Targetting fitness tips to bloggers as if the breed were something special and the advice didn’t apply to the rest of the real world. All together now! Climb those stairs, say hello to Mom, put on shades and suncream, go outside, breathe deeply…
Wait a minute. Maybe you will. I first heard of this via Raincoaster, who pointed out that no matter how successful a blogger you are, there will always be someone out there with more readers and a more loyal following. Even if the blogger died more than six months ago. Not to make light of suicide - far from it - but where do the desperation that drives you that far end, and the obsession to blog forever, overlap? Think about it. If you want to, you can write hundreds of entries, time-posting them so that they publish on the dates and times you choose in the future. After you die, but before pre-paying your hosting fees, if you have them. I don’t know… I think it would make responding to comments a bit of a problem.
Reading too much into one executive’s move a while back from dusty, crusty old CBS News to shiny, new, hip and happening news blog The Huffington Post. I’d be willing to bet they simply offered her a shitload more money.
Writing a diary about your blogging habits. Don’t millions already consider their blog to be a diary? I guess it would look something like this: Dear offline diary. Woke up, scratched privates, logged on, blogged. Went offline, wrote this. Went back online, wrote some more. Went offline, wrote a bit more about what I wrote online. Went online… The really obsessives could start a new blog which tracks the offline diary which tracks their main blog.
Getting bummed out about your blog and generally not having fun. The writer says he has people come to him “…feeling despondent (about) their underperforming blogs.” Lighten up, already! Everyone goes through a slump now and then. When in doubt, go out.
Like me. I was going to list ten, but have to stop here.
If you’re also a blogger, you’ve probably heard this before:
I am, to be honest, mystified by the whole blog phenomenon. I’m barely interested in the minutiae of my own day, so why on earth would I want to read about someone else’s?
That’s from an old friend with whom I’ve recently re-connected via Facebook. No, not THAT old friend.
But scrape beyond the surface, spend some time seriously sifting through the vast array of blogs out there, and you’ll come across gems. I liken it to writing a newspaper column or even doing stand-up comedy. You write about what everyone has experienced sometime or another, but put a twist in it that makes the reader say, hmmm, never thought of it that way before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but what keeps you going is the challenge. Or you do a bit of a niche thing, like what it’s like to be a gay expatriate. Or an expatriate who is stateless, rootless, godless and gay. Or a funny Canadianfreezing his ass off enjoying winters sports in Norway.
Some blogs are as unusual as the jobs held by the people who write them. If you go to my blogroll, check out Gimcrack Hospital. It’s written by this nurse who works in a hospital for old people who’ve literally fallen off their rocker. She’s a psychiatric geriatric specialist. It’s at times hilarious, at others shocking, brutal, touching, whimsical and flirty. I love it. Ummm, NSFW, especially on Fridays.
Some blog for money, and some have made fortunes, but mostly I yawn at their stuff. I mean, I know they have a following of millions, but icanhascheezburger.com - for the past few months consistently the most popular blog on WordPress - is nothing but a bunch of cat pics with mangled English pasted over. I do not find it funny. But people send the stuff in, they post it, a few laughs are had, and the money rolls in.
There are now so many tens of millions of blogs, it’s starting to resemble life itself. You can choose whom you want to read and communicate with, just as in real life you can choose whom you want to be friends with. Some you will find fascinating, others boring, still others disgusting. I like to think there’s room for all of us.
Sometimes I make the mistake of comparing mine to others and think I should have done the usual and invented something really quirky instead of Letters Home (I dropped the To You a while back) but then again, if I called it something funny and edgy and cool like Little Red Rabbit Turds I would have to live up to it - be funny and edgy and cool all the time.
That’s not only impossible to maintain, it isn’t me. I’m political one day, whacko the next, introspective the third, ranting the fourth, dripping with cynicism the fifth… I prefer it that way because some blogs start to look like the same post over and over after a while. This way, even if it’s at the risk of alienating some readers who prefer one type of writing and not others, I can try to keep fresh myself. Besides, I’m not a kid anymore. If I were, I’d be on (retch) MySpace.
We’ll see how it goes. I’m still having fun doing it, though it can piss you off at times when people steal your content and stick ads up beside it, and sometimes you don’t feel like posting, so I don’t. But I’ve met some real-life people - and not just in Dresden this past autumn - and that’s been fun, too.
PS: Today marks one year since my first post. Thanks for reading, commenting, clicking on links, checking out the blogroll and the photos way down at the bottom, and for just dropping by. -Ian
There’s something unseemly about talking about money. These days people are more likely to spread details of their sex lives around the globe than talk honestly about how they feel about personal investing, savings or money itself. But like sex, some seem to need it more than others, it’s hard for most to get by without it, and a little more from time to time never hurt.
But with all the news about a panic interest-rate cut following stock market dives around the world on fears of a U.S. recession, because Joe Average American can’t pay his mortgage, because unscrupulous bankers lent money they never had to people who didn’t read the fine print on mortgages whose payments were set to explode months later and doom them to default, mortgages which were then bundled together and sold to suckers investors half-way around the world who also never bothered to read the fine print and didn’t know what they were buying into anyway…
…when you factor in sky-high oil prices coupled with a possible collapse of the shrinking U.S. dollar, it helps to step back, cut through the crap and gain a little perspective on what’s only the latest in a long line of financial crises born of greed and swindle.
One of the things I used to do as a way to make a living was cram myself into a van along with a driver, soundman, cameraman and technician, spin through the green hillsides of the Hong Kong New Territories, past stinky tofu and joss stick hawkers and through a long, dirty tunnel into Asia’s Manhattan to interview stock brokers and company analysts on daily matters financial.
Then I’d go back through the tunnel to the bureau, cut the best two quotes, lay a bunch of wallpaper footage of stock market traders talking on the phone, people buying things, and of course lots of money - people counting out money, bits of change falling out of pockets… well, not quite that bad….
…but anyway I’d put together a little package, gussy it up with little tidbits of what was happening in the markets around Asia and the world, add a few items of business news, go get slapped on so much make-up I’d put a corpse to shame, plunk myself in front of the camera and then try to look and sound like I knew what I was talking about. Sometimes, I even succeeded. It was a great job, paid the rent and then some on a Hong Kong shoebox apartment, and I even got to learn a thing or two.
Like for instance:
Nothing personal if that’s your line of work, but they’re all full of shit. Next time you see Gordon Gotbucks up there on CNBC Squawkbox blabbering on about where the Hang Seng is going to trend for the next fortnight or next year, throw a brick at it. Can ol’ Gordo predict the next September 11? The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan? A civil war in China? These things have and will move markets up or down, but the thing is, nobody can predict the news.
All they want is your money. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re buying, selling or watching it melt before your eyes, you will always pay a fee to whoever is doing the buying and selling. With online trading the fees have been cut to a fraction of what they used to be, but there are more playing the game. It always will be the oil that greases the skids and keeps them fat and happy on their yachts. Sure, you will always be given the line that stocks outperform over the long term, but I have yet to see an investment fund brochure that didn’t have a caveat at the bottom in fine print: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
The game is stacked against you. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I do know there are honest people in the business, but the fact of the matter is that insider trading is what makes the markets go ’round. I had colleagues ask me to give them hot stock tips. When I said I didn’t have any, they didn’t believe me. What? Aren’t you getting any inside dope from them? One of those colleagues, btw, is now anchoring on a well-known financial news channel.
If you’re reading this on a computer, you’re already rich, you’re just trained to think you’re not. The finance industry has a vested interest in making sure you know that someone else has more money than you do, you should envy him for it, and adjust your portfolio accordingly. Step back. If your pile is small, count your blessings. If it’s large, look where you could spread it around to do some good. Just remember to keep receipts to deduct those donations at tax time.
Oh, and a precious few tips gleaned from some of the sharks:
1. Never catch a falling knife. Translation: never buy shares in a company whose share price is falling.
2. Sell everything when you start to hear cab drivers and fitness instructors giving investment advice.
3. Buy the hell out of the market when there’s blood on the streets.
Only three? Hell, two of them contradict each other. Seriously, I know very little about this. I was only a business reporter for four years. That’s where the cynicism comes from, I guess.
One day when we’re old and counting our blessings, my wife and I will look at each other across our bowls of porridge and gum the words:
Oh, that was the time I fainted in front of the television!
Oh, that was the time I found a 50-euro note laying on the ground outside the supermarket!
Oh, that was the time Humphrey the Hamster, our daughter’s first pet, died!
Oh, that was the time our weird neighbour cranked the music in the middle of the night so loud, and we had to call the cops because we couldn’t get her to even answer the door or the telephone!
Sounds like things that occur only once in a while, but they all happened over the past 24 hours. The round-up:
German woman faints in front of television
My wife is not one of these wilting-flower types or a drama queen, but she has a physical reaction to seeing other people suffer. She faints. If you’re that type, best not view what we saw yesterday morning while watching the men’s downhill at Kitzbühel live on television. It’s one of most violent skiing crashes I’ve seen in a long time, and I remember thinking as the American skier Scott McCartney lay there twitching like a rabbit who’d been run over by a car: please, whoever’s doing the directing, CUT THE CAMERA AWAY.
The video is taken from Swiss television, but we were watching it on ARD, the German public broadcaster, whose announcers were so shocked they didn’t speak for nearly a minute. The crowd fell silent for what seemed like ages, then the replay came on, their reaction to which you can also hear. I’m glad they had the good graces not to show the replay of what at the time seemed to be the man’s convulsive death throes.
Is he going to live? asked my daughter.
I don’t know, I said, but if he does, he might not be able to walk again, or talk even. When he fell, he was going as fast as we usually do down the Autobahn, and he smacked his head so hard, he lost his helmet.
Suddenly my wife was on the floor, lying on her back with her arms behind her head, moaning a little and saying in a weak voice: we shouldn’t watch this.
I turned it off, left my wife on the floor because she wanted to be alone, went to do some errands, all the while thinking of how much the images disturbed me too. It was only later that she told me she’d actually lost consciousness.
German woman finds 50-euro note on the ground
Some people are lucky, I guess. I told my wife later: maybe you can put up a sign on the store’s bulletin board. Found: 50-euro note. Owner may claim by quoting serial number.
Hamster falls, dies.
Our daughter took her pet hamster out of its cage to show to a friend, but as she was holding it in her hand, it bit her on the finger and she dropped him to the floor. Unfortunately, she was also holding his food dish in her other hand, and dropped that too - right onto his hindquarters.
I get this panic call at work.
Daddy, we need an emergency veterinarian clinic! Humphrey’s hurt - I dropped his dish on him - and he’s lying in the corner, hardly moving! Can you find one for us?
They were getting ready to take him to the vet’s when they found he’d died.
It’s OK, I tell her. You gave him a good home and it wasn’t your fault what happened. It was an accident.
I get home around midnight find her hamster in the little transport box she used to carry him around in if she were taking him over to a friend’s place, or to the vet. Is it ghoulish to take a picture of a dead pet? I don’t know. I found her flower very touching.
Bizarre neighbour cranks music in the middle of the night.
So since I hate flopping straight to bed when I come home from work, I was lying on the couch quietly reading the first few pages of the newly published diary of a young French Jewish woman when suddenly I hear the unmistakeable sound of German rock music from the 70s - the kitchy pop tunes you just can’t avoid while flipping through the aural wasteland which is the German radio dial.
Damn.
The volume reminded me of the teenage kid a couple of floors down, now since Gott sei Dank flown the parental nest, but in whose worst phases would invite all his metalhead friends over for a ‘rents-away-let’s-all-play no-holds-barred blow-out, sometimes topped off by a marathon open-window scream-n-moan session courtesy of his multi-orgasmic girlfriend.
But it wasn’t thrashmetal or grungecore or whatever the fuck they call it these days, so I knew it couldn’t be him. By now my wife was awake and asking me bleary-eyed: who can THAT be?
Donning a jacket I went out to investigate and it turns out it’s the frumpy, 50-ish Frau who lives right next door to us, which would explain why our bedroom is now rumbling like a disco with shitty music.
So we knock on her door. Ring the doorbell. Knock again, ring again, on and off for ages and get no response.
I go online to telefonbuch.de, find her number, dial it. It rings forever.
We try banging on the door, so hard my wife says this morning her knuckles ache. I go out onto our balcony, try to peer into her place, but though the light are on I can see no shadows moving, no sign of life.
Maybe she’s had a heart attack, I say. She could actually be in some kind of trouble. Best call the cops, let them deal with her.
So my wife calls the cops, but in the meantime, we go back to our trying to raise her. My wife then gets the idea to go downstairs and ring the buzzer from outside, because it has a different tone.
Finally, after another 10 minutes of my wife and I alternately buzzing from the door and from downstairs and just as I’m giving up for the last time and walking away, the woman comes to the door.
Oh, she says. Did you ring the doorbell?
The woman has a face which betrays a lifetime of alcohol and cigarettes, but she doesn’t appear to be that wasted. Aside from a few spells of awkwardness over the past seven years where I actually had to come into contact with this person - I find her extremely repellant, to be honest - she has pretty well kept to herself.
I look at her, don’t say anything. Then I say: often.
What?
Often. We’ve been trying to get you to come to the door for the past half an hour. We gave up and phoned the police.
Then she says something that really floors me.
Oh, that’s OK. Have a nice evening.
I look at her, too stunned to say anything.
Yes, I say finally. I’m sure it’ll be a really nice evening, unsuccessful this time at hiding my anger and frustration.
A half-hour later the cops come. She lets them in the building, they trudge up the stairs to her door and ask if anything’s the matter. Oh, nothing she says. I was just playing some music, nothing special. Would you like to come in?
Maybe she just wanted some company, I don’t know. She does seem rather lonely.
Goal: reduce unnecessary medical consultations and lower health care costs.
Method: make every patient pay €10 the first time he visits the doctor every quarter.
Result: chaos.
I’m not dying or anything. In fact, based on how often I have called in sick in nearly eight years at my full-time job - that would be twice - I am pretty damn healthy, touch wood.
But over the past six months I have had to see not one but two specialists for completely unrelated and - let me stress this, Mom - non-life-threatening conditions.
Last fall, one of the specialists referred me to a third specialist, and because this new guy is really booked out, I couldn’t get an appointment to see him until next month.
So this is where German efficiency kicks in. I’ll try to keep it simple.
Unless you’re insured under a private scheme and therefore get your ass kissed by everyone the royal treatment, you have to pay €10 the first time you visit your doctor in any quarter. You receive a little receipt with a stamp on it from the doctor to show on arrival at any further medical treatment during that quarter.
Too bad if one appointment is at the end of March, the follow-up the beginning of April. Ten bucks each time.
If you need to see a specialist, your family doctor will write you a referral. So last autumn I took a referral to see one of the specialists, who did some tests, the results of which made him write out another referral to the third specialist.
I phoned the third specialist, but because I couldn’t get an appointment until February, and thus in the new quarter, I had to go back to my doctor to get a new referral. Apparently they die, like mayflies. So I went back to my doctor today to get a new referral. They gave me one, but then they asked me for €10.
Damn. Even though I’d already paid €10 at another specialist’s office this month, and so covered myself for this quarter, I’d left the receipt at home.
No problem, they said. We’ll issue you a bill for €10, and if you come in any time over the next two weeks with the proof you’ve paid the €10, it will be waived. Otherwise you’ll have to pay us €10.
Not wanting to forget the matter, I pedaled home and came back with the receipt within the hour.
Oh.
Sorry, they tell me. We know this says you paid your €10, and we believe you actually did, but because you also need to give us a referral from the doctor to whom you gave the €10, we can’t accept it.
But he’s an ambislambic bardgimologist specializing in midgemriolic gambiderpodery, I tell them, and has nothing to do with this other problem.
Sorry, we need a referral.
So I take the receipt and, since they’re within a few blocks of one other, pedal over to my family doctor and tell the nurses there the whole story. They issue me a referral.
As I was riding back to the specialist I thought, good thing I’m healthy and can take my bike all over the place to do this shit. What if I were really sick, or old, in a wheelchair, or God forbid forced to jump through hoops behind the wheel of a car? I’d probably just drop 10 bucks whenever anyone asked for it just to avoid the hassle.
The receptionist at the specialist’s office looked at the referral, ripped up the bill, and said it’s all taken care of.
Though I know she was just following procedure, I felt like saying thank you andhave a nice fucking day.
A while back I took the little red-haired girl into downtown Hamburg, stopping on the way to finally explore this huge, hulking mass of concrete about a mile west of the city centre. We must have ridden by it a hundred times already in the ten years we’ve lived here, but never went for a look inside.
It was built during the war and used to be a bunker. It’s one of many scattered throughout the city, most of which are now painted over and dressed up to blend so easily into the surrounding streets, you can go by them every day without noticing what it was originally built for. But this one is not only so much bigger than the others, it sits alone at the edge of a huge empty lot. You can’t miss it.
It was designed both for air raid flak defenses and as a bomb shelter for residents, completely self-contained with its own water, power generation and sewage removal systems.
Local legend has it that the British occupation forces wanted to level it after the war, but gave up after a few attempts to crack the two-metre-thick walls. Others say the concrete didn’t actually set to its hardest state until the 1970s - four decades after its construction - a claim I can neither verify nor refute, and neither can they, I bet.
Today it’s stuffed full of music stores stuffed with all kinds of musical instruments, but I liked just walking around inside, poking into corners and opening doors we probably shouldn’t have, wondering what it must have been like to scurry like rats into bunkers like these from a hail of bombs that over two nights in the middle of summer 1943 killed 50-thousand people in this city alone.
I wanted to climb up to the top of the staircase to see if we could go out onto the roof, but my daughter was having none of it. I could tell what was bugging her. It was kind of creepy walking through creaky old metal doorways, down dimly lit corridors and up spiral staircases of cold, bare concrete, and I wasn’t helping matters much with my off-track mutterings of the folly of man, the use of fear and demonisation of the enemy in preparation for war, how some people rightly or wrongly compare what’s happening in the United States of America today with what happened in Germany before things got really crazy, how some people today speak of Muslims - yes, the boys and girls sitting beside her in school - the way Hitler used to talk about the Jews, the concept of forced labour and its use in building the structure we were standing in, another enduring reminder of the extreme lengths human beings are willing to go in the pursuit of killing each other.
All she wanted to do that day was to hang out in the sunshine near the lake, and here I was dragging her through a bunker giving a rambling political science and history lesson. I can’t wait to take her down south near Munich to Dachau, and try to explain the unexplainable.
Amazing story and a book recommendation in one, so I thought I’d pass it along.
It’s about the diary of a young Jewish girl living in a major European city during the Nazi occupation of her country. Described as beautifully written and quite personal, it details her life and that of her family members leading up to their deportation to the death camps.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Anne Frank, right?
No, it’s Hélène Berr, the diary of whom has become an instant best-seller after its recent publication in France nearly 65 years after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Comparisons to Anne Frank are inevitable. But while Frank detailed a life spent in hiding from the Nazis in her Amsterdam home, Berr tells a story of everyday life under the German occupation in Paris.
Before being sent away to die along with most of the rest of her family, she gave it to the family cook, who passed it along to Berr’s fiancé, who eventually gave it to Berr’s niece. After an editor noticed a group of girls gathered around a display case trying to read the diary at a Paris holocaust exhibition, the niece was approached with the idea of publishing, but it took another five years to come out in book form.
The book sold more than 26,000 copies in its first three days of sale in France. Rights had already been sold in 15 countries before the French publication, but an English translation is slated to come out only in September. I can’t wait that long, so I’m going to pick it up at Amazon.fr and hope to translate an extract or two over the coming weeks.
One of the most beautiful gifts we have ever received is junk. It’s a rusty old pitchfork, it’s a drill bit, it’s an auger - and a candleholder all in one.
The end of the drill bit is covered in gold leaf. Nice touch.
An old friend of my wife - a high school arts teacher who went through a phase tinkering with this sort of stuff - gave it to us as a wedding present. When our daughter came along we had to put it away in a box for awhile, concerned as we were about the possibility of having to explain to the doctors in emergency that we really had no plans to make a shishkebab of our kid.
Spam poetry works the same way. You take scrap that normally wouldn’t merit a second glance to make something new out of it.
...'Reality' in America has become synonymous with the rank and sordid. We've fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment - our version of the public hanging. The crowd gathers to gape.
-Siri Hustvedt
- The Sorrows of an American
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