For in a world where shades of grey have replaced almost all those old, comfortable black & white truths and images, it is nice to come upon any story that restores (even for the shortest while) our faith in good and evil – especially evil: A Nazi sympathiser, described by police as extremely dangerous, has been found guilty of planning acts of terrorism and of possessing child pornography after investigators found homemade bombs and indecent images of children at his home. Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck driver from Goole, east Yorkshire, pleaded guilty in two separate cases at Leeds crown court after police found “significant” volumes of extreme right-wing literature, weapons, ammunition and homemade explosives in his flat last October.
Now, there is truly something for almost every moral crusader here: Nazi shit, kiddie porn and home-made bombs.
You can almost see George Lucas and Steven Spielberg deciding to call the other: Indiana Jones meets Schindler’s List.
Hell, throw in an albino monk and a secret manuscript and you would have the blockbuster to crush all blockbusters with truly extreme prejudice.
The writer GK Chesterton once said that “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”
It’s not only angels that fly, of course – lightly or otherwise: RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A sharp increase in drugs and cellphones found inside a Brazilian prison mystified officials — until guards spotted some distressed pigeons struggling to stay airborne. Inmates at the prison in Marilia, Sao Paulo state had been training carrier pigeons to smuggle in goods using cell phone sized pouches on their backs, a low-tech but ingenious way of skipping the high-tech security that visitors faced.
Never mind those drugs but isn’t it funny that pigeons, which used to carry actual messages between people now are used to transport mobile phones?
Okay, maybe I just have a strange sense of humour, for I also quite like the following joke – which has nothing to do with either pigeons, drugs or mobile phones. Although it is vaguely linked to people in prison:
“I give good head,” said the hooker.
“That’s good to know,” said the guillotine.
Okay, I just made that one up myself (though I still think it’s funny – and it’s my column, so there.)
One thing you can say about the Church of England: It looks for relevance the same way junkies go for a fix: One of the most outspoken bishops in the Church of England is expected to claim that clergy who tolerate homosexuality within the church should face tougher sanctions.
Yes, sanctions. That’s working so well for Zimbabwe: The mutilated bodies of four young men bore witness yesterday to the latest atrocities of the Mugabe regime in the run-up to next week’s elections. The victims were murdered while defending the home of a local leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
Ah well, so many idiots, so many headlines and excuses. Here’s Leonard Cohen though - and here’s two fragments from his ‘Anthem’:
“Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.”
*** *** ***
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
First, let me tell you a story – an old Roald Dahl story, in fact, ‘William and Mary’, about a bullying scientist and his wife. He’s one of those nasty control freaks who will tell his wife which part of the house must be cleaned with what kind of brush & detergent; who will tell her what to wear and how to eat and how to lift a tea cup.
He’s also quite obsessive about smoking and forbids her to smoke.
Then he dies – but he’s not gone. Being a scientist he’s had his brain put into some life-protecting and nurturing fluid. He can see through one of his own eyes, which floats in another bowl – and he can communicate with the world at large through a voice box.
So, each day his widowed wife visits the room where the brain and the lone eye and the voice box ‘live’. She disconnects the voice box and then she smokes a cigarette and blows smoke into the furious eye of her late tormenter.
Anyway, the next story that I read in one of today’s online papers is about a man, his dead father and a teapot but it’s not about revenge beyond the grave - not this time, at least:
Tea fan John Lowndes had his dad’s ashes mixed with clay and turned into a teapot. John, 54, used to enjoy a brew with Ian, 75, and got a potter to make the tribute in Broad Haven, Pembrokeshire.
It’s a nice idea, really – and as a memorial it beats having an urn standing on the mantelpiece, where it will just gather dust on the outside as well.
I’m sure some enterprising individual could make quite a decent living from such a pottery as well. Pipe-smoking sons of pipe-smoking fathers could have the ashes of the latter mixed with clay and turned into a pipe. If grandma loved to potter in the garden or bake cookies you could mix her ashes with the clay of a flowerpot or a nice cookie container. So many hobbies, so many options to make a pleasant and/or functional memorial.
Plus, as that Roald Dahl story showed, some people still have outstanding issues with the dead. In that case, you can say with Brutus, ‘I have not come to bury Caesar but to glaze him’ – and then stick the knife in posthumously.
Again, so many resentful brains, so many options. If the goner was a Gunner, mingle his ashes with clay that will make a Chelsea garden gnome. Was the much hated corpse allergic to cats, make him or her inhabit a clay moggie. Did he or she vote Labour religiously, make the despised deceased into a Maggie Thatcher commemorative plate.
In other words, mingle the dust of your nearest and not so dearest with the potter’s clay and do as Dahl’s widow did and blow that smoke into the now silent but still furious eye of that old nemesis.
Now, here’s a conundrum: A story about an unfit mother and a seriously incompetent Superior Court judge. So, which one of them is the most stupid and most dangerous waste of space?
A San Carlos woman was sentenced today to 90 days in jail after she left her young children at home alone, got behind the wheel drunk, rear-ended another car, ran from the scene and later scuffled with police as they tried to arrest her. She was so intoxicated she almost fell down doing field sobriety tests.
The judge recommended that Sara Haderle, 36, who is pregnant, perform light labor in the San Mateo County sheriff’s work program to fulfill her sentence. She is unlikely to spend any time behind bars. “I sort of doubt you’ll be back here again,” Superior Court Judge Clifford Cretan said.
Let’s not waste any more time on that San Carlos woman. Luckily, children are tougher than most child agencies think but I’m afraid these kids will need all the mental strength and lots of luck to survive the tender care of their mother.
Still, what strikes me most is the blithe optimism of that aptly named judge Cretin, who ’sort of doubts’ that the woman will behave as criminally stupid again. You’d have thought that a judge would be aware of the fact that most people don’t change. A useless, selfish drunk will remain a useless, selfish drunk until the moment he or she gets hit by a sudden blast of true self-awareness & irreversible self-loathing or hits some tree at enough miles per hour to end his or her stupid life - and only a fool would place a serious bet on the first outcome.
You can understand why a judge would prefer not to give a long and mandatory prison sentence to a pregnant woman but in this case the judge is dead wrong and acting almost as irresponsibly as the drunk driver herself. He is, to use the proper jargon, facilitating her behaviour – and the one thing a criminally stupid drunk doesn’t need is facilitating.
By letting this woman off the hook he is not helping her unborn child, or the young children she left to fend for themselves, so that she could go on a drinking and drunk driving spree. He is, in fact, condemning all these children to more of the same behaviour a little bit further down the road.
Down that road, of course, the woman – with all those children aboard – may very well meet, head-on, a tree, a lamppost or another car, filled with another, entirely sober family.
When that happens, will Judge Cretin, who sent this drunk the message that she could, more or less, get away with her behaviour, get fired – let alone prosecuted for aiding and abetting the accused in a vehicular murder case? To use the judge’s own words, ‘I sort of doubt it – alas…’
Okay, so, today, Robert Mugabe announced that only God could remove him from power – while his tortured subjects just pray for any kind of deliverance. That in itself should tell you enough about the existence of an all-loving and all-seeing God. You know what though, I’ve had it with both Gods and monsters for now, so I’m not going to waste more than this one paragraph on them today. Today’s column is all about the celebration of life – and what makes intelligent life both bearable and, at times, even joyous: language.
For the first story we leave the sea where it all began, move through Africa where man first descended from those trees and end our brief journey up in London, where something marvellous finally happened for Jamie Jenkins and his family:
The parents of a five-year-old boy who feared they would never hear him talk have spoken of their joy after he uttered his first words. Jamie Jenkins, who was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a condition that affects the ability to communicate, broke his silence with the words ‘mumma’ and ‘purple’.
His mother and his father David Jenkins recently took him to the National Light and Sound Therapy Centre in London, where he underwent twice daily light and sound therapy sessions. The therapy involved listening to music through headphones while the light therapy exposed him to different colours from a light box.
Language is one of those truly miraculous gifts from nature. On its most primitive levels it functions to let one member of a tribe (or species) inform the others of the location of food, and of approaching danger, and of sexual intent. Birds do this; bees do this; and so do humans – but we’ve been given the opportunity to develop the language (and with it our brains) so that we can tell our campfire stories about monsters and Gods, dragons and princes, and sing our songs that tell of love, and of beauty, and of loss. In this, we are truly blessed.
We are not the only ones who were touched like this. We share this earth with a few other species that have developed language to a point where function and art and beauty meet. So, now, let’s say goodbye to Jamie Jenkins and his family and wish them God’s or Darwin’s speed on this most miraculous of journeys and turn our eyes to one of the most beautiful creatures on this planet – and for that we don’t need Africa’s trees and various other, rugged features: for this we can stay in the sea, where all began, and where some things still continue, despite the wastefulness and ugly husbandry of man:
The haunting song of the world’s biggest animal, the blue whale, is getting deeper, researchers have discovered. Underwater recordings of the giant endangered mammals have revealed that the tone of their rhythmic pulses and moans has become steadily lower as their population have slowly recovered after nearly being wiped out by whaling. Before large-scale hunting, the global blue whale population was thought to have been around 200,000 animals, but numbers fell to just a few hundred by the 1960s when a hunting ban was introduced. The population has since recovered to around 4,500 animals.
Professor John Hildebrand, a blue whale expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, has used recordings of blue whales since the 1960s to track the changes in their songs. He said: “It takes a conscious decision to make the calls deeper, so it is a reflection of what is going on in the population. These animals have a finite lung capacity, so their songs are a trade off between frequency and volume. They can either make the song really loud or really deep. As their numbers have slowly increased after the devastation caused by whaling, they are having to communicate over smaller distances so their songs don’t need to be as loud and they can make them deeper.”
Like Jamie Jenkins, the whale population has still a long way ago till it can sing with all the might and glory of its predecessors - but here’s to hope.
If you’ll excuse me I will start with a bit of old news, from last month. Another insane piece of legislation by the British government, which specialises in pushing through stupid laws and moronic reforms: Unmarried mothers will have to include the name of their child’s father on birth certificates under sweeping changes to the law unveiled yesterday. The Government proposals aim to give more children the ’security’ of being acknowledged by both parents. Fathers who refuse to be named and mothers who do not record the father’s name are liable for a £200 fine.
Isn’t that nice? The government want to give all children the security of being acknowledged by both their parents…
The following story comes to you thanks to the fact that one father did indeed acknowledge his two-year-old son – with a vengeance:
PDT TURLOCK — Stanislaus County authorities confirmedon Thursday the identity of a young boy whose father beat and stomped him to death Saturday night on a rural road outside Turlock, an attack that left the 2-year-old child unrecognizable.
Now, before anyone protest that Great Britain ain’t the US of A: I know that – but human nature doesn’t change because there’s a bit of water in between people. The following basic truth comes to you (and has been with us) from the dawn of man-made time: When a child is seriously unwanted it can come to grave harm through the acts (or negligence) of either or both of its parents. There’s no mystery in that: that’s simply how it’s always been, how it is now and how it for ever will be, as long as humankind doesn’t do a serious soul make-over.
I’m not sure if the British government means well here or is simply going through some weird, misguided focus group motions. With New labour it’s hard to judge anymore what is plain stupidity and what is the cynical playing to the tabloid gallery – but this latest plan is more than both these things. It is, in fact, putting a not negligible amount of children in grave and indeed mortal danger.
In some cases there are very good reasons why mothers don’t want the biological fathers involved. In any given population there are some very disturbing relational stories hidden from view. There’s incest; there’s rape by strangers, family and ‘friends’; there are any number of choices of abusive relationships; there’s substance abuse; there’s psychological illness – and there are the many children born from these ‘relations’.
By forcing all mothers to name the father on the birth certificate (or face what is for the most vulnerable among them a huge fine) the government may gain some added information about the population as a whole but by doing so they will also put many children in a very clear and very present danger – and for quite a few of them, like that 2-year-old American boy, this will prove to be a death sentence.
Right, this is from one of the British tabloids, so expect a bit of hyperbole:
Campaigners reacted furiously last night after a support group for victims of paedophiles closed for lack of state cash – while one for paedos is backed by taxpayers. Shy Keenan, of abused kiddies’ group Phoenix Survivors, said they were promised crucial funding by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – but never got a penny. She was shocked when The Sun told yesterday how Circles UK, which helps sex offenders “reintegrate” into society, receives £164,000 a year from the Ministry of Justice.
It’s still quite sad, though. I, like most all of the other readers of this article, can’t judge how hard those promises for funding were for the support group by the Home Secretary. She has a long record of disgustingly hypocritical decisions – and fudges – but I don’t know if this is one of them. She is a ‘pro’, of course, which, in politics, means that she can make vague promises like the ‘best’ of them. It is possible that she told these mothers that it was a really good thing what they were doing and that she would support them as best as she could…
Jacqui Smith, like most of the New Labour crowd, would have made an excellent Hollywood lawyer.
Anyway, any idea how much that needles war in Iraq has cost the British taxpayer so far – or the shambles that is the war in Afghanistan? Anyone knows how much that new ID system will set Britain back – not to mention those stupid Olympic Games…?
I don’t and forgive me but I can’t even be bothered to go an look it up right now, because I know, and all of you know, that compared to those moral, legal and financial outrages giving whatever amount of money would be needed to finance a support group for victims of paedophilia is less than a drop in the ocean of ill-judged and mismanaged government spending.
Of course, it adds grave insult to ruinous injury when you hear that the government won’t help this support group but does pay another group to help reintegrate sex offenders.
Mind you, I wouldn’t have any problem with even more money spent on the successful reintegration of these offenders, if these policies had even a half-decent success rate – but they don’t. The voodoo doctors of psychology talk a good game but their records are simply atrocious. Only a week ago I wrote a whole, long column about re-offending sex offenders and I won’t rehash all those arguments and statistics: You can find it here, if you are interested.
My overall conclusion was that, for the moment, we are not capable to treat and cure repeat sex offenders – and paedophiles are always repeat offenders. So, to protect society as a whole and in fairness to all victims past, present and future, we should have mandatory life sentences for repeat sexual offenders.
As I said in that other column, the most conservative estimate is that 20% of them will go on committing these crimes (while the real figure must be much, much higher.) We would not accept that kind of figure if we had an electrician in after a toaster almost burnt the house down. His assurances that there would ‘only’ be a one in five chance that the same would happen any time we would want to make toast after he had ‘repaired’ the thing would not really impress any of us, now would it?
Sometimes, life is stranger than fiction – and sometimes, unfortunately, it is not:
Spray-on condoms have become the subject of a wave of online interest after being featured in the popular forensics television show CSI. But viewers intrigued by the prospect of a condom in a can will be disappointed to learn that the CSI script-writers were getting a little ahead of themselves. The one-size-fits-all contraceptives may never hit the shelves, after the German inventor behind them admitted his team had been unable to overcome technical problems.
That is a shame. As one of the many, many people who can’t even open one of those miniature cream cups without flooding a bar or restaurant, I admit I have a vested interest in any male prophylactic that is not the traditional condom.
Alas, chances are that we will never be able to honour either this spray-on condom or its inventer with a huge and truly deserved, phallic style monument.
You can’t say the same for a certain Russian spa resort and its tribute to the statuary world: A Russian spa resort has built an 800lb monument to one of its most famous treatments – the enema. The 5ft tall sculpture, a bronze syringe bulb held aloft by three Botticelli-style angels, was revealed at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa in the southern city of Zheleznovodsk. Alexander Kharchenko, the spa’s director, said: “There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art. An enema is almost a symbol of our region.”
How nice for the region in question - and indeed, why have one of the many boring European lions, a Canadian maple leaf or a US bald eagle as a national symbol when you can raise the enema flag?
Still, after long, dark decades of workers’ mausoleums, countless images of Stalin, and ditto monuments to Lenin, a bronze enema must come as a relief. At least the humble enema’s intimate purges don’t come with the millions of deaths Stalin’s and Lenin’s purges caused.
Nurses are to be scored on how compassionate they are towards patients as part of a government plan to improve quality in the NHS. The health secretary, Alan Johnson, wants the performance of every nursing team in every ward across England to be measured, with the results published on an official website. He believes putting a smile on the face of nurses and encouraging empathetic care is as important to recovery as the skill of doctors in the operating theatre.
It used to be that people said silly things like ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Which, I suppose, would work – if the apple were hard enough and you had the throwing arm of a major league baseball pitcher. ‘A smile a day keeps the Reaper away’ would seem to be a harder sell.
Of course, nobody would like nurse Ratched to look after them or someone with the bedside manners of Kathy Bates in Misery:
So, I’m sure a nursing staff with friendly smiles and an overall sunny dispositon must be a great asset to any hospital – but to demand from them that they behave like that and reward (or punish) them accordingly?
Me, I would feel very uncomfortable as a patient if I knew that the smile that would greet me whenever I had the strength to open my eyes had been pasted there by the health secretary – and that I would have to fear that those smiles were as sincere as a politician’s handshake.
One word to the wise – or in this case, alas, to Alan Johnson: We really don’t need Stepford nurses, mister secretary. We need a dedicated staff that is treated decently by the hospitals and by the politicians running the whole show. Treat nurses with respect and pay them in a manner that reflects both the crucial importance and the very high demands of their jobs and those smiles will, most likely, follow.
Oh, just one other thing. Yes, smiles are nice but no, they are not AS important as a doctor’s skill in the operating theater. I’m sure a Robin Williams would get more laughs in that cutting room than your average surgeon but I’d prefer any sour-faced scalpel man over a stand-up comedian when I need surgery.
More to the point though, could the minister stop obsessing about smiley faces and pay a bit more attention to the overall hygiene in the NHS hospitals. Germs kill a Hell of a lot more people than smiles will ever cure.
