Sunday, January 31, 2010

News Haikus # 19, Conan the Destroyer

Five years ago, when the head offices of FPPInternational we still FPPDomestic and based in NYC, some pals came to the big apple for a visit. A whole bunch a touristy shit was seen and done and, among other things, we four Washatonians (spelling?) agreed that a trip to see the Conan O'Brien Late Night show would be a cool way to kill an afternoon. He was, and I think still is, our hands-down fave talkshow host (if I can speak for Chili, Strando and The Weatherman--That's them there, in NYC).

empire5

Anyway, we got into studio and watched the taping of an episode. It was a good time, and although freakishly tall, thin, pale and coifed, Conan seemed a true class act.



Lately the shakeup at NBC has proved that estimation correct, and the estimation that his late-night rival Jay Leno is a complete douchebag. Anyway, The staff here at FPPInternational are collectively saddened at the end of Conan's tenure at the Tonight Show and we swear we will never ever watch a minute of The Tonight Show with Leno, unless Neil Young is on there singing a duet (triet?) with Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley.

Seems I am not the only one. Other folks think Jay's a fuckstick as well. Check out Jimmy Kimmel...




So, until then, adios Tonight Show, Johnny Carson's empire is now a shitty little G-rated monkey show featuring a whiny, Buick-jawed turd....

Haiku
...
Spin, spin Johnny. I
Hope Ed is drunk, 'cause Tonight
Will never be worse.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Digital Malaise

We offer you our sacrifice, Oh Holy Techno-splat...

A final comment on the January 2010 Adventure in Southern Colombia...So. The trip to the Amazon over, we mounted our 737 to get back home....But not before realizing that neither of our cameras would work anymore.

That's right. After wrestling with four TRONEX batteries purchased in Leticia before heading into the jungle (I swear TRONEX was all they had at the "supermarket" in Leticia. I wasn't just being a cheap-ass), which didn't ever power up the camera long enough to get a picture, after all the events were catalogued, both of our camera completely pooped out, at roughly the same minute, and to this day neither of them will start up, and that's using non-TRONEX batteries. So, our adventure complete, it seems that the gods of digital digitalosis decided to punish or reward us for our sins or virtue.

Either way, we're gonna have to get ourselves some fancy schmancy new picture taking device.

Hope all is well,
Kisses,
Fpp

BTW...Carnivals arrived in BQ this last week in the shape of a drunken old lady using a vacuum cleaner bag as luggage. The mayhem is thick in the air like carrot cake.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Hearts of Darkness in the Southern Hemisphere, Days IV and V

Polishing off our Amazon adventure meant a leisurely stroll through the Jungle, checking out trees, plants, bugs, animals, and air that can kill you.

The return trip to Leticia was uneventful, and really really slow

Up a Tree

The final movement in our Super-southern adventure was to go canopying with our best friends, 300,000 mosquitoes. It was a nice little capper and we got back to our hotel, showered up and left the Amazon for more familiar climes. So long to the Jungle. Back to work. etc. etc. etc.


Sorry about the lack of audio here, you will have you find your own, inner Sammy Hagar.

Friday, January 15, 2010

News Haikus 17. The Haitian Spin

Sorry to actually post something from these idiots, but...





O'Reily wants to know what China has donated. The Chinese were the first nation to respond when this thing went down. They had aid workers on the ground in Haiti in hours, beating the American response team by about an hour. I am not saying the Chinese are the greatest things since sliced pie, but why does everything with these dipshits (O'Reilly & Rush, not the Chinese) have to boil down into a contest ending with "America beats everyone, but Obama still apologizes to the world?"

Ah, Rush, you make O'Reilly look sane. "Three days. And when he came out, after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it."

or "He lives for serving those in misery."
How in the hell did a bastard who helps people in need ever get elected President of the United States?

Something Rush doesn't seem to get...
What Exactly was Obama supposed to say about a failed plane bombing? What he supposed to threaten to find the rest of the guy's pants and burn them too? The Christmas pants-burning terrorist attempt was OVER within seconds. There's not much a US President can do once the event is already over.
Rush and his cronies seem to like presidents who make grandiose statements about stuff they can do nothing about (see George W. Bush), instead of presidents who respond to events that can be responded to. Anyone remember Katrina? Remember Bush's 'response'?
No one was in danger of being blown up from the Nigerian pants burner two minutes after he tried to blow up the plane, which leads me to believe that some knee-jerk response to such an event is ineffectual, unnecessary and probably, way too late anyway; whereas, people are still in the rubble down there in Haiti (up there for the staff at FPPInternational), and this merits a timely response.

And, by the way, how nations respond to calamities can be checked...

And, by the way, Haiti isn't the only natural disaster in recent times, check out Cuba on this one, and Djibouti, they offered 50,000 bucks to Katrina relief. Djibouti. They don't have $50,000.


And from even deeper down the nutjob tank



My favorite line there is "They got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you, if you get us free from the French.' True story. And the Devil said, 'Ok.'"


HAIKU:

Rush Responding to
Haitian 'quake is like a Don
Rickles Eulogy.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Hearts of Darkness in the Southern Hemisphere, Day III

The Adventure in the Amazon continues with a morning paddle into the shiznit. The guide said, "we're going to go look at some lilly pads." Awesome. Lilly pads. Ok. Whatever, it's early and I just ate a bunch of eggs. I'll go look at some Lillypads. Lillypads were the least of what we saw.

Nothing says "wake up and breathe in the morning freshness," like fire ants and screaming monkeys.

FPPInternational Sports editor LaFlaca was good enough to shoot some footage of me paddling us through the jungle, and I was good enough to paddle. And since my Sony Vegas software went kerplunk and stopped working about six months ago, I edited some of the video and pics together using a trial version of a piece-of-crap software that I downloaded. I did not care for the program at all, but I did like the little video, so I uploaded it, even though it has that goofy title "purchase now" BS throughout.



Really, though, this was one cool paddling adventure, unlike anything else I have ever done. The sense of being absolute away from everything that one knows is positively thick in the air. Alice never made it this far into Wonderland and the Mad Hatter would have been positively aghast and in a tizzy, rabbits and cats being the least of his concerns.

Bienvenidos alla jungla.

After the paddle back to the pad and a lunch of fish (of course), we went out and caught some piranha, using little cubes of beef on hooks on sticks with four feet of fishing line on them. The deadly little buggers flipped around in the boat like farts in skillets (to quote my grandmother) and were consumed at dinner.
1978 Roger Corman Joe Dante film
The vicious little monsters have virtually no meat on em at all. But eating a piranha is like reading "The Most Dangerous Game" with a class of eighth graders. General Zaroff's bed is indeed soft and we do not remember having ever had better digestion.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Hearts of Darkness in the Southern Hemisphere, Days 1 and 2

For the first time since 2001, The editorial staff at FppInternational hopped over the equator.
Heart of Darkness

To celebrate the new decade, the FPPInternational jokers voyaged into the dark netherlands of Colombia, the Amazon. But the Amazon is a monster, you say, where oh where did the FppInternational staff venture to? Worry not, intrepid readers, in Colombia, your Amazon choices are pretty damn limited. If one examines the little map here, a handy trapezoid bugger hanging off the bottom of the country will be observed. That, my friends, is the Colombian river-front property on the Amazon. And that is where we went.In doing so, we actually spent most of our time in Peru and a snippet in Brazil. But we were never officially anywhere but Colombia, and man did we see some jungle stuff. In fact, the editors at FPPInternational are almost 100% in agreement that the Amazon is the single coolest thing in Colombia, if not in South America.
Crazy Drivers
Day one involved getting into Leticia, via Aires and Bogota, getting ahold of some amigos, planning the next four days, and getting some sleep. All this foolishness was accomplished and on the morning of January 7th, we yumped our little yimmities onto a little wooden craft and took off on a three hour tour into the jungle, and out to our new digs.

The ride on the boat was very cool, then very very cool, then downright amazing.

You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby, and you're gonna take some pictures.

We arrived at our pad
Jungle Pad
and had some lunch and met our pals. Then, after an hour's siesta went out on the river for a little swim in the big brown and some dolphin spotting.

"Dolphins?" you say, "On the amazon?"
You're damn skippy.

The river is absolutely rife with dolphins, both gray and pink. And FPPInternational sports editor La Flaca, was simple gaga over the slipperly porpoises and their sunset antics.

However, the little buggers were sure hard to catch on film, especially when the batteries in camera 1 were completely depleted. That's Ok, more tomorrow.

Aires II-IV, The Other Flights and Capital-City Capers

All right, so the Aires folks treated us badly on the way to Bogota, but would their nefarious dealings with team FPPInternational.com persist? For the answers to this and other Bogota related questions please keep reading

Flaca bench Bogota

Ok. So the first flight was a bit of a pain-in-the-ass. Aires, however, did recover their reputation a bit.

Flight II, Bogota to Leticia...
This one I love. Tuesday night in Bogota, after our Embassadorial Adventure, La Flaca got a text message on her phone saying the following day's (Wed. Jan. 6) flight to Leticia would be two hours late. The text asked her to call a number which is impossible to call on anything except a home phone for confirming our rez. Eventually, thanks to the helpful staff at Bellissimo Italian Trattoria in Bogota, we were able to get ahold of Aires. After confirming everything for the now 1 pm flight, La Flaca asked, off the cuff, why the flight time was changed. "Weather," the woman said.
wait...
weather?
On a cloudless, breezeless night, weather? Fifteen hours in advance, these people changed a flight because of weather?
That's some serious fucking Doppler.
BTW, the next day at 11am and 1pm, the weather was fine. and the plane was an only an hour late (2 pm). Oh, and we were in the dead-last row this time, not second, and we sure-as-shit didn't exit out the back door this time. Oh, and La flaca's seat didn't have a seatbelt.
Consenus...
Aires Rocks!

For some reason, the flights back were less interesting, and this morning, EARLY this morning, on our Bogota to Barranquilla return-em home flight, we were in the first, yes, you heard right, first row, and the damn thing was on time, and the front door worked, and I was the second guy off the plane.

Home Sweet Home

Kisses
FppInternational

Oh, and as far as Capital City Capers go, after much back-and-forth, and hither-and-thither, The entire staff at FppIntenational is now permitted to enter the United States without a hitch, although features editor Dr. Dinkus Reichlin Phd. will have to mind his damned p's and q's.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

The Aire up There.


A couple months ago, the three major Colombia airlines (in order of size and prestige: Avianca, Aero Republica, and Aires) had a big ol' fare war and we, being dutiful citizens, fired a couple shots ourselves, securing a couple trips BAQ to Bogota in October and BAQ to Bogota to Leticia (the Amazon) in January. Well, it´s January, and after a couple hitches (well, one hitch, the price for changing our dates went from A. free to B. eleven dollars to C. three hundred dollars, in the span of about forty minutes) we finally embarked on journey number two. Journey number one having involved an extra two hours added to our wait in BAQ on the way down.


Anyway, on an oddly foggy January fourth morning we went to the airport to fly to Bogota, the capital of Colombia. Because of the fog, the plane we were waiting for went to Cartagena instead of BAQ. Goddamnit. So, finally, the fog clears, the plane shows up, and our pal Becky gets off of it. She isn´t happy, and wants to go home. We get on the plane.

Have I mentioned that we're meeting friends in the Bogota airport to get some apartment keys so we have some digs for the next two days?

It doesn't matter though, cause the dude with the keys is waiting for our jet, and, because it went to Cartagena, it's about two hours late, again.


So we land in Bogota, everyone is a little irritated with Aires because of the delay, but it's a sunny day and the birds are singing. Then the jackasses at Aires can't figure out how to get that damned gate thing to line up with the door of the plane. We backed up. They tried it again. We went forward again. No dice. Shit! We sat in our little itty bitty seats (Row 2 by the way, the closest I have ever been to being the first SOB off the plane, I was stoked!) for forty minutes. Until finally someone opens the back door and pulls up some stairs and buses us (buses us, seriously, about fifty yards. No shit) to a door. Did I mention that for the first time in my 100 plus flights I was in one of the first two rows and was almost guaranteed to be one of the first ten assholes off the plane? So, Aires fucked that up for me, which is ok, I still have my dreams. To make a sad story short, we arrived in Bogota, unharmed, but still have three flights to go, Bogota to Leticia, Leticia to Bogota, Bogota to Barranquilla, all on Aires. I am expecting to make it home just before Easter.
Kisses from the Colombia Capital,
FppInternational


Friday, January 01, 2010

2010 -- Year of the Dog (Bite)

So, 2010 started out interestingly enough.

Dog leg-hole 2, the Quickening

Walking Dinky in the late am, after a pretty uneventful New Year's Eve, the Editor-in-chief of FppInternational was surprised by a red Chow Chow off his leash half a block from corporate headquarters. The owner of this Chow Chow was running after it, yelling. The Chow Chow, named, we found out later, Leon (or Lion in Spanish) ran towards FppInternational features editor Dr. Dinkus Reichlin, Phd. in a manner that suggested Leon wanted to engage in less-than-civil discourse. So, the quick-thinking FppInternational editor-in-chief lifted the features editor into the air, to avoid the hostile canine takeover. Leon, unappreciative of Fpp's move, chomped his cursed teeth into our editor's leg.

So, a trip to the emergency room and a tetanus shot later, all is well at corporate headquarters. And really, isn't this better than a hangover?


Dog leg-hole

Happy New Year, buy some iodine.

BTW... I am writing all cool and stuff now, but Goddamn was I mad at the time. I yelled and swore and made a big amount of ruckus when that damned beast was finally tied down.

Dinky was oblivious to the fact that he almost got mauled by a 60 pound cougar-like monster, and I think he's pissed at me that his morning walk was shortened.

Take care, enjoy your 2010.
Kisses,
FPP