Glob-a-log

So, you get up slowly from your bed, gravitate with glacier speed to the shower house, feed the cat, children & spouse, or fish and then sit down with a cup of tea or coffee and the morning paper.

Most of what you read will sustain that bless̩d early morning state of brain limbo for a little while longer Рas the world, steadily and in an almost comfortably familiar manner, keeps going on going to Hell in a handcart.

Sometimes though, you will read some piece that’s truly hair-raising:

A man was beaten by his fiance and in-laws and relieved of his belongings in India after they found out he was bald and wearing a wig, it was alleged yesterday.

Prabir Das, of Dispur in Assam, told police that his fiancé yanked off his hairpiece after dinner last week and began beating and abusing him for hiding his pate.

Her parents then joined in, ripping his expensive wig apart and relieving the 33-year-old of his wallet, mobile phone, motorbike and driving licence as “penalty” for his deception, he alleged.

The wedding, police said, appears to be off.

Still, most of the news we half read and half watch on TV is like a demonic form of Transcendental Meditation. The war on Iraq, flooding in Bangladesh, hunger & AIDS & corruption & mad dictators in Africa… Been there, done that, washed down the T-shirt with some cheap corn whiskey.

Most news just doesn’t feel all that much like news. More like yet another sighting of UFOs and Bigfoot or the news that Angelina Jolie (or Michael Jackson) is considering to adopt yet another child.

In other words, ‘Yeah, yeah’ news:

The Kindle, once again for those of you who don’t salivate over wireless devices, is an electronic reader, like an iPod, but for books. Amazon describes it as “a revolutionary wireless reading device”, heroically ignoring the fact that most pre-revolution reading devices didn’t have wires either.

We called them books, and they were awfully popular. We hardly ever had to plug them in either.

So, we’ve dealt with the hair-raising news and the ‘yeah, yeah’ news, which leaves us with the third variety: the anti-news.

The anti-news is a bit like the ‘yeah, yeah’ news, in the sense that it doesn’t really bring us anything new – but it does so in such a ludicrous manner that it almost become hair-raising again.

Anti-news is the dark matter that lurks in the more seedy alleys of the journalistic universe, distorting everything it comes into contact with. It’s business as usual but with a vengeance. It’s also always quite grotesque, like falling up the Eiffel tower.

In fact, it’s exactly like opening the newspaper and reading something that so deeply penetrates the world of the bleeding obvious, that it comes out of the other side of its own arse as a true work of art:

ST. MARTINVILLE, La. — Willie Nelson and his tour manager were spared jail time Tuesday after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of marijuana possession.

Nelson and tour manager David Anderson, along with Nelson’s sister, Bobbie Nelson, and two drivers, were issued citations on Sept. 18 after state troopers said they found marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms on the country legend’s tour bus during a commercial-vehicle inspection on Interstate 10.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 19:14 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.