We’ve just had a sunset here that can’t measure up to West Indian or Greek ends-of-day for awesome brilliance followed by soft red, but will always beat them hands-down for the range of colours involved.
In this sort of late-winter Aquitainian sunset, there are light greys, charcoals, limes, four shades of blue, infinite yellows – and spectacular solid rays that reach up to the heavens. Religiously influenced 19th century paintings of the English sunset made great play with the rays thing, but they all look insipid alongside what I just saw here.
The thing that’s particularly enthralling about the skies in the Lot is that they’re never boring. This enhances the sense, at sunset, of the illusion of Time being played out second by second: it’s a bit like watching a Turner painting observed through the Polaroids of David Hockney. You can’t take your eye off it for even a second, because all is change. As the Buddhist mantra has it, all things are in transition.
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If only the same could be said for Wolfgang Schäuble. You always know where you are with Wolfie: the bloke comes with a cast-iron guarantee that he will always support his inflexible approach with an insane argument. He was on top form in the Bundestag today, asserting to his CDU naysayers that “This is not about lending more money to Greece, it is about continuing with the programme”.
Just to insert the odd undisputed fact here, since 2010 his geliebte programme imposed upon Greece has produced the greatest depression of any Western economy in recorded history. Yet Dr Strangelove insists that Greek recovery will without question emerge from Aphrodite by the waterhole standing firmly at the side of Phoenix among the ashes – neither of whom have any money to consume the goods that the Greek economy cannot produce, because it has no finance.
You really do have to be profoundly mad to stick to that kind of programme.
But in Germany, political rebellion takes place in a way no other country can reproduce. In Germany, the leading CDU rednecks give Merkel a hard time for being a liberal pinko, and then traipse into the Bundestag to vote overwhelmingly for the extension of the Programme. In a German revolution, everyone forms an orderly queue to express dissatisfaction at the soft treatment being meted out to the Üntermenschen who do not grasp their Weltanschauung. Then they obey whatever bonkers bollocks Mutti Merkel comes out with.
It is all terrifyingly similar to Goebbels yelling that “All Jews are Communists, and all Communists are Jews”.
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Now that South Korea’s Constitutional Court has decriminalized adultery, Bloomberg reports that the country’s leading condom manufacturer Unidus shares rose by 11.75% today.
If you’re in any doubt about the importance of this ruling, I should point out that in 2008, actress Ok So Ri acknowledged publicly she had an affair with a singer. So her compassionate actor husband called for the maximum penalty of two years in prison. She got a suspended eight-month term. I’m not the world’s most right-on person, but the idea of this kind of chastity-belt claptrap still existing in the 21st century is not good news. Take a look at Indonesia’s laws against women: they beggar belief.
I do believe in long-term relationship sexual loyalty, but manufacturing crime out of human passion is about as bad as it gets.
That said, I have problems with the share price rise…as I so often do with f**kwitted stock market logic. If you’re marrried and you have an affair involving unprotected sex, presumably your husband knows you’re unprotected. So why would condoms be necessary – especially in the passion of the moment?
I do dislike reducing love to the mechanics of it all. But the problem with bourses the world over is that they’re dominated by daft testerone-fuelled blokes whose left brains are atrophied as a result of none-use.
And on that happy note, I bid you all bon weekend.
The Slog 