The Ephemerist

My son did a painting. Indulge me.

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… stayed at a friend’s flat in Bethnal Green, walked through Pollard Street daily on our way to the tube and left the day before this arrived. Aargh ! Thanks, Wooster Collective, for disturbing my innocent bliss !

Oh, and could this be true ?

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Yes, I’m a belgian ! No, we haven’t had a government for almost four months. And yes, it would seem that some people would like to bury Belgium, not praise it. But still, I’d like it to continue, at least for my time. Here’s why (from the Sidney Morning Herald with a tip of the hat to soon-to-be-expat Hans D.

With its two halves unable to agree on the formation of a new government, Belgium stands on the verge of disintegration. So should Belgium continue to exist? The answer is yes. Here’s why.The first reason is linguistic. If Belgium does break up, two new nationalities will be born: Flemish and Walloon. Belgian chocolates will become “Flemish chocolates”, and Belgian beer cafes will give way to “Walloon beer cafes”. Belgium owes it to the world to prevent us from having to use either of these unspeakably silly adjectives on anything like a semi-regular basis.

There is a reason no business has ever succeeded with the word “Walloon” in its title, and it is the word “Walloon”, the Oompa-Loompa of national adjectives. To inflict a word like that on the world would be intolerably cruel.

The second reason is historical. Belgium, as many of you will know, was established in 1830 for two reasons: to host the main international conflicts of the 20th century; and to provide a viable, long-term basis for Belgian jokes.

After World War I, Polish jokes briefly threatened to overtake Belgian jokes in popularity, but at Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in 1945 to negotiate the division of postwar international comedy, it was decided that Belgian jokes would go to the West, while Polish jokes were left to the Soviet Union.

If Belgium were to cease to exist, this would create a potentially fatal vacuum at the heart of Western comedy. “Did you hear the one about the Walloon ..?” just doesn’t have the right ring.

The final reason is sexual-culinary. America was built on a noble ideal: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Belgium was founded on a far punchier plea: “Give me your bureaucrats.” But when people complain that Brussels is “stuffed with bureaucrats”, what they really mean is that everyone who lives there gets to knock off at 5pm every day and spend the rest of the night gorging on wheat beer, mussels and chips. That doesn’t sound like anything to be ashamed of to me.

Belgium long ago abandoned all hope of being a presence on the world stage and gave itself over to the pleasures of alcohol, chocolate, sex and seafood. To this day, it remains a nation untouched by nutrition. These are ideas worth fighting for.

In its almost total lack of ambition, in its unrelenting sense of existential dread, in its drunkenness and in its gluttony, Belgium is the most inspiring of nations. If the Belgians have tired of being Belgian, it is up to us to take their place. If Belgium will not be Belgium, it is up to Australia to be Belgium.

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Chris Hambly has some interesting things to say about Quechup (see here for a previous post, which accounts for about 60 % off all traffic to the Ephemerist), and more particularly about its signup process.

His logic lacks a little, methinks. Just read on (this is an edited version of my reply on Chris’s site, which was written a bit too much in the spur of the moment).

The Quechup page quotes :

“Congratulations! Welcome to Quechup. Find out which of your friends are already members. Choose the address book with the most contacts and we’ll search for matches so you can add them to your friends network and invite non Quechup members to join you. By inviting contacts you confirm you have consent from them to send an invitation. We will not spam or sell addresses from your contacts.”

This obviously is read logically (i.e. if you’re unaware of Quechup’s devious intentions) as :

“Choose the address book with the most contacts and we’ll search for matches so you can add them to your friends network and YOU CAN invite non Quechup members to join you. By inviting contacts you confirm you have consent from them to send an invitation. We will not spam or sell addresses from your contacts.”

What Quechup deviously is saying, is :

“Choose the address book with the most contacts and WE WILL search for matches so you can add them to your friends network and WE WILL invite non Quechup members to join you. By inviting contacts you confirm you have consent from them to send an invitation. We will not spam or sell addresses from your contacts.”

However, even in that interpretation, “By inviting” does not make sense. It does not refer to the previous sentence, since the meaning “Because WE invite your contacts, YOU confirm (etc)” is meaningless. The first phrase can’t possibly entail the second.

Moreover, at no point in the procedure does the website say that Quechup will send mails to each and everybody in the address book. At no point in the procedure does the user get a list of people that will be sent an email. At no point in the procedure can the user select anybody to invite or not.

Finally, the email that IS sent, is sent AS IF the user sent it. This is not only dodgy, it is even illegal in most European countries. Member-gets-member campaign mails should originate from a mail address within the same domain as the website they originate from. In Germany, you even have to send a blank email to the invitee first, asking him whether he / she wants to receive the invite.

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Late last year I visited the “World of Franquin” exhibition in Brussels with my kids.

It was a great show, with lots of real life objects that were lifted from several Spirou and Gaston stories that Franquin did. I was amazed at seeing the Turbotraction cars “in the metal”, as it were. Enjoy the pictures.

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I’ve moved the article about my run-in with Quechup.com to here. I didn’t want new visitors to be confronted with a full page slab of text and run away.

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This is what my colleagues do when work is slow… I wonder what sound it makes when it gets thrown in the fryer.

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Hell ??!

Wolfenstein ??!

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Yes, I know, it’s pronounced Comitchi, and the Italian for Comics is Fumetti anyhow, but I kinda liked the fact that at comics are everywhere if you look for them.  Even at 2000 M in the Dolomites…

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See you in two weeks !

(btw - this cartoon is by David Steinlight. Every tuesday David publishes a new, very cool comic)

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