Mrs. A’s sweet dilemma

“Today I have a slight headache – probably overdid it at the Tutta birthday party ... hmmm ... I think the Lamborghini might be the cure for that. Or not? 
Maybe the Rolls because of its softer springing? 
Where do I have to go anyway? – Ah yes, the golf course to meet hubby. 
It’s going to be so hot there! Thank God there’s a highly effective AC in the clubhouse. 
Which one reflects our status more accurately? – Tell me, dear Sher Singh – Italian or British?”

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Photo credit
AI - no real people or cars are shown here.

How to do Europe in five days

 

Jackie and Jilly, who used to be friends and colleagues while both lived in L.A., are finally meeting again at a bar in Boise, Idaho, for the first time in years.
“I hear you went on a trip last year?”
“Yes, we did Europe in five days. It was great.”
“What do you mean by you did Europe?”
“Well, we looked up What to see in Europe on the Internet and planned accordingly.”
“I see.”
“It worked perfectly. We did France, Spain, Italy, Germany and England.”
“And saw them in five days?”
“Yes! And the beauty of it is we’ll never have to go back there.”
“Because you’ve seen all there is to see?”
“Everything worth seeing!”
“Good for you and your blessed little eyes!”
“Are you being sarcastic by any chance?”
“Never! Europe and the wisdom of the Internet would never recover!”

Photos
Top left: Paris, France; top right: Rome, Italy
Center right: Heidelberg, Germany
Bottom left: London, England; bottom right: Madrid, Spain

A contemporary gesture haiku

Kiss your own palm 
ecstatically while LOL
and jumping up and down

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

Notes
Gestural cloning is an essential part of (aspiring to) social media popularity. The above poem is based on one such gesture observed today. Do it, post it on tiktok (or wherever) immediately and get popularity!

For anyone unfamiliar with messaging abbreviations: LOL does not mean “lots of love” but “laughing out loud”. Seems to happen all the time in messages.

For purists: No, I did not quite follow the syllable count and don’t really GAFF.

Balzac, Balzac

“Balzac, Balzac ... that rings a bell. Wait – wasn’t he the gasman? Or the notary? Not sure which.”

An English-language take on Léo Ferré’s lyrics from La vie moderne (click on the video above to hear the chanson).

From the original French lyrics:

Quant à Balzac il s’y demande si

C’est un gazier ou un notaire

Seamstresses bent over sewing machines

 

AI art is a hot item in the crypto art collection scene and currently creates an enormous amount of hype. To investigate this hoopla a little bit myself, I went to one of the online generators that can be used to create such art.

You enter a text description, press the GENERATE button and wait for the piece of art to emerge on the screen in front of you.

The prompt I entered for the masterpiece above was “Portrait of a seamstress bent over a sewing machine”.

What I got from the machine was – lo and behold! – not only one but two seamstresses and two sewing machines.

While this idyll looks quite realistic in its 19th-century charm, you will notice some interesting anomalies when you take a closer look. Three of the hands, for example, are disfigured and/or have missing or superfluous fingers, and there are two fingers to the left of the front sewing machine that do not originate from any hand.

Did the artificial intelligence decide to play a trick on me because I did not pay for its services? 

We shall never know.

– Yours artificially, Leonardo Blumfeld

The that’s progress haiku

 

Some programmer got 
busy – made a box smaller,
saving room for adz.

– Leonard Blumfed (© 2022)

Note
The ugly truth and nothing but. Now that the Congrats box has been shrunk, Microsoft can not only display one ad but two at the same time! Pure genius! Just as we were getting undersugared from too few adz.

Terminology explanation
What are adz? Same as ads (advertisements), only much cheaper! It's like the difference between music and muzak.

The Melinda haiku

 

Dear Melinda, stop
putting your label on all 
the apples you sell.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Note
Melinda is probably Italy’s best known producer of apples and pears. Its products can be found in most supermarkets throughout the country. And each fruit comes with its own little sticky plastic Melinda label. The company’s website goes on and on about sustainability, bio, etc. How about really doing something good and leaving off the damn labels? Not only are they a nuisance to remove but they also create waste. How important can fruit branding really be?

How to become a Bitcoin millionaire

It’s actually quite easy! 

Have faith in the Bitcoin mails in your spam folder that arrive from all the generous and anonymous benefactors that miraculously deposit amazing amounts in your account – every day without fail! 

Why are they doing that? No-one knows. Maybe they’re just lovely people, unlike most that send spam.

Simply have faith and look for Bitcoin in the mouth of every gift horse that gallops along.

Here’s one of these wonderful notifications that make you rich (in Spanish no less – ¡Ay caramba – qué maravilla!):

Current trends in spam

 

An excerpt from my gmail spam inbox

Brand new: funeral plan offers! Wow, can't wait to get one of those plans from a surely entirely trustworthy source.

Old faithfuls for the last year or so: Bitcoin! As you can see from all the mails I've received, I'm filthy Bitcoin rich by now. Bitcoin spammers - such benefactors to mankind. And not just in English - I've also been identified as a Spanish-speaking Bitcoin aficionado. ¡Ay, caramba!

Apply and receive funds today (Just remember to include the asterisk next to 'today') - That one day was the one that went by me, so did not receive the funds. Ouch!

I also failed to track that package from Royal Mail I never ordered. Ouch again.

Now off they go - there's that handy Delete forever button.

Upon which Google Mail proudly crows "Hooray, no spam here!" like a rooster on a missing pile of manure.

Example of a 3rd person biography

 

“A windy and somniferous birdwatcher, Lean Mean Moran is an ambitious young dynamic emerging writer who roams the high and low lands and some more or less dubious neighborhoods of a lesser known Balkan country. On warm summer days you can find him in somebody’s backyard with his bong. He enjoys short and mindless hikes in the company of his I-Pod, expired USSR army outlet biscuits and reading Sylvia Bletch. One day, he is sure that he will die and hopes so. He has bled and published profusely in the realms of desktop perpetrators.”

The above recent photo shows Lean striking a favorite pose on the way to his Italian podologist.

Note
All aspiring writers looking to have their outpourings published are faced with the demand for that 3rd person biography that makes editors gasp. The above is a good example of what to write if you want to (not) get published. Of course, a hard-hitting bio such as this must go hand in hand with the proverbial poetry that contains fresh imagery and surprises even the most inured editor.

The pupation of Donald Trump

 

This worm will always remain a worm.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2020) 

Photo by Nick Windsor on Unsplash

The amazing prowess of Goggle ... oops ... you know what

   

Goggle keeps amazing the world! 

   

Not only is it the world's best search engine (how bad must the others be!) according to Internet statistics that appear to be virtually unanimous, but it also offers Goggle docs, which allow you to do anything you could possibly want ... except buying food and eating it while you're working on your Goggle docs.

However, there's one thing it doesn't like ... and considers a potential "grammar" issue:

DO NOT USE GOGGLE INSTEAD OF GOOGLE

The Windows update haiku

Walking around like
a tiger in a cage – Micro-
soft is updating.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2020)

Notes
The truth and nothing but. Well, except that I didn’t really turn into a tiger. But my anger is that of a caged big cat. It’s been going on for years – you are trying to get some work done while Microsoft nixes all your plans by doing an excruciatingly slow update it deems necessary for reasons even Microsoft probably doesn’t understand. Otherwise they would not constantly update their crap.

The jomo haiku

Dear John, enjoyed not
being there among dfs
slurping aperol

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2019)

Note
As you (all 3 of you constituting my dear audience) know, JOMO stands for “joy of missing out.” It is with that emotion that I missed out on yet another apero party organized by a well-known expat yuppy organization in yet another umpteen star hotel bar in that capital of apero parties of the land of aperol spritz. As to what “dfs” may mean, give free reign to your imagination.

The Instagram pout haiku

Brought to her knees by
her own beauty and that pout
as she shoots herself

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2018)

Note
View Instagram for zillions of examples.

The Con Is On (2018)

“An unfunny comedy about assorted murderous, scamming, drug and booze consuming sleazoids; it may work if you consider it to be a far-fetched satire on the scummy oligarchs that are currently in charge of some major countries.”

Refers to the 2018 movie The Con Is On, directed by James Oakley and starring Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Alice Eve, Sofía Vergara and Maggie Q. Anyone can safely skip this one without missing anything worthwhile.

The poised haiku

It is sovereign
in weight distribution, bright
ease and breeziness

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2018)

Note
Most haiku (at least the ones that come to my eyes) are pretentious – in insinuating they have to offer something worthwhile – as well as flat sprat on their face in attempting to create a moment of instant recognition – that special haiku specialty – that usually is neither instant nor recognition. So, once again, I decided to add to the mass with a haiku that is definitely pretentious as well as completely devoid of any instant recognition.

The artificial intelligence haiku

Stop second guessing
and correcting what I have
to say, you dumbshit.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2017)

Notes
Needs to be urgently said before this artificial so-called “intelligence” takes over everything completely. Like Google: “Did you mean ...?” NO, I DEFINITELY DID NOT! STOP QUESTIONING MY INTELLIGENCE, YOU ARTIFICIAL NITWIT and then presenting “sponsored” results I did not ask for.

Stop putting words in my mouth (or under my fingers), Android! You are not even vaguely an android but a stupidly programmed piece of idiocy.

Long live artificial inanity – it shall eventually achieve its ultimate goal: to stop everyone from doing their own thinking.

A so what poem

I betrayed the sea
when I pretended
I didn’t want to tame it

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2017)

Note
More of an illustration or example than a real poem (one that would have come from my heart). What is a so what poem? It is a poem that is based on a preposterous, pretentious assumption, like the one above. Why would anyone in his right mind give a shit about some poet drooling about pretending not to want to tame the sea? Should or would the sea really care? Unfortunately, the genre of so what poems seems to abound and thrive. Particularly on social networks.

The brutal reality haiku

If it's not fake, it's
most likely war, injustice,
fraud or betrayal.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2017)

Note
A somewhat pessimistic view of what’s going on in the world.
What brought that on?
Looking at the news, I suppose, suppressing the few hopeful items that are reported on now and then as well as advertising, which suggests that everything is fun and games if you buy the right products.