Televisual Tower of Babel

FINALLY I got my Turkish TV turned off and HOTBIRD is coming through loud and clear. After retuning my satbox I found I had 1300 new channels. Minus the encrypted ones there are still about 700. I spent ages pruning these down to about 220. 150 of these are in Italian. But I get a load in German, English and French too. There are some really bizarre things on that satellite. Like a Buddhist channel in with Thai priests reading endless tracts in Pali. Thai gameshows (on another channel). Italian señoritas jiggling their bare mammaries at midday. There was a really manic woman on yesterday at about 1pm vigorously fanning her private parts while taking calls on two separate phones. I try and escape but she's on five consecutive channels! I'm sure that woman was mentally ill or on drugs (or both).

Oh talking about drugged-out mentally ill sex workers, I met my old housemate LAUNDRETTA at the bus stop. Smashed out of her brains on vodka. She has a massive scar across her forehead where she crashed her car during a drunken psychotic episode. She said she's now been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (quelle surprise) and some kind of psychosis. She's on 750mg quetiapine (Seroquel). I'm only on 300. I told her about my manic episode when the dryers were all talking to me down the laundrette and she laughed and laughed at that. I don't know what she's doing now but she's not doing well. Poor lass.

I'm doing really well at my Spanish. I'm nearly a third of the way through the Linguaphone course. They don't seem to know Linguaphone in America but it's basically four books and nine CDs and you learn a vocabulary of 2000 words+. To draw a comparison, Pimsleur only teaches you a few hundred words. I've been watching the news in Spanish and with Spanish subtitles can just about follow what they're going on about. I've got so far into this Spanish I started worrying about what I'd do once the course ran out. So I've already invested in Italian. I want to learn both, but am avoiding all those Italian TV channels, which will only confuse me. I've been reading ¡Hola! magazine with the aid of my trusty Collins Gem dictionary. I'm not feeling too depressed these days... (famous last words, I know!)

O cripes I've got to go ~ about to be timed out.

Hope you're all well... Hasta la vista, baby!