Glob-a-log

It would seem that London has just escaped what Baghdad has to suffer through almost every day.

The Blair government, as always in cinq with its Whitehouse Big Brother, has always denied that the Bush/Blair adventurism in the Middle East has made the world - including England - a decidedly less safer place.

This from the White House site; Bush speaking in 2006,

Our coalition will seize this moment, as well. I look forward for continued in-depth discussions with Tony Blair, so we can develop the best approach in helping the new Iraqi government achieve its objectives. The new government of Iraq will have the full support of our two countries and our coalition, and we will work to engage other nations around the world to ensure that constitutional democracy in Iraq succeeds and the terrorists are defeated.

Well, maybe not - and now it appears that the first Al Qaeda car bombs have made it to England. Yet, with exquisite timing, the man responsible for this mess has flown the coup. He’s resigned as prime minister and has left his successor to deal with whatever future mayhem will follow. Something he may even see as a just revenge on his hated rival, Gordon the Usurper.

Yes, Blair has gone - via Rome - towards new adventures. He’s become a peace envoy, no less. So, it seems that God - or Satan - is a humorist after all. Or, as the Guardian’s Marina Hyde wrote,

Clearly, George Bush so loved the idea of Middle East peace that he sent his only lapdog to have a crack at it, despite the fact that messiahs have a history of running aground in the region. But then, the US president does have form with jobs-for-the-boys appointments that seem so preposterous that they must be presumed to be satirical.

Quite.

Well, no-one has ever said it is easy to admit mistakes. So, Bush and Blair can almost be forgiven for not wanting to admit that they screwed up big time in Iraq. It’s less obvious why both of them would want to make things worse by sending Tony ‘the Torch’  Blair to what has proven to be, time after time - with the possible exception of the Balkans - the most inflammable place on earth.

Maybe the two of them should watch more educational TV - like the Hamas children’s programme. Remember that Hamas Mouse? Well, when the world learnt of the existence of the mouse, public opinion leapt upon a kitchen chair and started to screech its collective head off. A much bewildered Hamas took note of this slightly hysterical reaction,

The British government’s health inspectors have banned the TV ad Go to work on an egg. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins was less than impressed:

Any on-message official should see that “Go to work on an egg” was intolerable. There was no indication of what sort of egg: boiled, fried, scrambled or poached. There was no family risk assessment form ready for distribution. Nobody, not even the ban-crazy Health and Safety Executive, had thought of the side-effects. How many people might see the slogan as an incitement to ride an egg to work? Think of the congestion, with smashed whites and yolks confusing parking bays. Think of the implications for disabled people and the vegan minority. And suppose the eggs had been fertilised. Was there any view from the human fertilisation and embryology authority?

It is though in perfect agreement with the Jekyll & Hyde nature of the man responsible for all this nonsense, Tony Blair, the now ex-PM.

Ah, before I go on, wasn’t it absolutely marvellous that the BBC stopped the live transmission of Tony Blair’s last Question Time session in parliament, in order to tell us about upcoming programmes – to wit: the rise and fall of the ultimately decadent Rome and, indeed, their new drama Jekyll?

How fitting for a man who loved adventurism and mad wars abroad, not worrying overly much about a few (hundred thousand) civilians killed here and a handful (of hundreds of) British soldiers killed there but who, at home, tried to turn the country into a risk-free, smoke-free and joy-free asylum for the bland.

He was like that dentist who threatens with Hell and Damnation if you don’t brush and floss your teeth but who, behind your back, takes a piss in his own surgery sink.

He turned Britain into a place where parents can’t hang a Jolly Roger in their own garden when they want to have a pirate party for their small son’s birthday.

Worse, when you’re a smoking parent the government may very well come by, one of these days, to take your kids away from you. A far-fetched scenario? Think again.

Smokers will be banned from adopting children under the age of five in an attempt to protect young people from health risks such as asthma and lung cancer.

This ban has already been approved by council chiefs in Portsmouth.

It’s time to put up some serious resistance, folks – and ride under the banner of saint Simon and throw eggs and seriously pointy things at all those mad clowns that threaten to turn the country into one enormous, padded health & safety cell.

Let’s all follow the example of the publican who’s trying to make his pub into the official embassy for a small Caribbean island, so he can avoid the smoking ban. Yes, the very best of British luck to you, sir!

Let’s be like children again, refusing to eat our greens – and when some boring, Blairy grown-up tells us to stop playing with our food, we’ll tell him to stuff it and build a whole damn symphony orchestra out of it.

There have been lots of depressing stories in the news lately. Enough to make you want to find a sympathetic lap, lay down your head and be cuddled – or maybe not cuddled. Laps may come cheap these days; cuddles do not.

Which is fairly depressing in itself, come to think of it.

Anyway, onwards and ever downwards, I’m afraid. For here’s to a guy who managed to combine the worst of two worlds (gobbledygook science with Loony Tunes religion) in one and the same foul swoop - or book:

I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.

That’s from the book The Physics of Christianity, by a guy named, no doubt very aptly, Frank Tipler. Another frankly tippled quote? Why the Hell not:

If Jesus indeed rose from the dead using the mechanism described in Chapter 8, namely electroweak tunneling to convert matter into energy, and if indeed this was done with the intention of showing us how to use the same process, then we ourselves should be able to learn how to turn matter into either electromagnetic energy or neutrinos within a few decades.

Compared to Tipler the 78-year-old Romanian orphan who wanted to get his original birth name back for Resurrectional purposes, sounds positively sane:

It is well known God calls you by the name you were given when you were born and when you are baptised and when I die I will need that name.

Talking of death and endless resurrections and post-mortems, there was yet another interview with one of the princes – yes, the sons of Diana the Dead.

Prince William said that the most outrageous thing the tabloid press had ever done to his mother was to say that she’d been too fat. Spoke the prince:

Someone said she had cellulite or something like that. As a woman in the public eye, she tried so hard and was so glamorous, always in the gym.

Weeellll…

In terms of outrageousness drawing attention to a bit of lemon peely skin ain’t exactly in the same league as chasing that same person through Paris, into a tunnel, where she subsequently dies in a car crash that can’t have done much for her looks either.

Or - yes! Maybe this is the missing piece of the puzzle. Maybe the last words of Diana, when she got in the car were:

Right, that’s it! Did you hear that? That beastly photographer called me a lard arse. Step on it, Dodi. I need to get to the gym NOW!

Mind you, however irritating and even deadly these individual invasions of privacy may be, they are nothing to what Bush and his old mate Tony were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course.

Sorry, sorry, I take that back! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, etcetera. NEWSFLASH!!!:

Mr. Bush said that he and the outgoing British prime minister had worked together to achieve world peace.

Ah, so that was what they were doing. Well, that’s alright then – and now we can worry about much more sinister invasions, like the soon expected arrival of the dreaded rubber ducks!

Keeping on the subject of invasions, the alien threat is back – and no, I’m not talking about a few border-crossing Mexicans or even those dastardly, customs-dodging penguins; no, the real ones – the little green men from Mars ones.

No lesser organisation than the American Advertising Standards Bureau has upheld several complaints against a McDonald’s television commercial, because it encourages children to accept lifts from space aliens.

McDonald’s colluding with evil space invaders who want to harm innocent children…? Yes, one could see how that would work - with that evil clown saying to the alien spaceship commander:

Right. We fatten them up - and you take it from there.

As I said, it’s been a week of incredibly dumb and depressing news. With only one exception.

I want to bow deeply and say my thankful prayers to Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC, who flat out refused to read out any more stories about Paris Hilton.

Thank you, Mika. Truly.

Please, make a run for the presidency: your country needs you.

Last week, at the E.U. summit, Poland complained that it should have more votes in Europe. Because, said president Kaczynski, if Germany hadn’t started World War ll, there would have been many more Poles today.

It was a perfect Fawlty Towers (’Don’t mention the war‘) moment. Newspapers and TV journalists all over Europe mentioned the faux pas in, what you could almost describe as a certain awe.

All the European newspapers but the Polish ones. They kept their powder dry and only started to comment on the summit, when they deemed the Polish delegation had not been unfriendly enough to Germany.

Still, there was a bit of good news for Poland as well this week. The UN has accepted their request to rename Auschwitz, to make it clear that the concentration camp was run by Germans and not Poles.

Poland, of course, had been the innocent victim of German’s foul aggression. Poland was one of the good guys, right?

Well, actually, no. Not even close. While it’s true that the Germans were responsible for running Auschwitz, the Poles were not exactly Snow White to the Nazis’ evil witch, when it comes to antisemitism:

One might have thought that if anything could have cured Poland of its anti-Semitism, it was World War II. Polish Jews and Christians were bonded, as never before, by unimaginable suffering at the hands of a common foe. One might also have thought there’d have been pity for the Jewish survivors, most of whom had lost nearly everything: their homes, their youth, their hope, their entire families. Besides, there were so few of them left to hate: only 200,000 or so in a population of 20 million.

Instead, returning Polish Jews encountered an anti-Semitism of terrible fury and brutality. Small wonder, then, that nearly as soon as they set foot on Polish soil, most fled all over again. Many went westward, to a place that, oddly enough, had suddenly become an oasis of tranquillity and safety by comparison: Germany. Far from being celebrated, those Poles who had sheltered Jews during the war — and there were many — begged them to say nothing, lest their neighbors deride them as “Jew lovers,” or beat them, or break into their homes (searching for the money the Jews had surely left behind) or kill them.

That was right after World War ll – but in a way this was just a pale shadow of what happened right after World War l, when Poland became a sovereign state again. Following Poland’s rebirth, a reign of terror against the Jews began.

So, no, Poland was not responsible for Auschwitz but it might consider being a bit less self-righteous about their own, quite recent, atrocious behaviour towards Jews.

Well, not just towards Jews. There were others who died in Germany’s death camps. The Romani, for instance. I’m sure the Poles would hasten to assure us that they weren’t responsible for these deaths either.

Which would be true enough but again, the Poles are very good at imitating Nazis:

On Friday July 3rd, 1998, the community centre for Roma in Lodz (Poland) was broken into and vandalised. The perpetrators have not yet been identified; they daubed swastikas on the walls along with slogans like “Send Gypsies to the gas chambers” and “Lynch all gypsies”.

The so-called “Narodowe Odrozenie Polski” —NOP—(Polish National Renewal) has claimed responsiblity for the attack. Although this organistation has it headquarters barely two streets away, according to the Lodz police P.R. rep Jadwiga Kosiak, there is no reason to press charges against the extremist NOP.

Quite.

Ah, but wait. There was yet another group of people that ended up in the death camps. Indeed, homosexuals. We’re innocent, guv, we ain’t done nothing!, Poland will cry out. Yeah well, again, that’s true, up to a point. Still, the new leaders of Poland would have felt quite at home at any Nazi do:

Only last year, Poland’s state prosecutor announced a government investigation of all Polish gay groups for illegal financing, criminal connections, and pedophilia.

“Every police office will confirm that homosexuals are a circle that is nearly 100 percent identical to the circle of pedophiles. It is a fact that does not require any research,” Wierzejski declared, according to the English-language newspaper Warsaw Independent.

And two years ago,

in Poznan the police cordoned off the hundreds of lgbt activists who’d gathered together in the heart of the city, at a rally, organized by the Green party. Homophobic skinheads swarmed around, pelted eggs and shouted at the activists: “Fags to gas,” “We’ll do to you what Hitler did to Jews.”

The police stormed the gay and lesbian demonstrators. Sixty-five activists were arrested. Many of them were beaten. The activists were arrested and face the penalty of fine or imprisonment.

Jews, check.
Romani, check.
Homosexuals, check.

You know, it would be ever so nice if we’d, oh, let’s say, for the next two or three centuries, not hear anything from self-pitying Polish politicos about their evil German neighbours, or any more fucking sob stories about the war, or - well, quite frankly, any bloody thing at all.

One more pathetic bleat from those evil little Kaczynski trolls and I will personally organize a prayer group, which will only make this one request: that global warming not just destroy the North & South Poles but that smaller Polish blot on Europe’s landscape as well.

You know, when you’re deeply unpopular and you’ve outstayed your welcome by somewhat longer than it takes to soft boil a stone, people will give you signs. Those signs will, in time, become more and more pronounced.

It may start with a simple stare or a polite cough but then it will work itself up slowly to the glaringly obvious – like mount Vesuvius come knocking on your door.

Humanity, as a whole, is not very good at taking hints.

Nature, on the other hand, can do a Vesuvius, if need be.

So, now we have sturgeons leaping out of the water to beat people senseless. There are squirrels out there going Rambo on us and attacking folks.

Worse, even nature’s snitches & collaborateurs, the sniffer dogs, have had it with their evil masters and the public at large. They have started to misbehave so badly, that they have to be laid off - and you know that you are in real trouble when even your own trusties and camp guards turn on you.

But why do they hate us so? the human heart cries out.

Well, maybe humans aren’t the only ones who watch the news. I can see sturgeon and squirrel, sitting in some pub, watching CNN.

“I do understand that you would take the first excuse not to speak to Michael Moore.” the sturgeon said.

“Yup.” said the squirrel; “And Paris is a lot easier on the eyes.”

“Indeed.” the sturgeon said. “But to compare her to Mandela…”

“Yeah. Shit like that makes you want to go out and buy an Uzi, to do some serious trick or treating.”

Anyway, it’s not just the animals that have had it with us. More and more people too are coming to the conclusion that the planet would be better off without us.

There’s a new pledge group that’s gaining new members by the day. They call themselves Anything But A Human – or ABAH. They take a slow and gentle approach to ridding Earth of humanity, simply by shutting down the assembly line.

No longer putting their trust in even the best of contraceptives they have decided that they will no longer risk having sex with other humans. Abstinence, of course, is seen as the most dignified way. Still, in a pinch, anything other than a human partner will do.

So, there have been some much-publicised cases (much applauded by members of ABAH) about people who have really started to practise what they preach.

One man, driven by lust, took his bicycle to a hotel room and did the dirty with his two-wheeled mate.

Another one, who’d gone to the woods, to seek solace in splendid isolation, got so giddy with desire, that he grabbed the first comely hedgehog he saw and made passionate love to it.

So, it seems that for humans the end, at long last. is nigh.

Or, as the poet Jane Hirshfield once wrote,

And however sharply
you are tested -
this sorrow, that great love -
it too will leave on that clean knife.

People like to talk about ‘dumb animals’. At times with some reason, mind you.

If you’re a duckling, ugly or not, and your mama asks you to go out on a walk with her, do as that storybook horse did not – and just say no. For mama duck sure ain’t no boyscout when it comes to tracking.

Still, it takes some gall for homo sapiens to call other species dumb. If power is the pinnacle of evolution, look at the most powerful man on earth for smarts – and all you can go for are tears, laughter, anger or good, old-fashioned rue.

Compare the collective efforts of poor befuddled Double Duh to make this world a much better and much safer place for all of us to the easy and ruthlessly efficient manner in which a single cat dealt with a danger that threatened the ears of an entire planet.

Can you contemplate a cat choking on a pretzel? Or – but no, let’s leave old George alone, for now (since ‘in peace’ does not seem to be his default mode exactly.)

So, imagine the most idiotic duck in the long history of proudly weird duckiness. Can you see even such an unfortunate animal be as stupid as the man who died while mowing his lawn?

Or the woman who went for a walk and then for a nosedive?

In other words, less of the ‘dumb animal’ routine maybe.

Talking of dumb – and of animals – in a roundabout way. Some time ago Spielberg came out and announced he’d support the Hillary for prez campaign.

Somewhat later, a very disgruntled McCain and a frankly pissed-off Giuliani were sitting in a bar, telling dirty Hillary jokes and complaining about this, that and the other.

Fucking Spielberg, said Giuliani.

Yeah, said McCain.

What a louse! said the hero of 9/11

Yeah, said the Vietnam vet.

I mean, What’s with this guy? I thought he liked dinosaurs!

A group of girls returning home from school in Afghanistan’s Logar province recently did not for a moment expect what lay ahead. As they walked down a dirt track, insurgents sprang out of the parched farms and began firing on them. Some of them fled into the farm, but two girls, one aged 13, the other 10, were killed in the ambush. Three of their friends were wounded.

Ah, and finally: now we see Muslim crowds protesting against this outr… ; oh, so sorry. No, those are still the same ones calling for the blood of some writer.

God, but they look stupid, and ugly. Give them red shawls and tattoos instead of beards and they could pass for drunken Liverpool supporters any time of the day.

Still, this is not an anti-Muslim rant. No, no, it’s not.

So, picture yourself inside a proper English court-room, with a proper English judge presiding over it. Now, those Taliban killers are brought in, to hear their sentence.

The judge stares down at them with paternal sternness and says,

Hey, guys, what you did was wrong, you know. Sure, you were provoked. Those damn girls were carrying books openly, for goodness’ sake. They were practically begging for it, if you ask me. Still, think of their mothers, lads. I’d suggest you dish out some cash to them, so they can go to the barber – oh no, sorry, this is Afghanistan. Right, so give them some money, so that they can buy a new veil or even a whole new hijab. That will cheer them up in no time, I’m sure.

Far-fetched? Not really.

This week, in an English court judge Julian Hall gave a two-year prison sentence to a man who had attacked and raped a ten-year-old girl in some park. With time already served, this means the man will walk free in a few weeks time.

So, why this astonishing leniency? Let’s hear it from the judge,

Here is a very young woman of ten who is taken to the park. Within three-quarters of an hour of meeting a 24-year-old man, they have sex together. That is not a good idea. It is an absolute crime because she was only ten.

Then, the court was told that the young girl regularly wore make-up, strappy tops and jeans.

The judge again,

It is quite clear she is a very disturbed child and a very needy child and she is a sexually precocious child. She liked to dress provocatively.

Ah yes. The uncovered meat defence – again. Always a difficult one to counter, that. Said the judge,

In my experience this has been the most difficult sentencing exercise I have ever had to decide on.

Right.

Judge Julian Hall has dealt with paedophiles before, by the way. He once gave a suspended sentence to a man who had put his hands down the trousers of a six-year-old girl. Said the judge to the defendant,

In criminal terms, what you did was quite mild.

The judge also told the guy to give his victim 250 pounds in compensation, stating,

If it buys her a nice new bicycle, that’s the sort of thing that might cheer her up.

Rrriiight…

One would almost be tempted to advice judge Hall to follow his heart and leave the judicial circuit for some paedophile ring – and if not that, then at least to paint his red robes white, exchange his wig for a Kalashnikov and join the Taliban.

He’d fit right in.

There are no legal grounds to put somebody in a psychiatric hospital because he was a victim of aliens.

Quite. Insanity, like beauty, may well be in the eye of the beholder. Still, there are a lot of crazies out there, you know.

Some are almost benign, if more than a bit perverted. People who enjoy beheading Japanese sex dolls – or the good folks who run and visit the Christian domestic discipline site, which offers Loving Wife Spanking in a Christian Marriage.

Others, still relatively harmless, are a bit more alarming – and definitely show both a lack of taste and style. Like the producers and consumers of the Italian novelty product, Hitler wine – or the American gravedigger who took bits of his trade back home to make ashtrays out of them.

Still, for every baker’s dozen of relatively harmless nuts, there are one or two crazies that do need watching,

A Chinese court has jailed two officials after they let a blind contractor build a bridge which collapsed during construction and injured 12 people, the official Xinhua news agency said Monday.

Obviously, here the two officials were the true culprits. The blind guy might have been certifiable for wanting to build bridges but most of the blame should fall on the guys who enabled him to actually do it.

Which, of course, leads us seamlessly to yet another notorious idiot – yes, indeed, George Double Duh Bush, the 43rd president off the US of A.

A White House spokeswoman told the press that the prez, is keeping Guantanamo open until he figures out a way to ensure that the detainees are treated humanely once they are repatriated.

Again, who are those irresponsible moral morons who allow poor George to leave his rubber room so often and hand him a microphone each time he does?

As for the argument itself: yes, it’s very likely that some of the Guantanamo prisoners will face even worse treatment if they would be repatriated. However, that doesn’t make the prison itself less evil.

After the second world war, the Jews who had survived the death camps and returned to the countries where they had come from, found they were less than welcome there. In most cases their houses and other possessions had been confiscated by their former neighbours or governments and neither were willing to give these back to the rightful owners.

So, mister Bush, following your logic, would it have been better then to keep those Jews in their camps till a final humane solution could be found for this problem?

That, alas, brings us to the most disgusting and depraved example of a sick and evil mind,

It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.

Who was that? Hitler? Some Hamas spokesmadman? The Iranian president himself perhaps? Nah, it was the spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, calling for the extermination of all Arabs.

Before the proper authorities lock him up and throw away the key and dump the locked room from great hight right in the middle of the Bermuda triangle, could someone please explain to the good Rabbi that, yes, it is right and proper to try and learn from history – but that, no, this doesn’t mean you do that by adopting the methods of the very madman who tried to do the same thing to your own people, only a few decades ago.

Staff at a Slimbridge wildlife park in Gloucestershire are using a mechanical gadget to feed an orphaned baby crane. The idea behind this is that if the young bird got used to a human hand feeding it, it would then be less able to cope for itself in the wild when it was grown.

That sounds like good thinking but is it really?

The basic idea is correct, I’d say. As human little girls want to marry daddy and their little brothers want to sleep with their mama, birds also tend to want to be with someone they can remember from an early, impressionable age.

However, where the Hell is this baby crane going to find a mate that even vaguely looks like the machine those kind keepers at the wildlife park have built for it?

Still, the story does, in a way, show how strong the forces of nostalgia are. A smell of childhood; memories of a kinder past. We long for all things that are gone - and forever, consciously or not, try to explain and improve the present through some imagined Paradise Lost.

So, we long for the days of the American Dream, before it turned into the ugliness of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

We long for those days when families where big and not custom-made to satisfy some single or parental co-op desire. When the food was bad - but shared and shared alike.

Like Marcel Proust we love the smell of temps perdu in the morning – and we can take that to very silly extremes…

What’s more, these days we can get nostalgic about things that happened only round history’s corner.

When we read certain stories we almost get rosy-eyed with longing for the days that even scary stories had a certain, simple charm. Like, Remember that good old Anthrax scare? Ah, bless!

So, when someone starts up the Kill Rushdie chants again or says something nasty about the Da Vinci Code, we almost go, Aaaah, how cute!

Mind you, some forms of nostalgia we need like a Chinese facial – or a garden gnome needs a snake up his arse. I mean, a Spice Girls reunion…??!! Christ on a cuckoo clock; how low can you go?

Still, not everyone likes nostalgia. Some people find the past so inconvenient they deny it ever happened. Puzzled and furious they’ll go, Dinosaurs? What dinosaurs?! There were no bloody dinosaurs, alright!!!

Come to think of it though, these dingbats do seem to long for certain old days - and certain old ways. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and all of that.

So, those good folks would certainly approve of a certain husband’s action to help his wife kick that dangerous and foul habit of smoking.

It was, evidently, the only real Christian thing to do.

Humanity’s various belief systems often beggar belief. From ghosts to Gods to goblins: we swallow all and we hallow all.

So, it wasn’t worth more than a slightly raised eyebrow when the Indian police announced that they had discovered a stash of hundreds of human skulls and thigh bones and arrested a gang for allegedly smuggling them to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for use in Buddhist monasteries.

The investigating police officer Ravinder Nalwa mentioned that,

During interrogation they confessed that the hollow human thigh bones were in great demand in monasteries and were used as blow-horns, and the skulls as vessels to drink from at religious ceremonies.

Waste nor, want not. Or, A stiff saved in time, etcetera, etcetera.

Then, there is all kinds of weird stuff, commonly & lazily referred to as ‘tribal.’ Like burying babies alive because they look a bit peaky – or are part of a set.

(More crazy still, of course, the mindset of the so-called civilised world who think all this tribal shit – like baby killing, widows being forced to climb upon their dead husband’s funeral pyres or clitoridectomy – is charmingly quaint and should be respected and preserved at all cost.)

Still, if you want really weird, there is always ‘formal’ religion. There’s Judaism, which is based on the concept that some extremely sadistic God saw fit to nominate the Jewish tribes His ‘chosen.’ Or, as the poet said,

First thing they do
is cut up your dick.
Then they tell you,
Don’t eat this and that.

They take you to a desert
you had no wish to visit in the first place.
The promised land, they say -
of bombs and snipers.

And everybody hates you
(and you can’t stop bickering
about the cost of living
and the price of milk and honey)

The chosen - right.
One thing you know,
Next time you’ll see a burning bush
you’ll piss it out.

One demented off-shoot of Judaism is Christianity. Those fish people are truly funny buggers. When they don’t burn you as a witch, crusade the Hell out of you or enslave you, they will try to sell you stuff. They are a true Salvation Sales Army. And they’re not remotely bothered by small matters as ethics – or even taste. There truly is something for everyone, from Jesus air-fresheners to Last Supper mints.

The second, even more feeble child of Judaism is, of course, the happy house of Islam. And they all lived together in a little crooked house, as the nursery rhyme goes. Yes, indeedy do. The followers of Mohammad are really into some strange and unhealthily perverse shit.

Like telling their women that’s it their fault when a Muslim man rapes them – and, of course, then punishing, sometimes even killing the women for having been forced to have extramarital sex.

And they’re very funny about books. They really don’t like them. Hell, they don’t even like cartoons.

Although, and fair is fair, the Muslim world seems to be changing its collective small mind on that one. News reached us that that unlikeliest of cabals, Rushdie and his Danish cartoonists, can sleep easily once again.

Some representatives of the highest religious authorities in Egypt have categorically stated that it is perfectly alright – no, a blessing even – to take the piss out of Mohammed.