Glob-a-log

Last month, a prominent Saudi television presenter made international headlines when she permitted newspapers to print horrific images of injuries she said she had sustained from an alleged beating by her husband.

Rania al-Baz’s bruised and swollen face shocked the global community - and ignited an unprecedented public debate within Saudi Arabia itself over the normally taboo issue of domestic violence.

The Saudi king’s response was swift and decisive. He called in the kingdom’s editors and told them not to publish any pictures of women anymore,

The King reportedly told editors in a meeting this week that publishing a woman’s picture was inappropriate. “One must think, do they want their daughter, their sister, or their wife to appear in this way? Of course, no one would accept this,” the newspaper Okaz quoted King Abdullah as saying. “Young people are driven by emotion and the spirit, but the spirit can go astray. So I ask you to go easy on these things,” the King reportedly said.

These people, according to president Bush, are our allies. Well, fuck that - fuck Bush and all his oily, wife-beating friends.

It is at times hard to believe but there are more things on the internet than Ron Paul and xxx-sites.

in fact, some of the oldest professions in the book (no, not those xxx’s again, thank you very much; we can’t all be DC madams, you know.) now have online chapters.

Romanian witches are going online in a bid to win more customers now the country is in the EU. Witchcraft is a recognised profession in Romania where white witches offer spells, potions and readings of the future.

The witches are also offering a new range of spells such as love potions for gay men and lucky charms guaranteed to win EU grant money.

Obviously, where witches go, the church and others will follow, to root out evil and defend their magic zombie franchise.

So, there may be devilry but there’s also - laissez les bon temps rouler - online exorcism.

Still, the sinners and the virtuous are not spending the whole time locked in virtual combat. Spaceship Earth still sees some action in real time too:

Authorities were investigating an unusual case after police found the daughter of an Edgewater city councilwoman screaming, bruised and claiming her parents tried to perform an exorcism on her, according to police papers released Friday.

Danielle Rogers’ shirt and bra were partially torn off and she was covered in olive oil after the incident, which took place June 27 about 8 p.m.

Ah well, as the old saying goes, Possession is nine tenths of the law…

Of course, there’s also (and indeed always) that oldest and most incurable form of possession. It makes the world go round - if it doesn’t blind you first. It makes fools of wise men and makes the rest of us look positively demented.

Some, who don’t have that much brain power to start with…: oh dear… and oh dear squared…

Remember Golda Meir? Indeed, the fourth prime minister of Israel - and only the third female prime minister in the world. She also had a deliciously weird sense of humour.

This is what she once said about Moses:

Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil!

True.

Imagine: forty years to get from Egypt to The Promised Land. The guy must have had the homing instinct of a demented squirrel - and he definitely could have done with some more burning bushes to lead him in the right direction.

In other words, some people think love will conquer all but at times some practical help can also be nice.

Even the Gods Who rule the Heavens and walk the earth - yes, the Powerful Ones Who, each day and each night, hang the sun and the stars and the moon; even They can use a helping hand, from time to time.

So, it was particularly nice to see, how the people and the priesthood in Nepal helped a young and foolish and disgraced Goddess find her way back to true divinity.

Such a pity that so many people in the West seem to beyond reason and beyond help, divine or otherwise.

In the midst of various wars, on a warming planet that’s become grotesquely polluted and overcrowded, the few remaining Westeners not engaged in burning books are saving their money to buy themselves a personal pole dancer.

(a glance at the mirror
a glimpse into my heart
makes me want
to shut up forever

so why do you lean me here
Lord of my life
lean me at this table
in the middle of the night
wondering
how to be beautiful)

US President George W Bush has signed an executive order banning “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of terror suspects.

(Meanwhile, in the real world,

A U.S. Marine guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit larceny, housebreaking, kidnapping, false official statements and murder was sentenced on Friday to a reduction in rank to private and a bad-conduct discharge with no additional time in prison.)

The order the president signed says,

torture and personal abuse - including sexual acts and attacks on religious beliefs - are intolerable.

Mr. president, with all due respect: please, don’t fucking bother.

It was definitely a case of Poor Pluto. No, not that one; I meant the best friend of mice and men.

People talk about a fate worse than death – or they say, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead, doing this or that but one dog might have preferred to die rather than having been caught like this…

Mind you, if you really want to talk incredibly dumb and humiliating dropped trousers stuff, then what’d you say about these guys?

Police dog handlers arriving Wednesday at the abandoned nursing home where they hold training sessions discovered two men and a woman dismantling the building’s copper pipes and wiring.

Yes, trying to steal copper from coppers, where the latter train their dogs. That must be the stupidest thing a thief has ever…

Eeeerrrrr…, no:

A man trying to take down a power line to steal and sell the copper inside was electrocuted Monday, the Butler County sheriff’s office said.

Deputies found Brandon Reed, 22, of Hamilton, tangled in lines about 3 a.m., Lt. Marian Olivas said.

However, if you want truly surreal, we have that too. Surreal in a mostly comical way:

A car thief with just one arm has been jailed for the seventeenth time in Bulgaria after he was spotted trying to force open a car door.

Police in the Bulgarian capital Sofia say one-armed bandit Rumen Dimitrov, 50, is just not suited for crime, but can’t seem to give it up.

Also surreal but more like some terrible nightmare – think Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as performed by the Royal Hiphop Company, or something equally weird and vile:

Daley, 30, drove her 14-year-old son and six other members of the Latin Marijuana Smokers gang to a skate park to kill a 13-year-old boy they had a grudge against, police say. The boy, Jose “Bobby” Cano, was stabbed to death.

Life, my friends, can be strange and cruel – but it can’t hold a candle to people, in that respect.

So, take it away, Charlie – yeah, the big B.:

the acute and terrible air hangs with murder
as summer birds mingle in the branches
and warble
and mystify the clamour of the mind;
an old parrot
who never talks,
sits thinking in a Chinese laundry,
disgruntled
forsaken
celibate;
there is red on his wing
where there should be green,
and between us
the recognition of
an immense and wasted life.

You know that old saw: about God watching every sparrow fall. Most people don’t know this but He actually picked that hobby in order to avoid looking at people.

Someone said if people really understood the full extent of the power we have available through prayer, we might be speechless.

Our prayers are the most powerful asset we have.

Yeah, right.

God is probably praying that those who keep trying to get His attention do indeed lose their voice, before it reaches the Heavens.

His most devout – or at least loud – followers are forever begging Him to smite this foe or send boils & locusts to that miscreant. Then, if God doesn’t deliver like a demented pizza courier, they go for DIY options:

University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.

The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group named because police are still investigating.

Most of the time, God’s most ardent followers behave like none too bright ten-year olds, putting on their fake Bin Laden beards, and whining to Santa, Please, please, please, bring us some home-made explosives!

Worse, whatever small part of humanity isn’t obsessed with bloody vengeance and self-righteousness seems to have sex on the brain - which makes listening to their prayers real fun for any God Who is is the cursed Owner of He knows how many blasted phone lines with toll free numbers.

Especially when those callers are male - like Hideo Tsuchiya, president of sex doll manufacturer Orient Industry, who wants to share with all who (really, really don’t!) care to listen, that

nowadays, women are sometimes more dominant than men in the real world, and they don’t always pay attention to men. More and more men are finding themselves miserable so we’re making these dolls partly in support of men.

You know what, like us, God could be thinking: too much information…!

Talking of which – and of yet another large sub group of followers that the Almighty really could have done without:

An unordained preacher who pleaded guilty today to three felony charges of first-degree sodomy in the repeated sexual abuse of three of his adopted children will not serve any time in prison.

Circuit Judge Karen Hall sentenced Jerry Wayne Love to 15 years on each charge to be served one after the other. But she accepted prosecutors’ recommendation and ordered Love to spend five years on probation and undergo treatment in a sex offender program.

(It would be interesting, by the way, to be a fly on the wall when, one very fine and final day, both judge and prosecutor would stand before God and got to hear what He thought of their really peculiar ideas of ‘doing’ justice.)

Anyway, I’d say it’s a safe bet that God, whenever He risks taking another peek at us, mainly feels a gut-wrenching despair.

Romanian police have arrested a naked man with no hands for drink driving. Officers pulled over his car after seeing it swerving from side to side on a busy road.

They were shocked to find disabled driver Aurel Olteanu, 23, naked in his BMW 3 series in the seaside resort of Mamaia.

Olteanu who was twice over the legal alcohol limit has been charged with dangerous driving.

Yes, it’s time for another award!

The Olteanu ‘No Clothes, No Hands, No Clue Awards’ (or ‘No CHCs’) will be presented to individuals, institutions or countries who will have made an unforgivable ass of themselves in public.

For this year the No CHC candidates are:

1) The Tokyo High Court, for their “See! No hands, no quake” approach to public safety;

In 2005, fearing the effects of a significant quake, a group of residents fought to have Kashiwazaki’s licence to build a new reactor revoked. The Tokyo High Court rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that an active fault ran under the station, concluding that what the residents thought was an active fault “did not even amount to a fault and could not cause a quake”.

2) Former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for his shameless, no clue populism:

DeLay told a gathering of College Republicans that a link exists between legal abortion and illegal immigration in America. The remarks were included in a video produced by writer Max Blumenthal and posted at The Huffington Post.

“I contend [abortion] affects you in immigration,” DeLay told the Washington-area gathering. “If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years, we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today. Think about it.”

3) Mark E. Petersen, of the Council of the 12 Apostles, for his ‘No hands, no clue’ publication on the evils of masturbation:

Pray. But when you pray, don’t pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep [it] in your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for the Missionaries, the General Authorities, your friends, your families, BUT KEEP THE PROBLEM OUT OF YOUR MIND BY NOT MENTIONING IT EVER — NOT IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHERS, NOT IN YOUR PRAYERS. KEEP IT _OUT_ of your mind! The attitude of a person toward his problem has an affect on how easy it is to overcome. It is essential that a firm commitment be made to control the habit. As a person understands his reasons for the behavior, and is sensitive to the conditions or situations that may trigger a desire for the act, he develops the power to control it.

And his very appropriate but still rather surprising rule number 7, which should be printed on the front of every self-help manual:

Never read about your problem. Keep it out of mind.

In the celebrity category, this year’s two nominees for the No CHC Awards are the singer Jon Bon Jovi:

Jon Bon Jovi wants the owner of the Mijovi energy drink to change its name, arguing it is too similar to his famous moniker.

The singer’s lawyers are now moving in on the the Belgium chocolate industry, claiming that their most popular product, the bonbon, could remind people, unfavourably, of the dreadfully sacharine ballads Jon Bon Jovi has been producing the last fifteen years or so.

(Rumours that the singer’s lawyers are also talking to people in the Long Johns industry are hotly denied by Jon Bon Jovi’s minders.)

The second, very strong celebrity candidate for this year’s No CHCs is talkshow host Oprah Winfrey, whose dog recently died.

I don’t believe in accidents,” writes Winfrey. “I know for sure that everything in life happens to help us live.”

“Her life was a gift to me. Her death, a greater one.”

Like many people - and almost all celebrities - Winfrey firmly believes that the world turns around her. To her, and others, we must, nevertheless point out, friendly but firmly, that

dogs don’t die horribly bewildered deaths, choking on stupid toys you should have cleared up, in order to teach you that you should live your witless life to the full, you self-centered moron!

The idea that your famous Godhead has a plan for everything, which also involves torturing and killing dumb animals for your highly dubious enlightenment, is only in a matter of scale any different from the obscene suggestion that God planned the World War ll death camps, so that the rest of us would appreciate our little lives a bit more and read our self-centered self-help manuals with even more greedy gusto.

End of rant – but not, by any means, the end of my loathing.

Almost two weeks late - so sorry, but still:

Happy birthday, Frida!

Love from Leonora,

With painting it’s just you and the canvas. You don’t decide to paint. It’s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.

and Keith,

My body is mad.
It listens to my bones exploding.
This is a close-up of my shattered column.

My face is mad.
My third eye is on fire.
They drive pins into my bones.

The hospital is mad.
They sew me together, bit by bit.
The floor drowns in blood.

My mind is mad.
Trapped in the hell of my body.
I paint myself falling from many heavens.

Mexico is mad.
Scarecrow dogs stagger to sugar skulls.
I paint my body as a cadaver.

My husband is mad.
I find him crying at my corpse.
And laugh and laugh, blessed by his pain.

and all the rest of us, of course.

Thanks for everything!

P.S.: Pablo says hi!

porque tú siendo tan pequeñita como eres
dejas caer la risa desde tu meteoro
electrizando el nombre de la naturaleza.

Fighting words today, people! So, get your bucket of cold throwing water – or get thee to a bomb shelter now…

No, it’s not Bush and Cheney going Strangelove over Iran. Not yet, anyway.

Neither is it the American Congress, declaring war on the Iraqi parliament’s August holiday planner, though they are sulking a bit.

According to the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, there’s not even a chance of a Rocky 666 blockbuster, this summer, between the new Gordon and the old Vlad:

The pundits are misty-eyed with nostalgia. Just when the so-called war on terror is looking passe, the old cold war is back. Four-hour waits at Heathrow and a handful of beards in the slammer are no match for Dr Strangelove, Checkpoint Charlie and George Smiley.

What is a fertiliser bomb against the awesome carapace of mutually assured destruction? For most people, foreign policy is a cliché. With the Russian bear behaving badly again we can relax to default mode and flip diplomats like tiddlywinks.

It’s not even the Christians this time, declaring war on Felis domestica, for mocking the Baby Jesus - but you’re definitely getting warmer.

No, no: it’s not our friendly Islamist suicide sociopaths either. After this month’s PR disaster they’ve probably decided to go on some kind of refresher course. Yes, a crash course, if you want.

No, strangely enough it’s some Hebrew rabbi-rousers who are running amok, this time round,

The figure responsible for Israel’s latest religious row is a bespectacled British teenager who is gifted with magical powers, world famous and entirely fictional.

The synchronized worldwide launch of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and last installment in the wildly popular series, falls at 2:01 a.m. local time this Saturday, on the Jewish Sabbath, when Israeli law requires most businesses to close.

Still, the Sabbath is there for man, right? Man not for the Sabbath. That’s what Jesus…

Ah…

Yes, Jews don’t do Jesus – and some of them aren’t big on H.P. either:

Avraham Ravitz of the United Torah Judaism Party slammed the Potter books for their “defective messages”

“We don’t have to be dragged like monkeys after the world with this subculture, and certainly not while violating our holy Sabbath,” Ravitz said in a statement.

Ah well, that’s one man’s opinion, so…

No, it’s not:

“Israeli law forbids businesses to force their employees to work on the Sabbath, and that applies in this case as well. The minister will fine and prosecute any businesses which violate the law,” said Roei Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Yishai, of the ultra-0rthodox Jewish Shas party.

Alright! That’s more like it. So, they’ve got God and Harold Bloom on their side – the Pope, even – and now they will sick the law on Rowling’s wonderboy as well.

Let’s hope the bookstores won’t fold too quickly.

And they won’t!

Steimatzky, Israel’s biggest bookstore chain, is holding a gala event in Tel Aviv beginning Friday night to launch the book, and the company has no plans to change the time, said spokeswoman Alona Zamir.

Great. Coming to a theatre near you, soon: Harry Potter and the Rabbis of Overkill.

I can’t wait.

It’s always dangerous to play that still popular game, What would Jesus have done?

Fact is, we don’t know. We can’t know. Do you know what your wife or husband is thinking, your siblings, your children? Your boss or personnel? Your dog?

And you still want to claim you can read Jesus like some carnie’s crystal ball…?

People do love to play the game though – and until Jesus will come down from Heaven to come down hard on those who try to use Him as a hand puppet, the game will probably not run out of fashion anytime soon.

So, with one hand on the Bible and the other holding something alcoholic, let’s have a go at it ourselves.

You remember this quote?

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Yeah, I know. Not exactly life in the 21st century as we know it. We do tend to worry a bit more than old king Solomon. That’s why we’re more into insurance than lilies, to be honest.

Jesus might not wholeheartedly approve of that but He knows us, and He is in the forgiveness business, after all.

It’s less likely though that He’d be very comfortable with individuals or churches who’d take out insurance to cover their arses against possible future sins:

Like any business, churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations purchase insurance to protect themselves from lawsuits, like discrimination claims or negligence charges against officers. Since the spike in sex-abuse lawsuits in the mid-1980s, churches have also had the option to take out extra liability policies for damages related to sexual misconduct.

It’s almost funny to imagine the Pope and his cardinals do a round of ‘What would Jesus have done?’ and come up with, ‘Stop the rape of children? Meh, we’re insured!’

So, it could just be that the Vatican has placed itself firmly on the Son of God’s shit list with this.

If so, it’s most likely not the only name there. Wal-mart might also have a bit more than second thoughts about some of the stuff they’ve been up to lately. Like the stocking of a certain game:

Left Behind Games’ president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is pacifist because players lose “spirit points” every time they gun down nonbelievers rather than convert them.

Anyway, losing a few points for a bit of Christian slaughter is neither here nor there, cause they

can earn spirit points again by having their character pray.

So, that’s alright then – and what’s more,

“You are fighting a defensive battle in the game,” Frichner, whose previous company produced Bible software, said of combatting the Antichrist. “You are a sort of a freedom fighter.”

Lovely.

Despite fierce protests,

a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the retailer has no plans to pull Left Behind: Eternal Forces from any of the 200 of Wal-Mart’s 3,800 stores that offer the game.

Well, Wal-Mart will find out in time what Jesus makes of people who think massacring people is part of the ‘Turn the other cheek’ school of thought.

By the way, as if Wal-Mart wasn’t asking for enough trouble already with their Jesus-says-shoot-them games,

More than 420 Wal-Mart stores nationwide will sell faith-based toys that include Jesus and Samson action figures.

So far Jesus hasn’t been available for comment but one of His former disciples (J.I.) has told a CNN reporter,

Hey, I thought I was the only one who was allowed to sell out our Lord!