Weekend Approaching

The weekend is essentially here, well I mean at 16:00 on a Friday I am going to call WEEKEND! Of course in my case this means that tonight I am off and then I have work Saturday and Sunday. After Sunday I will be officially unemployed as the pizzeria I am working at for the moment is simply not making enough money to have me working there. Cést la vie says I.

Its too bad of course, but this just means that I will have to put more effort into finding a real job which its about time to find. There is also a messy fight going on between the owners at the pizzeria and while I like them both, I do not wish to witness the whole disintegrate first hand. So this weekend maybe I will go for a swim or maybe for a little skate (depending on the weather of course).


Otherwise not much else going on. I went to see 1. FC Köln play Hertha BSC a few weeks ago and here is a photo from said event.

Centrism, the death of the US, and how I feel

This notion of bi-partisanship is dead in the US and for the time it should remain that way. Why comes the shout from the peanut gallery? The Republican party has fuck-all when it comes to answers as to how to solve things. No thats not right, they have exactly the same ideas they had eight years ago and even earlier all the way back to Reagan; lower the taxes and everything will solve itself. This idea that one persons personal greed can translate into fulfilling the needs of others is so beyond idiotic that its amazing they can still sell it.

The way they do it is have you believe that starting now, you can be a millionaire before you know it. Everyone can is the fairy tale line that has been the staple of the conservative party. Never mind that they are only interested in helping certain types of people and would like rights only for those who agree with them (or how else can DADT or Protection for Heterosexual Marriages be explained). Worse is the fear of Islam, while they want the churches to have all kinds of rights.

The US will slowly recede on the world horizon if it doesn´t get its shit together in a hurry. If they were to elect someone completely lacking in answers (even afraid to give her own opinion) like Palin it will only speed up the process. This isn´t an admonishment of failure or an I give up statement no I will opt for the John Paul-Jones route: I have not yet begun to fight. I will oppose these empty nationalist parties and their attempt to dictate how people live their lives (because telling people what is and what is not accepted sexuality is about as far from freedom as one can get).

Sure it gets lonely at times but I remember there are others out there who care about standing against a system that perpetuates injustice and even mistreats its own citizens.

Been a month

Well its been about a month since anything has happened on this blog. It isn´t that I haven´t had anything to write about, I just haven´t taken the opportunity, but it seems that I am back now and ready for the minimum two-a-week post schedule. Maybe the whole thing would be better if I had an editor breathing down my neck.

I just finished John Irving´s "Until I Find You" and I think that I can honestly say it was the worst book I have read in a really long time. The characters seemed very shallow and the story line at times became just too unbelievable. I am still somewhere in the middle of Atwood´s "The Tent" and I just started Jonathan Franzen´s "The Corrections." I have a lot of reading ahead of me. I want to get a hold of Atwood´s "After the Flood" which is the sequel to "Oryx and Crake" (which had to be the best book I had read in a long time).

"Oryx and Crake" is easily described as a post-apocalyptic novel. The tone throughout is somewhat sarcastic and there are two periods that are explored: what happened leading up to the event that killed off civilization and then what happened after. The narrator is the person who believes himself to be the only survivor. The book takes a negative view of transnational corporations and their influence on politics (or power to control politics) as well as how run-away greed is able to lead to bio-engineering. The book also uses the overuse of resources as a central theme to what drives humanity into the squalid conditions found in the novel. While I have never read Atwood before this, I imagine that it is one of her best works.

In sport, the little nation of Slovenia managed to knock out the Russians from the World Cup and this, while the only upset in the playoffs, was a great moment in sports history (actually just great that the overrated Russians were revealed for what they really are: just average with a lot of luck).

Well that is about it for this post.