Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a 'medium' to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits.

The young do not feel intruded when the old tag along with packed lunches. The old have no qualms about sharing high school jokes with their grandchildren as the pines and the cypresses shade their walk to the picnic.

They carry packed lunches in wooden tiffins and tea in Chinese-made flasks with pictures of scary dragons. Picnics are for everyone, as the destination is a monastery.

National dress is mandatory in Bhutan to enter religious sites. So, men can be seen in a Scottish-styled knee-length robe (gho) and women wearing a highly colorful and intricately designed ankle-length dress (kira).

If the climb to the monastery is too inaccessible, then the gho and the kira are stuffed into a backpack along with the lunch.

The picnickers wear jeans, jackets and sneakers and listen to Curt Cobain or Britney Spears from their ear plugs. Some mobile phones scream out loud FM stations playing local Dzongkha songs.

Chimi Lhakhang will not seem far away as you climb up to the monastery enjoying the blend of music, nature and the gurgle of River Punatsangchhu.

Tourists who come to this 14th Century monastery, drive up the hill and have to stop by the rice fields. Then it’s a leisurely walk until the complex wood work on the roof become clearer.

But the first time I went there, I took a different route from the northern side. It was a walk up from Punakha, the former capital of Bhutan, till the culvert on the road from were you could see the monastery of the Divine Madman who subdued demons and women with his enormous phallus.

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Then we descend to the banks of the river, walk alongside it till we reach the foot of the monastery hill.

The climb uphill was always punctuated by the stories about the maverick saint, whose blessings the local females and tourists seek to become pregnant. The walk would become smoother with the stories and chants about him.

Here is a smooth prayer, which the saint had apparently taught:

The mind of a Bodhisattva is smooth,
The talk of self-seekers is smoother,
But the thighs of a virgin are smoother than silk:
That is the teaching on the Three Smooth Things.
Women in the group would giggle as the men would further be inspired and continue churning out more outrageous ones.

The divine thunderbolt

Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a ‘medium’ to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits. The use of phallus was also intended to free up the social inhibitions enforced by the established values.

The blessing of the phallus kept in the monastery is considered sacred especially to barren women. And once they give birth, the child, male or female, is named after the saint, Kuenley.

The phallus of the saint is drawn on walls of houses across the country and one cannot miss it or avoid it.

Elsewhere it would seem scandalous, but that’s what makes Bhutan different and makes even a picnic spiritually satisfying.

I no longer stay near the temple. Almost 70 kilometers away, I stay in the capital of Bhutan now. But I have been there, a couple of times after on taxis and motorbikes.

In the last week of August, I had the opportunity to talk about the temple to a small group of students pursuing a Masters degree in cultural psychology.

We had a lively discussion for about two hours, but I didn’t recite this centuries old Drukpa Kuenley son:

The bed is the workshop of sex,
And should be wide and comfortable;
The knee is the messenger of sex,
And should be sent up in advance

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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.

I know it’s just plastic, but somehow this feels wrong. [Copyranter]

A debate has been raging here, in the comments section, as well on the blog of Mark Adomanis about what is a Russophobe and what is Russia’s trajectory and do one’s thoughts about the other make one a Russophobe or a Russophile? Addressing the question before my hop to another platform seemed especially fitting.

To kick off the discussion, I wanted to offer commenter yalensis’s taxonomy of a “Russophobe”:

To my mind, the term “Russophobe” mostly involves a constellation of assumptions (stereotypes?) about that person’s political views, i.e., they believe that: (1) Russia was on the right course towards democracy under Yeltsin, but then Putin came along. (2) Khodorkovsky was shafted, he should be released from prison and given his oil company back (3) hopefully during the upcoming Kasparov administration, but (4) none of this matters anyway because Russia is doomed due to low birth rate, alcoholism, and Islamic insurgencies. (5) The thought of Russia’s demise makes the Russophobe feel happy, because Russia has been so mean to the Gruzians and Chechens; however (6) Russians will not go gently into that good night because they suffer from “neo-imperialist” ambitions and want to restore their lost empire, so (7) it is up to the noble West to confront them and keep them inside their shrunken borders…. etc etc
I could rattle off a lot more cliches, but I think everybody gets the point.

I would say it’s a helpful one, except it isn’t. First, there is the fact that yalensis outlines what is basically an alternative political view. How having a different vision of Russia qualifies for hating Russia is unclear except it does reinforce the stereotype — since yalensis went that way — of the Kremlin brute who knows no truth but his truth and sees any alternative view through the sight of a rifle. It also is uncannily reminiscent of the thought process we saw in our mercifully unseated president, George W. Bush, as well as his spiritual heir, Ms. Mama Grizzly.

Furthermore, yalensis offers for our consideration a man made mostly of straw, a collection, by his own admission, of cliches. Because who really believes in the virgin peachiness of the Yeltsin era? Who really thinks Kasparov or his cohort are a realistic choice to lead Russia? And really — and this is a question for all the commenters who accuse me of subterfuge and of preparing the ground for an imminent American invasion of Russia — really who is rooting for Russia’s demise? Who? To be brutally honest: no one in the world give that much of a shit about Russia to actively want America to take over. Maybe you’ve heard about how insular and navel-gazing Americans are? And maybe apathy is a more apt definition of a “Russophobe,” but then it isn’t much of the toothy ogre you’re looking to beat your chest about and make you feel once again to be the fulcrum of world history, is it?

A gallery of agitprop from Seliger, the summer camp for pro-Kremlin youth, really snapped a lot of the comments I’ve seen into focus.

Especially this one:

This is a caricature of Viktor Suvorov, a KGB spy who defected to the West and wrote books about Soviet history as well as its security aparatus. Here’s what the poster says about him:

Way back when he left the USSR and nursed a grudge. Works on the orders of international intelligence agencies. In his books, turns Russian history on its head, calls into question the results of the Great Fatherland War.

It sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? Because I’ve seen it here, under so many blog posts I’ve written and in the comments section of Inosmi when they pick up one of my pieces — except without the virulent anti-Semitism.

Julia Ioffe emigrated and has made a career of hating and defaming Russia in order to justify her decision to leave and betray her homeland.

Right?

Or, better yet:

Julia Ioffe wants to see Russia fail, collapse, become the 52nd American state so that she really, really feels justified.

A Western colleague last night asked me about my “line” and accused me of hating Russia. (That’s right, the Western media in Russia is not monolithically Russophibic, whatever that means.) It was a stupid question. I don’t have a “line.” I have the news and my sources on the ground in Moscow and when something happens I talk to them and then call it as I see it. If it’s in the format of a blog, I get cheeky and pick only the funny things. The hard work I leave for my published pieces. I don’t hate Russia, given all the friends and family I have living here. And I’ve never had an editor enforce “a line,” have never had them turn down a paid assignment because they didn’t agree with “my line” or wanted something more anti-Putin. I don’t get orders for articles except as vague “Can you write about Phenomenon X?”

It’s just stupid, simplistic, and it brings me to Mark’s very apt question about what one believes is Russia’s trajectory. And despite the nuance of his question, it still boils down to this: if you are optimistic about Russia, you are not a Russophobe. But what are you if you — if you had to venture a guess — were to predict that Russia would continue, like any other country, along a sinusoidal path of ebbs and flows, ups and downs. Does anybody really still believe in linear, Hegelian trajectories? Russia’s path, given its history and its present, is likely to have more height in those highs and more depth in those lows. Steps forward, steps back while time passes and Russia changes in ways we cannot predict, not all of them good. You know, like any country, but more pronounced — and, like any other country, with its aggregate of tiny, hilarious, absurd details I’ve tried to chronicle here. That may not be optimistic, but it sure is realistic. Does that make me a Russophobe?

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.

It's a tragedy for me to see the dream is over

Well, gang, it’s been fun. This is the last thing I’ll write for True/Slant, and I want to thank everyone who read me and emailed me and offered to name their children after me. (This one goes out to you, little Briana Sanchez.) When I was first approached to write for True/Slant I thought no one would read me and the site would only last a few months. Turns out, True/Slant thrived for several years and was eventually bought by Forbes, so…one out of two ain’t bad.

Seriously though, I had a great time at the T/S and hope to cross paths with these good looking gentlepersons again soon. A hearty high-five to Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel, and Lewis Dvorkin. Great to work with, for, and about. People who let you curse out an entire country for no reason are good people to know.

If you’d like to keep reading me, please follow my Twitter: @b_donovan. I’ll post links and news there about my upcoming work for other sites, TV shows, and fast-food restaurants. As of August 1st, I will begin writing for the good people at ThoughtCatalogue.com, and may be turning up at other sites you’ve certainly heard of – so stay tuned!

Happy Christmas to All, and To All a Good Night

-Brian

Reports this evening that a hijacking has been stopped at Domodedovo airport in Moscow. Yesterday afternoon.

Apparently, a passenger on a Moscow-bound flight from Mineralnye Vody “made demands” of the crew and held up the plane for two hours. One report says this passenger turned to the plane’s captain saying he had “valuable information for the security forces.” The pilot reported the incident to air traffic control who diverted the plane to a special lot. In the meantime, the demander changed his demand: now he wanted to see the security administrators as well as representatives of the media. A fellow passenger felt ill. Instead of medics, though, the airport’s security and FSB boarded the plane and cleared it out.

It is unclear right now who this guy is or how one guy can hold up a plane or why he did this and how an offer of information constitutes a demand or how good of a hijacker he was if the pilot was able to, you know, land the plane exactly where he wanted, or whether this is anything more than the froth of a drunken rant, but Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that a body presumed to have fallen out of the plane [sic] and that police have cordoned off some of the landing/take-off strips and are not letting passengers off their planes on this, the hottest day of the year in Moscow. The planes are stuffy, out of water and even juice.

In short: who knows. More knowledge when I know it.

In New Hampshire a bear entered a house through an open door then proceeded to eat two pears, a bunch of grapes, sipped some fine agua from the fish bowl and then on his or her way out grabbed a stuffed bear. That’s an adult grown bear that could tear you limb from limb grabbing a toy stuffed bear before exiting the house. It must get lonely in those woods.

via Bear Eats Fruit, Takes Stuffed Bear From NH House – NYTimes.com.

Image by AFP via @daylife

Y’all, it is so hot in Moscow. There are peat-bog fires in the countryside so the city is choked with a visible, and pungent, white smoke. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten every record ever set since they started recording the temperature here 130 years ago. At this writing it is 97 degrees.

So instead of writing something about corruption or the fact that the budget deficit will be double what the Finance Ministry projected, I will bring you this awesomeness: a music video by comedian Aleksandr Revva under the pseudonym Artur Pirozhkov. (English speakers are free to tune out, as are Russian speakers who don’t get Russian humor.)

And, for context, some of his precious hilariousness.

You’re welcome.

Image via Wikipedia

Now that True/Slant is winding down and will cease to exist and I go looking for another website where I can spew my half-hearted written agenda, I have arrived at the very important decision of using the umlauts in my name.

Fruzsina Eördögh

Fruzsina comes from the greek goddess “Euphrosyne” but in Communist countries, being named after a god is frowned upon, so the “eu” was chopped off.

Eördögh alludes to the Hungarian word for little devil- like a tricky imp, a demon faun of the lesser order. I will continue to pronouce Eördögh in the weird French way that I do, because I don’t want to listen to Americans attempt to roll their “r’s”.

The use of umlauts was a long time coming… and  friends have been pushing this  for a while, but I held strong for many years. I kept telling people I didn’t use them because I was lazy… too lazy to cut and paste, too lazy to convert my keyboard. Whatever excuse there was, I claimed it. I resisted the change. I’ve gone through multiple identity crises in my time, and my Hungarian identity was one of them (I’ve felt “not American enough” while also not being “Hungarian enough”). Maybe I am not as Hungarian as I would like, (my Hungarian spelling resembles an Elementary  student’s), but I am working on it.

But the embracing of the umlauts in my name is just part of a larger initiative to be more comfortable with who I am.  In the 4th or 5th year of my existence, I began telling people my name was Gina. It was easy for Americans to say. I kept “Gina” until  college, where I had a similar “f*ck it” realization I can only assume “Barry” Obama also went through. My name is Fruzsina Eördögh… not Gina. I am not a dime-a-dozen. That whole anglicized  “Phillips-Henderson” fluff was not meant to be either.

I’ve tried to incorporate the politeness and seriousness of the Midwestern demeanor, but I find my New York City self popping up more times than I’d like. Maybe it is time I embraced the brat.  The rise in brassiness can be attributed to Ke$ha (who stole my hairstyle), but at least my umlauts make me unique.   I’ve failed to quit smoking (a work in progress), like millions of Americans, but at least my umlauts make me a winner. I have yet to reign in my depression, and that again makes me like millions of Americans across the country. I will try some sort of part-time acting career (I’ve secretly wanted to be an actress all my life), but that again, makes me narcissistic like everyone else in Gen Y. When I think  of the future, I am hopeful, again making me like every cookie-cutter young person in the United States today. Except they don’t have umlauts.

Suck it, America… what ever it is!

My neighbor (Image via Wikipedia)

I got all excited when I learned that Don Draper’s bachelor pad was in my neighborhood. I’ve never had a leading character from a high-quality TV drama living anywhere near me.

We’ve been told he’s located in the vicinity of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue so I hustled over there to see if I could ferret out the exact address.

I figured Don would be on (comparatively) quiet Waverly rather than hectic, clangorous Sixth (which the city fathers once tried to get New Yorkers to call “Avenue of the Americas” and failed utterly). He has a lot of dissipating to sleep off.

I’ve always loved Waverly. It wavers all over Greenwich Village, at one point bending so sharply there appears to be an intersection of Waverly Place and Waverly Place.

I also figured Don for a large-apartment-building inmate rather than a brownstoner; he’s the kind of guy who’d need a doorman to run interference for him, make up excuses when necessary, calm down and/or misdirect jealous husbands, hysterical women brandishing guns, that sort of thing.

I found the place in about three minutes: “The Waverly,” 136 Waverly Place.

I just knew.

It had the right look. Old, discreet, fifteen floors, maybe 100 apartments, faded yellow brick façade, just off the corner, southwest side. The lobby’s dark, art-decoish, with a diamond-pattern floor that I worried might pose a danger to Don if he comes in a bit tipsy just after it’s been buffed. It’ll be slippery.

The doorman instantly confirmed my suspicion. “Don Draper?” he said, all innocence. “No, there’s nobody here by that name.” Clearly Don has tipped this fellow well.

His apartment is probably in the back and on a high floor. The further away from the street, the better. Early ‘60s rents being what they are, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got two bedrooms for a couple hundred a month.

Right next door to 136 is Hong Kong Tailor Jack, which will come in handy for emergency clothing repairs. Things do occasionally turn violent in Don’s world. People get punched in the nose. Garments are removed quite hastily and strewn carelessly about.

There’s a subway at Waverly and Sixth but I don’t see Don using it. He’s more of a taxi man.

Then there’s the Waverly Restaurant. It’s not really Don’s kind of joint, too downscale for him to ever eat in. But the place has booze. And it’s very close by. So late some night, maybe the call girl slaps him a little too hard, maybe Bert Cooper tells him he’s failed again, maybe Betty still hasn’t moved out of the damn house, maybe he’s out of gin…Don’t be surprised to see Don, collar turned up, hat brim pulled down, duck across the street for a quick one. Or several.

Triplets take a break. The Just for Laughs 2010 Twins Parade on Saturday was twice the fun of a standard parade. (Is that enough of hack opening for you?) This is what I learned when I ventured to JFL’s TP for my friends at Asylum.

Held in Montreal, the event is comprised of more than 500 twins from such far-reaching locales as Australia, Nigeria, and America. (Though most of the pairs were from Quebec.) Residents were doing double-takes (more twin puns to come) as their French-Canadian streets filled with those who sprang from a single zygote that split and formed two embryos.

The theme for this year’s parade (the 13th annual celebration) was “Ballroom.” Each pair sported caricatures of themselves as they paraded down St. Catherine’s Street delighting the crowd of thousands by showing off their rare trait: a sibling doppelganger.

Here’s a joke. What’s the most popular fruit for Montreal’s Twins Parade? Answer: pairs. (I’m the wittiest man on earth!)

The sight of twins, after twins, after twins, after more twins, was as surreal as a Fellini film on pairs of mushrooms. In general, twins makes people happy in the same manner as an army of Santas bearing down and sporting gifts.

For the moment, all we wanted to do is permanently live in a world comprised of twins walking the streets. It makes people feel envious and slightly lonely that they too don’t have a twin.

The oldest pair of twins was over 100 years old — each! That’s a crazy 200 twin years combined.

Here’s a fun thing you could do after the Twins Parade. Run frantically into a bar and scream “Has anyone seen my twin? I’ve lost my twin!!” Then leave. A few minutes later return with a slightly different hairstyle and ask the room, “Was someone just in here looking for me?”

See the rest of my Twins Parade photos at Asylum.com>/strong>

Why Klingon? Apparently, an episode of Star Trek: TNG featured a ship named USS Jenolan. Don’t the tongue of Worf? Fear not. The tours will also be offered in ten “more commonly-spoken languages.”

Crossposted at Caveat Viator

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Interior Ministry’s Department of Economic Security reports today that as President Dmitry Medvedev’s war on corruption heats up, so has corruption. In the first six months of 2010, the size of the average bribe has nearly doubled, from 23,000 RUB ($760) to 44,000. Since Medvedev was elected in 2008, bribes have quadrupled.

Quadrupled.

And bribes for bureaucrats who are of middle or low-middle rank have grown faster than inflation.

This confirms what I’ve been hearing from Russian businessmen in Moscow, who complain that visits from renegade tax inspectors, fire inspectors, pencil inspectors have grown more frequent and more brazen, and the size of bribes they ask for, well, see above. Some speculate that it is because the average bureaucrat’s sense of uncertainty has grown, especially if he thinks his money spigot is in imminent danger of being shut off, so they take as much as they can for the long winter ahead. But that is, of course, just the speculation of the people who have to deal with these inspectors.

No wonder even Medvedev admits he’s made no progress on fighting corruption. Quoth he: “Often efforts toward fighting corruption are limited to energetically signing papers.”

via Gazeta.ru

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.

Because you guys seem to enjoy discussions about Russian women and money, I figured I would repost my latest article, from Slate, here. It is about how corrupt Russian bureaucrats use their wives as offshore bank accounts to hide the money they steal, and why that undermines the millions of Russian women not married to chinovniki, and who work for their family’s bread.

A strange thing happened in late June, when the big Russian Internal Ministry bosses disclosed their earnings and those of their family members, thanks to President Dmitry Medvedev’s new anti-corruption measures. The surprise didn’t come from the men: The head-honcho cops were the fat cats everyone assumed them to be, declaring incomes that strangely exceeded that of the president. And the ranks of the obscure upper-middle management fittingly declared modest incomes, usually topping at out around $50,000. A Russian-made car here, a modest apartment there.

But the wifely half of the family disclosures was far more revelatory. There was, for example, the amazing financial statement of the spouse of Viktor Smirnov, the deputy director of the Russian Internal Ministry’s Center to Ensure Operation Performance to Combat Extremism. In 2009, a year in which the Russian economy struggled to get back on its feet after the financial crisis turned it virtually inside-out, Mrs. Smirnov made $500,000. She also owns two plots of land, each about 40 acres. She has shares in two apartments as well as in a housing complex, plus a Subaru Outback, an industrial truck, and a BMW 3-Series, which can retail for over $60,000. What does Mr. Smirnov own? One-quarter of one apartment.

Read the rest here.

via Slate’s Double X

Image via Wikipedia

After having just watched HBO’s Friends of God last night, and recently reading Atheists  using blow dryers to de-baptize themselves, I’ve come to the conclusion that Atheists are doing it wrong.   On religious home-schooling:

“They are practicing child abuse in teaching that the world operates in ways other than it does,” he told the convention crowd. “And in my opinion, they are engaged in terrorism by weakening our nation and our understanding of science and things with which we can defend ourselves and progress. If it had not been for these fools we could have been at the stars 2,000 years ago.”

-Atheists use Blow-Dryers to De-Baptize

While everyone has the right to use hot button key words like “child abuse”,  ”terrorism”, or even “science”, these words cause religious folk to foam at the mouth, and when that happens, you know no healthy debate will take place. We live in a time when everyone is fearful and quick to hate.

I wrote in my “How to Talk to your Gaming Significant Other“, if someone is already in a hyped up aggressive state (Religion regarding Atheism), you shouldn’t approach that hyped-up person with more aggression. Kagin has every right to poke fun at religion, and has every right to use satire to make a point, but in this instance, maybe taking a less aggressive stance might do more good. What would this less aggressive stance be?

Advocating more religious education.

If the fundamentalist Christians are pushing for Creationism to be taught in public schools  (despite it violating the First Amendment), then the Atheists should be willing to compromise by pushing for more faith based studies – because, how can religious folk say no to more religious education?

If teaching a science-based view of the creation of the world is too difficult to get public support for,  getting public support for a World Religion class should be a cinch. The class can begin with a bible studies unit, which should please the religious. Children should learn  the New Testament was written at least 50 years after Christ, with some books coming hundreds of years after Christ. The canonization process of the Bible should be discussed, and this would be a good time to discuss all the stories of Jesus the church removed because they did not like them (for example: Jesus as a child making clay figurines and breathing them to life – the church thought this made Jesus look like a loner. In fact, all of the stories of Jesus as a child were removed, save one).

The Epic of Gilgamesh should be taught, particularly the Gilgamesh flood myth,  for its similarities with the Noah flood myth in the bible. It should be noted that Judo- Islam-Christianity (or as I like to call them, “the desert religions” created by men for men) has spread quickly due to its violent nature. Once the bible unit is complete, Judaism and Islam should be mentioned, but do not meet the requirements of  another religious viewpoint because they share the same god. Buddhism and Hinduism should be mentioned, as should all ancient religions like the Greek and Roman religions.

While I realize global religious studies are required in some universities,  a world religious class should be given as an alternative  to an evolution class. Religious students should have the right to choose between a global religious studies class or a class on evolution.

If getting a Global Religious Studies class is too complicated to accomplish, then inside the history unit, there should be a religious component. When students study the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires (later the Frank and Nordic Empires), there should be a religious component. When students learn about the colonization of South America, they should learn about the Mayans, Incan, etc. When students learn about the great silk road through China, they should learn about Confucius. When students are taught about Christopher Columbus and Plymouth Rock, there should be a unit on the Native American religion.

Atheists will not be able to dispel the notion of God from our collective minds for a long long time (Religion has dominated human minds for thousands of years) – so Atheists should instead be pushing for more tolerance of various different viewpoints, of various different religions. Because that is the real problem Athiests have with the Religious. The religious fundamentals lack critical thinking skills, are narrow minded, possess various prejudices in spades, don’t care about love or this planet, and cannot even defend why they are part of the faith they are in – its like they are indoctrinated, much like a cult.

Hopefully teaching the religious about other religions will make them a more tolerant people, a people who can defend their own religion, and are more like that Jesus fellow they admire so much.

Edit: A TED video featuring Dan Dennett has come to my attention.  Philosopher Dennett advocates a similar educational initiative, without my facetiousness and New York City rudeness.

Eat, Pray, Love

That could’ve gone better.

In an age where political upstarts use every tool available to gain exposure, Basil Marceaux is decidedly lo-fi — despite the Web 1.0 “Dot Com” in his name. As one of the Republican candidates for governor in Tennessee’s upcoming mid-term elections, Mr. Marceaux is a curious case. In a recent televised address aired on WSMV-TV, it’s hard to tell — on first look — whether Marceaux is nervous, had recently been beaten about the head and face with a sack of old doorknobs, or perhaps a little bit of both. The resulting public address is equal parts terror and amusement.

While much will be written about Marceaux in the next few days (as he quickly burns his way through a Minor Internet Celebrity Famecycle), mainly fueled by a bored American workforce spreading OMGs and LOLs among friends, there’s something to admire in the man’s apparent buffoonery. He’s rather honestly asserted himself, however haphazardly, into a political process permeated with cynicism and contempt. It appears Marceaux means well, if only in his own mind. But given his abysmally scatterbrained platform — I’m gonna remove all goldfinch flags from the state! — good intentions (that only make sense to him) don’t amount to much of anything.

This Saturday found Vladimir Putin in Sevastopol, a city made famous by Tolstoy and the fact that this Ukrainian Black Sea port has a large Russian population that once spoke openly of seceding.

The press has mentioned this historic visit because, at a press conference there, Putin confirmed that he had, in fact, met with the 10 Russian spies deported from the U.S., and even sang patriotic songs with them. (The cause of their downfall, the premier said, was “treachery” and, as we know, “traitors always end badly…either from drinking, or drugs” they end up, he said, “in the gutter.” He also sympathized with how hard spying is: “Just imagine: you have to acquire the fluency of a native. You have to think in [the language], speak in it, and do that which has been assigned in the interests of your homeland.” He added that the 10 Illegals will have “bright futures” in Russia and will work in high-level positions.)

Anyway. The visit, I would argue, was important in the world-historical sense for a different reason: Putin attended an international biker convention.

He rode in like a conquering knight on a three-wheeler Harley Davidson, dressed in black and sporting black gloves. The Russian Prime Minister tore up the chalky dust before taking the stage and expounding on why he loves bikes.  You guessed it. FREEDOM.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that the bike gives its owner a sweet feeling of freedom. And that’s why we can say, without any exaggeration, without any tenousness, straightly and bravely, that the bike is a symbol of freedom.”

Opposition leaders, I hope you were listening: bikes.

via Gazeta.ru, Thompson Reuters