Glob-a-log

I have to say that I thank God daily that He did not make me in the image of a Christian blogger – or I would do so, if I weren’t an ungrateful, agnostic so-and-so.

Anyway, it would seem that being a blogging Godhead ain’t all that easy, these days:

“Alarmed by the extent to which religious blogs can descend into vitriol, senior evangelical clergy are calling on bloggers to obey a new set of the Ten Commandments aimed at delivering “God bloggers” from the temptations of the blogosphere.

Bloggers are commanded to honour their fellow bloggers and not to get too upset by their mistakes. They shall not murder the reputation of another blogger, shall not give false testimony against a fellow blogger and shall not steal the blog content of another. Bloggers are also told to be content with their own creation and not to covet their neighbour’s blog ranking.”

Which all sounds a bit dire, to be honest.

I mean, I’m all for civil behaviour and all that – and I will smite and remove any comment from my blog that refuses to play nice – but you wouldn’t want the blogosphere to resemble a Roman Catholic prayer meeting or a Church of England jumbles sale.

In other words, most bloggers and blog readers would prefer a Boston tea party to its much tamer, Anglican cousin.

Anyway, I do think it’s a bit much that, as a Christian blogger, you’re not even allowed to covet your neighbour’s blog ranking.

What else would there be left to covet?

For verily, I tell thee, it is virtually impossible to covet a blogger’s wife, or, when it comes to it, a blogger’s life – for anyone who ever spent some time in blogland knows that the vast majority of bloggers out there don’t have either of those two commodities.

(Photo from Arbroath)

Truly, I’m a huge fan of all things scientific. Scientists can easily be as entertaining as a roomful of Britneys or a den of Palins dancing around a witch’s cauldron.

Still, if I have one gripe with my beloved science tribe, it’s that I wish that they were slightly less inconsistent – or at least would have the good grace not to contradict themselves within the course of one day.

So, in a study, done over five seasons, during which 114 men were shown pictures every three months, scientists found out that winter’s supposedly cruel and cold attributes can, in fact, contain and reveal many joyful sights and occasions:

Anthropologists asked a group of male subjects, at different times of the year, to rate photos of women. There were three kinds of photographs: full body portraits of women in black swimsuits, exposed breasts of different sizes, and faces of young women. They gave their highest scores in the winter and autumn, and their lowest scores in the summer.

You’ve got to love these anthropologists… Who else would come up with a brilliant idea like, ‘Hey, let’s show photos of naked winter tits to 114 men and see what happens!‘?

Anyway, so one group of scientists proved that winter can be a quite stimulating time, if you provide the right distractions. Which is nice – but then another bunch of scientists come and spoil it again for all who had just begun to think that cold could be cool:

Loneliness and coldness are often associated in everyday language, but psychologists have found that social isolation does make people feel cold. The University of Toronto team found people feeling excluded said a room was colder than those feeling included. A UK psychologist said the findings could help people feeling isolated, particularly in the winter months.

(’Help people feeling isolated’ in what manner precisely, I wonder. By giving these poor saps a nice sweater?)

So, in a manner of speaking, these psychologists found that, far from making us think of all the naked women who might come out the moment the first snow flakes hit the window, this wintry cold was, in fact, caused by a distinct lack of naked women to start with.

(”I collapsed and cried for a long time“)

It is often stated that the West is decadent – that we treat our women like whores, or cattle. Our advertisement industry can’t seem to sell a bar of soap, a tube of toothpaste, a family car or even a mortgage loan, without showing us images of near naked women who are begging the punters for it.

Then, there are our celebrities and reality TV shows, and the way that each and every mainstream movie needs at least a few shots of naked breasts and one or two steamy sex scenes.

So yes, on the whole, I would say I agree with the observation that our Western culture and our attitudes to sex – and women – are crude, exploitative and often quite vile.

Some of the fiercest critics of our Western way of life are, none too surprisingly, Muslims. There are those Muslim women, in the West and elsewhere, who now proclaim that wearing the veil or the hijab is a form of feminism; a way to protest the exploitation of women by the West’s pornographic culture.

Never mind that the veil, historically speaking, is not far removed from the slave collar: Covering yourself from the lustful gaze of men is seen by them as superior to being exploited.

(”My mother says I shouldn’t answer back”)

Then, there are the more traditional – and male – remonstrations against Western sinfulness; mostly by the same kind of bearded misogynists we have always had in our own Judeo-Christian culture.

In effect, these guys do see women as cattle but merely insist these (future) possessions should not be paraded in the street, for other eyes to feast on. Like the Muslim ‘feminists’, these cattle bosses think the veil and the hijab are splendid inventions.

Anyway, whatever the differences may be between all those Muslims who see the West as utterly depraved, they all agree that things are much better in most Muslim countries. Maybe not in some of the more fundamentalist Islamist Hell holes but certainly in more moderate countries, like Egypt.

Well, you know what? I am no fan of our modern, greed and quick fix driven West. I think there is a Hell of a lot wrong with the way we live our sad and hurried lives. When I think of all the millions of people, sitting home and watching some reality TV show, I think of a huge herd of cows, standing around one of those huge salt licks – licking and licking and licking, with eyes as empty as any junkie’s gaze.

Still, I’d rather live with the brazen, if stupid, commercialization of sex, and the whole pathological and pathetic Big Brother industry, than be caught dead in the sickeningly hypocritical, Allah-loving main streets of Egypt. If that is life in even a moderate Muslim country, I’d say, bring on a whole army of Richard Dawkinses and a Great Lake’s worth of the most aggressive detergent.

Anyway, just read the BBC news article I linked to, here below. I can promise you it is disgusting in ways that our most lurid billboards and Paris Hilton videos will never be able to touch:

“Seven Egyptian women talk about their experience of sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo. It is an increasingly common problem, with a recent survey suggesting more than four out of five women have been sexually harassed, while nearly two-thirds of men admitted assaulting women.”

(I remember so many scary harassments”)

You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to notice that most men are breast-orientated, to the point of fixated – and for a lot of men, the bigger the breasts, the worse this gets. Here, we are forced to leave the field of Freud and enter the realm of Newton – with men gravitating towards their preferred heavenly orbs.

Anyway, all humankind has this tendency to overdo things, which, when it comes to men and breasts, takes on quite outlandish proportions – to use a thematic simile: the kind of proportions you  can only achieve when you’d staple Pamela Anderson’s tits to a chihuahua.

So, yesterday, we read about a Muslim hate preacher, whose daughter had become a pole dancer in London. Today, we hear the even funnier background story to this almost Dickensian ‘Tale of Two Titties’:

Hate preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed paid for a boob job which launched his daughter’s pole dancing career, it was revealed last night. He forked out £4,000 in cash for 27-year-old Yasmin Fostock’s bust-boosting surgery — while living on benefits in the UK. Bakri, 50, who rants about Western “depravity” and blasts women who flaunt their sexuality, secretly paid for Yasmin to increase her A cup size to a DD.

Last night a pal of single mum Yasmin said: “Her dad’s ashamed of her behaviour but she’d have never have become a pole dancer if he hadn’t paid for her bigger boobs. She was always self-conscious about her size and managed to convince him she should have it done. She played the daddy’s girl and said it would make her feel more of a mother when she was breast feeding her children. He went along with it and even went to the top London clinic with her where he paid for the surgery in cash.

Divine justice doesn’t come any better than this, I’d say – and if this only could come to pass, thanks to the generosity of the English social benefits system, I think most people would agree that this was money wisely and well spent.

The image of this stupid little man, who professed to loathe all things British, holding up his hand to receive his dole, only to blow it on fake tits for his daughter, who then becomes a pole dancer…

Well, as that Mastercard commercial goes: Priceless.

So, we’ve now seen how breasts can easily bring low the most fanatic of terrorist groupies – so what chance your very average, horny American teenage boy, in the grip of this both lurid and ludicrous fixation?

Answer: None whatsoever…

FOUNTAIN (AP) — A Colorado teenager hired men to kill his mother so he could use her money to get breast implants for his girlfriend, police said. Nikita Lee Weis, 18, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, said Fountain Deputy Police Chief Mike Barnett. Weis’ mother, Hyun Weis, was attacked Thursday with a small wooden baseball bat at her home but escaped, authorities said. She was released Friday from a hospital.

I wonder what the boy’s lawyer will use as defence. Maybe something Freudian.

According to Freud, the roots of breast fixation lie in the act of breast feeding itself. You can then claim that an unhealthy, male interest in breasts derives from:

- the mother not breast feeding her child for long enough
- the mother not stopping with breast feeding soon enough or
- the mother not having breast fed the child at all.

Any of these three scenarios will do – especially when you’re a lawyer who wants to argue that it’s the mother’s own fault that her son developed this murderous need to buy his girlfriend a pair of fake tits.

As inbuilt excuses go, the good doctor will serve as well as any bearded & authoritarian God, when it comes to giving this world’s moral morons a blank ‘get out of jail’ cheque for any outrage they want to or ‘must’ commit.

(Of course, it’s the job of any civilised society to bung these people up regardless of the colour of their God’s or guru’s beard. For instance, if a mad bomber would tell the judge it was Allah’s will that he killed any number of infidels, the judge could tell him that, in that case, the key to the convict’s cell would be handed to Allah the moment He came down to the jail to ask for it in Person – and not one moment earlier, of course.)

(Omar Bakri Mohammed: “I want them this big…!”)

(It’s just like Morris dancing, really)

You’ve heard about ‘cultural relativism’, no doubt. The somewhat dubious – okay, the quite insane idea that you can’t, in effect, judge and/or disapprove of any type of behaviour, since different cultures do things differently, which means that saying this or that is morally wrong is a form of (no doubt colonial) bigotry, racism and what have you.

So, in the eyes of the cultural relativist, stoning adulteresses, hanging homosexuals, or cutting off the clitorises of young girls with blunt and infected knives, is, in essence, the same type of activity as Morris dancing.

Anyway, I was reminded of this whole stupid business of cultural relativism, when I read the following, highly amusing news story. Mind you, it’s brought to you by one of the worst, and most sensational and mendacious of the English tabloids, the Sun. So, it might well be untrue, or exaggerated to a point that you’d need an inverted Hadron Collider to define it.

Still, I’d very much like this story to be true, so I’ll treat it as seriously as anything I would read in, let’s say, the Financial Times. (Which, come to think of it, is a very cultural relative type of behaviour…)

Okay, so, this is what I was thinking: You have cultural relativism, which, superficially, looks like the exact opposite of cultural determinism. It’s no such thing beyond this surface look of things, of course, since ‘cultural determinism’ is just a posh way of saying that, as Newton found out, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Which brings us back to the story I read, about a father and his daughter. Without too much hyperbole you can say that, in this case, the apple couldn’t have ended further from the tree if Satan had been Babe Ruthing it and Eve had been the wide receiver.

Anyway, enjoy the story. I sure did:

Yasmin Fostok, 27, leads a secret life after rebelling against her fanatical Muslim dad, cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who once hailed the 9/11 terrorists as the “Magnificent 19”.  She has performed in London pole dancing bars and gyrated half-naked in cages at club nights, and she admitted: “I’m willing to go topless if the venue is right.”

Bakri, 50 — in Lebanon after being kicked out of Britain — told The Sun: “I am deeply shocked.” Bakri is a Muslim preacher of hate who wants all women to be covered from head to toe. His daughter loves partying, happily poses for raunchy topless photos and is described by a lover as “very adventurous in bed”.

(So, you can’t compare some apples and trees…)

(TO BE CONTINUED… HERE)

You know, in books and in movies, there’s this somewhat Freudian tradition of giving almost every villain an unhappy youth, or one specific, traumatic incident that explains their present criminal behaviour. So, Batman’s Joker fell in a large barrel of acid – and even that most perfect of monsters, Hannibal Lecter, belatedly got a back story as a traumatised kid who’d seen his little sister being eaten by a bunch of looters/deserters in World War ll.

In real life, there seldom is this elegant and entertaining tit for tat. Most of the people who had unhappy childhoods, were bullied at school and at home, couldn’t get a girl or couldn’t get rid of their zits – most of these didn’t turn into glamorous arch-villains. They just became City Councillors, wheel clampers and, of course, referees.

The referee, and especially the football (or soccer) referee is a perfect example of the above-mentioned Arch-Villain Principle (the A-VP). Friendless, girlfriendless – and altogether hopeless – they have, most literally, turned into the card-carrying pricks we can admire each week during our football matches.

Neurotic?  Check
Anal-retentive?  Check
Napoleon/Mussolini complex?  Check

I mean, just look at the next clip: How many times do you need people to retake a penalty before you have satisfied your inner tyrant…?

Of course, even worse than the megalomanic bean splicer is the megalomanic incompetent.

Most referees think that they are infallible – like a God Who walks the earth and terrifies all sinners with His whistle and smites them with the holy Yellow & Red Card.

Which is irritating enough as it is, even if so many of them wouldn’t have the maturity of a five-year-old, the intelligence of a waffle iron and the acuity of a blind drunk hedgehog.

As the following clip shows, in which the Almighty-In-Shorts finds nothing at all wrong with this goal:

Of course, it won’t do you a blind bit of good to complain to the ref, after the latter has blown his whistle (and his top.) For the referee is a jealous God, Who does not allow any other authority in His realm. Like old and demented barnyard dogs, referees guard their territory with a terrifying and insane vehemence.

As the following clip shows:

The depressing truth is, though, that however much these referees act like primadonnas, they remain these sad, sad figures.

Their grown-up frames, their little whistle and their funny, little cards, all their tantrums and mad dog antics cannot hide the little boy who was never picked by any team.

Of course, that’s no reason to pity these creatures. The school ground may be a ruthless jungle but its laws are, on the whole, pretty straightforward, and almost fair.

So, there was nearly always a solid reason why these future referees were not exactly part of the in-group. As the following, short clip shows.

I mean, would you want a guy like this in your team…?

Not exactly the moves of a young Mohammed Ali – and yet, types like this rule the world of football. They make the decisions that influence the multi-million dollar careers of players, the sacking of managers, the promotion and relegation of teams…

Those who sing like toads and move like arthritic goats are masters of and very much present on the stage on which the ballerinas and the opera singers try to give us their best performances.

Talking of ballerinas, though: Even worse than the clumsy oaf who should not be allowed near any dance floor, is the narcissistic madman who thinks he’s got all the moves.

Self-confidence is one thing. Thinking that your feeble stiffy compares favourably to the Eiffel tower is something else entirely, as the following clip shows:

Which would be a fitting but rather disappointing conclusion to leave you with, so I won’t. Instead I’ll give you the following bonus clip, in which two referees are treated with the respect they, no doubt, deserve.

Not a football clip, alas, but many a football player and supporter would have wished it were:

(Public health warning: This column contains two truly atrocious puns)

Now, I didn’t know this – did you? I find it quite interesting though, and it does shine some welcome light on the normally dark and murky field of theoloogy:

Public conveniences are being specially designed at London’s Olympic Park so Muslims will not have to face Mecca while sitting on the loo. The Olympic Delivery Authority has said it wants to produce an ideal venue for people of all cultures, faiths, ages and abilities for the 2012 Games and beyond. The Islamic religion prohibits Muslims from facing the Kiblah - the direction of prayer - when they visit the lavatory.

Which tells us that Allah, like the God of the Old Testament, is a cranky and miserable old Bugger Who likes to see His followers suffer.

So, imagine you’re a devout Muslim, suffering from severe constipation…

Yes, indeed. There you are, in deep and humiliating pain, and you’d love to be able to pray to your God, for deliverance, or just some sympathy – and all you get through the dial-a-prayer line is a sniffy, “Don’t look at Me, pal! You’re on your own there.”

Which just goes to show that Jews, Christians and Muslims have much more in common than they routinely believe is the case.

Because all Three of These Grumpy Old Gods treat Their followers like crap, really, and never can be reached when the shit truly hits Their fans.

1) ”Bush and Cheney tie the knot”

Which could be, in Republican speak, a ‘gay lifestyle’ thing - or, to use one of Oprah Winfrey’s favourite words, a death-of-Sadam type of ‘closure’.

2) ”Paris and Amy in Tinkerbell horror tale”

In which a teary Paris Hilton admits stabbing Amy Winehouse 69 times with one of her $250,000 Jagger Daggers, after a cracked-up Amy fries the Hilton chihuahua in the microwave.

3) “Global warming conspiracy revealed!”

Al Gore’s environmental plea deal was leaked to the Washington Post. Twelve charges have been dropped after Gore confesses that Michael Moore is the mastermind who invented  the global warming threat to discomfort the Bush administration. The ex vice president made this confession during a private session with a special prosecutor, after worried scientists had told him that, instead of heating up, the planet would become encased in ice within five years, if CO2 levels wouldn’t rise with at least a factor of 666 and no less than one-and-a-half billion people would start smoking unfiltered cigarettes within the next few months.

4) “Traffic warden recruitment centre hit by suicide bomber”

Yesterday, the HSGM! (Health & Safety Gone Mad!) confirmed that one of its more radical splinter groups, the BTWSTNS!!! (Behead Those Who Support The Nanny State) was responsible for the suicide attack that cost the lives of 42 traffic warden recruits. A City Council spokesperson denied that 80% of the traffic wardens and wheel clampers had not reported for duty that morning. “Morale is still high,” the Council functionary insisted.

5) ”Space robot finds life on Mars”

A CNN breaking news story tells the world how one of NASA’s robots has sent back a series of pictures that prove beyond a doubt that there is a form of alien life on Mars. In these photographs you can clearly see a group (or family) of Martians watching old and slightly fuzzy repeats of ‘American Idol’ & ‘Who wants to marry a millionaire’. Which goes a long way toward finally proving that there truly is no intelligent life on Mars.

Science is cool -  but first, let me digress a little bit; just for one short paragraph…

So, we know about art imitating life – and, sometimes, of course, life imitating art – but what would happen if human inventions would imitate their natural equivalents, which still are, in many ways, their betters?

Which thought leads us to the following bit of news, concerning yet another scientific discovery; one that I find just a little bit worrying:

Deciduous trees use an elaborate cellular mechanism to part company from their leaves, which act as “solar cells” in the summer but become superfluous in the darker winter months. At the base of each leaf is a special layer called the abscission zone. When the time comes in autumn to shed a leaf, cells in this layer begin to swell, slowing the transport of nutrients between the tree and leaf. Once the abscission zone has been blocked, a tear line forms and moves downwards, until eventually the leaf is blown away or falls off. A protective layer seals the wound, preventing water evaporating and bugs getting in.

You see, these trees shed their solar cells when they don’t need them anymore. Which is all very good and well if you’re a tree – but what about our human homes? Houses are not as smart as trees, so maybe they will just blindly follow the latter and also shed their solar panels the moment the days grow shorter, not realising that, unlike trees, houses can’t grow these things back again come spring.

Anyway, I’m not so sure these scientists are right. All that stuff about cellular mechanisms, solar cells and abscission zones sounds impressive enough but I can’t say I find it terribly convincing.

Me, I think it’s poetry – or rather, bad poetry.

You know how some poets are always going on about spring and renewal, and summer-kissed meadows and what have you. Then, when fall comes around again, it’s all melancholy and the beauty of autumn leaves…

In other words, I think trees dropping their leaves is just an allergic reaction to all of this poetic waffling – which is, unfortunately, the only kind of ‘Fuck you, I’m out of here!” option open to you, when you have roots instead of feet.

Same with those melting ice-caps, I’m sure, or the expanding deserts. Forget about CO2 and greenhouse gasses. It’s not people driving cars that’s causing all these environmental problems. It’s bad poets driving mother nature round the bend who are to blame.

When it comes to sex, we, in the West, are obviously bonkers – off our collective trolly, if you like. We don’t know how to deal with these matters sensibly ourselves, and we certainly have no clue how to prepare our children for it.

Some folks would like to tell their kids about the birds and the full Brazilean bees wax the moment these children can crawl towards the remote. Others would rather pretend sex did not exist at all and raise their kids as if they lived in an early fifties time bubble. Like the following ad shows:

Now, I have to say that I don’t think any good can come from pretending the outside world – or human nature – doesn’t exist but I’m not so sure what’s more disturbing: Parents who treat their daughters as future Stepford wives…

… or the type of imbeciles who think that Paris Hilton, Britney Spears etcetera are the perfect role models for anyone – let alone for young girls.

Just read the following excerpt from a Daily Mail story about a pole-dancing kit for children:

Tesco has been forced to remove a pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of “destroying children’s innocence”. The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, “Unleash the sex kitten inside…simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!”

Here’s a link to the original Guardian article about the seven worst sex toys for kids.

So, with one type of parents trying desperately to preserve their children’s innocence till the latter die, still virgins, of old age – and others buying their four-year-old kids Playboy erasers, thongs, ‘I’m so sexy’ T-shirts and what have you – it’sno wonder that so many grown-ups end up being terribly confused about sex.

More to the point, millions of grown-ups don’t have a bloody clue how to behave and what is even close to appropriate when it comes to sex.

No wonder brothels have always been such a lucrative business.

In a way, whore houses are like McDonalds. Of course, everybody can learn to cook for him or herself – but it takes time to learn about all the possible ingredients, and how to mix them; and even when you’ve spent all that time learning how to prepare a good meal, it still takes quite a lot of time, each time, to cook a really excellent dinner.

Coming back to sex: it takes a while to learn about yourself, and about others: what you and they want, and need; what’s good for both parties, and what’s fun; what works and what does not.

So, it’s much more easier to go out and buy a Big mac instead… Hell, they even do it in good old, Roman Catholic & formerly repressed Ireland:

Yes, you can meet the girls of Irishescorts.com right here, and right now. They might not come as cheap as a Big Mac but you won’t have to sweat over the stove for hours, before you can have a taste.

These days, of course, it’s not just the men who are looking for a quick fix.

In the West, women can go the fast food route as well – and thanks to the internet, shopping for your meat has never been so easy, or so cheap.

As the following link shows.

Even the name of this site shows its class and sophistication. Called the ‘Toyboy warehouse’, it claims to offer an online dating service for ‘gorgeous women and younger men.’ The rules are easy enough:

Once registered, men will be restricted in their search to women at least a year older, and women to men at least a year younger.

Very nice, I’m sure.

Of course, one of the problems with not being able to deal with, or talk about sex in a normal way, is that it can be bloody dangerous. God – or the Devil – knows how many people have died from venereal diseases throughout human history. I’m sure that, in the past, as a cause of death, sex never really threatened to dispose the ultimate top four from their poll position: war, pestilence, famine & religion.

Still, sexual diseases must have killed millions and millions of people, even before a combination of overpopulation and AIDS did manage to turn sex into something that is as lethal as modern warfare.

Funnily enough, there are millions of people who are not only against the use of condoms but also don’t want to talk about it – let alone warn their children about the real dangers that are out there, or how they might protect themself from them.

Obviously, as we saw with those children’s toys, for every person who thinks sex is Satan’s calling card, there’s another one who loves the whole bodily fluids’ business to distraction.

Which can take many, many silly forms, as the next blog entry shows, which gives us a top ten of the weirdest Japanese condoms:

Still, and coming back to those venereal diseases, people are also much too complacent.

Even if they know the risks, they don’t really want to know. Which is why anti-AIDS campaigns try to shock us out of our ostrich mode, from time to time – like this, quite brilliant, French poster campaign: