might be America’s greatest contribution to world cuisine. Pumpkin pie and chocolate chip cookies. They can invade everybody and pretend to be the world’s police as long as they keep making pumpkin pie.

Passport to Korea

Play Ball

Now we know who will be playing.

South Afrika
Ghana
Côte d'Ivoire
Nigeria
Cameroon
Algeria
Brazil
Paraguay
Chile
Argentina
Uruguay
Australia
Japan
South Korea
North Korea
New Zealand
Mexico
USA
Honduras
Netherlands
Spain
England
Italy
Germany
Denmark
Serbia
Switzerland
Slovakia
Greece
France
Slovenia
Portugal

Passport to Indonesia

Medium of Peace

I don’t think these people deserve the attention they are getting. They are not credible threats. Queen Elizabeth shall not be converting to Islam in the near future. German trains will remain as efficient as ever. If New York explodes it will be because of Wall Street, not wasat. The only reason they are getting any attention at all is because they are making all their noise in the West. Meaning the proper Christian countries. You never hear about tiny fringe groups threatening to bomb shops in Indonesia.


Mainstream Christian recruitment or fringe extremist group?

Be afraid. Be very afraid

Passport to Japan

Passport to China

Places I’ll Remember All My Life

I don’t normally get nostalgic when government documents expire but when I passed through the pages of this passport I saw all of those stamps and visas. There are a lot of memories to go with each stamp. I don’t generally collect memorabilia. I never keep ticket stubs or packets. The only souvenirs I buy on trips are for other people. You will not find many chotchkies around my house. Usually the only reminders I have of trips are pictures, memories and all of those stamps on my passport.

Rest in peace, tiny book of stamps.


RIP

[Updated occasionally]

China
Japan
Indonesia
Korea
China again
Thailand
Israel
Cambodia
Hong Kong
Maldives

The Illusion of Freedom

Just look at a teenager’s to do list: 

Go to school
Hang out
Talk on the phone
Try to get laid


Just look at an adult’s to do list: 

Wake up the husband
Wake up the children
Wake up the husband again
Make breakfast for people who always want something else
Take children to school
Take husband to work because his driver’s licence was revoked
Go to work and hope a natural disaster closes the place down that day
Take son to ballet class
Take daughter to football practice
Retrieve husband’s shirt that he stained when he got drunk at the office party from the cleaners
Retrieve the car from the shop after somebody hit it because they were too stressed to pay attention
Go to the gynecologist
Go to the dentist
Go to the oncologist
Go to the proctologist
Go to the psychiatrist
Do all the grocery shopping for a house full of people
Retrieve son from ballet class
Retrieve daughter from football practice
Retrieve husband from his dead-end job 
Make dinner that nobody appreciates
Pay whichever bills have the highest interest rates/late penalties
Fall asleep at 9pm because you’re too exhausted to stay awake and balance the bankbook

Was That It?

I think his family is right. Jackson went to extreme lengths to create his Wacko Jacko image. If he wanted to be seen as a dedicated professional with a sense of humour who cares about things besides private zoos and Elephant Man bones he had ample opportunity to do so while he was alive. This movie is damaging a carefully constructed image of the side show freak he wanted us to think he was.

Separated By a Common Language

Want to take a drive? Most of the English speaking world and former British territories drive on the left hand side of the road with the steering wheel on the right. So does Japan for some reason. America and the rest of the world drives the opposite.

South Africans drive on nationals, as in N12 to Witbank. Americans drive on the interstate, as in I5 to San Diego. Brits drive on motorways, as in M1 to Leeds. A circle in RSA is a traffic circle in US and a roundabout in UK. When you reach one be sure to use your directional in RSA, turn indicator in UK, turn signal in US. Once you arrive in RSA use a parkade, a car park in UK, a parking lot in US. Watch out for robots in RSA. I don’t think anybody else does.

P is for Fun

Olya went through a wide range of emotions in about a minute. She was surprised to see porn where she was looking for details about the hotel they are planning on using their next holiday. I think she is the only one who could have been surprised. If you have ever met her husband you would not be. He judges movies on how many tits are shown. He hates Disney. Not because of the animation style or fairy tale stories. He hates the fact that not a single one of those cartoons shows a single bare ass.

I Always Give Them My Money

© Somebody

The Beatles released 13 albums in their lifetime if you include Magical Mystery Tour. Which I do. First I had to buy the LPs then the CDs. That is a lot of money before I had a steady job. Add to that all of the Anthology CDs, Past Masters, Live at the BBC, Let it Be Naked, Love. Fortunately they were all released in the days of CDs so I only had to buy them once. I’m glad I never lived in an age when 8 track tapes and cassettes were all the rage. I never bothered with any of the compilations because there was nothing new there and the American versions do not interest me since I did not grow up with that.

The Dating Game: IT Happens

Maybe a week later I was having website troubles and a friend gave me an illegal copy of an antivirus CD. Don’t tell anybody. While it was running I noticed a folder with Ben’s name tucked away in the abyss. When I opened the folder there were a few pictures of me. One I had e-mailed to Levi, one he took on our second date, and one with his sister and me.

Also in the folder were a few pictures of Levi. In one he was waving at the camera and naked as the day he was born. In the others he was pleasuring himself, feverishly in one. The expression on his face was funny if you ignore the complete betrayal of trust. In the final picture he had spilt his seed all over a printed copy of the picture I had e-mailed him. When I confronted him he matter of factly told me that he likes to masturbate to my pictures and he added that folder to let me know how much he liked me.

Norwegian Wood

A Brief Comparative Analysis of World Health Care Systems From My Purely Subjective and Limited Perspective

Tel Aviv

Cape Town

Shanghai

Zürich

Los Angeles

My introduction to America’s controversial health cover system came at university. Health insurance was compulsory for students. I had to pay the usual school and housing fees plus health insurance, a special fee for foreigners and taxes on top of all that. Everything was taxed. I think they even taxed my student visa. California’s tax system is second only in labyrinthe complexity to China’s. I spent more than US $14 000 on insurance in California, more than everywhere else combined. And I never really used it.


Anchorage

Blame It On Rio

If you live on this planet you have probably heard that Rio de Janeiro will be hosting the Olympics in 2016. If you live on another planet I hope that I am not your only source of information about us. I cannot handle that responsibility. But maybe reading me would give you better insight into humans than watching TV. Especially Pop Idol. That one would instigate the invasion for sure.

I can’t tell you how cross I would be if I was an intergalactic slave working at the human organ mining colony because of crap TV. But if you are learning about us from the internet then you should probably know that we are not all that angry or watch that much porn.

Dogs: Chewing everything and howling at the moon.
Cats: String and looking at you with contempt.
Humans: Porn and angry rants.

Young Turks

My generation had it easier. AIDS was a gay disease and the internet was just getting started. We had grainy digital cameras to take pictures we would be embarrassed about later but we did not have to worry about everybody around us having high quality cameras in their phones. Nothing indecorous was posted online in seconds for all our friends to see. We did not even have mobile phones without cameras.

My mother’s generation had it the easiest. No AIDS at all. Anything they contracted could be fixed with a simple injection. Their most embarrassing moments were only recorded in their minds. Drugs were freely available without stigma. And they were not likely to kill you. They also had much better music. You had to pay for it back then but it was worth it.