Saturday, June 16, 2007

looking back

News of the demise of Kurt Waldheim is making me oddly nostalgic for simpler, less invasive times, when one could become secretary general of the United Nations without anyone discovering one's Nazi past.

That wouldn't happen today. Today, someone on the UN hiring committee (in the UN HR department? at the headhunting company that supplies the UN with potential secretaries general? I'm a little fuzzy on process here) would google "Kurt Waldheim" and discover his MySpace page, replete with swastikas and glowing reviews of Mein Kampf and "I HEART Hitler" buttons and it would be game over.

Everything was simpler in my day (please don't ask me define exactly when "my day" was, it varies according to my mood - sometimes I'll swear it was the mid-70s glory years of the Montreal Canadiens). Take Maggie Thatcher's invasion of the Falklands. Now there was a war. No "shock and awe" tactics, no precision bombing, no invasion-justifying whoppers about weapons of mass destruction - just Maggie, smacking Argentinians into submission with her handbag. And when it was over, it was over - no counter-insurgents, no suicide sheep bombers, no nothing. I know she was a little long in the tooth for active duty at the time, but I kind of wish they'd dusted her off and sent her into Iraq. (Of course, she and Saddam would probably have gotten along like a house afire and all thoughts of regime change would have been abandoned in favor of a crackdown on the real enemy - the unions.)

But such times are past, gone the way of rotary dial telephones and glass milk bottles and privacy (other things about which I could wax nostalgic, but won't), and it's probably better to embrace the complications of modern existence than to continually bash one's head against them. So I'm going to google "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon" and I'm telling you right now, I'd better like what I see.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

long time no blog

This morning was a sour milk morning - you know, when you take the time to make coffee rather than paying 40,000 kc for a cup at Java Java Java* but then you add the milk and it curdles because long-life milk lasts until June 2011 only when UNOPENED.

So you drink what's left in the coffee pot black because you don't have time to go to the store for more milk because you have to clean the kitty litter box. The "kitties" in question are busy leaving little black paw prints all over your tub and sink and you can't help but ask yourself "What have they ever done for me?" and the answer is, of course, "Nothing." Nor are they ever likely to do anything. Not like that Golden Retriever you heard about on the BBC the other night, the one who basically gave his owner the Heimlich maneuver when she choked on a piece of food. The dog jumped on her chest until the food was dislodged. My cats wouldn't do that. My cats would polish off my dinner then go live with the neighbors. (Above: My cats, dreaming of a life without me.)

As you may have noticed, it has been a month since I posted and I'm still on about my cats, so you clearly haven't been missing anything. Other than an addiction to the Gilmore Girls, a terrifying new Facebook membership, and an unsuccessful attempt to tidy my house and KEEP IT THAT WAY, there's not much to report.




*Some of the names in this post have been changed so I can bitch freely.