Mes dames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen! Sorry for the delay, without further ado, please allow me to introduce the exlusive diary of a mouse caught in outer space, told to you through the project Space Blog
We behind the beingadonis blog would like to thank you, our readers, for your faithfulness and contributions, and announce that we will be back within a month’s time with two quite original and hopefully entertaining projects that are currently in the planning phase. The links will be posted in this blog upon launch, so keep checking in. The beingadonis blog will not be continued for now since we feel it is time to express ourselves in a new format. It has been a true joy and an honour.
Thank you, merci, a bientot, and bye for now.
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Yesterday I experienced for me unprecedented queue arrogance. I have seen a lot of people cheat in lines, the queue culture is not as strict here as in northern parts of Europe, but this took the price. I was in one of two lines for the cash registers in a sports store. In the queue beside me there was an old French couple. They were there before me, but in a different queue. And then as I had waited in line a minute or so, the man in the couple leaves his place in their queue to take a better one, right in front of me! I was so astonished I couldn’t even say anything. I thought that there must be some kind of explanation, but in retrospect, I think not. If anyone could attempt an explanation I am all ears. The man did not look senile.
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When I was a child, there was a man, who lived on the other side of the woods. He could not understand, why God, who is so wise, had created
Doormen
premature ejaculation
and Robert Mugabe
When you can sit on a rock, in the forest, and just watch. Tv.
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the "No-Lita" campaign by fashion creator Oliviero Toscani
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His answer is obviously not very well thought trough. He knows he stole the elections, that the process was unfair, he tries to attack the British with his reponse, and the result is poetic:
ITN Correspondent: "On what basis do you regard yourself as President of Zimbabwe?"
Mugabe: "On the same basis as Gordon Brown regards himself as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe."
So, on a false basis. Smooth Robert, very smooth..
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I read the news and I wonder what is happening to my home country of Sweden. Since I left there has been suggestions to store all sms traffic, to listen to all digital traffic crossing the nation’s borders, and now in the latest attempt to breach the integrity of the Swedes, the social authorities suggested to keep record of all kids below 18 that are overweight. What is next? To register how much alcohol each person buys in the government controlled stores so that doctors could be alarmed of unhealthy consumption?
George Orwell’s 1984 should be mandatory reading for future generations of Swedes so that people realize that for each step in this direction, no matter how well intended, we are heading for a big brother society.
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Soccer can bring forth both the worst and the best in people. On one side, a joy and spirit that is transcending nations and politics, which unites people with different backgrounds and can give a great sense of national accomplishment, and on the other side, the worst possible combination of feelings: frustration, disappointment and sorrow. Right now, and so many times before, that is what I am experiencing. And I wonder if it is worth it, supporting the Swedish national team. The possibility in terms of good player material has been there for a long time now, but nothing special seems to come out of it. I know a certain coach who should have his license to live revoked..
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Israel has just confirmed the long awaited cease fire with Hamas that might lead to further compromises as release of hostages and ease of the Gaza strip blockade. This might enable a new climate for diplomatic negotiations in the near future.
Obama has appointed Patti Solis Doyle, who was fired from the Clinton campaign over a dispute with Ms Clinton, to a key position in his campaign, thus sending a clear message that Ms Clinton is not likely to be his Vice President.
The Swedish parliament has decided to reconsider the controversial and disputed law proposition to legalize wire-tapping of all electronic traffic crossing the Swedish border.
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After a recent visit to a gay club, where pick-up methods can be quite straightforward to use a euphemism, I have for the first time experienced what it must be like for some girls who tend to get a lot of male attention in the clubs. That is to say, trying to defend yourself from being groped/kissed/licked in the face by guys who don’t really care if you approve or not. I am not complaining, you walk into a gay club and you deal with the culture, but it helped me understand why some girls develop a cold or bitchy attitude towards guys in clubs. After being subjected to less sophisticated approaches time after time, I guess you loose faith a bit in the opposite sex and develop a blasé attitude. On the other hand.. if you peel of all the social etiquette, learned morals and inhibitions, perhaps the guys in the gay club were just.. free.
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During the last rainfalls here on the Riviera, we had some very warm winds sweeping in. I thought it was quite pleasant. Turns out these winds come from the Sahara dessert, the rain that fell therefore contained a brown/red sand, which is now covering all vehicles, windows, and balcony rails in the region. As a result, 3 of my shirts are now stained by Sahara sand. The only people happy about the situation are probably the car wash owners who must regard it as a blessing from the sky.
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It is easier to come to terms with mistakes you have done, than getting over what you wish you had done but never did.
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Tourist
tour·ist /ˈtʊər ɪst/ Pronunciation Key [too r-ist]
–noun
A person traveling, especially for pleasure, usaully staying in hotels and going sightseeing. Is often seen walking very slowly in stupid looking clothes, (e.g. flowered shirts, shorts, and sandals with socks in them), with little idea of where they are, what they are looking at, and what they have just ordered in the overprized restaurant with the charmy waitor who invited them from off the street.
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I want to express my disgust for the Burmese military junta for not doing more to help the victims of cyclone Nargir. They are not letting aid organizations into the country freely, so far only a quarter of the 2.4 million affected have received aid. And journalists have extremely limited rights to move around in the effected regions and cover the misery. Through a reporter at the Guardian who managed to slip by government controls, we are given some insight into the ridiculous efforts made by the inhumane and despotic senior general Than Shwe. A camp of 40 tents is set up outside of Rangoon, 40 tents! The handouts of rice are so insufficient that villagers have to draw straws to decide who will get food and who won’t. The only full hearted effort from inside the country comes from Rangoon civilians who have set up small scale aid stations, handing out one cup of rice per person.
It is my hope that the government’s weak response will spur a general discontent with the junta, which will lead to mass protests, (which of course will be met by deadly violence) and later along the line with a little help from some foreign intelligence agency with selfish motives, a coup d’état. Then a western friendly, faux democratic regime is put in place, the country is opened up to western capitalist interests, and people will leave the countryside to work for slave wages at Nike or HM. Hm…
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I want to touch upon an important subject. Sneezing and the people who don't. I have come across a few people in my lifetime who hold back their sneezes. One of them is sitting in front of me right now as I type. Whether by chance or not, they have all come across as a bit weird to me. Sneezing, as everybody knows, is the body’s reaction to unwanted particles in the nose or sinuses. It can be something you breath in, dead bacteria going out (a cold), or it can be caused by sharp light. Yes, it’s true, one out of three people sometimes sneeze when exposed to bright light, some doctors call them “photics”.
Holding back a sneeze impulse can be dangerous due to the high pressure exerted on your ear canals. There have even been reports of people suffering from a stroke, trying to suffocate a sneeze impulse. So why do people behave in this way? Because they think it hurts? Because they don't want to contaminate people? Or because they regard it as bad manners to sneeze if it's not in a tissue? And most importantly, why does this irritate me so much?
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There is a short bus transporting us between the different company sites at work in case we need to go for a meeting or, as in most cases, if we want to eat lunch at the other restaurant. Some time ago, a friend from work told me he had met an older Swedish guy at the bus stop who he had spoken to once or twice before. The following conversation took place:
Older Swedish guy: "Do you also ride the bus?"
My friend: "Yes"
Older Swedish guy: "How lame"
In original language:
"Åker du oxå bussen?"
"Ja"
"Vad mesigt"
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Caught smoking at a Nobel Prize dinner, the only reaction he can muster is to remove the cigarette from his mouth in the strangest possible manner. Perhaps he thought that by looking like a fool who doesn’t really know how a cigarette works, somehow his innocence would be preserved.
One of the reasons why I don't support the Swedish Monarchy
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Do you ever get the feeling that something is wrong with the society of today, except for the usual stuff like starvation, unfair trade balances, ethnic/religious conflicts, climate change, greedy interests of powerful nations etc.? Do you ever ask yourself where we went wrong? Well I’ll tell you.
Most of us spend more than half of our lives (not counting sleep) working more or less meaningless jobs. Don’t get me wrong, almost all of the jobs that exist today fill a purpose, since they are results of our lifestyles. However, many or most of our needs and wants today are invented by commercial enterprises and we are brainwashed into incorporating them as basic needs.
Me, I don’t by into the crap about work being a virtue in itself, no matter what you do. The more affluent human need a job fulfills, the more meaningless it is in a bigger context. I would argue that a baker does a job a 100 times more meaningful than the CEO of Louis Vitton, and a voluntary worker in a NGO does a job a 1000 times more meaningful than the baker. But not many people seem to value their own and other’s jobs based on the purpose it has and what it gives back to society. Personal success and individual value are strongly connected with professional careers, no matter how meaningless a purpose we chose to serve.
So to recap, what’s wrong with today’s society is, we work too much, our jobs are meaningless, and nobody cares about it. About the working too much part, technological evolution is making us more and more efficient, but still we are not working less and less. Even if we could, that would never be the case until employees join forces and claim the right to work less. If we don’t, the increase in efficiency will forever come to gain the corporations and not ourselves. This power shift is of course very hard to achieve as long as the supply of workforce is greater than the demand for it, but still not impossible.
Another thing we could do is to stop consuming so damn much stuff we really don’t need. If the demand for affluent products and services goes down, the supply side would have to follow, and thus, more and more meaningless jobs would disappear from the marketplace. Yeah yeah, like Lennon, of course you can always imagine.. that one day all people will come to their senses and live in harmony with each other and crocodiles and rhinoceros in one great country called Utopia. Of course none of the above solutions are very likely to come about.
And who am I to pass judgment on other people’s jobs and lifestyles? I myself work for a giant IT company in the travel industry. Not too meaningful or altruistic at all. Like Jesus said “May he who is without sin cast the first stone”. Well that might be true in many situations, but on this blog, I’m throwing the damn stones regardless.
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“No individual president can compare to the second Bush, Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”
“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”
One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”
“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”
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I apologize for the decreased frequency of posts lately. It has been busy times. In France, after 30th of April, the country stops working. In May, hardly any work gets done due to the many holidays, and from June on, the 5-6 weeks of vacation must be spent. The French therefore do not work seriously again until "la rentree" in September. That means everything that needs to be done has to be done before the 30th of April. So it is no mystery why my workload has increased a lot lately.
I have also started training for a half marathon that will be conducted and hopefully completed on Sunday the 20th. Yes, for those of you who know me and just raised an eybrow, it’s true. Thus I am trying to shed all those 15 months or so of eating brie and chevre croque monsieurs, chocolate crepes, and kebab (which seems to be the only fast food available late at night in this town), in one month. So far I feel marginally lighter. Running 150 meters from my flat to the bus station still exhausts me. It must be the leather shoes without suspension..
Promenade des Anglais, Nice, Friday 11/4 2008
Perhaps... Perhaps it is a good thing that the Olympic Games are given to shady regimes where terrible crimes on humanity are taking place. Attention is suddenly drawn towards misery and injustice that has being going on for quite a while. But that's just human nature. We can't direct our attention and outrage towards ALL of the injustices at once, so quite fittingly, the Olympics act as a focusing lens for the eyes of the world. I say next host should be… Russia. It is time for Kremlin to stop silencing voices of opposition.
There are a lot of people in high places (state leaders, IOC, etc) that have a funny way of reasoning regarding the demands for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. They say, that the Olympics are not about politics. It is about sports, it is in honour of the athletes, to unite the world etc. I find it to be a naïve argument. Is it really that simple? Can you, in the name of athletics, feasts, or global unity, close your eyes to politics, to cultural genocide, to the violation of human rights?
J'ai ne te jamais vu si beau comme tu etait ce soir. J'ai ne te jamais vu polir si lumineux. Je n'ai jamais vu ainsi beaucoup d'hommes pour vous demander si vous vouliez danser. Ils recherchent un petit roman, donné la moitié d'une chance. Je n'ai jamais vu que robe que tu port. Ou les points culminants dans votre tête qui attirent vos attentions, j'ai été aveugle..
La dame dans le rouge. Danse avec moi, joue à la joue. Il n'y a personne ici. Il est juste toi et moi, il est où je veux être. Mais je connais presque pas, cette beauté par mon côté. Je n'oublierai jamais, la manière que vous semblez ce soir. .
I feel that the movie we saw when we were forced to eat pastries, deserve to be mentioned. It was "Darjeeling Limited" by Wes Anderson. Sometimes it was a bit too much Wes Anderson quirkiness, and not enough substance. But on the other hand, most of the time his talent for implicit, or mute humor, shone through. And that is precisely why his movies appeals to me. In these times when we are bombarded by mainstream make-sure-you-get-the-joke comedy, his minimalistic approach to dialogue, with more focus on imagery, facial expressions and feeling, is very refreshing. As always, his subtle comedy is delivered with the aid of thoughtful camerawork and carefully chosen music that sets the mood perfectly.
From the “Darjeeling Limited” soundtrack, especially one song has a mood that makes it seem like it actually was written for a Wes Anderson movie, “Where do you go to my lovely”. And trough some quick research, I found out that the writer of the song, Peter Sarstedt, actually was born in New Delhi, India, at the time when it was still a colony, and later moved to the town of… Darjeeling.
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Pain au chocolatDon't worry, this blog has not changed languages, any French speaker could see that. But I promised to post in French one time, so voila.
Je n'aime pas quand les jeunes qui me passent me dit ca va? Si ils n'ont pas l'intention de s'arreter, c'est stupid demander si ca va ou non. Oui, je sais, c'est pour etre polit, mais c'est superficiel, et on sais deja la reponse, mais pas non plus! Pas avec moi. Je vais commencer de repondre "Non, pas trop" juste pour m'opposer. Vous vous imaginer comme vous aller vous sentir, vous m'eloigner apres avoir entendu ca.
I don't like when people who pass me by ask me how I'm doing. If they don't have the intention of stopping for a few seconds, I don't see the point of asking how I'm doing. Yes, I know, it's just to be polite, but it's superficial, and they already know what the answer will be. But not anymore! Not with me. I'm gonna start responding "not too good" whilst passing by. Just to protest to this behaviour. Imagine how you would feel walking away from that.
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Since I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Boy band music, Voila, Trace Bundy. It's beeing cheesy with class.
There seems to be a relatively large quantity of crazy people on the French Riviera and in Nice in particular. We have the regular “bird woman” walking around with dirt all over, no shoes, screaming incomprehensibly like she was possessed by demons. We have a Finnish lady that has been walking the streets for several years, holding a rag over her mouth, using the same story over and over about how she fell, broke her teeth, and need money to get home. I have several friends that have been subjected to unprovoked attacks from lunatics, hitting them, pulling their hair, et.c. One of the most spectacular attacks was on a Scottish friend’s girlfriend. They were talking in Spanish!, on the bus, when a crazy woman attacked them, pulling his girlfriends hair whilst screaming something like “god damn tourists!”. The police had to come pull her off the bus.
Even the street performers are crazy. There’s a Japanese guy, singing with an extremely high pitched voice, constantly turning his hat around. And there is a guy doing the most bizarre dance I’ve seen. He moves around in a kind of new age style to slow music, in very tight pants. But there is something fascinating about him. He always draws a crowd, and I think it is because people wait for something to happen, but nothing ever does. He has no talent what so ever, and that’s what makes the guy so funny.
The latest lunatic encounter I had was this morning. When rapidly walking my 150 meters or so to the bus, one would think that I wouldn’t bee subjected to mad people, but I was. A man was walking around greeting people in a quite cool way. The first part of the salute was an incredibly loud and exaggerated laugh, which was followed by “Bonne Année!” i.e. Happy New Year! Since I like to analyze, my theory is that the guy had a psychosis from sniffing too much glue or overdosing on drugs last New Year’s, lost the concept of time, and now regards every day as New Year’s Day.
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The world is going green
pa·thet·ic /pəˈθɛtɪk/ [puh-thet-ik]
–adjective
1.
causing or evoking pity, sympathetic sadness, sorrow, etc.; pitiful; pitiable: a pathetic letter; a pathetic sight.
2.
affecting or moving the feelings.
3.
pertaining to or caused by the feelings.
4.
miserably or contemptibly inadequate: In return for our investment we get a pathetic three percent interest.
5.
having pasta with herbes the provence tomato sauce and steak hache for lunch, on a Sunday, alone, cleaning your dishes and cooking the exakt same thing for dinner.
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