Glob-a-log

Ever heard of anything useful coming out of a school book depository?

As in Dealey Plaza? As in Dallas? As in Texas?

Did anything useful ever come out of Texas – apart from Kinky Friedman? He of the very funny P.I. books and the wonderful band ‘The Texas Jew Boys’; the guy who wrote the immortal lines:

“No, they ain’t makin Jews like Jesus anymore,
We dont turn the other cheek the way they done before.
You hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor
Lord, they ain’t makin Jews like Jesus anymore.”

Anyway, Texas is weird:

WHITE OAK, TEXAS—A Longview woman who sells sex toys has been charged with felony obscenity after White Oak police found some of her wares in her car during a traffic stop

The arrest report describes the 17 items as “obscene materials and obscene devices,” but Police Chief Charlie Smith said the items were mostly lotions and objects defined in a dictionary as having the shape and often the appearance of the male genitalia, used in sexual stimulation.

According to state law, it’s illegal to “wholesale promote” obscene materials or devices. Texas statute says an obscene device is a simulated sexual organ or an item designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs. The law allows investigators to assume that anyone with six or more of the items is intending to promote them.

More from the Texan front:

SAN ANTONIO — A group of atheists at the University of Texas at San Antonio is putting a novel twist on the toys-for-guns programs run by many urban police departments. But instead of toys, they are handing out porn in exchange for bibles.

“We consider the bible to be a very negative force in the history of the world,” student Ryan Walker said. Walker is part of a student group that calls itself the Atheist Agenda.

The group is not officially sanctioned by the university and has raised the ire of several religious organizations on campus.

“In my opinion, there are no atheists. There are fools,” Pastor Rick Hawkins of UTSA’s Family Praise Center said. “So, that would be foolish propaganda. I don’t know one believer that would take his Bible and turn it in for pornography.”

Hawkins obviously didn’t stop by the Atheist Agenda table, where several students had dropped off copies of the good book and walked away with skin mags.

To be fair though, it’s not just Texans who can be weird about sex. Though they don’t go around shooting their presidents much, Italy does share some pretty strange sexual hang-ups with the Lone Star State.

Breast enlargements are now the most common graduation gift for girls who pass their secondary school exams in Italy.

Boob jobs have knocked cars and summer holidays back into second and third places respectively.

By the way, it’s not just Christians (or Muslims) who take a dim view of most things sexual. Even the Pagans are at it, at times. When it comes to the surgeon’s knife and the subject of sex change, Pagans can also become pretty ‘Thou shall not’ about things pretty damn fast:

Pagans are angry that the Long Man of Wilmington has been given breasts and pigtails.

On Monday the ancient Sussex landmark was transformed when 80 women laid down on the hill and transformed it into the Long Woman of Wilmington.

And no, it’s not solely the Western world that is obsessed with sex. In Africa things are hardly more level-headed :

Some 900 Kampala women call the Uganda Police emergency lines every night begging the officers for sex. According to a police press officer:

“We warn desperate women who call our officers at night using police patrol lines asking them to make love. They call the toll free line everyday saying they are feeling so cold in bed and need some assistance from police.”

Back to the USA though, for a bit, to the City of Keizer, in Oregon, where City Hall is taking heat for installing a group of cement posts designed to protect pedestrians from cars:

A number of residents have complained to the city that the posts resemble male genitalia.

City manager Eppley said that the posts were ordered from a catalogue and looked much different on paper.

The city is looking into retrofitting the posts with metal collars and chains that run between them, which they hope will change the look. If not, they said the posts will have to go.

Yes, that really does make perfect sense… If you want to draw the SM tourist traffic, that is.

Talking of traffic, we must leave you with a general health & embarrassment warning. You know how mothers used to warn their children to always wear clear underwear, in case they got into an accident and had to be taken to the hospital.

Well, you might want to think about something besides clean underwear as well…:

After being hit from behind by a motorcycle Sunday evening, a 32-year-old woman was left lying near a crosswalk in Fort Collins, Colorado. Two women witnessed the accident and called police. She had been knocked out from the hit and had a broken and bleeding left arm, said one of the women on the seen.

“This was a serious accident”, said one witnesses, “but when they pulled that vibrator hooked to her iPod out of her shorts you could see everyone’s faces turn red. She was lucky she was still knocked out for the ride to the hospital. I don’t think I could have survived the embarrassment”.

P.S: Photograph created by Larry D. Moore and is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 licence

As they say, know your Shakespeare: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Or, as Charles Dickens also knew, The law is an ass - and here’s just a short collection of stories to prove it:

Two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran - what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry.

And no, not it’s not a case of ‘only in America’, alas. You thought Australia was all cool and surfing and barbies (and only the occasional shark & poisonous spider)? Well, think again:

Australian courts have begun ordering parents to refrain from making offensive remarks, claiming that constant carping between couples can damage young minds.

England, in the meantime, is completely lost – and conquered by the insanity brigade. Hitler and his bombs couldn’t do it, but Great Britain has, without as much as a whimper, completely fallen to the health and safety clowns’ army – as always aided and abetted by the political correctness imbeciles:

That’s why dustmen can’t even wear a bandana anymore:

A black dustman has been banned from wearing a St George’s Cross bandana because council officials say it could be regarded as racist.

and children can’t go swimming with plastic or rubber armbands & rings:

Bournemouth’s leisure centres have been banned from lending armbands and rubber rings to swimmers because it’s against professional guidelines.

Staying for just a little bit longer in England, here’s another gem from the insanity text book:

Old soldiers in Horwich will have to be content with watching the national Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph on TV after their own parade had to be scrapped because of an £18,000 ‘health and safety’ bill

These costs could bring the final bill to £18,000 - making the November 11 parade too expensive to hold.

Usually it would cost only a couple of thousand pounds.

Greater Manchester Police said the extra security is necessary because another force in the West Midlands was successfully sued when Brownies participating in a parade were injured by a car which drove into them while they were marching.

However, in terms of absolute insanity, the US of A is hard to beat:

MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on its website, more than four times the number cited by the company two months ago.

North Carolina is pushing for a state law that would require children to receive parental permission before creating social networking profiles, and require the websites to verify the parents’ identity and age.

A Virginia man pleaded guilty this week to kidnapping and soliciting a 14-year old girl he met on MySpace.

Advocates for internet companies and privacy issues testified against the proposed restrictions, saying the broad parental verification standards would be found unconstitutional because they prohibit free speech or impede interstate commerce.

Yes, God forbid a paedophile’s progress would be hampered by silly interstate commerce laws.

And free speech is also very important, of course. You wouldn’t want to stop children from having the right or the occasion to tell their abusers ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

Still, the ‘total waste of space’ price must go to the lawyer who defended a woman who admitted to have waited until her partner fell asleep, before she,

glued his penis to his stomach, glued his testicle to his leg and glued the cheeks of his buttocks together.

The lawyer claimed,

this was part of routine sexual activity between the couple — acts that he agreed to — incidents that should have stayed in the bedroom.

Yes, and some people - Hitler, Stalin, the inventors of Big Brother and most lawyers - should have stayed in the womb, no doubt.

You know that you’re really not going to like the next few moments when someone comes up to you and says ‘I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news.

So, you’re a biologists who’s interested in a certain species that has become so rare that people think it might already be extinct.

Then someone says he has recently seen one of these animals - and captured it, and ate it…

Still, these kinds of set backs do occur and a good biologist needs to be stoical. As a boy he might have been keen on dinosaur sets or pestered his parents for tickets to the unicorn museum but a grown-up biologist has to have put these childish things behind him.

Yes, it is a sad day when our young Indiana Jones of zoology discovers that it is rather unlikely that he’ll run into any live dinosaurs (or unicorns, for that matter) but that’s life. In the field of biology it’s not the survival of the most fanciful, alas.

Indeed, it’s often quite hard to get even close to excited about your house and garden variety of endangered species.

Without trying to discourage any future biologists, it must be said that your typical sighting of some animal belonging to a rare species goes something like this:

Some guy in a train happens to find a giant African [...] under a seat.

So, what did he find there? Was it
a) a lion
b) a crocodile
c) a python
d) a diamond or gold mine

Obviously, the answer is: none of the above.

Here’s what really happened:

A train driver tidying up his carriages was shocked to find a giant African snail under a seat.

Hardly the stuff of great Hollywood movies or something to make a small boy sit up and say: ‘When I grow up, that’s what I’m gonna do: catch giant snails, for fun and gain!’

Another sad truth about animals is, that, when they’re not extinct (or giant snails) they can get right up your nose.

And if you thought Flipper and lassie were annoying, have another think coming:

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

The monkeys also seem to suffer from something maybe best described as ‘Rude Builders’ Syndrome’:

Nachu’s women have tried wearing their husbands’ clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

“The monkeys can tell the difference and they don’t run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops.”

In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim. “The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us,” said Mrs Njeri.

You know, I’d really love to tell that Mrs Njeri that if she truly doesn’t consider the behaviour of those monkeys to be sexual harassment already, she might also consider Michael Jackson to be an ideal baby sit and Paris Hilton the perfect choice to star in ‘Mother Theresa, the early years.’

Anyway, there are easier ways to get rid of those pesky monkeys. The Kenyan villagers should do what our grandfathers did to chase snotty kids from their well-dressed and perfectly manicured lawns.

Ah, those were the days…

Shakespeare coined the little phrase, in his Romeo and Juliet:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Well, maybe not. Sometimes a name should really be in accordance with the original idea behind it. Too often though, the rose smells anything but sweet:

A “neighbour from hell” was jailed yesterday for sliding a hosepipe through a ceiling, turning the tap on and flooding the home next door.

Michael Couture, 49, drilled a hole in his neighbours’ ceiling – then jammed his garden hose into it and turned on the tap.

Mature student Couture was jailed for 18 months after admitting criminal damage.

At other times a given name is so sweet, and such a perfect fit that even the thought of replacing it with something else would be a terrible sin:

Andy Dick, a former co-star on the 1990s sitcom “NewsRadio,” appeared at a club, called the Funny Bone last weekend.

The club’s managing partner, said the 41-year-old actor-comedian made inappropriate comments while on stage, groped patrons, took women into the men’s room and urinated on the floor and on at least one person.

A Hell of a lot of times though, people get confused by names, mostly because their tiny, pre-recorded minds are stuck in some weird political or religious groove:

A children’s exercise class has been banned from two church halls because it is teaching yoga. The group has been turned away by vicars who described yoga as a sham and un-Christian.

The Rev Simon Farrar defended the decision yesterday. He said: “We are a Christian organisation and when we let rooms to people we want them to understand that they must be fully in line with our Christian ethos. Clearly, yoga impinges on the spiritual life of people in a way which we as Christians don’t believe is the same as our ethos.”

“If it was just a group of children singing nursery rhymes, there wouldn’t be a problem but she’s called it yoga and therefore there is a dividing line we’re not prepared to cross.”

We can sympathize with the good reverend though. There is something ever so nice and innocent about little children singing nursery rhymes, especially in church.

Alas, they really don’t make those old nursery rhymes like they used too…

But, hark…! The little angels sing:

Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers let him go!
Eenee, Meenee. Mainee, Mo!
You-are-It!

Yes, much better than yoga, for sure.