Floating like a Psycho

Wrote this yesterday, left it at the office on my memory stick (doh!) and posted it today.

I left the car out last night. I rushed home so that I would be there when the boy reached our house on his trick or treating route, but I was late, so I parked the car in the street and rushed in to light our jack o lantern. Then I forgot I’d left the car there and it stayed there all night. On the plus side, I was just in time to hand out the sweets, and the boy had an awesome costume.

We had hundreds of little ghosts and goblins knocking on the door last night. I had to take down the lantern by about 7.30pm because I’d run out of supplies. I quite like the little ones coming round.

So,today’s nudity story… (I wonder how long I can keep doing this)

The New Museum in New York is currently exhibiting an installation by artist Carsten Holler entitled, “Psycho Tank”. The idea would appear to be that visitors disrobe completely and float six at a time in salty water together for a while and enjoy the sensory deprevation. A problem has arisen however. It would appear that allowing six people to flaot naked in a plastic tank of salty water makes the museum a “bath house”, and they don’t have the right permit to operate as a bath house. The local authorities are claiming that the exhibit is a potential health hazard and have decreed that only one person at a time can now enter. Personally I can’t see how letting people in one at a time is going to reduce any health risk, but what do I know?

I quite like the idea of an exhibit that is open to viewing only to naked people. I’d go and float in the buff for a bit. But I just have a thing for nudity! I suppose the health risk thing is a real issue, but my guess is that the authorities here are more worried about naked people than sick people. It’s not difficult to chlorinate water after all.

There are fascinating things happening in Europe currently and, at the risk of boring some people, I want to make a comment. The Eurozone is in a bit of a fix because some countries, like Greece for instance, have huge debts that they can’t repay. A solution was sort of reached last week. Eurozone countries agreed to increase the amount of money in the bail out fund, write off some of the debt, and hand out a bunch of austerity measures to those countries which are causing the problems. Cynics amongst us noticed that although extra money was promised, it wasn’t quite clear where if was going to come from. Taking a begging bowl to China is an option, but China as far as I am aware, hasn’t actually agreed to it.

However, a rather larger turd has been dropped into the swimming pool by the Greeks today. It seems that the Greek President, Mr Papandreou, has decided that the Greek people should be offered the chance of a referendum on whether or not they want to accept the austerity measures. It wouldn’t matter much if they voted ‘yes’, but they will of course vote ‘no’. Can you remember a Euro referendum in which a population voted ‘yes’ to anything? No, neither can I. Well there was that last Irish one that was held three times until they got the answer they wanted. I’m not counting that. The really frightening thing however is the way the news has been greeted by Euro leaders. They all seemed utterly astonished that the President should let the people of his country decide their own future. Janet Daley in the Telegraph writes it up much better than I ever could.