Glob-a-log

(They really are out to get us…)

Now, I’m sure it’s hard to be one of God’s chosen. Hell, ask the Jews…

It must be particularly hard though to be one of those select few who think it is their duty to tell their less fortunate brothers and sisters about Whatever The Particular Brand Of Truth Of The Week is.

Just imagine: It’s another Sunday morning, on the foul side of dawn, and your alarm goes off like a demented angel, telling you it’s time to rise and shine…

… and tell the heathen hordes about WTPBOTOTW is…

… and get door after door after door slammed into your face. So, it’s no wonder that some of these Chosen Ones go slightly mad - or screaming, bark-biting & gun-toting insane, of course:

“Two Jehovah’s Witnesses have been accused of murdering 13 people on a mad “mission from God”. Vladimir Gurianov, 44, and Elvira Egorycheva 46, are said to have hacked, bludgeoned and shot their innocent victims in a nine-month killing spree.”

It would make for a nice old-fashioned Hollywood B-movie. Quentin Tarantino meets ‘They came from outer space’ or something like that.

To be honest, two people only managing to hack, bludgeon & shoot 13 people in nine whole bloody months is a bit lame. Your average American school kid can easily kill as many within nine minutes or so.

Still, Russian madmen may, as of yet, not be as streamlined & efficient as their American counterparts but you can see that Russia is fast becoming as capitalistic and entrepreneurial as the USA.

This from the same article:

“They also robbed their victims on “God’s orders”. Gurianov told detectives after his arrest: “God told us to go and take the money. He said, ‘Go there and take as much as you need’. So we did.””

Yes, when even your orthodox Russian Mad Hatters are having at least one wild and wide open eye for the main chance, you can truly say that the old, Communist spirit, like Elvis, has left the building.

(Pesky aliens again…)

Ah well, people can be such idiots. A few weeks ago it was UFOs eating wind turbines:

“A family has described seeing tentacled flying objects in the night sky just days before a wind turbine was supposedly wrecked by similar looking UFOs. The group said they watched several glowing orange spheres with octupus-like arms reaching down from them, while driving late at night. The sighting came just three days before a wind turbine had one of its blades ripped off in Conisholme, Lincs, in what many believe was a close encounter. And the family’s description is strikingly similar to what witnesses claim they saw shortly before the wind farm incident on January 4.”

‘Strikingly similar’, indeed. Poor wind turbine.

Anyway, man can not live on aliens alone, so now it’s back to that other old favourite, things that go bump in the night:

“A hospital has called in an exorcist after staff claimed they were being haunted by a ghost. Staff at Derby’s new City General claim a black-clad figure wearing a cloak is stalking the corridors and wards. Senior manager Debbie Butler has now reportedly briefed the terrified employees via email, explaining that they have hired an exorcist to come and rid the £334 million hospital of their unwanted visitor. She explained: “I’m not sure how many of you are aware that some members of staff have reported seeing a ghost. I’m taking it seriously as the last thing I want is staff feeling uneasy.”"

God forbid.

You wouldn’t want the type of personnel that normally can’t bother to remember washing their hands in between seeing patients to feel uneasy about ghosts wandering through their decidedly unclean wards.

It may seem somewhat strange to worry about the unquiet dead, while so many patients are still dying, quite needlessly, from those hospital bugs but then again, those bugs are smaller than the eye can see, while people will, most probably, never stop reporting having seen ghosts.

Anyway, both these stories serve well enough as metaphors - or as illustrations of what’s wrong with us, humans.

You would think it would make more sense to send in some engineers than to shout ‘Aliens!’ when a wind turbine suddenly collapses and most sane people would have thought that, in your average hospital, it would be wise to reinstall old-fashioned matrons to keep an eye on procedures, to improve your cleaning services and even get in a few good rat catchers before you’d make that call to the ghostbusters.

When you look at the world’s more serious problems though and, more pertinently, the way we respond to them, from environmental to geopolitical problems, from ethical questions to religious and cultural dilemmas, you could argue that the main reason that we mess up things so badly is that we do have this endearing but not very helpful habit to respond to most crises by crying ‘Aliens!’ or ‘Ghosts!’, instead of trying to find a more rational approach.

(The joys of DIY…?)

Now, people are always going on about the perfect this or the perfect that. Lists of favourite music, cars, movies and, of course, movie stars…

… and each journalist, blogger or columnist knows that you can almost always get away with writing another list-based piece. Because there will always be an audience for lists (or cats.)

No cats today though - okay, one short paragraph to keep our feline junkies happy. So, here’s one cute cat picture and one strange cat story. On to the next, cat-free paragraph now.

Before I so rudely interrupted myself with that stupid cat paragraph, I was talking about lists of favourite things (because I obviously have nothing better to do right now and still have this column to write.)

So, most people, at least sometimes, make these lists in their heads. They see a car, or a house, or someone wearing a cool outfit and think: I wouldn’t mind having one of those, and those, and those…

Some people go for composite lists. So, for example, they would like to have Oprah’s bank account, look like Brad Pitt and have sex with Angelina Jolie.

Obviously, when you try to make a perfect composite fantasy figure, you need to be careful, unless you don’t mind ending up with someone who has the sense of humour of Eddy Murphy, the body of Jack Nicholson and the tastes of Hannibal Lecter.

Right, so you can guess where I am going with this - and here is my very obvious question: If you were given God or Frankenstein type powers and could create the perfect man or woman out of three (or more) celebrities, who would you pick for what parts and attributes precisely?

As I said, be careful out there - or, at least, don’t come back to complain to me when you’ve managed to provide your composite woman with Jolie’s tats, Oprah’s hips and Paris Hilton’s brains.

Anyway, have fun and, if you want, let me know what your favourite composite man and/or woman would look like.

(And the risks of DIY…?)

(Now who is who exactly here…?)

It is often suggested that familiarity breeds contempt. What is lesser known is that it also produces more milk:

“Cows with names produce more milk than those animals who are not named, scientists have found. Ermintrude, Daisy and La vache qui rit may produce as much as 454 pints more each year than cows with no names. The average amount of milk produced by a cow over its annual 10 month lactation period is 13,198 pints (7,500 litres). Those cows with names had an average higher milk yield of 454 pints (258 litres).”

Of course, it’s not always easy to come up with the correct name. The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote that ‘the naming of cats is a serious matter.’

Paris Hilton would have agreed with this - if she knew Eliot (or could read.) God knows poor Paris is severely challenged in the brains department, so she can’t be expected to see the difference between a cow and a cat and call them by their proper names at the same time.

As becomes quite obvious if you read the following story:

Paris Hilton, in London to launch her new television show, has said she thought Gordon Ramsay was the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The hotel heiress revealed that, although she said her time in the country taught her slang terms such as “minger” and “fit”, she failed to answer correctly when asked to name the British Prime Minister, claiming she thought it was Gordon Ramsay.

To be fair to Paris, it was a relatively easy mistake to make. One Gordon is a famous chef who likes to say the word ‘fuck’ a lot, whenever he is on TV, while the other Gordon solely appears on TV to explain one of his own past, present and future fuck ups.

Still, it would be mildly interesting to see what would happen if you called a cow ‘Paris’ or ‘Hilton’.

Would such a cow also go on to produce more milk or would she simply end up producing sex tapes and dubious TV shows?

(Going for pastures new or still milking the fame game…?)

(Quiz master supreme…)

No news today.

Just a reminder that life (as we all know) is short, cruel and often quite hilarious.

I was reminded of that when I watched an old BBC clip of Stephen Fry’s more than quite interesting QI show.

If you don’t know it, it’s a quiz show, in which the master (S.F.) asks weird & hard questions, gives points to panel members for being entertaining and punishes them whenever their answer is too predictably boring.

It’s a great show and it often informs the viewers of things that are not only quite interesting but also pathetic and, yes, hilarious.

Take, for instance, the German Saint Bernard dog Barry.

Now, I’m sorry to say that these rescue dogs never actually carried brandy in those little wooden caskets that they wore around their necks. (Alcohol would kill people with hypothermia, it seems.) Still, however mythical that casket of booze is, there’s nothing even slightly apocryphal about these famous Saint Bernard Dogs.

They are very real and they have saved many an innocent traveller and stupid tourist.

Which takes us back to Barry, who plied his trade in the early 1800s.

According to quiz master Stephen Fry our canine hero rescued a grand total of 43 people.

Barry died in the line of duty.

He was killed while trying to help a 44th person, who thought the Saint Bernard was a wolf and subsequently shot him…

(Barry’s monument)

(Jeremiah: Patron saint of all tedious Crusaders and other lamenting nuts)

I used to like the English columnist Jeremy Clarkson very much but the last few years he’s become a bit of an eco bore. Proving that on both far ends of any issue, only the useless and the tedious seem to gather, spoiling any kind of meaningful discussion for all sides.

Of course, on the few occassions that Clarkson is not behaving like a latter-day Cato, ending each and every speech to the Roman Senate with his trademark ‘By the way, I think that Carthage must be destroyed’, J.C. can still be very entertaining.

Only last Sunday, he was complaining about the British government, which was, yet again, wasting money and time, in its never ending campaign to keep the whole of Britain healthy & safe & bored out of its collective skull:

“Genuinely, it staggers me that with all the problems facing the nation right now, some of my tax money is being used to work out how much wine I should drink before supper. What next? An enormous Prora-style holiday camp on the east coast where smiling families in lederhosen will be ordered to do star jumps from dawn till dusk? Drinking to excess is what separates us from the Greeks. Being drunk is what separates us from the beasts.”

I was reminded of yesterday’s jeremiad by Clarkson when I read an article in one of England’s less serious newspapers - okay, a tabloid really: The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph specializes in putting out stories of a highly dubious scientific nature.

What they seem to do is half read some serious science story, latch on to its most dubious bits, paint those purple and then inflate the poor things till they are buggered up beyond recognition and belief.

Obviously, almost nothing that appears in the science section of the Telegraph has anything even remotely to do with real science (reporting) but these pieces can still be quite amusing.

They are like those ‘How about that!‘ sections that most papers now carry - with the added advantage that what is written in the science section need not even be true at all.

Anyway, I thought the following story was quite entertaining:

“Rather than curbing a man’s prowess in bed, new research from Australia claims that alcohol can actually improve sexual performance. The suggestion flies in the face of conventional thinking which insists that men who drink too much are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. The new findings are based on a study of 1,580 Australian men, carried out by Western Australia’s Keogh Institute for Medical Research and published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. It concluded that those men who drank a moderate amount of alcohol reported 30 per cent fewer problems than teetotallers.”

Now, I’m sure these new findings (such as they are) will not change the government’s attitude to alcohol. In fact, it might even harden their stance - since this adds another potential pleasure to the act of drinking.

Which is probably the most annoying aspect of this whole health & safety obsession: That you can’t help but think that those who claim to act for the good of all of us are, in fact, miserabilist spoil-sports who simply can’t stand it when other people are having fun.

Whether it’s the fanatical, total war on smokers, the drinking of alcohol or the eating of fast food, there’s always this impression that these campaigners don’t really want us to be healthy: They just want to convert us to their risk & pleasure averse faith - and, failing that, take everything that gives us pleasure away from us by force.

In that sense, I have to say that the extremists on the environmental front very much seem to be operating according to that same principle. While I am - unlike Jeremy Clarkson - not a Global Warming denier, I’m not exactly a paid up member of The Latter Day Green Church of Total Doom.

So, I do feel that, like the health & safety Nazis, a sizable number of the fanatical environmentalists simply hate it when other people seem to have the kind of fun they disapprove of.

Something tells me that, if tomorrow would bring absolute & undeniable proof that all those scientists had been wrong about Global Warming, quite a few of the more obsessed Greens would not be pleased with these good tidings at all.

Like all the fanatics who want us to lead healthy & boring lives, these environmentalists would probably plain hate it if things like cheap flights, fancy cars and other, in their eyes, almost evil pursuits & assets would prove to be absolutely harmless in environmental terms.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Global Warming will prove to be as much of a real threat as the Wizard of Oz was - but I’m quite convinced that at least some of the doom sayers would actually prefer an environmental catastrophe over a scenario where consumerist pleasures would not lead all of us to ruin.

In that sense, the colour green suits the Mad Hatter’s part of the environmental movement as well as a more Calvinist black would. Not, however, the pleasant green of meadows and trees and what have you but the glaring green of poisonous envy.

(Sex sells - sort of…)

Most advertisements are incredibly boring. They either try to sell us washing detergents by repeating the name of the product as many times as possible within two minutes or they try to interest the punters by having some almost naked woman pouting and panting at them for however long it takes to create a hard-on for some useless product or service.

Every now and then, of course, there will be an ad that is genuinely funny but most of them are, at best, tedious and, at worst, the stuff that mutinous mass murder and screaming suicides are made of.

The Apple ads are a perfect example of how a slightly engaging idea for a campaign can soon turn into a boring and mildly offensive rut. You know the ones. It has those two guys representing an Apple and a Microsoft computer. As I said, mildly engaging for a short time, until the whole concept morphs into the equivalent of your average party bore.

Someone at the Apple company must have become aware of this, because it seems that they’ve come up with a new approach.

I haven’t seen this new ad yet but those two men are gone and they’ve been replaced by a person in a white coat, who is making some heavy duty claims about the product.

To spice things up a bit the scientist is assisted by a bunch of mice and one Hell of a blender:

Research has found that consuming two glasses of apple juice a day could delay the onset of the brain disorder, which affects more than 400,000 people in the UK. Scientists made the discovery through laboratory tests on mice, which showed that those fed apple juice performed better in maze trials.

(The new Apple blender babe…?)

(The PC brigade: Still in the mockingbird killing business…)

It’s a comforting fact that whatever change Obama will bring to America and the wider world, same world will never lack its more or less constant supply of fuckwits, dickheads and other assorted arseholes - and some of the stories that they generate are so familiar that they almost fail to register as the mindlessly moronic drivel that they are. Nor that they slowly yet surely threaten to engulf and poison the collective mind.

It’s no use to say that, to paraphrase Jesus, the morons will always be with us and that, at least, these PC imbeciles mean well - not as long as they continue to threaten the fundaments and fabric of our societies.

Terrorists may kill the odd few people - but as long as we take care not to overreact to these outrages, they can never do our societies any real or lasting harm. They can’t win, unless we decide to give them victory.

Not to belittle the grief of all families and friends who suffered the loss of someone killed in any terrorist attack but countless more people die on our roads, fiddling with their domestic electric appliances or through alcohol related accidents - and none of those, mostly avoidable deaths have ever threatened the existence or even the progress of our societies.

In truth, all the petty & vengeful Osama bin Ladens of this world are but nuisances and, as long as we keep a collective cool head, irrelevant nuisances at that.

It’s a pity that you can’t say the same about the insidious PC brigade. They keep gnawing at the very pillars of our societies, insisting that these are turned into a bland porridge like swamp, in which all words, all thoughts, all deeds must be censored and sterilised - until all creativity, all that inspires us and defines us and makes us human has been killed off.

As the following news story, again, abundantly makes clear.

How to kill a mocking bird indeed…:

An American English teacher has called for novels which use the word “nigger” to be removed from the high school curriculum now that Barack Obama has been elected president.

John Foley, who teaches at Ridgefield High School in southern Washington, believes classics of American literature such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men should no longer be required reading for students. “The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms. Barack Obama is [president] of the United States, and novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Some might call this apostasy; I call it common sense. Obama’s victory signals that Americans are ready for change. Let’s follow his lead and make a change that removes the N-word from the high school curriculum.”

He then goes on to say that he never wants “to rationalise Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe”.

Well, there’s a very easy solution to that problem. It comes with, let’s say, a twenty story building and the laws of gravity…

… or, failing that, a simple pretzel or two wet fingers & an electric socket may do the trick as well - either that or, less pleasingly perhaps, a simple resignation letter.

(Politically correct roadkill…?)

(Some stories do not change…)

Last week I read an amazing story about Mike, the headless chicken. Mike’s owner decapitated the hapless egg factory in 1945, after which the chicken lived on for another eighteen months - earning its murderous owner a cool $4,500 per month on the sideshow circuit. Something that wouldn’t be considered chicken feed by most folks now but was a true fortune in the mid forties.

Anyway, it was a cute story and probably worth a column of its own but I was reminded of Mike when I read the following newspaper article - which involves a stolen car, a goat and the dumbest creature ever dreamt up by any optimistic God or explained by some enterprising Darwin:

“Police in Nigeria are holding a goat accused of attempting to steal a car. The black and white animal was turned in to police by a vigilante group, which claimed it was an armed car thief who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

“The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car,” Tunde Mohammed, a spokesman for Kwara state police, told Reuters. “They pursued them. However, one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,” he said. While Mr Mohammed said he could not confirm whether a man had, in fact, turned into a goat, he did admit that the animal was in police custody.”

You have to say that when it comes to behaving like a headless chicken, poor Mike is seriously out of his depth when us humans enter the race.

Mike lasted for just a measly eighteen months. Humankind has been going at it for a cool 276.000 years (or 6000 years, if you care to believe a very weird subcategory of headless chickens.)

Nothing much has changed since the first cave-painting human being lost his first paint brush. Then, no doubt, mister caveman blamed his loss on the wicked sabre-toothed tiger next door or a cleptomanic woolly mammoth.

Since then, we have involved somewhat, inventing the wheel and traffic lights and windshield wipers en route, - to the point that we can now blame goats for the theft of our vehicles.

Plus ça change - not.

(Meet Mike, humankind’s totem animal)

(Wake up, dear…)

Ah well, Tammy Wynette was right: Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman…:

“Women suffer more nightmares than men because they find it harder to switch off their emotions at the end of the day, research has found. They carry their worries into their dreams, and continue to process emotional concerns while they are asleep, according to the study. The findings came from a study of 193 male and female volunteers at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. When asked to record their most recent dream, 19 per cent of male students reported having a nightmare compared to 34 per cent of women.”

I’m not quite sure I trust the results of this latest bit of research. For decades now, we have been told that women are better at dealing with their emotions than men, because they talk about them more - while men bottle these things up, which then leads to ulcers, heart-attacks, teeth-grinding, hair loss and what have you.

So, one would expect that if emotions lay at the basis of our nightmares, men would suffer from them more than women do. (Hell, maybe we do but are simply better at repressing those nightmares too…?)

Anyway, the whole study of dreams is endlessly fascinating but it is rather doubtful that there is such a direct, causal link between certain emotions and nightmares. On the whole, people don’t dream more happy dreams when they are happy, erotic dreams when they are wildly in love or football dreams during a world cup tournament. The inner workings of our brain are a bit more subtle than that.

Still, there might be a much simpler answer to the question why women seem to have more nightmares than men. I mean, it might be that I’m a bit biased here, as a heterosexual male but I’m sure I would have more nightmares too, if, like so many women do on a daily basis, I had to wake up next to some bloody guy.