*****
A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing and telling political jokes. The fourth one desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, frustrated, he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 67 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party.
Five minutes later, he bends over an ashtray and says with utter nonchalance: "Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please." In a few minutes, there's a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the joker finally gets to sleep.
The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge where his neighbors had gone. "Oh, the KGB has arrested them!" she answers. "B-but... but what about me?" asks the guy in terror. "Oh, well, they decided to let you go. You made Comrade Major laugh a lot with your tea joke."
*****
The KGB, the GIGN and the CIA are all trying to prove that they are the best at catching criminals. The Secretary General of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and each of them has to catch it. The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that rabbits do not exist. The GIGN goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and make no apologies. The rabbit had it coming.
The KGB goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling: "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"
*****
This weekend has been good.
* Leena had an excellent birthday party at Kulosaaren Kasino. What a lovely place. Mr. HP and I have to start frequenting it. And boy, didn't we dance! Yes, we did! A lot! Mr HP has a new nickname now, "Fred A".
* Miss Funnybunny and I went to Heidi's, too. Our visit was brief, but it was good to see good guys. Some of them were there a month ago eating Greek salad.
* I had a good time with Miss Funnybunny all weekend. She´s great. She sings all the time, now her favourite is "Happy Birthday". She keeps telling me – tone of her voice requiring respect for a mature person – that she is not a baby any more. She says she is a big girl. Well, that's right, two years and a half is much more than baby ages, measured in months.
* Mr HP and I are getting ready for our visit to Prague, taking place next week: We have been reading travel guides - the best one being in Finnish, published by Mondo. Best wishes to Antti Helin!
So, a Kafka quote is needed. Do not waste your time, that is what he says. The following reminded me of the time-saving tips I wrote last summer. (But I refuse to link them here. Waste your time and find them in my archives.)
"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
– Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904
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