Gryffyd Eamonn Dempsey » Foreigners

Thaler

Gryffyd — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:36:02 +0000

There are pros and cons to a weak dollar, but if it gives the Belgians an opportunity to elevate Budweiser from its current position as the King of Lye-flavored Urine Substitutes, then one might say that the good our attenuated currency has brought outweighs the misery it causes our intrepid tourists abroad.

That said, having grown up watching the purchasing value of my father’s salary in the currencies of our host countries swing with rate changes, I can say the debate about the dollar’s slide of recent years lacks historical perspective. This kind of analysis should be required reading for those who claim the world’s reserve currency is in its death throes.

That doesn’t mean that remedies of our current account deficit and national debt aren’t required. They may even be urgent in some cases, but we’re ill served by panic and Chicken Little punditry.

Dumb and dumber

Gryffyd — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:38:51 +0000

Jim Corr is self-evidently a cretin and I should not assist in propagating any cretinous musician’s political views. However, a certain common element to his ravings struck me as worthy of comment. This is the use by these cretins of jargon to give their idiocies a patina of authority. In Corr’s case he refers to a “false flag operation” like he’s some expert in spycraft and disinformation. He’s not; he’s a thick musician who’s been impressed when he’s seen the phrase on whatever lunatic troofer websites he frequents and thinks his using it in turn will impress his audience.

Rosie O’Donnell blathered on about a collapsed building having “defied physics”. The only way a collapsing building defies physics is if it actually falls upward. O’Donnell thinks that she has some inside secret to engineering objections to the collapse of Building 7, but actually she’s just an idiot who’s mindlessly parrotting something she read on a website and that impressed her febrile walnut of a brain.

Tom Cruise said once that he had “studied the history of psychiatry”. No; more likely Cruise once read a wee pamphlet prepared by one of his fellow loony cultists. Said pamphlet was prepared by dredging Dianetics for LRH’s loony views on psychiatry, then boiling those views into a short form that could be understood by the stupider celebrity Scientologists. His “study” of psychiatry was the equivalent of a child studying the back of a breakfast cereal box.

Crikey

Gryffyd — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:49:45 +0000

Being at work today, and only having basic cable at home anyway, I was unable to watch today’s Champion’s League final. I followed the match via BBC live update and that was enough to nearly give me a heart attack. Since my father was watching it, being retired and having more cable than I, I called him right afterwards to make sure he hadn’t had an aneurysm. All is well.

I know I’ll be putting on my Manchester United jersey when I get home this evening.

Being helpful

Gryffyd — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:49:18 +0000

Mrs The Fyd was born and raised in Hawaii. Not only is this a foreign country, it is also a foreign clime and the torpor thus generated has led its culture to develop on a different track from that of the North American continent. It would be vulgar to state that their version of the English language has become bastardized, and to declare it a pidgin might be considered condescending and require one to attend sensitivity training. So let us just posit that it is a frank demotic useful for the tasks of sugar-cane cutting and coconut harvesting and hula dancing (Mrs The Fyd is a long-time student of that primitive art), and the charming idioms of its provenance that creep into Mrs’ speech rarely fail to provoke a smile on my face. Mrs recognizes this indulgence and is grateful for my patient forbearance and my willingness to guide her toward proper speech. However, like many of her kind, she can be stubborn and resistant to progress. Recently she has refused the right path and insists that “pointer finger” (how rude) is an appropriate substitute for that digit we all know as the “index finger”. She has tried to sway me by supplying example after example of that crass phrasing in popular discourse. I contend that the rantings of hip-hop starlets and middle-school Chomskyites are not infallible precursors of rational language change, and I will refrain from their vulgate. I have no doubt that the masses delight in such deviancy, but you won’t find that finger up the Queen’s bum.

Sunday, whilst perusing the funny pages, I reluctantly passed an eye over the Wizard of Id. I doubt that the phrase’s conquest of that particular forum guarantees its future acceptance by learned folks. So, Mrs, Parker and Hart are the last goddamned people I would bring to your defense and I warn you that you bring yourself into disrepute by associating with such types.

Speaking of sweltering climes, I’m sure that the temperature dropping from 96 on the weekend to 59 today cannot be good for the inner ear. It will be good for everything else in Portland, though one might suspect that the throngs of Obama supporters will still appear to be addled by heat.

With regard to presidential candidates, I find keeping this concept in mind to be useful.

Underground

Gryffyd — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:41:37 +0000

I want to emphasize to you that AT NO TIME while I lived in Austria did I keep anybody in a secret room underground, nor was I ever kept in a secret room underground, nor did I ever know anybody who lived in a secret room underground.

On the other hand, one of my favorite places to visit during summers was the Seegrotte; a wonderful place to escape from the heat. That warplanes were built and stored down there during the war added perhaps a slight frisson to the underground chill. Of course one won’t find mention at the website, nor in my memory is it acknowledged at the place itself, that these great technological advances (“2000 workers were employed here to produce one of the first jetfighters of the world, the “Heinkel HE 162 Salamander”") were accomplished with the use of slave labor from the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Honi soit qui mal y pense

Gryffyd — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:52:28 +0000

When Gorgeous George Galloway appeared before the Senate way back when, even some of those who thought he was lying through his oil-smeared pie-hole could admire his artful use of parliamentary rhetoric. In a similar vein, I present an official defending his government’s policy with an élan that Condoleeza Rice was unable to summon when confronted by the witless Barbara Boxer. Here’s French Prime Minister François Fillon:

“Avant d’être tournée contre mon gouvernement, cette motion de censure est tournée contre ceux qui décidèrent avec courage et lucidité d’engager la France dans un processus certes difficile, mais juste”, a-t-il souligné, alors que la décision d’intervenir en Afghanistan avait été prise en 2001 par Jacques Chirac et son Premier ministre socialiste Lionel Jospin. [...] Le retrait, ce serait la défaite. (…) En somme, nous laisserions à nos alliés le soin de régler l’affaire, laissant ainsi entendre que leur victoire ou celle d’al-Qaïda et des Talibans ne nous empêcherait pas de dormir”, a-t-il dit. [...] L’opposition nous accuse d”atlantisme’, façon aimable de nous présenter à la solde de George Bush. Chacun l’aura compris, il s’agit pour eux de surfer sur l’un de nos travers les plus discutables : l’anti-américanisme primaire”, a-t-il dit.

Perhaps it all reads better in French but would sound quotidian in English. More likely it represents a real advantage that comes from having Cabinet-equivalent officials who have to survive equally in the rowdy world of parliamentary politics as well as their bureaucracies. That class of our officialdom might be dominated by too many academics and lawyers to allow for such facility with extemporaneousness.

Speaking of officialdom, Barack Obama has confirmed that I have as much or more foreign policy experience as does he. I always knew I was presidential caliber:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/us/politics/10obama.html?ref=us

I like this quote from McCain’s spokesthing:

“Oh, and as Senator Obama may know, [McCain] has actually spent some time living abroad as well.”