Throwing stones

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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Got a license to live?

Lists are great! They are informative, pedagogical, and they are easy for the mind to consume because our minds are constantly organizing the alternatives we are forced chose between in lists based on the attractiveness and inconvenience of the possible outcomes. So here’s a list for you, the top 5 carbon based living organisms in the world that in my opinion should have to apply for a license to live:

1. Paris Hilton
2. People from the media who put Paris Hilton in the spotlight
3. People who look up to Paris Hilton as a “smart business woman”
4. People who carry around small dogs
5. Celine Dion


The criteria for acquiring a license to live would hence be quite simple.

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Bush & his-story

With the Bush administration finally on its way out, people are starting to sum up the accomplishments and impact of the well spoken Texas rancher. The question of how Bush will be remembered in future generations has been raised. Bush’s own comment on the matter was the following sharp and relevant observation:

“As far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.” – George W. Bush, Fox News Sunday, Feb 10, 2008

Quite an impressive way to shrug of criticism, guess we’ll have to wait 2-300 years before we pass judgment on Mr. Bush & Co. Contemporary speculation about his legacy is apparently useless.

Some people may disagree with this statement, for example historians themselves. The History News Network (HNN), founded by, and independent of the George Mason University, recently conducted a courageous poll among professional historians, daring to compare Bush to his predecessors, a long time before we have actually reached history.

The survey was open to all historians, and among the respondents were some of the most respected historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners. I will let the graphs speak for themselves, and finish of with a few quotes from participating historians that sum up Mr. Bush’s achievements in a clearer way then I ever could. After this, I will let him be.. for a while.

“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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Peas in a pod

Steve MartinM.......artin.........John McCain

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Running on plenty

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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..

Oh Bama! (can't you tell?)

In a tight presidential race you turn on each stone to find an edge towards your competition. If something can be used against you, you can bet your ass that it will, no matter how distorted. Barrack Obama recently stated, what to me sounds like a very reasonable and true argument, that people who live in economically stagnant areas with growing unemployment tend to loose faith in government and turn their trust towards other institutions and values. He said that people get bitter when loosing their jobs, and instead of voting on economical issues, they vote about religious matters, the right to bear arms, about gay marriage or immigration.

The Clinton campaign is now thriving on this statement, accusing Obama of being elitist. For what? Telling the truth? Hillary says America needs a president who is more in touch with the people he represents. By “in touch”, does she mean patriotic enough not to criticize the behaviour of Americans?

The McCain camp of course got on the bandwagon and was shocked by Obama’s belittling slur. They said,

“Barack Obama's elitism allows him to believe that the American traditions that have contributed to the identity and greatness of this country are actually just frustrations and bitterness”

To me this is really shooting yourself in the foot. But I guess it is not if you’re a conservative republican. They are really saying, that the identity and greatness of the US is based on faith, guns, and intolerance.

Say no more.
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Book of Revelation

Promenade des Anglais, Nice, Friday 11/4 2008

And the lord said, on the day of reckoning, cats will get along with dogs, ketchup will taste like mustard, and the water will no longer end where it used to.

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Other side of the woods

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

War

Paris Hilton

And Internet dating

When you can sit on a rock, in the forest, and just watch. Tv.

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See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

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?

On the other hand, is this “the extension of an olive branch” towards China? A chance for Beijing to better itself and its horrible human rights record. It might be. Just don’t say that the Olympic Games are not about politics. Who has the God-given power to decide that? It is what it is. It is the whole world gathering for a feast in the name of athletics, fair play, and world unity, in a regime where people are getting brutally assaulted, arrested, and murdered because of their political views, a regime that is well on their way in marginalizing away the Tibetans and their cultural heritage.

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I wrote a poem tonight

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. .

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No coincidence

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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Only in France II

Pain au chocolat

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Yesterday I had to go through the humiliating act of eating pastries at the cinema. The only theatre in town that shows movies in original language, doesn’t sell any popcorn. In fact they don’t sell any kind of candy. There are only two vending machines, offering canned soda and ice cream! The kind on a stick with chocolate coating that conveniently falls of, lands somewhere on your clothes, and is impossible to find in the darkness of a cinema theatre. No wonder nobody’s buying them. Perhaps they thought that since it’s so pleasant to eat ice cream in front of a movie at home, why not sell some in the cinema?

But the beauty of eating popcorn in a cinema is the quantity of it. You would have something to snack on throughout the entire film; whereas an ice cream wouldn’t last you past the commercials, and would probably stain your shirt/trousers or both, so you would look like an idiot coming out of the cinema, thus failing to seduce that date you brought with you. Now I can understand that the French (outside of Paris) perhaps just haven’t got the habit of snacking in the cinema. But if you chose to sell something edible, why ice cream on a stick?

My roommate said that they didn’t sell popcorn because they don’t want to get fat. Well I am not sure if this is a widely spread explanation. Either it would mean that the cinema owners would have the social responsibility to set aside commercial aspects, and decide not to sell popcorn in order to keep the French population slim. Or it would mean that they have tried to sell popcorn in the cinemas, but the French refused to buy it, safeguarding their figure. But then again, why the ice cream?

So it was that we had to resort to the nearest Boulangerie (bread and pastry shop), since no Epicerie (mini market) was to be found in the proximity. 2 Swedes eating pain au chocolat (chocolate filled croissants), grissini sticks, and some unknown French pastry. My French roommate had nothing. He is very slim though.

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Ca va? ca va, ca va? ca va!

Don'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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I want it that way

Since I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Boy band music, Voila, Trace Bundy. It's beeing cheesy with class.

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Evilution

Some would argue that since we no longer are as threatened by death in or day to day lives as we used to be, our evolution has slowed down or seized completely. We no longer depend on our physical or mental capabilities to keep us from being eaten alive by a mammoth or being excluded from our group, kicked out of the cave, and die of starvation. At least most of us don’t. But there are still people that are subjected to natural selection. It is the people who climb into tiger dens at the zoo, who walk up to a huge piece of firework to see why it didn’t go off, or that monk that recently got killed by his own lawn mover.

But sadly, there are not enough dangers nowadays to fuel the cleansing evolutionary fire. It does not take much intelligence at all to grow old anymore. And even if you don’t even have enough of it to tie your own shoe laces, your parents won’t kick you out of the cave or drown you in the river. No the only contemporary danger with the ability of weeding out the feeble minded seems to be traffic accidents. And as you can see in the list below it only stands for 2.3 percent of all deaths in moderate to well developed countries.


Ischemic Heart Disease 12.4%
Cerebrovascular Disease 9.2%
Lower Respiratory Infections 6.9%
HIV/AIDS 5.3%
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease 4.5%
Perinatal conditions 4.4%
Diarrhoeal Diseases 3.8%
Tuberculosis 3.0%
Road Traffic Injuries 2.3%
Trachea, Bronchus, Lung Cancers 2.2%


And since the most common type of accident is a collision between two vehicles, there is a good chance that the idiots who drive too fast or recklessly will take a person with normal or high intelligence with them to the afterlife. You might argue that it’s not only stupid people who drive fast or recklessly. No, of course it’s not, but give me a break, I’m not writing a scientific essay here. I just want to make two points about evolution.

Point no 1: The results of if might be slow, but it’s happening.. all the time! So watch out! (Note: Since all of my readers are higly intellectual, none of you run the risk of being victims of natural selection)

Point no 2: It is evil. It is evil because it weeds out the weakest. And therefore it contradicts the notion of a loving god.

Some religious people would say that evolution is just a scientific theory and not a fact of life, and that all of the binding evidence in the form of fossils, were placed there by god to test our faith. Even if that was the case I wouldn’t worship a god who plays with dirty tricks like that. It’s like sending an anonymous flirtatious mail to your girlfriend to test her loyalty. It is not worthy of an all-knowing, all-powerful god, and it is very close to being in contradiction with his own commandment nr 8, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, which at least to Roman Catholics and Lutherans, is interpreted as the interdiction of lying.

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Crazy Cote d'Azur

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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Playing the Piano

In my series of musical virtuosity, the turn has come to the piano. And for the second time in a row, I will feature a child prodigy. There is something fascinating about child prodigies. You think it shouldn’t be possible for kids to possess such amazing skills and intelligence, but we are underestimating the little buggers I think. Perhaps they were right in medieval times, kids are just small versions of grown-ups.

I remember thinking that I was pretty smart and special as a small child, but then something happened to me that almost (;) had me convinced otherwise. School. Once out of school again, and out of reach from the arbitrary judgments of teachers. I can once again start to believe in my suppressed geniality. Enough about me!? Have a look at this Japanese 8 year old and his interpretation of Chopin’s Valse no 14. I think it’s a safe bet to assume that his parents didn’t take him to McDonalds on Sundays (euphemism).

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The absent gardener

So we were sitting in the bar at Sinnoths, in Dublin, when I noticed a rugby player looking guy who was hanging out in our proximity. I noticed him because he was hanging out in a weird way. He wasn't sitting or standing at the bar. Nor was he sitting in one of the chair groups a bit away from the bar. He was simply standing on the floor, a good one and a half meters from the counter, with a weird smile and an absent look on his face. I remember saying something like "this guy seems a bit lost" to my Irish friend.

A few beers and Bulmers (Irish cider) later, we were still sitting at the bar, having a discussion about god knows what, when suddenly, out of nowhere, he emerges right next to us, leaning in very close to try and catch what my Dutch friend was saying. Of course the conversation stopped abruptly. What do you do when someone just comes up to you and listens carefully to your conversation without introducing himself? If he hadn't put his face 20 cm's from my friends, perhaps we could have ignored him, but now we were in an awkward situation. My Dutch friend started chatting with him though, and later on we were introduced. It soon became quite clear that he was mentally challenged. His engine was running but there was no one behind the wheel. Or the driver was drunk, which clearly was also the case on that night, and didn't help him to come across as more comprehensible.

Since he didn't have any other friends, and since he seemed like a happy camper, smiling and laughing at anything we said, he was quickly integrated into our group. He was even hired by my Dutch friend to come do his garden in Holland, a legally binding oral business contract. Nothing unusual about that. Who hasn't gotten a bit drunk and hired a retarded gardener who lives 1000 km's away, across two oceans, in another country.

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Somewhere after midnight, he said he had missed his last bus. And a few hours later when we were about to leave, I made the decision that could have had sinister consequences. He seemed quite helpless, it was raining cats and dogs outside, so I decided he could come with us and crash on (our) floor, in my Irish friend’s apartment that is. When I took that decision, I didn't reflect much upon the fact that the flat owner, who had gone home a bit earlier, might not be to keen on us bringing home drunk, retarded gardeners with intimidating body masses.

So it was that we went back to the flat with a few nice locals and Craig the gardener. Craig got tired pretty quickly and was sleeping sitting up in one of the chairs in the living room. We were about six people who were not about to sleep, so to keep the party mood going, I moved him to the room next door where a friend of mine just happened to be sleeping as well. And this is where the exceptional part of this story begins.

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The room was about 5 meters wide, thus I put him down to sleep on a safe distance from my friend, who were still to be awaken by feeling the gardener's breath on the back of his neck. Not the most reassuring way of waking up. My friend told the gardener to move away, and so he did. But the creepiest part is yet to come. The second time he was woken up it was to see Craig the gardener standing over him, filming him with his mobile phone. It might have been just to keep a strange sort of souvenir. Then again, we all, and the gardener’s involuntary roommate in particular, might be very lucky to still be in one piece.

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Dye me a river

Just arrived to O’Connell street in Dublin, I bought a green hat, couldn’t find any hot dog stands, but made my way down to the river Liffey.. and it wasn’t green. Nor was any beer in the pubs. Turns out the Irish care too much about their beer to dye it green. I couldn’t say if adding colorants would impact the quality that much, maybe the Guinness is too dark and complex to color, but they could play around with a simpler beer like Budweiser or Heineken. Since I really want to come back sometime, I propose that you use some of that new found wealth on beer and river colorants. If Chicago can do it, so can you.

That being the only disappointments, I was really content and impressed with the Dubliners, their beautiful city, and the buzzing atmosphere during S:t Paddy’s. You can actually talk to strangers without being met by suspicion. And yes, the Guinness is different in Ireland. It is less creamy and tastes better.

And for the exceptional events that I was expecting from this year’s S:t Paddy’s, I was not let down. It is kind of unrelated, but we were approached by this peculiar smiling gardener in of the pubs…

To be continued.

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Exceptional

I will leave sunny Nice now for a few days. Getting on a plane to Dublin this afternoon. I am going there to drink green beer, dressed in green, in a green pub, by a green river. Yes, it's S:t Patrick's Day, or "Lá Fhéile Pádraig" in Gaelic. A celebration of S:t Patrick, an English missionary in Ireland some 1700 years ago. This year, the Pope has moved the holiday from its traditional date, 17th March, to the 14th or 15th (will see when I get there), because it coincides with the "Palm Sunday". Last time that happened was in 1940, and next time it will happen will be in 2160.

Thus I have picked an exceptionally special occasion to go there, and in return my expectations are exceptionally high. I expect exceptional and extraordinary events to take place so that I can share them exceptionally with you in this exceptional blog.

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