Category Archives: Corona virus

“You’re the first one who didn’t take me for a wh*re”

Nina studied me for another moment. Then she let it pour about what usually happened when people found out she was Ukrainian. She’d been living in Slovenia for years and holy crabs did she have stories.

Back then, the Slovenian word for female Ukrainian was synonymous with prostitute. I’m being serious. When people said Ukrajinka they meant prostitute, and the implications were solid.

Like when a cop checked Nina’s papers on a sleeper train, closed the cabin door and whipped out his junk. Nina pointed back at the prick pointing at her and asked what it was, perhaps a pencil, did she need to sign something? The cop didn’t appreciate the wit, they rarely do, and he ordered the train be stopped and the defiant Ukrajinka hauled off to a deserted train station at two in the morning. Nina said alright I am a hooker, bought and paid for, and you sir are about to find out what happens when you mess with mafia property. Then Nina was escorted back on the train and she didn’t need to sign anything.

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Live from Slovenia: People queuing to have their balls and/or tits tattooed yellow and blue

While this seemingly unprovoked campaign of aggression against the Ukrainian people that Alec Baldwin started and Vladolf Putler continued was not exactly what we had in mind when we said enough with this corona shit already can we please move on to something new, it managed to achieve the impossible:

Bringing Slovenians together. Resigned to sticking to our bitter divisions until further notice, we suddenly found ourselves united in the belief that:

– Ukraine must be accepted into the European Union with immediate effect and retroactively made its founding member.

– As soon as this blows over, Ukraine needs to be installed as some sort of supreme king-president-patron saint of NATO, somehow. We haven’t worked out all the details yet.

– Ukrainians are the best. They make other nations proud. The bravest, coolest and inevitably, given the former, the hottest people of them all. They are the lesson in toughness, resilience, well-placed national pride and, apparently, the answer to the all-pervasive thirst that everybody needed. Now this is how you defend your country and win over everybody’s heart and all that it powers.

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Here’s to one crazy year

Remember when people were saying 2016/2017/2018/2019 was totally wtf? Oh well…

2020 showed its cards early enough. I quickly figured I should focus on work-related news and steer clear of social media. It takes social distancing to dodge corona, but it takes social-media abstinence to avoid insanity because it’s contagious as feck. Recently, when my curiosity got the better of me and made me look at our national news, a renowned gynaecologist was telling everybody that the corona vaccine was going to leave about two thirds of women infertile. I checked what our neighbours the Croatians were doing and it turned out that they had misplaced a whole offshore rig and had no idea where it went. Then I opened The Daily Mail and there was an ex‑SAS guy who ramboed his way through a bunch of terrorists in Kenya in 2019. Now, in testament to both his chivalry and intellect, our spec-ops hero chose to withhold his name from the public and use the family name of his celebrity fiancé instead, figuring the bad guys might be after revenge. And there was this lockdown-flouting gay orgy in Brussels that the police broke up and caught a conservative Hungarian MEP climbing down the drain in the process. None of these really threw me because it’s just the new normal.

You know what still managed to surprise me? Two things:

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Doctor Typhoid Mario & Julija the Handless

First of all, a belated happy Brexit & Megxit to everyone. Also, I’m sorry to hear about Adele and hope she cranks out a few more generation-defining hits before going the Amy Winehouse way.

Well, Slovenia is between governments again and, different to the last time it happened, there’s barely any excitement about; the guy who got the most votes the first time around, but nobody wanted to form a coalition with him, will now have a crack at governing this thing and that’s about it. Our country is also beginning to tackle the corona scare and it’s a miracle it took this long, considering we have a border with Italy where the zombie apocalypse is already well underway. Needless to say, the media are pissing themselves with excitement and politicians are busy pretending to believe there’s anything they can do to put a damper on this mess. So, here’s a few more Snopes-type bits from the sunny side of the Alps before they shut down the internet.

Typhoid Mario, MD: Did a Slovenian doctor infect god knows how many of his patients and colleagues with corona?

Yes, that indeed happened, and you couldn’t find a more perfect illustration of our general attitude to the virus de jour, i.e. the old and the weak should watch out but it doesn’t concern the rest of us and we’ve got enough pensioners and hospital bed-blockers anyway. Unless you’re blissfully oblivious to dark undertones, you’ve probably noticed this ageism-meets-eugenics undercurrent in your country too. Anyway, a doc returned from his ski trip to Italy, went straight to work in a community health-care centre and a home for the elderly, generously sharing his viral load with the fit and the frail alike. Accounts differ on the details; some say the good doctor never even considered getting tested on his return from the European corona hotbed and others say he offered to get tested but his superior said ‘nah no worries’. It was when he started sweating and shaking while doing his rounds of dementia patients that the penny dropped. He got scooped up into quarantine and his whole health-care centre went into shutdown.

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