Site update

My mate has finally got around to updating the about page, mostly thanks to the prodding of the masterful A List Apart Hopefully this will make a bit more sense of the drunken ramblings on the rest of the site.

Alchoholics and Christ Killers

My mate drinks sometimes. Sometimes, when he’s drunk, he’ll be talking to a girl he knows and suddenly start telling her how, despite all evidence to the contrary, he’s actually crazy about her and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her for weeks. The girl will, as any sensible woman would, find the nearest sober friend and instruct them that it’s time my mate was taken home. One extremely painful hangover later, my mate’s attention is focussed on laughing off the whole thing.

So, my mate is no stranger to saying stuff he didn’t mean to say However, I’ll let you in on a secret. Every time my mate did something like that he kind of meant it. So, now we get Mad Max drink-driving and declaring that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. (Really? Which side are they on in Kashmir?) So, whatever Braveheart says next, you’ve gotta wonder if he kind of meant it.

Now, a couple of years ago Mel Gibson made a very odd movie called The Passion of The Christ years ago. Different people saw different things in it. Atheists saw an absence of spiritual feeling. Catholics saw the work of Opus Dei (the real one…). Screaming fundamentalists saw God, but then they always do. The headlines, though, were about anti-semitism.

My mate’s not one of those to boycott a movie, went and saw it anyway. Ninety minutes of explicit torture scenes later, my mate thought the case unproven. Certainly there were bits that could be construed as anti-semitic, but weren’t those bits in the bible, too?

The church and anti-semitism has a long and unpleasant history. The teaching that Jews killed Christ and were, in some sense, fundamentally evil has run through history, giving rise to all sorts of unpleasant words: ghetto, pogrom. Not that you need to be a Christian to be an anti-semite, but it’s only this century that the Church has finally apologised.

But when you’ve got Opus Dei’s most famous member getting drunking and spouting stuff that could come straight from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, my mate gets suspiscious. Is the movie anti-semitic? Is this his opinion? Or does Opus Dei cling to some really rather unpleasant outmoded beliefs along with their rather harmless obsession with hurting themselves. Well, it’d probably help to watch the movie again, but frankly, my mate doesn’t fancy it.

Another day, another social networking site

In the future, you will find your life partner on google. Searches like

male, 27, 5′10, ten miles of EC1, genuine, chinese food, leather

will actually find you a soulmate, rather than the soc.culture.bulgaria frequently asked questions list.* Until that point, we have social networking sites, which range from the incompetent (can anyone use LinkedIn?) to the ridiculous (MySpace, natch). So, you spend half an hour filling in details on yet another site, which looks increasing like a psychoanalysis session…

Q: What did you learn from past relationships?
A: That there’s no good answers to some questions.

(My mate challenges you to come up with a better answer.)

So, you’ve now filled in your details on LinkedIn (if you can), Orkut (or is it Ortak?), MySpace (because all the kidz are doing it), Friendster, TheTribe and all of a sudden you realise: you have more social networking sites than friends. My mate reckons you’re more likely to make real friends playing video games on your Xbox than browsing MySpace

Having written this, it was rather disappointing to discover someone else had already said it better. If you want an intelligent article on the subject, you could do worse than reading Autistic Social Software.

*My mate assures you that this is really what happens. He was also curious to find out that there were in fact questions asked frequently about bulgarian society and culture.

Don’t come back

My mate was telling me that Fidel Castro has handed power to his brother. Old Fidel is one of the last old school South American dictators, in other words, scum. All over the continent, people have been kicking out those losers and trying to stick their country back together. Fidel has clung on and continued to strangle his country for twenty years more than most.

Some people reckon that Fidel’s a bit of a special case because he’s a commie. This makes him an automatic hero to some people, and an automatic demon to others. And there’s the big history with America, which makes him popular with the sort of people who don’t care who you are, as long as you make the Yanks look stupid. My mate doesn’t think the average Joe (or Juan) cares what political flavour his oppressor is.

And another thing. Your brother, Fidel? You mean that in the last fifty years since taking control you can’t think of anyone better to run the country than your brother? Well, there’s basically two possibilities. One is that your entire government is full of incompetents. The other is he’s the only guy you trust to give power back. Funny the way communist countries end up looking like absolute monarchies.

My mate’s mum went to Cuba last year. She said it was a dump. Let’s think about that for a minute. A dump. A poor dump. We’re talking about prime real estate rafting distance from Miami. The birthplace of salsa. This place should be minting it. People should be immigrating to Cuba, not trying to escape it. Sooner he’s gone for good, the better.