Glob-a-log

Words are fun; language is fun. There is, obviously, power in naming things. God gave Adam the right to give names to all the animals, as part of the ritual of handing over some of God’s power over His creation to the first of men and his descendants.

Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they’re Irish and we should all have a drink? It’s not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen

Prague is full of beautiful little parks, impressive churches and handsome bridges. True, there are some eye-sores too. Everything that was built in the communist era is loathsome to behold. Of course, the Soviets were more into plundering or neglecting what was already there, so they didn’t leave all that much in the way of an architectural heritage - apart from their dreadful panelaks: those housing blocks that look even worse than what all those optimistic young architects built in England after the second world war.

“You poor, poor baby” I said - and no, I did not mean that bloody cat of mine - nor the aliens, of whom no trace was left, as far as I could see.

As boats beget barnacles, cities grow stories. Prague is an old city, so it has gathered a lot of interesting stories. Some are hidden, some are almost too big to be noticed any more and almost all of them are interesting - and some are damned funny.

Did you know, for instance that the seriously land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia once had its own navy? Strange but true. ‘T was in the communist era, of course - most mad tales come from that unhappy time. The Russians needed money, so they came up with yet another thieving & blackmailing scheme. They had some old boats that they wanted to be rid of and so they forced the Czechoslovakian puppet government to buy these ships (that were rusting in some faraway communist harbour.)

Thus, the republic of Czechoslovakia got its own navy and its own admiral, no doubt, who after the Russians had finally buggered off probably spent his retirement in his splendid uniforms, ceremoniously opening one McDonald’s outlet after the other.

Anyway, like I said, cities accumulate stories like cats gather the corpses of their unhappy victims and leave them for their owners to clear away. Right now though I was thinking of another true story, from another small country - and how I once came upon the story that the Swiss government had built an official landing site for UFO’s.

I was also thinking about my cat and cursing it enthusiastically but that was just business as usual. Well, maybe not quite that:

“They want what?!” I asked, hardly believing my luck.

“They want me to come with them, to their home planet, where they will build temples for me - and a palace, of course.”

“Those stupid aliens still think you’re a God?”

“Yesss.”

“What fun. And of course you told them you would be happy to come and be their God for ever and ever amen?”

“Yes. On one condition though.”

“Ah…?”

“I told them my slave had to come too.”

“Your slave…” “

“Yes”

“By which you mean…”

“Yes.”

“Of course. And then I trust they explained to you that I would not fit into their tiny spaceships.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“So I told them to go home and build a larger spaceship.”

“To which they replied…?”

“Yesss…!!!“

“Bloody Hell.”

(To be continued.)

Prague, to me, is the most beautiful city in the world. Of course, they say everybody who’s seriously in love thinks the woman he loves is the most beautiful gal on spaceship earth. Well, fair enough: after all these years I’m still in love with this city, so I admit to a certain bias. It’s still damn beautiful though.

(To be continued) 

Sometimes you have to wonder what our forefathers would say if they could see us now. As we do, from time to time, they must have imagined what some far-flung future would look like. If they could have done, it’s probably unlikely that they ever would have left their caves at all.

We use our waste products to design new and trendy clothes. We praise bad books and delight in wasting our time on watching stupid movies. We worship violence and fill our Holy Books with porn.

We are obsessed with fame and youth and glamorously thin and naked bodies - yet we stuff our faces with crap, while we torture our bodies in vain pursuits of the perfect form and even our Gods & Goddesses let it be known that they are unhappy with their bedazzling lives.

We ruin everything we touch and then blame our unborn children for the world that we’ve created.

No, it is rather unlikely that our forefathers would have left their nicely painted caves for such a world. They’d probably would not even have left their trees to begin with - or the warm comfort of the ocean.

Today’s newspapers seem to overflow with happy tidings. Not only was Chelsea’s famously well-adjusted coach José Mourinho arrested but Paris Hilton, who is still appealing to the whole wide world to help her escape that prison sentence, was caught smoking a joint.

(Someone must have read her the wrong children’s books when she was growing up - and dumber by the day.)

Then there was the eagerly awaited announcement that yet another book about Kennedy’s assassination was about to hit the market - and the not all that surprising but still welcome fact that the Jackpots all had the same mad doctor rearrange their collective faces in one freaky image.

Then there was, of course, the wonderful news that the virgin Mary is selling sex toys these days. Not exactly reading from the same publicity hymn book, in a hastily arranged press conference a Catholic church spokesman said that contrary to some evil, atheist rumours the church had no insider knowledge about the end of the world.

(Pope watchers consider this to mean that though the church does not approve of Mary’s new job, they will learn to live with it.)

There is, of course, no change in the Vatican’s position on the claim that we all, eventually, must die. Which brings us to the most beautiful piece of news that hit all the world’s news stands today:

The guy who said, amongst other things, on 9/11:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen’.

that guy has now gone to pick up his final, written-on-asbestos reward. Yes, finally, Tinky Winky is avenged: Foul Falwell, the accuser, is dead.

It would be hypocritical, perhaps, to wish him a happy journey but most of us would probably wish him God’s speed, followed by a very warm welcome by a special welcoming committee and ultimately a very, very, very long stay down there.

We live in strange times. Cats deliver puppies, museums buy cockroaches and you can get cocaine in the Vatican.

As always though, for every small glimpse of Hell, there will be intimations of Heaven too. So, there’s also comforting news. There are places that don’t serve O.J. and even the British queen can be brought to justice.

And it has been a mixed bag of news stories everywhere. So, while Christians may despair, now that Wal-Mart may soon sell the morning-after pill and the Jedi church is on the brink of gaining suburban respectability, they can also rejoice, for verily, verily, yea & hark, hark, there’s now yet another story of redemption - and one that’s even bigger than that of old George Double Duh Bush:

Yes, the good news is that, after years of dubious celeprosy, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie have become real life (or, at least, reality TV) counselors. They’ll be giving calorically challenged girls advice about diets and other stuff. Ah, those girls will think they’ve died and gone to puppy fat Heaven, no doubt.

Those who’d cynically claim the experience will prove to be more a case of a Harlot Hell than Celestial Celeb show, will soon have to eat their own words, since no lesser man than Dick Cheney has come out to give his full endorsement of this plan.

In his own words, I am absolutely convinced that Paris and Nicole will be a great success, in the same way that Iraq and my good friend Wolfie have been great successes!

So, no more negative talk. No zombie satire jokes. Or snide remarks about these two angels being as pretty as a swastika. No room in the inn for cheap shots suggesting these born-again virgins are as likely a pair of counselors as Sylvester Stallone would be as a serious steroids-free sports campaigner or Woody Allen as winner of an Albert Einstein look-alike contest.

No, there can be no room for any doubting Thomases here. It’s time now for all of us to do our Jesus Saves song & dance routine, for the girls have obviously reformed - finally and most gloriously, they must have let Jesus in their formerly vain and empty little hearts.

They’re redone like Donne - or, in terms that are more befitting their past, dumb Hollywood selves: they are (give me one more verily, verily yea - go, harks, go!) like evil Goth dolls turned lovely, innocent Barbies.

Mark Twain once wrote, Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds. Listening to Wagner, however, seems to easier than talking about it, since it took Wagner’s biographer forty years to write a book about the composer.

Still, in the eyes of history forty years is but a blink - Hell, in the eyes of your average Lost & Found department it’s less than a small gnat’s fart.

In politics though, forty years is like a cross between a very slow snail and an Ice Age. Even ten years in politics can be like watching pubic hair grow on Michelangelo’s David.

And yet, people still want to go into politics - some of them desperately so. In a week where the beleaguered Wolfowitz offered all comers to have sex with him or his girlfriend, in Belgium some woman who’s running for the senate offered to give blowjobs to 40.000 people who’d be willing to stand up for real democracy in action.

Sadly for her, her offer came at the same moment that some spoil-sport scientists revealed that oral sex causes throat cancer. Come to think of it, that might not stop her fans…

Mind you, as political campaigns go, offering sex is a risky business. Bill Clinton just about got away with it, though - as far as we know, so far - he was a rank amateur compared to the likes of this Belgium candidate, or even his predecessor Kennedy (or most Republicans, it seems…)

Anyway, it’s probably very sexual-politically incorrect to say this but if you don’t want to blow your chances for success you must look the part. Granted, men can be very indiscriminate but would you want someone like this offer you her services? Or this one… or this…?

Straying slightly - but yes, only very slightly - from the subject: what you really don’t want is to be the desk cop on duty in Japan, when some disturbed teenager comes in and then actually gives you a head.

(And while we’re doing these bad taste jokes: lots of men dream of being able to perform oral sex on themselves. To cut out the middle head, so to speak. This though might not be the most satisfying way of going about it.)

Anyway, enough of the bad taste politics leave in most people’s mouth (and the lame jokes; though I didn’t even take the opportunity here to refer to the mouth of that campaigning Belgium lady - oops… But enough of that now - really, I promise: enough already!)

So, I leave you with some very happy tidings. True, it’s not been an easy week for quite a few of us. Canada has gone to the bad, the Welsh language has come under serious attack and the Cyprus army is being threatened by ladies’ accessories.

Still, I’m very proud that (even though I didn’t take the photo myself) I may be the first to claim that here there is finally proof that Jesus lives and has returned - the Buddhist way, that is.

Ah well, the sad saga of Paris Hilton continues. So, now there is a petition on her site, calling for all her fans to let governor Arnie know that her public needs Paris - need her not to go to jail, that is. We can only hope that the guv will answer: I’ll get back to you.

(Mind you, it would be rather nice to have some sort of Free Willy campaign for Paris Hilton. Especially if that would end up with her swimming in splendid isolation in some Norwegian fjord. Better even if she could just simply do what Willy did and leave all of us in peace.)

Life can be a lonely business though, at times - and it’s not only us, humans, who feel like we’re alone in the desert: birds do it, E.T. does it - Hell, even very ugly and incredibly alien creatures like Dick ‘the Vice’ Cheney do it: the whole damn world and its neighbours are looking for LUV…

(By the way, can you imagine the face of that poor working girl when her trick or treat of that night proved to be Dick Cheney? Close your eyes and think of England indeed. Though with Cheney more desperate measures would be needed. Most of the rest of the world has been trying to pretend for ages that he isn’t there and that hasn’t worked so well either.)

Anyway, all of us feel there’s something lacking in our lives. When we’re married, we cheat; when we’re alone we want love: the real thing most of all - but any surrogate will do really, latex or otherwise. And when we’re dead, we’re still at it, reaching out for our loved ones.

(And now the queen of bad taste, the arbiter of cheap feel good values and the undisputed darling of dumbed down, daytime television, yes, indeed, Oprah herself, is now giving away men to her faithful studio audience. Ah yes, the woman knows very well what all of us are looking for, in those deep and lonely pockets of our very souls.)

People need to connect, it seems. Army colonels fall in love with robots and psychopaths & coke-heads find their personalized versions of God. And, over our coffees, on our typewriters and laptops, the rest of us just moan, to our friends or in splendid isolation, with the poet:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

It’s nice to think that - on the whole - there is a balance; that we can agree with the poet that, indeed, it is true there are:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, certainly, the seasons come and go - and there is a time for weddings and a time to bury a spouse. Why though does it look as if humans must always be so desperately unbalanced? Not merely brother set against brother but more like fruitcakes fighting bugs? What evil or plain incompetent God made us to be this insane?

So, in the richest country the world has ever known a man is, in yet another decadent pursuit of purpose, effectively tortured to death - while in other parts of the world people are burnt alive and stoned to death. Just business as usual in the human heart, of course.

Still, news also reached us that an Austrian court is in the process of deciding whether apes should have the same rights as human beings.

How nice.

Next rights that then might be granted to them would possibly be the right to work in our factories - the great honour to fight in our wars.

They could also share with us our rituals of power and wealth, our traditions and our systems of patronage and entitlement.

Then, they might join us in our strange courtship dances and our tastes for the bizarre and the unspeakable.

They could read our holy texts and pray to all the various weird Aspects of our many, many Gods.

They would also be most welcome, of course, to share our general paranoia - and become, like us, totally bewildered by the worlds we forged, the cages we built for ourselves. In short, they could become as absolutely useless and utterly clueless as we have made ourselves to be.

Or they could, if they are indeed as smart as their advocates claim they are, just tell all those nice Austrian judges to stick it where the sun won’t shine.