Who you gonna call? Goat busters!
It could have been made for Hollywood or maybe for a Bollywood movie, with lots of song and dance – and no nudity or kissing. A story of an airplane, one God and two goats.
A little bit like ‘Ghostbusters’, maybe, but without the ghosts (or perhaps two disgruntled ghosts of goats, yes, very good…) and without New York’s skyline, but with the Nepalese mountains being almost as photogenic and majestic (and yes, with those two goats. Now, shut up about those bloody goats already, will you?)
Anyway, it is a lovely story:
NEPAL’S troubled national carrier has taken a spiritual approach to recent maintenance troubles with one of its Boeing 757s by sacrificing two goats in front of the plane to appease a Hindu god.
The carrier was forced to suspend international flights for around 10 days in August as both the aircraft it uses for foreign flights were grounded due to technical problems.
“Nepal Airline Corporation officials worshipped the aircraft by sacrificing two goats to avoid technical glitches while flying,” an airline spokesman, Raju Bahadur K.C., said yesterday.
“The goats were offered to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu god of sky protection, whose symbol is printed on all of our aircraft,” he explained.
It does make you wonder why George Bush won’t try this in Iraq. God knows he’s tried almost any other irrational approach.
Now his staunch (if paunchy) ally, Gordon Brown, is turning his back on this doomed endeavour and even his own Government Accountability Office seems to have given up on the war:
A bleak portrait of the political and security situation in Iraq released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office sparked sharp protests from the top U.S. military command in Baghdad, whose officials described it as flawed and “factually incorrect.”
The controversy followed last-minute changes made in the final draft of the report after the Defense Department maintained that its conclusions were too harsh and insisted that some of the information it contained — such as the extent of a fall in the number of Iraqi army units capable of operating without U.S. assistance — should not appear in the final, unclassified version.
The GAO rejected several changes proposed by the Pentagon and concluded that Iraq had failed to meet all but two of nine security goals Congress had set as part of a list of 18 benchmarks of progress.
Surely it’s time for old Double Duh to order the Pentagon to fly out a couple of sacrificial elephants to Baghdad and offer them to one God or the other.
Since Nepalese Gods seem to come through more quickly than the president’s own Son of Man, we’d suggest Bishamonten, the Nepalese God of war.
He is also a dispenser of wealth, which will please any Republican with greedy friends - and even more importantly, given the job at hand, Bishamonten is a dab hand at dispensing
good fortune, and he is also considered a God of healing, with the power to save emperors from life-threatening illness and to expel the demons of plague.
With all those job qualifications, surely Bishamonten should be able to cure this president’s gross stupidity as well?
We can only pray…
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