The lost Dr. Seuss Christmas post

Executors of the will of the late Dr. Seuss are still wondering what to do with unpublished manuscripts found in the basement among the Seuss family Christmas decorations. Turns out the old geezer was actually a blogger before its time.

‘Twas the night before Christmas. He held onto his mouse

As the rest of the family started to grouse

That all he did now was stare at a screen

In hopes that some blog comments soon would be seen.

No Way! he told them. You’ve got it all wrong!

A problem I’d have if I sucked on a bong,

Or shot up my arm, whacked outta my tree!

This blog’s not a problem. It’s fun! Don’t you see?

The stories I’ve told of a nasty old Grinch

Of how down in Whoville, Christmas he pinched

Or the Lorax, whose message, environmental

Still rings today, pan-continental

They keep us in chips. Royalties, no?

Is there something with me that just has to go?

Maybe, they said. You spend too much time

Looking at blogs. It’s really a crime.

Blogs are for those who don’t have a life

A home and a family, a husband or wife.

They sit in their hovels, down pizza and coke

For days at a time! It’s really a joke!

Twenty-fourth of December. It’s Christmas, remember?

Turn off that thing. Become a member

Of the land of the living. It’s not so hard.

Just ‘cuz you blog doesn’t mean you’re the Bard.

And while you were blogging, we decked out the tree.

Stuck presents around it, for her, you and me.

Amazon may have delivered the stuff

You ordered while posting some more of your fluff,

But unless you log off and join in the fun,

Christmas will seem like we’re three minus one.

OK, I told them. But cut me some slack.

The way you go on, it’s like I’m some hack

Who whacks out the rhymes on the back of a rag

As he checks out the posts of another gas-bag.

That’s not how it is. I swear, it’s not true.

I’ll repeat it again ’til my face is of blue:

Blogging is fun. It keeps me in cheer.

Who cares if it pays not even a beer?

But I know that you’re right. It’s time for a break.

It’s time to log off, more merry to make.

We’ll see you next year. Two thousand and eight

Greetings to you, and ….damn, can’t seem to get this last line to rhyme.

(crumple-crumple-crumple. Toss.)

© 2007 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Someday the Rabbi Will Leave

Just got back from my company Christmas party.

Apologies for any spelling mistakes or scans off-kilter.

We exchanged gifts. Little things.

Mugs with Santies and reindeer. Puzzles.

The gay guy got a thong made out of edible candy.

Me?

I got a book.

Now I dunno. I’m definitely not a Rabbi.

And I’m not Jewish.

And on a good day, I’m not even paranoid.

But do you think my colleagues are trying to tell me something?

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Giving in to the Facebook Temptation.

Stuck for juicy blog fodder Too curious for my own good, I finally contacted Nicole, girlfriend of 21 years ago whom I found dangling there in two dimensions on Facebook some weeks back. The post drew a lot of comments, some very thought-provoking. About half were in favour if my contacting her again, the other half saying, nah - just let the past stay in the past.

What intrigued me about the whole story is part of my growing interest in how we adapt to the rapidly changing capabilities offered by new technologies.

Twenty years ago, no-one would never have even been put in the position of having to decide whether or not to click a button to re-establish contact with anyone. The process would have been so difficult, so time-consuming, it would have taken on the aura of obsession.

But now it’s so easy, it’s like: why the hell not?

So I did.

Here’s what I wrote her:

Hi Nicole,

West End Vancouver, summer of Expo ‘86? Four months of fun and three months of none? How are you? Are you still nursing? In case you’ve ever wondered what became of that guy who didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, here’s a short update for you. I quit wasting my time with that awful job with those awful people, went skiing for a while and kicked around a bit, left Vancouver two years later to live in Montreal, went back to school for journalism, worked as a reporter in Sherbrooke and Hong Kong, where I met my wife and where my daughter was born. We’ve been living in Hamburg, Germany for the past decade. I’m still in media and still enjoying it. Hey, guess what? That post-university quarter-life crisis I was going through when you knew me? It now has its own label, website, support group and everything! And you can now - perhaps too easily - get ahold of old girlfriends on Facebook, but believe me: I hesitated a long time before hitting the send button.

Pretty much what I said I’d write.

She answered right away.

Here’s what she wrote:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I don’t want to be mean or anything but i don’t know you. I’ve never seen you in my life.
I think you must have the wrong person.
I’ve never been to Vancouver.
and in 1986 I was only 12 years old and i didn’t have a b/f.
I’m happy to hear that you have success in your life and that you found the right girl.

I still can’t believe it.

Looks exactly like her, and the age she should be. Same name. Does this sort of thing happen every day?

Her full profile - now that I can see it, because I couldn’t when I wrote that other post - puts her birthdate in 1974, so yeah, she would have been around 12.

Good thing it wasn’t her, or I’d probably have a few jail stories to tell.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Freedom on the Beach of a Thousand Dreams

Sometimes you have to be in the right place at the right time for big ideas to come around.

In the summer of 2006 we were in South Africa for the second time. We’d already spent a week in Lesotho, climbed the Drakensberg, and were settled in for seven nights at a simple backpacker hostel on the Wild Coast.

On the third or fourth day there, after the bone-jarring ride over a nearly impassable road was behind us and the slow, easy rhythm of the place had washed over us like the ever-present sea, we took a walk to the end of a long stretch of sand I now call the Beach of a Thousand Dreams.

Because as we were walking along we started to talk about what we want to do over the next decade or so. Long-term stuff we so often put off addressing because the daily grind of making a living, staying ahead in the paper war, and meeting obligations gets in the way.

I don’t know how the conversation started, or who said it first, or whether it was the carefree manner of the young couple who walked past us, but we were both thinking the same thing at the same time: let’s make this a year-long thing. Let’s go travel the world while we’re both still fit and healthy. Who cares if we will have a few thousand euros less in the retirement pension account at the end of the day? All we have in this life is time. We’ll still be relatively young and full of energy for the road.

I remember jumping for joy at the mere thought of it. I almost did a cartwheel. YES! I felt free, so completely liberated! Just before we’d left for South Africa I’d already felt this feeling of liberation - like getting a monkey off your back - and this only added to it.

If the thousand dreams come to be, this is what we’ve decided: in five years, we’ll put our daughter in a school in an English-speaking country, then go travel the world for a year. India, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, southern Africa, Canada. We really haven’t worked out how long in each country, or if the list will be reduced or expanded, or which order we’ll do it in, but we’re going to do it.

PS: To read more of the trouble you can get up to down there, I’ve finally finished putting in the photos on the Month in South Africa and Lesotho page, which has been dangling up there at the top of this blog incomplete for ages now. Take your time, though. I printed it out and the text alone came to 11 pages single-spaced. I could have written a lot more, put in twice as many photos, and still not mentioned anything of our first trip back in 2003. Short piece of advice: go!

© 2007 lettershometoyou

After 100 posts, I finally learn the truth.

I get that sometimes, but not in so many words. It’s often a sort of vague look, that oh-my-god-he’s-really-gone-off-the-deep-end kind of posture adopted as they slowly back up to get away…

You can find the full strip at Blondie.com.

Oh, and no kidding: according to a little number tucked away in a corner of the WordPress dashboard, this is post #101.

Thanks for being a reader, commenter, e-mailer, booster, mentor, fellow blogger and patient receiver of my at times pissy comments - wherever you are.

- ian in hamburg

Germany’s ban on Scientology would be a Gong Show move.

What I can’t understand is why the German government even pays attention to Scientology. Instead of banning them, thereby creating a cause célèbre for them and inviting a Falun Gong-type protest road show every time Angela Merkel goes abroad, what they should actually do is make a day-long introductory course in Scientology a requirement for first-year University students.

That’s about how old I was when I found myself walking down the street in Los Angeles one day in May, 1980. I’d just spent the winter working for the railway in northern British Columbia, was about to quit my job and go backpacking to Europe for the summer - it turned out to be a whole year - and was kinda bored waiting for life to get underway.

A woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test. I said sure, why not? I sat down at a desk out on the street and was handed a very long questionnaire. I’m pretty sure they tell everyone what they told me once the
results came in: I appear to have things pretty much under control, but if I check out the answers here, here, here and here, when things get rough I react in strange ways.

But Scientology can help! Sceptical but curious, I paid $20 to enroll in a day course.

I was led inside a building and down a corridor to a classroom. There, I met some guy who sat me down and asked me to grasp in each hand a wooden handle attached by wires to some meter.

Even though I was barely out of my teens and didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, I did know that wood is a poor conductor of electricity. Ah, they explained, the meter will nevertheless pick up whether or not you’re accessing your engrams.

My whatgrams?

Your engrams.

That’s what they call the buried memories of bad things that have happened to us. Through the wonders of Scientology, those memories will be liberated, they told me, and eventually I would become what they call “clear” - free of guilt, worry, phobias, all the negative energy that holds the vast majority of us back from achieving our true potential.

To recover the engrams, I was to close my eyes and recall a time when I felt angry, or anxious, or scared, or whatever he asked. Not just recall, but remember what I was seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting at that time as well.

After a half-hour of this - it was really hard to do - I felt like asking him: I can go on, but why do I have to sit here like a jerk holding onto hunks of wood the whole time?

They also showed me a scratchy cartoon of two figures looking across at one another, the narrator repeating over and over that there are some people we have have affinity for, and we like them, and others we don’t have an affinity for, and we don’t like them. OK…

I don’t recall much of the rest of the day, because after that I sort of went through the motions just to see where this farce would lead, but I do remember the course leader getting into apissy argument with a colleague, which led me to believe that aside from their weird take on life, these people were not much different from the rest of us.

What they don’t tell you is that one only becomes clear if you pay enough money for the vast array of courses it would take to satisfy them that you are indeed clear. And once there, you can pay for more courses to move further up the ladder.

Used to be that once you’d paid tens of thousands of your life savings to these weirdos - and by then it was probably too late to admit to yourself what a fool you’d been - they’d introduce you to Xenu, an alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy who, 75 million years ago,brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. The alien souls continue to do this today, and that’s what’s fucking you up.

But now this is all available on Wikipedia, so you have to wonder how they attract new customers recruits.

Because it’s such a great antidote to my Seasonal Affective Disorder, I’ve been doing a lot of silly humour stuff lately. I wasn’t going to tag this as such, but really: Scientology is such complete nonsense, such unadulterated shit, it can only be put in the category of humour, something that any sane individual can only laugh at. Even the flying spaghetti monster makes more sense.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Queen Elizabeth Foundation email scam reply

A scam email making the rounds has slammed into my inbox with a resounding thud. Polite Canadian that I am, I always respond to emails - especially ones from Her Royal Highness - but I’m in a hurry today, so I’ll just fill in my responses in bold.

QUEEN ELIZABETH FOUNDATION
QEII FOUNDATION,
UNITED KINGDOM,
LONDON.

Concern.

Yes, you bet I’m concerned.

The QEII Foundation, would like to formal notify you that you have been chosen by the board of trustees as one of the final recipients of a cash Grant/Donation for your own personal, educational, and business development. What if I just feel like going out and getting smashed a little more often?

The QEII Foundation established 1977 by the Multi-Million groups and with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development. Grammar lessons will one day be offered too, I hope?

To celebrate the 28th anniversary program which, if you’re paying attention, was nearly three years ago, The QEII Foundation is giving out a yearly donation of £488,210.00 (Four Hundred And Eighty Eight Thousand, Two Hundred and Ten Pound Sterling) to 100 lucky recipients. These specific Donations/Grants will be awarded to 100 lucky international recipients worldwide; in different categories for their personal business development and enhancement of their educational plans.

At least 15% of the awarded funds should be used by you to develop a part of your environment. Development proposals include turning forest into housing, landfill, amusement parks or server farms to ensure shit like this has a safe place to be stored and distributed.

This is a yearly program, which is a measure of universal development strategy, whatever the hell that means. The objective is to make a notable change in the standard of living of people all around the Universe (From America to Europe, Asia to Africa and all around). The Klingons will be miffed you forgot to mention them.

The QEII Foundation has been assured of highest organization standard courtesy of the British Government. It is our belief that we can achieve a great positive change in the general welfare of the universe through this program. OK, now I’m suspicious. The Brits spell it programme.
That is why the foundation is doing everything possible to get all recipients notified of their donation.

Note that your country is not the only country that is benefiting from this donation. Finally being nice to the Germans, are we? Oh right, your family’s German. Sorry.

Beneficiaries have been chosen from countries from all continents. The idea of this donation is that within ten years from now, there will be notable richness among many unusual people around the world. Gee, thanks! I guess…

This will give many people the opportunity to get their lives to a stage where they had always wanted. Kindly note that you will only be chosen to receive the donation once, which means that subsequent yearly donation will not get to you again.

Take time and thought in spending the donation wisely on something that will last you a long time. Guess that rules out iPods? Recipients are only eligible to be awarded this donation once.

You were selected among the lucky recipients to receive the award sum of £488,210.00 (Four Hundred And Eighty
Eight Thousand, Two Hundred And Ten Pound Sterling) as charity donations/aid from the QEII Foundation. Is there an echo around here?

Note that all beneficiaries email addresses were selected randomly from over 100,000 internet websites or a shop’s cash invoice around your area in which you might have purchased something from). Punctuation trouble is temporary. Please do not adjust your viewer.

You are required to fill the form below and email it to our Executive Secretary below for qualification documentation and processing of your claims. After contacting our office with the requested data, you will be given your donation
pin number, which you will use in collecting the funds. I’ve always wanted to tell you how much I love the way you grasp your sceptre at the opening of Parliament, my Sovereign.

All information is strictly confidential and will only be used for the purpose to which it is been requested. Vacuuming my bank account, perhaps?

Please note that these donations/Grants are strictly administered under delegated powers from the British Government. This means that your qualification number will be reffled to know the organization that will handle your payment. That’s a relief. Adequate reffling is the first thing I check for when verifying an offer’s legitimacy.

You are to keep this whole information confidential until you have been able to collect your donation, as there have been many cases of double and unqualified claim, due to beneficiaries informing third parties about his/her donation. Lips are sealed, Queenie babe.

On behalf of the Board kindly, accept our warmest congratulations.

Regards.
Queen Elizabeth II, By the grace of Google, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith in Spam.
(Foundation officer).

© 2007 QEII Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

The best of German TV news bloopers: a daily treat before Christmas.

I can’t get enough of these.

Once again the online news portal of Germany’s public broadcaster ARD tagesschau.de is posting a series of bloopers - some of the funniest on-air gaffes you’re ever likely to see - with a new one every day until Christmas.

Today’s is a special treat because it’s an inadvertent sight gag, so you don’t need to understand a word of German to get it.

Not many people saw it when it aired live about seven years ago, because it happened at 5:30 in the morning, but it has since become one of the best-known German tv news bloopers.

You can see the whole line-up of videos at tagesschau.de. The ones that have already run since December 1 include:

• A newsreader who mistakes the letter N for R and reads out Kurds instead of customers, (Kurde statt Kunde) rendering the entire news item ridiculous. At least he finds it funny, because he giggles through the rest of the newscast. This one must be watched to the very end.
• Another who can’t stop coughing.
• A live interview via satellite where the viewer can see the moderator and the correspondent, but the correspondent can’t hear the moderator, and doesn’t know he’s live and on air.

Enjoy.

© 2007 lettershometoyou