-----Original Message-----
FROM: Helga The Help
SENT: May 28 2005 12:00AM
SUBJECT:Newsletter 5/28/05
Dressing like a middle aged man is but one of the ways to score a 40-year-old MILF.
-- Helga
Dear Your Majesty, Queen Elizabeth,
I am Helga the Help, LiquidGeneration’s globe-trotting transsexual, and I am writing this with a fake British accent after a holiday in London, England...or Britain...or United Commonwealth...or whatever the hell you call it these days.
Until the moment I stepped off the plane, I thought that we Chicagoans had it bad. Our lifestyle is by no means cheap, especially when one has as refined a taste as I do, but nothing could have prepared me for the armed robbery that masquerades as capitalism in this filth-hole you call a city. What we pay in US Dollars for goods like breakfast, booze and clothing, Londoners pay slightly less in Pounds Sterling. This makes it seem cheaper until one remembers that it costs 1.87 US Dollars to buy a single British Pound and thus a £5.99 morning breakfast cost $11.20. Can’t you make like China and peg the damn currency?
But I’m just getting started.
Let’s talk about the streets. Let’s assume for a minute that one actually knows where the hell one is going or can read a map that looks more like a Where’s Waldo cartoon than a metropolitan abstraction. To get anywhere, one has to brave approximately 28 discarded pieces of chewing gum per square yard of street tile. This random snapshot of Oxford Street shows what I mean:
When I went to a club (because every other bloody place closes at 11:00 PM) they searched me more thoroughly than my last proctologist and upon confiscating several sticks of chewing gum, threw them into a pile up to my waist. Are you people a nation of cows too proper to spit into a garbage can? I suggest swapping a few sticks of gum for a few ounces of toothpaste and sparing us the glare of your urine-colored smiles.
Shall we discuss the filth? I do not, by any means live in rain-forest-pure surroundings. But I also am not used to blowing my nose at the end of the day and seeing my usual accumulation of phlegm hosting black substances too numerous to count and too disgusting to identify. It briefly made me consider the possibility that all the crap on the sidewalk was not gum after all but toxic nasal drip. That was until I paid a bum 50 pence, (93 cents) to chew some of it. It was gum all right.
Which brings us to a British assault on my life’s greatest passion: restaurants. London allegedly has no shortage of the good, the bad and the absolutely, positively disgusting. I assume the good is out there, but on this trip, I only got to experience the latter two.
Being a long-time sushiphile, I estimate that I have sucked soybeans out of at least 35,0001 edamame pods since my introduction to the cuisine 7 years ago. Of these, never have I popped out anything other than a soybean out of the venerable pod. That was until I dined at Roka, 37 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia. Without regurgitating the worn cliché on words and pictures, I will leave to you to decide the value of this one:
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1The Math: Roughly 500 meals [approximately 1.37 meals per week], average restaurant serving size = 125 grams, average soybean pod weight = 1 grams; 125 grams / 1 grams/pods/meal X 500 meals = 62,500 pods/2 + allowance for the majority of the meal since I always eat more than my dinner mates. In yo face, bitchass.
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If one pays close attention to the top right corner of the photo, one will see why I have renamed Roka’s version of the appetizer: Maggotmame. You can thank Rainer Becker, owner and Nic Watt, head chef, for the inventiveness while my reward for inventing a new word will probably be commuted.
Whatever, I mean...BOLLOCKS! I realize that I get pissed off a lot and never before have I aired out my frustration by giving proper names, but the staff at Roka took the general London service-person attitude to new lows by joking that "...why am I pissed, I’m still alive..." and very grudgingly getting a low-level floor supervisor to half-heartedly comp me the edamame and a bottle of overpriced sake. Wow. Bless her heart. If I’m going to be eating unhatched fly larvae, it’s going to be during a visit to India or at least on a reality TV show like Fear Factor for loads of cash, not at a restaurant where the meal costs me 200 US Dollars a head and the new pair of shoes that I ruined by getting 30 flavors of gum stuck to them en route.
And what about the driving? Left side of the street? Are you trying to say that you’re all left brained? Sorry, that part is logical, rational and sequential. Look at any street map and see how logical the country is. You are more like a right-brainer who got his corpus-collosum severed. Just like a street that stops only to start a block and a half in another direction. Is there a taxi-driver union that lobbies for confusion or did your city planner have Tourette Syndrome?
In closing, I can only say that I feel sorry for you. A once great empire that occupied a quarter of the world’s land has been relegated to a measly island and a few territories. Now that I’ve been to the mother country and have seen where it all began, I can only express my bewilderment of how such rotten roots could have possibly yielded a fruit as magnificent as the United States of America. It’s a good thing that you also birthed Canada as the bigger, dumber twin or I would have thought that your imperialism simply passed as badly as post vindaloo gas.
Allah Save the Queen,
Helga
Yellow-Toothed Bloke/Scallywag