Glob-a-log

(Hussein Obama: Out of the closet…!!!)

So, by now you must have heard that Obama took the oath of office a second time round.

This is the official line, as presented by the Washington Post:

“After flubbing his one role on Inauguration Day – administering the oath of office to Obama — Roberts traveled to the White House to re-administer the oath. Just to make sure.”

‘Just to make sure,’ of course…

Well, of course not…!!!

The Devil - or Shaitan - is, as always, in the details. Read and weep, and be very, very afraid:

“After a flawless recitation that included no Bible and took 25 seconds, Roberts smiled and said, “Congratulations, again.”"

‘INCLUDED NO BIBLE…!!!’

‘Why no Bible?’ you may well ask - and I can give you the simple and only true answer to that.

It’s because Obama is such a devout - or fanatic - Muslim that he was not prepared to swear anything on a Christian Bible, even  if (as is the case!!!) he doesn’t mean to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States but plans to destroy the country from within the Oval Office…!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Right, and if you believe any of that shit, then it’s a wonder that you can tell your dick from your radio dial for long enough to tune in to one of those right wing talk shows, where they peddle this kind of shit and much, much worse, each and every fucking day.

Ah well, I guess for some folks April Fool’s Day is an all year round marathon: A sort of Groundhog Day, with endlessly repeated malicious rumours for jokes.)

(The truth is out there…!!!)

(Grampian Police £170,000 poster boy)

You know how, when someone in the armed forces, fire brigade or police does something truly heroic, people often use that tired old phrase, “Above and beyond the call of duty”.

It’s not just courageous acts though, that can be described like this. It can also cover all kinds of foolhardy, spiteful and quite moronic acts, as the following story shows:

“A police force has been criticised after spending £170,000 to arrest a stripper 22 times for impersonating an officer. Stuart Kennedy, a 25-year-old genetics student from Aberdeen University, has spent 123 hours in police custody since his first arrest in March 2007. Since then he has faced charges including possession of an offensive weapon - his truncheon and a fake CS spray - and for allegedly fitting a flashing light to his car. But so far none of the cases brought against him have yielded a successful prosecution and the latest collapsed in court last week after the Crown Office unexpectedly dropped the charges.”

Many kudos to all those judges who keep throwing out these ludicrous charges. It’s not often that you can sing the praises of the British judiciary. Most of the times, they simply provide the complimentary senile rubber stamp for whatever ludicrous claims the police make. So, it’s nice to see that there are still at least some judges who do have a mind of their own.

Still, I would like to know what’s with the Grampian police force. I mean, this is what Colin Menzies, the Assistant Chief Constable of Grampian Police had to say about all these arrests:

“The force has a duty to investigate all instances when reports of alleged criminal behaviour are received. I am, however, extremely disappointed that the force and our officers have come in for such criticism when I believe they have acted proportionately and with the greater interests of the community we serve at heart throughout.”

Yes…

Arresting one male stripper 22 times, at a combined cost of £170,000, is so in the interest of the community at large.

You know what though, I sincerely doubt that these arrests were made after the police received any of those so-called “reports of alleged criminal behaviour”. I’m reasonably sure that they just have it in for this male stripper.

Whether that is because the Grampian police force are bad losers who simply can’t stand it when any arrest they make is not followed by a stiff fine and/or jail sentence or that they are particularly pro-active homophobes (or a combination of both) is hardly relevant.

Like a demented cat they keep dragging the same old dead mouse back to the house, again and again, to leave it out on the doorstep, for its owner to admire. That these efforts are greeted with buckets of cold water instead of appreciative noises and gratulatory kibble may confuse the cat for a few seconds but then it will be off again, to repeat the procedure - ad nauseam.

So, maybe, in the case of the Grampian police force, it’s not malice or homophobia but simply rank stupidity that makes them go after this one male stripper, again and again and again.

On the other hand, my preferred scenario would be that at least some Grampian police officers just have this enormous hard-on for male strippers and are guided by nothing more sinister than helpless lust.

(A girl’s best friend indeed…)

So, some distressing news for all men who are not exactly part of the Russian oligarchy - but first, a short digression and a few questions solely aimed at the males of our species. Women, hedgehogs and buttercups may look away now, if they so wish.

Right, how many of you are convinced that you are:

a) excellent drivers
b) better at holding your liquor than most
c) good at telling jokes and/or
d) way above average in the sack?

Chances are that most men will consider themselves above average in all or at least most of these fields - which, of course, means that a large majority of us are sadly delusional about these things. This may come as a shock to, let’s say, 95% of all males but will not be much of a surprise to 99% of all women.

Which, I would suggest, may go a long way to explaining the following findings of some Newcastle University psychologists - though I’m sure it won’t soothe the pain or stroke the egos of most men:

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance. They found that the wealthier a man is, the more frequently his partner has orgasms. “Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Dr Thomas Pollet, the Newcastle University psychologist behind the research. He believes the phenomenon is an “evolutionary adaptation” that is hard-wired into women, driving them to select men on the basis of their perceived quality.

Now, I think that most of us (men, I mean; not those women, hedgehogs and buttercups) will agree that the large majority of men are not as pretty as Cristiano Ronaldo or as ruggedly handsome as Daniel Craig. There are quite a few, almost archetypical moulds when it comes to sex appeal: From Marlon Brando’s simmering rage to Hugh Grant’s helpless, boyish charms; from the almost monstrously grotesque ruin that is the elder Jack Nicholson to the impish Peter Pan appeal of the average boy band line-up.

All of these types (and more) can be highly attractive to certain percentages of women but I can guarantee you that around 95% of all men would never survive an audition for any of these various roles, whatever we tell ourselves when we look in our mirrors (or into our sixth or seventh glass of whiskey.)

Which is sad.

Yet true.

So, since we have established that most of us are much less accomplished than we would like to be when it comes to driving cars, holding our drinks, telling jokes and making love to those women who are not only willing to overlook all those defects but also our much less than perfect bodies and overall sex-appeal…

… well, then it should not come as a surprise that a well-filled bank account is about the only, possibly truly exciting thing that most men are left with to bring pleasure or, at least, some solace to the women in their lives.

In other words, this latest and quite melancholic bit of research should not be seen as proof that most women are vile gold diggers but simply as an almost unavoidable fact of life and as a direct consequence of gross & collective male inadequacy.

You are not convinced… (I’m talking of the men, of course; not those women, hedgehogs and/or buttercups - I trust the latter are already with the programme.) Okay, so, let’s put it another way:

If someone in a restaurant, who’d been asked by the waiter how the meal was, had merely said that the table linen and the cutlery looked quite nice indeed, would this always mean that the person involved was too shallow and obsessed with the trappings of luxury to appreciate a good meal by itself?

Of course not.

It might simply have been the case that the soup was much too salty, the mutton undercooked, the potatoes burnt, the vegetables a reeking yet bland puddle of goo and the pudding as comforting & sweet as Dick Cheney’s smile - and if that was so, could you really blame the diner if she derived at least some quantum of solace from the fact that the cutlery and linen were of the finest quality that money can buy?

(Can you really blame them…?)

(Volunteer work: It’s not all about altruism…)

What wonderful news…!

There we thought that the age of chivalry had gone missing in action around the second or third Crusade, that the milk of human kindness had been powdered and flogged off to various Third World countries and that charity had become the favourite working name of high maintenance working girls…

… but here is Tory MP Tim Loughton to assure us that voluntary work can still offer the odd benefits to those who can be bothered to get out of bed and help their fellow men - or, more to the point, not to get out of bed really but to fuck their brains out:

“Voluntary work can improve young people’s sex lives, according to a Tory MP. Tim Loughton, who is the Shadow Minister for Children, made the comments during a Parliamentary question and answer session on funding for volunteer groups. He said: “We are all well aware of the excellent work voluntary groups do to promote social cohesion and to engage young people in their communities, and of the excellent qualities volunteering brings. It promotes self-esteem and a survey showed 17 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds said volunteering had improved their sex lives.”"

Now, I don’t want to be the Spanish fly in the ointment here but do we really need Tory MPs to wax lyrical about the various birds and bees that do the dirty with all those innocent and naked lilies of the field, so to speak?

I mean, as a tribe, Tory politicians are more prone to be found dead in their closets, after a rather clumsy bit of dressing up and an even clumsier bit of self-strangulation - and those who don’t turn into cross-dressed corpses in the cold light of morning, with a Tesco bag over their heads or their old Boy Scout’s belt or Eton tie around their necks, can be found wandering forlornly through the cruising zones in London’s many parks or lurking outside men’s toilets, hoping to avoid the almost obligatory gay bashers, embarrassing diseases and tabloid photographers.

Not that there is necessarily much wrong with any of those activities, of course but the Tories are supposed to be - in public - all in favour of heterosexual, only-within-the-confines-of-marriage sexual congress. They are very much like the Roman Catholic church, in that way. Never mind what those priests are up to when they’ve done their daily incense swiveling, the rest of us are still supposed to avoid same sex relationships.

So, the Tories, like the RC Church, love to tell us to follow what they preach and not what they do. Which is probably wise, what with Tory MPs and their asphyxiation routines and the Church’s (ongoing) love affair with sexual child abuse but it might be even wiser for Conservative politicians not to talk about the state of the nation’s sex life at all.

Not that I’m all that fond of Boy Scouts forcing old ladies to cross the street or doing good deeds for a few bobs but I don’t want to see them ending up in a closet either, all blue in the face and wearing the slightly soiled underwear of some blameless Akela - and all of that because they tried to follow the intsructions of the Tory’s handbook for a fulfilling sex life.

Mind you, if the Tory Shadow Minister for Children were right about the link between charity and sex, it would give a whole new & desperate meaning to the term ‘mercy fuck.’

(Desperate do-gooder or sex addict…?)

Ah well, you know, I’m still not sure that he or we or anyone really ‘can’ but, sometimes, you just have to tell all your inner doubts and fears and demons to shut the fuck up and live in the moment.

(Can this really be less environmentally harmful than cow farts…?)

It’s probably very wrong of me but this following article had me laughing out loud, at quite a few moments:

So many people want to scatter the ashes of family and friends in beauty spots that the government has been forced to step in with anti-pollution rules. Last month, staff at the Jane Austen House Museum in Hampshire discovered piles of human ashes scattered around the novelist’s home and gardens, and football grounds, rivers, parks, golf courses, lakes, rivers and mountain tops have all become favourite remembrance spots.

A new leaflet from the Environment Agency says that sites must be inspected if they are to be regularly used for scattering ashes. “Individual ceremonies are unlikely to pollute the water,” it reads. “But the site you choose must not be near buildings, people bathing or marinas. On a river, it should be 1km upstream of any water abstraction. You should spread the ashes as close to the surface of the water as possible and avoid windy days.

Avoiding windy days indeed. Quite probably, nothing would disturb the solemn & melancholic act of saying farewell to one’s nearest and dearest more than when their ashes would fly right back into the mourners’ faces.

Tears might be appropriate at such a sad occasion but having to rub bits of the dearly departed out of your eyes is probably not something that should be part of the ceremony.

Still, I’m kind of disappointed that the rising popularity of spreading the ashes of our loved ones isn’t linked in some way to global warming.

Everything else seems to be, these days - and I do think that it’s somewhat unfair that our cremated bits and pieces would appear to have less environmental impact than cow farts.

Ah well, you can’t have everything, I suppose, so we will have to do with the somewhat lesser evil of Jane Austen’s house getting slowly yet completely buried under a mountain of her devoted readers’ ashes.

Although it is a real pity that Manchester United have stopped people from throwing out their cremated dead on the pitch. It would be fun to imagine how, the next time that Cristiano Ronaldo took one of his famed & elegant dives, he would end up with bits of someone’s belovéd granddad shoved up his nose.

(A very clever stitch-up job indeed…)

Now, I’m normally not a huge fan of woolly thinking but this truly is a lovely story:

“Psychiatrist Dr Karen Norberg, of National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spent a year knitting an anatomically correct replica of the human brain. Dr Norberg used different colours to represent parts of the notoriously complex organ. The frontal cortex is cream and pale green, the visual cortex a mix of blue, purple and turquoise while the hippocampus is made up of baby pink wool. The two sides of the nine inch brain - one and a half times life size - are joined together by a zip with the cerebellum knitted in blue and spinal cord trailing off in white strands of wool.”

Mind you, my trust in psychiatrists is such that I’m always quite grateful when they engage in activities as harmless as knitting. With this field’s track record you have to be relieved when its practitioners use long, thin and sharpish instruments for anything else than crude lobotomies.

Still, a knitted brain is quite a beautiful thought - and it did remind me of someone who’s still not yet dearly departed and keeps making ludicrous and unhelpful noises from his fast fading, soon to be backstage place in history.

They say ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ and by now it’s almost eight years too late for this but there is at least one man whose functioning could have been much improved with one of those craftily knitted brains.

As I said, it comes much too late to avoid all the terrible damage the guy has done but it might still be fitting, if perhaps slightly more generous than he deserves, to give this knitted brain as a parting gift to the 43rd president of the United States of America.

That, and perhaps THIS CLIP from the Guardian, in which cartoonist-in-chief Steve Bell talks about his eight year relationship with George Bush…

(Maybe not exactly Mount Rushmore material…)

Now, we all know that the English - or, if we want to be more inclusive: the British - are technically insane.

The English have given us Morris dancing, the Scots came up with the idea of haggis, North Ireland fathered Ian Paisley and the Welsh, well, where to start…? Let’s just say that the Welsh language, as written, makes dyslexia look hot as Hilton.

Anyway, since they are all quite mad on what’s left of the British isles, the following bit of news should not come as a big surprise:

“A group of British scuba divers have broken the world record for underwater ironing. The divers braved water temperatures of just 41F (5C) to carry out the attempt at the bottom of a 173ft-deep flooded quarry. They each had to iron one item of linen within a 10-minute time limit - and 86 of them completed the task under the watchful eye of adjudicators. The group beat the previous world record of 72 set in Melbourne, Australia, last year. Their incredible feat at the National Diving and Activity Centre in Chepstow, Wales, was captured on camera by 11 photographers armed with special underwater cameras.”

You know, that Guinness Book of Records has a lot to answer for. Before its existence, anyone who would have announced that he (or she, but mostly he) would try to eat as many live gerbils as possible, walk on their hands to the South Pole, have sex with Gordon Brown or iron a few shirts underwater, would either have been ignored by all sane people or marched off to the nearest madhouse.

Nowadays, unfortunately, these lunatics get all the attention they so obviously crave. Newspapers report their pathetic little ploys, and hordes of photographers are sent out to record these efforts for posterity.

Eleven of them in this one single case…

Which is probably more than the number of photographers that roam the streets of Gaza, these days, but let’s not go there. (The one thing that you can say in favour of British madness, compared to the Middle Eastern variety, is that it is, most often, more eccentric than lethal. Morris dancers seldom moonlight as suicide bombers, haggis is not normally used as a biological weapon by the Scottish army and the Welsh language is hardly ever dropped on innocent foreign civilians from great height by stealth bombers.)

Anyway, leave it to the Brits to go iron their shirts underwater, before they go on a celebratory bout of binge drinking, during which said & still soaking wet shirts will, no doubt, end the evening, being covered with vomit, blood and various other bodily stains and fluids.

Those of you, whose eagle eyes have spotted that this stupid little record was first held by the Australians, I would remind of the fact that, as a former English penal colony, Australia was, more or less, filled & foddered with those good folks who were too mad, bad and dangerous to know even by British standards.

The human mind is one of the most weird & wonderful toys to have ever been developed on this weird & wonderful planet of ours - praise be to God or Darwin - but, at times, it does come up with the most insane stuff.

As we can see here, thanks to an advert for a new, snortingly self-congratulatory website:

“iPinkVisual.com: A new website with free, hot videos from our most popular DVDs. We’re bringing these videos to your iPhone or iPod Touch so that you can take them anywhere - your office, the bathroom, or the supply closet. Wherever you go, your porn goes with you. And we update weekly with 10 new clips that are so hot, people will be asking “Is that an iPod in your pocket or are you happy to see me?”"

“Wherever you go, your porn goes with you”.

Yes, we do so need more porn.

What with about a mere 90% of the Internet dedicated to this field - and only 99% of all our mainstream movies having the obligatory big sex scene and not nearly enough adverts in newspapers and on commercial TV, informing us that there are about a zillion telephone numbers we can call, to hear some bored housewife or strapped-for-cash student make dubious noises while we wank…

… so, yes, there was obviously room for more of the same and we are very grateful to iPinkVisual that they so kindly provide us with ways to make better use of those boring offices, bathrooms and supply closets.

Still, what with people insisting on using their phones while driving, we do hope that there are hands-free options available as well.

Otherwise, things could become very messy, very fast.

(The invasion of the pod porn people…?)

(And the winner of the Useless Wanker Reward is…)

Most teenage boys are absolute pests, of course and the only reason that we allow them to live is our collective, if slightly optimistic hope that most of them will grow out of it. In the meantime, we try to ignore their rude and blemished faces, their pathetic fads and their self-righteous auras of self-pity and disdain, their stupid music and their smells.

Ah, that teenage boy smell! That wonderful cocktail of unwashed socks & underwear, cheap cologne and dried-up semen…

Of course, some teenagers are bigger pests than others and probably should be drowned on principle - as a warning to other teens (and as a bit of light relief to the rest of us.)

Take young master McKay Hatch, who is someone whose company is even too much to bear for the rest of the spotty brigade:

“Most people aren’t McKay Hatch, the 15-year-old founder of the No Cussing Club whose stand against public profanity has suddenly subjected him to a torrent of four-letter-word abuse and other harassment. Pizzas began proliferating shortly after New Year’s Day. Pornographic magazines began filling up his mailbox last week. He and his family drew the line when the death threats started coming in over the Internet. He’s surprised by the sudden ire he seems to have drawn from the pro-cussing crowd. “They say I’m trying to take away their freedom of speech, but I’m not,” he says. “I’m just trying to improve people’s speech.”"

Ah yes, that’s alright then. I’m not taking away your right to exist, I’m just going to bugger it up beyond your wildest nightmare.

Not that I approve of sending pizzas to creeps, or porn - okay, okay, or death threats - but I am quite glad that there is a huge ocean between McKay Hatch and me. When I hit my thumb, or have to watch yet another speech by Tony ‘I come in peace’ Blair, or read another article about Britney Spears, or have to endure one more Bud Lite commercial…

… well, then I will be mighty happy that I do have a few handy & choice curses lying around the house, that are always ready to help out when the situation calls for their employment. Curses can be the olive in an otherwise bland cocktail, or, to wax poetical, the spire on each cathedral and the nipple upon each breast.

So, while I would not wish more pizzas, porn or even death threats delivered to blue stocking McKay Hatch’s door, I can’t help to wish for him to hit his thumb with a largish hammer, let’s say three times a day, for the rest of his unnatural life, without the benefit of an appropriate bit of cursing to soothe the pain.

That might not really teach him the error of his ways but it will be fun to watch for the rest of us.