Glob-a-log

It’s been another good week for crime reporters. They took everything but the kitchen sink, as the saying goes - and it came pretty close to that as well, as a matter of fact. There was also a bit of old-fashioned Jailhouse Rock, when an Elvis fan got caught with his hands in the till. Weighing about as much as the King in his final days, the loot came in at a respectable 500.000 pounds.

It wasn’t just crime; there was also some plain mad, bad and dangerous behaviour. Dentists who refused to treat bad teeth, nurses screaming abuse at patients and an Italian teacher who bit one of her pupils in the arm. (Well, at least she didn’t cut off the pupil’s tongue, as another Italian teacher did earlier this year.)

Of course, all the stupid celebs were at it again as well. Lindsay ‘there’s nothing wrong with me’ Lohan went into rehab - again. In a new bid for sympathy (and a get-out-of-jail card) Paris Hilton tried to sell her new goody good shoe daughter act, visiting her father in hospital. Britney Spears also came a-creeping from under some stubbly stone and wrote a highly moving message to all her fans, explaining why - ah well, who cares.

There was also some Christian madness, from Poland this time. Falwell may be dead and buried but his spirit is alive and well and hovers in Poland. Talking of Christian charity: Starbucks, that lovable company, made the news when they announced they plan to fire a single mother because she got pregnant. The cup that cheers, indeed.

(There was one bit of hilarious news from the Bible Belt boondocks, when a Christian blogger accused atheists of, let’s call it, moral property theft.)

Anyway, business as usual on spaceship Earth. Although lately there have been some worrying developments. It’s one thing if humans are misbehaving - we’re pretty used to that, by now - but more and more animals are now copycatting us.

Just this week a hamster put a man into hospital, a leopard was caught burgling a house and an ageing elephant was seen threatening motorists, aggressively panhandling for food. Still, the most distressing news was that the cheetah behaves even worse and more lewdly than human celebrities.

Ah well, we have to look on the bright side - and we can. Scientists have discovered 28 new planets. With all those animals now starting to behave like us, humans, we are probably going to need all the planets we can get at soon enough.

Sometimes, in the midst of war, we can almost forget what it is we’re fighting for. So, it’s good to remind ourselves that we’re not in Iraq for the oil, or for Haliburton, or because George junior wanted to proof something to his daddy.

No, we’re there because ‘they’ started and ‘they’ want to destroy us and everything we stand for. Like democracy and free speech. Our hard-won values, in other words - as shown, day after day, on our TV screens.

You want death porn? Go watch England’s Channel Four’s new documentary on princess Diana. You want more death? Go online to play that lovely new game some Australian designed, based on the Virginia Tech shooting.

Still not quite depraved or decadent enough? Then tune in to that new Dutch TV show, where people who desperately need a new kidney can plead live-on-air to the viewers at home, who will then vote which candidate will get the kidney of a person who is dying of cancer and wants to donate her kidney in this ‘more personal’ way.

That’s what we’re fighting for, folks. Now, don’t forget, you hear!

That good fight is still ongoing, of course. Not just in Iraq but also at home. So, all praise to the state of Alabama, where the Homeland Security folks came up with two new alerts: state green and state pink. Yes, the good people of Alabama have recognized that environmentalists and gays are potentially terrorist organisations. You go, Alabama!... again.

At Los Angeles’ airport, the authorities are also still vigilant and always on the lookout for suspicious behaviour, clothing and/or pigmentation - as a certain film director found out. When asked what the purpose of his visit was, he answered that he’d hoped to come and do his job. Whereupon he was led away and grilled for five hours. These days one really has to weigh one’s words, when answering a bureaucrat’s questions.

So, the authorities really have their collective ear to the ground - which is a comforting thought, of course - but what about the big guys, our leaders?

Philip K. Dick once held a speech, called How to build universe that doesn’t fall apart after two days. Well, there are a few guys you would not quite trust do do the job.

Like the general staff of the British army. After some disgusting and widely publicised cases of abuse of recruits in certain army barracks, they’d promised to clean up their houses and installed a commissionaire to make sure that everyone was on the game - with the almost predictable results, as shown on a certain mobile phone camera.

Or like the president of the World Bank - that noble institution that was meant to spread the world’s wealth around a bit more fairly, so that people wouldn’t want to fight the West but simply would join it. This president, mister Wolfowitz, got the message and became personally involved, spreading - or shedding some of this wealth towards his girlfriend. When caught and forced to resign he then, of course, blamed the media for his problems.

Like good old Tony Blair, of course - still not gone; still beating the drums of war and blowing his legacy horn. Like Bush, who claims the American people are still with him on Iraq. Like Cheney, who is presently trying to circumvent his Commander in Chief, in order to go and wage war on Iran.

Create a universe - these guys? Blow up a planet, quite possibly. Make anything? Even something as relatively simple as sense? Nope. None of these folks could even be trusted to build a sand castle that would last for more than two minutes.

It’s such a pity that our leaders in the West don’t have the same social and moral values as their colleagues in the East. It would be so nice if Bush, Cheney, Blair and all those other misfits would follow the example of the Japanese Minister of Agriculture. That won’t happen though, alas.

So, the only thing that’s left for us is to pray, like Mark Twain did, in the aftermath of yet another stupid, messy, little war:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Strange days indeed, as John Lennon sang - not all that long before some low life loser shot him dead.

So, while it’s raining Batmen, South-African pagans are dancing round Royal Guard soldiers who bite the heads off of chicken.

(And hamsters with Viagra hard-ons discover that you don’t even get the chance to grab yourself some jet lag before a horde of demented killer bees attack your plane.)

Still, most of this week’s news was business as usual - with most people not being content to lead their own little lives but always trying to stop other people from doing whatever they want to do. We are, I’m afraid, not so much homo sapiens as homo querulus.

In Switzerland the right wing, majority party wants to forbid the placement of minarets on mosques. Admittedly, those Osama onions can be real pests and they breed like rabbits - I kid you not. Poor beleaguered Switzerland by now is covered with TWO mosques with minarets!!! Dreadful, ain’t it?

In Australia they are, of course, always in search of new groups to exterminate or simply persecute. Since so many Aboriginals are now in full DIY spring, drinking themselves into an early grave, it isn’t much fun to go after them any more. Shooting kangaroos was also quite pleasant for a while but as victims they did lack a certain See what I bagged myself, me, macho man, me? appeal.

All the illegal immigrants by now are safely locked away in Quantanamo-like camps, so what group was there left to bother? Well, this one bar has found a new group to pick on.

In the US of A, of course, nobody is minding their own business any more. The government is spying on its citizens and when its citizens are not trying to kill each other, they are seeing each other - in court. The most popular sport remains, as ever, the colour game.

When, for instance, Disney’s The Lion King came out, one action group immediately started to ‘count’ the voice-over voices: how many of these voices were black, how many white - and how many black voices were wearing, so to speak, white hats and vice versa?

So, it’s no wonder that questions were raised immediately about the new movie by Pitt and Jolie. The main querulous question being, of course, if Angelina Jolie should not be crucified for daring to play a woman of colour in this new movie.

Ah well, as the man said, So it goes.

Still, since mankind does have enough real and serious problems, wouldn’t it be nice if people could stop obsessing about all these little nonsense issues? You know - folks, give it a rest; be cool. Let your neighbours do with his wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, donkey and what have you, whatever the hell they want to do.

Do as Jane Hirshfield advises: go to the park, sit on a bench, look at the pond through non-meddlesome eyes:

But perhaps
the heart
does not want
to be understood.
Your shadow
falls on the pond
and the small fish
hurry away.
They have
their own lives,
not yours,
which they love.

And if to you
it is anger,
bewilderment,
grief,
to them
it is simply life:
their mouths
open and close,
their gills,
they are fed,
they breathe.

The gods
are not large,
outside us.
They are the fish,
going on
with their own concerns.

All kinds of boring people are continuously advising us to think outside the box, these days. Obviously, people who love to live in cliché houses wouldn’t recognize a real thought if it would poke them in the eye or run circles round them like an runaway crack emu.

Still, it is always nice to explode yet another tiresome mid-management myth, so, here’s a good luck and un très bon voyage to at least one guy who found out that you can really get where you want to go if you place yourself solidly inside a box.

Anyway, one should always look on the bright side. So yes, one guy escapes from jail and that always makes all those poor, dedicated police officers look bad - but hey, it also means that now they have a nice empty cell, ready and waiting for some other criminal; perhaps that bicycle thief that someone caught on camera.

Mind you, it will take more than one locked-up bicycle thief to put the smile back on the face of a certain Norwegian police chief. I’m not sure the proverb Happy as a wombat exists, but if it does, this guy sure ain’t. What is sure is that that old saw Crime doesn’t pay could do with a reality check.

By the way, one guy who has never been into reality checks all that much was at it again yesterday. Yes, we’re talking about loveable George, of course, the president of the US of A. Whenever he opens his mouth these days, he shows he’s so bad at reading the signs of the times that one wonders what those good folks who did a study about map reading ability and sexuality would make of old Double Duh’s bedroom fantasies.

It’s a good things that you can buy the presidency (and if that doesn’t quite work, steal it) because if Bush had had to go through all the normal channels - i.e. writing a letter and then later, in an interview, explaining, in a coherent fashion, why he thought he would be suited for the job - he wouldn’t have been able to land even the lowest McJob on offer.

Anyway, yes, so, he was at it again. He made it known that he didn’t think the American soldiers needed a pay rise. Well, there’s a surprise. Since he also didn’t think the troops needed proper protective gear or decent medical care when they got wounded, it isn’t such a big shocker that the president didn’t think that soldiers should be paid decent wages, while they were fighting his stupid & probably illicit war.

It was, on the other hand, quite breathtakingly vile, that in the same moment Bush proposed yet another tax break for the absurdly rich. As if Haliburton and all the other true president’s men hadn’t made enough money over the broken body of Iraq and the dead bodies of the American soldiers who were sent out on a wing and a prayer and a pack of cynical lies.

Dick Cheney and Tony Blair, by the way, were also singing from the same warped hymn sheet. Cheney, in yet another firebrand speech, had another go at the Geneva Convention, while Blair wrote an article in the English Guardian, in which he claimed that all those judges who put emphasis on civil rights were, as it were, extremely ill-judged.

Somewhere, in some mountain cave, Osama must be laughing his head off.

Still, we can end on a more positive note. This week, Vladimir Putin showed the world he was in a much more reconciliatory mood than he had been lately. In fact, he clearly extended the hand of friendship to the American and English leaders.

By having his police beat up and then incarcerate a group of gay petitioners, he more or less directly told Bush, Cheney and Blair that he was a man they could do business with: someone who was happy to come out and show that he had the exact same high moral values as his Western colleagues.

You know the expression, A little bird told me… Well, this little bird told president Bush once and for all how popular Double Duh is with all Gods creatures, big and small. (It’s a shame though that the wrong bird delivered the message. There would have been more appropriate candidates.)

Talking of birds, isn’t it amazing that a country that is so obsessed with firearms can’t seem to get this star wars stuff right? Now they couldn’t get their pigeons to work properly, for crying out loud.

Ah well, maybe it’s not so surprising after all. When the US army finds it more important to go after gays than after the people placing all those bombs beside Iraq’s roads, it is no wonder that they haven’t had much success fighting anything but budget cuts lately.

Mind you, the army hasn’t been particularly well-served by other government branches. First, the CIA let itself be bullied by the White House into lying about everything that had to do with Iraq.

Now, with that scary Rumsfeld safely gone and most of the country and the political establishment no longer believing or caring what the White House says about Iraq, now the CIA has the temerity to suggest that they’d knew all along that starting a war to remove Saddam could lead to all kinds of problems - like, war.

Duh. Thanks guys, for this worthwhile and, above all, so very well-timed contribution.

Not that domestically things are much better. Of course, no-one but the regular army of conspiracy cranks really believes that the attack on the Twin Towers could have been easily avoided if only the combined Intelligence Services had been talking to their colleagues instead of waging territorial and bureaucratic war on each other.

You cannot stop madmen from planning and carrying out atrocities, however well-prepared any country or organisation is. Still, it would be nice if the various domestic agencies would do a little bit more than harass librarians and obsess about the kind of websites the general public visits.

The question is though, will we ever be prepared for any future threat? Are we able to learn from past events and past mistakes and use whatever insights we come up with? The signs are not promising.

Talking of which: if your sole contribution to this learning process is to simply replace old street names with politically correct new ones, you’re not exactly helping:

Move along now, folks, nothing to see here. This is the Nelson Mandela square now. Apartheid? No, look, there: the Desmond Tutu opera house! See: all is fine now.

Denial is a power tool. So, the Chinese contribution to the Cannes film festival is a moving tribute to the victims of the massacre the Japanese army inflicted on them in 1937.

Great, So, maybe, around 2059, we might expect a movie about Tianaman Square?

Another extremely popular (if not very helpful) way of dealing with the past is by way of mythologising persons and events. We make angels out of pinheads and sell their relics on E-bay. We take spiteful, meaningless squabbles and reshape them into patriotic tales of heroism, pride and virtue.

On the whole, the only way we tend to pay tribute to history is through lies, damned lies and Hollywood blockbusters.

Still, even if we would pay attention to history’s lessons, there is no way that we could ever be totally prepared for what tomorrow will throw at us:

I will take all your Old Testament prophets and raise them with a handful of Rasputins and a jumbo bag of Nostradamuses and still I’m sure the whole bunch of them could never have predicted, some sixty-two years ago, the kind of Nazi offspring that is moving through parts of Europe right now.

Ah well, you know that other expression, Out of the mouth of babes…

In a way life - past, present & future - is a bit like what comes out of George Bush’s mouth. It will be quite predictable, of course but you’ll never quite know in what exact form the usual lunacy, aggression, ugliness, day-to-day stupidity and, yes, unintended humour will come.

You know, it’s like the man said:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

So, a woman was left to die somewhere on Mount Everest and a rescue team was sent out to try and save her. I wouldn’t be surprised if her companion, her husband maybe, hadn’t even noticed that she had got into any kind of trouble - he was probably too busy talking on his mobile.

Never mind, he’ll probably be able to catch up on events on his new portable TV. That’s what’s become of those segments of earth’s population which aren’t actually dying of hunger & thirst or busy trying to kill each other over oil, religion or meaningless bits of real estate: people watching TV or talking on their mobiles.

Watching & talking shit is, of course, much easier than doing meaningful things or interacting in a sane way with our fellow human beings. Still, when a species is that good at doing insane things, it’s almost a waste of a God-given talent not to go for all-out specialisation.

Why try to sort things out with your girlfriend when you can park your car in the middle of a rail road crossing and then watch how things develop further? Sensible - not quite, no but Hollywood-style mayhem is much more fun, of course. Plus, most of us don’t think any of our actions have real consequences, so why stop and bother to think at all, before acting like a cartoon character?

Of course, there is one other thing we’re very good at: envy. Our Holy Books may warn us not to covet this, that or the other but most of us react to these instructions with a shrug and a mumbled, not covet, my ass! Ah yes, as the saying goes, We’re only human, after all.

So, if you want a baby and you can’t get one at K-mart immediately, why not abduct your pregnant neighbour, try to kill her and remove that neighbour’s baby with a razor blade?

One of the reasons we do spend all those hours doing the zombie in front of our TV’s or chitchatting on our mobiles like senile squirrels on speed, is that we know that we’re very bad at all the relationships we find ourselves in.

When we’re not busy plotting to kill our significant others or obsessing about getting pregnant, we raise our children to become either, just like us, zombie squirrels - or we lazily and (self)indulgently turn them into self-absorbed princesses and mad hatter frogs.

That is, of course, if we can find someone to become a significant other. We’ve become so used to not doing anything more tiring than changing the batteries in our remotes and recharging the batteries in our mobiles, that we can’t even be bothered any more to get out to find a mate.

So, we even try to find and select dates through computer dating sites - and there are a Hell of a lot of them these days, catering to every whimwham whim & fancy. There’s one for every kind of religion, from born-again bores to atheist activists - and if you want to make sure your future soul mate shares your political beliefs, you can cover the whole spectrum, from liberal lefties to Aryan arseholes.

Not that all these sites are of much use, in the end. It’s like they say about computers, Garbage in, garbage out. So, however advanced and clever these sites are, in the end they have to try to connect human being to human being. Garbage outed, indeed.

(Incoming news flash: now there’s proof that even molecules are better at dating than we are. If that ain’t enough to give you kittens, I don’t know what is.)

(And another: from the moment man picked up a rock to brain another man, humanity has always been busy to build better tools to fix all his problems. So, after spending billions of dollars and God knows how much time on getting to the point that we now can change a deeply miserable man or woman into a no doubt as dissatisfied woman or man, ain’t it lovely to learn that chicken have found a way to do the same thing spontaneously?)

Well, you know that we are in deep shit when we can’t trust Al Gore anymore about climate control and even Noah risen can’t be bothered to make a decent job of it and buggers off even before the half time commercials. So, like the dodo before us, we will soon join the dinosaur.

Maybe then all those much-abused mobiles and terrorized TV-sets will finally have some time for themselves - and who knows, when they come to know each other, something beautiful will come from the useless ashes that we left.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m just a sucker for a happy ending.

In the olden days they used to say, Beware of the dog. This, of course, is the bright new age of (in the ancient, Chinese way of naming stuff) the ding bat and we do things differently now.

So, now we are training moths to go and attack our enemies. Mind you, those bats will have to be real careful out there, unless they want to end up as private detective Kitten. For every moth patrol there will be some eager beaver SWAT team going for glory.

For the rest, it’s been another one of those What was God smoking? news weeks - where we learnt that dolphins now speak Welsh, elves steal lingerie by gunpoint and animal rights activists, in order to draw attention to the plight of abused animals, have started to eat corgis.

Then, there was the news that some Dutch students had invented alcohol powder. Just add it to water and it’s party time - sort of. It would have been better though if these kids had been able to come up with something really useful; like a celebrity solvent.

We could have tested that first on that disgusting Sharon Stone shrew. Yes, she’s managed to make the news again, playing auctioneer in Cannes, to raise money for AIDS research.

How noble, yes? Well, Hell, no. This is the same bitching broad who earlier this year refused to turn up at a benefit in Santa Monica for the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation, because she was upset that a lookalike Stone doll she was presented with didn’t look all that much like her after all. (What the problem was? I don’t know. Maybe the doll did wear underwear or worse, maybe it even vaguely looked like a human being.)

Which reminds me, it seems that American cemeteries are desperately looking for custom. Obviously, not enough people are kicking the bucket. Well, we can’t expect everybody to be this good at the DIY of dying. So, my advice to the cemetery folks would be to get proactive - like a killer rabbit, or a patriotic pretzel.

They could make a brilliant start by calling Sharon Stone, to tell her they have some publicity stunt gig for her and simply take it from there.

Then, when they’re really ready for this all out, new recruitment drive, they could do much worse than start with reuniting all the mad followers of Falwell with their dead hero. When that job is done they could spend some happy time doing unto the natural history museum people in Texas what the latter would do to some blameless trees.

Having successfully dealt with that little assignment, then they really should go for broke and rid us of all those imbeciles who blame (and sue) the whole wide world before even starting to contemplate that they might bear at least some responsibility for their own actions.

And wouldn’t it be nice, if some of these deserving cemeteries would specialize in staging six-feet-under reunion concerts for all those bands that should have been buried at the close of the sixties? I’d pay good money to sit on a quiet bench, not to face the music exactly but to be there when the head crow would announce, Here they are, finally: The Osmond Brothers! Now take them away!

We know it’s bad for us - we’ve been there, seen it and vomited all over our T-shirts. We’ve gone from American Idol through England’s Big Brother towards the insane, new world of Japanese TV quiz shows. We also know, if we’re honest that it will only get worse; probably much, much worse. So why not do the sane and merciful thing and just kill all of our TV’s. Let’s read a good book instead.

Of course, as Tammy Wynette already knew, Sometimes it’s hard to write a novel. Pamela Anderson found this out the hard way, when she had to hire a ghost writer to help her with, in her own words, all those hard things.

Well, at least she was brave enough to seek help and admit that she had a problem - just as Oprah always tells us to do. Talking of witch - sorry, which, the self-styled, goody-goody queen of remakes, self-help programmes and bare all confessionals now wants the world to know that she was shocked, I tell you, shocked, and deeply hurt when she heard that her own father is now writing a book of a bare all, confessional nature.

Our collective hearts bleed for her: you go suck a duck, girl!

There were more hard luck stories though, this week. Kinky Friedman once sang, They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore. True - and the same goes for flying carpets, it seems. Still, that is small beer compared to the suffering of all those oppressed Christians. They really are having a hard time of it.

Whatever they try, people just don’t want to let Jesus come into their heart. According to an English prelate, 95% of Britons are on a fast boat to Hell. Christians are trying to reach out, of course but people are even less inclined to give up sinning than they’re willing to give up smoking, however bad both things are for body & soul and despite all those very helpful health warnings.

Other outreach projects have also not been all that successful - though the soldiers of the Lord won’t give up, of course. If at intelligent design you don’t succeed try for other, vaguely similar approaches.

They are trying - they are really trying to save all of us. With McJesus soul food, with born again theme parks and Adam & Eve museums. They have the Klan singing love songs - they have George Bush…

Well, maybe not. Like all good Christians George is really trying - but he’s not exactly helping the cause (any cause, to be honest but let’s stick to the subject at hand - for once.)

Oh, there was such gnashing of teeth this week, such wailing and rending of clothes - when George, holy George, of burning bush fame; the born again saint George, the deeply and decidedly humble George… did it again.

Remember, he once welcomed that evil garden gnome and unbeliever Putin as a personal friend - as he had once welcomed Jesus in his sinful heart. That in itself was bad enough but now, oh now master George had really gone for broke in this latest I’m with stupid & Follow that there pretzel routine.

No, it did not help the Christian cause at all, when it became known this week that Jesus had paid the prez another, late night visit, in the White House this time. Marvellous news, one would think, at first glance - and of great propaganda value.

Ah yes, but for the fact that George at first took the Man for Bin laden and then shot the crap out of the holy ghost.
Good ole George; he’s been winning the Britney (Oops… I did it again) Awards forever now, it seems.

As Second Comings go, this one was even less successful than the much hyped but slightly disappointing follow-up of that famous movie, Dick Cheney’s Sex Slave Massacre (part two.)

Ah well, as Nero said, while the Christian torches burned with shame, They’ll get over it, ‘m sure.

I need to keep this very, very short now – balancing in between a serious blood vessel rupture and an exploding spleen.

Will humans ever learn anything? No.

Will I ever learn not to care? Same answer, most annoyingly.

So, no, we will never solve even the smallest of all the world’s problems. The maps of our collective minds are half Dali and half new Durban nonsense, alas.

What do you expect though, when even the Bridge of Light has serious weight issues?

Enough already: I’m trying to hide behind the funny mask again. That will not do today.

No, for of course, they’re at it again in Louisiana - and why not? If the hippies have their Woodstock revivals, why shouldn’t the racists also have their nostalgic fun with Alabama/Birmingham re-enactments?

Ah yes, what a friend we have in Jesus – and His evil Muppets.

Same for Mohammed and his imbecile followers, of course. Indeed, why ever not use mosques for plague carriers?

Obviously, God/Allah/Yahweh (or whatever name He, She or It is using, these days) may be innocent and even unaware of all the stupid stuff that’s going on here, below.

Nevertheless, behind the beards, the robes and all the temple curtains evil always lurks – at times disguised as mercy, truth & grace and promises of better things to come.

Don’t believe it though. Even the birds know better.

It’s been another good week for all the homo sapiens watchers out there in the big blue yonder. We may not make very good TV programmes ourselves but we do make for great TV.

So, in a week that brought us news of an upcoming Lord of the Rings musical and the Lonely Planet Guide’s verdict on Great Britain, we also learnt that at least the UN is now in the Christ business, doing that swords into ploughshares deal - with a heavy New Italics‘ emphasis on ‘deal’.

Last but not least, the joyful tiding reached us that mankind has broken through yet another tasteless sound barrier: the first mobile phone call from the top of Mount Everest. Surely, any day now the first mobile phone call from the top of some high rise building will come through:

“Honey, guess what: I’m standing on top of the Trump tower and right now I’m jumping off and it’s aaaallll yourrrrrrrrr faulllllllllllllt…!!!!!!!”

In the meantime, it was yet another lost and found luggage week for the great and the good. While Tony Blair is still kind of lost and Bush lost yet again another popularity poll, Bill Clinton’s statue was erected in Kosovo and John Cleese got honoured in New Zealand.

(Both Bush and Blair could have learnt wise lessons from Belgium’s latest wannabe senator: namely, that it is far better to delegate some things than to be seen doing those dirty jobs yourself.)

Then there were the inevitable stories dealing with man’s biggest obsession: sex. Like the Pakistani Tourism Minister, Britain’s Jeremy Clarkson found out that it doesn’t matter whether you live in a so-called enlightened society or a fundamentalist Hell hole: in either case you get stoned when you say or do something that the ‘moral’ majority disagrees with.

That’s not to say that you can compare free and modern countries in the West with those backwards and evil countries elsewhere, of course. We are superior in every way. We have freedom of speech - and that’s a good thing! Really! No, honestly, it is! We can bring the real world into every living room, through daring and informative TV programmes like this.

Ah well, small wonder even penguins and flamingoes drop out of the heterosexual rat race and go for different lifestyles. Still, to avoid any controversy, it might be better to take one step further and, like this shark, go for single parenthood, the Mary way.