Glob-a-log

A New York City lawmaker is pushing to symbolically ban the words “bitch” and “ho” to discourage their use in rap and pop music and among young people.

Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, D-Brooklyn, suggested the non-enforceable ban (designed after a similar ban of the N-word passed by the New York City Council in March) to help combat sexism in the city, the New York Daily News reported Monday.

Bitching news for some, no doubt, though there was one guy in particular who took it rather hard...

When migrating swallows turned her house and barn into a home from home, Vivien Reynolds thought she had hit upon the ideal deterrent.

She placed a model of a giant eagle owl high up in the barn, hoping the plastic predator’s golden eyes and sharp talons would scare off the birds.

Sadly, the swallows had other ideas. After two days eyeing up Ollie, the fake 3ft owl, a pair of the birds settled on its head.

Such a pity not all uninvited guests are so well-organized, charming – or harmless…

Just a quickie, this time. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Ingmar Bergman has died.

I can’t say I liked any of his films but never mind. One of the most famous of his movies was The Seventh Seal.

To give you an impression of this (yet another) gloom and doom vehicle for our frolic-free Viking, there’s this useful link.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have bothered with this - or any mention of Bergman’s passing if it weren’t for a glorious cartoon in today’s Guardian, by Steve Bell.

Truly wonderful.

It almost makes all those dreadful Bergman films worth their while - but not worth watching again, thank you.

INCOMING: This is a Seventh Seal based cartoon by Peter Brookes in today’s Times,

Scientists have discovered why we have eyebrows:

The researchers said the effect of eyebrow position was suggestive of a social function for the hairy tufts, and helped explain the ‘eyebrow flash’ – the convention for people to raise their eyebrows at each other from a distance in a gesture of acknowledgement.

“It may make the eye gaze direction of the sender briefly visible to the receiver. Since that eye gaze direction is at the receiver, it results in the receiver being given a brief ‘I am looking at you signal’, which would communicate recognition,” they said.

Isn’t it nice that science can give us all these clever answers to so many of life’s great mysteries? So, now we finally know: human beings developed eyebrows, so they could raise them when confronted with other humans.

Who’d have thought?! For raising, huh?

Let’s not wait for next year’s Nobel prizes. No, don’t be shy, you wonderful geniuses: you deserve it! So, here’s, from all of us, a heartfelt thanks and an admiring

DUH…!

A 108-year-old woman has been told she must wait at least 18 months before she receives a new hearing aid.

Mrs Beal, a former piano teacher who was involved in the suffragette movement, would be 110 by the time she gets her new hearing aid. “I could be dead by then,” she said yesterday.

You know this old Stones song, right: No Expectations?

Take me to the station
And put me on a train
I’ve got no expectations
To pass through here again

Once I was a rich man
Now I am so poor
But never in my sweet short life
Have I felt like this before

Well, they’re right. Love sure ain’t easy.

So, I met this woman in a bar. We talked. We had fun. Then she had to leave and I asked her if we could meet up again.

Sure, she said; If tomorrow’s okay, meet me at the station. Call me if you can’t make it.

I went home happy. I woke up happy. Then I checked my wallet: I’d lost the paper with her phone number – and the stupid name of that stupid station.

And now I’ll never see her again.

God, I hate Wales.

You know that old lawyer joke?

What do you call a hunderd dead lawyers in a lake? A good start.

So, what do you call two vultures colliding in the sky, while they are circling some dying, desert bunny?

Ah yes, indeed… 

Happiness lies round the corner, they say. Which may, in fact, be a bit of a problem…

Not that we trust the future to be kind, of course. We’d like the seconds that await us to resemble the very best of times that we already had - or imagined that we had.

For even that most reliable of time machines, smell, is subject to change. Listen to A.A. Gill:

Smells come and go, pervade our lives and then disappear on the wind. You can’t recreate a smell, but neither can you quite forget it. I still remember the odour of London fog, coal gas, steaming King’s Cross, Bronco toilet paper, Vim, Gumption, beeswax polish, fishbone glue, Silvo, shoebox brushes, wax crayons, typewriter ribbon, mackintosh, paraffin, linseed oil, Vicks, burnt feathers, butcher’s sawdust, puncture-repair kits, iodine and woolly plasters, lily of the valley on licked hankies, and patchouli on cheesecloth. All rare to extinct now and nobody to save them.

And what we can’t keep, we change – mostly for the worse:

We’ve tidied up the olfactory landscape, sprayed it with the pervasive squawk of lemon and pine, grass and pulped fruit. At the moment, I’m being nose-raped by some sort of detergent or fabric softener or skid-mark shifter: a sweet, ersatz smell that pretends to be a Swiss meadow humping a fruit salad. It’s truly unpleasant, like being interrupted by a loony Ophelia on the bus.

In other words, we can’t trust the future, or truly know the past – and what’s left is the strangest of comforts:

As part of his research into how light influences reproduction in birds, Prof. Grégoy Bédécarrats discovered that a genetically blind strain of White Leghorn birds called Smoky Joes start reproduction earlier and produce more eggs than the average chicken.

So, that’s about the best that we can do: humbly accept that blindness, at times, seems to work - and that maybe, since love is also wearing those Stevie Wonder glasses, there might be hope for our fool hearts: that love might work for us as well, however clumsily we go about it:

Two female tortoises needed life-saving operations after their shells cracked up through years of a violent mating ritual.

Old-timer Phoebe, 100, and Grandma, 50, had to have parts of their shells replaced with fibreglass.

A vet treating them described their condition as, “the most severe I have ever seen”.

During the “bashing” ritual, randy male tortoises smash their shells against the females forcing them into submission.

Or, if not for some uncertain future or a forgotten past – and if not for love, or other forms of blindness - maybe, like Jane Hirshfield wrote, we just go on until we open

to the dark that comes to take us – embrace
that should be brutal, yet somehow not. No, intimate,
almost a kindness, the quick taking.
And then that too is faithfully stripped from our arms.

Let’s start with an old graveyard story.

In the south of England there’s a grave that carries the following inscription:

“Sacred to the memory of MAJOR JAMES BRUSH, tragically killed by the accidental discharge of his pistol in the hand of his orderly. 14th April 1831″

There’s also a Bible text, at the bottom of the gravestone, that reads:

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Now, let’s go to Germany, where, last week,

the German Protestant Church compared the Hollywood film star Tom Cruise to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and claimed the actor was using his celebrity status to publicise the controversial Church of Scientology, of which he is a prominent member.

In other words, chances are slim that Tom Cruise will win any ‘faithful servant’ prizes in Germany, any time soon.

It is certainly true that people can be very strange and are able to lose their heads anywhere and anytime over any damn thing. They are also easily led by any criminal or mad, pie in the sky piper.

So, in itself, it is admirable that these church leaders want to protect their flock from harmful influences – even if, in doing so, they seem to go a little bit overboard here, like another, overprotective shepherd did.

Still, you can understand this. I mean, talking about easily led, look at the US, where the Republicans are currently having a bit of an image problem.

Their overall leader is not the most eloquent kid on the block, while the rest of the government is either spending too much time in brothels or, like good Genesis monkeys, down on their knees, waiting and fervently praying for the world to end.

However, with all of that going on and with all the endless talk about the unpopularity of Bush, one tends to forget that a cool 30% of all voting Americans would still follow him and his party anywhere, like a demented flock of Japanese Coke junkies.

Having said all that though – and readily admitting that people can be incredible idiots…:

Tom Cruise? Tom bleeding Cruise?? Tom ‘I went on Oprah & insane’ Cruise???

I’d really suggest the German protestant church cease to bother about the bad influence this Hollywood freak would have on the German people. Toady Tom might easily be as mad as Goebbels but these days he’d have trouble giving away cocktails in an all male whorehouse.

We started in some cemetery, so let’s end this in another:

Three men who dug up a young woman’s corpse to have sex with it after seeing her obituary photo cannot be charged with attempted sexual assault because Wisconsin has no law against necrophilia, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

In other words, dear German church leaders, stop fretting so.

This side of eternity, the chances of Tom Cruise converting any souls in Germany are about as good as those three idiot gravediggers’ are to get lucky with any living Wisconsin females.

NASA’s astronauts have flown while intoxicated on at least two occasions, according to reports of an internal NASA investigation, and the astronauts involved were warned that their drunkenness constituted a safety risk to the flight. But it is unclear whether this is a current problem and whether the incidents involved space shuttle flights.

The report, which has not been released, was described in an article published yesterday on the Web site of Aviation Week and Space Technology. According to the article, the panel investigators reported ” ‘heavy use of alcohol’ by astronauts” within 12 hours of flying.

Ah well, drunk asstronauts…; whatever next? It’s like the poet said:

The sun must be a liquid,
molten fire -
one gigantic Johnny Walker in the sky.

The moon an afterthought,
an aspirin -
small wonder all those astronauts get blasted.

Three o’ clock:
the hour of Rubicon.
One more drink and I am home and here to stay.

I could pay the bill and leave
under the pale, protective sign
of Sister Aspirin.

One more drink and mine
are all the blessings and the stigmata
of Brother Walker.

INCOMING: What kind of job openings are there for alcoholic ex-astronauts? Ah yes, of course…

They become flying instructors!

Have you heard of Oscar yet?

Well, Oscar is a cat that seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

Keep Oscar in mind for now: he will come in very handy in just a moment. For now though I’ll pass the mike to The Times‘ very own Matthew Parris:

Soviet communism being no longer appropriate for the role of preoccupying threat, the IRA having gone away, and bird flu having failed to live up to early hopes, we have fixed on al-Qaeda. It would need to achieve about four big explosions a week to match deaths from MRSA and road accidents, but commonplace dangers lack the scare value we crave. Thus too, unwanted pregnancy having lost its power to intimidate, syphilis being curable, and homosexuality having gone out of fashion as a sin, we have lighted upon smoking as our new moral horror.

So far, so theoretical? Not quite. For Parris has gone to Buxton’s opera house to watch a performance of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux:

At the entrance to the auditorium was a big sign: WARNING: THIS PERFORMANCE CONTAINS A PERSON SMOKING ON STAGE.

Can someone please wake up Oscar – and point him in the general direction of Buxton. He’s got some serious curling up to do there.

Mind you, when he’s done, put the cat on the first plane to South Africa:

Earlier this week, a woman in Umlazi township, near Durban, was stripped naked and her shack burnt down, because she was wearing trousers.

Which is bad enough - but it gets quite a bit worse:

After this, a community meeting decided to ban women in the area wearing trousers.

So, All those present at that meeting, meet Oscar. Oscar, go cuddle!

Now, I know the little fellow needs his sleep but I’ve got one last job for him before he can retire for the night. Oscar, to Brooklyn, please:

Fourth Street was abuzz on Sunday when neighbors awoke to find a woman — in full wedding attire — apparently asleep on a ledge above the door of a Park Slope brownstone.

So, what’s the fuss? Never heard of Sleeping Beauty?

Police quickly arrived, but no one knew what to make of the mysterious woman or even how she could have gotten up on the ledge without assistance.

I’m telling you, it’s Sleeping Beauty. It’s what she does: fall asleep any which way & where, at the drop of a bloody sewing needle.

The woman had a teddy bear-shaped bag with her that contained a wedding ring inside a Tiffany box, a witness told The Brooklyn Paper. When the cops took it away from her briefly, she squealed, a witness said, and the officer gave it back.

Told you so: Sleeping bleeding Beauty! The Prince woke her; they got hitched; he won her some stupid carnival toy bag. Now he’s off to buy some more champagne and she’s taking a nap. It’s what she does!

Another neighbor added, “We all kept thinking, ‘This has got to be some student prank or something…

Nope, just Sleeping Beauty.

But once the cops cuffed her, it didn’t seem like a joke anymore.”

They frigging cuffed Sleeping Beauty??!!

OSCAR…!!!