Who was referred to nick this week

I love looking in my blog stats and seeing what people typed into Google on their way to Outsourced. Good stuff.

pivobrani zizkov 2009
how to keep elderly patients entertained
hvar dress and what to wear
escort girl + bratislava + in door call
terra cortereal
“texas it’s bigger than france”

I don’t know what the poor guy looking for whores was doing on my site, but I can definitely say that I’m the expert in the ‘texas is bigger than france’ battle.

 

Entropa

Jana and I went to the DOX art gallery to check out ‘Entropa’ a few weeks ago. Entropa was originally commissioned by the Czech government as a Brussels-based celebration of European diversity. Luckily they got this guy to put it together.

Yes, that dude is David Cerny, designer of the famous Prague TV tower babies, and of course ‘Shark’, which is perhaps the greatest work of satire as art that I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, back to Entropa. It’s designed to look like those plastic things that hold toy parts when you first open up the box. Each country is included, but designed to play a bit to stereotype.

This was the first to cause anger and merriment. Bulgaria here is make out of Turkish toilets. I can’t confirm the validity of this, but the EU promptly made Cerny remove the Bulgarian toilet, adding another empty slot (along with that of the UK, which is seen as not wanting to be in the EU).

There was some hand-wringing and compaining about Romania being a Dracula theme park, but no one found anything worse on it so it was left alone.

By worse I mean this:

At first Italy didn’t seem to be too bad. Football Players! Yay! Forza Italia! But like every piece of this exhibit, you need to take a closer look

Yes, when properly plugged in the Italian football players masturbate with soccer balls.

My favorite is Denmark. Originally it just looked like denmark made out of Legos. But look closer…

The legos are actually in the shape of the famous Danish cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Awesome.

A few more I enjoyed:

Poland is a field of potatoes, with some priests raising the Gay Pride flag

And Germany consists entirely of highways in a rather odd pattern:

All my pictures can be seen in a flickr set here.

 

travel season

The travelling of Nick has been limited this year. The company has a travel ban in place, so no heavy drinking sessions with colleagues so far. I tried to go to Germany, but got thrown off the train and almost immediately incapacitated myself by breaking a toe. My more recent forays outside of the neighborhood have resulted in bleeding and filth. So I”m looking forward to visiting the Moravian town of Mikulov, a festive burg known for both aesthetic charm and wine. Jana and I are taking a three day weekend, so I can’t ask for much more. Pictures, and updates on any newly acquired injuries will follow on Monday.

 

Creative ebbing

I like to flip back through my old posts on occasion. There’s plenty of nonsense coupled with a dangerously high number of references to beer. But there’s some good humor and fun stories, some of it surprisingly well written in retrospect.

I wonder if, like a band that has recently discovered sobriety, some of my creativity has ebbed in recent years. My blog hiatus was for many reasons, but mostly I didn’t feel like I had something to say to the world at large. Perhaps to discover my creative flow I need to resize my audience to something more internal and managable.

Or maybe I should just go back to writing the stuff that annoys my mother. That was much more fun.

 

injuries

I am injured.

I don’t want to discuss the event last month, in which I was thrown off a train, went home, and broke my toe. That is too preposterous to be believed.

Instead let’s discuss tuesday. Jana suggested that we go for a short bike ride, and I was happy to do a bit of exercise in return for a stop at the bike pub for a kolbasa and pivo. After a pleasant tour through the local park we took a short ferry across the Vltava (or as I like to call it, Prague’s most picturesque sewer). While walking across the short wooden bridge connecting the ferry to the shore I managed to totally wipe out.

I emerged from the water bleeding from a cut in my knee and covered in weird soot-like mud. People seemed momentarily concerned, then got back to the process of finding their own bike pub. We swiftly biked back home and Jana spent approximately five hours cleaning Vltava mud out of my cut.

The sad thing is that I can’t blame this bout of clumsiness on beer – I hadn’t managed have even one when I fell off that pier. I’m not sure how I can acquire graceful movements, except by travelling back in time and introducing my teenage mother to a ballet dancer. Although I’ve seen advertisements for that Bruno movie, I’m pretty sure how that would have ended up.

So I’m asking my non-existent commenters to request what further Injury I could acquire. Hilarious yet non-threatening arrow through head? rickets? pink eye? Let me know…

 

A visit to the art museum

A lot of my objection to contemporary art revolves around its lack of satire. Self-indulgence, especially the return to childhood forms of art such as smearing paint unthinkingly across an innocent canvas, is coupled with a sincere belief on the part of the artist that his or her art represents a feeling/sensation/insight that is not widely available to the art-viewing public. This is true, and can be attributed to the artists’ drug habits.

Jana and I took the long journey to the other side of Holesovice today in order to view David Cerny’s Entropa. I’ll write about that tomorrow when I get bored at work. In the meantime, here’s an awesome picture of Jana with an inflatable skull. It is part of an exhibit that is exploring some psychological shit that I didn’t understand, but the inflatable skull, coupled with a performer from the movie Army of Darkness, is totally bitchin’.

 

I’ve done this

More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

 

Music!

 

On Paroubek and associated opponents

Politics in the Czech Republic is often entertainingly counter-intuitive.  The green party here is (was) in a coalition with a party whose founder, Vaclav Klaus,  once called environmentalism as dangerous an ideology as Communism.  This election map may be familiar to many readers – the capital city votes for one party, and the surrounding rural areas the other.  Except here tradition is reversed, the capital voting for the center-right ODS and the countryside voting for the socialists.  And young people here are fanatically opposed to the leader of the Socialists, Jiri Paroubek.

We’ve encountered Pan Paroubek on Outsourced before. Perhaps the most irritating politician imaginable, he exudes sleazy populism unmatched since Diamond Joe Quimby.  His most recent sin was to help topple the current ODS-led Czech government during their EU presidency, which has almost entirely destroyed the credibility of post-communist governments in the eyes of the western EU.  In a semi-traditional move for czech politicians, he dumped his wife of 28 for a much younger blonde, who disgusted the nation by attesting to the sexiness of her new husband’s brain.  Oh, and as Prime Minister a few years ago he broke up a techno music festival with a merry round of police violence, which earned him the initial ire of many druggy youth.

Happily hitting the campaign trail after his stabbing and mutilation of the Czech EU presidency, Pan Paroubek has encountered an interesting phenomenon.  Youths have began pelting him with eggs at every campaign event possible.  An Anti-Paroubek facebook group called ‘An Egg for Paroubek in Every Town‘ has attracted over 50,000 members.  (Other amusing anti-Paroubek groups include ‘Paroubek for President, a Joke‘, ‘Will you find 1 Million people who hate Rath and Paroubek (20,000 members), and ‘Paroubek is a Shitty Piece of Fucking Fuck’, with 11,000 members.)

Paroubek made an appearance in Prague today near Jana’s office.  What occured at this farce of an election rally needs to be seen to be believed.  CLICK HERE (as I can’t figure out how to embed the video from the czech website).

If I have any political ideology it is as a free-speech fundamentalist, so I am a strong believer in allowing people the freedom to say stupid things.  Yet I find it hard to pity this opportunistic, failed mafioso as he is pelted with unfertilized chickens.  He fully intends to raise my taxes if he comes to power, which gives me reason enough to to support the egg-projecting youth.    Pelting Paroubek with eggs is, at its most basic level, a sign that the youth have embraced Hope and thrown off the Yolk of Apathy.

 

CV upgrade

Once more, the economist makes me more awesome:

ANECDOTAL evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.

…

Merely travelling abroad, however, was not enough. You do have to live there. Packing your beach towel and suntan lotion will not, by itself, make you Hemingway.

It’s hard for me to tell if I’ve become more awesome in comparison to my peers, as I still live abroad.  But I have no doubt my eurotrashy traits (cheek-kissing, stupid british spelling, saying ‘ciao’) will irritate the hell out of anyone considering hiring me, leaving me almost unemployable in America.  But at least I’ve developed the ability to make intuitively understandable and beautiful excel spreadsheets.