LIONS VS. ELEPHANTS

Interestingly, both lions & elephants are a gaggle of grrrrlz who hang out together in a group. The lionesses let a guy hang around on a regular basis as long as he makes himself useful and keeps hyenas away from the babies while the grrlllz go off hunting.

Elephants as I understand it, prefer a kind of one-night-stand… approach with the males. The boy elephants don’t get to hang with the grrlllz on a regular basis.

It’s really weird, the wold of gender perception is upside down… or perhaps it just seems that way – I see the world through goddess-goggles….

The Pill Causes Breast Cancer

Hellooooooo.

I just got the news that one of my friends has breast cancer at a pretty young age.

I was just ranting about breast cancer the other day, because of the ridiculous BULLSHIT that is passing for ‘research’ or ‘information’ regarding breast cancer.

ANYTHING which raises your estrogen level for a sustained period of time will increase your breast cancer risk.

That includes:

1. as little as one drink of alcohol per day
2. being overweight
3. deliberately taking pills every day which contain synthetic estrogen. HELLOOOOO.

I remember being in my teens and 20s and having everyone lean on me to take the pill (guess they didn’t want me to reproduce LOL).  I said no thanks to that.

The doctors never mentioned elevated breast cancer risk. OK they give you the sample pack with the absolutely blood-curdling list of possible deathly side-effects but does anyone (except me) read them?

Anyway, just in case you believe the BS that the media is putting out there, the skyrocketing rates of breast cancer are NOT a mystery. They are due to the popularity of birth control pills, and obesity I guess, but that’s a whole ‘nother wave of it coming down the pipes.

Just in case you think I am making this up:

http://www.womenshealthmatters.ca/centres/cancer/breast/causes.html (you have to scroll down for the ugly truth).

And frankly, I believe the following to be utter bullshit:

http://www.breastcancer.org/tips/nutrition/new_research/20070320b.jsp

SATISFACTION

I get my satisfaction. It’s up to me, and nobody else but me. If everyone could clear this concept, then the world would be a better place.

Seriously, there are so many unhappy people who are looking to SOMEONE ELSE to satisfy them in one way or another…. It causes a lot of frustration and antipathy.

OK – here is a Satisfaction-Set going out to y’all – DJ IdeazGuy Is In Da House:

Self-Hypnosis Video

Cunt

My little sister was recently chastised by some Canadians for her use of the C-word (not ‘Canada’).

It occurs to me in this instance that we are culturally British, although brought up entirely in this maple-beaver-hockey country.

My British Dad called pretty much everyone a cunt. We didn’t bat an eye. We were aware that this was not a polite term, but growing up, we were completely unaware that for Canadians, the word ‘cunt’ is much more abominable than, for example, ‘prick’ or ‘dick’, which are rather well tolerated even in mixed company.

Do women need to “own” the word ‘cunt’ just as black people own the N-word? Do women want to own it? Is it bad or good that ‘dick’ is OK but ‘cunt’ isn’t?

I can’t make these decisions.

I suppose the obvious solution is to avoid using profanity.

Just to prove to any Canadians (I suppose Americans are similar in their abhorrence of ‘cunt’) that Brits just use English differently, here are Dudley Moore and Peter Cook having a casual conversation in their native tongue. Let us refer to this as “Exhibit A” – this is how British people talk:

CURE FOR ANOREXIA

(And I’m talking about the semi-suicidal anorexics, not the vain type who just watch what they eat to the point of neurotic control-freakism)

Lock them up in a pleasant room full of interesting, positive books, yummy meals passed through a slot, NO TV or any kind of glamour mags, funny videos, & NO MIRROR. If you just leave them in there for a month or two without any access to humans they can torture with their psychological bullshit, I’m sure they’d be alive.

Then again, I think there’s some argument for making it a crime against their parents… grrr … spoiled narcissistic little bitches, torturing their Mums & Dads.
I think the most efficient approach is, upon diagnosis, take them to a special kind of (minimum wage) doctor who offers them a choice between
A)eating a balanced meal (without throwing up) or
B)taking a lethal injection
EVERY DAY AT NOON UNTIL CURED OR DEAD.

As with almost every subject, I’m with George Carlin on this one:

ADDICTION IS A RODEO RIDE

Or anyway that’s how it feels. I know because I am on month #4 of quitting smoking. And hey, I have the odd slip-up but I forgive myself and get back up on that bucking horse.

THEM THERE YOUNG FOLKS

…wonder what they are listening to!

I have little fits and spurts of wondering what is ACTUALLY going on in the world of new music. I don’t drive a car so I have no need of the top40 station – indeed, I am not even really capable of listening to the same 5 sh*tty songs played over and over and over til i just want to shoot myself.

So anyway here is my old-fart secret infiltration method of finding some cool toonz to listen to:

www.spin.com

I just go to the site, download a bunch of stuff they are talking about from limewire and then if I like it, I’ll buy the CD (haha not really, but i thought i would throw the RIA a bone – I’ve bought 3 CDs in the past decade: 1 by Fatboy Slim and 1 by the Dandy Warhols and 1 by Russel Peters because I REALLY REALLY REALLY LOVE THEM).

So anyway, now I’m all… listenin’ to Britney’s new POM and all that. Meanwhile all the young people I know are listening to stuff like The Beatles!

Go figure.

ETHANOL HUMMERS – WHAAAAAT?!

It’s like:

I’ll have a double BigBurg with extra cheese and bacon,
supersize the fries and I’d like a deep-fried sugar pie also please.
Oh, and an extra large supersize diet soda …
cuz i’m on a diet.

American drivers, ethanol is your saccharin:
swap tooth decay and obesity for cancer…?

The ethanol Hummer is the metaphorical diet soda at the end of the fast-food order above.

Oil is not the real enemy; the American dream is.

Please, America (Canada, UK, et al), go to a shrink and get cured of your unwholesome, insatiable greed and prideful conspicuous consumption.

Our obsession with material possessions as status symbols is killing us all.

I saw an interesting reality show the other day about Americans who came into money suddenly/unexpectedly – most of them squander it in just a few years and go back to square one. After hearing/seeing a few of these sad little stories, I noticed the common themes: buying themselves ridiculously expensive status-symbol cars, and buying fancy cars for their grasping ‘friends’ and relatives. I don’t mention the real-estate, which although it is part of the whole conspicuous consumption mental disease, tends to be a good investment, appreciating in value with time, unlike cars, which usually depreciate with time.

Meanwhile, George Bush is running around the Middle East trying to get them to drop oil prices so the American shoppers can continue to guzzle resources like junkies who have run out of money and are now starting to beg/borrow/steal to support their consumerist addictions.

The US government is its citizens’ destructive codependent enabler, their Howard K Stern….

Politics, Religion, Sex and Other Cocktail-Party Conversational No-Nos

These are the 3 most important things to human beings I guess, and open discussion of these matters (as opposed to discussion of the weather or what a nice hat you have) – and especially where alcohol is involved, has the potential to result in unplanned homicide.

That’s all I can make of the etiquette regarding discussions of politics, religion, and sex.

One weird thing that happened to me over the holidays is that I had time to read. I read Confessions of an Economic Hitman and Jesus Lived in India.

And I had time to think.

And I came up with the conclusion that here in the ‘First World’, we have replaced religious belief with the worship of material goods/wealth. The mall is our church; our gods are Prada, iPod, Sony, Ferrari, etc. We are not Christians or Muslims or Jews, but Consumers, strict adherents to the principles of Consumerism.

Some empires in history have replaced religious belief with government (Communist Russia & Rome’s Caesar come to mind), but in N.America, consumerism is definitely the religion de rigeur.

Having spent some time in India where I met very few atheists, it is strange to come back to this godless culture.

I’m not criticizing, just observing.

It’s not surprising that so many Christians have jumped ship – as members of the culture learned to read and think critically, the obviously philosophically unsound (pro-slavery, misogynistic) components of the bible (esp. old testament) have become unpalateable and the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater here.

I’ve never met so many staunch atheists as in Quebec, where the Catholic church was the real oppressor all those years. The Quebecois frequently blame Anglos or “the rest of Canada,” but in their hearts, they are sitting there with Sinead O’Connor on Saturday Night Live (the swan song of her career), knowing who the ‘real enemy’ was all those years.

Teaching people that masturbation/homosexuality/non-baby-producing-sex is hateful to a vengeful God (who will gladly grill you on a spit in hell for stuff like that) is a wonderful behaviour modification tool for an organization (the Catholic church) which benefits from having a large-as-possible, poor, ignorant, and guilty, worried populace.

People have now noticed that they haven’t been struck by lighning bolts for disobeying the Church’s teachings and have concluded that it is 100% bullshit….ie: there is no God.

I don’t agree with that, but hey, this is not about me!

So anyway, I’m thinking that this consumerism is different from, but equally as bad as wonky religions. We are destroying everything with our consumerism – we are like a plague of army ants or locusts, and we are ruining everything. The Rich are metaphorically eating the Poor right now.

I thought this was such a funny article, because I can read in WIRED now – just like in the bible – that everything is the fault of WOMEN:
Women Who Find Ferrari Drivers Sexy Contribute to Global Warming.

I guess some things will never change.

DRIVERS AND CHAUFFEURS

When I first arrived here it seemed that all of life’s difficulties and problems would be solved magically by having a good driver. Having spent hours and hours of my first 2 weeks in Bangalore being driven in circles during heavy traffic by drivers who had been living in the city no longer than myself, I vowed to solve my problem and I promptly hired an excellent driver (stole him from the hotel where my colleagues from the States were staying).

 

I just loved this driver – you could hand him a biz card with an address on it and he would find the place. You could ask him if he knew where the newest nightclub was that everyone wanted to go to and he always knew everything.

He also had a uniform and a HAT, and would come to a short stop, BOLT out of his door and LEAP around the car to open my door. The door opening was a bit much but I really dug the navigation skills and the hat.

Seems to me a driver with a HAT is a CHAUFFEUR.

The other drivers just drove us around the way a grumpy dad would drive the kids to school, no hat, no manners, no door opening, none of that, jusssst driving, no extras.

Well anyway, I thought I had very cleverly solved all life’s problems until the shitty Hyundai Santro the company was renting fell apart completely one day…

… and so I had a driver but no car.

Just goes to show: it’s never that simple.

EATING WITH HANDS

My buddy and I go to a little vegetarian restaurant down the road for masala dossa or a Thali (a ‘meal’) all the time because it’s about a dollar each and delicious.  He has told me in no uncertain terms that if I am intending to stay in India I am simply going HAVE TO learn to eat with my hand.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! YUK. I don’t like the slime of rice on my hands. I’m English! Help! I just can’t do it. I can’t I can’t I can’t. I really hope I can weasel out of this.

My son would love it here!

HUSBANDS AND WIVES

 

 

I was interviewing, here in Bangalore,candidates for the position of my assistant and had this one lady in my office that I really liked the best — I liked everything about her, from her humble yet firm demeanour, to the fact that she speaks 5 languages (I have determined that I may lose my sanity if I don’t hire an assistant who speaks the local language here, Kanada). I told her my hours are 1pm to 9pm and she flatly told me that was impossible for her. She said, “My husband won’t let me work that late. I know it is different in your culture, but in India, a wife really has to do what her husband says. I have to make time to be with my husband and family. He won’t tolerate me being out that late.”

I told her she could start earlier and leave at 7 instead of 9 and she said OK but that was the ABSOLUTE latest and she would have to leave at 7 SHARP.

She wasn’t about to have any guff from me, her future employer.

I said OK…. I guess her husband is the boss of me too!