Glob-a-log

Christ, but what is it with those damn priests?

First, they can’t keep their hands off our children, and now they’re stealing other priests’ sermons from the Internet. Okay, I suppose that is slightly better than trolling the Web for paedophile porn sites but as a type of behaviour it’s still not exactly in the ‘What would Jesus have done?’ category:

Poland’s 28,000 Roman Catholic priests have been told by church authorities that they may be fined if they are discovered to have plagiarised their sermons from the internet, and could even face up to three years in prison. The church has published a self-help book on writing sermons to lure parish priests away from the growing habit of stealing the words of their fellow clergy.

Father Wieslaw Przyczyna, the co-author of To Plagiarise or not to Plagiarise, told Polish media that the guide had been written to address what had become an increasingly common problem, as more churches put their sermons online and an increasing numbers of priests used the internet.

The 150-page Polish guide is being sold to priests in for £6. But Przyczyna has already faced a backlash to his anti-plagiarism crusade. He told the online Catholic News Service that he had received complaints for “harassing priests and exposing their weaknesses”.

Well, yes, we all know only too well that the church doesn’t like it when the ‘weaknesses’ of its priests are exposed.

That can, after all, cost the church a Hell of a lot of money in reparations and out of court settlements.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that many within the church still believe in those old Omerta virtues - and while plagiarism might not be as serious and ultimately as costly as raping children, it is quite remarkable that so many still automatically defend any kind of criminal activity by the clergy and brand those who object to these crimes as people who harass priests.

It truly is as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

You obviously do not need to be (or have read a lot of) Freud to understand why men appreciate images of women consuming certain types of food.

Any heterosexual male claiming not to see anything erotic at all in a photo of, let’s say, tennis player Maria Sharapova eating a banana, is lying. Or has been dead for at least a couple of weeks.

So, one would not be surprised to read about some scientific research project which found that women who ate lots of bananas in public had no problem attracting men.

Which is what the following study showed, more or less - well, okay, it showed a hell of a lot more than that, really. It’s not just that eating lots of bananas will deliver the boys to you but that banana loving women will also deliver more boys themselves:

A new study has found that women who eat a lot of bananas before conceiving have an increased chance of having boys than their non banana eating counterparts. Researchers say it’s because a high potassium diet is linked to having boys.

First, this:

In The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E.P. Evans listed 37 prosecutions of swine between the ninth and nineteenth centuries. A few examples: In 1266, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, a pig convicted of having eaten a child was publicly burned by order of the monks of Sainte Genevieve. In 1394, a pig was found guilty of “having killed and murdered a child in the parish of Roumaygne, in the county of Mortaing, for which deed the said pig was condemned to be haled and hanged by Jehan Petit, lieutenant of the bailiff.”

Etcetera, etcetera. The Middle Ages really was a fun place to be - if you weren’t a pig. Or a woman. Or a Jew. Or anyone being vaguely human.

Not that things have changed all that much. When it comes to being mind-bogglingly stupid, primitive, superstitious and what have you, the human animal hasn’t evolved much since it dropped from those first trees.

Like the following New Zealand blokes, for whom this great line by Carlos Ruiz Zafón could be written, ‘One of those people who fall off the tree and never quite reach the ground.’ Which comes from his marvellous book ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, by the way.

Back to those New Zealand clowns though - be it more than a bit reluctantly:

Three drunken men carried out an axe attack on a tree they blamed for a car crash that killed a friend, a court was told yesterday. Harry James Hayward Swain, 23, Paul James Ashby, 22, and Zac Lance Pearsey, 24, meat worker, pleaded guilty in Gore District Court yesterday to intentionally damaging the Gore District Council-owned tree on November 25 last year.

The attack was carried out just over 12 hours after talented rugby player Jeremy Cowan was killed when the car he was a passenger in hit the tree in Gore’s main street, The Southland Times reported. Police prosecutor Sergeant Grant Gerken said the men hacked out a hole 20cm to 30cm wide and 10cm deep in the tree.

They told police they thought the tree was responsible for their friend’s death.

Remember Tania Derveaux? The woman who offered to give 40.000 blow-jobs when elected to the Belgium senate?

Well, she’s at it again, now campaigning for Internet neutrality - and offering to have sex with virgins to deliver this…

Don’t ask.

She offers a real contract, with all the usual elements, like ‘Acceptance of Terms’. ‘Description of Services’ and, of course, ‘General Requirements and Rules of Conduct’:

3. General Requirements and Rules of Conduct
Services will only be provided to those who meet the following requirements:

* applicants must be 18yrs old or above
* condom must be used, except if the applicant prefers to release his semen upon Tania’s body without any oral or vaginal contact
* Anal sex is negotiable, although Tania will cease the performance immediately if any form of ’surprise buttsex’ occurs
* multiple participants are not allowed, but applicants are entitled to have an audience observe the performance
* if anywhere along the process, it becomes clear that the applicant is not a virgin, Tania reserves the right to terminate all activity
* applicant must be able to provide sufficient evidence that clearly shows he has been defending net neutrality (eg. a print-out of a forum post, a link to a vlog)
* applicant agrees that in the event of the applicant infringing upon Terms of Service during the process of the act, Tania is not responsible for any genital injury that the applicant may suffer
* Tania may deny service for hygiene reasons

Lovely.

Sanity is like oil: a rapidly diminishing resource.

Take Madonna’s latest remarks on the terrible plight of Tom Cruise:

Madonna believes Tom Cruise gets a “raw deal” for believing in Scientology. The pop superstar, who is a follower of controversial religion Kabbalah, a mystical off-shoot of Judaism insists the actor should be allowed to practice his faith without being ridiculed.

She told New York magazine: “I don’t care if people worship turtles or frogs! All I care about is whether they are good people and Tom is a good person. He gets a raw deal, just like the orphans in Malawi get a raw deal. I think a lot of marginalised people get a raw deal.”

I’m sure her Magsesty is right: Many marginalised people are indeed being marginalised.

Not many of them are couch climbing millionaire movie stars though, professing a belief in some highly weird ‘turtles and frogs’ indeed.

As most people - apart from Madonna - seem to understand though, it’s not necessarily the voices talking to you that are the problem but what you do about them. And when one of the things you do is to tell your wife to stop screaming while she delivers a baby without the benefit of pain-killers or attack people in public for seeking psychiatric help, well, then you come to a point where it becomes a public duty to ‘marginalise’ people who spend their time in public praising these various turtles and frogs.

On a less abstract level though, Mrs Madonna: about poor Tom Cruise being as bad off as a Malawi orphan? Are you too stupid or too indifferent to see the difference between a starving orphan and a pampered Hollywood star?

Would it were true, of course: Tom Cruise being a Malawi orphan. Though with our luck some idiot like Madonna would then adopt him and bring him to the West.

It’s an amazing story and it shows that cricket’s ICC (International Cricket Cunts) is, if possible, made up of even more despicable folks than the International Olympic Crooks:

In an extraordinary development today Malcolm Speed, the ICC’s chief executive, was put on paid leave until his contract expires on July 4 after a severe falling-out with the ICC’s president, Ray Mali, over the organisation’s handling of Zimbabwean cricket.

Mali and Speed reportedly disagreed on the ICC’s decision not to take any major action against Zimbabwe despite a damning independent audit of Zimbabwean cricket recently carried out by KPMG. Speed had previously refused to attend a media conference after the March meeting at which the ICC decided to overlook the audit. He said at the time that he was not prepared to defend in public a decision with which he fundamentally disagreed. Speed clearly believed that the conduct of senior Zimbabwean cricket officials should have been referred to the ICC’s ethics committee.

Mali, who has always made it clear that he supported Zimbabwe cricket and its officials, was believed to have been outraged by Speed’s statement. Subsequently he has gained support from a number of board members and successfully moved to have Speed sidelined into paid leave.

If it wasn’t so absolutely horrendous, it would be very funny. Mugabe has been terrorising, starving and killing his people and is now busily preparing for full scale genocide and the ICC is not only ignoring all of this in its ’sports ain’t politics’ stance, it’s even bending over and spreading its arse cheeks for this evil dictatorship, not even wanting to know if the Mugabe battery boys broke the rules of the noble game itself.

It’s even worse than the president of the IOC bemoaning the disruption of the Olympic flame tour, choosing the side of those who rape Tibet over people who want to protest this and the many other crimes against humanity China habitually commits.

As always, both the IOC and the ICC want us to know that nothing should stand in the way of their corrupt little games. So, if the Olympic flame scorches Tibet in passing, tough - and if the people in Zimbabwe are being butchered in the street by Mugabe’s thugs, who gives a fuck? This is sport, this is big business.

And politics ain’t cricket, that’s for sure.

Okay, you have your old time star-crossed lovers - and those traditional starry-eyed lovers.

Add to the mix now your glass-eyed lovers…

MONROE, Conn. — A Monroe woman is suing her husband, claiming he caused her to lose an eye when he threw a carrot at her during an argument, from about 20 feet away.

The woman’s lawyer says Pamela Vecsey was hit in the left eye by the carrot which ruptured the eyeball. The eye was removed and she now has a glass eye. Roderick Vecsey was arrested and charged with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct. The charges against him were later dropped.

The couple still live together.

Love conquers all - more or less.

Though it won’t exactly improve the humble carrot’s claim that it enhances your eyesight.

However, what the story does show is that whatever feminists think, some guys obviously should never be allowed to help out in the kitchen.

Now, here’s an interesting idea for you:

An English village is so taken with the benefits of being Welsh, including free prescriptions and free hospital car parking, that it is holding a referendum on becoming part of Wales. Residents of Audlem, Cheshire, nine miles from the Welsh border, have organised an online poll asking villagers whether it is time to break away from England.

Short of the biggest constitutional shake-up since the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan made Monmouthshire part of Wales, the village is unlikely to come under the control of the Welsh Assembly any time soon. However, residents say that simply holding the poll will tell politicians that there is an issue of increasing inequality between countries in Britain that needs addressing.

It’s a charming concept - and less messy than parliamentary elections or an actual revolution. It could become quite a popular idea as well.

We’ve heard the head of England’s Anglican church talk favourably about installing certain forms of Sharia law. Following Audlem’s example Archbishop Rowan Williams might just choose to pick up the old town of Canterbury and take it to Saudi Arabia.

Me, I’d like the Dutch town of Utrecht to become a part of the Czech republic, since our own beer is cheap, mass-produced shit that nevertheless sells for the price of plutonium - and because the bars and shops (and life) just never closes down in Prague and they don’t have these obsessive anti-smoking imbeciles around. That the Czech women are among the most beautiful in the world is an interesting bonus.

What’s more, whole countries could decide they’d rather burn their own flags and go marching to a different anthem altogether. Most of England would probably be glad to to leave both ‘New’ labour and the Tories behind and join Brazil. Not only would it rid them of all the usual stuff the English are forever complaining about, it would also give them an actual chance to win - Hell, to qualify for - another international football tournament.

On a much sadder note I’m quite sure that 99.9% of the people of Zimbabwe would love to be somewhere else - anywhere else, in fact, as long as it was far away from their own mad dictator and his evil thugs.

In the USA things could become quite interesting too. It’s God’s own country, as we all know only too well, so Americans wouldn’t want to opt out but they might, like the citizens of that small English town, want to rearrange things - along the formerly very bloody lines that were fought over during their civil war. The pro and anti Bushies could then divide the continent and call both parts America.

As I said, a bit like that old segregationist war, with one huge difference, of course and that’s that the plantation owners now actually rule in Washington.

Hey, what do you know, Hubble is old enough to vote - or to die for his country in some senseless oil war, if it weren’t for the fact that Hubble is a bit too far away from the polling boots and not all that easy to recruit either.

Being a telescope (and being stationed in space) helps with avoiding most manmade messes, of course:

A series of spectacular images of galaxies crashing into each other has been made public to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s coming of age.

Hubble was launched 18 years ago on April 24, 1990, and to mark the anniversary space scientists have picked out 59 pictures of the cosmic collisions.

Anyway, happy birthday, Hubble - and thanks for all the lovely pics!

Now here’s a funny and quite symbolic story for you:

Viewers complained of dizziness and nausea as a £550,000 rebrand of the BBC’s news operation, featuring a swirling red globe, was broadcast for the first time. BBC presenters struggled to keep pace with a day of upheaval as the News 24 channel was rebranded BBC News in an attempt to bring “coherence” to the sprawling operation.

The response echoed the outcry when the BBC overhauled its weather map three years ago. One viewer complained that the new swirling globe induced dizziness. Others found the motion “nauseating” and said that it could prompt epileptic fits.

It’s kind of funny, when you think about it: TV viewers in England complaining about a BBC news rebrand - claiming it makes them sick.

One would have thought most of the news itself would do that - and it is quite telling that people don’t complain or get up in arms about the news and the state of the world itself but merely the presentation of these things.

That tells you all about the human species that you need to know, really.