Just to drive the point home....

What doesn't make it in the news...

...is oft-times more telling that what makes the news.

Take the current state of race/immigrant relations in Iceland.

A few days ago, Bubbi holds a concert to "rock against racism", complete with the Prime Minister of Iceland warbling through a sickly duet. The show is packed, people jamming the isles, the parking lot overflowing into the surrounding streets and sidewalks.

And the show gets a ton of good press. Mentioned in every newspaper in the land (although they left the part out about the mainly Icelandic crowd at this mainly Icelandic concert heckling the Polish woman who gave Bubbi an award), on the news and the net.

No one seems inclined to report on what many people found stuck to their windshields after the concert, usually inside the little plastic envelope their parking tickets came in. A flier calling on Icelanders to "fight back against multiculturalism" and "race mixing" being pushed by the "traitors" in power or they'd wind up with the same problems as Denmark is currently experiencing, and urging them to contact a new website. Run by none other than those Neo-Nazi-queer-bashing-hostel-burning-immigrant-beating pipe-bombing inbred Fascist fuckheads Blood and Honor & Combat 18.

I don't know what's sadder. The fact that the media hasn't reported this (especially considering their gleeful reportage both of other racist acts and of supposed infiltrations on the part of "foreign mafias" and gangs) or the fact that some sad-sack pathetic Icelandic shithead decided he hated útlendingar so much he joined an international fascist organization to do something about it. An organization with a Polish chapter, it bears pointing out.

The irony would crack me up if it weren't so damned sad

In lieu of my rant about the upcoming elections...

...I'll let an expert do the talking.

In other news, can someone pleast explain to my computer iliterate ass just how one goes about posting Youtube videos on ones blog, cause this page doesn't want to let me do it.

Also, after some renegotations with the boss o' the school, I'll now be working until March 14th. then its freedom baby...FREEEEEDDDDOOOOMMMMM!!!!!

Grrr....arrrrghhh....adssssss

I've had a shit morning.

I mean shit.

I mean, what with the constant rescheduling of me (without my knowledge) which led to the hackle-raising fun of having the functionally retarded cleaning lady mock/bitch at me for not being aware of the third unannounced change to my schedule this week, and the snow-ball kiddy riot wherein the fucking sixth graders (walking arguments for contraception that they are) attacked a group of fifth graders with ice balls to the head, kicks, punches and shoving into the snow, only to break down into tears and squeal like stuck pigs about the unfairness of it all when called out on it.

Alright. Job bitching done.

And I'll save my rant about the upcoming US election that fucking everyone and their mother just has to ask me my opinion on.

Instead, to cheer myself up for Beerday, I'm going to try a comic little experiment.

I'm signing up, and selling out. Just for shits and giggles.

I'm putting Google AdSense on my page.

This amuses me for a plethora of reasons. Like, what the hell kind of products are they going to try to sell based on the contents of my blog? Malatov cocktail kits? Second-hand clothes? Leather child-restraint straps? Tours of fabulous drunken downtown Rvk? Books on anti-consumerism? I want to see what they advertise!

Also, if I make enough to buy a sixpack of beer, I promise to share it with the three people I know read my blog...he he he

Limbo lower now.

(<---REALLY GOOD MOVIE)

So thanks to Emblita's perfectly timed shabuku, I turned in my letter of resignation from the school on Monday.

I then promptly fell ill and spent the next 36 hours in bed.

It felt great, printing that thing out, slapping the ol' John Hancock on the line and all, but the fact that the principal was so busy that I wound up having to send it to her via email and interoffice was a serious anti-climax. Like having your grandma walk in on you mid-wank.

I keep waiting for a phone call or an email or just to be called to the carpet, but nothing, nada, zilch.

Which I guess is a good thing, I mean, I'd hate to wind up in a shouting match or storming out or anything, considering thatI'll be working in the same buildling at least until March, but I would like to have it all signed seal and finished.

The thing is, despite applying for numerous other jobs, I'm kinda looking foward to next month, only working about 60% but earning the same if not slightly more moolah. Having time in the mornings to work on the place, to write, to swim, to fart around with projects too long delayed.

I can't wait.

In other news, during my feverish limbo on my new little couch (Thanks Embla and Klaus) I wound up watching movies like mad including Walk the Line (really good but short of brilliant) Kinsey (brilliant!) Hannibal Rising (complete and total shitstorm of badness) and Hellboy (which I've watched a zillion times and love).

I really don't know why I felt the need to tack that on to this post...anywho...

Update: I finally got the word, I'm officially on short-time now. They tried the whole passive-agressive bs with me ("we really want you here, why are you leaving us?") and so on, but its nice to know that I'm gone. Solid gone.

Do as I say and not as I do.

So there’s a couple interesting little factoids I've picked up from the slew of free daily papers that are chucked on my doorstep.

A lot of it has to with the poorly thought out Nanny-State smoking ban that went into effect last June. Some of the bars in town, most notably the reanimated corpse of the once-great 22, Barinn are allowing smoking either inside in specially built smoking sections, or outside in gardens and court-yards. Now, while the special smoking rooms may be a rather direct challenge, the amazing thing is how they are also bitching and moaning about smoking in courtyards (the one at Hressó has been singled out a few times). Why you ask? Because the law says that smoking is only allowed "undir beru himni" and some bars have put up roofs for the already compromised comfort of their tobacco indulging/addicted customers.

The rank hypocrisy becomes evident when one realizes that the law only applies to restaurants, bars, stores and the like, and not to other institutions, like say, I don't know...

THE FUCKING PARLIMENT!!??

So the same elected officials that passed this stupid law wrote themselves a handy little exemption.

Fucking hypocrites.

But then again, the world is awash in hypocrisy. Last month I blogged about the authorities plan to send foreign convicts "back home" to serve out their sentences, which considering the humane and lenient (for a prison) Icelandic penal (hehe, penal...) system, basically amounts to stiffer penalties and harsher treatment for foreigners. Compare this to a country that fought a long-running campaign to bring a convicted child-molester over to Iceland because they found his sentence too harsh, and offered asylum to a mentally unstable chess player so he wouldn't have to serve a term in federal prison for breaking a boycott and tax evasion. Not to mention went completely up in arms when a woman was detained for more than 24 hours and escorted in shackles and a orange prison jump-suit to an Icelandair flight for deportation because she over-stayed her visa 12 years ago.*

So Icelanders and Íslandvinur should be saved at all costs from harsh and inhumane treatment at the hands of foreign authorities, but foreigners should be handed over to their tender mercies?

Then there's me. I'm an anarchist; I truly believe that coercion is the mother of all evils. Yet I work at a place where it has been made crystal clear that they don't want me here to educate children, to facilitate of love of books in the library, or anything else of the sort. They want me here to control them. When I recently requested a cut in my hours at the school in order to work more and the better paying, and much less ethically fucked up AST, my bosses had the choice of either letting me show up at 8am, open up the library and work there until 11:30, and then do an hour's worth of kiddy-copping in the lunch room, or close the library every morning until 9, and have me kiddy-cop until 1pm.

They chose the latter.

I mean, talk about a harsh light shined into a dark place. This is like a laser mounted on a colonoscopy scope. The school cares more about having someone telling the kids to shut up and eat quietly and clean up after themselves (except the little ones, who I have to clean up after because the janitors can't be assed to do their job, and who can blame them when they get paid 158,000 before taxes for fulltime work*) and stand in line (practically impossible with Icelanders) than have the library, the preferred fount of knowledge, open for the kids to use.

The worst thing is, I know this is wrong. I hate it. And I'm still too much of a fucking coward to quit. Which hit pretty hard yesterday when I realized I was wearing my "Anarchy is for lovers" T-shirt under my hoody as I busted a kid for acting up at the pool.

Do as I say and not as I do...
*for the record: I think the treatment Aron Palmi received was horrible, a typical puritanical persecution of a child in order to further the Christian-Right's ongoing war against sex. I also think that the U.S.S.A. has no business banning citizens from traveling to whatever country they damned well please, even if it’s under an embargo (which I think they have no right to enforce) as in the case of Bobby Fischer. Finally, I think that the INS and DHS are a bunch of right-wing fascist jack-boot brownshirt thugs and that the woman so shamefully "deported" was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the inhumane, unethical, and down-right genocidal treatment that foreigners can be subject to in the U.S.S.A.

*for the record: I make almost as much working 50% at the AST.