It used to be that people loved to sunbathe. Millions upon millions would, and still go to soak up the sun, lying on beaches, walking on boulevards. The old Egyptians might have made the sun a God but modern man was its true disciple.
Then, all the health scares about skin cancer – and, for many, the even more horrifying news that too much sun could make your skin (and you!) look old.
So, people still go to the beaches, and buy sexy-looking & much-revealing summer clothes but now our relationship with our God has become more problematic, and a bit strained.
We know, when we’ve come to stand naked in front of it, that we revere it at our peril.
Nevertheless, there are things that can happen to us under the sun that they don’t warn us of in all those skin cancer and sun lotion brochures:
Gavin Rigby, 34, had been sunbathing with friends, when he got up to stretch his legs but lost his footing and toppled head first down a short slope. He landed on an eight inch metal spike, which was protruding from the ground and was left stranded on top for half an hour, till three firecrews including one armed with special cutting equipment arrived at the scene along with police and an ambulance. After he was freed, Mr Rigby was rushed to hospital but was later discharged.
“It was certainly painful,” Mr Rigby commented, afterwards.
Indeed.
Poor Mr Rigby. He went to pray in the church of Ra and strayed into the court of Vlad the Impaler.
I’m sure there is a moral to this unfortunate story but right now I find it hard to think of anything beyond a respectful, if quivering ‘Ouch!’
Olympic-themed condom adverts have been released in China to coincide with the start of the 2008 Beijing Games. The adverts, which depict stick-man athletes using condoms as apparatus in Olympic events, have become a viral sensation in China.
Earlier this week it emerged that the 16,000 competitors staying in the Beijing village will be able to purchase a wide variety of soft pornography, including erotic books featuring provocative pictures of naked women with titles such as “Drawing book for the Nude”.
At the 2004 Athens Olympics 130,000 free condoms were made available to athletes and officials. In the Sydney 2000 Games, each competing athlete was given 51 condoms on arrival at the Olympic Village, but another 20,000 had to be shipped in when supplies began to run low.
I never really got that original Olympic slogan, the one stating that it is more important to partake in the Games than to win them.
Still, when you read about extra shiploads of 20,000 condoms having to be brought in during the Games, because the athletes were, excuséz le mot, running low…
… well, then it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand why people would want to train four years for stupid shit like the triple jump.
You know how our governments are always going on about healthy living, obesity and alcohol abuse – and how it would be so much better for us if we’d exercise a bit more? Well, I’m afraid they’ve been taking the wrong approach for decades now.
Me, I hated sports when I was at school, like millions and millions of other kids. Gods, if only someone in authority had told us about these Olympic villages and those shipments of condoms…
Now, that would have been a government health and fitness campaign that would have worked like a charm with all those perpetually horny schoolboys!
I was reading one of Ken Bruen’s very dark ‘Jack Taylor’ novels and he mentioned a song that he (or at least the main character) liked. It was ‘Sunday morning coming down’ by Kris Kristofferson. According to Bruen (or his alter ego) the song told you all about alcoholism that you needed to know.
So, I put down the book, did a quick Google search and found the song. A good song too. Then I made a note of it and forgot about it for a while.
Today though, I’m in a mood for that kind of music and I was thinking of other drinking songs I like. Not the jolly, happy-clappy ones about smiling, friendly faces and welcoming bars but the ones that offer a somewhat darker, maybe more honest picture.
So, here’s my top three of drinking songs – not a definite one by any means; just three songs I like – and one bonus song as a special, ‘last round’ offer. First, of course, the one Ken Bruen mentioned. A good, proper song – and I love the opening lines:
Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An’ I washed my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.
Here’s the song:
The second song I’m gonna play for you – well, Youtube will – is by one of my favourite artists: the Belgian singer, Jacques Brel. One of those people who cram a lot of living in the way too few years given to them. He died from cancer, having retired from the stage a few years before that, but he left a great body of work. The next song is called ‘l’Ivrogne’ (The Drunk). It’s about a man, sitting in a bar. These are the opening lines, the French original and my translation:
Ami remplis mon verre
Encore un et je vas
Encore un et je vais
Non je ne pleure pas
Je chante et je suis gai
Mais j’ai mal d’être moi
Ami remplis mon verre
Ami remplis mon verre
(My friend, fill my glass again
one more and I will go
No, I’m not crying
I sing, I’m happy
but I hate being me
My friend, fill my glass again)
And here’s the song:
My all time favourite song writer (and singer) is Leonard Cohen and he too wrote a very fine song about people drinking in a bar, called ‘Closing time’. They seem to be having a good time – but it ain’t exactly paradise we’re dealing with here. These are the opening lines:
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high
And my very sweet companion
she’s the Angel of Compassion
she’s rubbing half the world against her thigh
And every drinker every dancer
lifts a happy face to thank her
the fiddler fiddles something so sublime
all the women tear their blouses off
and the men they dance on the polka-dots
and it’s partner found, it’s partner lost
and it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
it’s CLOSING TIME
Okay, we’re almost done for now. Time to go home, really, but I want to give you one more for the road. A very funny one, by Tom Waits, ‘The piano has been drinking.’ Here are the opening lines: The piano has been drinking
My necktie’s asleep
The combo went back to New York, and left me all alone
The jukebox has to take a leak
Have you noticed that the carpet needs a haircut?
And the spotlight looks just like a prison break
And the telephone’s out of cigarettes
As usual the balcony’s on the make
And the piano has been drinking, heavily
The piano has been drinking
And he’s on the hard stuff tonight
It’s been a while since I heard anything quite as casually and appallingly cynical as the following political scheme, thought up by the head of an Ugandan state agency:
A Ugandan official has suggested to MPs that funerals should be limited to Saturday afternoons to stop people taking time off work to attend them. Speciosa Kazibwe, a former vice-president who now heads a state development agency, noted that Uganda’s death rate was very high. Uganda has been hard hit buy HIV/Aids, which caused 91,000 deaths in 2005.
I wish I were joking but Ms. Kazibwe complained that burials, besides taking up lots of time, also demanded the use of vehicles which could have been put to much more productive uses.
So, she has now suggested that “each constituency should have a mortuary with a fridge that could preserve corpses.”
It’s not all that long ago that Uganda’s old and unlamented president Idi Amin also used fridges to store dead Ugandans – so that they wouldn’t go off before the old dictator was ready to eat them.
This, let’s say, recycled idea of using refrigerators to store Uganda’s dead for future handling is, of course, not quite as distasteful as Idi Amin’s use of his fridges – but not by all that much.
Did you know there was such an animal as the ‘pentailed tree shrew’? Well, neither did I.
It’s a weird-looking creature, I have to say but that’s not what makes this West Malaysian animal so fascinating. It’s what he does, that’s rather remarkable – which is giving your average English lager lout a good run for his money:
A tropical shrew with a taste for alcoholic nectar has been identified as the hardest-drinking creature in the world. Pentailed tree shrews have such an appetite for alcohol that each night they imbibe, weight for weight, the equivalent of a human downing up to nine glasses of wine.
Yes, traditionally, England’s associated with saint George and that silly dragon he killed – which is why a certain type of English football fan paints that stupid red cross on their faces before they drink themselves in a stupor and/or violent rage.
Maybe St George was a bad-tempered alcoholic himself, or perhaps that dragon got a bit too feisty after a few rounds of gin and tonics. So, I suppose this whole hooliganism thing could be a case of young Englishmen devoutly trying to play a game of ‘Follow the leader.’
If so, then the world would have been a much quieter and more civilised place if England had adopted the blameless (if alcoholic) pentailed tree shrew as its national symbol. At the very least, it would have made for a far more interesting national flag, of course.
Also, it’s kind of hard to imagine hordes of marauding morons, shouting ‘Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land!’, under the shrew’s superbly silly looking banner, while boasting long shrew tail scarves and waving little pointy shrew face caps.
Most of the world is, quite rightly, disgusted with the continuing existence of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp – and neither have most of us forgotten about the Abu Ghraib fiasco, nor the whole, damning issue of those disgusting rendition flights.
So, it’s easy – and, up to a point, understandable – to buy into the myth that the USA is, somehow, the world’s Supervillain, torturing and killing people for fun, invading countries for the Hell of it, etcetera, etcetera.
I’m not a fan of the current American administration – and I do think the war in Iraq is an ungoing and unnecessary disaster for all concerned – but those who want to believe that the US is the Snake in an otherwise peaceful Garden, are, to put it mildly, gravely mistaken.
Whatever you think of Bush and his team, there are far worse regimes in the world – and whatever you think of US foreign policy, it is not responsible for all the world’s ills or evils.
Again, nothing excuses the gross blunders, and indeed crimes that the US government continues to commit in its foolhardy War on Terror, but don’t think that the world would be a better place if America, as those old placards suggested, did ‘go home.’
Sure, it’s easy to blame the USA for all of the world’s troubles, or blame the Israelis or the British – but those who sing these anti-colonial (or anti-zionist) songs and march to the drums of the ‘resistance’ better look deeply into their own hearts.
So, a bit less of the easy slogans, please; and more honest introspection. As the following story shows all too painfully, crime, brutality and inhumanity itself are part of the whole human experience: Palestinians detained by Fatah and Hamas, the two main factions in the West Bank and Gaza, face routine abuse and torture, according to two leading human rights organisations in reports published this week. Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian human rights group, said yesterday that more than 1,000 people have been detained by each side within the past year. An estimated 20%-30% of the detainees suffered torture.
When you want a hamburger, go to some fast food outlet. You want to see a movie, go to a cinema. You want to meet a bunch of bloody-minded, meddlesome imbeciles, look no further than your average English Council: Would-be cab drivers in Walsall could soon have to hold a 15-minute conversation with an examiner to prove their ability to keep passengers entertained on a journey. Similar to a school foreign language oral, the test will involve drivers discussing topics such as their favourite places in the West Midlands. But subjects will be mixed up to avoid drivers learning them off “parrot fashion.”
Nice.
So, next time you take a cab in Walsall and your driver starts to talk to you in a feverish and all-over-the-place fashion, don’t worry: He or she is, most probably, not a dangerous lunatic. Just someone who’s recently finished a course where they teach you to talk like a mixed up parrot.
You know, I’m STILL waiting for the moment that I wake up and find that this sickening, meddling and moronic nannification of our society has just been a highly unpleasant dream. I’m starting to suspect though that this has become our reality: To live in a world where all humans will be programmed to be safe, predictable, boring and utterly fucking useless.
Conversation tests for cabbies? God give me strength but where will it end? Truly, is there no limit to the fearsome fussing, wimpish whining and blatant bullying of the stupid state? What’s bloody next? Safety instructions for picking your nose; the do’s and don’ts of scraping shit from shoes?
Gods, it’s really getting too much to bear. Shakespeare famously wrote, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ He obviously hadn’t heard of the English councilor yet.
We all know that the Republicans can fight dirty, if they feel threatened. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that, after senator Obama’s successful trip abroad, the people who gave us the Swift boat, would try to counter that success in the only way they know: with a truly wild smear campaign.
So, what did they decide to go for this time? More Muslim rumours, or more snide remarks about his old pastor – something about the wife again?
No, it’s way more devious than that. It’s an honest to God sexual slur, but with a difference. Everybody knows that if you are hunting for the big fish, you need to bring superior bait - and, boy, did those crafty Republicans do that!
They chewed up and threw out one of their own, in order to get to their target: Some Democratic campaign buttons made for distribution in Idaho show an unlikely pair: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Larry Craig. The button was intended to show Obama beside Larry LaRocco, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Craig is not seeking re-election following his arrest in a Minnesota airport restroom sex sting.
Democrat mistake, my arse – or it must have been part of Hillary’s revenge, of course.
Nah. Distributing buttons with a smiling Obama and a smirking Larry Craig, standing side by side, as if they already shared a cubicle…? No, that one could only have been thought up by the likes of Karl Rove.
I have to admit though, it will be fun to watch Obama’s minders, trying to put a large enough amount of distance between their man and the ‘wide stance’ man.
It was last November that I heard that Tim Burton was going to be working on a new version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – and this week it was announced that he has found his Alice, the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska.
Now, I am a huge fan of Tim Burton but I do think I will give this one a miss. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Alice books: I still reread them, from time to time – and I think the original, animated Disney film was quite good, especially for the time (if a little bit too sweet and too safe to my taste.)
That’s the problem though. I think that the animated movie is the best medium for the Alice in Wonderland saga, if you want to translate book to screen. It’s not just because the first movie version was an animation that I think so; it’s all those weird creatures, from hookah smoking caterpillar, to Mad Hatter, to the Red queen – and the long and short versions of Alice herself.
To use real life actors would make the story/movie, paradoxically, less real to me.
I know Tim Burton is very good at whatever he does; he’s very talented, very clever, and almost as imaginative as he is solid (as a film maker and story teller) but I fear that this one is not going to work.
I have these frightful visions that, however good everybody’s intentions will be, this may be a disaster along the lines of The Flintstones, or the Asterix movies. Okay, I’m sure that Tim Burton will give us something better than The Flintstones (a movie film critic Barry Norman warned his viewers not to see – his advice a simple, ‘Yabbadabbadon’t!’)
Still, I don’t want to see a vaguely okay Alice movie; I want a perfect Alice movie, because the original is as close to perfect as any story can ever hope to get. However, because the two Alice books are so strange, and so surreal, I truly do believe that the only way to do them justice is to go for an animated adaptation.
I would have loved for Burton to do just that. As I said in the beginning, the original Alice in Wonderland movie was quite good, but also a bit too saccharine and too cosy. With Tim Burton in the driving seat, that problem would have been solved, of course.
An ‘Alice in Wonderland’ with real live actors, even with all the computer-driven gimmickry possible: Not for me, I think.
So, what do you think: Could a non-animated Alice in Wonderland work – and maybe more generally: Do you think some stories can only be told in a certain format or do you think all stories can be adapted, and transformed, from one medium to any other?
First, the poll mentioned in the following article was conducted for a Right-wing think tank, the ‘Centre for Social Cohesion.’ That doesn’t make the poll invalid but you might keep in mind that the people ordering the poll have a certain socio-political bias.
Having said all that, the results were not pretty:
A third of Muslim students in Britain believe killing someone in the name of religion is justified, a new YouGov poll claims. The survey found that extreme Islamist ideology has a profound influence on a significant minority of Muslims on campuses across the country. The poll also found that:
- 40 per cent support the introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims
- A third back the notion of a worldwide Islamic caliphate (state) based on sharia law
- 40 per feel it is unacceptable for Muslim men and women to mix freely
- 24 per cent do not think men and women are equal in the eyes of Allah
- A quarter have little or no respect for homosexuals
Look, I’m an agnost and, on the whole, I don’t care much to what God you pray to or if you belong to the Church of Darwin. The only thing I would ask of anyone on a personal level is that he or she doesn’t try to convert or bully me. That goes for religions, but also for political beliefs, personally revered football teams and pop & movie stars.
‘Whatever gets you through the night,’ as John Lennon sang – and as long as people realize that one person’s dream might be another person’s nightmare scenario and behave with according civility, it doesn’t matter much if one citizen prays to Jesus, the other to Allah, and others to the pecs of Ronaldo or the breasts of Dolly Parton.
Also, we have laws.
The nice thing is that, apart from a truly minor percentage of the super rich and people with extreme amounts of influence, pretty much everyone is, more or less, equal under the law. It’s not a perfect system but let’s be brutally honest here: It IS fucking perfect compared to most of the countries where the rest of the world’s Muslims live.
So, having said all of the above, I must admit that I find it particularly galling that quite a large minority of Muslim students in Britain, who have the kind of advantages and privileges some 90% of other Muslims in the world can only dream of, express their contempt of the society they live in with such stupid and small-minded fervour.
Obviously, they, like all other bigots in the West, have the right to think and say what they believe. For the moment, that’s another one of those privileges the vast majority of the world’s Muslims don’t have.
On the other hand, again, for now, I’m still free to suggest that, if these people so dislike the laws of our land, and so despise our mores and sexual morals and freedom and equality, that they just should get the Hell out of our countries and fuck off to the nearest fundamentalist Hell hole of their own choosing – and, quite frankly, I don’t give a damn whether there will be some cushy place at a university or poverty, squalor and the secret police’s truncheons & electrodes waiting for them.
(For a more level-headed and rational approach & solution, read Minette Marrin’s excellent column here.)
