Glob-a-log

Okay, let’s say a bunch of aliens land somewhere, let’s say in Australia. After landing their ships in front of the Sidney opera house, they soon start to build a fence around the continent. Having done that, they horde the total human population into a large number of overcrowded camps. Then, they proceed to slaughter and eat all the new-born babies and make all kinds of mildly useful things out of human skin.

That kind of scenario would make for quite a few excited headlines in the rest-of-the-world’s newspapers, I’m sure.

Obviously, when it’s just chickens we’re talking about, this kind of stuff simply makes for a filler article on a slow news day:

Scientists at Manchester University have found a new way to make egg boxes - out of chicken feathers. They used feathers rejected by a duvet and pillow company as a basic ingredient for a range of paper products, including festive wrapping paper. At present, the vast majority of the 120,000 tonnes of feathers plucked from poultry in UK farms goes into landfill or is incinerated. However, under the method pioneered by Professor Chris Carr and colleagues, feathers from poultry are beaten, filtered and turned into a crude feather pulp.

Adding insult to injury, you might call it. First, they steal your unhatched children and then they make portable coffins for them from your own feathers.

Kermit the frog once sang that it’s not easy being green. Well, what with humanity’s craving for frogs’ legs, the little fellow had a point - but it sure ain’t fun to be a chicken either. Which makes you wonder why you never hear about chickens getting rabid and attacking their human jailers. I mean, if, one day, all the world’s chickens would organize and go psycho on us, that would make Al Qaeda look as lethal as the Women’s Institute.

Now, you go and chew on that thought of the week for a bit, while I go and make myself a nice mushroom omelette.

Okay, it seems that every columnist and/or blogger must write a cat column, from time to time. It must be (to quote Robert Rankin) a tradition or an old charter or something.

Well, I’m reasonably happy to oblige but first, a disclaimer. Or maybe not a disclaimer but a declaration of interest, or bias: I like cats.

I know that they are ornery creatures; vain, arrogant, lazy, contrary, irritating, psychotic and murderous beasties even. Still, I tick quite a few of those boxes myself, so I’m cool with their less oh-look-how-sweet-she’s-purring aspects.

Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Now, I’m not saying the following story had me laughing so loud that it woke my cat. (I haven’t tested this out yet but I suspect it would take a fairly large nuclear explosion to do that when the little monster is in the middle of a serious snooze.)

So, I’m aware that other cat lovers might also find this story less than hilarious but they (and I) must surely, if grudgingly, admit that there is a certain poetic justice to it:

“A fire that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter near Toronto may have been started by mice, say officials. A Toronto Humane Society spokesman told the BBC: “It’s unfortunate and ironic that mice caused the fire that killed the cats. Unfortunately, the mice probably perished in the fire as well.”"

Mice going Rambo on us; who’d have expected that? Mind you, it would have been nice if Rambo had been more like these murderous mice. That is, if he had perished too, after taking that first, bloody revenge. Then, we would not have had to live with all those other cretinous movies.

Anyway, as the further development & exploitation of mouse stories go, I think Disney will probably give this one a miss.

Okay, so I’ve always hated the movie ‘Titanic’. As one film critic put it: “Three bloody hours - and then the bloody boat sinks.”

So, normally, nothing would have pleased me more than to read that some other movie had torpedoed that bloody ship from its record holding, box office position.

Apart from the fact that the movie that’s now even more successful than that irritating boat movie is ‘Mamma Mia!’ - and I fucking hate ABBA…!

Anyway, reading about that fun little fact, I came to think. So, we’ve had ‘Titanic’, and before ‘Mamma Mia!’ we also had ‘ABBA: The Musical’. Combine those ingredients, retch and then think of the commercial possibilities of such a mix.

Isn’t it strange that there haven’t been lemming like surges of producers, wanting to make it big in the ‘disaster musical’ genre?

Mind you, me, I would consider ‘ABBA: The Musical’ already to be a disaster, of course. Still, there are so many more worthy topics for such a disaster musical. Let’s see. Yes, you could have:

‘Catarina: The Musical’
‘Iraq: The Musical’
‘Stalin: The Musical’
‘Haggis: The Musical’

Still, if there is one disaster musical that I would put good money on to score big, it would, of course, be “Dick Cheney: The Musical.”

In which we would see how the young Dick tortured kittens and bullied his class mates to give him all their lunch money: Singing his way from one foul deed to the other, into the White House, where he, in the final scene, rips the heart out of the body of his former master and (in a final, rousing song) declares himself the master of the universe.

That would work, I’d think.

Anyway, I’ve had my say, so, here’s the obvious question to everyone who’s still reading this: What would be YOUR favourite disaster musical?

Nice one, Herr Ratzinger:

“In a further sign of the Vatican’s “Green” policies, wood from the Christmas tree inaugurated on St Peter’s Square at the weekend is to be recycled to make “toys for needy children” and school benches, Vatican officials said.”

Positively heart-warming, don’t you think?

One of the richest and most powerful institutions on earth will be giving away its Christmas tree, after it’s become surplus to requirements.

Now, don’t sneer: Those trees cost quite a few pennies, you know… Well, normally they do: The Pope got this one for free from some Austrian fans.

Which makes this most generous gesture look even worse than that of any grandstanding middle class family that donates the toys their children don’t want anymore to the nearest Oxfam shop.

Ah well, I suppose those needy children will be quite happy with and grateful for whatever of the tree will be left, after those school benches have been cut.

I mean, when you’re poor, you might never be sure how much time there will be in between meals, so then you will be very glad to have a bit of wood to chew on, while you’re waiting.

Though I’m not sure that it is a good idea to encourage the young urban poor that it’s okay to play with needles.

First: I don’t smoke, I have never smoked and I will, most probably, never start smoking, unless someone lights me up.

Anyway, so I still think there’s way too much hysteria about the dangers of passive smoking.  Of course, we know that all governments tend to climb on the loudest bandwagon du jour, gladly foregoing commons sense for a few positive headlines and that fuzzy feeling of doing something popular - but this world-wide war on the cigarette seems a bit over the top.

Especially if you compare the (somewhat dubious) statistics of people dying from passive smoking with the very real and known fatalities, caused by ‘passive driving.’

Across Europe some 400 people are killed annually by lorries that have no side mirrors. After years and years of inaction, there are now laws (in some European countries) that say new lorries will have to have these mirrors, which make it possible for drivers to even see pedestrians and cyclists.

That’s for lorries made after 2000 - because the costs of ‘retro-fitting’ older vehicles would be too high. Which is very funny, since the cost of putting a mirror on an existing lorry is that of a tank of diesel. So, we know how high our governments set the price for a human life, normally.

Obviously, the figure of people killed by lorries without side mirrors is very low compared to those killed by speeding. Yet, there are no obligatory manslaughter charges against speeding motorists who cause death - let alone automatic charges for attempted manslaughter against those who are caught speeding. So, again, governments are happy to side with the majority of careless and criminal drivers, rather than protect the potential and actual victims of ‘passive driving.’

Then, of course, there’s the risk of ‘passive drinking’ (often combined with that of ‘passive driving’.) That kills way more people than passive smoking but, so far, governments have not even come close to getting as tough on drunk driving as they are on, let’s say, smoking cannabis - and, while smokers are now the new lepers who must be kept away from the general public, you can still drink alcohol in bars, of course.

All of that is passingly strange but then we know that humans (and their elected governments) can be quite stupid, hysterical and very easy to lead.

Anyway, the above is not an endorsement of smoking. Smoking is indeed a filthy, addictive and quite often lethal habit. As the following story shows:

A 10-a-day cigarette chewing 24-year-old Dachshund has been knocked down and killed – on his way to the tobacconist’s shop. General Edi has been munching his way through half a packet of cigarettes every day since he was a puppy, said owner Wolfgang Treirler. But Edi has died after he was hit by a car during a walk to his favourite cigarette shop.

You know, lots of people have quite tedious jobs - so, it’s no wonder that the oft-spoken phrase ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ also became the title of a quite popular (if crappy) movie.

Of course, after eight years of Bush and Cheney, a simple ‘Thank God’ is hardly enough to express the world’s collective relief that those eight years are now almost over.

Mind you, it’s an ill wind that sells blow jobs at a Republican fund raiser do - so it should not come as a surprise that even the lousiest president can make some creative spirit some serious bucks. As the new ‘Throw shoes at Bush’ computer game proves.

Talking of which, both in terms of ill winds and collective sighs of relief…

Thank God that this year’s X factor show is over. Me, I don’t even own a TV but that fact could not save me from the endless coverage of that lame show in serious newspapers (and stupid blogs like this one.) Isn’t it amazing how many millions of people want to watch shit like that - not to discover some new talent but to have a laugh at all those deluded people who can’t sing but still are so desperate to become famous that they would indeed give blowjobs for free to the whole damn GOP, if it meant they could be on TV for even fifteen seconds, let alone fifteen minutes of fame?

Sickening nonsense, of course but, as that viral show game showed, someone will always profit from whatever disaster hits humankind, be it George Bush or a sadistic TV show.

So, at first I was not happy when I read that the X Factor’s finalists would have to sing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song ‘Hallelujah’. Hearing some talentless hack sing one of your favourite songs is a bit like seeing the love of your life giving blowjobs to etcetera, etcetera.

That though was before I read that this meant that Cohen himself would earn a cool £1 million because of this decision, which made me happy enough to forgive this brutal rape of a beloved song.

Still, I prefer his master’s voice - or, if it has to be a cover, there are much better ones, done by the likes of K.D. Lang and John Cale - though Jefff Buckley’s Hallelujah is, I think, the best of all the covers. So, let’s call his version Hallelujah B to Cohen’s original Hallelujah A, if you like:

Hallelujah A

However, honours where these dubious honours are due, so I’ll leave you with a clip of that X Factor finalist - and yes, I admit that even a grumpy old sod as I couldn’t help but feel happy for the girl, when I watched her clip.

Once more, let’s sing the praises of the women & men in white: Those dedicated servants of the mind, whose endless curiosity and perseverance, have given us all these delightful things, like penicillin, talking toasters, the World Wide Web and the hydrogen bomb.

So, yet again, our scientists come with a report that will bring comfort to the hearts of all who read it:

“Research has now shown a link between high childhood IQ and an adult enthusiasm for alcohol that leads in some cases to problem drinking.”

Now, truly, that is good news. No, I mean it.

We’ve all seen those images of English towns, being overrun by what seemed to be a horde of sloshed barbarians. People vomiting all over the street, picking fights, getting raped and ending up in hospitals, morgues and, in the very worst case scenario, dry-up clinics.

Like I said, we’ve all heard and read those stories and most of us ended up feeling disgusted, sad and/or appalled…

… and now it has been proven that there was no reason for that at all. So, bring on those images of weekend’s drunk marauders, for now we understand that what we see is not the degeneration and break-down of our society but a sign that, in England at least, the young are all little Einsteins in the making.

So, when you pass someone who’s puking his heart out, or see some half-naked girl lying in the gutter, don’t shake your head and despair: Chances are he and she are simply in the midst of working out a formula to end world hunger or to bring world peace.

Ah, the wonderful world of science: It can tell us so much about this world we are living in - although this story started with someone walking on a beach, who had an open eye for beauty.

Of course, you could, more truthfully, say that this one started way before the first white coat walked through his lab - or the first human walked the beach, a cool 140 million years ago:

“The world’s oldest spider web, spun when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, has been discovered in a piece of amber from a beach in the south of England. Scientists working at Oxford University found tiny threads of spider silk encased inside a piece of amber that formed around 140 million years ago. The web appears to be similar to those of modern orb web spiders, which weave a spiral web of silk to catch insect prey.”

It’s a beautiful thought, don’t you think? The spider web may be the most fragile of constructions ever to be invented and built by any species - and yet part of one survived, locked in amber, for 140 million years.

You can’t really compare these things - not without becoming very silly - but this is my blog and I can be as silly as I damn well want to be, so here we go regardless:

Though you can’t compare these things, it’s a bit like how the Motown music machine collected all those broken hearts and preserved them in those many, many wonderful 3-minute records that survived to tell us these stories, long after the original hearts stopped bleeding.

Broken hearts that were caught in vinyl, like spiderwebs in amber.

(A.A. Gill in Iceland)

The most beautiful sentence in any of the papers that I read today, was written by The TimesOnline restaurant & TV critic and general affairs writer, mister AA Gill.

It’s from a long, insightful article about Iceland and how that country has suffered from and deals with the world’s economic crisis.

It truly is a wonderful article, so please go and read it (here), after you’ve read this brilliant line:

“They have grown through a hard Calvinism to a moral atheism while maintaining an open mind about elves.”

Wonderful.

Thank you, mister Gill!

(A tough yet graceful crowd…)