and, we're back

most people need something to be happy about, but it sure is something to be happy

cooler than cool

sometimes you hear a song for the first time and you just know it is brilliant, and Coldcut's True Skool now ranks among those songs. dunno why this might be important, but an exam period is an exam period and irrelevance must reign these days!

my eurovison

a couple of weeks ago, some friends invited me over to watch the Eurovision Song Festival. it must have been more than ten years since i had last watched it. i did find it funny, though. at least in the beginning. the more the show progressed, the more songs i saw, the more i started to feel disgusted by the industry that promotes the creation of such empty, soulless, emotionless music, so devoid of creativity or originality. but i soon remembered not to be too much of a snob. it is true that i just do not really belong to the intended audience of that musical show, and that i watched it only because i had been asked to (and it was a fun evening, by the way). tastes differ.

but soon my thoughts again took a walk, and i could not shake off certain ideas. the Eurovision Song Festival is something which should unite the countries of Europe. nice idea, but is a competition really the way to do this? now, all we get is disgruntled not-winners and angry people because "country x will always vote for country y" (hey, didn't we know that in advance?)

aren't there better ways to 'unite' our European soul? if we consider the amount of money spent on this show, we must be aware that of the perversity of it. my country (Belgium) alone spent € 60000 on a dotation for our participant. thousands of euros more were spent on clothing, airplane tickets, etc etc etc. isn't that just a bit ridiculous to spend on a participant of a contest? i mean, only one of them wins, so that i don't know how many people go home empty-handed, but they have cost us A LOT of money. and the winner gets a lot of comments as well. we must be able to do something more constructive. how about a Eurosolidarity Show or something? i mean, if all the money now spent on each and every artist can be combined and added to the amount of money the hosting country would spend on a stage, commercials, light, the show, etc, we have a very strong basis to start with. if people all over Europe would then be prompted to donate money as well, we could do something useful with it, like divide that money over all countries and help poor people get along. there is still so much poverty in Europe, even in my own 'wealthy' country, that there is a lot of work to be done. and the money now spent on the Eurovision Song Festival could then be used to aid those in need. for all we have now is a contest which disappoints the participating countries, which leads in no way to a 'union' and which has poorer people feel completely left in the cold - and rightly so. if you receive a couple of hundreds euros every month through wellfare because you are too weak or too old to work, how sad and bitter it must make you to see hundreds of thousands of euros spent on something like this? i do not see the 'festival' of it all.

i ate all the plums - just to let you know

i love to see that setting sun go down...

entirely in love with the beauty of the world.

dirty pics

apparently, i am very good at playing pictionary. good to know. i'm pretty sure that will save me in a life-threatening situation.

"oh my god, a giant crocodile in our living room! and it's drawing something!"

"oh i see, the crocodile is drawing a zebra, or no, a hamburger, no, it is... a stove! yes, a stove!"

crocodile: "okay dude, cos you guessed it right i wont eat you. cheers."


ah.

boing BOOM *tsjak*

was just biking home with early evening sun, listening to Kraftwerk's Kling Klang. and i wondered. why is it that Kraftwerk manages to sound so... old? i do not mean dated, not at all (i still love listening to their music, and i am far from alone), but old in the sense of distant in time, as if belonging to some other world. Kraftwerk's music sounds like something you would pick up if you and your spaceship were orbiting Pluto or Neptune or if you are somewhere gently travelling through the dark matter of our universe, millions of light years away, no soul in sight but the communication system which is set to work only once a week, and even though you know where you are going you are lost because of the vastness of nothing surrounding you. and if you then try to tune in to some long lost radio sounds which seem to have been travelling space for aeons, you stumble across one of their songs and it sounds just in place. so not old perhaps, but distant. and yet close enough to love it, listen to it, enjoy it.

Bobbles 2

happiness # 7

the final monologue of American Beauty. to understand it, to feel it, to know it, to love it, again and again and again.

a map of silent places

looking at a map of the world. many places i see in my mind, imagine what they look like. places i have never been but seen on photos, or places close enough to other places of which i know what they should look like. but looking at that same map, i see how many other places there are of which i can in no way form an image, only an approach to that image. for example, some peninsula on Nova Zembla north of Russia. of course, there will be snow, but what exactly would it look like? or those many small islands that constitute the fragmented shores of many parts of our world?

more places i have no idea of what they look like, than places i know or think i know. frustrating? no. i could probably make it frustrating, but that would not help me at all. in this life i will not have enough time to visit all the places i know, and will have even less time to visit the other places. i will not see the world, i will catch a glimpse of it. and even if i started walking today until my death, i would forget more than half of that same world. what was where and when was there... all unknown again. but what it can really mean, is the potential of places out there, inviting us. and even if we do not go to every invitation, the fact that at the end of our lives we can look back and think of all that other world out there, with its people and lives and happiness and sadness, is enough to be satisfied. satisfaction cannot come with wanting the world, satisfaction will come by loving the wealth this world has to offer, without tasting it all. that wealth is beauty, the unrealised potentials are roads not taken but are roads anyway. perhaps we should just be thankful for the many ways we can lead our lives, even if we follow only this one road from beginning to end.

happiness # 6

to cover a two-person bed just by yourself, lazily stretching out, lingering between falling asleep again or gently waking up. one leg this way, one leg the other way, floating on an endless sea of mattress. being a daybreaker on a bed that is worth two of its kind, on a surface that is to be covered eternally by the lengths of your own body.