It’s just after 1pm in Budapest, which I suppose means around 7am in New York city, and another 18 hours before… what? I’m not really sure. Does the site just disappear offline with a trace? It seems hard to believe.

Curmudgeonly old bastard that I am and so rusty in these forms of expression, I would still like to say thank you to Lewis, Coates, Andrea and Michael and of course to all the other contributors, for making this site a great temporary home for my twisted rantings and ravings.

They’re all such smart and capable people and it’s probably not that often such a disreputable, flotsam and jetsam bar-fly hack like me comes into their orbit. I’ve tried not to be too much of a pain in the arse. I suppose it is possible that my repeated demands to have my name at the top of the masthead in neon, and my weekly letters demanding a dramatic increase in salary, backdated to my first post may have got on their assembled nerves just occasionally.

Thank you for putting up with me guys, and for giving a voice in the wilderness a chance to gain an audience. Not quite sure I’ll be blogging anywhere near as regularly at this site, but I guess occasionally, and the archives will be there in all their obscure glory.

So that’s it, I may even add a few bits and pieces to the site, but this not that, is the last time I’ll say an actual goodbye. Bon voyage everyone.

And to leave you, hopefully, with a twisted smile on your face, I present an episode from my 26 episode series, Space Cadets. It’s one in a series of what were wordless French animations jazzed up with some comedic after-narration. All things being equal, they should be coming soon to a late night cable television station near you.

So one way or another, I hope we’ll meet again. If not, we’ll always have True/Slant.

In November 2008, this so-called Jet-Set Hobo was in Buenos Aires when he filed his first story for True/Slant. It was called ‘From Argentina with Love’, and was in some way concerned with what was the new James Bond movie, ‘A Portion of Condolence’.  If there was any actual film reviewing going on, I think it would have betrayed some disappointment. But greater disappointments were to come.

There could still be ‘A Scintilla of Comfort’. But you’ll have to read/scroll until the end of the piece for that.

For one thing, troubles at MGM indicate that after ‘A Quantum of Solace’ the James Bond series of movies has been suspended …indefinitely! As assiduous followers of this blog can tell you, one of my great, unfulfilled ambitions was to play a villain in a James Bond movie. Any villain. Naturally I would have preferred to be the doomed evil mastermind, but anyone of his windswept and interesting henchman would have sufficed.

This has been true ever since I used to go to the cinema as a toddler back in the 1960s with my rather glamorous mother, who I somehow sensed – even back then – wouldn’t have minded a certain former Edinburgh milkman slipping his JB monogrammed velvet slippers under her bed one fateful night.

It must have been jealousy on my part, but I wanted to turn the tables on Bond, or more literally, feed him to a shark tank, or slice him in two with a laser beam, or pull the levers on him in a remote controlled helicopter on a collision course with a mashing machine – anything to get rid of that infernal Queen & Country prat.

With the combined ages of Messers Connery and Moore now at 163, more recently I’d set my heart on little Daniel Craig. But now even that seems to be in doubt.

Ah, but back in those far-off, heady days of 2008, and at the tender age of just 42, I had other, equally romantic ideas about blogging, and what it might do for what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my career. That is, when I’m absolutely determined to burst the seams of trousers.  These ideas were about the “vision of a contributor and community driven news and opinion websites that would forever change the face of journalism”. And I misquote. Because actually, these weren’t so much ideas as warm, mushy feelings engendered by reading online interviews with our CEO, COO, CTO and all the other chiefs. The guys in the backroom who stop the frurckendeiser from being mixmitized, as I like to put it. I like to put it that way because I can’t be arsed getting to grips with the jargonology. Anyhoo, it all sounded so gee whiz this is straight out of the lab, let’s see what it does, it might change everything.

Like Kim Jong Il, who may not understand precisely how all this nuclear technology works, but sure-as-hell knows he’d like to use it, well, that for me was the blogosphere. I wasn’t quite sure how blogging for True/Slant was going to finally catapult my diabolical alter ego ‘The Jet-Set Hobo’ to literary fame, but I felt it had some part to play.

So, for nearly two years, in fits and starts but fairly regular great bursts of activity, I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at the wall here to see if it would stick. Travel stories straight and twisted, from the high and low end of the social scale; from Florentine restaurant reviews and Budapest’s little Hollywood all the way to gangsters in Belgrade and an assassination in Beirut.

I have regularly cast a rueful eye over the English Channel to comment on the degrading spectacle that British public life seems to have become in the last 15 or 20 years. I’m not a Republican, out to eviscerate the Royal Family, neither am I a toadying colonial.

From time to time, I’ve held forth on what might be called modern manners; such as what to wear when you’re abroad or how to conduct a foreign affair.  Perhaps I should have done a bit more of this sort of material, after all, no offence intended, but take a look around at some of the baseball cap and sweatpants wearing, Cheeto eating contributors and I assume consumers of this site who could certainly use an overhaul, please -nobody-say-makeover.

There’s been my Fiction, which I started to publish late in the game here, just after we all knew the end was nigh. Some of which it must be owed, such as Krakow Nights, is fairly dark matter. They’re all stories that have been told to me, I swear! Your correspondent has always lived a life of blameless domesticity which is why he is also able to turn out work such as his as-if-Jean Cocteau-wrote-a-children’s-book over-a-couple-of-afternoons minor masterpiece, The Wild Cats of Piran.

You see, now we really are getting to the crux of the matter. The Jet-Set Hobo has both literally and figuratively been all over the map since this blog began. Not enough focus, and I suppose if I do return in some shape or form it will be with a tighter focus. But can you blame me, entirely? Since I began this blog in November 08 I’ve lived in and filed reports from Buenos Aires, Auckland, Beirut, London and Budapest.

But wait, there’s more.

From time to time, I’ve even posted some of my weird little movies online, which must really throw readers who come to True/Slant looking for either, broadly speaking, policy wonks discussing health care reform or otherwise smart people discussing articles with headlines like “Can sex with Dakota Fanning make Bela Lugosi hot again?” (Okay, I’m mixing it up a little there, but a headline like that would be more fun.)

Which brings us neatly to my final ‘beat’. When I’ve had enough of it, I’ve also vented against the mind-dumbing fatuity of celebrity culture. Yet some of my most popular posts have been about celebrities, so I can’t help but think I have failed in some way. I don’t just mean as a writer, but as a person. Because I can’t help watching and commenting on the tawdry parade of low life distraction that it is. For the record, I’m Team Oksana, all the way. So what if she is manipulative and a gold digger, (which I suppose she must be), you can see a train when it’s coming, can’t you? Besides, I never cared much for Mel Gibson and that was cemented for me by his revisionist historical movies. For example, painting the Brits of the War of Revolution as if they were the Gestapo. Plus I used to cringe whenever you’d see his co-stars talking with forced smiles about what a pranky prankster the Gibster was on set. But I digress as I am so wont to do. I’ve said that before too.

Perhaps it’s time for the Rogue Bond movie. Remember the Australian Bond, George Lazenby? Well, imagine him enjoying his sunset years at Strangways health farm, puttering about in a wheelchair, trying to get it on with the nurses. Along I come at the wheel of lawn tractor and crash straight into bank of rhododendrons. Later while recuperating, my character strikes up an unlikely friendship with the octogenarian secret agent, finally getting close enough to strangle him with a stethoscope, or his tie-your-0wn bow-tie. That’d truly be a happy end, for this fantasist at least. But I jest, I’m just jealous.

So anyway, a happy ending for my real future in the virtual sphere? I don’t know. I’ve migrated most of the stuff filed here over to another site, and I’ll be sure to post there when I have the energy and stamina for it. Like about once every five years.

I’m thinking of cancelling my facebook account too incidentally. All these people, putting all their junk out in public, affairs going toxic, surrendering all their personal data to a 26 year old fratboy. Hmm. When did we ever think that was a good idea? Privacy. It’s the new luxury. Besides, it’s occured to me many times how much like high school Facebook is, and I never particularly cared for that either.

So, we’re going to wrap this up, because it’s already 1200 words or so, and I think a good blog post is seldom no more than a thousand, just like eight hours is as long as you ever really can enjoy sitting in a plane, no matter how good the service. This isn’t quite goodbye however. It’s my understanding some of the True/Slant team are going to be asked to stay on in some new, transmogrified version of this site, and I’d quite like to be one of them …so you never know. Hmmm.

Besides, it’s not midnight EST on July 31st just yet, so we’ve time for a few more laughs and some goodbyes.

Stay tuned.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Not too sure about her consort, pictured here, from the forehead up. The headware was part of his laughable bid for Governorship of California. How laughable? Read on.

Los Angeles, California (CNN) — How well Zsa Zsa Gabor is recovering from hip replacement surgery a week ago depends on whom you ask: her husband or her daughter. Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said his wife of 24 years is in “critical” condition, but daughter Francesca Hilton said her condition is “guarded.” Gabor, 93, suffered a broken hip in a fall at her Bel Air, California, home nine days ago. “It’s up and down,” Von Anhalt said Monday afternoon. “It worries me very much.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor is from good, hearty Hungarian stock. She may well survive this trial and then the so-called Prince will have to wait a bit longer to inherit all those wedding rings from past marriages. After all, she herself said “I never hated a husband enough to give him his diamonds back.”

The so-called prince’s royal credentials certainly bear closer scrutiny. According to Wikipedia, he became the adopted son of Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt at the age of 37 in a business transaction put together by Hans Hermann Weyer, a former consul of Bolivia.

Not that I’m knocking this, not entirely. I mean, I’d simply adore to have a title, even if did come out of a packet of breakfast cereal. What is also… interesting is that since marrying, the couple have adopted several grown men:  Marcus Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Marcus Eberhardt), who now calls himself as “Prince Germany”; Oliver Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Oliver Bendig); and Michael Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Michael Killer.) Following their adoption, all these chaps are entitled to use the last name of “Prinz von Anhalt”. In return for what, we can only surmise. In any case, back to the ailing screen siren of yore…

“The publicist for Hilton, however, gave a more optimistic report. Edward Lozzi said the glamour icon was able to sit up in bed and talk, an improvement that followed a blood transfusion and the removal of her morphine drip over the weekend.”

Again, this is a Hungarian woman we’re talking about. You could probably shoot her full of enough morphine to keep Pete Doherty and the Libertines out of recording studios for the next decade, and she’d still be babbling away.

Gabor has “rallied” and is “more talkative,” Lozzi said.

More talkative than whom?

She is still in the intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, but the prince’s publicist, John Blanchette, said she could go home as soon as Thursday.

I see, so the prince’s publicist differs from the great lady’s publicist? My what a strange little band of 21st century Californian courtiers they must be when all assembled.

Von Anhalt is either Gabor’s eighth or ninth husband; depending on whether you count one marriage that was quickly annulled. The glamorous Hungarian-born actress, the second of the three celebrated Gabor sisters, is most famous for her many marriages. Among her other husbands was Oscar-winning actor George Sanders.

via Prince: Zsa Zsa Gabor’s recovery is ‘up and down’ – CNN.com.

Her older sister Magda got married to Sanders some time after he was divorced from Zsa Zsa, which would seem to indicate that he had a thing for chatty and batty Hungarian beauties. And who can blame him? Certainly not this Budapest resident. George Sanders must have felt that, after two Gabor sisters, life held little more in store for him by way of excitement, for he committed suicide, leaving behind the most urbane suicide note imaginable. It read: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

How simply wonderful. The prince I feel, is somewhat less so. You may remember he was one of the men who came forward to claim possible paternity of poor Anna Nicole Smith’s baby girl in 2006. If that wasn’t fantastical enough, less than a year later, he had a great story for the police. Found naked inside his Rolls-Royce, he claimed to have been taken in by three nubile, young beauties who at first asked him to pose for pictures with them. At this point, von Anhalt said they stripped him bare, took his car keys, wallet and money, jewellery, driver’s license and clothes, before handcuffing him to the steering wheel. Which was remarkable, given that he was able to call the cops to the scene of the crime, using his cellular phone. The culprits, he said, had driven away in a Chrysler convertible.  How common, you’d think they’d have at least had the good taste to dig up a Bentley from somewhere.

You may also recall that Zsa Zsa has had some trouble with the Old Bill herself. In 1989, while still a spritely 72 year old, she was jailed for as many hours after slapping a Beverly Hills cop who had the temerity to slap her with a traffic fine.

Be that as it may, we wish her Royal ZsaZsaness a speedy recovery. Her eventual passing will and probably should be mourned in Hungary, not only as a famous daughter of Hungarian soil, but as the last of her kind. She was born in Budapest. In 1917.

Image via Wikipedia

Ex-Romanian Dictator Ceauşescu Exhumed: Forensic scientists have exhumed what are believed to be the bodies of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena at the request of their children. Ceauşescu ruled Romania for 25 years with an iron first before being ousted and executed during the 1989 anti-communist revolt in which more than 1,000 people were killed. Some Romanians doubt that the Ceauşescus were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest.

via Ex-Romanian Dictator Ceausescu And Wife Elena Exhumed For DNA Tests To Determine Identities | World News | Sky News.

Strange echoes of the legends surrounding Romania’s other famous tyrant Vlad Ţepeș AKA Dracula. It seems hard to believe there were any doubts about the Ceauşescus really being dead. They were hauled in front of TV cameras after being seized by an angry mob, and lined up against a wall to face a firing squad on Christmas day 1989.

Granted, the camera panned away as the volley of shots were fired, but a few moments later and the bodies of the most vile married couple in the Balkans – before Slobodan and Mirjana Milošević – were lying there plain to see. Rough justice perhaps, but justice nonetheless. Apparently, their bodies were then whisked away to a cemetery in Bucharest and buried in military cemetery with falsely marked gravestones. In the last few years, their children have pressed for the bodies to be exhumed and subjected to DNA tests. It will be another six months before there will be any conclusive test results, which will have the purpose of achieving… just what exactly, I really don’t know, except their son-in-law claims he will sue the Romanian state if the remains are not those of the gruesome couple. Gruesome? Well, the Ceauşescus starved the population while building a massive people’s palace, imposed Stalinist collectivism in the countryside, destroyed old churches and towns and replaced them with concrete housing projects – and in less than 25 years of iron rule, wreaked such devastation upon their native land that it will probably take another generation or two for Romania to recover. Let sleeping fascistic pig-dogs lie, would be my modest suggestion.

Cover via Amazon

“These are bad times for people who like to sit outside the library at dawn on a rainy morning and get ripped to the tits on crank and powerful music.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed

Today, July 18th, is Hunter S. Thompson’s 73rd birthday, or at least it would be if he hadn’t shot himself dead 5 years ago while his grandson played in another room of the rambling log cabin that was his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.

Based on those credentials, Hunter S. Thompson might present himself as an unlikely candidate for hero, literary or otherwise. Suffice to say that this lowly hack does have literary heroes, including figures as jumbled and miscellaneous as Lord Byron, Douglas Adams, Evelyn Waugh, William S. Burroughs and Oscar Wilde, and Hunter S. Thompson is one of them. That’s despite the fact I’m a cynical and jaded veteran of the journalistic trade and aware there are a lot of criticisms you can level at Thompson and his legacy. For one thing, he has become the poster boy for an awful lot of readers who cnta evne slpel tiher nwo nasem, let alone tell you for example the name of the current vice president of the United States. Well at least they’re reading something I guess.

Also, a parsing of any of Thompson’s numerous biographies and one quickly becomes aware of just how out-of-control the author of Hells Angels could get. At his worst, he must have been a fucking nightmare. A great screaming and shouting physical brute demanding expenses and room service and bottles of Chivas Regal sent up to his room so that he could finish his goddamn column. But it was even worse than that – it seems he beat his long-suffering first wife Sandy, and made a lot of other people suffer in the shadow of his savage temper. There was if we are honest, a little something of the ‘Mel Gibson in the night’ about the so-called good doctor.

And yet. However enthralling or appalling his antics were, the reason he had stood out in the first place was that at his best he wrote the same way a Cheetah can run. “A man of vast syntactical resources” as William F. Buckley put it. In the 2006 biopic ‘Hunter S. Thompson on Film’, Buckley also reads this piece by Thompson aloud.

“Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I’ve regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosones that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.”

In the film, I seem to recall Buckley folds the book shut, grimaces and says: “That’s as mean as you can get.” (Quite right, which is why we need more reporters more like him around today, and never mind their personal habits. Whoops! Nearly fell into the terrible trap of trying to write like Thompson, an amateurish slip if ever there was one).

However, sad to say, after 1990’s Songs of the Doomed, it was all, for the most part, a somewhat pale imitation or rehash of his own material: There were new collections of old works, somewhat incoherent attempts at fiction, silly movies and even in his columns, the use of the same phrases over and over – as if to fill space on the page. ‘We are after all professionals/buy the ticket take the ride/when the going gets weird the wierd turn pro/Mahalo, I am Lono’ and so on we go. Then a little later, fat volumes of his collected letters came out, and when they actually turned out to be a bracingly good read, his reputation was somewhat salvaged. It turned out that Hunter S. Thompson’s bread-and-butter notes were more interesting than most other writers’ best contrivances.

Even in the journalism, midst all the repetitions and strange leaps in continuity, there were flashes of brilliance. One famous example would be the piece he wrote for ESPN of all people on the morning of 9/11, where he quite accurately predicted the US administration’s game-plan for at least the next eight years. And here and there were passages to remind you that even when you took away the politics, sentence by sentence, Thompson was one of the best writers who ever drew breath, even if he never drew a sober one. Just listen to this, it’s from the opening part of Fear & Loathing in Elko:-

“It is autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown, and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing. Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black Opium for dessert and went outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to be an American on a day like this. If felt like a goddamn Football Game, Jann — it was like Paradise…. You remember that bliss you felt when we powered down to the farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it felt like That.”

You don’t even need to be an American to be stirred by the rhythm and the deceptive simplicity of that passage. “We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more”.

And in this context, the difference between Hunter Stockon Thompson and Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson? Well one is an alright-ish sort of actor and a decent technician of a director with a violent streak and the other – Thompson- was a wordsmith of genius who called the shots on the towering figures of his times. His enemies were for the most part, to put it mildly, worthy political adversaries: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and (it’s more subtly stated in the books) Bill Clinton. Mel Gibson’s enemies seem to be women and babies and blacks and jews. But let’s leave the Aussie battler out of this – and shut it down because I have other things to do today aside from tipping my hat to a potentially dangerous but also oddly rewarding role model.

It comes down to this for me. At Thompson’s best, no-one could top him – then or now. And personally, although I enjoyed Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas I enjoyed more Generation of Swine, his collection of columns from the San Francisco Examiner in the late 80s. Even the straightest pieces are of course infused by his wildly inventive and mischevious voice, but plenty of them are also just good reportage. It’s also fascinating to see that however addled with substances he reputedly was, Thompson could still calculate the betting odds on a point spread of the American electoral college, and blow up a jeep all in the same night. All those abstemious, respectable mainstream journalists who deride Thompson (however accurately at times) should attempt to write as many well-crafted, savagely funny truisms in a decade as this guy could churn out in just a month writing for the Examiner.

So in memory of the crazy, gifted bastard,  lets wrap this up with the deleted three stanzas of WH Auden’s ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’ that Hunter S. was very fond of quoting:

“Time that is intolerant Of the brave and the innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet. Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.”

And if that’s not an excuse, it’ll just have to do as an alibi.

The New European Environment – starring my brother Craig Young

An Emotional weather report

So, as usual after coffee and various salves I began my day with a check of the headlines and see Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called a snap election which she’ll probably win. Speaking of woman premieres, it seems Margaret Thatcher’s family are appalled by the idea of Meryl Streep playing Mrs T in a movie.

Speaking of …ecological disasters BP think they might have finally put a cap on the leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But I see also an oil pipeline has exploded in China and is keeping 2000 firefighters busy, which sounds like a pretty big blaze to me. The phrase “It’s a wonder these kind of things don’t happen more often” is fast becoming redundant. We’re all going to have to be brave to make it in this scary new world. Meanwhile, the environmental update from the Hungarian capital is that it’s hot… How hot? Well, it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit last night at 11pm in Budapest and this evening it is, as I like to say in a voice like Sam Elliott’s, still “hotter than a snake’s hide in a wagon rut” now at 7pm CET.

And I’m sitting here in the living room of this rather suitable-for-one apartment, trying to write with the television on. Christ, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. CNN is the only English language channel I can get in my otherwise well equipped and well appointed gentleman’s quarterings in the 7th district, the oh-so boho old Jewish quarter of Budapest. Well, I can’t complain but sometimes I still do. I go to sleep every night in a bed fit for a Transylvanian Prince, in a heavy, antique furniture filled and airy apartment, equidistant to practically everything I need.

Finding gainful employment has been as slow as Continental drift, but that all seems to change around September, when the weather will also be agreeably cooler. Tomorrow, at least according to Wunderground, Budapest has a chance to cool down in the wake of a few welcome rainstorms that’ll wash the streets clean(ish) and give us all some relief. The so-called Jet-Set Hobo (might be time to hang up those spurs) is not cut out for this kind of heat – Not unless I’m near a beach with a pile of good books and someone nice to rub in the sun screen lotion. The position is open by the way, so if you’re glamorous and amorous, drop me a line. I make a good dry martini, I’m a good conversationalist and er, well that’s about it really I suppose.

*

‘At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.’

George Orwell

Lunched today with my friend Kiki today and not quite all we could talk about was the Mel Gibson affair. Ms Gregoriova must be quite a piece of work herself if she handed those tapes over to the Radar website before giving them to the cops. But whatever sort of schemer she may or may not be it doesn’t really matter. Mel Gibson is now on display for the kind of tasteless, raging monster of mullet-wearing vulgarity and rage I’d long suspected him to be. In my view, he’s played fast and loose with history with every film he’s made and yes, of course he is anti-semitic and everything else. It’s obvious for instance that he loathes the English too. In his risible movie The Patriot he has a Nazi prototype English officer having civilians burned in barns, the kind of thing for which there is no record. I guess the revolutionary war just wasn’t violent enough for Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson. I haven’t seen Apocalypto, but I suppose if anyone could up the ante on the brutality of Mayan society, it would be him.

The tapes make for an uncomfortable listen. Gibson sounds like Hitler with an X-rated mouth, or the ultimate potty mouthed spoiled infant, a roaring furnace of anger. After you have heard Gibson shrieking at the top of his voice that he wants oral sex, it becomes difficult to imagine seeing him in any romantic roles ever again.

Anyway, according to Wunderground the temperature has dropped a couple of degrees in the last hour and it’s not going to get over 80 degrees between tonight and Thursday. Time for everybody to chill, and not just Mel Gibson.

And time to change the subject. I have other things on my mind – which include organising a Hallowe’en Party and doing some location scouting in Transylvania the better to breathe in some fresh mountain air.  I’ll report back soon, but right now I’m going to lie down on that almost ridiculously comfortable bed with a cold compress on my forehead and quietly enjoy the feel of the temperature slowly falling.

As Lightnin’ Hopkins used to sing, “I’m going down slow”…

A little bit closer to my home in Budapest, and I submit for your attention, Kristyna Koci, Chief Negotiator for the Czech Republic’s ruling political party, the Public Affairs party.

I kid you not. The photograph is taken from a just released 2011 calendar put out by the Czech Public Affairs party. Certainly it’ll be in the stores well in time for Christmas, (which the Czechs don’t particularly believe in, a majority registering themselves as atheist in census polls – whatever you may have heard about Good King Wenceslas on the feast of Stephen.) “Women’s political influence is growing. Why not show we are women who aren’t afraid of being sexy?” said Marketa Reedova, the party’s candidate for Mayor of Prague.

Following on from my last post, it must seem like the Jet-Set Hobo has sex on the brain. Well hey, no more than usual. It’s not like I’m inventing this stuff, it is just what flits across my radar. Anyway, it might be too sweeping a generalisation to say the women of Central and European Europe are, how shall we say, tres formidable, but there you go. One would have to be blind or deliberately obtuse not to notice how many drop dead gorgeous women there are in places like Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Warsaw and so on. But as traditionally feminine as they may be in their dress and often rather demure manner, don’t let that fool you. It seems to me – and please accept that these are broad sweeping generalisations – that women fared better than men during both communism and in its aftermath. While so many of the menfolk are still today sitting in darkened rooms drinking vodka in front of the TV and watching reruns of Starsky and Hutch, Eastern European gals are out there wrestling the bear of life with all they’ve got, and winning. If there’s a lesson or moral to be drawn from this, I’m not quite sure what it is. But here on the ground, it’s certainly hard to ignore.

Only in Hungary. Here’s what the pithy satirical news website Pestiside has to say about a new pole-dancing world record…

If there was ever going to be a pole-dancing world record set, you knew it would have to come from Hungary.

A reasonable hypothesis.

Former pornstar and pole dancing world champion Alma Pirner along with several other strippers pole artistes got together at the Dollhouse dance studio and slid up and down and ground their bodies against a chrome pole for 24 hours, with Pirner setting a solo record for eight hours of consecutive sliding around.

How invigorating. But the kind of thing you could read about every day online at Blikk, if you could er, penetrate the impenetrable, the Hungarian language that is. But here comes the kicker.

When asked why this did this, Pirner said that it was to prove that women are just as physically and mentally capable as men, and deserve to be treated equally in the workplace, which is kind of like BP promoting responsible deep-sea oil drilling, but still, it’s the thought that counts, right?

via Pestiside.hu: The International Voice of Underground Hungary.

One of the joys of living in this country. Much of the time, there’s no need to make it up.

Image via Wikipedia

Saturday evening in Budapest, and as I write, either war has broken out on the streets around the apartment I’m renting, or there is a big fireworks display going on nearby. That’s Budapest for you, at least when the temperatures are hot. Every night in the Summer, something different. The Hobo is definitely housebound this evening however. Last night’s carousing with the Tasmanian Princess and the Welsh/Hungarian actress/antique dealer was quite enough high voltage bonhomie for one weekend. Probably.

Anyway, today we hoisted ourselves up to the highest point above Budapest we could (using our best petard but for good this time) in order to take a look at those not-so-distant London lights. Okay, I used Google Earth. Well, as previously noted, commentary on the British sociopolitical landscape has been part of the Jet-Set Hobo’s loosely assembled, journalistic beat. It might as well continue this way until the end, which may be nigh. So no more ado, here’s a quick round-up of today’s headlines from the Old Dart. (Colonial slang for Great Britain).

Raoul Moat manhunt: Investigation into Taser shots fired at fugitive

According to The Grauniad, sorry the Guardian, shots fired from a Taser could have caused the  Northumberland gunman to shoot himself after a six-hour standoff with police. Investigations have already begun into the actions of local police in the hours before the death of Raoul Moat. They are apparently focusing on whether the two Taser shots fired at the fugitive may have pushed him over the edge.

Well, that sounds to me like a good use of taxpayer money in the midst of a depression, spending no doubt millions on an enquiry that will solve absolutely nothing. And frankly, who gives a damn if the Taser shots did tip him over the line. Rhetorical. He was too far gone.

‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson sticks it to Gordon Brown, just months after spinning for him

That headline just about sums up the entire affair. According to the Daily Telegraph, Mandelson’s book claims that “Brown waged insurgency from next door against Blair”.

What a disgraceful but quite open duplicity is on showcase here. Don’t get me wrong, I was never a particular fan of Gordon Brown, but it was only in April, less than three months ago today, that ‘Mandy’, as Labour’s Chair of Election Strategy was vocally defending the honour and reputation of Gordon Brown. How can anyone be expected to believe anything these people have to say, if a few weeks later, they are happy to publish a book saying the opposite, in explicit detail. There’s really no grace period left at all before you start twisting the knife in these days is there? What a rotten battle fought over barren ground.

On a far cheerier note. The best cartoon from The Spectator I’ve seen in an aeon.

‘It’s the hottest Cold War since records began.’

If you’re interested, and you probably should be, there are more Spectator political cartoons here. They range from the merely amusing to the sublime.

…Time has now passed, and I have had brunch, the contents of which I will not describe, except to say that ice is tinkling in a glass as I type this, and a lemon has also been strategically sliced and deployed. The fireworks display (or war) outside must have ended and I’m getting that familiar itch under my skin to patrol a few of the more louche drinking establishments of my immediate neighbourhood. I can’t see the use of living in the 7th district of Budapest otherwise, quite frankly.

So finally, because back in the dark ages I used to produce a radio series called Today in History, I’ll leave you with some headlines from the history books. I see the Emperor Hadrian died today in AD138, the city of Dublin was founded on the banks of the River Liffey in 988 and Marcel Proust, author of A la Recerche du Temps Perdu was born in 1871. But finally, let’s all Recherche le Rainbow Warrior. For it was in 1985 – exactly 25 years ago – that Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk in the Auckland, New Zealand harbour by French DGSE agents, who were then sent to a vacation prison sentence to some tropical New Caledonian paradise. Alain Marfart and Dominique Prier they were called. For some reason I can never forget their names.

Image via Wikipedia

Apparently the Human Riff is planning to publish his memoirs in a few months. They contain revelations that you can best believe won’t go down well with ‘Sir’ Mick Jagger.

Maybe it’s his way of ending it. The Stones I mean. There is a time to quit and perhaps this is the only way. That thought just occured to me incidentally. Well, the Stones have gone on for just about as long as anyone has had the right to expect. Longer. And through it all, the two real anchors of the band, Jagger and Richards, have schemed against and fueded with the other. They’ve been like two Grand Dames of Soap Opera according to some insiders. At the same time, Mick has been quoted as saying they were like brothers born to different parents, or ‘brothers from another mother’ if you will. Or again, even if you won’t.

It’s certainly a highly combustible partnership, a love/hate working relationship some 59 years old. And still Rockin’. But for how much longer? Let’s see.

Keith Richard’s autobiography, which is simply entitled Life, will be published in October by Little, Brown. In it, Jack Daniels whiskey’s most famous consumer is said to give full vent to his opinions of Mick Jagger. For one thing, it’s hard to see Jagger being happy about his druggy past being resurrected, when he has mostly distanced himself from all that in the last, oh my God, twenty years? Nor are the robust opinions of his lead guitarist about Jagger’s relationships with women likely to endear the legendarily satyr-like lead singer. Because it’s already rumoured, that in Keith’s stated opinion Mick Jagger has “never been able to handle chicks.”

It seems to me a sad way to perhaps terminate an association which could probably claim to being the greatest partnership in rock. As I said, it has occured to me that perhaps it’s the only way to end it. But still, where I come from, you don’t dish dirt on your friends in public and I’d have thought that’s where an old rhythm & bluesman from Dartford would have come from too. It all seems pretty tawdry, but I’ll reserve judgement until the book actually comes out I suppose. (Oi, Keef’s people! Can you send me a review copy?)