E3

We don't use buses very much for getting about, but if we have a major voyage to make we always check the buses out, and this is a big shout out to EUROLINES, a French company who cover Europe, and for the three years we've had them on our list, have made fucking sure our chances of actually making any successful contact with them are fraught with failed emails and more unresponsive telephone lines than any organization we've struck that actually have a website up there in cyberspace. I presume these fuckers have identified a market amongst PEOPLE WITHOUT ANY OTHER FORM OF TRANSPORT, and have chosen to exercise there microcephalia on them, and any normal, sensible, 'alternative option'- conscious people who feel it is worthwhile to seek something other than a five dollar jet ticket are fair game for their ultra-studied indifference.
The trip in question is Paris-Zagreb, which pretty much passes by our door, in Slovenia, BUT THEY WON'T LET YOU GET OUT THERE. Instead THEY TAKE YOU TO THE NEXT COUNTRY, where I have to drive, through three toll/customs gates, EACH WAY, and fight my way through a congested, polluted city where the bus depot is. (Needless to say, there an't a bus....)
We can do the air trip, cheapest €35 option, but it goes via London, with a long wait for the connecting flight, and as my partner will be carrying a new Mac desktop computer, (read WMD) the thrill of hanging out in a London Airport for several hours, (you've been there recently? No luggage facilities anymore; you piss where you sit or you take the computer boxes with you into the cubicle, in the john, two floors and several kilometres from your departure area) and one starts to realise just what a hold those pricks in Eurolines have over you.
I feel like I am in the real 'war on terror', and it is only the impossibility of owning a couple of vehicles in Europe that causes us this angst in the first place; we'll take a car back to France, sell it there, and bring the money back to buy a car here; re-homologation we have done once, an astounding experience requiring detailed contact with all the thicknesses of bureaucracy here or there, and we'll avoid doing it again. This is one Europe, but it is controlled by the motor trade/mafia who want you to have as much contact with them as you can possibly imagine, and the insurance? Don't ask...while we see the future, OUR future, as having as little possible contact with these cretins as possible, as the only viable way to survive into my children's dotage....
But the problem remains; we need to get from there to here, and short of following my partner in a second motorvehicle, there is no logistical way of making a sensible, brief, (24 hours for 1500kms?) trip in this century, and RAIL say three days, and that is TWO hotels, FOUR taxis, and godknwswhatfuckingabout, so..........
Where do you think your future is headed? Do you think living in the South Pacific might be a safe number? Free of environmental catsarsetrophy there are we? If you have a permanent job somewhere, please look closely at how you do it, and please, if you deal with the public, remember they chose to come and see you (probably) and in that case it behooves you, as a paid member of this muddle we live in, to give them an easy run; it will go on down the line, I can assure you; good news spreads fast too y'know.....
Nuff said.

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.