Drinking Smoothies with Leonardo

We do not really have smoothies here in the Geneva countryside. We have yogurt and we have compost bins. We have juice extractors, lemon presses, and blenders. We also have neat and efficient Nespresso coffee machines and George Clooney’s face on airport walls. What else could we possibly need?

Suddenly, though, the smoothie bullet machine has become ubiquitous. In the January post-foie-gras struggle to regain levity and youth, the stores are heaped high with these never-before-seen, health-war, bomb-shaped machines. The clear plastic globe carries the charge and is shown stuffed with a mixture of fresh fruit and vegetables—plump, perfect, and pristine—all ready to be whizzed into your daily dose of wellbeing.

You add exotics such as barberries, Goji berries, chia seeds, wheat germ, hemp, linen, almonds, dates and cranberries. To smooth it out, you add an avocado and/or a banana. Apparently, removing the peel is optional.

The cutting/slicing/dangerous blades tear up the outer structures of the seeds and nuts and release their essential nutrients that would otherwise just slide right through you. You are warned not to include avocado or apricot stones to your mixture. You are rejuvenated as you suck down the pap.

You no longer need teeth.

As our cuisine dissolves, so do our minds. In my village in the Geneva countryside, there is no cable TV.  Until recently, we relied on an antenna on the roof and a receiver dish, wobbling in the wind, strapped to the chimney, pointing toward a possible satellite. However, a recent automatic upgrade on our telephone system means that Netflix has raised its head of seductive nothingness.

Inside this smooth advertisement-free world, you suck down mindless made-for-TV-series of brilliant non-qualified lawyers, zombies, fictionalized royal history, movie-star sex-criminals who suddenly disappear, and future princesses. We sit under quilts and approach death at an alarming rate.

You no longer need thought.

To counter this mushy decadence and inspired by a recent Venice visit to a cold church filled with Leonardo’s incomprehensible machines, I have blown off the dust and taken up volume one (out of three) of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. This attempt to claw myself back into the world of gravitas has definitely not worked as the 500-year old observations are startlingly relevant and depressing as he worries about overpopulation, pandemics, climate disasters, political wandering wits, and the importance of truth.

Seriously stuck in the slough of despond, I have not moved past page 102 and the tome is now being used as a pillow for the Chi energy machine which is gathering dust under the couch.

I like to think that if Leonardo were around today, he would be busy building a rocket to Mars to save mankind. But, perhaps, he would have given up like the rest of us, and wearing a pair of pink pyjamas, be cuddled up to his boyfriend, mindlessly sucking on a millet and strawberry smoothie while watching Da Vinci’s Demons.

 

 

 

 

The Republic of Geneva Mounted Police

The Canton of Geneva is a source of constant hilarity to the other 25 cantons of the Swiss Confederation. Various local politicians go out on shaky limbs, plan unending projects, pull repetitive bloopers. These absurdities (Genevoiserie in French and genferei in German) are well-documented and there is an official web-site (http://www.genferei.org/) that is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud in these cold wet windy January days.

Some of the simpler genfereis include planning to build apartment buildings inside highway cloverleaves, planting the wrong (not growing) sort of (expensive) grass in the football stadium, hiring artists to paint designs under the trams at the tram stops, or modernizing the public transport system so that no one can figure out how to get to where they used to go.

Creativity, foresightedness and complexity are essential ingredients in a jolly good genferei, as is spending lots and lots of money. The joke is even bigger if the federal government has been persuaded to join in.

To my knowledge, no one is ever really punished for a genferei; rather, there is an annual prize for the very best one.  In extreme and conflicting cases there could be a bit of finger-wagging, but as no one did anything bad on purpose, then these follies are written off as simply being part of the great human comedy of life.  

Now, last night’s national news (perhaps to become redundant as we are all voting in a few weeks about abandoning the federal TV and radio tax but that’s another story) had a small report that Geneva is currently forming its very own Mounted Police force. Nine police people are currently in Belgium on a week-long training course.

The news presenter’s smirk was a dead give-away: the story has the makings of a perfect genferei.

Coming from Canada, the idea of tall strong men on horses bounces off my spirit and images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rise up: the red jackets, the flat-brimmed hats, the stiff upper lip, the impeccable black horses, the Musical Ride, Dudley Do-Right.

Of course, the Canadian Mounties no longer use horses operationally and from what I have seen a horse’s role in law enforcement in the 21st century has to do with urban patrolling and crowd control. Getting blown on by a big, smelly, uncouth horse would make just about anyone drop whatever they were doing and go home.

But no. Geneva’s Mounties are predestined to patrol rural and suburban zones. They will saunter bucolic bridle paths and gallop the frontiers. They will drink coffee at the garage up the hill. They will enforce finicky dog-poo laws and check on candy-wrapper litter.

They will be regularly sent on international training courses to acquire more equestrian skills. They will eat sparingly, I’m sure. Just a sprinkle of federal funding (transportation, perhaps?) and a most beautiful genferei is in the makings.

 

 

 

A Fire and Fury Weekend

Well, it wasn’t really my fault that I read the book. It was just an experiment.

My Kindle is my very favourite object. It is literally the only gadget that I have ever truly coveted and ordered for myself. A colleague, stuck in hospital for a spell, actually let me hold hers and “turn” the pages some years back and I was captivated.

So the day before yesterday, I just had a peek to see if I could buy the famous sold-out book by the journalist, Michael Wolff. It was available, so I made a snap intellectual decision to read it as quickly as possible before it could be withdrawn and disappear into the ether (this has happened to me before.)

I am ordinarily not a chaser of ambulances and dislike political exposés, but this one struck me as important considering the size-of-the-button situation. A child growing up in Canada during the Cuban Missile Crisis, having nightmares about having to hide in the village culvert not to be blown up, I am oddly scared to death of nuclear bombs.

Anyway, I now possess the complete mental low-down on the White House (and I am not talking about the Shell garage up the hill.)  I know everything about D.C.

To those of us who have been following, unbelieving and mesmerized, the goings on of the American political scene over the past year, there is little that is startling or new. So, if you are not a committed reader, you would die of boredom quite soon. The names of the ex-staffers and presidential “friends” just go on and on.

There is very little juicy material (except a couple of cheeseburgers) to get your teeth into. As a teacher, I was saddened to learn that Donald does not know how to read which is why he has three tv screens in his (separate) bedroom.

Another interesting snippet is that Donald is frightened of being poisoned, and so, like a Roman emperor, has a cheeseburger taster—or, preferentially, orders take-out from McDonalds.

Then there’s the fact that for Donald, the White House is a definite accommodation downgrade. His luxury triplex in Trump Towers in New York, makes the Washington presidential mansion seem like a shack in the woods. The perks of bowling alley, cinema, and plane are not interesting or overwhelming (as they would be almost any other person) as he already has any of this stuff he wants.

But what really caught my fancy is that even his height is fake. He has added inches to himself to squeeze in beneath the “obese” scale of the BMI. He claims to be something like 8 feet tall.

Of course, all the routine stuff about the FBI, the Russians, young women, the concept of Trumpism, the definition of an idiot, the Kushners, Bannon, the generals, money laundering, fluffs out the story and gives it a bit of a political slant.

On second thought, perhaps it’s a good thing that Donald can’t read.