I’m European — not American — so strictly speaking I shouldn’t be poking my leftist communist anti-capitalist Old-European nose into this matter, however: it appears some 70% of all Republicans reject Darwin’s theory of evolution, opting for the Creationism “theory” instead. Pardon my Freedom French Fries but: that is downright ludicrous, and quite scary to boot.

I get the impression that the US majority is silently sliding down toward some medieval perception of the world whereby the earth is flat and has all the other planets and stars revolving around it. Dunno about you, but that scares me.

Frank Zappa, sorely missed these days, had this to say about the matter:

The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn’t asked any questions.

… and also (back in ’86):

We are moving toward a fascist theocracy.

Hopin’ for the best, and so glad I’m not living in the land of the free right now…

Just a quick sketch. This guy’s the owner of a nearby bowling alley. Whenever we go there to play a game or have a drink, he has this irritating habit of ending every sentence with my name. It’ll invariably go something like this:

- Hi, I’d like a beer please.
- Ah, a beer coming right up, Jurgen.
- Thanks. How much is that?
- One euro, Jurgen.
- Here you go.
- Thanks Jurgen!
- Oh, and do you have a lane free to play?
- Yes Jurgen! Is lane eight okay Jurgen?
- Sure, no problem.
- Right Jurgen. So. Can you tell me your names then, Jurgen?

Seriously! What’s up with that?

© R. Crumb – The R. Crumb Handbook

“and remember: It’s only lines on paper, folks!!“

- Is this yours per chance?
- Uhh, … dad?

Dad comes to the doorway.

- Is this yours per chance?
- Uhh… ah yes. It’s uhh the wifey’s… she-uhh she… had no more need for it.

He grabs the reel from Gabriela’s hands, mumbles “Thank you,” and closes the door.

I swear these people are smoking some serious shit.

Last Thursday evening, I’d been playing some loud music – Admiral Freebee’s latest album, to be exact. It’s the kind of tunes you have to play at full volume if you want to fully enjoy them. Came 10 pm, being the responsible citizen that I am, the volume was lowered down to a pedestrian level so as not to offend the neighbours (belgian law says you can make as much noise as you want until 10pm).

Too late.

Five minutes past 10, I get Neighbour #1 (we’ll refer to him as The Hairless Hunchback from now on) banging on my door yelling that I must “Turn it down!“. And that if I didn’t know him yet, I was about to find out! Yours truly opens up window, tells the Hairless Hunchback to chill, upon which he limps back to his cave — thoroughly convinced of my evil “let’s render the neighbourhood sleepless” masterplan.

Fast forward to last Sunday. We’re in need of some gasoline for the lawnmower so I strap the jerrycan to Gabriela’s scooter and temporarily park the scooter in front of my house. Enter Neighbour #2 (we’d refer to her as Poor White Trash Bitch From Hell from now on, but that’s a bit long. Instead, let us call her Betsy). Betsy is the kind of person that has nothing else to do but to stand in her doorway all day while watching the trafic go by – as opposed to, oh I dunno, getting a job. Betsy generally does this wearing nothing but a bathrooom robe and a wig (cigarette optional). But I digress.

So I get out of the door, and Betsy yells (and boy, can she yell): “You fuck, you better not play that loud music anymore, ‘cuz we need some sleep!” To which I reply: “It happens about once a year and when it does, I turn the volume down after 10 pm.” Her cheap wig wiggles back and forth as she retorts: “Fuck that we need some sleep and next time we’re calling the cops!”.

This, to quote Droopy, mmmakes mmme mmmmad. But I’m slow.

I mumble “whatever” and drive off for the gasoline. By the time I’m at the gas station though, my fury has reached boiling point.

At this point, I should make a confession: I can stand dumb people, but I cannot stand dumb people that lack even the simplest form of courtesy. For one thing, Betsy’s husband (we’d refer to him as “Ye Pervert Who Pees On His Garden’s Begonias Early In The Morning Wearing Nothing But White Underwear, Trust Me I’ve Seen It With My Own Eyes” but that’s a bit long, so we’ll go with Bobby Potatohead) perpetually (illegally) parks his car right in front of my garage, thus considerably complicating my stalling my car into the garage.

Hence, once I came back (Betsy was still outside, wiggling about her wig), I gave her a piece of my mind. Some of my spit may well have landed on various parts of Betsy’s facial features.

Betsy probably hates my guts now. In fact, she had Bobby Potatohead conspicuously park his car right in front of my garage. But frankly? I don’t give a proverbial shit.

Here’s to loud music.

As things are a bit slow at work for the moment, I had some time to noodle around with photoshop and skEdit which resulted in what you’re looking at. If you’re wondering, the blurb on the top is my poor attempt at programming wittiness. Suffice it to say it uses php’s ternary operator, one of my favorite php constructs.

What else.

Well, we lost another client today. We’d been hosting this guy’s website since 1999, done the graphic layout and the backend programming. He always seemed very pleased with the result. Until about a year ago, some wiseass went and told him he could offer much cheaper hosting and a much better backend solution. This guy came to talk with me about this, and I had checked out his site prior to his visit — good lord, that site sucked big time. During the conversation I couldn’t help noticing that Señor Asshat was treating me like a mouthbreathing idiot — so in turn I told him how I felt about his website.

This did not go down well.

Since then, I’m guessing the guy has repeatedly attempted to get our client to move his business with him. And I suppose it finally paid off. The problem I’m having with this is not so much losing a client — it lies in how the hosting transfer was done: Señor Asshat has basically stolen my layout (copy/pasted html-source, took all the existing graphic elements that were designed by me) and is now presenting it as his own. With a big fat link to his “webdesign” firm. Loser.

The kicker in this whole story is: I had been working on a complete revamp of the site. No more frames, extensive usage of css and xhtml, to make it fast and search-engine friendly. No less than two days after I finished the redesign, in comes the email telling us he’s with Mr Asshat now. His loss, I say.

Oh well, by-gones and all that, yes?