Glob-a-log

Not all that surprisingly, the following story took place near Fruitvale…

You know how big companies like Coca Cola, General Motors and Starbucks spend millions and millions of dollars on advertising campaigns. Still, sometimes, you only need someone with a handheld camera who happens to be at the right place, at the right time, to shoot the perfect ad.

By the way, if you’d want to inspire people and give them an example of absolute and determined dedication, you could do worse than tell them about a 22-year-old driver from Oakland, California.

No greater love has any woman for her caffeine fix…

OAKLAND, Calif. — A woman swam to safety early Thursday after her car careened off a roadway and splashed into the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, floating to rest underneath a home built on stilts above the waterway.

The 22-year-old female driver, on her way to work at a nearby Brinks office, was able to knock out a window, climb out of the floating vehicle and swim to safety. Onlookers said she came ashore still cradling her coffee cup.

I think the whole War on Terror idea is a monstrous stupidity at best – and at worst a cynical ploy by our governments to keep us afraid and to keep them in office. Following that latter argument: enough people in the Republican administration must have realised Bush would never have been reelected without 9/11. So, it would make sense to use and manipulate the terror threat to keep the sheep so afraid of the idea of wolves that they would choose to follow even the most incompetent and corrupt shepherd.

I also believe bureaucracies are forces for evil. Within bureaucracies people stop to act and think as moral and responsible human beings. They will hide inside and behind these structures and are able to do the most monstrous things while using the ‘just following orders’ excuse/explanation. To make the most obvious comparison: the machinery behind the Nazi death camps was a perfect bureaucratic construct. Bureaucracies are also a great place and a magnet for petty and small-minded people who just love a bit of power and a big machine to hide behind when their decisions are questioned.

So, when you start with the fear-mongering monstrosity that is the War on Terror and its moronically perverse child ‘Homeland Security’ and you combine that with the societal evil of bureaucracies, you can be assured that things will soon get out of hand.

Which leads to stories like the following:

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems. The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said. Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said. She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring. She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

“After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove. The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary,” Allred wrote. “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.”

Manners matter – and in a way bad manners matter almost more than good manners. For this is age of celebrity culture, the ‘me me me’ age of l’Oréal clones, where greed is as much applauded as any other self-indulgent search for self-enrichment, self-development, self-this, self-that and the other.

People feel entitled to everything and responsible for nothing. It used to be that people (rightly or wrongly) looked up to their ‘betters’ and expected these folks to lead upstanding lives and make us follow by their example. These days, for way too many of us the role models are the empty-headed celebs, junkie pop stars, megalomaniac actors – and all those spoilt football players, of course:

Ashley Cole turned his back on a referee who was about to show him a yellow card. Javier Mascherano had to be pulled away from an official who had just given him a red one. At a time when the leaders of English soccer launch a campaign for players at all levels to show respect to those struggling to keep them in order, the big names aren’t listening. Neither, it seems, are the coaches.

Cole’s petulant behavior for Chelsea against Tottenham last week when he was considered lucky to avoid a red card should have been punished by England manager Fabio Capello. The Italian, who is trying to instill better discipline into his squad, should have sent out a message to the highly paid Chelsea left back and others inclined to similar misbehavior by dropping him. Instead, Cole is likely to be lining up for England against France on Wednesday as if nothing happened in last week’s 4-4 draw at White

His behavior, standing defiantly with his back to referee Mike Riley, who was repeatedly asking him to turn around, dragged the name of Premier League soccer back into the mud at a time when Football Association chairman Lord David Triesman is trying to persuade youngsters to show more respect to the officials. If Cole behaves like that and Mascherano chases after referee Steve Bennett over his red card, what’s the point of Triesman preaching a good behavior message to young players who copy the stars?

What’s the point indeed?

Well, as I said, manners matter. Without good manners, without the more or less gracious give and take of social intercourse, there can’t be any kind of real civilisation. Without this glue (and lubricant) societies will be a collection of individuals, locked up together inside a cage. The cage may be luxurious but the rats will turn on each other anyway – sooner rather than later.

So, I was thinking of these spoilt football stars when I came upon the following article:

A man has talked himself into nearly two years in jail after threatening to kill a Shelby County criminal court judge. Joshua Beadle, who was appearing in court on burglary and rape charges, has been held in contempt and sentenced to 10 days per word after a judge ordered him to stop the threatening comments. Judge Lee Coffee stopped counting at 70 words and sentenced Beadle to 700 days in jail.

Beadle was shackled and outfitted in a special hooded spit mask during the hearing Monday after spitting at the judge at a hearing in January. Beadle missed the judge and instead hit a clerk’s computer. Through his nylon-and-mesh spit mask, he apologized to the clerk on Monday and assured her that his intended target was the judge.

Now, when I read that I couldn’t help but think that our societies needed many more judge Lee Coffees.

I would swap the West’s ludicrous War on Terror within seconds for a War on Antisocial Behaviour. And let’s start right from the top: with out freak show celebs, our lying politicians, our corrupt Savings & Loans, Enron, Halliburton managers – and those idiotic football players, of course.

If the people who, for a large part, set the tone for our societies refuse to be good examples, we should at the very least make examples of them.

Though I’m not sure we could teach any of them the kind of good manners this burglar and rapist showed by apologizing to that courtroom clerk.

It’s been like a J.K. Rowling book, Harry Potter and the Bleeding Ban of Blackpool, or something to that effect – but the long, forced exile is over and the curse has been lifted.

So, after more than four decades the Stones can finally stop rolling and take some well-deserved time off, to lie on the beach and gather some moss:

A BAN on the ROLLING STONES playing in a seaside resort has been lifted — after 44 YEARS.

The former hellraisers, fronted by MICK JAGGER, were barred from performing in Blackpool after a 1964 ballroom concert ended in a riot.

Fifty people were taken to hospital after rowdy fans tore up seats, smashed chandeliers and threw bottles.

But council leader Peter Callow said: “The ban has now been lifted and the group are welcome to play here again.”

Well, it ain’t exactly the story of Moby Dick & mad captain Ahab but it’s interesting enough.

And slightly sad, in a way:

Fish will one day be able to catch themselves if an experiment by US scientists proves successful. Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts, are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by using a sound broadcast to attract them into a net.

They hope to release fish into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, before enticing them into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear a tone that signals feeding time. If successful, the system could be used to bolster depleted fish stocks and reduce the costs of fish farming, scientists said.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s real,” said Simon Miner, a research assistant at MBL. Mr Miner said the first step in the project was to establish whether fish could be trained. Fish, including black sea bass, stout and bottom-dwelling fish, were kept in a circular tank and fed in an enclosed feeding area within the tank.

Scientists would sound a tone before they dropped food into the feeding area, which the fish could enter through a small opening. The tone was played for 20 second, three times a day, for about two weeks. The result, according to Mr Miner, was “remote-control fish”.

“You hit that button and they go into that area and they wait patiently,” he said.

It’s an intriguing idea – but hardly original. Politicians have been doing it for ages with more or less the same results.

Just before the have to write out elections they lower taxes or start a war or give other crowd-pleasing signals…

… and in their millions schools of voters swim obediently towards the ballot boxes to worship the hands that feed them.

The British Royal Air Force is celebrating its 90th birthday. That’s nice, because for the rest the British armed forces don’t have much to celebrate these days.

Iraq hasn’t been a huge success – and a the moment what’s left of the British army there is hiding out at some obscure Basra airport, while fighting in the area is now intensifying. In Afghanistan things aren’t going all that much better, to be honest – and the much acclaimed War on terror isn’t even close to being won.

In other words, morale at home and abroad isn’t all that high. So, it’s a good thing that some smart folks at the RAF got together and came up with a new approach to engage the enemy. I have to say that the result is quite impressive. I’m not sure what the Geneva Convention will have to say about it, because the whole thing is more than a bit irregular.

In fact, one could say this new approach is a cross between the new-fangled dirty bomb and the more classical sex bomb:

The Royal Air Force is celebrating its 90th anniversary with the launch of a “show-stopping” diamante-encrusted bikini.

The swimwear, which leaves little room for hanging medals, is part of the RAF Collection’s Spring range. A spokeswoman for the RAF Collection said: “The collection will enable the next generation to own a piece of one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious brands.”

In RAF colours, the bikini top retails at £20, while the bottoms are £15. Sizes are available in 8 to 18. The RAF Collection website, which sells the bikini online, describes it as a “show-stopping bikini (which) will make anyone’s head turn, yet which is distinctly tasteful and flattering to the figure”. The garment is also available through mail order.

Ah, but what a piece of work is man…

You know that old saying, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

Most of the time that’s the politer way of saying, ‘Don’t let the door hit your arse on your way out.’

Sometimes though, this promise is kept – with quite hilarious results:

Robbers don’t usually leave phone numbers behind, but on Monday, at a Northwest Side muffler shop, a man asked employees to give him a call when their boss came back to open a safe, an employee said Tuesday.

When the 18-year-old returned a few hours later, plainclothes Chicago police officers shot and wounded him in the leg, police said. Ruben Zarate of the 5100 of West Schubert Avenue was charged Tuesday with attempted armed robbery and aggravated assault of a police officer, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said.

The incident started about 8 a.m., when the masked man, armed with a revolver, came in to Velasquez Mufflers For Less at 2600 N. Laramie Ave. and began demanding money, said Jose Sida, 37, a mechanic. Employees told him they had little money and couldn’t open the safe, so the man left two phone numbers for them to call when the owner returned with the combination, Sida said.

“He said, ‘You guys better call me because otherwise I’m going to come back to shoot you,’” Sida said.

Instead, an employee called Chicago police. Officers dressed in plainclothes came to the shop and told employees to call the man, Sida said. The man returned about noon, wearing the same mask and black clothing and officers told the employees to get to the back of the shop, Sida said. A police source said the teen pulled a gun from his hooded sweat shirt and at least one officer opened fire. Zarate’s injury was not thought to be life-threatening, the source said.

Of course, getting your legs shot from under you is slightly worse than a door hitting your arse on your way out but at least the robber can take some comfort from the fact that the guys who’d promised to call him back didn’t pull his leg.

Damn, I already knew that cats were antisocial, contrary and downright dangerous critters…

… but I’d never thought they would go so far as to join Bin Laden’s army of mad bombers:

A US driver was stopped on suspicion of being a terrorist after his radioactive cat was mistaken for a bomb. Anti-terror police using specialist radiation detectors on motorway traffic flagged down the man. But a search of his car revealed only his cat who had undergone radiotherapy for cancer three days earlier.

Deputy chief border agent Joe Giuliano revealed details of the incident to a meeting of San Juan Islanders, reports the Seattle Times. “Vehicle goes by at 70mph,” he said. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope.”

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot. The agent questioned the driver, then searched the car. “Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said. “That’s the type of technology we have that’s going on in the background. You don’t see it. If I hadn’t told you about it, you’d never know it was there.”

I do hope this was just an isolated incident – just one brain-washed moggie with a hare-brained, hair-trigger plan – because if all domestic cats would join Al Qaeda we’d be in deep shit.

Still, better safe than sorry, so we should stop asking the presidential candidates about past mishaps and future plans. Just a simple ‘Are you a dog or a cat person?’ will suffice for now.

Ah well, you can’t leave them alone for a minute…

With my thanks to Lost in Showbiz reporter Marina Hyde for breaking in this story:

You know how you’ve overheard people dissing Paris Hilton, and felt like totally calling them out and just DARING them to walk a mile in her shoes?

Well, consider your dreams fulfilled. Paris has released her first shoe line.

So every person who has ever sneered, every person who has ever sniggered, every person who has ever doubted that Being Paris Is Hard…. well, they are all hereby enabled to walk a mile in a leopardskin-effect polyurethane pump - style name: the Nicole! - after which they will know the Paris Hilton burden for themselves.

Paris Hilton shoes… What next?

I mean, she’s not exactly known for keeping her shoes – or anything else – on for longer than a few seconds at any given time.

Well, at least it’s slightly less improbable than a Paris Hilton underwear line.

Most sequels are pretty useless, of course.

Take Bush.

Some are more eagerly expected though, so there was great jubilation, amongst those who care for these kinds of things, when Sir Ian McKellen announced on his website that he will most probably play Gandalf again in the coming Hobbit film:

Sir Ian McKellen is to don the grey beard of Gandalf once more and reprise his role in the forthcoming film of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The respected actor has confirmed on his website that he will play the wizard again, delighting fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When questioned as to whether he would take up the role, Sir Ian writes: “Yes I will, if Peter Jackson and I have anything to do with it, he being the producer and me being, on the whole, a very lucky actor”.

It is believed that a contract has not yet been signed but that plans are underway to start shooting one of two of The Hobbit films next year. When asked by another fan if he has been approached by Peter Jackson or anyone else he replies:

“Encouragingly, Peter and Fran Walsh have told me they couldn’t imagine The Hobbit without their original Gandalf. Their confidence hasn’t yet been confirmed by the director Guillermo del Toro but I am keeping my diary free for 2009.”

Of course, it isn’t quite a done deal yet.

Like Hillary has already found out, it’s all good and well to plan for success and to feel that you are entitled to whatever role – or crown – you crave, but quite another to convince the people that matter that you actually should have it.

On the whole though, I’d say that Sir Ian is damn more likely to get the part he wants than Hillary Clinton is – but then, if he’d be allowed to run for that other job, he might have brushed her aside with ease and would have given both Obama and McCain a good run for their money as well.

Yes, it’s such a pity for your average politician (and especially in Hillary’s case, one feels) that there is no place where they teach you that kind of magic anymore – outside of Hogwarts, I suppose.