Blog G2

Great Burdock Oil; someone told me it was good for a dry scalp, which I get, and while in Ljubljana I spotted an industrial size pharmacy, and asked the bright tight thing for the aforesaid oil, and she went straight to it, which is commendable in comparison to the average staffer in the average pharmacy. I paid my seven Euros, or somesuch, and tried it out; yuck! Not good! I felt contaminated! So I got my magnifier out and read the label. Not the title, which was clearly redable in 2 languages in 15 and 10 point type, but that tiny stuff; about one or two points in size; I can just make it out under a ten times magnifier; parafinum liquidum; olea europaea; isoproply myristate; arctium lappa; tocopheryl acetate; rosmarinus officinalis; lavandula angustifolia; propyparaben; propylene glycol; BHT; ascorbyl palmitate; glyceryl stearate; glyceryl distearate; citric acid. So, a little miffed, I checked Wiki for some info, and 'arctium lappa' is the name of the plant in question, OK, but there is no actual reference to the oil of said great burdock being in the bottle. I definitely asked for the oil. The label in big type says it; the small print has no valid reference to it being in the mix. I don't go to Ljubljana very often, but Slovenia is the only country I've ever lived in that has no allowance for ANY alternative medicines, not even homoeopathy or biochemics, (yet a big 'wellness' tourism industry?) but anywhere in this world where I ask for an oil of a specific variety I expect to get it; not some trumped up concoction that I would not put on my rusty pliers, let alone my precious noddle. I look forward to a curt, well-directed tirade and a refund. Nuff said.

F2

I am astounded that any white man could deride the badly named 'Bollywood' film industry when the 'original and best' Hollywood has such an output of unmitigated, relentless crap.
Maybe the 'made for TV' industry is estranged from the big H, but where I live I get a non stop homogenised supply of not even B grade American movies on my redily available Slovenian and Croatian TV channels; tonight, true to form, three military films, one a series, but uniformly (pun intended) pulp literature on celluloid, low grade half hearted war films with great prejudice displayed... I'm sorry; I have the remote; off goes the TV. If I can be bothered waiting till after midnight I might cop an early Jim Jarmusch, or another B&W gem from way back, but these never get aired when my brain is up. I'm starting to realise an early to bed routine which I was never known for. If I had a choice, I'd plump for the Wim Wenders/Werner Herzog/Lars von Trier style of films; there is a ton of distinctive talent out there that cannot be replicated by the Tom Cruise/Nicholas Cage/Harrison Ford style of same old same old, and yet we have a supply chain drizzling this turgid effluent into our homes every night, without anyone crying 'Stop!' CNN have a similar mindset, and they are a 'news' channel, yet, repetition of yesterday's news is, to my mind, not; OK, they're Time Warner; Ted Turner was a brash and pushy bloke when I met him in the early seventies; now he has allowed his product to become the very shadow of what he set out to create; Ted's a yachtsman, but you'd hardly know that any sailing boats were currently engaged in a variety of really fascinating races; that one of the big names in yachting had retired in the face of a doping scandal, and that there are more life threatening challenges being overcome every day on the waves, if you relied on CNN for your daily dose of sports coverage. So call me sour if you like, but I cannot imagine a bigger network of people than the CNN crowd being 'everywhere' on this globe and specifically avoiding most of the interesting stuff, and specifically targeting the mundane and tediously repetitive low interest nonsense that they manage to fill our day with. (And will someone tell me that a pair of 'anchors' is necessary to deliver this drivel, with their bright smile at the intro of every fresh disaster?) There is a new software coming up now called 'Twitter', a term describing the utterly lightweight chat that emanates from low intellect social butterflies of the 20th century. Facebook I can understand, but from hanging out with the slacker crowd a few years back and hearing the perennial question 'what're you up to?' and the standard 'nothing' or 'not much', as acceptable dialogue between acquaintances, I think it is fair to assume we have seen the death of creativity as we knew it, and we now are well on the path to blinding, grinding mediocrity. Nuff said.