Glob-a-log

There’s that old health and safety warning, once most closely associated with children’s TV, ‘Don’t try this at home, kids!’

As instructions go it’s both eminently sensible and utterly self-defeating.

So, you’ve just shown something truly cool (preferably with lots of more or less controlled explosions) and then you warn all the excited kiddies not to try and duplicate said experiment. The collective, if unspoken, ‘Yeah, right!‘ must have been inner ear-shattering.

Anyway, sometimes it would still be wise to follow the advise not to try something at home - like certain food products, sold by certain, let’s say, not very discerning manufacturers…:

We’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that canned chili and dog food were one and the same. Adding fuel to that fire, Connors Bros and Castleberry’s expanded a recall of their pet and human foods after the canned meat products were found to contain botulism.

Still, if you were unfortunate or foolhardy enough to eat one of Connors Bros and Castleberry’s no doubt delicious products and you would be overcome by a certain urge: just contain it – especially when you’re dependent on public transport:

A woman was struck by a train as she leant over the track to be sick.

The driver of the non-stop 6.12pm service from Watford to Gatwick saw the woman leaning over the platform edge as he came through the station.

By the way, remember the ‘war on drugs‘? Yes, that was the one before the ‘war on terror’, the latter of which resulting in the biggest opium harvests in Afghanistan since the communists were kicked out of that benighted country.

Be that as it may, the war on drugs came with the same kind of lame brain sloganeering as those old kiddie TV makers had done– culminating in the truly mind-buggeringly inane, ‘Just say no’ campaign.

Yes, that sure did show them, didn’t it?

Anyway, as another old saying goes, ‘You can turn a horse into cat food but you can’t make it miaow.’ In other words, you can try to get people to buy your silly slogans but they will prefer to buy drugs anyway.

Knowing this, it would be a good idea for these druggies to do mind about certain health – and especially safety - issues. Which brings us back to that original slogan. Slightly adapted, that old saw can still be quite useful.

So, if you’re at the home of your local marijuana dealer, just don’t try to do this:

Two students at Southern Illinois University in this St. Louis suburb kidnapped, paddled and burned a young man with freshly baked cookies after a drug deal went bad, prosecutors said.

The suspects beat the man with a wooden paddle, burned his neck and shoulders with cookies immediately after taking them from the oven, shaved off some of his hair and poured urine over him from a soda bottle, Wells said.

Let’s get the most depressing news out of the way first.

All of us would like to think we are more than mere bit players in life. Most all of us would like to be fairytale princes and princesses (or the relevant or socio-politically correct equivalent thereof.)

That doesn’t mean all of us would have wanted to be born with a silver spoon in our baby gobs but at least we’d like to think that Heaven and its constellations smiled on our births – and we could have done without the following bit of statistics:

One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.

I’m not trying to badmouth Ikea here, of course – well, okay, I am… That whole bloody brand implies the kind of life style that comes with garden gnomes and long, flannel underwear instead of drinking champagne from the belly fluff free belly buttons of beautiful Russian spies.

Talking about depressing life styles,

A Pentagon decision to allow the sale of Playboy and Penthouse magazines on military bases has appalled US religious groups, which insist it is illegal.

After dozens of anti-pornography groups complained to Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, over the sale of magazines and videos, a Pentagon board reviewed the contents of Penthouse and Playboy and decided that they were not sexually explicit.

The board decided that because the majority of each title’s contents dealt with advertising and non-pornographic material, then “based on the totality of each magazine’s content, they were not sexually explicit”.

It ain’t porn, ’cause there’s ads. So, that’s solved then. From now on, the networks can do ‘Debby does Dallas’ during prime time on a Saturday night, as long as they play their usual amount of ads in between. Nothing explicit here, y’all hear? Gang bang? I didn’t see no fucking gang bang!

Just think ‘totality of content’ and all is cool.

By the way, if you think the Pentagon board may have erred on the side of insensitivity here, think again. Compared to the old editors of the Boy’s Own Paper they’re paragons of Oprah-approved, political correctness and depressingly liberal virtue:

One regular feature of the Boy’s Own Paper, which emerged without fanfare on page 160 of the first volume, was headed simply Answers to Correspondents, and over the first 20 years of its publication, it provided a panorama of all the things that puzzled boys (and occasionally girls) about life in the late Victorian world.

Sometimes answers were of such breathtaking callousness that it is difficult to see how the Religious Tract Society, dedicated as it was to Christian ideals, could be comfortable at their inclusion.

The editor was reprimanded for allowing one of Dr Gordon Stables’s answers to exceed the boundaries of good taste. To a boy who wrote, probably with great difficulty and some courage, of his “bad habits”, Stables replied:

“Coffins are cheap and boys like you are not of much use in the world.”

Yes, those were the good old days, when you could publicly wish the pox on anyone you didn’t like and get away with it, mostly – and if you didn’t, well, a duel in the morning is vastly to be preferred over the annoying alarums and protestations of those who pray in the P.C. pews.

Still, we can’t live in the past, however nicely unhygienic it was, in body and soul. We’re stuck in the non too perfect present tense, with all its confusing and often enraging demands of etiquette.

As Ariel Leve muses in one of her columns:

I’m all for free speech but if there are rules against yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, there should be rules against whispering “I love you” in bed.

Of course, there are varying degrees of criminality. It’s one thing to say, “Let’s spend the weekend together.” It’s another thing to say, “Let’s spend the rest of our lives together.” If it were a punishable offence, one is jaywalking; the other, armed robbery and attempted murder.

And you have to know your audience. For me, a suggestion of spending the weekend together is worse. I’d prefer to hear a man say he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me because I’d know he didn’t mean it. Whereas a weekend? I’d be planning what to pack before he finished the sentence.

Then again I’ve always believed there’s an unspoken understanding that once you’re naked, nothing that’s said can be taken too seriously. Until he notices something unusual. When a man says, “I think you should get that spot checked” that’s different. Not only does it show he’s observant, but even if it turns out he doesn’t care, I end up with an early diagnosis. Where’s the down side?

Yes, it’s not always easy to know what to say and when to say it, be it in bed, over breakfast or simply over the phone. Though in that latter case, just one bit of advice, Don’t try this at home…:

35-year-old Brian Poulin of Hebron was arrested Sunday after police said he called 911 several times and asked them to bring him beer.

Hebron was charged with disorderly conduct.

Police said he called 911 numerous times and told the dispatcher he was out of beer and asked them to pick up more for him.

Ah well, modern life is a bugger, isn’t it? Sometimes we could indeed wish we lived in more uncomplicated times – or simply that we could do what the octopus does, when confronted with something upsetting or just plainly annoying:

When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.

You know the old saw, The only two certainties in life are death & taxes. Well, try to sell that one to your average sequoia tree with a Swiss bank account.

Anyway, there is, of course, another thing that you can be sure about – and that is that between the cradle and the grave all of us will have had to face a certain amount of embarrassing situations. It can be something relatively minor, like your kid breaking the neighbour’s window (or something like that.) It can also be something decidedly worse, like being a Republican front runner, caught in a particularly embarrassing sex act.

Some people are quite easily embarrassed, like The Times’ columnist Caitlin Moran, who has a thing about Bonfire night music:

While, on nearly every level, the organised bonfire is superior to anything you could ever do at home – the sky flowering and flaming with a thousand tonnes of dynamite, a community united in awe, three glow sticks for £1 – there is one considerable problem with the organised do in the park: the music. Oh dear, the music.

Like men who shout “I’m really GIVING it to you” while having sex. At either point, you don’t really need to ramp the experience up much. You are overegging the exciting-times pudding. You need to calm down a bit, to be honest.

Other people though are as unflappable as a concrete rabbit in a tar casserole.

Remember those old birds who were knitting away quite peacefully, in the middle of the square where the guillotine sang during France’s reign of terror? Well, they had nothing on a certain group of German ladies, who are also quite good at keeping on with their knitting – even in the most surreal circumstances:

A group of German ladies are raking it in - by selling fetish knitwear to kinky fans who like it soft. Their range includes lingerie, face masks and full bodysuits.

“Our oldest team member is 86. She makes willy warmers and other gear just like the rest.”

Old age, of course, does come with its own full set of embarrassments.

Most of us will have seen holiday snaps of ourselves where we think, Well, I really didn’t need to be reminded of that one again, thank you!

Now, spare a moment’s thought for the poor souls who have to relive these embarrassing holiday moments in the most excruciating detail, because they have to fill out their insurance claim forms, probably in triplicate…:

One unlucky pensioner managed to lose his false teeth after throwing up over the side of a cruise ship on the choppy seas of the Bay of Biscay. Thankfully for the squeamish septuagenarian, his misplaced dentures were covered in his travel insurance policy under lost baggage, so his claim was paid.

Another unfortunate pensioner had to make an even more embarrassing travel claim after a stroll on the deck of a cruise ship went disastrously wrong. The poor gentlemen was chatting with friends when a strong gust of wind lifted his toupee off his head and blew it into the sea. He never got over the shame but at least his travel policy reimbursed the cost of his hairpiece.

Sometimes though people or organisations can be so breathtakingly and even, in a way, brilliantly callous that you have to wonder if they ever could feel anything like embarrassment at all.

Even though God knows that they really, really should…:

A children’s Advent calendar, featuring a serial killer clutching a meat cleaver, has been removed from sale in tourism offices in Hanover after officials admitted that it was “perhaps a little off-colour”.

The victims were between the ages of 13 and 20. Harmaan was sentenced to death and beheaded in 1925.

First, a bit of statistics – and something that will be painfully hard to swallow for the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg:

Deep Throat is reportedly the most profitable film ever. It was made for $25,000 (£13,700) and has grossed more than $600m.

Ah yes, the good old days – when even the most brutal porn was deemed to be emancipating. We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we? With our pole-dancing Britneys and all those ‘Nights in Paris’? Okay, maybe we haven’t.

Still, anything’s better than the fifties, when women were lovingly and routinely addressed as ‘cupcake.’

Talking of which… Call it nostalgia or a very weird case of retro racial and/or cultural stereotyping, but ‘cupcakes’ is back! Sort of:

Women’s underwear maker Triumph Japan showcased a bra with cups designed to look like a pair of rice and miso soup bowls and side pouches to hold compact chopsticks.

The “My Hashi” or “My Chopsticks” bra was designed to promote environmentally friendly measures to reduce the use of disposable chopsticks.

And the Chopstick bra has benefits beyond protecting the planet - the chopsticks encased in both sides of the bra will push up breasts and “gently accentuate cleavage,” the company said.

Clever marketing though. Since most men are simple creatures, with nothing more than cleavage and food on the brain, a woman who is that desperate to attract a man could do worse than wear one of those awfully cute Triumph bras.

Not that all women are that desperate to have their breasts measured in rice cups, or to find a man:

A Serbian woman has turned down more than 150 marriage proposals because she has still not met Mr Right.

She got her first proposal when she was 14 and they have been coming ever since.

Most people though are less fussy. Just take a look at all those new-fangled, digital dating sites or the more old-fashioned personal ads in the newspapers. Desperate, yes. Fussy, no – not really:

“Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth.”

“Bald, fat, short, and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.”

Still, some people do not like dating sites or newspaper ads. They prefer the hands-on and more personal approach. Which doesn’t make them any less desperate, of course – or in any way more successful…:

A driving instructor disguised a 12-inch carrot in his trousers to make a woman driver think she had given him an erection, a court has heard.

She said Cooney touched her breasts during lessons, once showed her naked photos of himself and admitted masturbating while watching her from his home.

Me, I blame the parents. Especially the mothers. Mothers should stop spoiling their little boy brats and stop giving the little monsters what they want the moment they start to make a fuss. Teach the boys how to fend for themselves at a young age, and teach them, by example, how to deal with and respect women.

That’s not exactly the equivalent of nuclear physics, now is it? Quite doable, in fact, one might think. Though mostly, I’m afraid, one would be dead wrong…:

Most parents like to pull out all the stops to make a child’s 16th birthday as memorable as possible.

The stripper, who arrived on cue halfway through the lesson, first walked the birthday boy around the classroom on all fours. Then, gyrating to the sounds of Britney Spears, she spanked him before stripping down to her bra and knickers and insisting the “naughty” schoolboy rub cream all over her body.

How often have we heard the lament, ‘Everybody’s a critic these days.’?

Most of the times we ignore the pathetic bleatings of these types of querulants and treat them as the boring chant of all sour grapes salesmen.

Still, when even possums stop playing possum to don the robes of Harold Bloom (also starring in the hit movie ‘When Harold met Harry’), it might become time to reconsider:

A “dirty great possum” ran amok inside a museum over several nights, destroying “priceless” relics and creating fears a gang of vandals had trashed the historic pieces.

Museum committee member John Sewell said he was shocked at the amount of damage the marsupial had caused.

It is, of course, not exactly an exaggeration to say that people like to share their personal opinions with their fellow human beings. In fact, I wager that for each human who ever invented stuff like the wheel, or harnessed the fire, there were at least ten bystanders who told the inventor they would have done it differently, and much, much better, of course.

Still, it’s not just individual people who like to critique their fellow man. Countries are also known to have a go at other countries, in this regard. Especially neighbouring countries.

You know that Devito, Schwarzenegger movie, ‘Twins’, right? With that slogan, ‘Only their mother can tell them apart’.

As yet another Times book review about a French woman’s take on England shows, it’s the same for England and France – or worse, really, for even the Channel can’t keep them apart…:

Instead of a sex life, the British have their newspapers. What they really love is scandal: catching people out, punishing them for daring to have sex. This is completely in keeping with the puritan tradition.

Then Hereward will go down to the dungeon kitchen to make a pot of tea. On the way up, he’ll pick up the papers that have been thrust through the letter box (newspaper delivery is the only service better here than in France), and with a sigh of true happiness, they will both sink back with a cup of tea and begin the “muck raking” that is so very much more enjoyable than their own lacklustre lovemaking.

So, everybody is indeed a critic. Which is somewhat tiring, of course. It would be nice, occasionally, to open a newspaper and not see headlines assuring us that ‘trainwreck’ Britney has grown as fat as Rupert Murdoch’s bank account. Still, most of us have become quite good at ignoring the rabid howling of the rabbit chasing paparazzi pack.

However, that does not mean that we should tolerate every single bit of blasphemy, be it by the typhoid Mary’s of the tabloid press or their eternal foes, those bloody, born-again health nazis.

Sometimes one has to draw a firm line in the sand and say, Enough is enough – and give fair warning to these blasphemous bonker beards to desist or risk to be chased to their deaths in some princess-stained, Parisian tunnel.

I mean, really…:

Santa is being told to shift the pounds before Christmas - because the obese saint is failing to set a “good example” for children.

Santa has been told he must slim down, or face eviction from shopping centres at Christmas.

Technology is fun. You can, for instance, see much more of the world with even the cheapest remote control than you would as the proud owner of the most expensive pair of hiking boots known to man.

Moreover, in your average hospital there is many a machine that is much better equipped to save your life than about 90% of your fellow human beings.

Which is great news, of course – unless you are

a) an insomniac and
b) a bloody moron:

Police in Southern Germany are quizzing a 17-year-old car crash victim who turned off a fellow hospital patient’s life-support machine because it was keeping him awake.

Luckily medical staff quickly realised what had happened, and reconnected the lucky pensioner. They then connected the sleep deprived 17-year-old with the local police.

Most of the time though, technology and all its lovely gadgets are simply here to make life just a little bit easier and more agreeable for all of us.

Take the booming USB gadgets market, for instance.

So, you’re feeling a bit peaky but you’re not quite ready to leave the loving embrace of your computer? No worries, for here’s the USB George Foreman grill.

You’re not hungry but (being a useless computer geek and all) you’re feeling just a little bit lonely? Again, we have the answer: your own electronic, budding buddy, in the form of a USB flowerpot speaker.

You have another kind of itch? Situated between hungry & lonely? Well, we do love the whole notion of customer satisfaction, so we’d be pleased to let you have it with our own, very special Super 10 Function USB vibrator.

Enough about those USB gadgets though. Now, let’s move on to…

What was that? You want what…?

No, we do not have any inflatable USBritney dolls!

Gods, some people! So, as I was saying…

What do you mean, ‘Not fair‘? I’m telling you, we don’t have…

But wait, if you promise to shut up and leave the grown-ups alone, you can have this: your very own pair of ‘Jingle Jugs Animatronic Singing and Dancing Boobs.’

Happy now? Good. Where was I? Right: technology, gadgets, fun. Okay, onwards and upwards…

It is a sad fact that gadgets, like their proud owners, grow old and boring and rather useless. However, that does not mean you should treat these old farty things disrespectfully. Just like you don’t pull the plug out of some old guy’s life support machine, you also shouldn’t treat your old gadgets in a rude and selfish manner.

Believe me, you really, really shouldn’t…:

Here’s a cautionary tale featuring an about-to-be destroyed Sony PlayStation 2. A proud owner of a new PS3 decided to allow partygoers to destroy his outgoing PS2, and the guy who won the honors in a drawing decided to pee all over the obsolete gaming console.

Bad idea. The PS2 was still plugged in, and because urine is an excellent conductor of electricity, the guy was instantly knocked unconscious and nearly electrocuted.

Oh yes, I almost forgot…

A word to the wise: gadgets are fun. We know that – but there still is just a little bit more between Heaven and earth than even Play Station has heard of.

So, it’s okay to love your gadgets. Just don’t go all squirrelly and do a Cory Ryder on your mostly blameless folks:

Like many middle-class, suburban American parents, Shannan and Joey Troiano worried about their son’s behaviour and his bad grades at high school. And like many wayward teenagers, Cory Ryder was grounded for weeks at a time, had a PlayStation confiscated and was banned from watching TV.

Police say that Cory offered the undercover officer his stepfather’s new pickup truck as payment for killing his parents. “Two bullets is all it takes,” he is alleged to have said.

I love scientists. No, it’s more than that - I adore them as only a columnist can adore certain chunks of sinfully delicious news…

…like the fact that our noble grey-beards have found yet another weird animal that seems to be closely related to us:

A “furry kite” looking like a cross between a squirrel and a bat is the closest animal relative to humans after apes, monkeys and lemurs, research has shown.

The colugo lives in the forests of south-east Asia, where it glides from tree to tree on “wings” made from skin stretched between its limbs.

So far, so good. If you could cross, let’s say, George Bush with the current Pope and then blow this delightful mixture up like a party balloon, you would indeed get something not unlike a squirrelly bat – or a furry kite.

Alas, these scientists never know when to quit:

Which of several mammalian groups is the most closely related to primates has been a hotly debated topic. Some scientists argue that the honour should go to scandentians, a group that includes Asian tree shrews - tiny animals with very large brains for their body size.

No, no, no, no, no.

Just stick with the Bush/Ratzinger kite. We don’t want no steenkin’ tiny animals with large brains. We’re talking about the forefathers & -mothers of humans here.

Like Britney…

Though really, sometimes you’ve got to love the girl…:

Trainwreck and part time pop singer Britney Spears drove over a Los Angeles County Sheriff deputy’s foot while she was leaving the courthouse at her last custody hearing on Oct. 26. Spears had to make her way through a pack of photographers at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in L.A. while she allegedly ran over the foot of a female officer.

Apparently the victim, a female officer, has no broken bones but is hobbling around the courthouse on crutches and has been reassigned to light duty. The incident comes just a week after Spears ran over a paparazzo’s foot.

So, the never-ending story continues. Britney will, no doubt, yet again be summoned to court, to explain yet another mauled foot incident. Still, maybe this time round the judge will do the sensible thing and just take away her car keys.

Problem is, that even though ‘bright as Britney’ may never make it as a popular proverb, some judges could easily go ten rounds with her in the ‘thick as a Brit’ department:

A judge who decided a custody dispute by flipping a coin was removed from the bench by the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday. The decision against Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge James Michael Shull of Gate City was unanimous.

According to the court, Shull admitted tossing a coin to determine which parent would have visitation with a child on Christmas.

It must be such a relief to be extinct at times.

It was probably bad enough being a live furry kite - never mind being posthumously compared with Bush and the Pope. The idea of surviving long enough to have to remember the names & birthday parties of great-great-great-etcetera-grandchildre n like Britney and Shull would simply have been intolerable.

Indeed, if that poor furry kite could have foreseen the consequences of his taking out the future Mrs Furry Kite in his dad’s Oldsmobile, he probably would have kept his zipper firmly up.

What’s more, if he’d even had an inkling about a certain future dentist he’d probably have shaved or hacked his furry member off before taking the risk of ever inserting it anywhere else again:

A dancing dentist made a terrible misstep when the inch-long drill bit he was using punctured a patient’s sinus cavity and ended up near her eye socket, the woman claims in a lawsuit.

The accident occurred as Trusty, 57, was drilling to break up a molar prior to extracting it. As he worked, he was “performing rhythmical steps and movements to the song ‘Car Wash,’ ” which was playing on the radio in the dental office, the suit says.

Animals can be quite a handful. From stuffed tigers to domestic goats, at time they seem to be more trouble than they are worth having about the place.

Take your average pooch. If it’s not shitting on the pavement or yapping at anything that passes, it’s threatening more than the dignity of all those long-suffering lampposts:

A doggy urinal is being touted as the answer to prematurely corroded lampposts in Sweden.

It consists of a rubber cup attached to the post and a hose to pipe the urine into the gutter.

‘The average lamp-post has a lifespan of 30 years but my invention could add a further 15 years,’ said inventor Lennart Jarlebro, from Boras.

Mind you, if dog piddle can cause that much damage to lampposts I hope to got that the Parisian authorities have made sure that no French canines can make a habit of pissing against any of the four pillars of the Eiffel tower…

Of course, lubricating lampposts is not the only bit of mischief man’s supposedly best friend does on a regular basis.

Or, as the old song goes:

“Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone
Oh where, oh where can he be
With his ears cut short and his tail cut long
Oh where, oh where can he be?”

Well, why don’t you just look right behind you, pal?

Ah, too late…:

Chicago - A pack of hunting dogs shot a man as he went to retrieve a fallen pheasant, authorities said.

The hunter had put his gun on the ground to climb a fence and retrieve the fallen bird. But the dogs followed him too closely, stepping on the gun’s trigger before he managed to get over the fence.

About 100 to 120 pellets of birdshot hit him square in the left calf at a distance of just one metre.

Mind you, in Australia, a continent which has more deadly animals than sense, they would laugh at people who’d think dogs can be dangerous:

Police in Australia kept an aggressive crocodile in a cell overnight after it threatened some local fisherman.

Senior Constable Wade Marshall told the BBC said that the unruly crocodile “had a go” at some fishermen who were trying to retrieve their boat, so they locked the reptile up before taking it to a nearby crocodile farm.

However he ensured that the prisoner was well-treated and comfortable.

And yet, ungratefulness is sharper than a serpent’s tooth. We expect crocodiles to take a grim view of two-legged nuisances with a handbag fixation – but Fido, our collective bestest of best friends… surely we should be able to put our trust in all those faithful Fidos out there…?

Well, maybe not. As this old news story, from Germany’s Wupperthal, so regrettably shows:

“We will not have him put down. Lucky is basically a damn good guide dog,” Ernst Gerber, a dog trainer from Wuppertal told reporters. “He just needs a little brush-up on some elementary skills, that’s all.”

Gerber admitted to the press conference that Lucky, a German shepherd guide-dog for the blind, had so far been responsible for the deaths of all four of his previous owners.

“I admit it’s not an impressive record on paper. He led his first owner in front of a bus, and the second off the end of a pier. He actually pushed his third owner off a railway platform just as the Cologne to Frankfurt express was approaching and he walked his fourth owner into heavy traffic, before abandoning him and running away to safety. But, apart from epileptic fits, he has a lovely temperament. And guide dogs are difficult to train these days.”

Asked if Lucky’s fifth owner would be told about his previous record, Gerber replied:

“No. It would make them nervous, and would make Lucky nervous. And when Lucky gets nervous he’s liable to do something silly.”

I’ve said it before but there is a truly monumental mountain of evidence that separates art from life – or, more to the point: detective novels from real life crime.

Whereas your average handsome & laconic & pipe-chewing & chief-inspecting hero of the Yard only got his man after endless cups of tea, a few rooftop chases and a formal ‘What’s all this, then?’ arrest, real life criminals hardly ever deliver the suspense that can be transubstantiated into delightful penny dreadfuls or splendid Sherlock Holmes movies.

Most criminals are so bad at their chosen profession that it would probably prove to be financially much more rewarding for them to retire and subsequently sue their old school’s job counseling department for malice:

In the long and noble history of the world’s most incompetent criminals, we have an impressive new entry – a burglar who decided that the ideal shop to break into would be… a security camera store.

Police in Boise, Idaho made one of the easier arrests they’ll ever make, after 21-year-old Allen Michael Darnell’s every move was filmed by over a dozen demonstration CCTV cameras in the Computer Central store.

The footage show him smashing the glass front door, then walking around the shop trying to steal computers. Unfortunately for him, they were bolted down.

He appears to have noticed the fact that the store was filled with security cameras, because after a short time he pulls his coat up over his head. This devious criminal masterstroke was slightly undercut, however, by the fact that he also kept going up to the cameras and staring straight into them.

Having spent some time failing to steal any computers and staring into surveillance cameras, Darnell decided to make off with around $250 from the cash register. The next part of his plan – hide in some nearby bushes until the police arrived – was then executed flawlessly.

Mind you, at least the fore-mentioned criminal had some kind of game plan: break in, steal, get away, hide. Granted, his mental capacities proved to be such that he had as much chance of doing so with any measure of success as a certain other person had in illegally invading a certain other country but at least there had been some skewed logic to the whole procedure. (I am talking of the store invader, of course – not of the other one.)

Hercule Poirot would always go on about ‘order & method’ and ‘the little grey cells.’ Which is all very well in the kind of limited and structured universe that Agatha Christie built but which has painfully little to do with the world of real, and mostly quite mad crime:

A man was arrested after a bizarre series of events that included him crashing his car, getting shot by a homeowner, breaking a restaurant window and stripping to his underwear.

Police said it all started when the man crashed his car into a pole and started banging on the door of a nearby house. After he kicked in a window, homeowner Leroy Bruce shot him.

Bruce said the man ran off and left his pants and other clothing behind. The bleeding suspect fled to a McDonald’s and threw a rock through the front window.

Witness Lisa Fuqua said that the man was easy for police to identify.

Yes, another glorious triumph for the pipe-chewing (or snuff-taking) heroes of the Yard. Though it probably didn’t involve much tea drinking and in all likelihood not much in the way of rooftop chasing either.

Still, however mad the perpetrator, he still eluded capture for an equally shambolic as symbolic few handsful of seconds. In other words, at least he gave it a try.

Which is more than you can say for a certain alcoholic burglar…

So, weep, you Queens of Crime, you Mistresses of Murder – and yes, all their fans who still believe it takes at least a great detective and some three hundred pages to catch the evil masterminding villain: weep, weep, weep your bitter, book-stained tears of deep regret.

Agatha Christie once famously said, ‘Crime pays.’

Real life, alas, is hardly ever as rewarding as fiction:

Alcoholic burglar Stuart Taylor had to call 999 after cutting his arm breaking into a house and then not being able to break out.

Blackburn magistrates heard that 41-year-old Taylor bled so profusely inside the house he caused more than £7,500-worth of damage to carpets and furniture.

“He had cut himself smashing a double glazed window and then couldn’t get out,” said Mr White. “When the police got to him he pointed to an open bottle of champagne and asked if he could finish it off before he went.”

It doesn’t happen all that often that I am tempted to commiserate with the leader of her Majesty’s loyal opposition, David Cameron.

Still, the only time he got something right, at some lunch do, he was subsequently mauled by no lesser figure than Vygaudas Usackas, the ambassador of Lithuania…:

David Cameron’s alleged off-the-cuff remarks at a recent arts funding lunch have caused outrage in Lithuania, and a complaint from the country’s ambassador to the UK asking the Conservative leader to explain himself.

Mr Usackas, a former deputy foreign minister and former ambassador to the US, said the comment had “prompted a wave of outrage in Lithuania”.

I would still say that Cameron was absolutely right. There are certain things nobody needs – and these do include most of the grants given by the Arts Council.

However, there are many things we don’t really need. Horrors, modern and ancient, that leave us tongue-tied with disgust, rage or just a certain, sudden, deep weariness of the soul.

For instance, when you are a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, and some dearly departed relative did his or her departing in the Holy Name Hospital, you really do not need to open your newspaper one fine morning and read the following story:

A former lab technician at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, N.J., is under arrest and accused of having sex with a corpse, authorities said.

A security guard at the hospital saw Merino, 24, engaged in sexual activity with a 92-year-old deceased woman in the morgue on Sunday, according to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. The security guard immediately called Teaneck police, who came and arrested Merino.

The above, of course, is quite an exceptional case – or so one would sincerely hope – but there are many daily irritants that we would dearly love to do without. Think of all the household appliances that only seem to be invented to make our lives needlessly complicated and irritating beyond belief. Like the smoothie maker:

The Smoothie Maker, to be honest, I consider to be the last straw. A Smoothie Maker is just a blender – IT’S JUST A BLENDER! – but with a tap on the bottom. A small, useless tap which will, on the first day of use, become clogged by a single strawberry seed, leaving you flossing the tiny nozzle with a pin until 4am, weeping.

A Smoothie Maker basically marks the UNINVENTING of the blender. It is a negation of progress. It’s like having sex with monkeys. It will do humankind no good.

Still, you can always refuse to buy these machines – and if some idiot relative gives you one, you can use the appliance as the famous blunt instrument and leave said relative to the tender care of one of the Holy Name Hospital’s amorous lab technicians.

It is a great pity you can’t do the same with the Washington DC airport – or the Disney Corporation. If only because even the most deranged lab technician would not touch either of these frightful entities, be they sadly alive or nicely decomposing:

From now on, the nerves of international passengers queuing up at passport control at airports in Washington DC and Houston will be soothed – or otherwise – by a sappy seven-minute film made by the folks at Walt Disney showcasing all that is wonderful, scenic and nice about the land of the free.

Oh, and one last thing: just a quick word to all our celebs…:

We know that you are needy. We know you snorted or dieted or fucked away the last few remaining brain cells left in your pretty useless skulls. So, we know you can’t really help it that all of you are an even bigger waste of space than a smoothie maker being rogered by a lab technician in a Disney sponsored airport – but still, can’t you just give it a bloody rest, for once…?! Please…?!

Britney Spears is set to shock the world with saucy new promotional shots picturing her seducing a handsome Catholic priest.

In one picture, Spears is snapped leaning seductively against the confession box as a young priest listens to her repent her sins, while in another photo, Spears is shown sitting on his lap inside the cubical.