moâ

(post-dated entry)

LiveJournal is getting on my tits, big-time, so this is to be my new abode, for good I believe.

The orange and grey scheme will need some getting used to.

Anyhow - if we already know each other, do please come in, the living room is over here, just step over the nekkid man lying down over here - do be careful with those stillettoes, he doesn't like needle-play - good. The booze is on its way, make yourself at home!

If we aren't yet acquainted, hello! Who are you, do you prefer blonds or brunettes, what are your views on postmodern literature, do you want to come in for a chat - mind the nekkid man, yes, he's too exhausted to get up and greet your properly. Let me offer you a drink - so, who did you say you were? Do you want to be added to the f-list?

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough?currentPage=all

à lire jusqu'à la fin... les Ricains découvrent le concept du médecin généraliste, sonnez trompettes!

after another lovely 14-hour day.

I love home.

/braindead

http://www.lovehoney.co.uk/sexmap/uk.html

kleio_caissa, I am seriously impressed. Seriously. And you don't even live there full-time any more!

And Expat will be moving to Reading soon, btw. He is in a red spot even now. Hm. Me, on the other hand? Pale yellow...

Also: Aberystwyth? O RLY?

(It's been too long since I've pointlessly annoyed people)

When the death penalty was abolished in France (before I was born...) a majority of voters were against it. It was a political gamble to put it on the agenda (annoying the electorate vs. gaining votes by showing one had deep humanist convictions that aren't influenced by vote-gathering) but it worked. Today, a majority of French voters support the abolition of the death penalty - showing that it's very much a cultural issue that my be swayed by the general mores.

Perhaps it is because none of my compatriots were led to the Veuve Patibulaire in my lifetime that I am influenced by the maintream opinions of my generation: I however cannot comprehend how it is even possible to support the death penalty.

Miscarriages of justice do occur. Not often, but they happen. Sending an innocent to prison to pray for new evidence to be discovered whilst they get raped by inmates is hardly compassionate, but does seem a better alternative than giving them a comprehensive and final haircut.

But even if you do think a swift death is preferable to the long prison ordeal, a death sentence is murder. It is murder carried out by society as a whole, embodied by an independent institution, but it is murder nonetheless. It is one step better than taking justice in your own hands as it does grant both parties a right to make their case, and robs the punishment of some of the hot anger involved, but killing someone = murder, no matter how you institutionalise and attempt to justify it. If you live in a country that does have the death penalty - those jurors are selected by chance. Not hand-picked, not elected. That means it could be you. That means they represent you. That means the decision they take is yours. That means that when they send someone to the chair, you have killed that someone too. When you go to sleep at night, you know that you share responsibility for the murder of another human being. When you wake up, you know that today you may be murdering another human being by proxy. How you can square that with your conscience is utterly and completely beyond my comprehension.

But people who do wake up at the crack of down to find themselves facing a one-way window and a threatening-looking needle are monsters, you say. They're dangerous, they've done horrible things, their DNA was all over the victim's chopped up body parts, they'll be doing it again, they have to be removed from society for society's sake, etc.

No.

What some people have done or do is truly horrible and indeed nigh-impossible to understand for the overwhelming majority of us. Blasting up a plane, raping, or any of those crimes who are invoked to justify the death penalty are so glaring in their inhumanity that they do make us forget what humanity is. They set the perpetrators apart from the rest of us by the sheer horror of the deed. When facing their cruelty, their violence and the irrevocable finality of their actions, we feel helpless. How could that happen? How could we have let that happen, in our town, country, planet? But there is no going back in time to avoid the tragedy, and nothing we can do can guarantee its not happening again either. The only venue left to do something about it is to punish the culprit, and it is easy to vent all the frustration and pent-up disgust in that punishment.

But that's the crux of the argument. The inhumanity of the crime or indeed of the criminal does not mean we should stoop to their level. On the contrary, if a murderer manages to make the rest of us murder him (or her), they'll have won - they'll have made murder acceptable! The very same argument goes for compassionate shortening of sentences too - it was right to release the Lockerbie bomber. It is the ultimate proof of humanity and wisdom - promoting humanity and compassion in the face of evil is the surest way to defeat evil as it means we are stronger, fairer and undefeated in the face of all the horrors of the world.

Countries that countenance the death penalty, on the other hand, are barbaric. Extradition towards these countries should be banned, as neither their justice systems nor their society can be trusted, and their leaders should prepare to face The Hague someday. They stand last among nations: there are repellent criminals everywhere, but a country full of silent, everyday murderers by consensus is more loathsome than all of them put together.

	week 1		week 2		week 3		week 4
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	week 9		week 10		week 11		week 12

...to fall off a bike and whip myself in the eye.

Not simultaneously, I hasten to add.

I also discovered this little gem so it's not all lost.

First chapter here, follow the links or the tag for all 15 chapters.

Warnings: it's still a WIP

It's hard to describe why I love it so much. The writing's good, the setting is excellent, and the execution is just masterful. In an alternative universe, the heir to one kingdom becomes the slave to the heir of their sworn enemies. There is a lot of court politics, of underlying tension, of deceit and manipulation. No slash so far, but I think it's better this way - these characters behave like real people, they have many other priorities than sex. And it's the best rendering of two different cultures in fic I have ever read.

Go, read, review.

Abstinence cures obesity!

My parcel is 2,1 kg, which means the postman was quite offended at my having even presumed to present him with it. Anything over two kilos, my friends, is not kosher, and not only because metrics are evil and our using it a sure sign the country is going to the dogs: anything with a suspicion of being more than 2kgs goes to Parcel Force.

Parcel Force being Royal Mail under another name, but it's at the other end of town.

So I walked, had my 2,1 kg parcel weighted, measured (again, in metrics. Tsks.) and had to spell every fucking word of the address to a Parcel Force member of staff who thus entered in into the Computer, laboriously, with two fingers, before taking my vital details (name, first name, mother's maiden name, post code, contact telephone number - daytime + after hours - width of big toe, date of birth, number of teenage pregnancies, triplicate of my I'm no terrorist, they're no bomb in that parcel certificate etc.). It resulted that sending it economy, guaranteed delivery within 46 days, would have cost me £45,17. You can of course get it there more quickly, but that's more expensive.

I went glurbps and thanks but no thanks. The French postal system has just regained a little bit of my esteem. They treat you like shit, but they at least they don't act like you're an idiot.

My parcel is going to be opened, split into two 1,05 kg parcels, and sent Royal Mail.

They can make as tiresome as they want to, but I'll beat them at their own game. Bastards.

On other news, we're all going to die!!! (swine flu) Details here: http://betedejour.blogspot.com/2009/07/swine-flu-unmasked-its-war.html

They smell and taste good but look awful, so probably won't be that big a success.

It doesn't matter, because leftovers = more for meeeeeee.

Am having second thoughts about returning the egg whisker. It did make good pancake dough and would perhaps be more efficient if used in more suitable container? My world is an abyss of critical doubt, perpetual second thoughts and endless tergiversations. (or is it????)

*iz spending quality time with seam-ripper*

Got a clubcard.

Send help!

Something I will never ever wrap my head around is how the English relate to words.

The French way of doing things, which I have in the past mistakenly perceived as universal, is to use words as a vehicle to thought. They can relay the mind of the speaker and convey anything from lightness to poetry to hate to laughter to actual rational conceptual elaboration. Discussing a word as of itself has no meaning but that of the idea it carries. "Idiot" is an insult only because it means the speaker holds the intellect of the referant in low regard; were it to be used in a context that implies this is not the case ("je t'écris, mon grand idiot, pour te dire que je ne pense plus qu'à toi..."), it would loose its pejorative meaning.

Not so for the English. It's socially unacceptable to say fuck, not because the action it refers to is generally thought to be unpalatable (though, the English being English, this is a possibility one shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss), but because the word itself is considered to be intolerable.

Now strong language isn't exactly polite in French either. But there's a major difference here. In French, a foul mouth indicates bad manners, a lower social class, or a very relaxed atmosphere. Here, it's anathema - you can even get movies rated as unappropriate for under 18s if too many of the characters say fuck too often. Sorry, if the F-word pops up too often (even writing it is Streng Verboten, you see - that you and I both know exactly what is meant by the capital and decapitated F- is irrelevant).

And the F word is not alone, no. You also have the C word, and the N word - but that's fine, because their pee-see opposites are also encapsulated in a nifty abbreviation. And yet that is not enough, and, when naming them becomes too dangerous, like a Dark spell that would take effect as soon as Voldemort's capital Vee is said aloud, you can still refer to them as four-letter words. To their defense, it does also cover the dangerous and oh so offensive cock and twat, piss and puke, kink and shag, and even the downright revolutionary arse.

Fine, thought I. Not all of us are capable of Rabelaisian explosions of semantic joy. If the English want to castrate their language and rob it of its most salient points, I can adapt: if they don't want me to say fuck, I won't. When in Rome, stick your fingers in the back of your throat mid-meal to get ready for the rest of the festivities.

But what I can't begin to comprehend is how the reverse is also true: a debasing insult, when it is voiced in politically correct terms, is totally acceptable here. My charming co-worker's favourite expression is the title of this post. What is, to my narrow French mind, a homophobic slur that clearly doesn't belong to an office environment is, to her, the cool phrase to say something's worthy of her contempt.

I wonder why she doesn't add in the same tone of voice, oh that's so ethnically diverse, or oh that's so disabled.

A brand of porn that's twice as shameful and dirty as the usual kind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQF0ZuL8vus&feature=player_embedded

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x941u6_le-buzz-du-ministre_fun

if you promise to keep a straight face.

It only took me five tries to park my car. On the road, just near the pavement, no others cars in front or behind, no fancy moves.
And the bit you're not allowed to find funny, not even one little bit? I was so concentrated on not hitting the curb and yet not parking in the middle of the road that I missed my house and parked in front of the neighbours'.

Dear neighbours, on the off chance you're reading this, I'm awfully sorry but there's no bleeding way I'm moving the thing before tomorrow. You're very welcome to the keys if you want to move it for me.

God I hate cars.

It's v. disappointing. I probably got it wrong.

With the kind of boredom that comes with having plenty of things to do but not being in the mood for anything.

On the plus side, I've reviewed all the artses on the SSHG exchange. Next step, all the one-shots. I'm not holding my breath for the multi-chaptered, though.

In an hour I'll be going to buy new glasses, woohoo! I have my heart set on a (don't laugh) purple frame. Dark purple. Almost black!

In the meantime, *yawn*. Time to open a word file to stare at unblinkingly for a while I should think.

So I went to lie down at 7pm, just for a few winks, you understand. Woke up briefly around 3 am for a glass of water, and again when the alarm clock I'd had the foresight to put on at 3 am rang, at the usual time.

*yawn*

Looks like a bit more than 12 hours of sleep. Round the clock! I can't remember when I did that last.