The wonders of the world

You know us by now. We Freds wonder about stuff. So here’s a few more things I can’t get my head round.

1) Some weeks ago I passed through Ghent’s busiest shopping street while it was close to zero degrees outside. At once I was reminded of something that has puzzled me forever: why the hell are fashion and shoe shops allowed to keep their doors wide open all the time? You can actually feel the wasted heat against your cheeks as you pass by on the pavement! How much energy and money could we save just by shutting the door like mum taught us to?

2) A while ago my car battery was dead. When I had finally found someone who had jump cables, he wanted to listen to the sound the car made first. He knew cars; so he would  be able to tell if it was a mechanical thing, not an electric one. I put the key in the ignition, turned it and voilà, the car started no problemo. Crap, just bothered someone for no reason. But why is it every time something is broken it miraculously fixes itself once the expert has shown up? Think plumbing, toilets, computers, phones and such. Only to break when the expert has left…

3) Also: why do we still have announcements in our railway stations? You know, those announcing stupid stuff like The train for Brussels is arriving at platform 2. First of all, in 99% of the cases, you’ll hear this several minutes before the train arrives. (That just gets me nervous.) Secondly, the volume is usually louder than shit. (I want to listen to my iPod, dude!) And thirdly, it’s not as if I don’t know where to go if I didn't hear these messages. I mean, either you look it up on the Internet or you look at the giant screen in the entry hall, or at the television screens in the corridors, or at the screens on the platforms themselves. We don't need an uninterested woman’s nasally drone announcing which train is arriving or (more often) delayed. (We saw the red +5, thank you very much!)

4) And the most frightening thought: today I realised that I have no idea when the last time was I swam. Suddenly I wondered: on average, how long until you forget how to and drown? 

Holy crap! 

Air cats

Yesterday I was in a bar with Fred and his girlfriend. As per usual the conversation meandered in all kinds of directions, until we hit one of my all time favourites: animals. Fred’s girlfriend mentioned that she found it strange that in Dutch we have a product called ‘WC-eend’ (Toilet Duck – I’ve complained about it before), which should really be called ‘WC-swan’ (Toilet Swan) if you think about it. Indeed, the bottle looks much more like a swan than a duck.

Which brought me to the following thought. There are actually loads of animals that have funny names in the sense that they don’t look like the aninal they’re named after. Especially sea animals, it seems.

Oh sure, there’s a sea spider or a sea horse which do look like spiders or horses, but there are others that just don’t make any sense to me.

Like the different kinds of seal-like creatures – you know, those slippery bastards with big snouts and whiskers that shout ‘uh uh uh’ all day and used to stink up your local Aquaworld. They have the most funny names like sea lion, sea cow and even sea bear or sea elephant!

But I don’t get it. What kind of biologist was observing this animal:

and thought to himself: “That kind of looks like a bear! That’s it, I’m gonna call it a sea bear!"? Didn’t it cross his mind that it would be pretty confusing to have a sea bear if we already have a polar bear, which is basically a bear that (partly) lives in the sea?

I mean, it’s almost as if we were out of inspiration when it came to giving names to the sea animals. Instead of inventing something new we just said. Okay that’s a sea eal, that’s a sea spider, that’s a sea turtle, that’s a sea snail. There’s no end to it!

Imagine we’d done that to birds? Look, son, there’s an air cat:

   

Lazy biologists.

Pissed off

Ah, the news. Always new opportunities to get irritated, frustrated or downright angry. During the past few days, a particular article had me raise my eyebrows...

You might have seen the video featuring American soldiers urinating on dead Afghan bodies. The 40-second clip, showing four men in combat gear exposing their genitals and relieving themselves whilst making bad jokes ("Have a great day buddy, golden like a shower!"), went around the world quickly and sparked outrage and a possible diplomatic row between Washington and Kabul. Even the Pentagon spokesman said the video was deeply troubling, and added "Whoever it was, and whatever the circumstances, it is egregious behaviour." Understandable, right? 

In a sense - a very weird one, that is, because the comparison I am about to make is more farfetched than a massive cruise ship running aground off the Italian coast, because the captain felt like waving his family (and a few other people, may they rest in peace) goodbye - this all reminds me of a discussion I had when I was 21 years old. I used to be a member of WINA at that time, the student organization associated to our mathematics department. As a matter of fact, I was in charge of taming the freshmen at our cantus activities (schachtentemmer, if that makes sense to you). 

To be more precise, this also implied that I had the final responsibilities over the student initiation ceremony (for those of you who are not familiar with this: it's a kind of passage rite, involving lots of beer, some nudity, oodles of ingredients to make pancakes and, of course, even more beer). Even today, I can still clearly recall that one particular moment when some of my fellow WINA members asked me whether they were allowed to 'wash' the students that very night. When I asked them what they meant by that, they gave me a 'you-idiot, isn't-that-plain-obvious'-look and added "Spit on them, of course!". I wasn't shocked, I knew far worse stories from other student organizations, but I obviously answered that they weren't. Because to me, student initiations were (and still are) all about recruiting people, engaging them in social activities and offering them a night of fun to remember for the rest of their lives - despite the alcohol. As opposed to what some people believe, it is not about humiliating people. 

So why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with US soldiers urinating on Afghan war victims, facing severe punishment because of (and I quote) this apparent desecration of the dead as a violation of our nation's military regulations and of international laws of war prohibiting such disgusting and immoral actions? I will tell you why: because this reasoning pisses me off badly. I find it very ironic - in a bad sense of the word - that people are judged as immoral because of something they did during a fucking war. It wasn't a cantus, nor a social activity meant to bring people closer together or to offer them an experience to remember forever (I am afraid that soldiers are returning with enough experiences they'd rather not remember). It happened during a conflict which, by its very definition, leads to mortality and human behaviour defying what we consider to be 'right'.

I am no expert, nor a philosopher - merely a pacifist with a humble opinion I feel like sharing - but according to me it doesn't make sense to make rules about what is okay and what is not during a war. Because the act of declaring and fighting a war itself is not okay. Period. Who are we to judge people who were actually trained to kill other people, from behind our desks or the comfort zones we tend to call 'houses'? Do not get me wrong (repeat twice!), I am by no means saying that what these soldiers did is morally right, but I am questioning the very concept of making rules about something that should not be in the first place. Amen. 

Quantum of doubt

When I was a teenager, I hated physics. And I sucked at it too. I remember one time having to calculate the amount of air pressure within a sealed water bottle. Triumphantly I quickly wrote down: 0. Because, I reckoned, since there is a cap on the bottle, that prevents the pressure from the outside air getting into the bottle. Of course, I was wrong. But I remember sharply - yes, with all the sharpness you can expect from a 14-year-old boy who was publicly laughed at by his alcoholic physics teacher for that answer - that no one bothered to explain why I was wrong. I just sucked at physics (like I sucked at geography or musical education) and that was that.

Today I know that I didn’t hate physics because I sucked at it, but because nothing we were ever taught in high school physics was interesting enough for me to want to try and be better at it. Indeed, for our class (that got only one hour of physics a week) the most interesting chapters were dropped with the message ‘You guys won’t understand this anyway’. And so physics became a kind of applied mathematics. All I remember us doing was calculating things like how quickly a drop of water falling from a cloud would hit the ground (remember F_z?). For someone like me, who was basically only interested in stories and therefore forever looking for the why behind everything, it was torture. Because no one ever talked about the whys. Physics, from the Greek word for ‘the things of nature’, should be about explaining how and why our physical world behaves the way it does. But we never heard anything about that. I guess if you asked our teachers they would have said that that was way too difficult for us.

Yet one year ago, probably almost to the day in fact, I was waiting with Fred for a Japanese train to arrive (Japanese trains are never late, so we must have been early) and I was listening to him explaining Einstein’s relativity theory and I realised that, when properly explained, even the most fundamental physics are not difficult at all. With ever growing eyes and ears and even brain, it seemed, I suddenly understood why distance and time are ultimately relative. I still rank that very moment firmly within the top five of interesting insights I’ve ever had. For one, because Einstein’s discovery is mind-blowing, but also because I realised then and there that physics can be interesting. In fact, it’s probably the most interesting thing there is.

Now yesterday evening I had another ‘physical’ experience, so to say, while watching the BBC documentary ‘A Night with the Stars’ (watch it here on YouTube). In the program, Manchester University physics professor Brian Cox explained the rudimentary elements of quantum theory which accounts for just about everything, so it seems. It answers questions like why it is that even though atoms consist of more than 99,9% empty space, you don’t fall through your chair while reading this. Or why it is when I rub my hands, every atom in the universe instantly changes ever so slightly (something to do with energy levels of electrons). Or why you can put something in a box, preferably a rather small one, wait a while (okay, a rather long while) and have a reasonable chance that whatever you put in the box will not be there anymore when you open it. Fascinating stuff, really, discovered by mostly young researchers who must have had a brain running on kerosene.

In fact, the longer I watched the documentary, the more I started thinking about these geniuses of quantum theory, people like Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli or Werner Heisenberg, and the amazing discoveries they made. And I must confess that suddenly I was insanely jealous of them.

Indeed, being in academic research myself (but about literature for God’s sake!) I suddenly felt like an imposter. Really, I asked myself, has any scholar in the humanities ever produced anything as staggeringly true as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (pun not intended)?

I mean, just look at it. Even if you don’t understand it (like me), you have to realise one thing. This is a mathematical formula, which means that it is universally true: always and everywhere, for every fucking particle in the whole Goddamn universe!

Indeed, nothing we scholars in the humanities will ever put down about anything, no matter how hard we research it and how much we think about it, will be able to boast a fraction of the value Heisenberg’s discovery. And that’s a bit of a blow. Especially since no one in humanities and particularly in my small field seems to care very much about this.

Sure, we can’t all be Nobel Prize winners and research in the humanities is fundamentally different to physics, but what annoys me is that lately it seems no one around me is truly trying to push the boundaries of what we know anymore. Academic research should be about formulating, testing and refining hypotheses in an open, but ever critical environment. Yet lately, it seems that a lot of what I see in my small field boils down to formulating clichés, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, refining the art of looking smart in a self-important, but ever empty environment.

After all, we might have been the people who invented the names ‘alpha’ and ‘beta sciences’, but after yesterday, I’m having real doubts about the value judgement seemingly implied in this alphabetical order. Because I seriously ask myself: is what I’m doing as good (for lack of a better term) as what a physicist does?

Truth be told: I’m not so sure anymore…

Les autres

Today I was at the baker’s at exactly 11:39 am. It might seem a pretty random or average time, but when you know the area I live in, it’s not. You see, it’s a pretty bad idea to go to the baker’s or the grocery store here between the hours of 12 and 1 pm, and between 4 and 5 pm. The reason is that I live pretty close to several schools and at those times these shops are swamped with children getting sandwiches, potato chips, sodas, etcetera.

So imagine my surprise when I found that today at 11:39 the baker’s was already swamped with cackling teenage girls and boasty schoolboys. Crap. I knew they would all be ordering those very time-consuming baguettes with chicken-curry spread and stuff like that, but on the other hand I needed to eat too, didn't I? So there was nothing for it. I had to wait. About 15 minutes to be exact.

Which, of course, is not a disaster. After all, this is supposed to be my day off. Still, I was pretty annoyed. I kept wondering where those kids came from. I mean, when we were young, school wasn’t out until about 12 (11.50, I think), so what were they doing here? However, with some of them, I couldn’t tell whether they might be university students or not. I mean, nowadays (oh yes, grandpa Fred is back!) I can’t honestly tell whether some of these girls are 15 or 20.

So anyway, while I was waiting at the baker’s, I began to think about being annoyed by other people, as it had happened to me a few times the previous days. Last Friday evening, for instance, while I was in my car (carpooling with a friend, mind you) on the ring road where traffic was just awful, I had the same feeling. Or two days later, when I made the very bad decision of checking out the Fnac store on a ‘shopping Sunday’, which was just swarming with people.

At times like that I find myself quite honestly wondering: “What are all these people doing here?” Really, sometimes I want to go up to them and ask them: “What are you doing here? What possible, good reason can you have for being here? Are you sure you’re not here just to annoy me?” As Sartre said: L’enfer c’est les autres.

Of course I’m being a self-centred ass here, but I’m fairly certain most of us feel like this once in a while. Other people can be so annoying. And the strange, even scary, part is that we’re not annoyed because of what these people do (although that doesn’t always help either!). We are annoyed because of the basic fact that they’re there.

Which is not that surprising. Indeed, to a certain extent it's impossible for anyone to come loose from the way we experience reality, which is always opposed to the way everybody else experiences reality. I mean: I’m me, and I may wonder what it’s like to be someone else, but I’ll never know for sure. (When I was a child I sometimes played with the thought that the whole world was an elaborate conspiracy and that only I was real and other people robots or aliens acting the part of people. I was a strange child, mind you).

But the thing is: this is a dangerous emotion, and what’s more (so I thought waiting for yet another kid specifying his order: ‘egg, but no cucumber and carrots instead of lettuce on my spicy-tuna-brown bread baguette please’): it’s illogical. Indeed, if I am an ego, then so is everybody else. And if I divide the world into ‘me’ and ‘other people’, then other people do the same. And in their view, I am other people.

By then it was my turn at the baker’s. I politely asked for a brown loaf and one with raisins (love those). But as I was walking out and passed the school children sitting outside enjoying their sandwiches and baguettes, I was still thinking about my paradoxical conclusion of me being other people. Logic then dictated that if hell is other people, than hell is me too. Or in the words of a T-shirt the biggest bully in our old neighbourhood used to wear: ‘Save the world, kill yourself’. And only then I realise how ironic it is that I often secretly wished he would follow his own advice.

Dutty Yea!

Warning: this is going to be one dirty blog post. Not for the faint hearted…

On a typical day the moment I step into the shower, is the time I start to think. And by now, you know what that means. A non-stop pondering of the whys, hows and what ifs of everything around me. But today the thinking did not only start in the shower, it was also about said shower. And more precisely about keeping clean in general.

I mean, have you never wondered how truly dirty a human being is? Really, think about it. I find it unbelievable how much work we need to put in just to keep our bodies acceptable to other people and even to ourselves.

To start, over the course of any given day or night our skin will produce so much oil and sweat that we need to wash every inch of it with water and soap or shower gel. That means face, arms, legs, back, front, elbows, pinkie finger and so on. And if you are female, there’s a good chance you’ll need to rub many of these areas with lotion afterwards. Or that you’ll preface the procedure with an assortment of peeling, scrubbing, rubbing or whatever it is you do with those cotton pads…

Next there’s the issue of hair. With humans, hair falls into two categories: wanted and unwanted. Most of the wanted hair resides on the top of your skull. It will, just like the rest of your body, get dirty but you can take care of that with shampoo. The downside of this, however, is that it results in your hair looking like crap – with descriptions varying from that ‘carpet’, ‘bush’, ‘German helmet’ or ‘bale of hay on top of my head’. So you’ll need to use either gel, wax, spray or all of the above to get it back into an aesthetically acceptable state.

The unwanted hair is a more complex problem, since it’s gender-specific. If you’re male, unwanted hair is found in your nose, ears, on your back and shoulders, and of course on certain regions of your face. We tend to shave these (although opinions on this do vary somewhat). If you’re female, however, unwanted hair is found not only in the aforementioned regions, but virtually everywhere that is not the top of your skull. And here is the bad news: society doesn’t really offer any other possibility than getting rid of it. And mind you, shaving is an option, but you’d better go for a more painful solution like waxing, plucking or epilating. You know, just to be sure…

Moving on, we get to finger and toe nails. Yes, over the course of 25 million years we have evolved from hairy primates to homo sapiens sapiens and basically since then we have not needed to be able to climb trees or kill rabbits with our sharpened nails, but that doesn’t keep them from growing. So every two to three weeks you’ll need to clip these. And just a point of warning: you might want to avoid clipping your fingernails with the same scissors as your toenails. Just saying. (And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!)

Then there’s the issue with your ears and nose, which also need special cleaning strategies. In the case of your ears it’s relatively simple. You take a cotton swab and clean out whatever shade of yellow, orange or brown is in there. (Oh, don’t act disgusted, as if you don’t inspect the harvest!) The nose, however, is trickier. Actually, you need a delicate technique of applying pressure and holding a piece of cloth in front of it, to get the filth out of there. You may not realise it, but it takes us years to perfect the art of blowing our nose. Just look at how long a toddler keeps walking around with that snail trail on his upper lip!

Additionally you’ll need to take care of your teeth. Two, some say three times a day; and it involves a brush and some kind of minty paste. The minty part – and this I find quite upsetting – is, let’s face it, to get rid of any unpleasant smells. In the mouth for heaven’s sake! If you really want to go to town, you can also get some wire (for flossing) and mouth water (if the smell is really bad).

Finally, there’s the nether regions. You know, that special place where your stomach ends and your legs start. If you look down once in a while, you’ll find two things there (front and back) that’ll need quite some cleaning too. I’m not going to go into detail, just remember these simple sayings: (for the back) One more time can never hurt, and (for the front) If every man sweeps his own doorstep, the city will soon be clean.

Umpf! It was pain in the ass, pardon the pun, just to write all this stuff down, let alone do it. Oily skin, unwanted hair, toenails, bad breath, nasty privates and a smelly bum. We’re a disaster if it comes to cleanliness. And just think about the way food and drink leave our bodies! Really, couldn’t nature come up with a better solution than that? Couldn’t we like, I don’t know, shed colourless and especially odourless cubes from time to time?

Truly, if God created man in his own image, I think the old guy must be one dirty bastard…

Bicycle madness

If cycling were a poker game, my style would be loose-aggressive. It might be plain compensation for the fact I don't own a car, but when I ride my bicycle I consider myself to be the king of the road. Which translates itself into a pretty offensive way of getting from point A to B (feel free to replace this euphemism by a sentence involving 'my life' and 'an old school strategic board game which - under the pretext of spending an evening with friends - has the sole purpose of driving a wedge between people') and getting rid of that universal amount of traffic-related frustration while pedaling the streets. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time a relative or friend of mine gets my middle finger shoved into the face because he or she honks the horn. Despite the fact that this is (more than) often meant as a simple 'Hello there!', my brain seems to interpret traffic horns as insults, and therefore reacts by extending the longest member of the digit family.

Anyway, this post is not meant as an excuse to sum up bicycle frustrations (although I just have to mention the biggest of them all: shattered glass on my path, often neatly shoveled onto the bicycle lane by the nitwit who wasn't able to steer clear of a car accident in the first place), but rather as an excuse to share my ideas on something that has been puzzling me for a while now: the fact that some people enjoy the act of smoking while riding their bike. There are definitely non-trivial actions which can be performed on a bike, while actually riding it. I haven't tried it myself, but professional cyclist seem to be able to pee while riding their bike. I do have experience with the following activities though: skipping tracks on the iPod, tying my shoes, making notes, sending text messages (often: "Will be there in 10 minutes, I am on my way!"), getting stuff from my backpack or preparing lectures.

Smoking while riding a bike, however, doesn't make any sense. At all. You don't see people eating hamburgers while jogging, do you? Although it would actually be a good idea to have top floor burger restaurants in tall buildings without elevators only: the Mac Stamina, your stairway to junk heaven! The thing is, I am more than willing to understand that you can enjoy a cigarette after dinner, or while going out(side), but how can you possibly do that on a bike? Unless traffic stresses you to an extent which goes beyond my understanding, or you just want to make perfectly clear why you are excessively panting and easily out of breath, holding the culprit in your hand. Because in that case, erhm...

Nah... It still doesn't make sense.

Holy shit

Yesterday I was not a happy camper. And although the reason for my foul mood wasn’t primarily that (surprise surprise) I was once again going through a commute from hell, it sure didn’t help either. By the time I was on my fourth train that morning and still hadn’t reached my destination to start the working day, I was pretty depressed. Now the train in question was packed with people trying to do the same as I was, but there was also a fairly large number of American students on it, all girls. And of course they did the classic American girl thing: they talked. Quite loudly, I might add.

But rather than the sheer volume of their quacking, it was their language that angered me. It really was my very own United States of Whatever on that train (click here if you don’t know what I’m talking about). In essence, this boils down to endless conversations consisting of nothing but ‘Yeah, whatever…’, ‘And then she was all like…’, ‘But I ain’t sayin’ nuthin’, knowwhamean?’ and similar capital offenses against the Queen’s Tongue. And of course that had me going for the rest of the day…

Indeed, it suddenly dawned on me that throughout any given day I’m at least several times annoyed by bad language. I already mentioned people using the noun ‘paranoia’ for the adjective ‘paranoid’ the day before yesterday. Now some of you might say, ‘Well, is it really that bad that the language is evolving into using ‘paranoia’ both as a noun and an adjective? A philologist like you should realise that language changes constantly and that there’s not really any objective reason to label something good or bad if it’s used by a community of speakers’. Well touché, I guess someone woke up with a linguistic mind this morning! But you see, I’m not really trying to decide what’s right and what’s wrong here. What I’m saying is that when we use poor language (in the literal sense of a language being less rich than before the change), we might end up using poor thinking.

For instance, most English speakers don’t know the difference between disinterested and uninterested. Now uninterested means you are not interested in something, as in ‘She gave him an uninterested look’, while disinterested means you take no interest in something, as in ‘To be a good referee you have to be disinterested’. Most people would use both to express the same, and many have already forgotten disinterested or consider it a posh alternative. But think about it: when we confuse both words or ultimately end up with only one, doesn’t that also mean that we’re losing a way to distinguish between two very different things? And doesn’t it fit wonderfully well with modern society that we are forgetting the notion of being disinterested (and objective) and favouring the notion of being uninterested (and - often - selfish)?

Anyway, to illustrate how bad language can ultimately turn into very bad thinking, or perhaps vice versa (I’m not too sure in this case), consider this picture of a sign posted in the bathroom of my working place. It’s been annoying me for months on end now, mainly because I cannot for the life of me decide what it actually means. I suppose the person who drafted it wasn’t too careful with the way he expressed himself and there you have the logical consequence: utter nonsense.


(for those who don’t speak Dutch: ‘Please put the toilet brush back clean and dry in its holder. Thank you kindly in advance!’)

But Holy Mackerel, what does that mean ‘put the toilet brush back clean and dry’? Clean and dry? You do know I’m using this brush to clean off my shit from inside a wet toilet, don’t you? That’s what it’s for! How on earth am I going to keep it from getting dirty and wet? Or, alternatively, do you expect me to get it clean and dry after I have used it? But what do you want me to do? I can’t very well rinse it out in the sink and then use the blow dryer to dry it, can I?

For God’s sake, people. Let’s try to express ourselves articulately, shall we?

Thank you in advance.

Panopticon

When Fred wrote a piece about Isis’ album Panopticon yesterday, I thought for sure he was going to explain what exactly a panopticon is. He does know, I’m sure of it, because we talked about it some time ago. Anyway, I guess his prediction that it wouldn’t be the last time for the word to be used in a blog, will come true even more quickly than he thought!

The Panopticon (from the Greek πᾶν ὀπτικόν, ‘all visible’) was originally a type of building designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Think of it like this. Imagine you need to make a prison for a thousand people but can’t afford more than one prison guard. How can you control that many people with that small amount of man power?

Bentham came up with the following solution to create an incredibly a cheap prison system. Build a prison with a circular structure and an ‘inspection house’ in the middle from which the one prison guard is able to watch the inmates who live in cells around the perimeter of the building. Like this:



Now make sure that the guard can watch the prisoners at all times and that the prisoners do not know when they are watched. You could do this, for instance, with one way glass - you know, the mirror/glass in the interrogation room in movies (Bentham’s nineteenth-century method was slightly different, but never mind). Now, in this way no prisoner of the Panopticon would ever try to escape, because they would never be sure whether the guard was watching them or not. In this way, one man could guard a thousand prisoners, and more. Moreover, he wouldn’t even have to work all the time. There would be no way for the prisoners to tell if he was on duty or not. In fact, if you think about it, you wouldn’t even need a guard at all. No prisoner would ever be the wiser. Indeed, the Panopticon leaves the watching to the watched, so to say, and thus operates by ‘power of mind over mind’, as Bentham put it, rather than by physically guarding people.

Over time (and largely thanks to the analysis of this concept by Michel Foucault) the panopticon came to stand metaphorically for the hierarchical social structure of modern society and its increasing tendency to observe and control people. Indeed, nowadays ‘they’ can see you in the street with CCTV, they can locate you with satellite imaging, they can listen to your cell phone conversations, they can see the websites you’ve visited, what you bought with your credit card and so forth. So I guess you could say we effectively live in a panopticon today.

However, I’m always slightly annoyed when people then turn paranoid (and even more when they use paranoia as an adjective talking about it) and start shouting Big Brother is watching you! There is, in my mind, one important difference in our case. The panopticon aims to keep prisoners from escaping, or generally stated to keep people from doing what’s illegal. So if you are not trying to do anything illegal, what does it matter if you might be watched? You don’t even know for sure if you’re ever really watched or who does the watching for that matter.

Think of it like this. Suppose there is a chance – but it’s not a certainty – that at some point someone – but you won’t know who – could see you in the shower – but you won’t know when it happens, provided it does. Would you then be afraid to take a shower? I don’t believe I would, actually.

So I’m not too crazy about all the shouting in the media that our privacy is being invaded. Come to think of it, I’m glad someone’s watching my streets, my credit card or the internet our children visit. So watch me all you want, Mr Big Brother, thou lonely guard of the Panopticon, I couldn’t care less.

But apparently the sludge metal band Isis did mind and that’s why they called their third album Panopticon, because it deals with ‘the proliferation of surveillance technologies throughout modern society and the government’s role in that spread’.

Such cry babies those metal heads...

Get it on!

I guess, nay hope, that you’re probably not too surprised to hear that Fred and Fred are pretty big fans of comedy. I mean, we do try to be funny (we hope you’ve at least noticed the intention), but of course we are very aware of the fact that we are nowhere near our examples. And who might they be? Well, I believe Fred is quite fond of standup comedians like Eddie Izzard, Steven Wright, Jimmy Carr and of all-round talent Ricky Gervais, whereas I’m more of a BBC comedy man, enjoying Green Wing, Little Britain, The Fast Show, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Shooting Stars, and shows like that. Still, I’m no stranger to standup either and especially like Scottish comedians Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges. Now, if you want to know more about all this funny stuff, do leave this blog and Google or YouTube any of the aforementioned names. You’re in for a very, very good laugh. But if you want to get to know something else, I suggest you read on for a while…

Indeed, I have left out one comedian in the list – a man whose nasaly drone (his words) I listen to almost every day. And that man is Adam Carolla. He’s come up a few times on this blog already as the source of one witticism or another, but I’m pretty sure nobody knows who the guy is.

Adam Carolla, born in LA in 1964, used to be a carpet cleaner, a traffic school instructor, a carpenter, a boxing instructor, and a general contracter before getting into the comedy business. He then did radio shows, got several succesful shows on MTV, made a movie and finally got his own morning radio program The Adam Carolla Show. However, in 2009 the very popular radioshow was inexplicably cancelled, and Carolla was out of a job.

And that’s when a stroke of genious hit. Carolla started a daily podcast, also called The Adam Carolla Show, which is available for free on iTunes.


It includes a news cast, a guy with a brain tumor doing funny sound effects (for real!), and games like Blahblah-blog where the guy guess which celebrity wrote a certain pompous quote on his or her blog. The show also features interviews with guests like Christoph Walz (the German colonel from Inglourious Basterds), Morgan Spurlock (the guy from Supersize Me) or Michael Moore. In May 2011 the show became the Guinness World Records holder for the most downloaded podcast after being downloaded a whopping 59,574,843 times from March 2009 to 16 March, 2011!

So now, every morning after getting out of the shower, I put my iPod in the speakerbox and listen to this podcast. And I listen to it during my commute, while doing the dishes, when shopping; pretty much whenever I have the time, really. And I absolutely love it.

Why?

Well, Carolla’s prime talent is … complaining – something I’m quite fond of myself actually (if you hadn’t noticed yet). Indeed, one of the many bits that come along in the podcast is called What Can’t Adam Complain About?, a part where listeners can call in and challenge Carolla to complain about something that they think is impossible to complain about. I’ve heard him complain with dolphins, Ferraris, even oxygen, and it’s always super funny. But during the show too, Carollo will complain about just about anything. About flavoured iced tea, for example, saying “Iced tea has a flavour! It’s tea flavour. We need to call peach or passion fruit iced tea something else so I don’t end up with a cold drink tasting like potpourri and shit when I order iced-tea!”

But complaining isn’t Carolla’s only talent. He’s quick as a fox and his tongue is razor sharp, which allows for hilarious quotes. I’ve often had people on the train looking at me in a funny way because I was ‘laughing like a hyena’ (again, Carolla’s words) at one of his quotes. Here’s a couple for you to enjoy:

• "Having sex without a condom is like riding a roller coaster with diarrhea. You can't just throw your hands up and enjoy it."
• "I give women two types of orgasms. Fake and none."
• "When black men get fat they become bouncers. When I put on 30lbs I start looking like Truman Capote."
• "He doesn't sound like a guy who's done a onesome, let alone a threesome."
• "Chicks named Tammy have a greater chance of actually driving a Mercedes than a chick named Mercedes."
• "You think you're Napoleon? You're nuts. You talk to Jesus? You're nuts."
• "You might be an eighth Cherokee, but you're still seven eighths asshole."
• "My philosophy is: figure out what you want to do in life then take a nap."

(source: @carollaquotes twitter-account)

So, get it on with Carolla (his catchphrase, repeated at the start of every podcast) and check out the show at http://www.adamcarolla.com. It’s free and funny as hell!

Thank you and mahalo (his Hawaian-style sign-off).

Bogey-Wogey

I'd say 'bogeys' is a misnomer. I don't know about you, but to me it sounds like candy. Red candy, to be more precise, shaped like a rabbit and slightly sour-tasting. The kind of candy that makes the muscles between your mouth and ears contract spontaneously when you have more than one.

As it stands, bogeys are pieces of dried nasal mucus. Dry snot, if that sounds more familiar to you. And if you still don't know what I'm talking about here, then visit the nearest primary school and turn over a random chair: the chunky pieces attached to the bottom of the seat might ring a bell. Unless they are pink of course, that used to be bubblegum.

You might be wondering where this is heading to, as the subject of today is not exactly the most tasteful one (we all tried it, no need to be judgemental here) and bordering a line which you don't necessarily want to see crossed - right? The thing is, this Fred is having one of those days in which my head seems to be filled to the brim with snot. I have no sense of smell at all today, and a voice which is so nasal that you could easily mistake me for Fran Drescher (The Nanny, anyone?).

But a Fred wouldn't be a real Fred if he didn't try to look at the slimy gooey stuff from the scientific point of view. And this is why I spent the fifteen-minute walk from my office to the lecture hall thinking about mucus.

And it led me to a baffling realization: we can't tell whether our own snot stinks!

Raclette

I suppose you are all familiar with that Swiss cheese dish called raclette? The funny thing about raclette is that it is one of those foods like sprouts or peanut butter. Either you love it, or you hate it.

And boy, do I hate raclette!

For me, it’s probably the worst food in the world, or at least a very close second to ambergris. Now there’s two ways to have raclette: one was handed down to us in a direct line from the Cro-Magnon-people, and the other is woosier than wearing Speedos.

Option one: you take half a ball of cheese, you slice it in half with a sword, and cook it on a flat stone in front of a open fire (brought to you since 30.000 BC).

Option two: you go buy prefabricated slices of seventeen different kinds of perfumed raclette-cheese and everyone at the dinner table gets to cook them themself, in weird looking little pans.

But what is it about heating up the cheese that is supposed to make it better? I’m perfectly happy with having a slice of cheese on toast. But when it comes to scooping up boiling yellow stuff from what looks like a pan a three-year-old would cook plastic vegetables in, I’m out.

Anyway, I'm telling you this because a few days ago I was having dinner at a friend’s house, a good friend whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time. And immediately when I went in, I saw the bad news. There it was on the dinner table in shiny chrome: a raclette stove, which looked to me like a restaurant kitchen for Leprichauns after Xzibit just came by to pimp it.

Anyhow, I knew what was coming and already started making excuses: “Errm, I’m actually not that hungry, you known?”. But of course, to no avail. I was sat down at the table and started the slow, labourious task of eating pan after pan after fucking little pan of this horrible melted cheese. Because having raclette is like getting crucified: it takes hours. And when finally it has become socially acceptable to stop, people do that retarded polite thing, where they say (tough man voice): “Come on, don’t tell me you’re full, Fred! Come on, mate. I don’t recognize you!”.

And I want to yell: “Don’t recognize me? I don’t blame you! I’ve had twenty seven of those little pans! I probably look like throwing up! Tomorrow I’ll be crapping out Gruyère scented candles! Hell, I wouldn’t be surpised to find horny mice trying to French kiss me tonight!”

(sigh) But you know how it is. I’m a polite person, so I pulled a stiff upper lip (it was literally stiff with cheese) and reluctantly shoved another one of those Barbie-doll pans under the heater. And then, oh then, at that exact moment the guy’s wife came with a digital camera, and she pointed it at the two of us and yelled…

…right. And then I lost it.

Guess that’s one less Christmas card this year.

Strange jobs...

When it comes to people having strange jobs, nothing beats the bailiff (aka de gerechtsdeurwaarder). Seriously, what exactly is it that these so-called legal officers do for a living? Break into your house and sell your stuff on the street? Sorry, some Eastern Europeans do that too. Faster, better and they don't get paid for it.

Bailiffs also need to be present at national lottery drawings, to make sure that nothing goes wrong. Erhm, excuse me? As far as I understood, a lottery drawing involves drawing a fixed number of coloured balls from an automated shuffling machine. Can somebody please explain to me what can go wrong with that? Look, I'll make an official promise: next time I come anywhere near that lottery machine, I'll throw a dead Smurf into it. I can't wait to see that bailiff's face.

- Hello boss, you've got a minute there?

- Uh, yes? What's going on?

- The lottery machine spit out this strange thing tonight.

- I don't know what it is, but it's definitely not a ball.

- What? Can you describe it for me?

- Eh, it's blue...ish, and it smells like the past tense conjugation of an animal. You've got any idea boss?

- Hm. Doesn't sound like tofu then...

On the other hand, I do envy the bailiff's job, because they get the opportunity to attend all kinds of world record attempts. The first time I saw the Guinness Book of World Records, I thought someone had compiled an encyclopedia on exemplary acts of human stupidity. I mean, precisely how deranged was your childhood when your life goal is to obtain a world record title for having the longest fingernails on earth? Or how about being recognized as our planet's fastest hot dog eater? Some nouns are just not meant to be combined with a superlative, right?

To me, one of the funniest world record titles is the one in barbecuing. I'm not joking: there exists a World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. Often won by the Germans by the way. I have to be honest with you, I don't see the point in this. Man has been grilling meat ever since the Big Bang. And since when did we decide to crown world champions in disciplines that are basically evolutionary instincts? If that is the line of thought, I would like to see a World Championship Fruit Picking Contest for Woman. Which would probably be won by the Germans too, they're more or less trained to stretch their arms, remember? Or how about the annual World Championship in Running Away from Dangerous Situations? This could be the only one in which the Germans consistently end up in second place.

- Scheisse, we're running out of beer!

And then, with a small lead, the Jewish world champion, anxiously looking over his shoulder:

- Ya ben shel kah-ba, the Germans!

Old boy

I recently bought a cap. Not a Yankees’ or NBA cap, an old guy’s flat cap. Like this:

And I must say, reactions have not been unequivocally positive, to say the least. One of the most heard criticisms is that it makes me look old. However, I don’t mind. Being a man I have the good fortune that looking older isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also, I like the cap. It keeps me from getting wet and keeps my ears warm when it’s nippy at 6 o’clock in the morning. But there’s another reason why I like my old guy’s cap, a deeper, more secret desire. To be honest, sometimes I can’t wait to be, let’s say, seventy. They say there’s a boy in every man, but in me there’s an old boy as well. I’m serious; being seventy must make life so much easier! Let me explain.

Primo it would solve my ongoing problems with hair. Obviously the hair on your head is hidden safely under the cap, so you needn’t worry about getting the correct style anymore! Also, when you’re a seventy-year-old guy, that means you can shave in patches and for instance leave long hairs on your Adam's apple. In fact, you needn’t worry about any facial hair whatsoever and can just ignore those hairs protruding from your nostrils or your ears, and start sporting Gandalf-like bushy eyebrows.

Secondo when you’re a seventy-year-old guy, you don’t need to think about what to wear anymore. You can just sit around all day with a wife beater on and old (preferably stained) trousers. Also very much on the plus side: you never need to take off your slippers anymore and you can even wear your hat inside on account of the stupid excuse that ‘There’s a mean draught in here!’, regardless of whether it’s November or July.

Terzo you don’t need to be polite anymore. You’re now allowed to wave your fist at noisy youths in the street shouting a hoarse ‘Goddammit!’, without them considering beating you up. Also you’re not obliged anymore to participate in conversations about stuff you’re not interested in, but you can either dose off in the middle of them, or just change the subject whenever you want without offending anyone.

Quarto you can completely indulge in strange eating habits like having the same sandwich every day, cutting sausage through the plastic wrapper, wolfing down stuff from tins others wouldn’t feed their cat, or proclaiming that ‘There’s nothing wrong with having a beer or two, look at me, I’m seventy and I never felt better!’.

Quinto you don’t need to be au courant anymore. No more ploughing through newspapers or diligently watching the news to get the latest in politics or global economy. You can just rely on the old cliché that in your time 'prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders', to quote Mary Schmich again. Moreover you are now allowed to get completely out of touch with technology and just stare at a cell phone, DVD player or even microwave oven until one of your grandkids programs it for you.

All in all, for me, being a seventy-year-old guy equals being able to do exactly what you want: use obsolete words, hum strange songs no one knows anymore, watch TV all goddamn day while complaining about it, sit around listening to the sound of your nose growing into a freakishly big size, and most of all, wear a flat cap without anyone thinking anything of it!

Take that, flat cap-haters!

Animals in Advertisements. Part Two…

…Roosters, Tigers, Monkeys and even more Frogs

When I complained earlier about the nonsensical use of animals in advertisements, I didn’t even mention the worst of them all: cereal. Indeed the Kellogg’s company seems the absolute champion of animal (and consumer) abuse in their advertisements.


Take the regular Kellogg’s Cornflakes, for instance, which has a rooster on the box. Okay, I get it; the rooster is the bird par excellence that wakes people up in the morning. But first of all, why is this one green? Ever seen a green rooster? Surely staring at a green cock (pardon my French) first thing in the morning cannot be conducive for your mental health. But actually this is not my major complaint about Kellogg’s Cornflakes. The thing that puzzles me most is why this particular branch still exists. Surely there’s no worse breakfast imaginable than these flavourless flakes, which by the way look as if someone put an explosive vest on a piece of corn. Frankly, they taste like chicken feed. But wait a minute…


When I was about seven the family breakfast table suddenly had Kellogg’s Frosties as an alternative to regular cornflakes. Which meant that flavourless was now being replaced by something sweeter than a koala bear with a funny hat. From the frying pan into the fire… And it was no improvement in the looks department either. Frosties figures a tiger on the box, and whether we want it or not, this tiger is a fucking celebrity. Not only does every human on the planet know its smiling face, we know his name and even his favourite hobby! He’s called ‘Tony’ and plays basketball. What on earth? I’m trying to have breakfast, not a first date! But the one thing that bugs me most is the red scarf. What kind of artist comes up with giving a tiger a bright red scarf? What possible use can a tiger have for a scarf? Frankly, it looks a bit gay to me.



Nevertheless, it’s actually a fairly general stupidity of artists and cartoonists drawing up animals. Donald Duck, for instance, is famous for wearing only a baret and a vest, and we will all fondly remember Plons (family name: The Crazy Frog), who - rather alarmingly for a persona in a children’s program - only wore very tight Speedo swimming trunks. And sure enough, Kellogg’s got on to the idea of the frog with their brand of Smacks. For some reason, this one wears a cap and a jacket. Which (again) makes zero sense. Why the hell would a frog need a cap or a jacket? To not get wet? If they’d given the cap and the jacket to the one cleaning toilets, I would have understood. But not the one praising the puffy Smacks…

And finally, there’s the chocolaty flavoured Coco Pops, which occasioned the birth of a monkey called 'Coco'. This one clearly is the most pimped out of the cereal animals, as he’s donning a whole wardrobe. Not only does he have a baseball cap on, but he’s also wearing jeans and a T-shirt with his name on it. A casually clad, but slightly self-absorbed monkey, seems to be the image Kellogg’s wanted to portray. The question here, I think, is why does it need to be a monkey? Aha, you’ll deftly reply, because Coco Pops are brown, and so is Coco! But really, think about it. Isn’t that a bit racist?

Beaver bashing, duck and frog hygiene habits, canine scatology, cocky behaviour, tiger-related gender issues, amphibian paedophilia and finally monkey racism, do you now see the complexity of the problem with animals in advertisements?

Thank you.

Animals in Advertisements. Part One…

…Beavers, Ducks, Frogs and Dogs.

Okay, I know I’ve already talked about this briefly, but after today I’ve really had it. Let me be formal: I hate animals in advertisements. So I’m going to complain about it. At length. At such length even that I’m already announcing a second round of complaining about this topic. So keep your eyes peeled for Thursday’s Animals in Advertisements. Part Two…

But why, you’ll ask, do you object to the smiling polar bear on the coke bottle or the cheery elephant on the pack of paper towels? I’ll tell you why. Because it makes no sense. Zero sense at all.

This morning I was acutely reminded of this when I noticed a giant billboard poster for an outdoor equipment shop (you know, fleece sweaters, Nordic walking sticks, igloo tents, that sort of thing) that features a beaver in its logo. Instantaneously it ruined my whole day. I mean, think about it. Who comes up with this kind of thing? First of all, beavers are always fat and I’m pretty sure that’s not the image you want to convey. Second, beavers are good swimmers and I doubt you’ll find lots of swimming-related stuff in an outdoor equipment shop. And third, beavers build dams. Which means they’re the exact opposite of going out into the wild and exploring. Surely there’s no worse animal than a beaver to use in the logo of an outdoor equipment shop!

However our friendly beaver (oh how I hate its fucking friendly face!) is only a small example of a much larger scale phenomenon. Indeed, whole industries have come to rely on animals for their commercial imagery. For instance, toilet cleaning products or washing up liquid almost always features ducks or frogs. But why ducks or frogs, for God’s sake? Surely, they’re not known to be cleanly animals? In that respect, a cat (constantly licking itself clean) would have made a much better choice. Alternatively one could claim ducks and frogs make sense because of their link with water. But then again, we all agree that washing up liquid or toilet cubes featuring a fish would be ridiculous, so that’s not it. So why do people use ducks and frogs in these advertisements? And most puzzlingly: why can both be used to advertise products for your toilet and for your dishes? Is their no inherent difference between both?

But the one that pisses me off the most is dogs for toilet paper. Oh yes, we all love the cuddly Labrador puppies dolling around with a roll of soft toilet paper. But again, think about it. Dogs and toilet paper. Do we really think the animal that will happily shit anywhere, anytime is a good way to advertise a product about cleaning up faecal matter?

Do we?

Next time: roosters, tigers and even more frogs. Oh goody…