DOCTOR SIDIMAN AZEBO...

Actually...a nom de plume. Or nom de radio, as it happens.

Check this out, however, very funny clip of some unsuspecting black woman in the US getting bamboozled by a prank radio call, by comedian Roy Wood Jr.


My Check

THE PERILS OF BABELFISH

Esperanto never did catch on in the old days. These days, one would assume with the power of the internet and thinking machines, that all languages, (especially) the most used ones like Spanish, French, and English, would be easy to approximate.


Then again, based on what Babelfish did with this recent email text, maybe we could use a world language, cuz machines sure can't do the job.


ORIGINAL TEXT


Tú o alguien de tu equipo quiere juntarse a nosotros.

Invitamos:

XX
YY
ZZ

Estan invitados. Eric puede ser una Buena persona.

Todavía tenemos unos 3 vacantes. Por ahí, si quieren invitar algún cliente que trabaja con ustedes.

Saludos,


BABELFISH TRANSLATION


You or somebody of your equipment wants to join themselves. We invite: XX YY ZZ Estan invited. Eric can be a Good person. Still we have about 3 vacancies. That way, if they want to invite some client who works with you.


MY COMMENT


I am trying to picture somebody joining themselves with their equipment. I have another use for that phrase, which I have used on occasion in the heat of the moment, especially when I am NOT a Good Person, which can be summed up as:


GO JOIN YOURSELF WITH YOUR OWN EQUIPMENT!


AND THE SAME TO BABELFISH. ******** MACHINE!

TELL NO ONE

Tell no one. That is what their marketing literature says. This is of course like telling a child not to touch something; it is the savvy marketer's method of bull-baiting that will guarantee the opposite will happen. To wit: this entry.

But am I bothered or do I feel exploited? No. Not bothered a mundo.

What am I talking about? Secret Cinema. (www.secretcinema.org). A night out (actually this was a matinee, but more about that later) where you don't know what you are going to see, where you are going to see it; what you are supposed to wear....all this a mystery until AFTER you have parted with your money. Oh yes? I hear you say. Do I look like my middle name is mug?

Trust me. This I know is an unorthodox sale, but there is absolutely nothing orthodox about the experience. You want mainstream? Go to the Odeon. You want to talk about your night (or afternoon) out? Check this out.

What's the drill? You go sign up at the aforementioned website. This costs nothing. Then, a week or so before the event, you receive an email telling you where to meet and at what time, what to wear, and what to bring. That's it. Oh yes. You get parted from your money.

The rest gets left up to your imagination.

A Colombian friend of mine told me about this, and I gave it to my wife as a stocking stuffer at Christmas (now there's a rarity, a gift that is both moderately thoughtful and painless ...make a card about some random gift you are going to give at some random time in the future, and you get to do it together!). I booked the Saturday night show a few weeks back, just in time to find out that my sister-in-law was coming onto town and I couldn't switch the tickets. I thought I was going to have to swallow the price and wait for the next one (they happen monthly).

Then, last week I received an email saying we look forward to seeing you at either the matinee or evening performance (or some such) and reiterating where to meet, (58 Shepherd's Bush Gardens, in this instance), what to wear (a hat and "something bohemian"), and what to bring ("a blanket and a piece of chalk"). It also attached two passes written in German (DDR, not the Federal Republic of), and said the "guards will check". I perused the passes and, my rudimentary German and amateur lawyer's analytical ability aside, could not find any date or performance specified. Hmm. I thought. I will chance it.

Saturday  came and went, as did my sister-in-law, and we trundled over to Shepherd's Bush on Sunday in time for the 1PM assembly time. Having Google Mapped it, I assumed (incorrectly, as it happens) that this was to be held at the Empire, the medium-sized theatre by the roundabout.

Wrong. When we pass by (in search of parking), there is a long queue outside the building next door to the Empire, which has a marquee which says POTSDAMER PLATZ. There are guards in the telltale DDR green uniforms with their peaked hats, men in long overcoats, and various other folk wandering about. And, of course, a lot of Bohemian types with hats carrying blankets.

We join the queue, and I trawl my cinematic memory bank for the category Communist Krauts, and all I can come up with is The Lives of Others. A guard approaches and barks in German: Papieren, bitte or some such (no I don't speak german save for a few words, so you teutonic spellmeisters will please forgive the orthography). Einshulegen-sie-bitte (one of the few words) I reply, as he chastises me for not having filled in the passes before marching off.

Shortly after, a young girl in tears with mascara running down her face appears, and asks me to hug her. "You may want to ask my wife what she thinks," I reply. I give her one anyway.

There are a lot of men in long dark coats who come and stare silently, and then disappear.

One man is dressed as Columbo, with the trenchcoat, the hunched shoulders, and the shifting gait.

I am none the wiser about what we are about to see.

We approach the front of the queue, and I see two people with a list, TICKING OFF NAMES. Oops.

Busted, I think.

But hey! This is performance art, and I have passes!

Your name please.

Pettigrew I say as they trawl through the list. No relatives appear, and certainly no Pettigrews. But I know this already. The top of the list says MATINEE, 28 Feb.

What is your first name?

Eric, I reply innocently.

They try the Es. I could have saved them the trouble.

Are you sure you booked the matinee?

Absolutely. Over the internet.

The crowd behind is getting impatient. I seize my chance.

Look I have these passes. (Nevermind that a friend could have printed them off for me).

I look the male guy in the eyes and don't blink. Then the female. They look at each other and shrug their shoulders.

We hold out our hands. Stamp. Stamp. We're in!

We go up the stairs. The stairwell has graffitti all over it. In chalk, and mostly in German. Mystery number one solved. Why the chalk?

Upstairs there is a rabbit warren of various rooms, with cabaret acts, food stalls (hot dogs, the bratwurst being up on the roof), and long queues everywhere. We grab a drink, and wander into the main auditorium. There are about 400 people. There is a circus going on, with a trapeze artist (a woman), a juggler, a unicyclist. The men in overcoats wander around, staring at you.

The room is vast and decrepit. And cold. There is a short film playing endlessly...the same few street scenes looped over and over...the words When the child was a child, it was time for these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there?

A hand writes in German. My wife translates.

I continue to be none the wiser.

A singer named Fyfe Dangerfield, with a hell of a voice, and two backing violinists, plays a set. There is another short film....not very memorable. It all seems rather disjointed.

Then the film starts.

It is Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, the 1987 Cannes Festival winner about Berlin, and angels, and life.

Three hours later, all is clear. Nothing was disjointed. Everything was planned. The men in the dark coats are angels. Every other character, the forlorn hug-me girl (a prostitute in the film), the police guards, the trapeze artist ( a woman with the fabulous name of Oceane Peillet)....everything has been planned down to last detail. I was just too ignorant to know.

This is serious cinema. This is a serious undertaking which manages to be fun.  I will leave it to the critics and arthouse aficionados to dissect the film, a broad history of Berlin with a melange of normal life, angels, love, a bitter past, Colombo (yes, there to make a film about the Nazi past), partially in black and white, part in colour, part in french or german or english, loosely based on the poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. The circus is called the Circus Alekan. Nick Cage and the Bad Seeds make an appearance in a seedy bar. It is a mosaic of humans in a city, with each person's thoughts accessible to all, and no lines between the real world and the world of the spirit.

When I say that this whole shtick is fun, I use the term loosely. This is not yuk yuk whoop-it-up fun. This is wow! how did they think this up? fun. And the movie? Well it is only part of the whole cinema experience.

Humans, huh?

Somebody deserves a lot of credit for this .

Oh yes...Mystery Number Two: Why the blanket? Because it was bloody cold in that unheated derelict theatre, soon to be torn down to be a hotel. It was self preservation, nothing more.

I immediately plan my return for next month's surprise, and this time I will bring my camera...and book the correct performance so I won't have to brave the Stasi....or whoever it might be next time.

CORPORATE LIFE (#2)

Nuff said.

A Life Without PrOblEMS- an album

Check out this book of photos and words that I produced.
CLICK BELOW TO VIEW

A Life Without PrOblEMS Words and Images by D. Eric Pettigrew

NOTE: 20Mb but high quality .pdf

A HIGHER PLAIN

I wrote this in 2005, just before I went on a bike ride on the Camino de Santiago in northwest Spain.


A HIGHER PLAIN

I want to hear the music of the world around me
I want to sing the song that is in my heart
I want that single place afar to try and find me
I want to go forward and return to the very start

I want to feel the melody within and live a lively tune
I want to laugh at myself
I want to bark at the moon

I want to know that perfect harmony
That comes when every day is true
I want to see a crystal sky
At the end of this path of pain

I want to know that when I die
What counts will be the friends that found me
And the simple song of love that plays behind me
And leads me ever towards a higher plain.

MODERN ART

MODERN ART

Glasgow January 2010

BRICK SHADOW

Stockholm September 2007

ON LOVE

Ah...the big one. Everybody knows, or think they know what love is. It's just that it is next to impossible to describe. So let me give it a shot.

Love is the ultimate expression of the self through complete selflessness.

There. I've said it. What does it mean exactly? 

Love is the perfect contradiction. 


It is the something which comes from nothing. 
It is receiving which comes from giving. 
It is power felt in a friend. 
It is the wholeness which comes from loss, the sweetness joined with the bitter. 
It is the world where according to Shakespeare: "Nothing is but what is not."

Love causes the sickness while being the cure.

Love is who we are, expressed in other people.

Love is what happens when what you tried so hard for comes without trying.

Love is an eternal moment.

Love is the liberating straitjacket, the freedom which comes from the infinity of a confined space.

Love is everywhere and nowhere.

Love feeds and nourishes you while making you hungry.

Love is both comfort and pain all wrapped into one.

Love is universal and very, very singular.

Love is the happiest you've ever been and a sadness whose depth knows no bottom.

It is not for nothing that they say that love comes from the heart, for the only way to make your life full and your heart whole is to empty it by giving it whole-heartedly and totally to someone else.

ON THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO  AUGUST 2005

PARIS AND KEW

ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE
Kew  January  2010

ROUND

Paris   January 2010

KEW JUNGLE

Kew   January 2010

BLUE TARTAN

London December 2010

YOU'VE BEEN SHMEISSED!

Shlemeil. Shlmozel. Shmuck. The Yiddish language is full of evocative words. The last few translate mostly as dolts, or dunderheads. The Sh sound is sh-tupendous for getting a feeling out.

So it is with shmeissing. To shmeiss is a verb meaning to strike or hit. Being shmeissed is a unique way of relaxing, and was one of the shtupendous Christmas gifts from my wife to my son and me. No we were not really hit, at least with any force.

Shmeissing is the guy's answer to a spa treatment. It takes place (uniquely, as far as I can tell) in the presence of the world's only accredited shmeisser and huge Jewish bear of a man named Lee Balch, who works in (and not for) the Portchester Baths near Bayswater. Shmeissing is a kind of massage/soaking/steaming/poaching/cleaning/foot-soaking/skin scraping/cold shocking treatment which in the course of an hour will alter your mood. Favourably.

I have a feeling it could become addictive.

The Portchester Baths (plural) is an old Victorian bathhouse with a rabbit warren of various steam rooms, a sauna, hot rooms (a tepidarium-warm, a calderium-warmer,and  a laconicium-the hottest, not to be confused with the sauna), chaise longues, swimming pools, showers etc.--all designed to percolate your body and mind.  That wasn't the original intention. The original purpose was to provide people who had no hot water a chance to bathe (and do their laundry) once a week. The original ones had a fumigation room for delousing clothes and then one for delousing people before they began the process of getting clean. They had a laundry (the steam being useful for both treatments and cleaning) and the freshly deloused kit was returned to the user at the end of his visit. Such precautions are not necessary today, and no, you cannot get your shirts pressed.

You enter past a matronly woman in a guichet who charges you £22 for the privilege. I inquire after Lee, saying: "We're here to get shmeissed." She is in the main, non-committal, replying: "Inside. Downstairs. You'll find him."

Trying to break the ice, I ask her if she has ever been shmeissed. "It is a required taste," she malaprops, and directs us to a young guy who shows us the lockers which are scattered about in a huge room with an assortment of men of varying shapes and sizes (older and larger, I would venture to say) lounging about. The banter is definitely East End, and lest you have doubts about where this story is heading, this is definitely a guy hangout, not a gay one. The bathhouse has  men only days (Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday) and women only days (Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday AM), and Sunday afternoon is couples day. So it is with Shmeissing.

They issue you with two towels (immense, thick gauge, with that old school laundry smell which says: I can't wait to dry off with this baby). No skimping here. You also get a wrap, which you wrap around your waist, a bit like a Beckham-sari. We go downstairs, and Lee appears, also in a wrap and slippers/flip flops (probably a good idea to bring those, though we didn't).

He is, as advertised, an immense man, and the mind begins to envision being slammed by him with a wet sponge. Hmm.

No fear is necessary. He is very amiable and chatty, and takes us on a tour through the maze of rooms. He suggests we take a sauna first, and then a steam bath, and then we will start the treatment. The schmeissing room has two chairs and two buckets, and then a chair to the side for an onlooker (he does couples on Sundays). The bucket in front of the chair is filled with Epsom salts, and the other one holds the besom, or the big raffia sponge (think mop or an oversized loofah) which he will use to shmeiss. We do his bidding, and return. I go first while my son looks on.

You sit there with your feet in the Epsom bucket while Lee works you over with practiced hands, your neck and shoulders being rid of the various knots and aches. He is (but I repeat myself) a big strong man, and this is done with no modicum of force. It feels great, however.

Lee chats all the time, and when prompted, tells the history of the baths, and how his shmeissing career came about. There is a limit to how much information you can extract when he has your neck in his hands, but that is not the point of the exercise. The point is to relax you, and after an indeterminate period of time, you then adjourn to the steam room at the end of the shmeissing room.

It should be emphasized that shmeissing is not a private affair, hidden away in some treatment room where you might think Max Moseley-like antics are going on behind closed doors in some subterranean lair. Nope. If there are other customers in the steam room, there are other customers in the steam room. What the hey? Do they care? Apparently not.

You then lie down, and get a damned good scrubbing. Not a beating. The besom is used as one would use a mop. Slap.  Mop. Slap. Mop. You get turned over, basted and slapped in appropriate places (no, your nads are safe). He then rinses you off with a hose with cold, and I mean cold, water.

This prepares you for the next step, which is to exit and go into the ice cold plunge pool, which is accessible from both side with steps. Do I go down the steps, or plunge? I inquire. Why do you think they call it plunge? he responds. We both jump in.

I have jumped into the Baltic after a sauna, but that isn't a patch on this. My normal reaction would be to jump out of the water like a tempura shrimp, but he insists I put my head above water and count to 20, slowly. He (though benefitting from a lot more....how do I put it? insulation) says that our body is a furnace, and will heat the water directly around us. Maybe so, but after the allotted time my bones ache and I get the hell out. He then suggests I slap my legs, which are numb.

We then adjourn back to the schmeissing room, where Toby has his turn. Because that room is nice and warm, you immediately begin to experience a sort of euphoria, which is at the same time a feeling of utter cleanliness and relaxation, as though all the bad shit in your system has dissipated into the air. He says it is the thyroxine which is produced naturally. He admits that his thyroid gland doesn't work, and thus he has no natural regulator of temperature in his body (thus explaining his portliness), and has to take it artificially.

I have no such problem, apparently, but I am here to tell you the euphoria you feel is worth much more than the £25 you will part with.

While Toby goes in for his shmeissing I stick my feet back in the Epsom salts, and feel, not to put too fine a point on it, content.

Or as happy as a pig in shit, as I say to Lee when he emerges.

You are under no obligation to leave after your shmeissing. Stick around. Have a nap. Go in the hot rooms. Take another sauna. Whatever. I pay Lee. Cash.

We emerge into another grey drizzly London day with a spring in our step, in stark contrast to the shivering, shuffling masses. We have the feeling that we know something they don't, and we have been well and truly shmeissed. How about that?

If you want to experience this , and in the kindest possible way, you would be a shmuck not to, then here are the details.

Porchester Spa, Queensway, W2 ( 020 7792 3980) Opening hours: 10am- 10pm Men's days : Monday, Wednesday, Saturday Women's days : Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday morning Couples: Sunday afternoon 


Lee's details are: tel: 07973 218211
His website is:  www.shmeisse.com