This is my street, Gloucester, in Christchurch, New Zealand, as it looked 24 hours ago, when we were hit by another 6.3 quake.
Photo courtesy to www.stuff.co.nz
Posts Tagged ‘Google’
New Earthquake
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011How NOT to Buy – The 2nd Edition
Saturday, June 26th, 2010A few months back I posted this on mockoblog.com. I thought it would be funny. Now, with the controlled recession around for such a long time, I find it not. Then, I had lots of comments and I deleted them as being superficial. Now, sorry, I have a different feeling about the issue. Please take two minutes of your valuable time and read bellow. You will come to your own conclusions, no doubt.
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One of the silliest things I can think of is shopping. And I absolutely love it!
I fully accept that shopping is therapy for depression, obesity, measles, catalepsy and many other conditions I claim not to have. People go shopping even when their account is in red, they get deeper in debt, yet they fell better. If a new pair of slippers could make you fell reborn, a new car will take you straight to Nirvana (I experienced it eight times).
The daily act of shopping is a bit like having sex, maybe with a softer ending, but safer, generally speaking. Sometimes it can involve a little redundancy (daily dairy shopping across the road) but this is like being in a strong matrimonial relationship: loads of fidelity and no surprises. Yet some other times shopping is a heavenly experience: go to Paris or Melbourne, Milan or Tokyo, get a cab and ask the driver to stop as soon as you see a shop with the letter ‘N’ third on its name or just walk on a busy commercial street and pick the seventh shop on the left. Go in and I bet you’ll find something to buy. Now, this is like having a one night stand and waking up with no hangover and the love of your life bringing you breakfast in bed. The only significant difference is that with shopping you can experience this far more often than in real life.
Shopping is power: I can buy; therefore I must have money, which means I’ve got the power.
Shopping is kindness: I can buy something for you; therefore I show you how much I care and how important you really are for me. (And shopping for YOU means even more power: I’m so powerful that I can even afford to buy it for you, not for ME.)
In a way or another, for many years I sold stuff or I advertised for other people’s stuff so they could sell it better. I know the look in the eyes of a person who wants to buy as well as the expression on the face of somebody who can not afford buying. Shopping is a drug. It is more addictive than nicotine, it is compulsive and unforgiving. Its high is very short lived when compared to how much you spent for achieving it and, what’s worse, shopping is not only legal, but encouraged. In fact shopping is the vital force of our society and one of the few differences between our species and the others.
Having had a lot to do with shopping and selling, I thought I may write a book on how NOT to buy stuff. I’d put really cool little secrets in there, like how not to make eye contact with the salesman and how not to… Forget it! I’m hoping a smart publisher will read this blog and offer me a contract for the printed, podcasted, DVD recorded and the online versions of How Not to Buy. Sorry, this is why I won’t disclose any tricks in here. (Not just yet.) I hope you’ve enjoyed the introduction though.
Travel for Real: How I’m Gonna Go to Europe and Maybe Back – Part 4
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009(Later in that flight)
No wonder I couldn’t read the secret meaning of her bracelets. Something was terribly wrong! And it wasn’t then, no, then it was just beautiful, the comfort of the guilty feeling when you know for sure you can’t be guilty at all. The wrong part only comes now, as I write: I have just realized that it takes a wee bit of Dali and quite a strong dose of Picasso to make the hand and arm of the English girl in the KLM flight perfectly match the described position with her book, blue jeans, white fingers and the arm rest of my seat. She was young, all right. Attractive over the limit, all right (in a 22-hour one-stop flight who wouldn’t be?). But contortionist, no way! Russian ballerina, no way! How was she, actually?
Now, as I remember, she was asleep. Or so she seemed.
She moved slightly as the plane shook from some lateral wind and the light dimmed and most kids cried but only a few mums shushed. Her left leg crossed over my right one, which was a severe violation of my private economy class space but I could see no air marshals or even better looking hostesses, so I chose not to induce any panic on board and I did not complain. The light got dimmer but not fast enough to prevent me from seeing her fragile, almost argyle, agile, ankle. A while.
She was wearing sandals: vandal’s teeth marks, shark’s in her flesh, fresh. I didn’t like her much. So I didn’t touch. I looked at my watch. There was NO time. Just a chime. We were stopping soon, in Bangkok, at noon.
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NOTE: By mistake or just randomly chosen, the airliners featuring in this post and the previous one replace British Airways and its partners, with whom indeed I flew. This is thanks to a charge they applied to my MasterCard for trying to contact over their satellite (?) phone a number on the ground, as I was flying over. It was something like 30 US a minute for NOT getting through. I wrote to British Airways and that letter came back at some expense, too. But never mind, the girl was real. I just picture her in a plane belonging to a company I am more comfortable with.
Travel for Real: How I’m Gonna Go to Europe and Maybe Back – Part 3
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009I don’t read travel blogs. What a bloody stupid idea! Why would you masochistically read one’s joy of traveling when you’re stuck at home with a broken DVD player, a noisy neighbor, your own evening before going back to work next morning plus a mother-in-law and, in at least one documented case I know, with two mothers-in-law, an ex and a current one? And that’s not mentioning religions where you may have more than one current anyway… and that would be fine! Or why would you even read the misfortune of some sponsored guy from Alaska who missed the plane to Barcelona, where he had a connection to Reykjavik for a one-day conference on blogging and ended up at Ibiza instead, all paid off, with no return options for ten days?
Another reason I don’t read travel blogs is that they tend to be on the same page in the local newspaper with the adverts from the main two travel agents in town.
Yet the main reason I would never advise any of you, smart readers of this mockoblog, to ever touch any travel guide (and a travel blog is a travel guide disguised as a nice one way chat, with no responsibility, a bit like a lawyer is almost a kind of a surgeon, just almost, you know) is that when and if you actually come to visit the same places, your experience has nothing to do with what you have been taught by the failed writer who’d been there before. You know they are failed writers when you see their author’s name less than two inches close to the word ‘blog’ and I’m sure this applies to journalists as well, although, with my limited access to the Internet, I couldn’t tell 100% whether this applied to online blogs as well. I’ve heard from a couple of friends that bad stuff may happen on the Net, which may imply that even well-known guys may be tempted to… But I digress!
I meant to tell you about how I went about booking my flight from New Zealand to Europe, but I ended up in some one-eyed polemic with a bunch of chaps I don’t know anyway. So I’d better tell you how useful a famous travel guide was to me when I was travelling to Bangkok a few years back.
I was flying a KLM/Malaysian Boeing 747 from Heathrow to Sydney and, due to my advanced age I had managed to get a seat by the aisle at the top of my compartment (do you call them compartments in planes? I guess not, but who cares) so I could stretch my deep vein thrombosis affected legs. Next to me, on my right, there sat an English girl who must have been on her way to both Miss Universe and Miss Sister Theresa Aspiring Fellowship (if such a union exists, the resemblance here is purely unintentional). She was carrying this Whatever Travel Guide Thailand between the knees on blue jeans, with a long index finger stopped firmly at some page and the rest of her marble-like fingers resting with an abandoned palm upwards on the arm of my seat. At her wrist many woven coloured cotton bracelets were trying to give me a signal I could not quite understand at first.
(To be continued.)