Glob-a-log

(The true axles of evil…?)

Now, here’s something really stupid. A bit like invading one country, when you have a bone to pick with a fugitive explosive backpacker from a totally different one.

Something, in short, that’s not just foolhardy but that has quite deadly but perfectly foreseeable, unintended consequences:

“10 cyclists were arrested in Bordeaux for drunkenness as part of a nationwide crackdown denounced by diners as an insult to the country’s gastronomic tradition. Police claim that the action is in response to a spate of accidents involving road-users on two wheels, but it has increased an already heated debate over official attitudes toward alcohol consumption. French food lovers, who say it is impossible to savour the country’s cuisine without its best-known beverage, are calling for tolerance when they cycle home afterwards.”

Of course, in Holland we have the same kind of alcohol laws as they have in France. In our country it is against the law to be drunk whenever you are out on the road, whether you do that as a car or motor driver, as a cyclist, a pedestrian or someone riding his or her pony, donkey, Dobermann pinscher or a privately owned & cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The alcohol laws don’t care about your travelling arrangements, as long as you move or loiter in a sober fashion.

Unlike their French counterparts though, the Dutch police don’t go about breathalizing cyclists and pedestrians (unless they are arrested for breaking any other laws than being drunk, that is.) These Dutch police officers won’t come out and say so, of course, but they choose not to harass cyclists and pedestrians in this fashion because our men and women in blue know better than most that, at times, the law is an ass.

You don’t need to be a statistician to realize that, no matter how hard they try, pedestrians and cyclists will never be able to wreak as much havoc or kill as many other road users as motorists do. A suicidally reckless pedestrian or Hannibal Lecter type cyclist will never be a match for a mildly demented old lady or a distracted Church of England vicar driving the humblest of Peugeots or Ford Escorts.

Yes, it has happened that a drunk pedestrian or cyclist caused an accident in which other people were hurt or even died but it just doesn’t happen very often – and it certainly doesn’t happen often enough to resort to the kind of policies and tactics that the French police have decided to adopt.

In other words, drunk drivers are a real danger and police and other government agencies should do all they can to inform people of the dangers of drunk driving, encourage them to find other means of transport when drunk and have strict laws with real teeth for those who do drink and drive.

What you really don’t want to do is to go after drunk cyclists and pedestrians, of whom quite a large number also own cars. The moment you pursue people like the latter (who for one reason or the other chose not to drive their cars that day) these folks may well decide to drive their cars the next time they are going somewhere where they will drink alcohol, reasoning that they may as well be hanged for one offence as the other.

They might even argue that they have a better chance avoiding getting caught when driving their car than by going home drunk by other, much slower means – and each person deciding to do so would risk their own and other people’s lives to a much greater and much more real extent than a hundred drunk pedestrians or cyclists would ever manage to do.

Like the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror, the War on Drunk Pedestrians and Cyclists is the truly dumb thing to do.

(You don’t need a compass to follow the Silk Route…)

People like Jeremy Clarkson and other Global Warming refuseniks will probably (and loudly) disagree with this but here is conclusive proof that environmental research can deliver the goods – some of which are quite spectaculair indeed:

“Arctic explorer Pen Hadow and his team are relying on a pair of lady’s knickers to navigate their way to the North Pole after compasses failed. The Catlin Arctic Survey are trekking 700 miles to the North Pole to measure the thickness of the shrinking Arctic icecap.

However due to the proximity to magnetic north the compasses are “going haywire”. The freezing conditions also mean the latest global positioning satellite or GPS equipment will not work. Therefore the team have to rely on navigating using the position of the sun. When it is cloudy they rely on following the direction of the wind helpfully indicated by a pair of lacy knickers shredded and stuck to the end of a ski pole”.

“Cherchéz la femme,” as we say that they say in France – and if technology fails, then just follow those blooming knickers.

Though it’s probably a blessing that the last Pope (the Pontiff formerly known as Karol Wojtyla) died before this story broke – for it might have broken his heart to learn that one of the two biggest, most famous and most macho Poles could only be tempted to reveal itself and welcome strangers if they came bearing women’s underwear as house warming gifts.

(Paul Cézanne: The first tabloid artist…?)

It’s as the prophet said:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

Nothing new then under the sun? Well, probably not – not until, perhaps, they do manage to prove that cold fusion works.

One thing is for sure though and that is that tabloids like the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and other insults to various rainforests don’t bother much with trying to prove the old prophet wrong.

Mind you, I am quite partial to the odd lurid headline – especially when these ‘newspapers’ are trying to sell yet another (t)issue of lies as science  but then I do demand that these stories are, at least, modestly entertaining.

As it is though, most of these articles are as repetitious as Cézanne and his bloody mountain – without the old impressionist’s artistry, that is. The average tabloid science story is more like a four year old’s drawing of a cartoon sun, repeated & held up to be admired ad nauseam.

Like this following story on the Telegraph’s science page:

“Looking into someone’s eyes is the key to remembering their face, a new study suggests. Scientists believe that our brains take the information they need to identify a person primarily from their eyes. After processing this information the mind then moves onto the mouth and the nose, rather than attempting to gauge a person’s face as a whole. Previous studies have shown that when humans analyse others they tend to focus only on one part of the face at a time.”

Right, now there’s a surprise…

… so, you can actually remember people’s faces better if you’ve looked them in the eyes, instead of, for instance, having looked at their shoes the whole damn evening? Thank God that we have scientists – or tabloid journalists – to sort these things out for us.

Obviously, this only works for men if the person we look at is another man – since it is a truth universally acknowledged by these same tabloids that men only stare at a woman’s tits.

Okay, one more science article from the Daily Telegraph before a tired, old sun will set on yet another day’s non-revolutionary column:

“Psychologists proved what car-dealers have boasted for generations the car one drives is key when it comes to turning a woman’s head. The university team showed women pictures of the same man sitting in two cars – a £70,000 silver Bentley Continental and a battered Ford Fiesta. The women, who were aged between 21 to 40, picked the man sitting in the Bentley ahead of the same man in the Ford.”

Right, that’s all the evidence we need that women are shallow creatures that only love shiny things.

Of course, if you did a similar test for men you could arrive at equally earth shattering conclusions.

Although, if you’d first show pictures of Angelina Jolie buried in a steaming pile of dead cows and then one of her wearing a few cole slaw leaves, I’m not really sure that the resulting headline, “Men prefer salads to steak!!!” would convince all that many people.

(Chalk dust! Everyone can see that there was chalk dust…)

There’s an old Marvin Gaye song, ‘Wherever I lay my hat is my home’.

Paul Young did an awful, very Eighties version of the song – but, to be honest, it really wasn’t one of Marvin Gaye’s finest, to begin with.

Still, whatever you say about the song, at least I don’t think Michael Jackson ever performed it.

Mind you, if he did, he’d better change the title a bit. ‘Wherever I lay my hat is my haunt’ would serve him better.

As the following tabloid story tries to show:

“Michael Jackson is to rent a house near haunted caves during his concerts in London The eccentric singer is reported to have paid £1 million to rent a large country house near the edge of an ancient 22-mile maze of haunted passageways.

The undisclosed home is thought to be close to the Chislehurst Caves in Bromley, in the south-east suburbs of London. Ghost sightings have been reported at the caves, which were dug in chalk by the Saxons, Druids and Romans”.

Old Ross Perot (the man who paved Clinton’s way to the White House) had a favourite saying: “The Devil is in the details” – and what’s true enough for Ross, the Rubik cube and needlepoint, remains so for most of the rest of our lives.

So, I dearly love that bit in the story about those Saxon, Druid & Roman caves, which were ‘dug in chalk’.

Truly, could there be a more fitting description for the man himself? Apart from the fact that he would be the ghost at anyone’s pajama party, can you think of anything better for the exiled king of pop’s headstone than this riff on John Keats’ last resting place:

“Here lies One Who was dug in Chalk”

(Oops, I did it again…?)

It must be such fun to be Obama, right now – a bit like being Jesus really, sent down to the Jewish tribes by His Daddy, to sort out some old prophesy stuff, only to find out the place is crawling with murderous Romans.

Same with Obama: The great post black, post white hope. The new Messiah, if you like – and no Roman hammer and nails to stop him.

(Though a world wide economic melt down is a quite impressive cross to bear, of course…)

Ah well, enough already – but here’s to my favourite tribe and its latest honorary member:

First thing they do

First thing they do
is cut up your dick.

Then they tell you:
don’t eat this and that.

They take you to a desert,
you had no wish to visit in the first place.

The Promised Land, they say,
of bombs and snipers.

And everybody hates you
(and you can’t stop bickering

about the cost of living
and the price of milk and honey.)

The Chosen, yes, no doubt -
but one thing you know for sure:

next time you see a burning bush,
you’ll piss it out.

(Follow those stamps…!)

Crime doesn’t pay, they say. Well, tell that to the ghost (or heirs) of Dame Agatha Christie or those who work for the ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ franchise.

Of course, a large number of resentful people also claim that all criminals go to Hell.

Well, I’m afraid that crime can pay quite well. What’s more, it can be funny as Hell too:

“Fraudsters have used a picture of jailed pop singer Boy George to replace the Queen on forged bank notes. Staff at a stationary shop discovered a fake £20 note with a picture of the former Culture Club singer on its watermark instead of the monarch. Ryman’s in Gravesend, Kent, took the forgery on Saturday afternoon, but it was not until they tried to cash the note on Monday that they realised it was a forgery.”

Bloody brilliant – and it made me think as well.

I mean, why not do this kind of thing on a regular & official basis? They already do it with stamps. Take the ones that will hit the market next summer, drawn by graphic novel artist Dave McKean…

They could do that with money as well, surely?

So, why stop at putting Boy George in bed with Prince Philip, so to speak, when you could, for instance, have Madonna and her Jesus frolicking on a Fiver?

Gordon Brown would look lovely on a £10 note – to commemorate both his ongoing occupation of 10 Downing Street and the number of political lives he will need to win the next election.

What’s more, whenever an English football team would finally manage to qualify for another big tournament, you could have pictures of the team members on special issue £11 notes, which would become the official ‘coin of the realm’ if the team managed to win it (or, more realistically, be pulped, straight after the quarter finals.)

So many glorious options, really. From the triumph that was the Millennium Dome, to the defunct body parts of Paul McCartney’s ex-wives. From famous villains, like Jack the Ripper and Ashley Cole, to the pictures of English saints, like princess Diana and Jade Goody.

Or, perhaps my personal favourite, a new half pound note which would carry the simple message ‘Fuck off!’, that you could give to all Jehovah’s Witness type missionaries and their more secular chugger counterparts, who badger you at home or in the street.

Anyway, my question to all of you who have read this post (or skipped) to this last alinea: What would be the face that would launch & float your thousand or so boats? In other words: Who would you put good money on to be put on (what’s left of) your money?

(Just another cock and John Bull story…?)

First, this:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

Philip Larkin wrote those lines, in 1972, in a poem called ‘Going, going’.

Now, it may be said that Larkin was a bit of a moaner and never happier than when complaining about the sad state of civilisation, while badmouthing his parents,”They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do,” (or when adding to his impressive porn collection.)

Still, the poet had a point. To paraphrase Prince Charles, you can blame the Nazi bombers for destroying a fair amount of English buildings but not for the kind of soulless crap modern architects have been littering the landscape with, after the war.

Also, there now must be more McDonald’s, CFK, IKEA, Pizza Hut and Starbucks outlets spread around like a deadly flue virus than there are squashed hedgehogs livening up our ever filling roads.

(World War One’s big member drive)

So, like Larkin, we can’t do much more than sigh & hide in nostalgic strophes or one-handed, porn-inspired strokes and moan about things in a frantic if impotent manner.

Talking of which – about impotence, that is and not of rueful rhymes or the power of porn: Here’s another sad example of the decline and fall of the British empire that once stood so proud and tall:

“A comparison of the 2008 population — using data from a variety of sources — with the first census in 1881 shows that the number of Cocks has shrunk by 75 per cent.

Cock, Daft, Death, Smellie, not to mention Gotobed, Shufflebottom and Jelly: they are all surnames that would have caused their owners considerable embarrassment over the years. A new analysis of British surnames reveals how names with rude overtones have seen the sharpest decline over the past 120 years as their owners have changed them to something more innocuous.”

(Pandora: The horse with a Tom Jones allergy…)

So, you have female spiders who eat their mates after sex. There are wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars and small critters in tropical rivers that follow the stream back to the source when you take a piss in their habitat.

Plus, of course, a few billion humans who make life a living Hell for most of the other species on space ship Earth.

In other words, there are enough hard luck stories going around to satisfy the most misanthropic Country & Western singer ever to have his heart, guitar strings and dear old mother’s dentures broken in Nashville.

Still, some stories will always stand out.

Who wouldn’t feel for a politician who’d be allergic to lying, a celebrity who’d get unseemly flushes from flashing cameras, a careful sex addict with a rubber allergy?

Or, more to the point, who wouldn’t sympathize with Pandora, a poor horse with a very special problem indeed?

Read and weep a few hay feverish tears:

“A horse stabled in Flackwell Heath suffers from an almost unheard of allergy to grass. Pandora, a five-year-old thoroughbred, is now only allowed out when she is covered from head to hoof in high-tech fibres to protect her, as one blade touching her will trigger a reaction.”

Sad, isn’t it: a horse that can’t roll in the sweet smelling grass?

That’s almost as bad as a doctor telling Paris Hilton she has to stop waxing and start to wear long underwear if she wants to get rid of that rash. Or some specialist telling Oprah she has to stop talking if she wants to avoid throat cancer. Or a Roman Catholic priest who’s been told by his cardiologist that he can’t mess about with little boys anymore.

Truly, of all God’s creatures, the horse should be the last one to develop an allergy for grass…

… okay, apart from cows and deer and sheep…

…and lawnmowers…

…and hippies, I suppose.

Anyway, poor Pandora.

(Necrophilia: Oh goody…!)

Well, by now I suppose most people will have heard that Jade Goody, former Big Brother star, slash racist monster, slash cancer saint has died. To those who haven’t I can only say that they have no idea how jealous I am of their non-Jaded life and that’s all I’m going to say about the whole sorry subject.

Which is more than I’d planned to do but, a bit earlier today, I was reading a newspaper article that seriously annoyed me – which led me to think about the many things that do irritate me, these days, about the media.

One of the things that immediately springs to mind is the way that the so-called mainstream or (God help us) ’serious’ media have embraced the vacuous world of celebrity news & gossip. It used to be only the tabloids that dealt with the likes of Jade Goody, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, or with stories about UFOs, Jetis and the (adopted) children and/or religions of various movie and pop stars. Nowadays, you’re as likely to read about Madonna’s Kabbalah crap or some starlet’s new tattoo in the London Times as in the National Enquirer.

Which is extremely aggravating but not the most irritating part of today’s dumbed down newspaper industry.

No, what’s truly annoying is the way our papers have become the proud propagators of any damn new life style fad that’s doing the rounds. Page after page after page will be wasted on ever new spas and diets – and if it’s not diets, then it’s a never ending stream of articles about other food fads, or cosmetic uses of certain food products.

Then, there are endless columns about dating, about sex, about children, about schools, about family holidays and single weekends – and all of them asserting that the problems (or, God forgive me: ‘challenges’) that we face now are truly different from anything mankind ever had to deal with.

The Bubonic plague; the first and second world war; Stalin’s gulags or Mao’s reeducation camps; all the Jewish pogroms throughout history…?

Psah! That’s nothing compared with today’s work stress, or weight problems, or sexual unfulfillment.

Still, even these moronic life style sections in today’s newspapers are not the true ham sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah. No, the worst of the worst are articles like the following:

“Some people would hate Knoydart. No shops, no cinemas, just 85 square miles of Highland heather, mountains and midges, where deer outnumber locals 10:1. There is a pub, but it’s an 18-mile hillwalk from the nearest road. There is a ferry from Mallaig, but it’s closed at weekends. See why some people might not bother?

Well, Knoydart is just about my favourite place on earth. It’s a land of rare, desolate beauty, a real wilderness. If that sounds good to you, read on: we’ve found 11 more wild, magical, abandoned Knoydarts around the globe.”

Yes, the travel section.

It’s not just the fact that almost all of these travel pieces are written by the kind of people you would hate to sit next to on any airplane: The hopeless hobbyist, the trendy Jet Set wannabe, the cheap skate weekend escapist, the cruise and four star elitist, the wildlife anorak and the pathetic beach bore.

In other words, the neighbours/colleague/uncle from Hell – the ones who will bore your head off with stories about their holiday and who will show you their photos and home movies until you manage to saw their heads off with the nearest more or less sharp instrument within easy reach.

Worse than these travel stories though are the kinds of articles that inform the millions of eager readers about some unspoilt, unknown destination. A tropical island with its coral reef as of yet untouched; a city that, so far, has avoided to become a stag weekend destination; a hiking trail or river that has been overlooked for centuries; an indigenous tribe that, till this day, had not heard of Big Macs or Big Brother…

Yes, the kind of article that serves as a map that points the rapacious tourist crowd towards the last few unspoilt places on Earth.

In a way, the people who write these travel pieces are far worse than those who make their money  with their disgusting Jade Goody obituaries. No matter what you may have thought about her when she was alive, she’s gone now and well out of it. Whatever the tabloids (and mainstream newspapers) choose to do to her corpse doesn’t matter all that much. The dead don’t mind a bit of necrophilia.

These travel writers though are making their sad wages with the rape, and the encouragement of rape, of the last few virgin bits of our long-suffering planet.

Compared to that, fucking the famous corpse of a cancer victim is a more harmless and attractive life style choice.

(Humanity: Just one big game of ‘Happy Families’…)

There are many things I don’t understand.

Obviously, people can’t be allowed to dump their rubbish wherever and whenever they would like. (Actually, the fact that littering is more or less accepted by most is another thing I can’t understand – and something that’s very telling about the sad state our civilisation is in.)

Anyway, I do appreciate that we need laws to regulate certain forms of waste disposal. When we find ourselves with a defunct fridge or a crappy sofa, it shouldn’t be an option just to throw these items out of our sixth floor windows, drop them in the middle of a busy roundabout or leave them in Princess Diana’s memorial pond.

Same with nests of unwanted kittens or leaky grandparents: We shouldn’t be allowed to tie these surplus-to-requirements critters (with some complementary stones) in a sack and throw them into the nearest canal or fresh water reservoir.

Still, and as I started saying, there are many things I don’t get – and one of them is why any government would feel it is its business to interfere when we decide that it’s our own selves that we think are surplus to requirement.

True, people kill themselves for the silliest of reasons: From broken hearts and bad exam results, to things like Internet peer pressure – but humans have been acting stupidly and self-destructively since time began for us and I’m not sure it’s the role of government to protect us from these types of mad impulses.

So, the moment the doctor says that the cancer has spread and I have six months of ever more painful months to live through, I want to be able to say, “Stop this planet; I want to get off now!”, without any government’s official even thinking about interfering.

Same when I would hear I am in the early stages of Alzheimer – or, to be frank, for whatever damn reason I would choose to call it a day.

Anyway, all of the above ramblings were inspired by the following article – and yes, again, it’s something I truly don’t get:

“Prison authorities in Austria have intensified their suicide watch over Josef Fritzl, amid fears that the convicted child killer and rapist will try to kill himself after receiving a life sentence for abusing his daughter for 24 years.

Erich Huber-Günsthofer, the vice-president of the prison in St Pölten, where Fritzl will be held until his transfer to a psychiatric institution, said yesterday that his mental health had deteriorated since the verdict last week in his trial for kidnapping, raping and incarcerating his daughter, and murdering one of the seven children she bore him.”

Don’t you love it that they claim his mental health deteriorated AFTER all he did in that damn cellar…?

Like, “Yes, m’Lud, the defendant was fine, really: A perfectly healthy & happy little bunny, until those cruel cops arrested him and some sadistic judge decided to lock him up.”

Truly, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’ doesn’t even come close to describing the situation, so why should the state try to keep the guy alive?

I’ve tried but I really cannot come up with one good reason why the state should be expected to walk an extra few inches or spend even half a Euro more, trying to keep this man alive, when he would choose to hop on the perdition express himself.