Yes, I can't imagine a more dull persona than that of <careerist>, but then I'm a snob.

I saw a documentary of a Japanese guy who tried to ski down <Mount Everest>.

It was GREAT!!

The guy was clearly insane-- good sense of humor.

He skiid down a good chunk after climbing all the way to the top-- and when he finally fell over, his <parachute> deployed and stopped his slide at the edge of a giant precipice that would otherwise have killed him.

I don't think he was a <careerist>, though.

I liked him a lot, but if I met him I'd be sure to remind him that we gave him a bloody good thumping at <Iwo Jima>.

No, actually- is there a weblink for it?

We Canadians love Wolverines, though only 3 Canadians have ever seen one.

Heh- thanks to you I'm remembering the skiing documentary now-- it was really GREAT and I saw it for free on <internet streaming live pirated video> as well.

Here it is-- It's not directed by <Herzog>, but it sure seems like it was. Catch it if you can-- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Yep, I enjoyed seeing the Son of Nippon's ski 'trip'.

BTW, I just watched Pennebaker's Don't Look Back right through for the first time ever. It's *true* that Dylan introduced irony to England in 1965.

Great scene where Alan Price tries to explain the word 'bloke':

Alan: Bloak
Bob: Heh. Bleuk?

Are you off to bed? Isn't it the middle of the day in Ireland?

I'm SO GLAD you saw the film as well!

Were you thinking of it when you made the <snowboarding joke>?

Heh <Alan Price> was Drunk as a Lord in that scene-- incredible film-- better, IMO, than the Scorcese film (No Direction Home) which was also brilliant.

My fave scene from the <Panning for Gold BAker> film was when there's a big stinking argument in the "green room" due to Bob cruelly persecuting some poor "hanger on", and then <Donovan> sings "Catch the Wind" to calm everyone down...

He succeeds, then <Bob> gives him a distinctly dirty look and promplty plays <Baby Blue> and when he's done the whole room is stunned and slack jawed-- floored by the beauty, the genius of the song--

'Hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds...'

As a World Champion of Inertia, I know the turf -- though actually I only reached the Inertitude Interzonal before I was defeated by a combination of ennui, tedium, kinetic inertia, hyperstability, supersaturation, anomie, obsolescence, stuckism, anti-tory conservatism, and the shock of encountering cultures where 'mañana' was seen as hyperactive.

On the other - heh - hand, this could be a case of <Gladly the Cross-eyed Bear> Syndrome, a rare combination of Mondegreens and hand-eye-thorax coordination.

Breton - originally Bert No, and an uncle of Doctor No - has sometimes been regarded as the primordial French Ouanquère, mais c'est pas possible.

Le hand est le main chance. And, as an old saying almost sez, <Fingers were made before fingerforking>.

'Made' in the evolutionary sense, that is.

I had a fascinating discussion this evening with a friend, talking about Saint Anselm's Ontological Proof of God's existence, and its influence on Kant.

Each of us assumed that both of us were spoofing and making it up as we went along -- "Aha, I 'ave 'ere a refutation greater than which no refutation can be conceived, therefore, um, contraception is a grave sin" -- sort of thing.

But he went to the trouble of looking it up afterwards, and the odd thing is that we both knew what we were talking about, even though we didn't know it at the time.

Did I mention that the Irish Gaelic term for contraception is 'frith-ghiniunach', pronounced 'friggin eunuch'?

In the 70s - when I bought one of his records - Donovan had taken to writing and singing 'novelty' songs, perhaps in the hope of a fluke hit single in the manner of <Shaddup You Face> or ... that sort of thing. There are other examples, but mercifully I've repressed them.

But I remember a Donovan song called 'Intergalactic Laxative'. Blending the 70s hippy-trippy vogue for space travel with the perennial English obsession with excrement and how to hide it.

British politics is based on different policies towards concealing excreta. Old Labour would have an outdoor toilet in every working-class terrace, so the lino wouldn't get grubby. New Labour puts in giant bidets and jacuzzis, but doesn't tell people what they're actually used for. Conservatives would build a stonking great mansion around the bathroom, then forget to install plumbing -- leading to embarrassing encounters behind gorse bushes during peasant shoots.

The Liberals said that nobody, even a King, should employ a servant to hold the privy male member during the act of urination, as Prince Charles is said to do (he has a PDA, the Prince's Dick Aimer, aka Hercules the Willie Director), and the Greens thought a brick in the cistern would reduce flushing power and save water. The Socialist Workers Party had other uses for bricks.

But what they all had in common was toilet training and a morbid fear of sheeting a brick in public.

Which partly explains why Donovan sang:

<Oh, the inter-galactic laxative will get you from here to Mars, If sheeting is a problem when you're out there in the stars ...>

"Come in", she said, "I'll give you melted butter on your prawns".

<Shelta from the Norn>

"It was in another lifetime, under President Obama,
When Blackness was a virtue, and the Klan was in the slammer, I came in the bathroom window lookin' like a thief:
"Come in," said V.P. Hillary, "meet my old friend, Tax Relief."

Well, I always say I'm happy to meet any woman's friend, But chicks have complex structures that outfox you in the end, I went in mentally alert, and arguably sane,
But what emerged was wreckage and her other friend was Pain.

<*NOTES tending to demonstrate that all tree-searches are infinite, and you're only as wacky as your last wiki ...*>

<Shelta> is a language still spoken by traditional Travelling People in Ireland and Britain. <Norns> are mythic beings in Viking and Scandinavian folklore, associated with death. In Northern Ireland, the words 'Northern Ireland' are pronounced 'Norn Iron'. Belfast is the biggest city in Norn Iron. Next comes Londonderry, known as 'Derry' to its Catholic/Nationalist majority and 'Londonderry' to the Protestant/Unionist minority. People who say 'Derry' often assert that the longer name is absurd, or ridiculous, or a hyper-corrective toponymical grovel (OK, I made the last one up ... nobody actually says that *often* ... but I said it *once*, which is arguably in the ballpark.) Frequency count words like 'often' are subjective: they go back to a time before people had learned to count. As William Burroughs said in a slightly different context, "Born Again is twice too often". 'Derry' comes from the Irish Gaelic word for 'oak tree' and is a common component in Irish placenames. There is a smaller town called Edenderry. Curiously, nobody finds this absurd, despite the fact that Eden (Garden of) is a mythical location, and London is a city in the real world. To be precise, parts of it are in the real world some of the time. I can't speak for Lambeth, Tooting, Barking, Reading, Erith, Much-Dangling-on-the-Parabola, or World's End, some of which aren't even in London.

'Fear is a Man's Best Friend', according to John Cale. The related idea of a friend named Pain is sometimes associated with the TV celeb-figure, Mr T., aka Laurence Tureaud ...

Tureaud is an anagram of Trudeau, the name of a Canadian Prime Minister (Pierre) whose (then) wife Margaret 'hung out' with the Rolling Stones (who sang 'Gimme Shelta' to her in the Presidential Jacuzzi, meaning that Pierre had to lose his wife, his jacuzzi, or his Nuclear Shelta policy; Margaret went, but in the UK a Thatcher of that ilk took up the Margaretian Cudgel).

Canada has a (mighty) St Lawrence: a strategic asset that will be invaluable if Canada is forced into war with The Uncivilized World, or even people who think wildernesses should be raped and their precious bodily fluids burned as a propitiary or apotropaic sacrifice to pagan machine deities.

The author of Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, is another famous Trudeau: the nominal lead character, Mike Doonesbury, is still baffled by women: his brilliant and beautiful wife, Kim; his genius daughter, Alex, now at college; and his elderly widowed mother, who hates to leave the farm, but dates bikers.

Speaking of Garry and Kim: Garry (Kimovich) Kasparov - originally Garik Weynshtein - is the only chessplayer whose FIDE Elo rating surpassed 2850 (although 3000+ is routinely reached in various online rating systems - one reason being that players select opponents, unlike OTB competitions).

Ms H (Rodham) Clinton and Mr B Obama sought the Democratic party nomination for the upcoming election in the USA. Mr Bob Dylan - originally Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota - is among the few living people to have invented a viable and distinct art form. History - which will not be written in Shelta, but may yet be transmitted orally via that medium, if the worldwide societal crash is bad enough - will forget them all after a while.

Interesting factoid: there are more *true facts* in this post than the average college student learns in a typical degree course. However, there are also more lies.

[ends]

... as we say in the biz to simulate professionalism. But nothing is ending, and certainly not this.

PS ... <Jess> ... I don't think even I could have imagined somebody snowboarding down Everest on a pizza carton were it not for the heroic example offered by our Nipponese friend. I wonder whether he was a follower of the <Shinto> religion.

I know a guy who planned a male remake of the film, set in Dublin circa 2000 when 'Celtic Tiger' affluence had taken off -- to be called 'All About Adam'.

It got made, but for some obscure reason the name was changed to 'About Adam' and the only plot parallel is that Adam, played by Stuart Townsend, moves in with a family -- Mum and her three daughters, one bookish, one ditzy, one married. And *has* them all, spinning a different version of himself to suit.

Not a bad movie at all, actually. I spent a day on set and kinda blew it while interviewing the star, Stuart.

- "So, ehh, is this your first feature?" I asked.

- "No, it's my 7th or 8th" he replied.

Ohhhh dear. Who hadn't done their research?

But I reserve the right to Eavesdrop, especially on trains. You get brilliant material. One conversation I heard today followed a PA announcement saying "this is the 13:30 train from Cork, due to arrive in Dublin ..." etc.

One guy pointed out that we don't need to be told where the train is coming from, since we probably know that already.

But then he spoiled it by asking what "13:30" meant. "Half past one", answered his friend -- and they then went into a riff about how it all worked, and whether subtracting 12 would always give you the right answer ...

Heh I love reading about your eavesdropping adventures.

My argument that the 'culture' section of a newspaper should perhaps regard radio as an artform gets nowhere.

"doin' anything my radio advised..."

You might want to check out the current <Nicolas Nipple Bee> controversey.

Youngest US Master in history, and <Hikaru Nagasaki> is whining about it.

In a post-insertion (actually post-extraction) interview, young Harry let slip that he'd much rather be back there with 'his men', taking out 'Terry Taliban and his mates'.

For some reason, Nicholas Nip reminds me of Terry Taliban. He should be careful lest a Windsor accidentally make the same connection. Though bred for stupidity, they are also trained from babyhood to shoot at nearby living (Pull!) creatures.

"She said she was working for the ABC news, it was all of the alphabet that she knew how to use ..."

Terry Taliban- Nicolas Nip-- Billy Bunter.

The first <triumvirate> of the last Roman Empire.