Glob-a-log

The old alchemists had this saying, ‘As above, so below.’

Which, very loosely, translates as, ‘Set a thief to catch a thief.‘

So, let’s start with a story where the decidedly non-Russian bear is the old-fashioned hero:

A carer was caught stealing from a terminally ill woman after her suspicious family hid a camera in a teddy bear. Yvonne Allen stole £40 from Thelma Sampson, 75, during a home visit. Her son Robert Sampson then bought the camera and hid it inside the teddy’s eye. Allen, 28, of Halewood, Merseyside, was filmed stealing another £60. She was jailed for six months at Liverpool Community Justice Centre.

Of course, most of the time it is that famously paranoid Russian bear doing the home invasion and looting detail – as Georgia’s president found out quite recently.

Or, as Putin said at the Beijing Olympics, ‘It’s not just the winning, it’s the taking apart of your enemy.’

Or, as the Charlie Daniels band predicted, quite some time ago: The Devil went down to Georgia:

It’s one of those weird and mostly undiscussed parts of life that everything has to do with the Olympics. So, in a way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kennedy’s grassy knoll, the exact timing of D-Day, New York’s 9/11 and, somewhat anachronistically, the Boston tea party were, at least partly, inspired by one country or the other preparing to get its desired quota of gold medals at the next Olympic Games.

Some countries have been more successful than others when it comes to Olympic game playing. The old European communist regimes trusted their various Party doctors to do it with steroids, and when it came to women’s sports like swimming, with non too subtle forms of cross-dressing and maybe, God or Lenin knows, by the careful pruning and snipping off of various ‘man bits.’

China, obviously, doesn’t need to cheat to bring the medals home. It was seven years ago that the country’s ruling party heard that they could organize the Games and seven years is a long time for any neurotic, self-obsessed, devious and paranoid dictatorship. Long enough to get organised, anyway – and you really do not need steroids and other crude forms of cheating when you have a population of 1.25 billion slaves who can be cajoled and bullied into medal winning shape.

England will host the Games in 2012 – and has been obsessing about the event since Christ was stuck to His tree. Which may explain that Boston tea party I mentioned above, the famously doomed Charge of the Light Brigade, the death of Diana and even Alan Sugar’s TV hit, The Apprentice. When you are a small island nation with a population that’s too busy binge drinking to swallow steroids, you have to get seriously devious if you want to bring at least some of those medals home…

… and to anyone who is still in doubt about Britain’s leaders’ obsession with the now fast approaching game, I offer the following news story as proof that England’s political classes are still trying to get the population into Olympic shape.

They’re getting pretty desperate, in fact:

A Government-funded campaign is being launched to encourage people to exercise while they’re waiting for a bus. Leaflets and posters setting out six Pilates-style exercise moves to do at the bus stop are being distributed to passengers travelling on buses between Blackburn and Manchester. According to the campaign’s organisers, those minutes spent at the bus stop watching the traffic go by could be spent more usefully – by standing on one leg, pointing your toes or clenching your buttocks.

Right, it’s a Sunday evening where I’m typing this, I’ve just spent more than an hour reading through various online papers and I’m bored silly.

So, the USA announces it wants to go it alone in Afghanistan and do another surge – while there’s more suicide carnage in Iraq. Sarkozy and Bush are warning Putin that they will hold their breath till Russia plays nice, while England’s Gordon Brown is, like a medieval monk, turning away from the world, because he has another bloody by-election on his hands – that he will lose, of course; when it comes to the ongoing Gordon Brown Big Brother soap, predicting the future is a piece of poisoned cake.

Anyway, none of the above stories is worth wasting yet another paragraph on, so let’s do something else instead. It’s Sunday, after all, so why not do what you are supposed to do on that day: Read the funnies and use the rest of the bloated paper as cat litter.

So, let’s have a Calvin and Hobbes time-out:

I’ve always been a big fan of the strip – and my appreciation has only grown over the years. It’s not just Bill Watterson’s decision not to go into the whole murky Peanuts & Garfield fray of an endlessly expanding sea of merchandise, though I do admire Watterson deeply for it.

It’s also that he didn’t outstay his welcome. He stopped. What’s more, he stopped at the peak of his powers, which is the absolutely best way to go. Did I mourn this decision? Hell, yes – and I’m sure he could have gone on for a year or so, without lessening the overall tone of the oeuvre but, again, I admire his decision to stop while he was still doing such a great job.

I once loved the strips ‘The wizard of Id’ and ‘BC’. Now I read them with almost a sense of dread. It’s like seeing an actor who once was formidable, making appearances in ‘As the world turns’ & ‘Murder, she wrote’ and doing cat food and life insurance commercials on the side.

So, all hail to the chief, Bill Watterson, and his Calvin and Hobbes – and here are three C & H sites for this and future Sunday delights.

Here’s a site that features animated Calvin and Hobbes pictures.

Here’s one fan site that has, among many other things, my favourite Calvin and Hobbes series: the snowmen saga.

To finish, here’s the unofficial Calvin and Hobbes site, where you can see all the old strips come by on a daily basis.

Enjoy!

(HMS Terror)

Bestselling author Dan Simmons wrote a fascinating historical horror novel about them but now the British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are back in the news again:

A Canadian team is to search for two ships lost in an 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were trapped in the Arctic ice as Sir John Franklin sought a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He and his 128 crew died - although their exact fate remains a mystery - and the ships were never found.

It’s a fascinating story – and if only one or two people reading this post will go on to read Simmons’s book (and then, most probably, the rest of his truly remarkable oeuvre) I’ll be happy enough. Simmons has written SF, horror (and one screwball horror comedy, which also featured Mark Twain), thrillers, main stream and, lately, also historical fiction – next year his historical novel about (a short period in) the life of Charles Dickens will come out.

Anyway, read him: you won’t be disappointed. Back to those two ships though.

Knowing what we know now about the earth’s geography, this obsession with the ‘Northern Route’ can seem like the height of folly – and it is certainly interesting to note that, as late as 1845, no-one knew, or could know, that this route simply didn’t exist.

We’re so used now to the fact of air travel and to satellite photography, that we tend to forget that it’s not that long ago that we were bound to the surface of this planet. For most of human history a bird’s-eye view was not an option; ours was the view of a moderately well-traveled ant.

So, now, sitting in front of our computers and watching Google Earth images, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be a geographer and scientist between the reign of queen Isabella of Spain and queen Victoria of England.

Science and the sum of human knowledge expanded so much during those centuries – and yet, so many things still remained unknown. So much so that God knows how much money and how many human lives were, in essence, wasted on the search for a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

All that, obviously, should make us wonder how much we are missing ourselves. Yes, our knowledge now has progressed beyond the wildest dreams of most of the scientists and philosophers who lived in the days of Isabella and Victoria – but they themselves would have proudly remarked upon the progress they had made since the days of Aristotle, Pythagoras and the others who came before them.

In other words, it’s easy to imagine how, in some faraway (or much nearer) future people will look back at our short time in the sun and wonder how we could ever have been so short-sighted, naïve and pig-headed  about some of the basic scientific and philosophical assumptions we now make as a matter of cause.

Which should be a sobering, but is, to me, also an exhilarating thought.

(”Columbus’ last appeal to Queen Isabella”)

Interesting news from the always fascinating world of science:

Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.

Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.

So, now we may be getting warp speed space craft to fool around with.

That’s wonderful news, of course but my mother always told me I had to eat my vegs before I could have any dessert – and I do feel the same about this new technology.

When you look at planet earth, and you see we still haven’t developed any safe and clean energy programmes, we still have famines and plagues, we still fight our wars over territories and resources, and we still haven’t outgrown our childish racial prejudices, and still haven’t found a way to peacefully deal with the various religious differences we have…

… well, if you consider all that, I would suggest we should see this whole new warp drive thing as a variant of that same veggie & dessert principle.

So, maybe we should first try to fix all those (mostly silly) earthly problems before we boldly go and fuck up all those other places as well.

Anyway, if we will be heading out to all those unknown destinations, saying hello to the rest of the universe and to all who may be out there, I do hope that humanity’s representatives will dress a little bit better than the old star ship Enterprise crew did.

I never really got that whole ‘Let’s boldly go to a pajama party’ thing…:

(John & Cindy McCain)

So, now you expect a joke, don’t you?

First though, here’s the background story for the Democratic chairman…:

The state chairman of the Arkansas Democratic party was shot and killed today at his Little Rock office by an assailant who later died after being shot by police. Democratic chairman Bill Gwatney was attacked by a man who insisted on speaking with him before firing three shots and fleeing, according to local media reports. Gwatney was taken to the hospital after his secretary made an emergency call from a nearby flower shop, but he later died of his wounds.

…and the following happened to the wife of senator John McCain:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s wife Cindy was taken to a Detroit-area hospital today after complaining of pain in her hand. At a West Bloomfield, Michigan campaign stop, during which the would-be first lady shook hands with supporters of her husband, an enthusiastic voter’s firm grip aggravated her previously existing carpal tunnel syndrome.

Time for that joke, right?

Well, not by me, it ain’t – though I’m sure the Internet is teeming with them already.

“What do you call a dead Democratic party official? A good start”

Or:

“Cindy McCain’s hand job/You see McCain’s a jerk?!”

Etcetera – and ad nauseam.

Me, I’m not an American but if I were I would vote for the Democratic ticket – which is not surprising, since I’m from Holland and most of our right wing parties are to way to the left of the US Republicans and when we use the word ‘liberal’ that mostly means ‘to the right of the centre’ – but that’s neither here nor there.

It is as a member of that larger club though, homo sapiens, that I am deeply saddened by the incredibly vitriolic tone of the political debates, these days, the scarily fanatic and truly humourless partisanship expressed by millions of people on both sides.

I love the Internet but at times it is an unbelievably vile cesspool, where legions of evil little fuckers come out to play. It can be full of hate, and full of shit, and so full of itself that it threatens to spill over and poison the whole WWW.

So, yes, millions of people actually rejoice, and make jokes, and get off on a local party official getting shot dead, or the wife of a candidate being taken to hospital.

I wish people would start to realize how demeaning all of this is.

It doesn’t matter whom you are voting for, if you think you can be on the side of the angels, while laughing at the death or the pain of your opponents, you’re sadly mistaken. When you’ve sunk so low, you’re not even on the side of humanity anymore.

End of sermon.

(Arkansas chairman Bill Gwatney)

Now, I know that there are millions of Christians out there who don’t believe in evolution – and some of these have now embraced the concept of ‘intelligent design’.

To be honest, I think it’s kind of ludicrous to say that since we can’t (as of yet) explain evolution in all its minutiae, it makes more sense to believe that some God created the whole universe in six days, cloned a female from the rib of the male, manufactured fake fossils to test His believers and trick the infidel etcetera, etcetera.

Which is a bit like saying that since blood changes colour once it is outside the body, God must have placed small and invisible angels inside all of us who are continuously repainting our blood as it travels through our bodies.

In other words, mention Occam’s razor to these type of Christians and they will probably think you’re talking about a Spanish Inquisition interview tool.

Still, even the most obsessive Creationist will probably accept that, when it comes to weapons and the art of war, evolution and intelligent design go hand in hand. Man’s motivations may not have mutated much since Cain killed Abel but in terms of technique there’s been a Hell of a lot of, let’s say, progress.

As the following article shows:

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told. On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with “pharmacological land mines” that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says. “The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects,” the report states.

Drugs could also be used to enhance the performance of military personnel. There is already anecdotal evidence of troops using the narcolepsy drug modafinil, and ritalin, which is prescribed for attention deficit disorder, to boost their performance. Greater understanding of the brain’s workings is also expected to usher in new devices that link directly to the brain, either to allow operators to control machinery with their minds, such as flying unmanned reconnaissance drones, or to boost their natural senses.

To be honest, I doubt that “pharmacological land mines” will ever replace bullets on the battlefield – unless they would be much cheaper and easier to produce than bullets (while still making lots of money for the arms industry, of course.)

Though I’m sure the people in Guantánamo Bay would welcome any kind of drug that would replace waterboarding, sleep deprivation, aggressive dogs and all those other forms of (America does not condone) torture.

Not that I’m holding my breath. Weapon systems may constantly evolve but mankind and any meaningful moral evolution will forever be inimical strangers – as hostile to each other, in fact, as your average Creationist is to the ideas of Darwin.

Right. Just when you think that things truly can’t get any weirder, you read stuff like this:

BLACKBURN Rovers have become the first Premiership club to install a prayer room where supporters can worship. The sound-proofed match day facility will replace a toilet block and contains prayer mats and religious texts. Club chiefs hope the room, in the Blackburn End stand, will attract more fans from different faiths and backgrounds.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind people praying to whatever God Who takes their fancy but surely, there’s a time and place for everything.

If you are having sex, for instance, it’s not too much to ask of your partner to refrain from smoking till the both of you are done. Same with going to a movie, or to a football match: Surely you can wait giving God a good talking to till the movie or the match has finished?

Mind you, if you are the owner or coach of Blackburn Rovers, I can understand you would welcome a bit of divine intervention. God knows the team needs it – but then, God, Allah or Jaweh is supposed to be all-knowing, so surely He must already be aware of the fact that the team’s chances of winning any kind of serious silverware are vanishingly small.

So, if the Almighty hasn’t so far seen fit to smite Blackburn’s enemies, I seriously doubt that a sound-proof prayer room will do the trick.

Oh, and one more thing. Remember the bit about the all-knowing and all-seeing…?

Somehow, I don’t think the Lord will be terribly impressed with a few prayer mats and holy books placed inside an old toilet block. Believe me, the last thing you need when your team is playing is a disgruntled God, looking down on your efforts, while the prayers rise up like the ghosts of urine past…

… and when you’re out on the pitch, wearing a Blackburn shirt, you really do not want to hear the voice of the Lord drowning out the chants of your supporters and those urine-soaked prayers, saying, “ARE YOU TAKING THE PISS OR WHAT…?!” just before the lightning bolts come down.

First, there was the break-up of the old Soviet Union. Well, first we had Mikhail Gorbachev and his Glasnost policies and Perestroika book. Not that anyone in the West, at that time, really believed that Gorby’s little beach book could ever hope to outsell Karl Marx’s old blockbuster, of course.

In fact, most people outside the old Evil Empire only started to believe in real change when the first McDonald’s opened its doors in Moscow. The moment Big Mac starts to beat the shit out of Big Borscht, you know that the wheels of history truly have started to turn.

Same with China.

Yes, there was a lot of dissent when Beijing got the Games – well, a lot of dissent outside of China, that is. Not so much protesting on Tienamen Square this time round: Even students get the message when you drive a few tanks over them, of course.

So, lots of people thought that China didn’t deserve to host the Olympics, because of its repressive regime. In the same way that Hitler’s Germany was blackballed in 1936 and Argentinia was not allowed to organize the World Cup Football in 1978…

What was that? Oh well, never mind.

(Who’s the original Little China girl…?)

Anyway, sometimes it pays not to pay too much attention to what the leaders of a country are saying or doing. So, while the Chinese government is obsessing about the Games and about image – up to the point of pointing the cameras at some photogenic play-backing kid, ’cause the one who does the actual singing has crooked teeth – real change is taking place somewhere else entirely.

As Tom Wolfe wrote,‘You can’t go home again.’ Same with those McDonald’s restaurants in the former USSR: You know that you can never go back to the old ways, when certain things have come to pass.

Same with China, as I said earlier - ’cause it’s really a case of ‘Ciao ciao, Chairman,’ when the Hooters have come to town:

Lying toward the east of Beijing in the Chaoyang district, the Workers Stadium was one of the Ten Great Buildings commissioned in 1959 to mark the 10th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. These are somewhat different times, though, and so it is that a new face in town has parked itself right across the street. As this establishment’s waitresses shriek in unison at arriving customers: “Welcome to Hooters Beijing!” Behold the new face of Chinese capitalism. And please try to stay looking at its face.

You know that old IT saying, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’

Well, that goes for most human endeavours too – and the larger an organisation, or government department, the bigger this problem will become.

So, combine computers, New Labour and the National health Service and there ain’t a fan that’s big enough to catch all the shit that will be generated by this unholy triumvirate:

A £13bn overhaul of the NHS records system has suffered so many problems that hospitals have struggled to keep track of people requiring operations, patients with suspected MRSA and potential cancer sufferers needing urgent consultations. Glitches in the roll-out of the Connecting for Health computer system have also resulted in delays at accident and emergency departments, soaring complaints and failures to identify child-abuse victims.

Mind you, you also know how they say that life imitates art?

Well, it still goes the other way around as well – as the following story shows.

If you want a metaphor for New Labour and all that Tony Blair and his incompetently scowling apprentice wizard Gordon brown stands for, don’t look any further than the Swiss museum and a certain piece of ‘art’ that feature in the following news story:

“Complex Shit”, an inflatable dog turd sculpture the size of a house has blown away from a modern art exhibition in a Swiss museum before bringing down an electricity line and smashing a greenhouse window. Museum authorities said the work had an automatic safety device that was supposed to make it deflate in the event of a storm - but it failed to operate.