el Plan B

an early rise

random thoughts:

Jumbosquid attacksdivers +old video

Orcas moving into the med in larger numbers. +orca whale culture video

I am the Walrus in my head because of Dan Hsu's tweet he's playing

Beatles rockband. trailer

A went to bed at 6.. its 9:30

"leave the pornsite open I'm downloading a soap."

I've been teaching her the ways of the internet.

All the highlighted words are links to bits and pieces of digital flotsam to inform or entertain and make this blog interactive in a multi-media so last century kind of way. BLOG! sounds like vomit doesn't it ? If you're a mac addict.. hold command while clicking it to open the link in a new tab. I'm not adept in the ways of HTML just yet and am using code so you don't have to read an URL every other sentence. I hate it when you have to reload the page you were reading because you (accidentally) clicked on a Link.

I've become quite adapt at asking for work in Spanish. Its quite easy, actually: "necesitan personal ?" if they have an ad in the window and "Estoy buscando trabajo" if they don't. That's it. They'll mutter something about curriculum and you hand them your cv and try and have a conversation as you might they'll make it clear they're not interested by not looking at you and saying the manager will call you and acting surprised you are still there straight after saying so or point at the lack of customers in their establishment and hold their hands up. If you get the manager straight away they'll tell you it needs to processed by the head-office, even if its clearly not a chain. Every now and again you'll bump into a friendly bartender who has succeeded but if they haven't been there for over a year they're usually of the following variety: barely 18, blonde, female, and there only for the few months in summer allowing them to bypass stringent laws on hiring and firing staff while I had every intention of staying. Had because instead of pulling my hair out waiting for something to turn up last minute I've chosen to return before my funds run completely dry and there's two of us in need of a financial rescue plan. Best return and appreciate any sofa available while I work my way back up again, capable of supporting the two of us as I go along. There's still plenty that can go wrong with my original plan B. The economy can take a further nose-dive and actually become as bad as they've hyped it to be.

I met some of Andrea's Catalan flatmate's friends the other weekend: they are moving back in with their parents. Can't afford the rent anymore. Chatting with my own Valencian flatmate about maybe finding some work in a factory folding boxes: all his mates just outside Barcelona have been laid off. You read the news: British expats areleaving Spain en masse, the local governments are paying Latinos to go back home to make their unemployment rates look good. I don't use hype lightly.

I went to see Transformers 2and thought it was great! But online my fellow nerds all thought it was shit. When you go and see a movie about toy robots that had a cartoon 20 years ago and the first one didn't live up to your childhood dreams don't complain to me about the lack of character development when I'm not interested in Shakespeare. But guess what: the amount it did in its opening weekend is an apt metaphor for what happened in el Crisis. Once upon a time there was a toy that needed to be sold. So they made a cartoon about the toy and sold the cartoon to tv networks all over the world. What a clever way to by pass laws on advertising designed to protect children from large corporation. Without taking into account inflation some of these toys would still be considered expensive today: a person living off minimum wage would have to forego 2 days wages, 3 if you count the one day they used to pay for the GoBotsknock off their kid cried about (that's like receiving a Zune for christmas). Then they re-packaged the cartoon into a Marvel comic. We all hit upon Nirvana. He shot himself. We grew up. Got a job. They waited for nostalgia to kick in. They re-packaged the toys once more and sold the movie rights to the guy who gave you Indiana Jones4 (hint) who talked to the guy who brought you Pearl Harbor (HINT). A $112 million in its opening weekend. They'll be back in 2 years to turn it into a trilogy. Will it be like Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Carribean 3, XMen3, talking teddybears fighting for peace in Return of theJedi ?? What do you think ? Question is: will you go..? if the answer is no: thats what happened to all those sub-prime-mortgages and loans in a land far far away. At some point no amount of special effects will save your plot and you end up with a Waterworld or worse, Town & Country: a romantic comedy for the price of a Transformer movie. So why did I like Transformers Zwei and is the economy hyped both ways ? I wanted a movie about a plastic toy robot I used to have back in the day the wall came down in the country next door and we were winning a cold war with the help of 2 wise old men who promised to join forces and save us if aliens ever attacked our planet. Reminding me of a time before highschool basically. And I wanted it to be like WWII, bigger and with better explosions than the first one. Long enough to actually finish the largest bucket of popcorn they have in that empty mall just off the popcorn
olympic village they built for the Games in 1992, and forget about not getting a singlephonecall or email for a job interview after 6 weeks of handing out and sending off CVs. Hyping moneymaking schemes is what got us here. I know some like to point fingers across the pond
but If we weren't all in on it we wouldn't all be out of a job. Now they are playing up the end of the world because only the threat of eternal damnanation seems to motivate mankind to do anything about anything but mainly worrying together. That's why all the superlatives are on the front pages of newspapers that are still in business: "..blablabla worst since the Great Depression." You know its hype because during the Great Depression farmers were dying on the land of starvation. We're still subsidising farmers so they won't go on strike and dump fresh produce on the highways leading into our capitals are we not ? But we need that kind of angst nowadays even to maintain personal hygiene: "Global Pandemic of Swine Flu underway, UN says it can't be stopped: now will you wash your hands ?" Over 50 million died during the outbreak of Spanish Influenza. A pandemic is when you don't need to read about it in the papers, the ambulance is outside.. you're hoping its for no one you know. Today that is more likely than in the close knit communities of a 100 years ago, when there were only 1.7 billion of us and a lot more whales. If you can still afford to buy sushi from a supermarket, 6 pieces of a tiny amount of food for the equivalent of .. month's wages in ... , while complaining how bad the latest summer blockbuster was compared to the original, in a big plastic box that is not going to be recycled because you're eating it on the way as you're supposed to.. then things are looking up. I just chose a bad time to come to Spain and am fortunate enough to travel back to another country to hopefully pick up where I left off with a lot more appreciation for being able to buy coronas at Tescos and sneaking them into a pub which is shit anyway but then we're only there because its raining. Shame about the whales though. But you know what I mean. Chin up.

You're one out of 6 billion.. start acting like it.