Posted 6:47 AM by Gobbler
Semana Santa

Here we are in the middle of Semana Santa. The processions went on until about 4:30 last night, I could hear the drums and the trumpets from my room. That is good procession work.

This is just to give anyone who cares a quick update. there's no story today as my disc has got corrupted and I cant access the files on it. This will probably come as a relief as you now don't feel pressured into reading another couple of thousand words of random story. If you ever felt pressured in the first place, that is.

Workds going alright. Main pain in the arse is the play I wrote which won't shut up and lie down like it was supposed to. Those of you who have read it will know that, on balance, it should be laid to rest, but it just doesn't want to; it creeps back into my head like a spoilt brat when I try to sleep. So it's gradually getting bigger and more confused and even more unplayable, and it was already unplayable to begin with. oh well, what can you do? Carry On Regardless, naturally, and hope it gets bored and goes away before too long.

Anyway, semana santa. Thousands of people parading the streets in different coloured kkk esque outfits. i should point out that they arent klu klux klan. they don't lynch people or burn crosses or stuff like that. They carry around huge silver floats with Big JC, Mary and possibly others, play glorious music and burn a heck of a lot of candles until near dawn all week long. Which reminds me, I should get out of here. Its four o clock now and the processions begin i think at about 6. if i leave it too long I'll be caught on the wrong side of the main parade into the cathedral and it could take me hours to get home. then i need to go to the supermarket which is on the wrong side of another huge parade. I gave up trying to get to the supermarket yesterday, unlike the frenchies who spent an hour getting there. They needed their vodka and rum.

No talkbacks you miserable lazy lot.

Bye!!!!

Posted 10:35 AM by Gobbler
I was just about to write the date but then i realised that you know what the date is because its written at the top of this damend thing.

Its the beginning of semana santa, holy week, here in seville and it's a great big super whoppìng celebration. cue non stop parades all over the city centre until one two or three in the morning by hundreds of people in black Klu Klux Klan uniforms carrying massive candles and floats for Mary, Jesus and other selected Christian big wigs. The people in the parades arent kkk members i should point oput, it's just that the kkk copied their uniforms. As far as Im aware semana santa in seville has been going on since before America was discovered, let alone the kkk was created. In any case this lot in seville are catholic and the kkk are protestant, and weren't partial to catholics. It's spectacular and is therefore rammed with tourists. It can seriously delay any plans you might have of getting to the pub.

Anyhow, a few more bitsies and bobsies today. In case youve got nothing better to do...

Happy Pizza

Pnom Penh, Cambodia. June 23 2003

They sat by the river in Happy Herbs Pizza restaurant. The name suggests that the pizzas might come with a herbal garnish other than your usual oregano. That’s precisely because the pizzas do come with a herbal garnish other than your usual oregano. All you had to do, or so Paul’s new American friends assured him, was to ask for your pizza to be a ‘happy’ or, alternatively, if you really didn’t fancy getting up to much for the next day or so, a ‘very happy’ pizza and it would be served impregnated with enough marajuana to knock out an elephant. Now, Paul was an Englishman and as such he knew that marajuana was illegal in England because it was very bad. Very naughty and bad. On the other hand, Paul reasoned, he remembered being told that when in Rome he should do as the Romans do and in Cambodia, whether or not it is officially illegal, no-one gives a monkey how much marajuana you get through. And some people get through a lot, like the Canadian guy at Paul’s Guest House, who had been stuck in Pnom Penh for months because he was permanently stoned and had missed his flight home and then couldn’t really remember where he lived anyway so it had all become a bit academic. No, the Cambodian’s don’t care if you smoke all the biftas in the world. You can’t really blame them, they’ve got far more important things to worry about. The last forty years hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses for Cambodia. Admittedly it hasn’t been absolute picnic for Britain either, but comparatively speaking, Britain’s done alright. To compare them very briefly:

Britain in the last forty years:

1960’s: i) Won the world cup in football.
ii) The Swinging Sixties. Britain becomes the most fashionable country in the world.
iii) Came up with some cool music.

1970’s: i) Didn’t win the world cup in football.
ii) Had some nasty economic difficulties which meant large job losses, a few riots and strikes, and the pound was devalued, which made it harder to go on holiday abroad.

1980’s i) Didn’t win the world cup in football.
ii) Had a quick war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands which the Argies had invaded. Or liberated, depending on your point of view. Britain won, losing a few nice ships and a couple of hundred military personell in the process.
iii) Lost most of the remainder of Her heavy industry especially coal mines, putting a lot of people out of work and tearing the heart out of mining communities. More riots and strikes.
iv) Made lots of money.

1990’s i) Didn’t win the world cup in football.
ii) Made lots more money.
iii) Had lower unemployment.
iv) Fought in the odd war overseas.

2000’s i) Still not winning the world cup in football. Bugger.
ii) People are still smoking marajuana. Fiends! Stop them!

Cambodia in the last forty years:

1960’s: i) America is bombing the living crap out of Vietnam from 1965 onwards. In 8 years they’re going to drop a greater tonnage of explosives than all the explosives used in the whole of World War Two, which is quite a lot. This means the Vietnamese Viet Cong soldiers, not enthusiastic about having the living crap blown out of them, make a trail through eastern Cambodia, the Ho Chi Minh trail, in an attempt to avoid having said living crap blown out of them. They like their living crap and want to keep it. Unfortunately the Americans, not being stupid and with plenty of spare bombs, then proceed to blow the living crap out of eastern Cambodia and anywhere else the living crap loving Vietnamese soldiers go. Result: Lots of dead people and eastern Cambodia covered in unexploded ordnance.

1970’s i) 1972. American’s leave Vietnam. Hooray! No more bombing. Still lots of unexploded bombs lying around, but no more bombing.
ii) 1975. Pol Pot and his ‘Communist’ Khmer Rouge come to power. Oh shit. Cue the massacre of one third of the population.
iii) 1978. Communist Vietnamese invade, get rid of the Khmer Rouge. Not even the Communist Vietnamese like the ‘Communist’ Khmer Rouge. Well done! But they don’t manage to get them all. Pol Pot and co. retreat to the jungle. Cue long and bloody civil war.

1980’s i) Long and bloody civil war gets longer and bloodier.
ii) More of country covered in land mines and unexploded ordnance.

1990’s i) Civil war eventually more or less ends, leaving Cambodia in tatters.
ii) Sane government comes to power.
iii) Monarchy returns to Cambodia.
iv) Country begins to rebuild.

2000’s i) People are still smoking marajuana. No one gives a rat’s arse.

So there they were; Paul and his two new friends, Eric and Jenny. They had an extra large, very happy vegetarian on the way. Vegetarian pizza, that is. A very happy pizza was just what was needed after the morning they had had. You would be seriously considering one too if you had had the morning they had had. It was even more disturbing than the day before, which had been a shocker, a real shocker.

The day before. Imagine it. You head off to the shooting range to try out some quality military hardware. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, of course, but for some people it’s just the ticket. There at the range they have AK 47’s, M 16’s, anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades, pistols, the list goes on, all for your shooting pleasure. Eat your heart out Rambo, come with me if you want to live Mister Swarzenegger. Twenty dollars for a full 30 round magazine of an AK 47, a must for any discerning trigger happy tourist. That was Paul and the dozen or so other male tourists who were at that particular range at that particular time. 30 rounds later Paul still was not satiated. He wanted to shoot more things, make more things go bang! 30 dollars later he was handed a fully loaded M 16. Yippee! Bang bang bang! Thirty bangs later, there were still a host of other things that go bang to play with. The M 60, firing at 600 rounds a minute? Rambo’s weapon de choix. Hang it over. 50 bucks for a grenade? What, a real one? Fire in the hole! Heh heh. 100 dollars for a rocket propelled grenade? A bargain! 100 dollars for 100 rounds on that anti-aircraft gun? A must have! But Paul didn’t have any money left and went back to his bike and driver, who smiled at him thinly. “You ready to go Mr. Paul? You have good time?”

“Yes, thanks, let’s go.”

Paul motored off to the next stop on the itinerary, the Killing Fields. You wouldn’t want to do the shooting range and the Killing Fields the other way around. The Killing Fields. The place where at least 8,000 men, women and children were slaughtered by the ‘Pol Pot Clique’, where a mausoleum stacked high with skulls now stands, where bits of bone and clothing still poke through the earth where the exhumation pits were dug, where an old tree stands, used by the Khmer Rouge as a hard surface upon which the evil and condemned babies were beaten to death (it saves a bullet), where tourists now come and where a tiny child stood in front of Paul demanding that Paul let him take his photo with Paul’s camera for 100 reill. Paul didn’t have anything smaller than 1000 so gave him that. It was just what Paul needed, a nice photo of him smiling at a site of mass murder. At least the child didn’t try and give Paul a tour.

That had been the day before. On this day, the day that Paul, Eric and Jenny sat quietly in the afternoon sunshine by the river at Happy Herbs Pizza, eagerly awaiting the Very Happy Vegetarian pizza, they had spent the morning at the S21 Detention Camp. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I mean, ‘S21 Detention Camp’ is a fairly innocent name. It’s no Auschwitz. If someone told you that you were being taken to Auschwitz you’d seriously start worrying, but if they told you that you were being taken to S21 Detention Camp you’d breathe easy. For one thing the fact that it’s called S21 suggests that there’s a lot of them about, and the fact that it’s called a ‘Detention Camp’ suggests that you’re in there for smoking pot or stealing cars or bunking school or beating too many people up or robbing too many grannies and you’re going to get a bit of a ticking off by a bearded bloke in a suit and a kindly yet stern councillor, all intent on improving you. Yeah, Detention Camp, that’s all right, you’ll spend your days playing pool and football, watching sattelite telly, being naughty and generally not getting very improved, and then they’ll let you out. It’s not prison, after all. If it was a prison they’d call it S21 Prison Camp, not Detention Camp. You do something wrong, you go to S21 Detention Camp and get detained, right? Right.

The big problem was that in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge it was very easy to do something wrong, which is one big reason why one third of the population was wiped out. If, for example, Police Constable Plod came up to you in Britain and said that he was carting you off to S21 Detention Camp because you happened to own a pair of glasses you would laugh in his face. If a Khmer Rouge soldier in Cambodia in 1975 came up to you and said the same and you laughed in his face he would shoot you in the face. It’s all quite simple, from a certain point of view. People with education are bad, they corrupt the people, they are evil, they think they are better than everyone else, the make for an unequal society. You don’t agree? Goodbye, my friend. You’re on the wrong end of an automatic rifle. You don’t want the people to get corrupted do you? You don’t want an unequal society do you? No, you want an equal society with people living happy, simple lives. So, obviously you don’t want educated people about, they are bad. And, obviously, I mean obviously, if you own a pair of glasses you are educated, why else would you have glasses? We’d better be getting you down to S21, sonny jim, and teach you why it is bad to be a corrupting, evil, educated person. We’re on an important mission, you know, we’re saving the people from people like you. You think, just because you’ve been educated for 15 years, you know something we don’t? Think you’re better than us, eh? We’re building a wonderful, new, happy society where everyone will be completely equal and you’ll only spoil it. So, come on! Off we go! S21.

And where is S21? In a secondary school, naturally. The Khmer Rouge’s new society didn’t have much time for schools, not being big on education and all. They didn’t have any time for cities either, or in fact any conurbation. Conurbations are, after all, evil dens of corruption, inequality and moral degeneracy. In the new society, everyone was going to be equal and that meant no more of this living in towns nonsense. “But hang on, chum,” you might say, as the Khmer Rouge soldier with the AK 47 tells you that you have to leave your nice house in Pnom Penh and go and live in a field somewhere, “I live here! This is my house, I’m quite happy here. I built this damn house! It’s mine, you can’t ask me to leave my house and go and live in a field somewhere, I’ll starve! That’s insane!” Oh dear, you poor fool. “Think you have the right to a house do you?” The Khmer Rouge soldier with the AK 47 will say, “Think that you’re better than everybody else do you? Hang on, what’s that, is that, why, you’re wearing a pair of glasses! I hadn’t noticed before because I’m long sighted. Evil, corrupting fiend!” And that’s it for you. Bang bang, you’re dead, thirty bullets in your head.

S21 is the special place political prisoners were taken to properly consider the crimes they had commited against society and, as we have seen, it was pretty easy to commit such a crime. And what did you do in S21, if you were unfortunate enough to be sent there? You didn’t get a bit of a ticking off by a bearded bloke in a suit and a kindly yet stern councillor, all intent on improving you. You didn’t spend your days playing pool and football, watching sattelite telly, being naughty and generally not getting very improved. You were usually put into a cell about two foot wide by 8 foot long and stayed there until it was your turn for interrogation, at which point you’d be taken to one of the classrooms, possibly by one of the ten year old boys specially selected as guards to learn about the evil corrupting people they were helping to remove, strapped to a chair and have a couple of wires stuck into the back of your head, then you’d be electrocuted until you realised that you really were a bad person after all and admitted it. Once you’d admitted that you were an evil enemy of the people you might, if you were lucky, simply get taken, with your family, (can’t have relatives alive and running around, they too are corrupted and anyway they might get angry) to the Killing Fields where you would all be shot. Not any babies you might have, of course, that would be a serious waste of bullets. They were beaten to death against the nearby tree. And that was if you were lucky. If you weren’t lucky the guards would take you to another classroom, strap you to a bed, torture you a bit and then electrocute you to death, leaving your sorry body a chargrilled twisted horror. How do we know all this? The Khmer Rouge kept very careful records of all the detainees and their crimes, they took pictures of them and took pictures of the torture, or rather ‘interrogation’, and it’s all there for you to look at. A prime example of State Education, Khmer Rouge style.

That had been the morning. Now, Paul, Eric and Jenny waited in the afternoon sunshine for their Very Happy Vegetarian pizza at Happy Herbs Pizza restaurant. It duly came, they duly ate it and a few hours later their minds had duly turned to mush and they duly fell asleep for the next 14 hours. Marajuana. It’s bad, so I’m told, but there’s a hell of a lot worse.

Fin. (END)

Theres more of course, but thats enough for now. Florian, the mad Frenchman I live with, wasnts to go and he's got a point. Some quick talkbacks:

Evil Unc: Nasty Business. Not much else I can say really. good to see you do in fact have an unlñimited supply of grim stories.

Vinny Boy: Heh heh, Gave me a good chuckle.

Cheesem: Quite so senor cheese. These damned footballers. I guess youre not going to be too impressed that, in the analysis of britain in the last forty years, Britain doesn't get a sniff.

the_bro: Yeh but thats the whole point. Im not saying these people are idiots doing stupid jobs, I'm saying that there isnt anything else out there and they have no choice. its not like theyve got vodafone hq on their doorstep willing to hire any old monkey for loads of dosh, theyve just got bugger all. at least, that was the idea.

Cheesem: do what ever you like old chap. I dont personally want to; the pension scheme is dreadful and youc have nothing to eat except nuts and plastic bags.

Good night all.