Belated Thanks...

Belated thanks indeed to the people of the Great State of California for throwing out Prop 86. last week while I was away: it was a close call though, as the trail of e-mail titles from my belovèd testified ("Noooooooo!", "Wait, Wait...", then "Yeeeeesssssss!!!").

And many, many thanks to the people of these United States for throwing the bastards out. Not that the new lot are likely to prove any better in the long run - but it takes time to become so corrupt and so craven.

My kid, Former Recruit^TM, managed to garner 2 or 3% of the vote as a write-in candidate for Mayor of our city. He didn't think much of the idea that a Mayor should run unopposed, so he organized a grassroots campaign of his own at short notice and persuaded his Mom, at least, to vote for him. She was all for it, since the lazy f**ker still doesn't have a job.

As for Poland - it reminded me very much of Scotland: two-lane roads (one lane for each direction) with roundabouts, biting wind coming off the sea, and slashing rain. Did not see too much of the place though, because it was dark when I left work at night. Still, staying in a small Baltic tourist town snuck between Gdansk and Gdynia, lots of terrific restaurants and english speakers. For once I was not too embarassed by my pitiful inability to speak the local language. Frankly, I defy anyone to make sense of polish: it's just all wrong. As proof - and this is the God's honest truth - one of the guys I was visiting had a name that most Poles can't pronounce and are forever asking him to write down so they can read it and try to figure it out.

A rather touching mural at the airport on the way home, said simple "Today began in Gdansk", and pictured Walesa, and a montage of Hungarian presidents, tumbling Walls, and Czech playwrites.

Flew over Berlin at night. I've never been there: but it's lit as a number of concentric circles, ringroads I guess, with long straight lines radiating from the center. There is clearly more of the Basil Fawlty in me than I'd care to admit. The thought that flashed through my mind when I saw this was "It's a great big target: that must have helped our boys during the war?" Funnier I suppose when you consider my dad was born in 1939, seven or eight weeks after the invasion of, well, Poland.

Tch. Boomers, huh?

Irishman Walks Into A Bar...

In little Britain the idiot in any joke is sure, to be sure, to be Irish: put in barrels, asked to pee in the corner; choosing death by Mau-Mau - that would be Paddy, or Seamus.

At school - Catholic school - we were taught that the origin of Irish jokes lay in the envy of Dark Agèd englishmen towards scholastic Irish monks, with their readin' and their writin' and their preachin' and their girlie Book of Kells when all that time they could have been out rapin' and pillagin' like real men! But like many things taught at that place, probably a myth, a half-truth at best: more likely, if it has any truth at all, it was the catholics, the Romans, who started it; whose mission was to subvert and subsume the heretical Celtic church, with its Holy Roods and its mad hairy monks.

Also in little Britain, where americans are all loud-mouthed and loud-trousered, it is the common belief that the Poles, polacks, are the National Butt of idiot jokes.

Well; I've been here eight years and never heard a single one. Not one.

Not that I'm likely to hear many jokes at all where I work, humor being wholly absent from that dreadful place, but not on the telly, not even Fox.

I mention all of this only because I'm off to Poland in the morning, in a last desperate attempt to pull something out of the flaming wreck that is my project before an iron curtain descends upon it forever. I've never been before, and don't know quite what to expect? I have known poles though - old guys in the Yard where I was apprenticed, full of twinkling mischief and dark humor; guys who'd come over during the war, to wreak revenge upon the Hun. Guys who kept pigs in their back yards, who'd bring home-made black puddings to share at work (I'd kill for some black pudding right now - but my Goddess would kill me if I even hinted at bringing some into the house. Not considered fit for Californian consumption. See - there are limits!)

Knowing next to nothing of where I am going, then, I was half-tempted to read The Tin Drum again on the plane, for it is set in the very city I'm headed to. But the bastard Grass was a nazi all along, and not at all the "hapless" kind he'd have us believe. Guess I'll read something else, then.

Oh - "Ouch!"