I’m going away to Tunisia for a week. Yay. In the meantime I can let you know that the layout for the new homepage is sort of finished.
Leave me comments on the layout, the images or whatever – I need to know if I’m on the right track here: monocultured.com/index.html
Until I come back I leave you with this image:
Yesterday was the last day Kent worked at YFO, my previous place of employment. He’s been working there for ten years, so this is an era of sorts that is coming to an end. A bit melancholy, but he’s moving onto other pastures and will do fine, I’m sure. After playing a bit of pool, during which Mano handed me my ass on a plate, we schlepped over to O’learys for dinner.
O’learys is a sports bar, not a kind of locales that I usually frequent; and for a good reason – it’s full of loud men screaming at tv screens. The food shouldn’t go unmentioned either. In our company of eight, two vomited afterwards; not because of food poisoning, but because their dinners consisted of so much cheese and grease that their stomachs kicked the food in the nuts and threw it out the front door. I’ve always had a rather spartan view of my own needs, so the largest vegan hurdle is other peoples’ look of pained sympathy when the salad sans everything comes in. This is why I love going to Kellys.
Because my mom told me to, I got my teeth salt-blasted. My mouth is bleeding and I can hardly taste anything, but look at that shine:
I am not certain that I made the right decision at the age of thirteen when I refused retainers; I like crooked teeth, but they are a bitch to keep clean, not to mention expensive when done in this fashion.
And in the ongoing saga to make you accept alien porn as a reasonalble turn-on: Austrian pinup superheroins – www.beesign.at
Gotta touch up on the essay today, after a weekend drunk/sleep.
Let’s start with my baby is smaller than your baby. World tiniest born (alive) baby is leaving the hospital, and the doctor (or someone) who just had to take a picture so that we can go all ooh and aah didn’t have anything medical looking to compare it to and used a pen:
And I’ve always had a weak spot for political cartoons:
Click image for more
And here’s some grainy footage from the fundraising party that the label copy/past threw last weekend:
Mcsweeneys.net is a place you ought to read once a week. I’ve always liked smart satire even though I don’t know enough litterature to appreciate it properly. But just knowing that something is making jokes that are high-brow makes me feel better.
Here are two recent articles that you might like:
* THE AMERICANS WHO VOTED FOR GEORGE W. BUSH WISH TO RETURN THEIR TELEVISIONS
* SUPERFOODS FOR THE PESSIMIST
Random domain hopping: flightcontrol.com
Over and out.
Marriage:
My friend Mirjana got married on Saturday. It was a short ceremony at city hall. And by short I mean really short. Less than one minute in fact. The halls were full of couples getting wed, and they were all processed on a conveyour belt (not really, but sort of):
In the image they have just turned their heads as the man doing the ceremony sped by like a small and quite fast japanese car. Do you? Do you? You’re done!
He even managed to include an aphorism about love that had us scratching our heads for a while: “To love is nothing, to be loved is something, to love and be loved is everything”. I think he liked the rhythm of “nothing-something-everything”. If it was “something-something-everything” we wouldn’t have had as much trouble parsing it as we had.
All the best to Mirjana and Dimitri on the endevour. Yay you! Etc.
Masturbation:
I was innocently browsing the internets for images of cute puppies and things that would make my mom proud when I stumbled upon this art porn site. I’ve been suggesting to my friends that we should get in on this neoporn thing while the getting is good – there has to be other ways of turning people on rather than showing the same worn out cumshots – but since I’m not a very prolific porn-surfer I haven’t seen much of this new-wave porn but rather heard it thrown around a bit (mostly on high profile blogs like boingboing.net or violet blues’ tinynibbles.com).
It’s videos showing the faces of people helping themselves to a handful of loving. All the pretentious stuff aside, it’s very onturning. Oh, and if you click the image and subscribe I might actually get a free months’ subscription. help me help myself, so to speak.
Mortality:
I was on the phone with mom the other day and she told me that a kid I grew up and went to kindergarden with got stabbed to death on new years eve. His name was Samir and during a fight outside a party he and some other people got knifed. I haven’t found any accounts of it (there were a few stabbings in Stockholm on new years), so I don’t know what happened.
He was living in the apartment building across from my moms when I was in grade school, and we would have fallouts because we both were stubborn. The strongest memory I have of him was when we were in afterschool daycare and after a spat I accidentally threw a baking pin in his face (the handle came off while I was waving it around), forcing him to visit a hospital and get his forehead stiched up. I recall being quite frightened at the small trail of blood leading to the bathroom where one of the grown-ups cleaned up the wound.
I was too engrossed in the taunting and ostracizing I was experiencing at school to consider if I was being overly mean to him (he was two years my junior I think) but I might have been. Anyways. RIP Samir
Melvin:
Mark Melvin came by to visit us gothenburgians, and it was much appreciated. I missed his show cause of the marriage but he did get a small telegram (with picture!) in the national/local paper about the exhibition.
Yes, he usually covers his face whenever being photographed. I don’t know why. It might be because he doesn’t want any bad images to appear on any blogs or such. Too bad I have enough decency not to show the image I have of him doing the face he always does when frustrated. Damn shame.
I just spend ten minutes googling Piers Steel, a researcher who has published a formula of procrastination. meta-procrastination.
Had a brief chat with a guy from Pinstorm in Mumbay about some marketing things my dad is thinking about. First time I have a live conversation with someone in india I think. Neat.
I’m moving to a new host: mswmedia.com which is run by Matthew Selznik, who besides has the same first name as I (sort of) also has a “s” and “z” in his last name. How can that be not good? In no way, that’s how. Also, he’s written brave men run and podcasted the whole thing on podiobooks.com which I recommend you to check out.
Anyway, expect some downtime in a week or so when I try to move over this blog and all other content to another server and fuck things up horribly and beyond repair. Don’t know how well email is going to work in the meantime, so use mateusz.pozar@valand.gu.se why don’t you.
Christmas and New Years eve, from the top:
1: The circle of life among christmas tree ornaments.
2: Traditional: the untangling of lights
3: Barszcz: Red beet soup
4: Skype to relatives in Poland
5: In order of apperance
… Que to a club in stockholm 25/12
… Improvised drunk sparring
… Like bombardment but with less death
… The sleep of unpredictable guests
6: Glitter that got in everywhere
7: Tabletop performance
8: Tormented, murdered, mutilated, fried and baked dinner
6: Rebel? Copyright notice
So I haven’t managed to write anything on the essay today. Basically, I’ve been helping my dad out with translations into English and coming up with a marketing plan for his new car catalogue. See, my dad is under the illusion that if you have the best product, it will win the battle for the marketplace. He’s such an honest capitalist that it hurts my blackened anarchist heart at times.
On my end of the capitalist spectrum, I’ve been looking for a pimp to whom I could offer my services. I.e. I’ve been looking at available jobs.
Let me illustrate the process and where I fail:
1: Web editor with graphic background. preferably be able to land a space shuttle using MySql, PHP, Pearl, while being a teamworker & customer-oriented.
2: Writer for a travelling website. We don’t respond to emails and you will work for nothing until you have three million readers.
3: Translator of shorter online telegrams. Unless you translated the original bible, or have a PhD in linear-B, don’t bother.
4: Guide at a museum. Service-oriented work. Must have served at least four (4) prime ministers as personal assistant. Retrospective at MoMa meriting
5: Storage worker. Organisational skills wanted. Only the top ten Tetris players in the world need apply. Drivers license. Truck license. MySql, PHP, Pearl guru.
6: Customer relations. Since you will be running around downtown with a ten litre thermos full with coffee, all we demand from you is your servitude and a rectum matched only by goatse. C++/Java a plus.
And here’s an alternative solution:
As the evening turned out yesterday, I ended up in front of the tv to watch the space-launch of the first Swedish taikonaut. I’ve never watched all that many things live on TV (the reruns usually are edited better) but it was kinda neat to see the countdown start and then you get the ignition and the takeoff and boom and a lot of lights.
When the event wasn’t narrated by the space-groupies in the studio (“my company developed this space yoghurt. Try it!”), we sat and listened to space control at Kennedy space station. I’m curious how many millions they put in to get that static-sounding, very clippy sound. Gazzilions I imagine – it’s sort of part of the whole thing. if they actually would use regular microphones instead of the NASA brand noise phones half the experience would get lost.
Anyway. It was a blast (har).
And to brighten my evening I just heard that Augusto Pinochet just died in hospital, 91 years old.
Now, if we could just reanimate him and kill him a couple of more times, maybe take a collective shit on his face, well, then I might believe in karma. As it is, the fucker didn’t stand trial nor face the consequences of any of his actions.
The orbituaries are mentioning his dictatorship, the one million refugees, the economical boom. They are not telling of US/western support of him (maggy suck-my-crusty-ass thatcher?), but that might start showing up tomorrow.
He started to decompose with enough time for the editors to put together an interesting retrospect for the morning edition (although I’m quite sure they’ve had one laying around for a bit already). I might actually buy that.
1) Still no job at the horizon.
2) My lip has split again. The price you pay for a full & kissable mouth.
3) I drink too much coffee
4) Caught the great white hope on camera last weekend, but it took me all of three days to find a way for a windows application to convert the fucking 3gpp format, finally settling on quicktime pro:
Also, because of my rather bleak mood of late, I just wrote this cover of summertime: Now, hum along with me:
Wintertime,
and the weather is comparatively easy.
Money’s tight,
and your friends are getting high.
Your daddy’s not rich,
although mom looks good for her age.
So hush little inner child,
don’t you cry.
One of these late mornings / afternoons,
you’re going to rise up and fall back down.
Then you’ll puke all over yourself,
and hope to die
But til that late morning / afternoon
There’s nothing that urgently wants to harm you,
Although daddy and momma might hire a spy.
Wintertime,
and the weather is comparatively easy.
Money’s tight,
and your friends are getting high.
Your daddy’s not rich,
although mom looks good for her age.
So hush little inner child,
don’t you cry.
And to round things off:
* Poor, poor girl. Is it just me or do the terms “bukkake” and “Tub girl” spring to mind?
* Smokey the bear-like artist.
* For some reason, people think that these pictures won’t end up online somehow. Only one way to teach them to behave. Teach them good. It’s turning ever so slightly into that Monty Python skit “blackmail”.
* Tes, this is yet again my cup of coffee. Right now, somewhere, someone, is having more fun than I.
* I created an account on Second life the other day, but the computer that I’m on is so slow that I experience everything as a set of stills. If anyone would try to strike up a conversation with me, I would behave as the total newbie that I am and not be able to answer (most likely cause the lag would be punching the shit out of the computer).