fslmjkd

I listened to this song throughout my childhood. It was on one of me and Alida's favorite LPs when we spent the weekends at my dad's. Being a kid I just liked the sound, but now the lyrics have some impact on me. It's a weird feeling. I'm having a sort of delayed pubescence where love songs (i.e. all songs) have actual meaning for me.

I also just realized that the Flying Pickets LP we played nonstop came out the year of my birth. I guess my parents must have listened to it when I was a little red ball of shit tears and piss. My mom has largely evacuated her life of any music from that era. My dad, a more sentimental person, maybe took more pleasure in reliving that time.

EDIT: I just noticed they're clearly lipsynching the album version of the song.  Nice invisible microphones!

You want mirrion dorrar?

I clicked on this NYT blogpost on income inequality in the US, read the first few paragraphs, then closed it.  Reading more would have made me upset, and I'm trying to go for emotional stability these days. 

Why are we addicted to self-sabotage?  Is it because Americans love to identify with the rich, and while they're eating their Hamburger Helper and slugging a Natural Ice they imagine how they'll spend their future riches? Because they're cowboys that play by their own rules, and cowboy code prevents them from accepting "hand-outs," especially from the Government? Everybody, stop deluding yourselves!  You're never gonna be mega-rich.  Most of you will never even be sorta rich.  So increasing taxes on the rich will only benefit you.

I tire of the usual rose-tinted argument that the rich have a moral duty to pay more in the spirit of human solidarity etc.  Does anyone really buy that?  And even if you do, the rich always have a nice charity they can point to, as proof that they've already contributed more than their fair share to society.  This is a scam.

So let's unshackle ourselves from the slave-ideology that tells us what we "deserve" or "don't derserve."  No! Let's tax the rich the most possible for one simple reason: it benefits YOU.  Call it the tyranny of the majority if you want.  I'll call it altruistic egoism (collective egoism that benefits the whole), and it's certainly better than the pathetic self-flaggelation that the american poor and working-class seem to prefer today.

I know these are complicated economic problems, but when the mega-rich, an increasingly vocal group of economists, and, well, all of Europe think that considerably raising taxes on the rich is a good idea, maybe we can at least give it a try.

How to avoid psychological trauma tip N°9876

Never confuse Lars von Trier and Gus Van Sant.

three thawts

I was almost home when I decided to just stop on my street to enjoy the last few minutes of sun.  Why do I feel self-concious for doing something completely innocent?  Everyone looks sideways at a guy alone just standing on the sidewalk.  Weirdo.

I have a room mate that does a terrible job of rinsing the soapsuds off of the dishes before putting them in the rack.  He leaves serious mounds of bubbles on the glasses.  I ribbed him for it, but he laughed and said that a little soap is not going to kill me.  True, but in my life I try to aim a little higher than being not dead.

Last night Louis Szekely's new HBO special aired.  The beginning was lame but the ending was great.  Huh.  It's almost like he saved his strongest material for the last half of the show.  Here's a clip that's not from the new special:

I want to fuck your face. from Andrew Perrine on Vimeo.

A bag of lies

There was recently some hubbub in the potato chip world over the "Chicken and Waffles" flavor proposed by Lay's as part of their Do Us a Flavor ad campaign. My world-weary eye could not be impressed by this, since France has some of the most avant-garde potato chips in the West. Once you've had Oyster-flavored chips, it's hard to be shocked by much. But today I saw Truffle-flavored chips.  I had to try them out!

I hesitated before opening them. I can't say that I love truffles, and I was a little anxious about encountering their heady aroma.  I imagined what I would write about these chips: "Truffle-flavored chips smell exactly as you would expect - like semen."  Finally I poured myself a glass of wine, opened the bag, and... nothing.  No truffle smell at all.  I put a chip in my mouth.  No truffle taste at all.  I was astounded.

I tried to remember the last time I had been so let down by a potato chip.  Cheeseburger flavored chips do not taste like cheeseburgers, but more like cheesy pickles and ketchup.  But their addictive goodness makes you forget about the initial deception.  That's all I can think of.  Oyster chips taste like oysters, Caramel chips taste like caramel, Roasted Chicken and Thyme chips taste remarkably like the food they claim to mimic.  Truffle chips taste like vaguely smoky Salt and Pepper chips.

As I kept eating I tried hard to find the trufflish flavor.  The problem is, it's a flavor that's hard to mistake, at least for me.  Scientists have found that people react to the smell differently.  I don't believe I ever ate any chips from "Sibell" and I'm afraid these will be my last. 

Despondant

Today we started off with a slide show of deaths by stab wounds, the perfect continuation of the string of events since Sunday.  We saw many women who were stabbed in the face and chest.  This is typical of women killed by ex-lovers the doctor said - the face is often the object of stabby attention.

I started to relate my story about being menaced with a knife to my "colleagues." I managed to say a few phrases before being interrupted by everyone's dumb stories about being almost robbed.  They didn't once think to return the floor to me, or ask what happened after he pulled out his knife.  They chattered without pause until the prof returned 5 minutes later.

What's so sad about Walid not having an attorney is his perception that "the law of the street" and the Law corresponded in some way.  He earnestly said in his defense, "Yeah I pulled out my knife and pointed it at him!  I just wanted to make him keep on walking. I wasn't going to hurt him." 

Why did he admit to pointing the knife at me?  It was my word against his!  But he seemed to think that since his reason for pulling the knife wasn't malicious, that would somehow convince the cop to let him go.  

In the afternoon we saw a hastily planned presentation from one of the forensic doctors.  "Sorry," he said, "they told me I was doing this just a couple days ago and I didn't really have time to prepare."  So he just showed us a bunch of pictures from things he's been doing lately, including crime scene photos from yesterday's headlines: "Dentist Murdered for 99 Euros."  The story is that an elderly man of 71 years was charged 399 euros instead of 300 euros, so he came into the dentist's office armed to the teeth, told everyone to leave, and then shot the dentist lady eight times.  After an hour holed up in the office he was shot to death by the police, who found many clips of ammo on him and two handguns.  So I saw everything there was to see and more from that grisly scene. 

 

Then we moved on to suicides.  The worst was a family that decided to kill itself.  The mother, the father, and the son (aged 19) all wrote separate suicide notes, and the doctor said there was no reason to suspect that they hadn't all participated willingly.  The reason was that they were financially ruined.  So I got to see all that too.  

I'm so fucking tired of this Masters program.

Che cosa è?

I often wake up to the upstairs neighbor's baby wailing, but not today!  Instead I woke up to a wailing baby from Italy in the background of a loud Skype conversation next door.  I've been listening to non-stop droning italian for three hours now (and smelling cigarettes).  Beautiful language they say.