I deviate a moment from this blog’s regular (well, not so regular any more) programme of self-absorption to tell you that a dear friend of mine, Ng Mei Fay, is shaving her head to raise money for the Children’s Cancer Foundation.
This is obviously a pretty cool thing to do, but in itself, it isn’t the only reason I’m asking you to support her. I’m also asking you to support her because it’s just one out of many charitable involvements Fay has had over the years. And without going into details, she has committed herself to such efforts despite personal problems that would cripple many people.
Please consider making an online donation at Fay’s pledge page, no matter where you are in the world.
Recently at Threadless, this hilarious tee. I won’t be buying it because I’ve been a little too extravagant lately, but if you also happen to like surrealist art and Super Mario and fancy one for yourself, I’d really appreciate you buying it through the above link.
[By the way, as I said once before I don't do the whole referrer link thing unless I've already used and enjoyed using the shop in question.]
While travelling in Greece several years ago, my companion and I were not surprised when the bus to Epidaurus left 45 minutes later than its scheduled departure time. We shrugged, accepted it as part of a Greek holiday, and counted our blessings that we’d found a shady spot to wait in. We were, however, somewhat blindsided when we turned up 7 minutes or so early for the return bus and found that it had already left, with the next bus due in about two and a half hours. We passed the time easily enough with other stranded backpackers, but I’ve never forgotten the laughable unpredictability of that particular travel glitch. Bloody Greeks.
Anyway, since a Greek bus leaving early is about as unheard of as a Parisian pavement without dog poo, I always dismissed it as a one-off, the sort of anecdote you throw into a conversation about travel stories when it reaches the point at which you revel, cackling, in the various national stereotypes your cosmopolitan jet-setting has only served to confirm.
Until we arrived at Senai Airport two weeks ago only to discover that the AirAsia flight described on our tickets as leaving at 1630 was, in fact, now leaving at 1545. We had received absolutely no notification of the change. But by a stroke of pure luck, we’d arrived in the last few minutes before the check-in counters closed, and made the flight.
Amusingly, the only reason we had even arrived as early as 1500 for what we thought was a 1630 internal flight was that the airport coach schedule from Senai Airport’s City Lounge was also markedly different from the coach schedule its website promised. So, having found that the 1440 coach no longer existed, we’d decided to take a cab rather than chance the 1500 coach. If not for that, we’d have been roundly fucked, first by the Senai City Lounge and then by AirAsia. Bloody Malaysia.
(There isn’t much more to write about the first day of the trip once we got to Kuching, apart from mentioning the great Teochew steamed fish dinner we had at ABC Seafood and the beginning of a dramatic shoe disintegration process that finally culminated in their utter surrender while trekking in Bako National Park two days later. I mostly just wanted to warn anyone reading this to be careful when flying AirAsia from Senai.)
Sorry everyone, I’ve been in a cesspool of work which I have yet to clamber out of, and the weekend after Kuching flew by with judging debates, watching plays written by friends, and doing household chores. I hardly even got a chance to go to Baybeats, though what I did manage to hear of it (A Vacant Affair, Bittersweet, Panda No Panda) was really boring.
While I’m treading water in shit, you could do worse than enjoy Hammer & tickle, a rather delightful article about Communist jokes. Apart from a number of rather funny jokes (Q: Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? A: Because it doesn’t even interfere in its own internal affairs.) the article tells of Eulenspiegel, the East German state’s official satirical magazine. Singaporeans especially may enjoy the following quotes, though of course for no other reason than that Singaporeans have a great sense of humour.
Eulenspiegel was founded in 1954 as the state’s official organ of humour. There were no censorship laws, as the East Germans were so proud of telling the west. Instead the editors had to guess what kind of jokes were permissible. Every week the magazine carried three or four pages of anti-imperialist humour, in which capitalists in top hats counted their money, GIs enslaved Africans and doves sat atop hammers and sickles. Eulenspiegel could also print anodyne comic critiques of daily life in East Germany, as long as they didn’t incriminate the politburo. Ernst Röhl was able to write things like this: Man doesn’t live from bread and ham alone. He needs something green. And green things have been in short supply for a long time. Cabbage has been more the subject of discussion than digestion. And the Adam’s apple is the closest one gets to fruit at the dinner table. But this year Mother Nature has been particularly green. Cucumbers are no longer the shoemaker’s bribe. Onions no longer raise laughs in cabaret sketches…
People like Röhl saw themselves, rather self-indulgently, as fifth columnists, eating away at the regime from the inside. But there were limits to permissible satire. Once the cover featured “young pioneers” with long hair—a decadent western fashion. The politburo was livid, but the magazine had already been sent out, so the police reclaimed all the copies they could from newsagents and post offices. Eulenspiegel once tried to make common cause with Pardon, its West German left-wing counterpart. After all, Pardon also attacked Adenauer and American imperialism. But the editors of Eulenspiegel were stung when Pardon rebuffed their advances, on the grounds that the communist satirists should criticise their own leader, Walter Ulbricht, the same way the capitalist ones went for theirs. The editors of Euelenspiegel printed a rebuttal entitled “How do we write about Walter Ulbricht?” in 1963: “We know from various reliable sources that President Ulbricht has a terrific sense of humour… [but] the transparency and virtue of our state makes it not only difficult but simply impossible to write a satire about its representatives. Where there is nothing to uncover, the satirist will find no material. So how do we satirists write about Walter Ulbricht?… We send our greetings and best wishes to the first secretary of the central committee. We wish comrade Ulbricht health, stamina and a long life.”
This article could have been satirical, but wasn’t. Rather, it occupies the strange socialist space where the serious and the humorous are identical. Eulenspiegel was the only place where serious criticism of the state could be published. Readers wrote in with complaints about their leaking prefab apartments and so on, and there was a column called Erledigt (Dealt With) which celebrated the grievances that the Eulenspiegel had managed to redress, and often came with printed apologies from factory managers and landlords. Nothing illustrates better the inverted reality of communism: real problems could only be presented in a context of laughter, presumably so that one could always claim one was only joking. In this realm, where humour turns out to be a complex social dance, the idea of the joke as simply subversive breaks down.
Before the Germany / Argentina match on Friday night, we managed to get an hour or so on a larger 9 foot table, since there was one free. As to be expected, since Alec is still very much the better player, he beat me 2 games to 1. Although I wasn’t quite as adept on the larger table as he was, I did manage to win the 3rd game with a shot he described as the best he’d ever seen me do and didn’t think he’d ever managed himself:
- White and black at opposite ends of the table length, with black against the cushion
- I designate the hole about a foot away from the white as where I’m attempting the pot
- White travels the entire length of the table, hits black, black travels back the entire length of the table, enters designated hole
- I win. WOOT!
Two gems from the commentary for the France / Brazil match, which I loved and you may quite possibly hate:
- “He’s going one on one with Juan! Hmm, bit tricky saying that all at once.”
- (As Malouda sends in a cross which neither his teammates nor the defence manages to meet) “Malouda’s ball has just maluded everyone!”
