Once in a while even the most modest of sites will get visted by internet trolls.
I know that it is the wisest thing by far to ignore them and their pesky comments but at times one can be very much tempted to get back at these pests and be rude and personally abusive oneself.
There have been many times in my life that I muttered some choice & foul obscenities under my breath before counting to ten and letting things go.
Which is the grown-up thing to do, of course but still: where’s the fun in that?
In other words, this post is all about letting off steam - containing just a few of the things I would liked to have said to those, happily few people who leave their poisonous comments or posts here.
So, here’s what I would call my ‘Dear X’ list:
1) I’m so glad ugly little fucks like you don’t grow on trees.
2) If you were Iraq I would sell Dick Cheney T-shirts.
3) If we could build toxic shit containers like you we would solve all our nuclear waste problems in one go.
4) In fact, you are worse than waste. I wouldn’t want your stupid ashes to mingle with honest Death Valley sand.
5) If you were a cocktail I would have you like the fucking Titanic: on the rocks.
6) You, sir, are a pest. You have the charm of Donald Rumsfeld, the taste of Oprah Winfrey, the wit of OJ Simpson and the brains of Paris Hilton.
7) You, madam, are a nuisance. Your soul must look like Ann Coulter on a bad hair day.
8) You’re like a pitbull singing ABBA songs. An ugly little fucker making ugly little noises.
9) Oh, go eat your brain. Yes, it would fit on a very small party cracker but it’s poisonous enough to do the business.
10) You’re like a slasher zombie movie. Not scary but deeply disgusting.
The Dalai Lama yesterday warnedthat Tibet’s next Buddhist spiritual leader would be chosen abroad if he dies in exile, and that Tibetans may hold a referendum before he dies to decide whether a new system of leadership would better serve them in their struggle for self-determination.
The 72-year-old said he was looking at “different methods or ways” of selecting a successor after nearly five decades in exile, drawing a sharp rebuke from Beijing.
“If my death comes when we are still in a refugee status then logically my reincarnation will come outside Tibet,” the Dalai Lama said in an interview restricted to three journalists.
According to centuries of tradition, high-ranking monks in Tibet choose the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation after the incumbent’s death. Instead, he suggested his successor could be selected by election, by seniority or could take over in the traditional way, but outside Tibet. This would head off plans by the Chinese Communist Party to select a successor.
The comments drew an immediate rebuke from Beijing.
“The reincarnation of the living Buddha is a unique way of succession of Tibetan Buddhism and follows relatively complete religious rituals and historical conventions,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “The Dalai’s remarks obviously violated the religious rituals and historical conventions.”
China recently said that living Tibetan Buddhas needed permission from the government to be reincarnated.
And here we end up: [The] unique selling point of democracy isn’t that it’s necessarily or intrinsically better than the alternative, but that it’s never quite as awful. Governments are the only man-made thing where the disposable and mass produced is preferable to the custom, handmade and unbreakable. Fundamentally, it’s not how you get a government that’s important, it’s how you get rid of it.
There are so many things wrong with the way we live our lives and feed our self-obsessed grievances that you don’t know where to begin to count the many ways in which so many people in the West have become intolerable nuisances.
Still, the following story, in all its disgusting detail, makes the case against the ‘It’s all about me’ culture quite convincingly:
CASSELBERRY - In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn’t breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.
Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.
One can’t help but feel that police Sgt Andrea Eichhorn missed the chance to make this world a much better place by not breaking her bloody neck.
And if you’d want a contrasting tale to this ugly little story, something to prove that human beings still can be quite noble in the way they can conquer or at least accommodate to whatever life will throw at them, just read the following story:
Chongqing resident Wang Fang, 27, says she has learned to live a normal life despite her condition, and refuses to be classed as disabled as she is capable of doing her job.
She said: “I can run faster than most of my friends and have a regular job as a waitress in the family restaurant. There is no reason to class me as disabled.”
You would wish that this Chinese waitress could be brought over to the West to teach all of our Andrea Echhorns how to become fully functioning humans.
On a more cheerful note, for those who quite simply will never be able to become fully human, our political classes, there is still some sort of hope.
Because, from now on, whatever those lowlife, hypocritical, lying, thieving and fornicating politicians will have done to make the news in an embarrassing manner, they will be able to hide behind the ‘Jambart’ defence:
Didier Jambart, a French defence ministry employee, has been suing for damages of €400,000 after being prescribed with dopamine agonist drugs in a case that is being closely studied by lawyers representing Parkinson’s sufferers in Britain, the US and Canada. Like Jambart, they claim that they were provided with minimal information about the disturbing side effects, estimated to affect up to 15 per cent of those taking the drugs.
The French court is set to award substantial damages to the 47-year-old father-of-two with Parkinson’s disease who was ruled to have been turned into a gambler and thief, with compulsive homosexual urges, by the drugs he was being treated with.
Sinners, and in this specific case, male sinners, be warned though. There are enough people around who will not be taking you to court when they feel you have done them wrong.
Or, to be even more specific, whatever you do, don’t fuck with Thai women…:
Thailand has become the world centre of penis reattachment surgery, but then it has been forced to be. While not unique to the kingdom, penis severing has been honed here to its most devastating effect through a mixture of infidelity, assertive womanhood and a national cuisine that lends itself to a kitchen full of sharp knives.
The men are now fearful of a rash of Thailand’s most notorious crime of passion, according to the surgeon who has stitched back many a male member for grateful patients.
Sitting in his office at Bangkok’s Paolo Memorial Hospital, surgeon Surasak Muangsombot recalled how he re-attached his first phallus in 1978 and soon discovered that penis hacking was a peculiarly Thai form of sexual violence.
Since then Sweden has had three cases, the US two - including the notorious case of John Wayne Bobbitt who returned from surgery to star in porn films - and one in Australia. In the same period, Muangsombot’s team alone has operated on 33 cases and many more have been reported.
Not all of them make it to surgery though…:
They have been boiled, fed to ducks, even attached to hot air balloons and cast into the night sky - when it comes to permanently depriving a cheating lover of a recently severed penis, the imagination of the wronged Thai woman knows few bounds.
Time for another short round of ‘Best of the British Columnists’. I’ve said it before but I’m more than happy to state again that, whatever their other (many) failings, the Brits are simply the best columnists in the world.
Talking about things the Brits are lousy at, none of the Brits qualified for the next European Football Championship. Neither Scotland, nor Wales, nor Northern Ireland, nor England, of course.
So, the English Football Association sacked the hapless English coach and began the quest for the next one. This is how Martin Samuel, sports columnist for the Times, described the start of this procedure:
Charged with making a dynamic decision that will shape the future of English football, Brian Barwick, the FA chief executive, knew exactly what to do. He asked the manager of Finland for advice. And the manager of Wales. Then he asked the assistant manager of Ireland, two former managers of Wolverhampton Wanderers and the director of a football club who previously made a decision of this nature in 1986. Wait by the phone long enough and he will get to you eventually.
Having canvassed these opinions, Barwick revealed his findings to the members of the FA board. He told them that he could now say, with confidence, that England needed someone good. You know, like, really, really good. World-class, in fact. No doubt the board members were impressed.
It’s not only English football that has been less than impressive the last decade. On the political front, the Tories, England’s conservative party, haven’t had much joy since it forecefully retired Margret Thatcher and her handbag.
Still, there might be hope for them yet. Labour and its current leader are having a hard time of it, so the English might be ready for a change. Times columnist Rod Liddle examines this possibility from a slightly unusual angle:
More signs of a revival in Conservative fortunes. It has just been discovered that dogs are cleverer than we thought; they can think in abstract terms, conceptualise and apparently enjoy highbrow fiction (especially James Joyce, Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov), according to a recent study. Dogs are notoriously right-of-centre creatures, of course; loyal, patriotic, implacably pro-hunting, wedded to the idea of the monogamous heterosexual middle-class family unit, deeply suspicious – to the point of violence – of all aliens.
Dogs – even the most stupid dalmatian or red setter – understand such half-forgotten terms as obedience, duty and discipline. Tell them to chase a stick and they will do so, without questioning why or contacting a lawyer and filing a complaint to a tribunal. Tell them to shut up and sit down and they will do so, with a chastened expression.
Until quite recently they were the country’s favourite pet – but about 10 years ago (oddly enough) they were usurped by the sinister and poisonous cats. There are now many more of these insinuating, manipulative, indolent left-liberal beasts in Britain: ask a cat to chase a stick and it will yawn, urinate on your carpet and then sit on the roof of the shed for the rest of the day in a catatonic stupor. Decadent and idle, they rub themselves up against your leg in a sexually incontinent manner. They are urban creatures, symbolic of an atomised and insular society which has lost its way.
The political debate in this country always lags behind cultural changes; the good news for David Cameron is that dogs are back.
To recap, this is not the best of times to be a member of the English Conservative party who also loves football – and for a certain subgroup of those desperate folks, this season hold even less cheer, of which A.A. Gill, food columnist for the Times, is good enough to remind us:
This is the time of year when we all have to think about flashers, the cold and the wet, the frost and the dark afternoons. Just as you leave something out for the tits, remember those who leave something out for you.
We used to have a flasher when I was in student digs. I shared with two girls, and Penny got sedately flashed every morning by an old gent who stood on the table in the bow window of his semi with a semi and a red velvet curtain wrapped round his head. It was an impressive and rather beautiful tableau: part Magritte, part Saga Lonely Hearts. One day, she came home and said he hadn’t been out that morning. He wasn’t there the next day, either, so she told the police. Sure enough, he’d fallen over and pulled something. She went to visit him in hospital. He apologised for the indecent shortness of the hospital gown, which we thought was funny. He never flashed again. I suppose the introduction took all the romance out of it.
Talking of romance – or well, maybe not romance per se – I will give the final word to Caitlin Moran, yet another Times columnist, who is wondering what an unsuspecting alien would make of some of our earthly goings-on:
If, however, you were an alien trying to find out what human sex and desire is from TV, movies or porn, you would conclude that, in the case of TV, it was about bawdy 18th-century prostitutes being done in an alley by soldiers. Movie sex seems incredibly driven and serious – a bit like two business rivals playing a high-stakes game of squash, but with lingerie. Porn, meanwhile, looks like shop-window dummies energetically being made to do rude things by teenagers.
Some claim God is dead. That, of course, would make the much-hyped ‘war on Christmas’ slightly tacky – like the opposite number of necrophilia…
Still, whatever the ultimate state of the Almighty One, religion, of course, is very much alive. People see Jesus (and/or His momma) in trees, tapestries, cheese sandwiches and flapjacks. God truly seems to be omnipresent – if not exactly mindful of the calories.
Some of these appearances may be more worrying than others though:
“I told him no,” Pauline said. “I’m not going to give you my money.”
The man threatened to kill Pauline but she wouldn’t give in.
“I said, ‘As soon as you kill me, I’ll go to heaven and you’ll go to hell. “I said, ‘Jesus is in this car and He goes with me everywhere I go.’”
That’s when something miraculous happened.
“He just looked around and tears began coming to his eyes,” Pauline remembers.
Jacobi ministered to the man for ten minutes and ended up giving him ten dollars, but she also gave him a warning.
“I told him, ‘Don’t you go spend it on whiskey either,’” says Pauline with a laugh.
Pauline’s ministering to the would-be thief seems to have helped.
This does indeed prove that miracles still happen, for usually women who minister to a sinner’s needs in cars are the ones who walk away with the money.
Far from me to slight this bit of divine intervention of course, but where was Jesus when the Enron people took the whole of the US for a ride?
Still, while Jesus is harassing petty thieves, some of His followers are after much bigger game. Enter the wonderfully strange minds of the ‘Jesus loves porn stars’ crowd:
The fellowship’s title was designed to attract attention, and it was originally intended as a resource for Christians who were struggling with pornography. They traveled with the fellowship to the world’s biggest porn convention in Las Vegas last month. The annual Adult Expo boasts two halls full of various exhibits ranging from the latest prosthetic devices, to hardcore high-definition films and handcuffs covered in pink ersatz fur.
The XXX Church set up camp, somewhat sheepishly, between the male gay section and the so-called Bang Bus — a tired old minivan which is used to film sex scenes that are then sold via the Internet.
The Porn Pastors, as they call themselves, do not preach in open-air sermons at the convention, but instead seek to engage porn “delegates” in conversation and then hand out Bibles, which proclaim “Jesus Loves Porn Stars.”
Lovely.
Maybe Jesus should take (or drop) a fig leaf from the book of these good folks – and His miracles need some upgrading anyway. That whole thing with the loafs and the fishes is terribly old hat. As He should have known like no-one else, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’
What’s more, who needs to go traipsing down to some lake for a fish sandwich when almost all food outlets do home deliveries?
No, if you want to reach the masses and do a bit of good at the same time, you need to go the E-bay route.
In fact, Jesus really should love porn stars, for verily, they could teach Him a few out-reaching, crowd-pleasing tricks:
LOS ANGELES, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Porn star Mary Carey, who shot to fame by running for California governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, unveiled plans on Tuesday to auction off her autographed, recently removed breast implants for charity.
The autographed implants have been placed on eBay and Carey, whose real name is Mary Cook, said she planned to donate some 90 percent of the proceeds to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
She intends to use the rest of the money on medical bills for her mother, who suffered major injuries after jumping off a four-story building in 2006.
Australians are a bit weird. That’s partly genetics, of course. A lot of them have their DNA firmly rooted in England and the English are as weird as a crack team of mimes on crack. Hell, they used to eat kidneys and kippers for breakfast - and their most successful export product is cricket (which, admittedly, also says a great deal about the sanity of the rest of the world.)
Still, there is another reason that the Australians are somewhat loopy - and that’s because they live in a country that is actually, actively and sometimes quite accurately trying to kill them. There’s a list of the ten most deadliest snakes in the world, and six of them live in Australia. There are also sharks, poisonous spiders and frogs and other weird creatures with only one thing on their evil little minds - and that’s to kill as many Ozzies as they can.
Hell, they even have a jellyfish, called the Irukandje, which is only 2.5 centimeters in diameter but so poisonous it can kill a person in a few lingering and very painful days…
So, it’s no wonder Australians can be a bit strange - sometimes though admirably so:
“He was only a little fella, so he probably got a bit tired in the rough tides or something. All I know is he had good little teeth on him and I think he would have taken a good chunk or two out of you if he had the chance.”
Jimmy Howard wanted to calm down the saltwater crocodile and says his red pants were all he had at hand.
“I just ripped my jocks off, soaked them in the water and wrapped them around its face,” he told the Northern Territory News.
“It was a bit cranky and that was the only thing I could use to cover its eyes.
The good thing about living in what’s not so much a killing field as a killing continent is that, aside from the odd moron, people tend to treat all God’s evil creatures with the weariest of respect - and if they have to deal with them, they learn to be damn creative handling them, like our Mr Howard and his saltwater croc.
Other people in less murderous surroundings haven’t developed these skills in the same manner - to say the least…
A motorcyclist was critically injured Wednesday afternoon when twine that secured an apparently dead 5-foot rattlesnake to the back of the bike he was riding may have come loose and distracted him as he entered a curve on Almonaster Avenue, police said.
Police accident investigators don’t know how, when or where the cyclist had gotten the rattlesnake, and where he was taking it or why. But they said they believed the presence of the snake and the possibility that the driver was trying to keep it from falling off the bike while heading into a right-hand bend in the eastern New Orleans road caused the accident.
Yes, people can be incredibly stupid. Death must be laughing its skinny socks off, every time he catches another member of the human race with his trousers down (and a very stupid look on his face.)
Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.
He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.
The newspaper reported Kear’s last words as being “Don’t worry - it’s nothing a drink can’t fix” before he succumbed to the cobra’s venom.
Of course, there are trouser snakes and then there are trouser snakes…:
Doctors at Royal Wigan Infirmary in Greater Manchester put out the alert after fearing the man faced amputation as the ring cut off his blood supply.
The firefighters placed a thin sheet of metal around his penis to protect the skin while removing the ring, which appeared to have been cut off from the end of a pipe.
Then they used a mini hand grinder to cut through the ring during a 20-minute procedure.
Not good - but wait for it…:
It is understood the man, aged in his 40s, was given an anaesthetic.
As a card-carrying member of the male species I must say I really, really love that ‘It is understood.’
Right, so let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that God does indeed want the Huckster as the next president of the US. I’m not really interested in the technical details. The Man Himself may have done that burning bush thing again, or He may have sent yet another messenger angel to convey these happy tidings. Still, let’s say it was Jehovah’s signature under this blank political cheque.
Is that really such a welcome endorsement though? If I were a starting professional writer, would I really want the support of all comers? Would I welcome, let’s say, the kind words of Dan Brown, writing a blurb like, ‘This is a very well-written book with a highly intelligent plot line and great dialogue’?
For this is the same God who asked Noah to build an Ark because it was going to rain for forty days and forty nights. Telling him, to be more precise, to build a wooden ship as big as a largish county and then to try and get get all the world’s animals on board – and this after the type of weather forecast one could only qualify as ‘your average English summer.’ Worst case scenario, really? A 24 hours’ postponement of the mixed doubles finals at Wimbledon.
Does a serious presidential candidate really need the endorsement of a God who gets all panicky when it is merely threatening to rain a bit? That would be like that story about the boy who was always crying, ‘Wolf, wolf!’. Or like another certain president, with the same kind of God cred, who’s always crying ‘They have weapons of mass destruction!‘ & ‘They’re building nuclear weapons!’
Still, to have God behind you – that must be worth something, no? Well, indeed, it does. It would take a bit too far to retell the whole story of the tribes of House of Israel, from their enslavement in Egypt to, let’s say, the middle of the 20th century but let’s simply leave it at the observation that if you are God’s ‘Chosen People’ you are seriously fucked.
Talking of Egypt – and God’s role as a celestial Dan Brown – remember how the Lord told Moses to lead his people out of captivity and towards the Promised Land? So, from Cairo to Jerusalem. That’s a 424 kilometers’ (or a 254 miles’) long journey. Which is, admittedly, a fair bit of walking but with God’s guidance the trip took a literally quite staggering forty years…!
In other words, whether Huckabee is deluded or correct in his ‘I’m God’s feller’ assertions, the only sane response by the American electorate would be like that of the Indian Brave of an old, old joke. It goes like this:
A quite mangy looking Indian Brave is looking out over the Atlantic ocean. Suddenly a flying saucer drops from the sky. A hatch opens and a little green fellow jumps out. The alien approaches the earthling and says,
“We come in peace.”
The Indian Brave sighs, and then says:
“Oh no, not again…”
The following message is fully endorsed by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee:
‘On the road’ is a wildly irritating book by Jack Kerouac about a bunch of boring people travelling from point A to point B for no other good reason than to be full of themselves.
People do like to travel though. Ever since the first human dropped from his tree to take a stroll over the African savannah we’ve been and developed as a species of fairly obnoxious camera toting, badly dressed tourists.
Only problem is, like the characters in Kerouac’s book, people can be total imbeciles. Most of the time they think they’re the star players in some heroic movie of cosmic importance, not realizing that if they do insist on being stupid arses any road from A to B will offer enough opportunity for them to end their journeying for good.
Most folks don’t want to be reminded though and that’s why they take offence when others do, like a certain news editor:
A newspaper editor, whose family has dealt with deadly drunk driving accidents, is offering a coffin to the first person who dies this holiday season from a drunk driving accident.
St. Mary’s Today editor Ken Rossignol was never shy about a journalistic style some say borders on the sensational. For years, he has posted the names of local people arrested on DWI charges in every weekly edition. “So the message is, don’t drink and drive.” He says people aren’t listening.
Now, he’s offering a free coffin to the first person who kills him or herself in a drunk driving accident in the Charles, Calvert, St. Mary’s County region. “You wanna die? We’re gonna make it cheaper for you.”
There are, of course, whole government departments whose only concern it is to keep all their nation’s morons alive. Which is only fair. Governments need a good deal of tax money to feed their ever hungry civil servants and other bureacrats, so you can’t have too many of your citizens dying on you in the tax-paying prime of their lives.
Of course, these departments then often go somewhat overboard in their efforts to keep all of us in rude health – including being very rude to Santa:
Tradition has it that Father Christmas travels by sleigh, but it seems even he is not exempt from the diktats of the health and safety police. They have told one Santa that he must be strapped into a full body harness in case he falls out of his sleigh as it is towed by a Land Rover at the gentle speed of five miles an hour.
But Father Christmas has not been so lucky in the Northumbrian town of Alnwick. There, a 30-year tradition of visits to the town by Santa and his sleigh have been brought to an abrupt halt by a similar insurance wrangle.
As usual, the organisers - Alnwick Lions Club - planned to mount the sleigh on a district council trailer. But this year the council has ruled that using the trailer would be too dangerous because Santa is not a council employee, so he would not be covered by its insurance. Instead, he has had to cancel the tour and will have to ride into town by bus to switch on the Christmas lights.
Alas, there’s no saving some people from themselves. Which was shown fairly conclusively in a Russian train just recently.
It was in fact an ending that would not have been misplaced in any self-respecting book. It would, for instance, have been the perfect ending of Kerouac’s ‘On the road’, preferably on page two or three…:
“Inspectors wanted to check the papers of passengers who looked drunk, but he took out a grenade. He demanded the train should go to Vladivostok,” Ergasheva said.
Passengers were evacuated and negotiations with the police had started before Mikhail Ershov, 43, triggered the explosion, blasting out windows in the train carriage.
“Ershov had taken the pin out, he then tried to put the pin back in the grenade, but instead it exploded,” the prosecutor said.
I’ve said it before but it is worth repeating: ‘Thick as a cop’ is not an official proverb but it should be. So, it’s nice that the government is now also slowly coming round to the view that PC Plod and his mates can do with a bit of help: It may not make it on to the best-seller list this Christmas but a Government manual offering advice on how to tell if someone is drunk could prove one of the more humorous offerings of the festive season.
From looking out for staggering or “dishevelled” pub-goers to listening for “rambling conversation” and offensive language, the Home Office publication covers it all in minute detail. The guide is being issued to thousands of police officers who will work undercover in pubs and clubs this Christmas to catch bar staff who sell alcohol to inebriated customers.
Other tell-tale signs of drunkenness, according to the guide, include being “careless with money”, exhibiting inappropriate sexual behaviour, offensive language, bumping into furniture, spilling drinks and drinking quickly or competitively. Drunkenness may also cause a loss of train of thought, difficulty in paying attention, not understanding what is said, glassy eyes or lack of focus.
Yes, Christmas is almost here again, as inevitable and grim and welcome as yet another Rocky movie. We can rant and rave against it but that won’t do a blind bit of good. Much better then to submerge oneself in this season of mirth, myrrh & mistletoe and pray for a quick drowning.
Even better yet – let’s jump before we are pushed into this jolly bog by some hohoho-ing lunatic. So, have you bought your Christmas presents yet? No? Shame on you – but don’t worry, here’s the new and improved cheery columnists with not one, not two but three suggestions for the perfect Christmas gift:
No money? No problem. Christmas should be a shared & miserable experience for everybody! So, you don’t have to buy yourself some good, old-fashioned Christmas cheer. You can also just go and nick some:
About 450 kegs of Guinness beer and stout were lifted from under the noses of security guards in what is believed to be the first raid on the historic St James’s Gate Brewery at Victoria Quay along the River Liffey.
It took place as the police announced their Christmas traffic blitz, giving warning that 160 officers would be on patrol over the coming weeks and urging motorists in the traffic-choked city to leave their vehicles at home.
Meanwhile, the lone raider, who has already been nicknamed “the Beer Hunter” by Dublin wags, was driving his own HGV through the Guinness security gates, attaching it to a well-provisioned trailer and taking off with the makings of a very merry Christmas.
Well, people used to say, ‘Possession is theft’ – so confiscating a trailer of Guinness could be considered a victory for the old proletariat. Hell, God knows – sorry: Marx knows those old communists really could do with some cheering up.
The dreaded army from the East which would conquer the West so easily has proven to be a rather nice band of plumbers - and in his Moscow mausoleum the sweet smell of Lenin’s decomposing body has been replaced by the similarly cloying smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds cheeseburgers.
Yes, the Cold War is over and the good news is: the house that Big Brother built won.
Still, as we said, Christmas is almost upon us. So, we should all link arms and sing like the Spice Girls had never gone away. So, cheer up already, Goddammit!
Right, so sorry about that. I need some more eggnog. Hand me that fucking bowl! And that bottle of Jameson. Yes, much better. I really do feel full of cheer now. So much so that I will leave you with a perfect story for Christmas.
You know, I already mentioned the Cold War. Such a sad time, that. Mushroom clouds forever looming and the Riders of the Apocalypse threatening to come down on us like a gaggle of psychopathic hookers…
Not a nice time at all – but we’ve travelled a long way since then. As the following story of Russian & American cooperation so gloriously and quite seasonally shows:
Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place. He cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says.
“Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version.”
Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.
Mr Kohler says: “One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.”
Ah well, I suppose those who would mourn the demise or defrocking of the missionary postion can always console themselves by splashing out on the ‘believe in God breath spray.’
So, let’s say you decide to go on some Polar expedition and you get stuck in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. Or let’s say you are not such a frigging idiot but just happen to live way up North – let’s say in Toronto, Canada.
In either case it will be important to find ways to keep warm during the long, long winter. So, here’s a little list of things that will help you to do just that:
1) If you’re a certain type of Christian (or Muslim) bring books, lots of books. Harry Potter and the Satanic verses; Freud and Stephen King; The Best of Playboy and Richard Dawkins - and then burn them. Just remember to bring enough copies. It would be so traumatic if you were forced to burn the family Bible or Koran just because spring came a bit late that year.
2) Bring lovers – a serious few handfuls of lovers. At least one athletic type, and one with stamina. One who’s pretty but dumb and one who’s a lousy lay but can talk about books. A fat one for emergencies and a tall one to get things from places you can’t reach. One who shut ups and let you talk at all the right moments and one who makes you shut up and stop talking at the right moment. And a few disposable ones to kill off during those long, long nights that you feel more than usually disgruntled.
3) Make sure you bring enough sexy looking underwear. Splash out on reds. Penguins love to dress up in sexy underthings, so you will end up spending many a busy morning chasing the little buggers when they’ve gone and dressed up in your things again. They are slippery and faster than you think, so chasing them is a great get-all-het-up exercise.
4) Apart from burning books it’s also a good idea to burn lots of candles and lamps. Whale blubber is the absolute best for this but it’s not easy to kill a whale or to carry it home. So, club some seals instead. They are much easier to kill but it will still be a good work out session, cause they’re not all that easy to handle when they’re dead. There’s also the added bonus of having to beat off other hunters and the odd, offended Greenpeace campaigner. All in all, the preparation and burning of seal blubber lamps will keep you warm quite effectively.
5) Train a polar bear to open the doors for you. You don’t want to leave your warm bed & lover to do this yourself. Also, it’s great fun to watch a polar bear deal with Jehovah’s witnesses.
6) Order lots of pizza from joints that promise to deliver it to your door hot, with a money-back guarantee if they don’t. You’ll get all warmed up, shaking with laughter in your seal (of Jehovah’s witness) skin coat, just watching those dorks on their little scooters trying desperately to make it to your place in time over the slippery ice & snow, getting attacked by polar bears, seal hunters and angry environmental groups. Most importantly, it’s particularly heart-warming to know that they will never make it in the promised time, so that you can keep the pizza and send the little scooter dork back into the cold without any money to show for his efforts.
7) Be bad. be very bad. Treat the lovers you brought with you like shit. Be mean to you polar bear doorman, kick penguins and torture the odd walrus and encyclopedia salesman. Then make fun of fat guys with beards and small creatures with wings. That will guarantee that Santa and his elves will put coals in all the stocking you’ll hang up for them to fill. And all that coal will come in handy if you run out of books or seal blubber to burn.
