Obama akbar

Before beginning this short blog post, I want to make a caveat by saying that I have already been disappointed numerous times by Obama as president (DOJ’s brief on telecom immunity, his banking rescue plan, the stimulus package having too many tax cuts, his faith-based initiatives, etc, and it’s only been a month) but with that said…

Today after my class with the lawyers (we talked about the 5-year old of one of them having a birthday party and about the small apartment of the other), I went to a department store, bought a new, light brown t-shirt for 4.50euros and then over to the print shop.  There I chose a font called Pescadero and a color called Petrol which is something like a hungover turquoise.  I had them print the following on the shirt:

Obama akbar

This is a play on words for a couple of topics, namely Allah akbar, the famous Arabic phrase meaning “God is great/powerful”, usually yelled in battle or perhaps to another friend.  This plays on the idea of Obama as a god or antichrist, of which he is neither.  However, God does disappoint but more importantly, he makes you have hope and faith.  I truly believe that Obama is instilling hope and faith but it’s like he has moved into an old rundown house that used to be grand but the previous owners trashed the place, even breaking keys off in the door locks on their way out, ripping the drapes letting too much light get in and pissing on the carpet.  But this has given him the motivation to leave the door unlocked, allowing us, the citizen to be able to come in and see what is going on there, leaving the curtains as they are, allowing the transparency that is needed in this world.  You can go to omb.gov and see what the budget of 2009 entails.  He is cleaning the carpets.  He is doing all of this with a weary smile on his face as he attempts to shield us from the worst atrocities left in the house (the old foreigner grandmother tied up in the attic and the broken open safe with all the family money gone) so that we can still feel like this house will once again be presentable and we can invited friends and family over.

I am at a point in my life that I think we need to turn a little inward as a nation and inspire those in America who want it to be better to do something to improve their communities.  I think a lot of us are willing to do something but we don’t know what to do or where to do it or when to start.  I think if he were to give us The Word, many of us would do what we could to help, like a Peace Corps within the country.  Many people don’t want to make lots of money, they want to lead satisifying lives.  And so, as we await the word, I say to as we pass on the Internet Boulevard: Obama akbar.  It certainly is better than my other political shirt from the last administration: Go Cheney Yourself!

Portugal in 5 pictures

hey ya’ll, I’m back after 10 days in Portugal.  It was an exhausting trip, but we had great weather, saw many castles, palaces, museums and other cultural things.  I’m sick right now and not in the mood to blog too much but thought I could explain our trip to Portugal in 5 pictures so here they are…

Little pirates in Alcobaca

Electric nudity in Sintra

An 8th century Moorish castle way up high on a hill

Late afternoon in Lisboa

The most amazing political graffiti in Lisboa

Calves

Greetings from Northern Portugal! My calves are killing me after we spent all day yesterday walking up and down steep streets here in Porto. We tried to go to a modern art museum yesterday but it was closed so we are trying again today and then after that we are heading about an hour or two south of here ( depending on what train we take) to a town called Coimbra.

The best part of the trip so far has been the weather which is perfect for jeans and a t-shirt.  We met our first couchsurfer last night since Costa Rica, a guy named Davide who sells wine. A really nice guy, he took us to a great little restaurant last night called Little Aunt Anna´s and so of course thought of my aunt.

Iºll catch you up in a couple of days, I am still waking up now and getting ready for our 3rd day of 10 in Portugal!

Where we’ll be tomorrow!

where we'll be tomorrow!

Tuning out

I’ll be tuning out of the world for the next 10 days, Portugal here we come!  I’m in my hammock here in germany and it is snowing outside the window, big juicy flakes and tomorrow at this time we’ll be in Northern Portugal with 60 degrees possibly smiling at us. I’m stoked about that.

Last night I tied one on with the boys, first starting the evening with a nice cocktail with Franziska and Kai and then F went home and Kai and I met Gregg and eventually Mark at Martin’s Brau for overpriced dinner but good microbrew. Then to a small cellar bar that was hopping with young people doing crazy shots and after awhile it was time to go.  I made it onto the midnight tram and that was a good thing.  I’m a bit slow today as a result but Franziska and I are going to an Argentine restaurant tonight and then going to the train station at midnight to start a new journey!

Octuplets and Portugal

The story of the lady who had octuplets recently is growing more and more trainwreckerous by the day.  She’s barely in contact with the father of all 14 children, 3 of whom are disabled.  She receives social security for those 3 and some other kind of assistance and 490 dollars of food stamps a month (all of which in and of itself is perfectly fine) but then claimed that she has never been on welfare.

People who are on public assistance should not be allowed to visit a fertility clinic solely to increase the number of babies she can have.  If it is to have A baby, a first one, that’s one thing.  But she already has six children.  She went to a fertility clinic and had 8 more.  She’s studying at the university, 50,000 dollars in college debt (which in and of itself is perfectly fine) but she’s now got 14 children and she’s all alone.  I mean, what the fuck.  This is insane.  I’m a liberal and I feel people should be able to do whatever it is they want to do to themselves but I just find this wrong.  If you break it down into little pieces it’s all copacetic but when put together, piled together with a mayonnaise slather of what the fuck holding it all together.

And wholly different note, Franziska and I are going to the train station just before midnight on Saturday night and are going to be on one train for a little under 3 hours, then we have 40 minutes to kill at the train station at 4am and then a bus for about 75 minutes.  We’ll be at the airport 3.5 hours early but it was the ONLY possible connection for us to get there.  We’ll fly 2.5 hours to NW Portugal, a city called Porto.  A direct bus from the airport brings us within 200 meters of our 4-star hotel the first two nights of our 10 nights. It should be in the mid 50s-low 60s sunny weather, I need that!

Customer service

I bought plane tickets in mid-November 2008 to fly to San Francisco for 11 days in March 2009.  The tickets cost me 528 euros and were direct Frankfurt-San Fran flights.

Last night I saw the same exact tickets on the same exact website for 454 euros.  I wrote them an email and called them and they said there was nothing they could do.

It just reminded me of www.orbitz.com, which states on the website that there is a price assurance that if orbitz sells the same exact tickets for a lower price, they’ll pay me back the difference.

At least I didn’t have to pay 14 cents/minute to call the German website phone number.

My day in 5 glimpses

1)I woke up to hard wind and rain.

2)I was live on the radio this morning and won a Jason Mraz CD.

3)I dropped off invoices worth a few thousand euros.

4)I photocopied a whole book today.

5)I had lasagna for dinner.

If I had to live on $500,000/year

On a cold and rainy Saturday morning, nice breakfast of bacon and bread with cream cheese, played poker with the boys last night and more or less broke even, actually won 5 euros, had planned/thought that the 50euros I bet was gonna be lost amidst fun but it’s not the case.  Considering I’m going on 10-day holiday next weekend, that 50euros could come in pretty handy.  Then again, I’m donating 100 euros to a charity in Ukraine this week so perhaps the money could go into that.  Or I just bought plane tickets to go home for Xmas so that could take a 10% chunk out of it.  Man, if I only made $500,000 a year to make these problems seem a bit trivial!

So, Barack Obama is saying that if your company gets bailout money, its top CEOs and executives cannot make more than $500,000/year.  One businessman was quoted as saying that imposing this on their top talent is “draconian”.  Now I think I know what that word means but it doesn’t seem to make any sense in the businessman’s quote.  Being forced to live on $500,000 as a salary is a wonderfully Vonnegut-like fantasy that could bring probably mostly good things in life.  And here is the this businessman using a word that means, according to Miriam-Webster, “harsh or cruel”.   Do you see what I mean?  Harsh and cruel?  Living on $500,000/year is harsh or cruel?  Fuck you.

Excuse me, let me rephrase that.  How would my life be different if I had to live on $500,000/year?  First, I would think to myself that that is $40,000/MONTH, more than I have ever earned in a year in my whole life.  I don’t want my rent to be more than 25% of my income ($10,000) so I’ll halve that and spend $5000 dollars and rent the nicest 6-room flat in the whole city.   I would immediately be the biggest pimp in this city of 200,000 inhabitants.

So now I’ve spent 12% of my monthly allotment of largesse, what else will I spend money on?  I would go to the best furniture store in town and one that I have fantasized about lightly and buy a few key pieces and spend $10,000 in there, picking up a sofa, dinner table and bed with a few accoutrements.  That would be a large expense but should only be for the month.  Normally that $10,000 will go into a safe and steady savings account every month.

Now I’ve spent nearly 40% of my monthly wages.  I will now add $2,000/month for food/entertainment/clothes/misc.  We travel a lot so I’ve got to allot $2,000/month for travel.  This can be a weekend trip flying from Basel to Rome or Bordeaux or Stockholm and every other month a trip of 10+ days to somewhere like Thailand, Namibia, New Zealand, Kenya, Mexico, Iceland, etc.

So, 5000 + 10000 + 4000 = $19,000

All right, I’m almost halfway there.  I guess now I will take 10% of my salary ($4,000) to go into a good and safe retirement plan.  $2,000 a month will go to making the world a better place and here’s what I mean.  I am donating 100euros to that Ukrainian charity this week and instead of 100 euros it could be 1000 dollars.  That would be roughly 10 times as much help.  Another $1000 can go to paying for people’s drinks, meals, surprising them in a store and saying, “I’ll pay for that.”

I’m going to buy a nice car, a BMW, that’ll cost $1000/month for car/insurance/gas.  Where am I at now?  $26,000? Damn, I’ve got quite a ways to go there.  I need to figure out how I’m going to spend $14,000 this month.  Fourteen thousand dollars.  That’s a lot of scratch.  I guess we can add another $2,000 for a person who cleans and cooks for us everyday, 500/month so her kid can go to a private school.   All right, and 500 for the lottery every month because I need to strike it big to get out of this numbing existence.

So now that $29,000.  $1,000/month on spoiling my woman, whether it be jewellery or fancy dinners and theater trips to France, flying to London for a one night to see a musical, and whatever else she might desire.

Sweet, I’ve made it to $30,000.  What else can I spend money on? Well, I’d be happy to spend $1000 a month on books and dvds and cds and stuff I like and let’s put $4,000/month into a college fund for my not-yet-as-born children.

$35,000.  $5,000 to go.  Any suggestions?  I guess the other $5000/month stays in the checking account so there is liquidity and half of it goes to the savings account when it hits $50,000.

So now I’ve spent my $40,000/month salary but we have to remember that 25% of that was spent on furniture to outfit the new pad.  What will be done with that $10,000 every month?

How would you live on a paltry $500,000/year?

Treason

definition: a violation of allegiance to one’s country, esp. by attempting to overthrow the government.

If President Obama instructs General Petraeus to bring him a 16-month withdrawl timeline and the General says on radio, tv and/or newspapers that this is not going to feasible or even Ray Odierno, the commander in charge of forces in Iraq says that the SOFA (American-Iraqi joint operating agreement that American soldiers must be out of the Iraqi cities this summer) is not going to be followed, is this not treason?  By not following protocol and rank, two of the highest ranking soldiers in the United States are actively attempting to undermine their commander-in-chief’s plan…I have respect for both of these men as soldiers, as having worked their way up and excelled in everything they’ve done, and served their country.  But the Bush years allowed “the Military” to dictate some policies.  Barack Obama is of course extremely interested in what the two soldiers have to say when they brief him in the Oval Office.  But when President Obama decides a course of action, those orders must be followed unless they are in direct violation of the Constitution.  No one has asserted such a thing.

**editor’s note: on retrospect this post looks a bit hysterical but I think I am still scarred and gun shy from the Bush Years where any form of opposition in opinion or direction was questioned as unpatriotic. What, you disagree? Don’t you love America?