Comrade no more

BEIJING:  China's bus drivers and ticket sellers have been urged to leave communism behind, with a new training manual instructing them to call travellers "sir" or "madam" instead of "comrade", state media reported yesterday.

    Older Beijingers, a few of whom still wear "Mao suits" that were once a virtual uniform for China's hundreds of millions of citizens, will be exempt from the new ruling.

    "Old comrade" is listed as the final possible choice of address for elderly travellers, but it comes after "elder master" and "elder sir".

    A newly released manual for Beijing bus staff suggests forms of address ranging from "student" to the plain "passenger" for younger travellers, for whom comrade has a different gloss, as a slang term for gay.  -  Reuters. 

    Can we hear George Orwell, author of "Animal Farm", saying from his cloud, I told you so?

Source

Cape Times 1/6/2010

L I F F

This book is an experience in the Absurd.

And an extract...

Source

See above

Airy Travel

This afternoon I called Air XYZ, a well known leading airline.  I didn't have much time and was hoping for quick service.  After I had dialed the number, I was relieved to hear the following ...

          In our past-paced world, we know that time does count.  Choosing Air XYZ 
          not only gives you more frequent schedules worldwide,  and a better connection
          to Europe and beyond.   We also give you a global network that is unsurpassed.
          Your call is important to us.  Please continue to hold...

           Then she said it again -

            In our fast-paced world, we know that time does count.  Choosing Air XYX... 

            She said this 42 times in a row.  In the background there is a kind of chanting pop    
             music.  Leading up to the 42nd time, the whole thing begins to feel like a shamanistic
             chant, except that her voice is so business-like.  Clear.  Articulate.  

             In our fast-paced world...  time... 

             I wonder again, with Ian Lee, whether words mean anything or whether they don't 
             mean anything today.   At times I feel I am clambering about in the syllable 
             structures of her words, inside them, through the vowels, over the consonants.

             In our fast-paced...
       
              Maybe the experience, in an obverse way, was teaching me to reject being seduced
              by The Next Thing and to Move into The Moment and Stay There... 

               In... 

              I'll call them again at a different time, but - just maybe - they've been infiltrated by         
              Zen practitioners who teach people by hypnotic mantras to resist The Next Thing. 


Will
22 October 2012
Paradox Box bluewill7.blogspot.com

           

Transition in South Africa

                                  

  We are not going soft on the ANC.  In fact, the ball is on the other foot.  -  National Party Director of Information Mr Con Botha, Weekly Mail, July 21 1989.

Security

In the town of Fish Hoek, on the Coast of False Bay, Western Cape, the local police station can have peace of mind:  they are protected by the security service Chubb.  It must be nice to know.

Source
Image by Will

Madness, like a 'bus

From a Zimbabwean newspaper: While transporting mental patients from Harare to Bulawayo , the 'bus driver stopped at a roadside shebeen (beerhall) for a few beers. When he got back to his vehicle, he found it empty, with the 20 patients nowhere to be seen. Realizing the trouble he was in if the truth were uncovered, he halted his bus at the next bus stop and offered lifts to those in the queue. 

Letting 20 people board, he then shut the doors and drove straight to the Bulawayo mental hospital, where he hastily handed over his 'charges', warning the nurses that they were particularly excitable. Staff removed the furious passengers; it was three days later that suspicions were roused by the consistency of stories from the 20. As for the real patients: nothing more has been heard of them and they have apparently blended comfortably back into Zimbabwean society...

Source

Joenative.com

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Jailhouse Rock: musings

I wonder how many people, smitten in the blast of Elvis's vein-splitting rock, actually experienced the lyric as a ballad.  It seems that most receive the song as an "unspeakable mix", as one commentator put it  -  we need words to this music, but we only hear them in fragments and we really don't care, not in that white-hot intensity.

The lyric has a setting, characters and a punch-line  - it's intriguing, funny and absurd.  Its irony comes from the Blues tradition and the song is largely in the 12-bar form.

That a warder, who is usually a control freak, should throw a wild party in a prison cell block, is unlikely.  The gallery of characters is rich -  Spider Murphy, Little Joe, the drummer boy from Illinois, Number Forty-Seven, Number Three, Shifty Henry, Bugsy and the hip warder himself who cajoles the sad sack into grabbing a wooden chair if he can't find a dancing partner.  

The ultimate absurdity  -  rock music like this has a greater freedom, Bugsy seems to imply, than making a prison break!  

The song, perhaps more from its elemental force than the crafting of the lyric, embodies one of rock's greatest concerns, what one writer called "keeping a free head".