Glob-a-log

You know that old Oscar Wilde story, ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’? In short: a not so nice guy hangs a picture of himself in the attic. Each evil act he commits leaves its traces on the face in the portrait, while the man himself stays young and beautiful.

I was reminded of that when I read the following:

When “High School Musical” star Ashley Tisdale’s doll was unveiled last month at the TIA Toy Fair in New York City — complete with outfits based on the 22-year-old’s music video and red-carpet looks — there was one problem. The doll hardly looks like the new Ashley; it resembles the “High School Musical” star before her nose job last November, according to some who’ve seen then doll.

“The width of the doll’s nose and the nostrils look like her nose pre-surgery,” cosmetic surgeon Dr. Patrick Abergel, who doesn’t treat the star, told In Touch Weekly.

Hopefully, Ashley’s fans won’t mind: “Ashley feels great about her new nose now that it’s finally healed,” an insider told the mag.

‘The doll of Dorian Gray’ has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Of course, this is just one silly little nose job but give the girl time. At that age Michael Jackson still was black…

(Now there’s an interesting series of dolls for you – all those thousands of M.J’s pre-op dolls.)

Which only leaves one question. Who left Chucky out of the attic and who does it really belong to?

Libel laws probably won’t allow me to say who I think it is, but if those laws and a certain ‘church’ would be so kind to look away for a moment I’d still say it’s this guy:

There we go again…

Has everyone gone totally insane here in Europe?

Appeasement, anone?

Authorities in Berlin have closed down an exhibition of works by the Danish art group Surrend after protests by Muslims, organizers said Thursday. The protesters threatened to use violence if a series of satirical posters were not withdrawn from the exhibition at a city-centre gallery, the local arts council said.

One of the 21 posters on display depicts Islam’s holiest place, the cube-like Kaaba in Mecca, with the words “Stupid Stone” written above it.

People don’t learn from history, do they? You don’t cave in to fucking terrorists – or their threats.

Everybody who went out there and made those threats should have been arrested and prosecuted. Those without valid papers or carrying temporary passports should have been kicked out of the country straight away.

Those who condone or encourage these actions should be held to account as well. Any mosque involved should have their licence revoked. Anyone on the pay list of the government should have been fired.

You don’t give in to terrorist threats and you don’t tolerate ‘fellow travellers.’

You don’t like some art exposition? Cool, you are not forced to go to it. You have real problems with it? Fine, then fuck off to whichever place shares your insane and evil approach to life – i.e. that it is alright to use violence to ‘defend’ your religious sensibilities.

Or we could, of course, just be done with Western civilisation once and for all and just hand those Islamist Schutzstaffel types some petrol and stones as well, so they can start another Kristallnacht straight away.

I always thought jogging (and especially joggers) were a pain in the arse but this one is really the flaming pits:

Polish police are baffled after a cyclist was badly burned when his trousers burst into flames.

Mieczyslaw Jasinski, 55, told doctors he smelt burning and looked down to see his trousers had caught fire.

He jumped off his bike and rolled on the ground trying to douse the flames but suffered second degree burns to his legs, back and stomach.

Passers-by spotted him lying at the side of the road in Koroszczyn, still smoking from the tattered remains of his trousers and groaning in pain.

A police spokesman said: “Witnesses said he was like a flaming human torch cycling along the road.

“We do not know how it happened but we have heard that it could have been caused by a reaction between friction as he cycled, sweat and the material of his trousers.”

Right.

So, what caused this roadside inferno was a combination of sweat, friction and the type of material used.

Well, I can only hope the inventors of novelty condoms take note…

I’m not sure what to think of this story:

A Hungarian policewoman has been sacked after she was spotted in a hard-core porn movie.

Livia Kovacs, 36, from the Budapest police force was spotted in the Triple X rated movie by a colleague who then told superiors.

She has now been fired for bringing the force into disrepute and misuse of her police uniform.

Sorry to butt in here but I just don’t get that. The misuse of the uniform, I mean. I’d have thought there would not have been any problem if she’d just kept the damn thing on throughout the movie.

Ah well, maybe her superiors don’t approve of all those inane story lines in porn flicks. I can sympathize with that. It’s like George Bush sending Colin Powell to the UN, doing that whole stupid song and dance routine, while all the time you just KNEW he was going to invade Iraq anyway. So yeah, fuck storyline and just start shooting – I mean those sex scenes, of course.

Anyway, back to the story:

In the movies, she plays a dominatrix cop who uses her police handcuffs and a truncheon during a wild sex session.

Kovacs said:

“I don’t care about being fired. Since news spread about my acting debut I have been flooded with offers from producers to do more films.”

Well, good on her. One other thing though: I hope at least that the ‘colleague’ who ratted on her got fired as well.

Knowing what most of those guys are up to in those porn theaters, I’d say it’s more than likely that he got more stains on his uniform than she could ever hope to leave on the reputation of the Hungarian police force.

Well, it’s been a while since we last heard from him, but Michael Jackson is back. He’s also proving that he truly is one of the people. Subprime justice, anyone?

Michael Jackson is to lose his eccentric American property, The Neverland Ranch, unless he can raise $25 million in the next three weeks. The onetime King of Pop will see the property, a child’s wonderland complete with carnival rides and a mock Tudor mansion, auctioned on March 19 after Financial Title Co. filed a trustee’s sale notice with Santa Barbara County Superior Court.

The ranch, named after the island in the JM Barrie novel Peter Pan where children never grow up, will be auctioned on March 19, according to Julie Wagner, a manager at the San Francisco-based Financial Title Co. Court documents warn Jackson, 49, that he has until the date of the auction to take action to maintain ownership of the unusual estate, situated in Los Olivos, north-west of Santa Barbara.

Still, it’s sad. He had some good times there, no doubt and I’m sure he’ll miss it.

Talking of missing things, Dick Cheney finds himself in a little bit of bother too. Not that one would like to compare the excellent Cheney to the misfit Jackson, of course. Cheney never stood trial for child abuse, for instance. Hell, he didn’t even stand trial for shooting a friend in the face. So, no real comparisons there, of course.

Further more, Cheney’s not exactly in any real estate trouble. As long as Pelosi keeps being a good little German, the vice-president is not exactly in danger of having to hand back his office keys. He’s still missing something though – and, like the former King of Pop, he ain’t all that thrilled about things anymore. Like poor old Michael he would love to tell all his detractors to beat it but they won’t go away. It’s so unfair though, all Cheney ever wanted to do was heal the world and still his enemies want to paint him as some smooth criminal. It’s bad. Real bad.

(Okay, enough with the lame Michael Jackson song title jokes. Though I can see Dick and Michael, sitting in some pub, drowning their sorrows and singing ‘They don’t care about us.’)

Oh, and what Dick Cheney was missing – well, as I said, nothing major; not some promised never Neverland. Just some silly bits of paper:

WASHINGTON - When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wanted to find out what was going on inside Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, the prosecutor in the CIA leak probe made a logical move. He dropped a grand jury subpoena on the White House for all the relevant e-mail.

One problem: Even though White House computer technicians hunted high and low, an entire week’s worth of e-mail from Cheney’s office was missing. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the Justice Department’s probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

‘O tempora, o mores!’ is an old Roman saying that loosely translates as ‘Fucking kids, these days!’

So, it’s nice to see how the great-great-grandchildren of these Romans try to turn back the clock, by enforcing some better ‘mores’ on these, by and large quite vulgar ‘tempora’.

They’re not pointing their scornful arrows at lay-about teenagers though. They don’t care about these little pricks, really. It’s the big dicks they’re after:

In a landmark judgement with far-reaching social implications, Italy’s highest appeals court has ruled it is a criminal offence for Italian men to touch their genitals in public. The practice has become increasingly frowned on, but “io mi tocco i … “, which translates as “I touch my … ” is still a common phrase, roughly equivalent to “fingers crossed”. The judges helpfully suggested that those seeking reassurance should wait till they had returned to the privacy of their own homes before letting their hands stray trouser-wards.

The judges of the court of cassation stressed that the ban did not just apply to brazen crotch-scratching, but also to what might be termed superstitious pre-emption. Anyone who has seen a hearse go past in Italy, or been part of a discussion in which some terrible illness or disaster is mentioned, will know it is traditional for men to ward off bad luck with a quick grab at what are delicately called their “attributi”.

The judges said such actions risked generating “awkwardness, disgust and disapproval in the average man”, unexpectedly perhaps failing to mention the average woman.

Indeed – women might have something to say about this subject too.

What’s more, they would probably have their own ideas about the best way to deal with guys who can’t control either their filthy minds or groping hands.

However, as we can see from the article below, most Italian men would probably prefer the ruling of these (mostly male?) Italian judges over the righteous wrath of and the more hands-on approach to justice by some women.

Like the wife of some hapless Chinese fellow.

Come to think of it, ‘hands-on’ might not be the happiest of terms…

A Chinese wife has cut her husband’s right hand off because of his internet addiction.

Jiang Ming of Chengdu city promised his wife, He Ling, that he would not go on the internet anymore and would spend more time at home to take care of their newborn son.

But after a short time he started to sneak into nearby internet cafes again to have video chats with girls.

“I was on the internet, and suddenly felt a numbness in my right hand. The arrow on the screen stopped moving,” says Jiang Ming.

“Then I found that my right hand was on the mouse pad, and blood was shooting out.”

In court, the husband pleaded with the judge to release his wife, since he was to blame for breaking his promise

You know, in politics, it’s quite hard to come up with new ideas. Most of the problems you encounter are familiar ones – and most of the solutions seem to involve doing the same stuff that countless other folks have tried before you.

Which, incidentally, comes close to the working definition of insanity: expecting a different outcome while doing the same stuff over and over again.

Politicians always like to talk about ‘thinking outside the box.’ Not many of them ever do, of course. They may be ticked off by that old box but ticking off familiar boxes is all they ever learned to do.

So, hats off to Edmond’s mayor Saundra Naifeh who, for once, came with a highly original idea to stop kids from drinking.

She took that old cliché ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ and turned it around in a quite revolutionary way, ‘Don’t join them but beat off instead!’

Michael Jackson would have been so proud…

EDMOND, Okla. - The mayor personally distributed thousands of fliers discouraging underage drinking only to find they mistakenly contained the phone number for a sex talk line.

Callers dialing the number were promised “exciting live talk” if they called a second number offering provocative telephone conversations or text messages costing 99 cents to $2.99 a minute.

Some things are so depressing they become almost hysterically funny.

You remember this quote from last year, I trust. It’s probably as indelibly fixed in the collective mind as ‘Read my lips, no more taxes’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ (or ‘I did not have sex with that woman’.)

Anyway, this is what Pamela Anderson said last year on a TV Talkshow:

“I paid off a poker debt with sexual favors and I fell in love. It’s so romantic.”

Which came after the following parental guidance message she wrote on her blog before ’sleeping off’ her gambling debts:

“I’m not really engaged. I don’t know what I am,” she sidestepped. “We may never get that far. We’re in love. This is nice. I’ve tried to remarry — move on — like any other single mom I’ve tried to create a healthy example for my kids always,” she wrote on her Web site in March.

Yup, she’s a healthy, old so-and-so alright.

Anyway, I’m bringing all of this up because of the following bit of news:

Pam Anderson sure knows how to pick ‘em. She married heavy metal douchebag Tommy Lee twice, then wed scrubby rap/rock star Kid Rock. That marriage clocked in at just three months and ended amid claims from Kid that Pam faked a miscarriage to get him to cancel his tour. Not long after the ink on that divorce dried, Pam married Rick Salomon, after claiming that she paid off a poker debt to him in sexual favors. That marriage lasted even less time than her marriage to kid. Now, the aging Playmate has decided that her marriage to Rick was such a mistake, a plain old divorce isn’t enough– she wants an annulment. Pam stipulates that both parties are not entitled to any property, assets or spousal support, and that the grounds of the annulment are based on fraud.

So, why fraud? Did she, after all, did not perform after Salomon paid for her services – or was her performance substandard, perhaps? Or did she give it all her hooker’s heart’s worth, just to hear that the Johnny then went for the second-oldest trick in the book by refusing to pay afterwards?

Ah, to have been a fly on that brothel’s wall…

By the way, I do admit that a far better question would have been, quite obviously, ‘Why bring the whole sorry mess up at all?’

Well, apart from the obvious, voyeuristic reasons this whole annulment thing got me thinking about something else. I hadn’t known that fraud was a good enough reason for an annulment. Now I know that it is, I’m wondering if this might not apply to the world of politics as well.

We can’t use the more traditional  ‘not consummated’ argument with the guy, because he truly fucked us over (and over and over…) for the last eight years but surely we can get him on fraud…

From announcing, right at the start, that  he was going to unite the country, through the weapons of mass destruction mess, to the ‘Heck of a job, Brownie’ brouhaha and the torture thing…

I’d say there’s material enough there to go for more than a few fraud claims.

Pelosi and the other (fraudulent) failures in Washington keep telling us that we can’t impeach the little born-again bastard. Fine – but can we then at least do what Pam did and go for an annulment?

One of the most unfortunate side-effects of global warming is that it has turned one of the funniest columnists in England into a petty-minded ideologist who hasn’t been able to talk or write about anything these last years without moaning about it.

I am, I’m afraid, talking about Jeremy Clarkson – and I wish I wasn’t. As I already mentioned, he used to be so good that I was positively afraid for him. I could see his colleagues gathering outside Castle Clarkson, muttering among themselves about the evil master who lived there, their envy as sharp as their pitchforks. Yes, I could see these descendants of extras in an old Dracula movie yearning to drive a stake through their competitor’s heart…

No longer though. Clarkson has joined the ranks of the true believers – those who lose their sense of humour and sense of self by taking on the heavy burden of self-righteousness and the dead weight of their convictions.

Still, there is hope – because I haven’t come here to bury J.C. but to praise him.

Maybe he’s turned a corner, perhaps some of his real friends have taken him aside and told him a few unwelcome but necessary truths. Maybe – but I sincerely hope not! - what happened today is once last spasm, one last rising spark, before this once great columnist sinks back and ever deeper in the mire of evangelical certainty and prophetic zeal.

Still, I sincerely hope that the latter will not prove to be the case. Reading today’s wonderful column I realized for the first time how much I had truly missed the man, before he turned into yet another boring Jeremiah.

So, I hope this latest column will just be the first stop on a proud and triumphant ’soul reunion’ tour, before he settles down again to become, once more, the columnist that makes his colleagues look like B-movie extras.

By the way, if you were planning to go skiing shortly, you might want to look away now, for Clarkson has some very funny and very painful things to say about the subject. All the rest of you: enjoy, as long as you promise to go read the rest of the column in today’s online Times straight afterwards.

Rest me to say but this: Mr Clarkson, glad to have you back on form. Please don’t go away again and leave us with that boring old body snatcher of late…:

For your next holiday, why don’t you take all your money and put it on the fire? Then stand in a fridge for a week, beating your children with a baseball bat until their arms and legs break. And then, after you’ve eaten some melted cheese, dislocate your shoulder. If all of this appeals then you are probably one of the 1.3m British people who go on a skiing holiday at this time of year.

Falling over, however, is not the greatest danger. Far worse is being hit by a teenager with baggy trousers on a snowboard. Snowboarding is like skiing, except you have absolutely no control over your direction of travel, mostly because you will have had a lot of marijuana at lunch time.

You know how psychotherapists can be. Obsessed with sex is how they can be. To quantify their obsession with this human need, think numbers. One psychotherapist is as obsessed with sex as a congregation of around 5000 Evangelical Christians – or, to use another kind of control group, about one third of a fourteen-year old boy.

And that’s seriously obsessed, my friends.

So, if, as an adult, you would decide to go see a shrink, you shouldn’t feel embarrassed for him. It’s just part of what he does: to translate every little thing you tell him into some phantasmagorical landscape even Salvador Dali would frown at.

For instance, you tell him about a dream you’ve been having, in which your stepfather tries to kill you with a garden gnome. When you’ve finished don’t be alarmed if your psychotherapist starts to drool a bit and then explains to you how, as a child, you wanted to have sex with the guy or (and here the shrink will try to give you a sympathetic look) that, for years, you were in fact sexually abused by your stepfather but have repressed this horrible fact up till now.

When the shrink has shared this with you, just nod and tell him how fantastic you think he is and that he’s the best you’ve ever had, etcetera, etcetera – and don’t try to tell him the much more mundane origins of this dream.

He wouldn’t believe you anyway. On the other hand, and to be fair to the shrink, not many people would. Even though the godfather of sexual obsession himself, Sigmund Freud, once admitted, that ‘Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.’

The same goes for garden gnomes, it would seem:

GREENSBURG, Pa. — A Greensburg man accused of assaulting his stepdaughter with a garden gnome early Wednesday was arrested, police said.

The girl claims she managed to push him out the back porch door, police said. A neighbor told police she saw Morrison throw the garden gnome through the window. Morrison was jailed on $25,000 bond, charged with aggravated assault, simple assault and harassment.