Via Archiblog: the projected Walter Towers to be built in Prague. Like I needed another reason to go back there.
Food
Another sort of tower discovered through OddityCentral but you can straight to the Heart Attack Grill for more of the same. This is the quadruple bypass burger (two pounds of meat).
Above are two shots from a television commercial that seemed to be on just about every time we turned on the television in the flat in Barcelona. The product consists of vibrating pads which will melt off the pounds even if you are absolutely sedentary. Another set of commercials, which I did not manage to get any pictures of, were for corsets for young women. This coupled with the lack of any visible exercisers in this town seemed to be a clue as to why the old people tended to look pretty run down, and an indicator that some of the many many hot young women around might in fact not be so much fit as fit to burst.
I’ve always liked watching television in countries not my own, and in languages I don’t understand. In Warsaw, there was a very strange voice over version of CSI (see here), and in Prague a dubbed soapy Western (see here), and I’ve already mentioned a little big about the mountain of psychics on Spanish television (see here).
A few years ago I was with my daughter in Kawaii. It was just her and I so I was bound back at the place at nights and ended up watching more television than I would have expected. There were a few rerun channels which convinced me once again that most television shows should have had stakes punched through their artless hearts and forever silenced. Now, thanks to digital technology, we will have to live with the low points of our culture forever.
The best thing though were the religious channels (not just shows but whole channels). Watching the small brained make sense of existence is always amusing (I will admit that this shows Christians at their very worst) but saw something absolutely amazing…imagine a Jim Morrison of Christianity…free-form charismatic rock n roll type extorting to Jesus….not quite up to the Lizard King but pretty good. Watched that for almost an hour. And then ended up tuning into the channel every day…it was mesmerizing. Saw other preachers, sweat flying, rapping, speaking in tongues and laying hands, and all these people were quite aggressive…no platitudes here….the theme was taking it back, getting back control of the culture…it was like watching Martians but being a little scared that they might be invading some day.
These religious networks or channels have born again comics, religious extreme sports, game shows, the whole spectrum of typical channels. (To be continued…)
Moving on from the cockbanditry of late, and isn’t it odd how unusual things seem to suddenly be everywhere, to being roundly cock-eyed in Southern Europe. This little article of cultural dickery (in its entirety) comes via DerSpeigel.
The Annual Phallus Festival in Greece
Each year on the first Monday of Lent, the people of the tiny Greek town of Tyrnavos go crazy about penises, singing lewd songs and urging passersby to kiss their model phallusses. The pagan fertility festival is one of the most famous parties in Greece.
A resident of the town of Tyrnavos in central Greece participates wields a model phallus at the town’s famous pagan phallus carnival.
If you want to eat phallus-shaped bread, drink through phallus-shaped straws from phallus-shaped cups, kiss ceramic phalluses, sit on a phallus-shaped throne and sing dirty Greek songs about the phallus, then you should visit the little Greek town of Tyrnavos each year on “Clean Monday.”
The one-day pagan fertility festival in this town of 15,000 people near the central Greek city of Larissa marks the beginning of Lent, the fasting period before Easter, and is one of the most famous carnivals in Greece.
Come prepared. Passersby tend to be grabbed and rocked over a pot of boiling “bourani” spinach soup while a ceramic penis is placed between their legs. They must kiss the phallus, then drink tsipouro — a strong local spirit — from its tip, and then stir the soup before they’re let go.
Phallus-kissers are rewarded with ash-streaks on their face, which presumably absolves them from having to go through the procedure again, unless of course they would like to.
The festival is in honor of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy. While the men, women and children of Tyrnavos celebrate the penis, the rest of Greece marks the beginning of the pre-Easter fast more modestly by flying kites and eating octopus, olives and unleavened bread.
If you want to come prepared, find some ceramic phalluses and dangle them from your waist. But make sure you come on the right day because this town is perfectly normal the other 364 days of the year.
The raunchy, lewd songs that echo round its streets on “Clean Monday” aren’t sung at any other time either.
Phallic worship was popular in ancient Rome, Egypt, India and Japan.
Until the 1940s, the penis party was reserved for the town’s men folk. Over the years women gradually joined it and even children enjoy it these days, along with many tourists. But the local church isn’t especially keen on it.
Used to be that daydreams of Greece consisted of images of white buildings against pristeen deep blue seas…
And its not just the Greeks…here is a shot from the Hounan fertility festival in demure Japan
and from the side of a building in Bhutan, and I hear these are everywhere there:
After this, yonis, yonis and yonis only, unless there is more of this crazy news..
Check out this set of photos illustrating A Day at the Beach in Korea. You’d need to get away from getting away.
But speaking of impact, this paper called Environmental Lifestyle Analysis has taken an interesting and sobering look at the costs of existing in a high energy use society, with the realization that even the homeless will not get their energy use below a certain level. Its all about the costs of the supporting infrastructure being shared by anyone who ever uses them. It does not buy into any sort of conclusion that this means that cutting back doesn’t help but helps to show there is a basic system cost below which you cannot sink without a radical tinker.
However, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the necessary response is to change the system; our individual energy expenditure levels are to a substantial degree attributable to an inefficient system. Having just experienced the European model (extensive transit and denser housing combined with smaller more numerous shops and streets which make walking a pleasure) where the most reasonable and pleasurable personal choices are also more environmentally friendly than the alternatives common here in Canada, it is obvious things could change for the better. My city encourages wastefulness and degradation in the way it subsidizes and continually improves avenues of personal auto use. Unless you are in either the few older neighborhoods or in the green spaces, walking is not all that pleasant. (Not that Spain is all peaches here; recycling is rare and the current water shortage is a result of unrestrained consumption in a fairly arid land.)
Above, is a Joan Miro sculpture that stands outside the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona. In later posts I will be writing about all that but my energy level is still a little under par, (great trip but bad sleeps), and I have my roughly 800 photos to organize, over 1000 postings for the last couple of weeks on my GoogleReader (not going to read all those), and a slightly neurotic post kennel Siberian to attend to. But today was an interesting day.
Yesterday, at Heathrow, I picked up a copy of Ben Elton‘s latest novel, Blind Faith. Below is the jacket copy, and it describes this book nicely. It is a smarter version of Idiocracy (which I thought, ironically, was made for a dumbed down audience). It has a good go at reality TV, FaceBook, blogging, The Secret and many more elements of current culture. Its a novelistic rant against modern mass culture, and both bitter and funny.
As Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of commuters, he is confronted by the intimidating figure of his Parish Confessor. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he’s different or special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide?Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person ‘feels’ and ‘truly believes’ is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Ben Elton’s dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. It offers a chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?
I mention the novel because it gets one thinking about how much nonsense is out there. And after attuning to Spain, and while thinking overall that it is a much saner culture than my own, the television viewing indicated that there were some curious parts of that culture that weren’t quite obvious from wandering around. Exhibit Number One:
This odd duck is an astrologer and one of the many various psychics encountered at any given time on Spanish television (in our room, out of the 20 or so stations, 3 had psychics, 2 had fulltime lottery shows, 1 switched to porn after supper and about 3 switched to porn after midnight, as well as more Walker Texas Ranger than anyone could wish for). Exhibit Number Two:
I do have more pictures but on to the point at hand. This and some very odd informercials led me to think that I was returning to normalcy on the reentry to Canada but today, trundling down to Zellers to pick up some dog bones and an extension cord, I was behind a woman in line who was buying a new type of toilet paper. There was some issue about a two for one deal and how to ring it through the register, so while waiting for a manager to call back, the till operator and the customer talked about the toilet paper. The operator said the paper looked good and the customer said that she had first used it in Hawaii and really loved it. And then the operator replied “and wasn’t it great that it had added vitamin E?” At first I thought they must be talking about a second item of some kind, a food product perhaps, but no, the packaging on the asswipe boldly proclaimed added aloe vera and vitamin E. To my mind, you would probably have to stuff the whole roll up the old sphinctre and leave it there for a fortnight to get any benefit accruing.
Reeling from this insanity, I staggered out to my car, and as I pulled out, on the radio, long time respected CBC host Shelagh Rogers was seriously discussing listeners’ letters and call-ins telling how dead loved ones had caused trees and flowers to bloom after their passage from this world.
(When I was on the way to the store, the same show was discussing a government health commission looking into reported (reported but not proven) high cancer rates in Fort Chipewyen. It was worried about the effects, should the commission not find evidence for the link with the oil sands that the local population were certain of. That in itself is not odd but it was stated quite bluntly that the locals had determined the cause, and if the science didn’t show it, or came up with another reason, the science was insufficient. They had decided what was real and the evidence was not going to get in the way of that. (A lot of this sort of thing in the Ben Elton novel as well). The thing about cancer is that it is both a very difficult causation to pin down and it is remarkably amenable to woowoo thinking (that is, making connections either without basis or without having the background to accurately determine the cause but not letting that stand in your way). Now, I am not saying that the oil sands aren’t a factor but there is every possibility of an alternative explanation or two, and some objective inquiry is necessary to determine the likely cause of the higher rate, and in fact, if there is a higher rate.) Added note: this was radio…the later report in the newspaper was much saner in all respects.
Its always been a little fuzzy out there but it may be getting worse. Kind of natural really. Most people are not that good at processing information, and now that there is so much more of it, the odds of doing a good job of that are decreasing, and the sheer mass of infocrap hurled at us every day along with the proven lower efficiency associated with multitasking, renders even good processors more vulnerable to lapses of judgment.
Alemanno, who this week became the first right-wing politician elected Rome mayor since Mussolini’s time, is among those critics who thought the classical Ara Pacis should never have been housed in such a modern structure.
One critic compared it to a giant petrol station, while another called it “an indecent cesspit”, when it was unveiled in 2006.
Alemanno, who ran on a security platform targeting illegal immigrants, said the Ara Pacis was not the only architectural project by his left-leaning predecessors he planned to review.
“We’re committed to looking at the constructions carried out in the historic centre, but the top emergencies are others,” he said.
Now, in general new architecture gets pilloried unfairly from time to time, and when I first read this article, familiar with the architect but neither the structure nor the mayor, the familiar hackles rose to defend the artiste against the philistines and then I took a look at the structure. Have you seen this thing? And to place this 70s sort of coffee table architecture into sublime classical Rome? It looks like a typical high school. I just might fly down there and help out. Here it is.
The headline is slightly misleading in that the eater approach to conservation works better for plants than for small animal populations but overall worth considering. Strange to think that if left alone, many of these species will die out. Of course, on an existential note, what does it mean to be only because you are edible.
Gordon Ramsay and James May eating bull’s penis and rotting shark and then cooking…
From Timothy Hallinan’s Thailand-set novel A Nail Through the Heart
“Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafé shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world’s best coffee, replacing taste with convenience.”
“But Rose [who is Thai] grew up with Nescafé. She adores it, hot, tepid or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. … [Rafferty] takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It’s an interesting drink if you don’t insist that it’s coffee.”
I suppose that might work..I do remember when down in Mexico and then later in other coffee growing lands being puzzled about the ubiquity of Nescafe.
This wonderful little gem from someone who is not entirely up on the current (or is it just North American) slang.
Cats and Dogs - One man’s pet is another man’s meal. Ghana’s Volta Region is the place to eat pussy (tastes like chicken) In Nigeria dog meat which is roasted like beef is also belived to improve your sex life.
This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.
But that 85 decibels, while “clearly unacceptable,” is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.
I was thinking of one brother who spent a very strange year in Egypt and then another who reported back from his trip in South Asia that a typical Thai restaurant had to have a full volume blaring televlsion set that no one paid any attention to. This was particularly galling to him in that, though he shares my distaste for urban noise and especially horrid music in commercial or public areas, he is so indisposed by this that he finds he can only feel calm living in the mountains. And that is where he has been for years, apart from the near annual trip over the ocean to somewhere.
About a Nokia user-anthropologist who travels the world looking for innovative design solutions based on how people actually do things, and see how they use products in unintended ways (naturally focussing on cellphones). Like this but took exception to the statement, which might be true, but kind of sad, that “in an increasingly transient world the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.” This too reminded me of my first mentioned brother’s reports from Egypt, and later Korea, about the cellphone madness in other lands where people obsessed about which model they had, and the topic of conversation was usually the phone itself. Come to think of it, we’re kind of going that way.
In this respect I remain actively Luddite and only when I am dead, or cells actually do become cheaper in which case it will stay in my house almost always, will they pry the landline from me. I have railed before and will again about the tyranny of technology. How it drops ever more filters between us and the life around us, how it fools us into thinking we are more important than the world, that we are the center because we can carry everything with us. I try to limit my labour saving devices, and my access to certain things so that I do go without sometimes, just so that something unexpected might happen. I don’t like a scheduled life and the cell phone is a step in that direction.
