Glob-a-log

Since time began – well, more precisely, from the moment that humans came on the scene with their clocks and other time-slicers – the middle-aged and the elderly of each generation have complained:

“Is nothing safe anymore from these people?! Is nothing sacred?”!

And the answer, obviously, has always been a resounding, if not very reassuring, ‘Nope.’

Flagstaff police say a man faces an auto burglary charge after he allegedly climbed into a hearse during a funeral and began stealing the flowers piled inside.

Police say they were called to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church Thursday night by a funeral director who watched as 37-year-old Christopher Billie opened the hearse door, climbed inside and began grabbing flower vases.

Don’t ask me why but there is, of course, something intrinsically funny about hearses and coffins going astray. Throw in a few clowns as extras – like a couple of drunks who see life as some kind of take-away or drive-through Hooters’ - and you have a scenario that even Hollywood couldn’t fuck up:

Two South African men have been arrested in Soweto for allegedly going on a drinking spree in a stolen hearse with a body in the back, police say.

The men were caught after the hearse ran out of petrol and they asked three women they had met at a drinking den to help push the hearse, local media say.

Mind you, it’s hard to commiserate with these funereal entrepreneurs, even if their hearses (and the occasional bouquet, or corpse perhaps) get stolen.

‘Death & taxes’ as they say. With people still being mortal and all, it’s hard to imagine an enterprise that’s safer in terms of customers per annum than the undertaking business.

So, you’d think funeral homes would be the least likely candidate to launch an aggressive advertising campaign in order to attract more punters.

Well, you would be very wrong then. Advertising campaigns don’t come any more aggressive than this…

Which is really rather silly - because humans are not merely mortal, they can also be suicidally stupid. Sometimes, they just get away with it – for the moment…:

A man in Oregon nearly died after a pet rattlesnake that he put in his mouth while drinking with some friends bit him inside his throat.

Matt Wilkinson said when he put his eastern diamondback rattlesnake down his throat, he immediately noticed a shot-like sensation.

“Me, being me, I put his head in my mouth”, Wilkinson said.

Most undertakers, when they read about these lucky escapes, will just shrug. They know the odds always favour the house, and that it is only a matter of time before their services will be needed again.

They also know that what Jesus said about the poor, goes for the stupid too: They will always be with us – well, for a little while at least:

A man who died after being head-butted by an armless man acclaimed for drawings he does with his feet died from a heart attack, not the head-butt, a county medical examiner said yesterday.

Redfern, who was born with no right arm and a stump below his left shoulder, kicked Teer, and Teer hit Redfern during the fight, which was due to bad blood over a woman who once dated Teer and now dates Redfern.

Ah well, so it goes…

Who saw him die?
“I,” said the fly,
“With my little eye,
I saw him die.”

Who’ll dig his grave?
“I,” said the owl,
“With my spade and trowel
I’ll dig his grave.”

Who’ll carry the coffin?
“I,” said the kite,
“If it’s not in the night,
I’ll carry the coffin.”

Art sells. Arts sells big time. Any van Gogh or Rembrandt or Vermeer going under the hammer, will hammer the message home: You wanna get rich, get your hands on some big (dead) name merchandise and flog it. Then you really will be talking about painting by numbers – very big numbers.

Only problem is: there aren’t that many van Goghs, Rembrandts or Vermeers to be found outside museums and pretty well-protected, private collections. And they’re damn hard to fake.

Enter Jackson Pollock. Pollock has three things going for him:

1) He made a lot of paintings
2) He’s dead
3) He’s incredibly easy to imitate.

We are truly talking easy money here.

And here’s how you do it – in six simple steps:

1) Remember the movie Reservoir Dogs? Those six gangsters with the colour code names? That’s where we start. Go to some specialist painter’s place and buy six largish tubes of paints.

2) Rent some old, empty barn. Any barn will do, as long as there are no holes in it.

3) Buy and lay down as many canvases as will fit on the floor of the barn.

4) Go and buy six parrots.

You really need parrots. Parrots are the best. Ever heard of ‘pica’? No? Okay, read this first then:

The word pica comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird known for its large and indiscriminate appetite.

Many young children put nonfood items in their mouths at one time or another. They’re naturally curious about their environment, and they may, for instance, eat some dirt out of the sandbox. Kids with pica, however, go beyond this innocent exploration of their surroundings. As many as 25% to 30% of kids (and 20% of those seen in mental health clinics) have an eating disorder called pica, which is characterized by persistent and compulsive cravings (lasting 1 month or longer) to eat nonfood items.

Parrots are the world’s most astonishing pica birds: they truly will eat any damn thing they see. The mystery of the lost island of Atlantis ? A no-brainer really: parrots ate it.

5) Take the parrots to the barn and hold the tubes of paint in front of their beaks. (Mind your fingers now!)

6) Let the birds loose inside the barn (and run like Hell.)

Parrots are quite amazing birds but they can malfunction rather easily:

Not all foods are good parrot foods. It has often been said that parrots can eat just about anything that we humans can eat, this is just not the truth. It would be a wise decision, to forget that what tastes good to you must also taste good for your parrot.

Many foods are just unable to be digested well by the parrot and may lead to an upset gastrointestinal tract.

A parrot with diarrhoea does not paint a pretty picture – but then, we’re not after a pretty picture. We want Pollocks.

So, about five minutes after the parrots have swallowed the paint they will get hit with the shits. And a paint-shitting parrot is a nervous parrot, which will then do what all birds do when they get nervous: take to the air and fly around in a dither. A paint-spraying dither, in this case.

It will probably take about fifteen more minutes for all the paint to run through all the parrots – and for your Pollocks to be finished.

See, told you it was dead-easy.

Now, go and make some Jacksons – and don’t forget to send me my 15% cut, in small notes. You do not want to find out about my six easy steps’ plan to debt-collecting (Which do involve, amongst other things, orangutans, six pair of head-phones, duct tape and the CD, ‘The Best of ABBA’.)

We need to get angry a Hell of a lot more than we do right now.

The lobster in the pot doesn’t feel as if it is in any kind of trouble: a gradual change in temperature will not be registered at all. If the lobster were American, it would quite probably not even bother to vote on changing it, if it could. But it is getting hotter – and we’re not talking global warming here. It’s human on human all the way - and we are still not angry enough about it, as of yet.

The human heart, without checks and balances, is not a pretty sight. We need good education, strong families and tight communities – and we can’t rust governments and bureaucracies: that’s where the human heart goes to hide from its own responsibilities, where it hides behind excuses and Orwell-speak. And we can’t trust unbridled capitalism, because that’s where all our darkest impulses flower like cancers and grow beyond all control, eating all and destroying all.

In an introduction to one of his short stories the writer Dan Simmons notes:

“But it is the evenings seen from the front stoop I most remember: a brick canyon rich with human noise, the long sweep of Bringhurst Street’s rowhouses illuminated in the sodium-yellow glow of “crime lights” while children jumped Double Dutch and played the dozens in the street, the endless parade of people strolling and laughing and chatting and making room on the step for visitors. To this day, confronted with the privacy-fenced sterility of suburban back-yard patios, I wonder what lunacy made us turn away from the front porch and the front step, the communal ownership of the street, to flee to these claustrophobic plots of isolation.”

That’s what we have done in the West: we have turned away from this communal ownership. We have become irresponsibly narcissistic. We have become vulgar and cheap, condoning, and aiding and abetting the worst that the human heart has on offer.

We need to get angry about this more. We need to take back that communal ownership – from that front porch up again, bit by bit, vote by vote.

And here are five simple resaons why all of us should be very angry, and finally get our act together – or keep doing the lobster thing till we are done:

1) A Rockford, IL woman with no arms is suing McDonald’s, claiming that employees refused to serve her food because she has no arms and was too “disgusting” to serve.

She says McDonald’s offered her a $10 gift certificate as compensation.

Dawn Larson was born with Holt-Oram Syndrome, a genetic disorder which causes abnormalities in the hands, arms, and heart. Her tiny hands are about 6 inches from her shoulders, so she does most things with her feet.

Dawn says her disability’s never stopped her from leading a normal life. “I do everyday things like everyday people.” But on November 3rd, she says that changed. Larson pulled up to the McDonald’s drive through on Kishwaukee Street and ordered food for her and her sons. She drove to the first window, gave the cashier her credit card with her foot, and pulled up to get her food. Dawn says, “The first girl said, ‘Girl, you ain’t got no arms’ and the manager said she couldn’t hand me her food and she just kept sticking to the fact that I didn’t have no arms and she was disgusted by it.

2) Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken.

“They’ve created a hellhole,” said Vivian Hewitt, who sued Habana in 2004 when her mother died after a large bedsore became infected by feces.

3) A management consultant branded his wife with a hot steam iron because she had failed to press his shirt.

Cambridge graduate Colin Read, 25, also slashed her with a knife because she had forgotten to make his sandwiches.

But the £90,000-a-year executive walked free from court - with just a £2,000 fine.
He was spared even a community punishment because the judge ruled that “special circumstances” suggested he was unlikely to reoffend and his job meant he was too “busy” to find the time to complete any order.

4) A gravely ill woman dependent on an oxygen machine died after a power company confronted her over an unpaid bill for £62 and cut off her electricity supply.

Folole Muliaga, 44, who suffered from heart and lung disorders, begged the contractor to switch the electricity back on. But, with the alarm of her oxygen machine sounding, he told her that he was only doing his job.

Within ten minutes she began to suffer a severe headache and said that she could not see. She died within two hours.

5) A Hartlepool man is facing jail after he urinated on a disabled woman who lay dying in the street.

The 27-year-old shouted “this is YouTube material” as he degraded Christine Lakinski, 50, who had fallen ill, magistrates heard.

So, yes, we need to be very angry – enough so that, like Rosa Parks, in reverse, we will finally speak out – and mean it, when we say:

“Enough is enough: we will now move…!”

Recently, all the right-wing & God-police commentators in New Zealand had a field day when the following story broke:

Funding for tertiary courses in prostitution could be considered under changes aimed at boosting quality and relevance in the sector, education officials say.

But MPs on Parliament’s education and science select committee were told today that although courses in the world’s oldest profession might be considered if providers put them forward, they would still have to meet tight criteria to get funding.

Still, and ignoring the clamouring of the paid-to-be-easily-offended brigade, you have to admit it’s not a bad idea per se.

People have been killing other people since Adam and Eve decided to raise a little Cain, but we still train our kids to do it ever more efficiently in our military academies.

So, why not train hookers to become better at what they’ve been doing since time began?

What’s more, why stop at giving courses aimed at the oldest profession in the world? Why not teach people how to do better within one of the oldest institutions on earth as well: marriage?

God knows most people could do with a little bit of help in this department.

You know, normally these things start well enough. Love is in the air, and all of that – with violins, and roses – and a ‘My angel’ here and a ‘Sweet princess’ there…

… but then you get hitched and suddenly that same princess is behaving in a decidedly odd manner:

Norwegian Princess Martha Louise announced on Tuesday that she is clairvoyant and wants to help people by teaching them how to talk to angels.

The 35-year-old trained physical therapist and daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja said on a Web site for her alternative education centre that she has been communicating with angels since childhood.

They never warn you about these things when you’ve finally made it to the church or the register office.

So, some schooling would not go amiss. At the moment, when people want to take a closer look at how a particular relationship functions they have no formal education to fall back on. They just improvise – with, at times, the most embarrassing results:

An Israeli man who hired a detective to find out whether his daughter was cheating on her husband was told by the investigator his wife was in fact the one being unfaithful, an Israeli newspaper reported on Sunday.

The man had his daughter followed at the request of his son-in-law, who had been suspicious of his wife’s behaviour. The daughter was found innocent but the private investigator managed to snap photographs of the mother and another man caught in the act.

Talking about embarrassing situations though: it can get worse – much, much worse…

Think Cherie Blair singing ‘When I’m 64′ (or just think ‘Tony & Cherie‘…) or that other golden duo: Bill & Monica.

Think ‘Ouch!’:

A football referee halted a match after his furious wife stormed on to the pitch and hurled a pile of his shirts on the grass.

She then gave Philip Prentice a mouthful before marching off in the 21st minute.

Players helped pick up the shirts - which had all the buttons cut off.

The 55-year-old official apologised to the teams before play continued.

Now, from the left I hear laughter and all the men saying: ‘Right on!’, while on the right I hear the dark mutterings of the women, going: ‘Why just pick on us?’

Why indeed?

If you think wives have the upper hand in the marriage miasma theater, think again:

A teacher allowed a schoolgirl to carry out a sex act on him as he drove the school minibus while speaking on his mobile telephone, a court was told yesterday. Andrew Riley, 36, left the girl feeling impressed with his ability to talk to a colleague at the same time, the court was told.

The married father-of-two also took the 18-year-old to hotels, gave her champagne and offered her cocaine before having “amazing” sex with her, Preston Crown Court was told.
Mr Riley, of Lancaster, was head of the sixth form at Baines High School in Poulton-le-Fylde at the time of the alleged incidents.

He denies two charges of an abuse of trust and sexual activity with a child and a single charge of offering to supply cocaine between May and July 2005.

Mr Riley did not deny spending nights in a hotel with the girl but denied having sex with her or giving her cocaine.

To be honest, it might take a little bit more than a ‘tertiary course’ in marriage studies to deal with that kind of situation.

Sometimes, book knowledge can only take you so far. Then, it’s good to know that the genes of Adam & Eve’s elder boy, like some wild river, still run strong through all of us:

A US woman is facing firearms charges after doctors probing her husband’s “headache” found a bullet in his head.

Michael Moylan was admitted to hospital in Florida on Wednesday complaining of severe head pain. His wife April fled when a bullet was discovered.

She was subsequently arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.

Moylan, a convicted felon, later told police she had accidentally shot her husband as he slept when she drew a gun kept under her pillow.

Yes, it’s another sex column! But not the kind of vulgar trash, with nuns showing their tits, or…

… what did you say?

Oh…

Okay, it seems we do have some nuns showing their tits. Ah well…:

Plans to erect a sign with the image of a bare-breasted nun outside a seaside resort hotel, converted from a convent, have angered councillors.

Tenby Town Council is urging planners to refuse permission for the sign which depicts a nun lifting her bodice.

They claim it is “disrespectful and inappropriate” for use outside the former St Teresa’s Convent building.

However they are supporting plans to turn the convent into a luxury hotel, restaurant and bar.

But it’s not just gratuitous sex. We also have scientists…!

And for once we can’t possibly disagree with their findings:

The Y chromosome is probably the weirdest chromosome in the human genome.

Scientists already knew that it determines the male sex, but other than that it was considered a genetic junkyard. It contains very few actual genes.

The rest is repetitious.

Yes, you can say that again. Besides being weird. Mr Y. is indeed also admirably focused on just that one little thing: getting some.

You know, if you’d tell the average guy he could make three wishes, the results would probably be, more or less, as follows:

1) Doing it with a “busty young woman in a revealing nurse’s outfit”:

An Australian company is seeking real life testers for its condom products.

“Got what it takes to be an official condom tester?” asks an advertisement launched by Durex Australia next to a photo of a busty young woman in a revealing nurse’s outfit.

The “bed-testing” position is unpaid, but 200 selected testers would be up for free pack of Durex products, plus a bonus prize of A$1,000 ($854) for one lucky winner, White said.

Since most men do have a serious breast fixation, it won’t come as a surprise that most men would also go for:

2) Being paid to look at tits:

Whether small or large, pert or pendulous, they all have their admirers. But there is one type of breast that most approaches perfection, a cosmetic surgeon claims.

Mr Mallucci will present his findings at the first international conference on breast enlargement, to be held in London this week.

In his lecture, titled Concepts in Design for Breast Augmentation, he will express the hope that his insights are used by surgeons providing breast enlargements.

The operation is Britain’s most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, with 6,156 performed last year.

Patrick Mallucci spent many hours poring over photos of topless models in lads magazines and tabloid newspapers to formulate his theory.

Most men also dream of the following scenario, of course: that the phone rings and someone with a peculiar kind of inverted penis envy at the other end asks if it would be possible for the person picking up the phone to come over and

3) help the caller out by having sex with the man’s beautiful fiancée…:

A man in Germany who was embarrassed about his penis size is facing charges, after asking his girlfriend to have sex in the dark – and getting his brother to stand in.

Manfred Schuh, 26, feared he would lose his 24-year-old girlfriend if he did not ‘perform well’, so he insisted on keeping the lights off during sex and going to the toilet beforehand.

His brother Walter, 28, would then enter the room and have sex with the woman. She found out after two months – when she turned the light on.

Still, all of the above could be boiled down to just one fervent male wish: that all the individual females of the species would want to sleep with him as desperately as he would like to have sex with them.

And you know what? It’s just about possible that that is going to happen quite soon…

Yes, it’s those freaky scientists again:

Female mice apparently become as randy as males after their senses of smell are tampered with, ending up aggressively trying to mount any mouse that moves, research now reveals.

The mice began chasing, mounting and thrusting pelvises against other mice, both male and female, as well as giving out ultrasonic mating calls and sniffing derrieres.

“These results are flabbergasting,” Dulac said. “Nobody had imagined that a simple mutation like this could induce females to behave so thoroughly like males.”

These findings open the question as to whether circuits for male behavior exist in a dormant state in females, and vice versa, in other species — including in humans.

Anyway, that’s what men want. So, now for the big one…:

What do women want?

And pickle my pecker and call it Pinocchio but once again those scientists claim they’ve found the answer:

Being exposed to the smell of a sweaty male armpit can make a woman feel calmer, according to a new study by a U.S. research team.

In the study, reported in the journal Biology of Reproduction, scientists placed pads under the armpits of male donors to collect sweat. They then put concentrated compounds extracted from the sweat under the noses of female volunteers.

After being exposed to the smells for six hours the women reported feeling less tense and more relaxed.

Mind you, chloroform would do the job much quicker, but hey, if that’s what women want, who are we to argue?

God knows what we would do if we hadn’t all those clever scientists around, to help us sort things out:

In a scientific study concerning the selection of mates, participants were asked before the session to fill out a questionnaire about what they were looking for in a mate, listing such categories as wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, healthiness and attractiveness.

After the session, the researchers compared what the participants said they were looking for with the people they actually chose to ask for another date.

Men’s choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women’s physical attractiveness.

The men also appeared to be much less choosy. Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold.

Well, call me a bugle and blow me!

So, now we know who will most definitely win next year’s Nobel prize in the ‘Discoveries of Universal Hindsight’ category – yes, indeed, the famous ‘Duh!’ award.

Men like good-looking women… Who’d have thought?

Well, the feminist movement did, for one – and on the whole they don’t approve.

And speaking of feminism: here’s what Zoe Williams wrote about the subject, some time ago, in the Guardian:

The sine qua non of feminism is battling for collective rights, anything else is just capitalism with tits.

Now, before you go all cave man & cave cat on me with your ‘I don’t like feminists!’ whining, there’s an awful lot of truth in what Zoe wrote - as a certain South Australian farmer learned, to his considerable cost…:

A South Australian farmer held hostage in Africa for 12 days in an internet bride scam has returned home, saying he’s lucky to be alive.

Des Gregor, a 56-year-old from Hoyleton in SA’s midnorth, arrived at Adelaide Airport tonight after being freed from his African captors who were ultimately duped by police.

Mr Gregor travelled to the landlocked west African nation of Mali last month to meet his supposed bride and collect a dowry of $100,000 in gold.

But on his July 27 arrival, he was kidnapped by an organised scam gang, beaten, stripped, had his cash and credit cards taken, and was held hostage at an apartment in Bamako, the capital of the third world country.

The wheat and sheep farmer was told he would have his limbs hacked off with a machete unless he arranged a $100,000 ransom.

Capitalism with tits indeed…

Of course, men get into trouble with, over, through & because of women all the bloody time – and not just in that first ’selection of mates’ phase.

Some of the worst troubles can start much, much later:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A woman set fire to her ex-husband’s penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday.

Asked if the man would make a full recovery, a police spokeswoman said it was “difficult to predict.”

The attack climaxed three years of acrimonious enforced co-habitation. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat, something common in Russia where property costs are very high.

So, it might, after all, be wise not to select your mate purely on the basis of good looks. In other words, if you’re dating online and the woman looks like [pick a film star of your choice] but the caption reads, ‘Slightly claustrophobic smoker with a fiery temperament’ just give her a miss.

It might save you a lot of extremely painful explanations to the fire brigade at a later stage.

By the way, it’s not only love that breaks your heart – or causes genital grief.

So, remember, please, whatever you do, don’t go and piss off your doctor…:

Doctors’ unions in Romania have criticised a decision to make a surgeon pay £100,000 in damages after he lost his temper and hacked off a patient’s penis during surgery.

Surgeon Naum Ciomu, who had been suffering from stress at the time, had been operating on patient Nelu Radonescu, 36, to correct a testicular malformation when he suddenly lost his temper.

Grabbing a scalpel, he sliced off the penis in front of shocked nursing staff, and then placed it on the operating table where he chopped it into small pieces before storming out of the operating theatre at Bucharest hospital.

You want to see something truly disgusting? Just wait till the next Vogue hits the stands. We’ve had fashion shoots that glorified AIDS and, not all that indirectly, anorexia.

Now, the Italian branche of Vogue has decided that the war in Iraq is too good a photo opportunity to miss - to sell a few magazines, that is.

Here’s what Emine Saner had to say about this new campaign in the Guardian:

War - it’s so glamorous and sexy, isn’t it? No? Italian Vogue seems to think so. In what must be the most nauseatingly tasteless fashion pictures ever, this month’s issue features a shoot (no pun intended) by the American photographer Steven Meisel, inspired by the Iraq war. Shock and awe most certainly - it takes some talent to simultaneously glorify jaded soldiers, rape and violence while selling this season’s Roberto Cavalli and Dior.

A model in a black dress that exposes both her breasts is leered over by a group of soldiers on their beds; a soldier wrestles a model in the dirt; a model in a black laced-up dress straddles a soldier while his friend films it. The models look like prostitutes brought to an army camp as entertainment, which kind of undermines Meisel’s title Make Love Not War. Unless, by “making love”, he meant rape:

a sleeping soldier, with a smile of post-coital bliss playing across his face, lies on his camp bed while the woman (in Versace, by the way) looks traumatised and bedraggled.

Enough said. You can see all the photos here. It starts almost innocently, by the way - but don’t ‘worry’: it soons becomes truly vile.

Thank you, Vogue.

One really shouldn’t wish this on anyone - but still: I almost wish all of the people involved in this campaign would end up on the least glamorous side of a battlefield, where even vultures would gag at the sight they made.

He gave up drinking - and we applauded that.

He gave up coke - and we cheered.

But it wasn’t quite enough:

- There was the Saddam thing

- The UN thing

- The Katrina thing

- The Pope thing

- The umbrella thing…

And it all started, maybe, with that pretzel thing.

So, Mr. president, sir, please. Take that final step, for our sakes, for your sake - and promise,

you will never smoke weed with Willie again…:

Human beings can be unspeakably vile, in their unthinking pursuit of egotistical goals & gratification.

Be they ‘bleeding heart liberal’:

I keep coming back to the middle-class drugs phenomena, however, because it’s something that genuinely bemuses me. Almost any middle-class drug consumption is, theoretically, oxymoronic. These are, after all, the bleeding heart liberals who recycle their tins, sign petitions against sweat-shops, buy organic wine and fair-trade coffee, and fulminate against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You never once, however, hear them excitedly boast about having got in a load of fair-trace, organic cocaine from a socialist lesbian commune in Colombia. And that’s because there aren’t any.

The illegal trade of Class A drugs rivals the black market for weapons, and the slave trade, as the most unethical on Earth. People working in the drugs industry get threatened, tortured, enslaved and killed, and the progression of the drug from one side of the world to another is marked out with a trail of misery, destruction, ecological degradation and death.

It’s about as friendly and right-on as the sex trade – and yet people who would look down on a shag with a crying 16-year-old Estonian prostitute will happily call their dealer in front of everyone on a Friday night. I’m amazed the middle-classes still turn a blind eye to the reality of the drugs in their pocket.

Or ‘greed head’ conservative:

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama’s football stadium.

And things seem to get progressively worse. Remember who said this?

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

That was the 34th president of the USA, actually: David ‘Ike’ Eisenhower. Can you imagine any politician today who would think (or dare) to say anything like that – let alone our current, and 43th president?

The only quotation that seems to go well with the younger Bush is what some journalist recently wrote about Protestants in general:

Catholics and Jews recycle their guilt as humour. Protestants became Protestants so they didn’t have to do guilt; they do blame instead. They have smiling anger and cruise missiles instead of a sense of humour.

Enough about politicians though. It’s always easy to point up and cry foul. While we should look at ourselves.

Collectively, we’ve become decadent, and so desperate for the next big wave of cheap emotion that we lose sight of all common sense and common decency:

This is also the week when Madeleine McCann was to have started her first school. In her enforced absence, its head teacher has decreed the tot’s very own shrine: an empty desk, peg and locker, together with a burning candle, thus ensuring that dozens of other four-year-olds who never knew Madeleine nevertheless will be reminded daily that there really are bogeymen who steal innocents from their beds, their mummies and their daddies.

This degree of immersion of children in our baser obsessions is recent — almost certainly inspired by the tons of Cellophane-wrapped, rotting foliage outside Kensington Palace a decade ago, when mass mourning first became a family day out.

Whatever, you wonder, is the adult justification? What are they thinking, as they urge a hurry-up with that picnic, there’s another dead kiddie to gawp over? They cannot even pretend it to be a lesson in self-protection; would “being careful” have helped Sarah? Or Rhys? Or Madeleine?

No. They may dress it up with fancy words — “tribute” is a favourite — but the cruder truth is that ersatz grief is now the new pornography; like the worst of hard-core, it is stimulus by proxy, voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private, for no better reason than frisson and the quickening of an otherwise jaded pulse. The only difference is that with old pornography at least we do our best to keep it away from children.

Individually, we’ve seen and will be seeing more and more of these types of stories:

A man was arrested Monday after assaulting a neighbor who refused to participate in a gymnastic exercise event organized by the neighborhood association, police said.

Katsuya Mori, 34, a company employee of Kanda, stands accused of inflicting bodily injury and damaging property.

The incident occurred on Aug. 1 this year. Mori visited a 35-year-old self-employed man’s home in Kanda when he was drunk, and hit him, investigators said. Mori then hurled a concrete chunk at the victim’s 5-year-old daughter and threatened to kill her.

At the time, Mori criticized the neighbor for refusing to participate in a radio gymnastic exercise session for summer vacation organized by the neighborhood association. Mori serves as vice president of the organization.

We point at terrorists and claim they are a threat to our civilisation, our ‘way of life’. They are not. They are a nuisance at most. What really threatens us – is us.

We do more harm to our own souls, our own communities and the world at large than any mad Bin Laden & assorted psychopaths can ever hope to achieve.

Let’s end today’s sermon with a parable, coming to us through yet another news clip:

A lifeguard rescued a 2ft (0.61m) sand shark that was being hit by frightened swimmers on Coney Island beach. Marisu Mironescu, 39, said that he saw about 75 to 100 people circling the shark.

“They were holding on to it and some people were hitting him, smacking his face,” he said.

He has been a lifeguard for 22 years but had never before dealt with a shark.

He grabbed the largely harmless fish and took it by backstroke out to sea.

You know, sometimes you read these stories about people winning lotteries, or marrying a Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie look-alike, or winning front seat tickets to the Super Nipple Bowl…

… and all you can do is put down the paper, and sigh, and think: you lucky bastard!

The following stories are a bit like that:

When a police car swerved off the road and ran over Daniel Horne’s foot, he thought he was owed an apology.

But instead he was landed with an £80 fine – for denting the car.

What’s lucky about that, you say? Well, it could have been the Californian police:

A Chino, Calif., police officer shot an Air Force MP on Sunday night after a short police chase in which the airman was a passenger in the car, while he was appearing to cooperate with instructions the police officer gave.

According to videotape evidence, Carrion, the passenger, was on the ground, when the officer ordered him to get up. Carrion said he was unarmed and in the military and would get up, and when he did, the officer, whose name was not released, shot him.

See?

And wouldn’t it also be nice if everybody would have the best of British luck – that is, to live in a country where both the authorities and shop managers are this considerate about the law and the general well-being of the public:

Supermarket staff refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man - because he would not confirm he was over 21.

Check-out staff at Morrisons in West Kirby, Wirral, demanded Tony Ralls prove he was old enough to buy his two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon.

A Morrisons spokesman said:

“We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously and all our stores operate the Task 21 scheme, which addresses the difficulties our staff face in being able to determine if a customer is legally old enough to buy alcohol.”

Indeed, and more power to you, good sir. Would you perhaps care to consider a job in the White House? They’re running rather low on gormless ‘follow the leader’ type idiots these days:

Michael J. Gerson, one of President Bush’s most trusted advisers and the author of nearly all of his most famous public words over the past seven years, plans to step down in the next couple of weeks in a decision that colleagues believe will leave a hole in the White House at a critical period.

“It seemed like a good time,” Gerson said. “Things are back on track a little.”

Quite - And O.J. Simpson will play Father Christmas in Walt Disney’s next family movie, ‘Stick it up the Christmas tree.’

Another person who was very lucky was Jamie Thomas ‘meatworker’ Lacey, of Kilcoy, who got himself a kind-hearted, if senile judge, who thought Kilcoy was just the kind of parent a kid could not afford to miss having around:

A Darling Downs burglar who broke into a woman’s house to allegedly use her vacuum cleaner and a modified detergent bottle as masturbation aids has narrowly avoided jail.

Crown prosecutors were unable to conclusively prove Jamie Thomas Lacey, of Kilcoy, had actually used the implements for sexual gratification, however a Brisbane judge today said it was unlikely the 27-year-old father of one had broken in for a spot of spring cleaning.

Police initially questioned Lacey, who denied any involvement. However a search of his home uncovered a black carry bag stuffed with condoms, creams and a wooden stick “tapered at one end” which Lacey admitted was his “masturbation bag”.

The judge said Lacey’s crime deserved a jail sentence because of the distress he had caused to his neighbour. However he said actual time behind bars would be “counterproductive” for the young meatworker, who was doing well in his job with the Kilcoy Pastoral Company and had a seven month-old baby to support.

Yup. Makes perfect sense. What do you do with someone who burgles houses and puts his dick in a vacuum cleaner? Well, you return him to his ‘pastoral’ work and let him near very young children. It’s what the Roman Catholic church does all the time, of course.

Strangely enough, the luckiest man alive this week would probably kill anyone who’d suggest he was that fortunate…:

An alligator bit a 59-year-old man’s arm off Sunday at a Lake Moultrie recreation area, officials said.

He stumbled into a party of picnickers with his arm missing and blood gushing from his wound. Five nurses were among those at the gathering and put ice on his wound and kept him awake until paramedics could arrive.

One of the picknickers followed the man’s trail of blood to the shore, where he saw the gator with victim’s arm in its jaw.

Department of Natural Resources officers showed up later and shot the animal, which was nearly 12-feet long and weighed about 550 pounds. The officers cut the gator open and removed the man’s arm.

“The arm, surprisingly, was not chewed up like you would think it would be,” Salisbury said.

You might not want to trade places with the guy but I know at least one country, which got chewed up a lot worse recently by another Leviathan – and which citizens could only wish for such a fortunate aftermath.