I found this last week, tucked into the back of a library book. I assume it had been used by its recipient as a bookmark and then returned to the library by accident.
My transcription:
7. july
dear lydia and mike
greetings from hot + humid
tokyoo! just wanted to say
thanks again for taking
care of milou the fish while
i am away these couple of
weeks – jb + i really appreciate
it!
things here are great – doing
lots of wedding planning!
- anna + jean-baptiste
Hooray for library books! and best wishes to Anna and JB and Milou for a very happy life together.
Occasionally, an Amazon Marketplace seller who has hitherto fulfilled orders in an exemplary manner will suddenly stop doing so. Who knows why this happens? But all buyers have a right to reply if their goods fail to arrive, and what they write may speak volumes – though not, interestingly, about the seller. Let’s take the example of one who suddenly dropped out of the picture in summer 2009, and the feedback he received, which I split for convenience into a number of categories.
Curt
1/5:
“Thief”
1/5:
“appauling!”
Presumptuous
1/5:
“This man is either lying dead in his bed or he is a crook. I suspect he is the latter. Thank you Amazon for refunding quickly and without problems. This guy is a rotten apple in Amazon’s fruit basket. People like him are party poopers when trying to have fun on the internet. Allas.”
1/5:
“this person is so desperate for money that he or she has to fraudulently obtain people’s hard earned cash for products they do not provide. I will try to summon up the pity for he or she, very sad case in life that they obviously do not have the brain power or social skills to earn money via legal means. Sleep well you sad waste of earth space. May you return as a space bar. Loser.”
Indulgent
1/5:
“I suspect the seller may have taken ill. Very strange.” [One mark out of five for the bastard's immune system.]
3/5:
“No sign of DVD after three weeks, nor any reply to either of two e-mails, but something disposes me to be merciful. It’s undoubtedly irritating, but it’s hardly the end of the world, and I dare say I may be able to get a refund from Amazon. Perhaps the seller has been prevented from fulfilling orders because of being struck down by swine flu, for instance. I do hope not.”
3/5:
“Perhaps the seller has been physically unable to fulfill orders and reply to Emails because of severe illness, accident or worse as they had good feedback before all these negative comments.”
Moralising
1/5:
“No delivery of item Emailed this person… no response Do not buy from this person… I hope youre conscience speaks to you about your actions… You will have to face your maker one day and give an account of your actions… You need to repent! ”
1/5:
“Is this really the kind of human being you want to be???”
Cockney
1/5:
“what a dip stick this geezer realy is. no replies and no dvds. why does amazon let him sell on here?”
Irate
1/5:
“***BE WARNED***THIS GUY IS A F*****G CROOK.HARD TO KNOW WHETHER TO WANNA RIP HIS HEAD OFF OR FEEL SORRY FOR HIM THAT HE STOOPS SO LOW AS TO ROB PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET FOR A FEW QUID. ANYWAY MY EXPERIENCE IS PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS NEARLY EVERYONE ELSE,ITEMS DIDNT ARRIVE AND NO RESPONSE TO EMAILS.I GOT REFUNDED BY AMAZON. SO I REPEAT ***BE WARNED***DO NOT TOUCH THIS GUY WITHA BARGEPOLE!!”
1/5:
“DO NOT USE THIS SELLER IF YOU WANT TO BE RIPPED OFF. CROOK AND THEIF. ITEMS NEVER ARRIVE. F*****G D******D”
Contradictory
1/5:
“It was a con. Goods did arrive. No replies. Had to use Amazon Marketplace guarentee to get money back.”
Scatological
1/5:
“What a piece of fecal matter. same as the you guys no goods no replies to emails. Amazon you need to up your game”
1/5:
“another one that they have ripped off, get rid of this excrament from amazon, no sorry, they are the smeggy bacteria that live and suck on excrament, hope you die!”
Bionic
1/5:
“i ordered the bionic woman weeks ago now and i am still waiting for it if you are not going to send it to me could you please refund the cash please i have waited an extra week so could you please let me know what you intend to do thankyou”
1/5:
“Never received Bionic Woman DVD set. Judging by the other feedback for this seller, he’s either very sick (maybe dead) or a thief. Given a choice I”d rather have him die on me then steal from me.”
Immoderate
1/5:
“the lowest life-form on earth .. ”
Eeyore
1/5:
“it goes without saying but its all the better for being said, if something seems too good to be true it proberly is, as in this case, no item has been received and no acknowledgement from seller to my email, I should have read the reviews which sum this seller up”
Oblique
1/5:
“Is there room for one more in this boat before it sinks? Three of three items, 1 week overdue: No response. The rats have fled. Goodbye. Your time is up.”
Part of a bionic woman. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Is it possible, I wonder, to identify some correlation between spelling/literacy and anger level? I confess, I hesitate to give such trash an outlet on my blog (though, as you might justifiably point out, it hasn’t stopped me before). After all, what is more depressing about the internet than the instinct for attacking others that it evidently gives people? But perhaps we can laugh at things like this. It’s almost worth the trouble of setting up a fake Amazon account to watch these people in action.
Ha! You thought I’d forgotten about my 50 films, didn’t you? What, sorry? You’d forgotten about them? Oh.
In January 2003 I was one of the ‘performers’ (and I can only use the word in its loosest possible sense) in a ‘performance’ (ditto) of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique in the Dome at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) in Cambridge. This is a work in which 100 metronomes are wound up and set off simultaneously, at different speeds. Initially cacophonous, it gradually becomes possible to discern individual metronomes as the others drop out one by one, until a single metronome is left, whose eventual silence signals the end. A fascinating piece, but a tricky one to stage, not least because of the practical impossibility of finding a reputable metronome hire company anywhere in the world, let alone in East Anglia. Still, we did some begging around and somehow got enough to make a performance viable (I confess I don’t remember as many as 100, though I feel sure we reached 50).
The reason I recall this is that I had planned to go to the cinema that same night to see the new Aki Kaurismäki, The Man Without a Past. I don’t think I’d seen any Kaurismäki before (perhaps Ariel and/or Hamlet Goes Business), but I’d read about it and it sounded absolutely my kind of thing. But the Ligeti dragged on interminably. The last few metronomes clung on … and on … and the minutes grew steadily longer. I have an unshakeable terror of turning up late for plays or films or concerts, but I could hardly leave this one before it had finished in order to go to the cinema. Finally, silence stole over us. The audience applauded the magnificent display of machinery arranged before them while presumably muttering things about an evening wasted, and I made my getaway. I rushed down Castle Hill and made it to the Arts Picturehouse in time to buy the last ticket available, in the leftmost seat of the front row.
This is Jaakko Antero Lujanen (Markku Peltola), though his name is not known until the end of the film, and in fact he is referred to in the end credits simply as ‘M’. The opening sequence shows him approaching Helsinki on a train from somewhere far away, looking in his stone-faced dejectedness not entirely unlike Cary Grant. On his arrival he sits down on a bench and falls asleep. Later that night, he is brutally beaten by thugs, who steal his money and dispose of his wallet – and, effectively, his identity, since when he regains consciousness in hospital he has no idea who he is.
My straightforward description of the setup omits a number of characteristic details one observes in the opening minutes, of the kind that give this film its magic. Take the director’s use of music, always thoughtful. The mournful bandoneon and piano track that accompanies M on his journey, or the victorious brass chords from the last movement of Leevi Madetoja’s 3rd symphony, which emanate from M’s radio, turned on by one of the thugs to accompany the beating, while he dons M’s welder’s mask – the only clue among the man’s possessions to his identity. After the beating, he covers M’s face with the mask, a beautifully symbolic representation of the loss of M’s identity, and exhilarating despite the violent tragedy that accompanies it. In hospital, M’s face is still covered, but by bandages. He dies, but then returns to life when the doctor and nurse have left his bedside, pausing only to straighten his crooked nose (one of a number of inspired and unexpected touches of humour) before discharging himself and returning to the world. I think this may be one of my favourite opening sequences in all cinema.
M is taken in by a poor but kind family. They help to set him up in a home of his own (it’s actually a shipping container, but he brightens it up by the addition of a jukebox which plays blues and rock and roll, and cultivates a small vegetable garden). His lack of identity and his ignorance of his former profession make it difficult for him to find work, but a visit to the Salvation Army for a free meal one Friday evening helps to give purpose to his life. Not only does he get some new clothes from their store, but he begins to fall in love with one of the workers, the unassuming Irma (Kati Outinen). He also has some suggestions for updating the music played by the Army band, and persuades them to abandon their insipid hymns in favour of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. ‘We’ve heard about rock,’ says the drummer, who plays a single snare drum. M then puts a record on, and the band members start slowly to respond, like the queuing metalworkers in The Full Monty. The band’s transformation is impressive, and M becomes a small-time rock manager.
Just as M has started to be able to live again – a place to call his own, a girlfriend, a sort-of-job – he sees a man welding, which unlocks something in his mind. Presently, the police contact M to say that his wife has identified him. This throws his life into disarray, not that you’d know it from his eternally impassive facial expressions. He bids a tender farewell to Irma and travels back home to Nurmes. There is play with the shifting of the concepts of home and identity throughout the film. Which M is the real one? Does the discovery of his old life automatically invalidate his new one? He makes a final train journey at the end of the film, back to Helsinki, replicating his journey at the start. Is this a homecoming?
Thugs apart, the characters of the film are, almost without exception, kindly, taciturn and passive. There is a scene where a lugubrious robber locks M and a cashier in a bank vault. ‘I must close the door to give myself a head start,’ he apologises. ‘Perfectly understandable in your position,’ M replies. The sparse range of facial expressions on display, typical of Kaurismäki’s characters, heightens the tenderness of the scenes between M and Irma, these two lonely, unremarkable people who have established an unlikely emotional connection. When someone smiles in a Kaurismäki film, it really counts.
For me, there is one character who does possess genuine charisma, and that is Matti Wuori (above right), a noted Finnish lawyer and politician, who makes a cameo appearance as himself. Like an angel, he appears as though unbidden (in fact at the behest of the Salvation Army, it transpires) to help get M out of police custody. His brief scene is one of the most joyous I have ever seen, and gives the same thrill as when Marshall McLuhan pops up in Annie Hall. Outside the station they shake hands, Wuori gives M a cigar, and they go their separate ways.
This film was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Film Oscar but lost out to the comparatively sterile German/African film Nowhere in Africa, a decision which still rankles with me. Markku Peltola died in 2007 at the age of 51. This film is an fine monument to him as an actor, and a beautiful introduction to the bittersweet world of Aki Kaurismäki.
This is the content of a spam email that I received in February 2007. I’m not sure what it was trying to sell me. Some reading between the lines may be necessary to divine that. But it contains a number of striking phrases, most of them seemingly stolen from other websites – blogs, news and self-help. The cumulative effect is to create a found poem of dare I say ethereal beauty? No. But a found poem nonetheless.
I always suspected Captain Feathersword was the one that got passed around amongst the Wiggles like new meat on cell block A.
Johnson is a managing partner of Maximum Reimbursement, a practice management company.
By following the same kind of healthy borrowing practices that you had before your bankruptcy, you can slowly re-establish your credit rating.
this is my payment for letting him borrow The Sculptress by Minette Walters, The Alienist by Caleb Carr, and Lonesome freaking Dove, among others.
What if you’re house hunting and you just need a few extra points to bump you over the line to the great rates?
The Academy loves to think they really, like, feel your pain, man.
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Officials said X-rays had revealed banned products but would not give any further details.
I’m lending him Sam Harris’ The End of Faith next.
driving a pickup with a pair of truck balls.
For example, taking lunch to work instead of buying one will save quite a bit of money.
And yet, while you’ll find lots of advice about the practical aspects of debt management, there is precious little help available for the psychological side of things.
Annual percentage rates are another variable to keep in mind when applying for secured cards.
Here are some ways to get credit after bankruptcy.
And the sword of feathers.
They may specialize in these kinds of high risk loans.
I found it hilarious.
Schumacher to race in WSK?
Altman, who died in November, is also nominated for best director for A Prairie Home Companion.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Love Song,” by Tesla.
She was a better liberal than me: I don’t think I ever felt sorry for Nixon.
They constantly validate my feelings of genetic and intellectual superiority.
She was also ordered to attend anger management classes and i
if your name starts with T.
That’s the one that I really can’t stand.
A make-up for snubbing his Pluto Nash performance!
I want to smack her in the nose with them.
Are these people really important to you?
Have a bad credit rating and you want to borrow some money.
Can chocolate be healthy?
Captain Feathersword's companion. Image from Wikimedia Commons
