Glob-a-log

(The new opera version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’…?)

Okay. No news today. Just something silly I wrote, yesterday evening. I’d been following the online Guardian’s minute-by-minute report of the football match Fiorentina-Liverpool and they had this mildly entertaining riff about things that irritate the Hell out of you.

At one point, one of the readers e-mailed…

“I can’t get past actors ending phonecalls without so much as a sign-off,” says Niall Caldwell. “It’s far too crisp and clinical – normal people invariably have an awkward bumbling verbal dance of ‘bye-byes’.”

… and I thought: That could make for an amusing TV sketch: An action movie setting with, as that reader had it, ‘an awkward bumbling verbal dance’…

… and that’s how this silly piece got written. So, my thanks to MbM reader Niall Caldwell – and here goes:

Bye now

(Picture yourself a small but expensive apartment in Barcelona. If the living room curtains had been open, you could have seen the top of Gaudi’s Casa Mila but they aren’t. The owner of the apartment has just woken up. Right now, he’s peeing into the wash basin. In about one minute’s time, he’ll be flossing his teeth – and then his i-Phone, which lies hidden under a cushion of the living room couch, will go, “La donna è mobile… La donna è mobile…La donna è mobile… La donna è mobile…”)

“Fuck.”

“La donna è mobile… La donna è mobile…La donna è mobile… La donna è mobile…”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck…!”

“La donna è mobile… La donna è mobile…La donna è mobile…”

“Ah – there you are…!”

“La donna è mo…”

“Hello?”

“Jack, is that you?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Iris. Please, Jack…”

“Iris! I haven’t seen you in ages. Not since…”

“Jack!”

“Yes? Don’t tell me…”

“Jack!”

“I remember! It was that dinner at Pablo’s. When I first saw your mother’s new boyfriend, if I remember well. That was…”

“JACK!!!”

“Yes?”

“Shut up…”

“Jeez; what’s wrong with you…?”

“… and listen!”

“Okay?”

“There’s a bomb in your apartment.”

“There’s what?”

“A bomb.”

“Here? In my apartment?”

“Yes. You’ve got to…”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, I’m not ki…”

“This is like ‘Candid camera’ or something, yeah?”

“NO!”

“I am so not falling for that. I am not going to…”

“Jack…!”

“Yes?”

“You have to get out of there. Right! Now!”

“Sure, sure…”

“I’m serious.”

“Right.”

“Remember that piece you wrote about the Mohammed cartoons?”

“Yes?”

“You know how Misha said he would translate it and send it to the Al Nilin?”

“That Egyptian newspaper? Yes, I remember. That was some party. Pity you couldn’t be there.”

“So, he did.”

“What? Oh, right, that. The Cairo rag and all.”

“Yes, that.”

“Cool.”

“Not cool. Remember Rushdie?”

“So you say…?

“Yes.”

“So…?

YES!”

“…”

“So, get the fuck out – NOW!”

“But…”

“Jack?”

“Yes.”

“NOW!!!”

“Okay…”

“Right.”

“Bye then. And thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Goodbye.”

“Bye.”

“Jack. Get the fuck out already!”

“Yes. Bye.”

“Bye.”

“You hang up first…”

“What…?!”

“You hang up first.”

“Are you fucking insane…?! Alright, alright… I will hang u…”

(Insert one mighty BOOM here.)

“Jack? Jack? JACK…?!”

(Imagine the sound of far-off sirens, almost as intrusive and elusive as the ring tone of a mobile, hidden under the cushion of a now extinct couch. Then, at last, silence again – and a whispered, “Fucking moron…!”)

(C’est la vie, say the old folks; it goes to show you never can tell…)

They say image is everything.

Which may explain the popularity of fortune cookie type theories as ‘Intelligent Design’. It’s much nicer to think that Someone designed us than that we were forged from primordial slime.

It also goes a long way explaining why people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Orwell’s Big Brother preferred shiny black boots and military parades to Dirndl costumes and folk dancing…

… even though, as the mighty Sun showed, the latter might have been more appropriate for Third Reich groupies:

“Historians were rocked yesterday after a DNA test showed Hitler’s skull to be from a woman. The discovery was made by an expert given access to the Führer’s remains by Russia. It cast doubt on whether the Nazi tyrant really did commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945.”

Or perhaps there never was a Herr Hitler, after all. Maybe it was Pope Joan all over again….

… but, as Marlowe had it, ‘That was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.’

Indeed.

So, back to the theory of Intelligent Design – or maybe not. Why waste more of my inky breath on something that Times columnist A.A. Gill already said so much better than I could ever hope to do?

Just insert ‘intelligent’ at the start of the first sentence of the following quote:

“Design is the most nebulous and insecure of disciplines, caught between art and craft. It is practised by people who can’t draw well enough to be artists, or make things well enough to be craftsmen.”

Or, in the case of Intelligent Design: A lazy Pick-n-Mix of ‘Theology & Science for Dummies’.

(Wake up and watch the coffee…?)

Now, here’s a story that will warm the cockles to your heart’s desire. Or something.

So many times we open the papers to yet another depressing story about police abuse. From botched O.J. Simpson cases to Rodney King beatings, from corruption to drugs dealing: At times it seems all cops are either criminal, incompetent or both.

Which makes it so very nice to hear stories about police officers who are simply trying to do an honest job.

Enter the police force of Everett, in Washington state.

Such dedication to duty. Such thoroughness.

Such vigour, one could even say.

“Five Washington state baristas charged customers to touch their breasts and buttocks at an espresso stand where servers wear bikinis to draw business. The Everett Herald reports the women were charging up to $80 to strip down while fixing lattes and mochas. During a two-month investigation, detectives also saw the women lick whipped cream off each other and pose naked for pictures at the Grab-n-Go Espresso stand in Everett, about 30 miles north of Seattle.”

Grab-n-Go in name perhaps but, for these cops, more of a lingering full body search in nature.

Indeed, it wasn’t enough for these fine officers to witness how the girls enticed customers to fondle their breasts once or twice, or strip down for them for a week or so. Even a month of whipped cream licking didn’t do the business for our boys in blue.

No, the Everett police took two whole arduous months before they were truly satisfied that they could make their case against these baristas.

By the way, this case Grab-n-Grab-n-Grab-n-Grab also debunks another quite slanderous myth – by proving that cops really do care about more things than coffee and donuts…

(Oh, say can you see…?)

Right. So, you have your rats leaving sinking ships. Then, you have your vultures, circling a bit of fresh meat. Time-honoured clichés – which expression, by the way, manages to be both a cliché and a pleonasm.

An ugly expression but since we are, once more, going into that famous ‘Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death’ direction, a.k.a. British politics, ugly is apt.

Anyway, where you have your fleeing rats and buzzing vultures, you also always have your ugly rumours, growing like pustules on plague victims.

So, as an article in the Times mentioned, there’s this persistent story lurching in badly lit oubliettes  in the corridors of power that Gordon Brown, who is already blind in one eye, is rapidly losing his sight in the other.

Normally, this type of tale would be considered to be beyond the pale. The kind of thing our tabloids do: Fuzzy pictures of Elvis, upskirt shots of Britney & upnose shots of Jack Nicholson.

Still, in this case, what might have been the lowlife version of a trompe d’oeil image could even be true.

I mean, consider the following statement by the British Prime Minister in same Times article:

“Mr Brown suggested that he recognised that Labour was facing a tough fight in next year’s general election. “I accept there’s a suspended judgment,” he said.”

‘Suspended judgement’…?

Surely, you would have to be as crazy as coot crawling out of a Tom Cruise cocktail – and yes, indeed, blind as a Stevie Wonder in a Batman suit – if you think ’suspended judgement’ could even come close to capturing the British public’s current state of mind.

On the other hand, maybe the Prime Minister is onto something…

… and I don’t even mean the kind of prescription drugs rumour has it he’s been hoovering up like a banker gobbles up bonuses.

No, ’suspended judgement’ is not such a bad way to describe the public mood, after all.

In a ‘hanging judge’ sense of the word, that is, obviously.

(“I’ll be back”, indeed…)

Right. Say goodbye, everyone: God is at it again…

Of course, we already knew things were pretty bad, right?

If we can believe FOX News – and why shouldn’t we have faith in the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly? – Hitler is alive and well and digging a new bunker under the White House, while Iran is building nukes and Gaddafi is doing a Genghis Khan, setting up his tents on the UN building’s much abused lawn.

Add a goblet of Global Warming, a snifter of Swine Flu and a soupçon of Sharon Stone style Celebrity Diplomacy…

… and it’s easy to see that humanity is fucked beyond lazy similes of shit, creeks and paddles.

We need stronger metaphors than that; a more bombastic Cecil B. DeMille type of background music to accompany this tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So, round up the Usual Suspect…

… but with a vaguely modern make-over.

In other words, forget about that old gopher wood. Think some serious horse powers, a SatNav and a bumper sticker that reads, ‘If you can read this, you’re not drowning fast enough’.

In short, we’re all doomed. For today we learned that Noah is alive and well and driving a bloody hatchback in Bari:

“Police have discovered 1,700 live animals crammed into the boot of a hatchback car in Bari, Italy, during a routine check. The animals included 216 budgies, 300 white mice, 150 hamsters, 30 Japanese squirrels, six chameleons and more than 1,000 terrapins. All 1,700 animals were confiscated and sent to nearby zoos while Police investigate the driver for links to animal smuggling.”

(The face of the new anti-smoking campaign…?)

Question: Where do superstitions come from?

Some, or most of them, seem to be based on nothing much at all. Like having to throw some salt over your shoulder when you’ve spilled salt on the table. Others seem to be rather straightforward, like the one stating that it is unlucky to walk under ladders. I mean, just imagine someone standing on top of that ladder, juggling buckets of water, or hammers, or grand pianos and say, “Duh!”.

Some, however, seem to be just silly but do have rather interesting back stories to them. Like the superstition about lighting no more than two cigarettes off the same match – and no, it’s got nothing to do with burning your fingers. It comes from the first world war; from the trenches. If you’d strike a match after dark this might draw the attention of snipers. By the time you would have lit a second cigarette with that match, a sniper might have got you in his sights. So, the moment you would have offered a third person a light might very well have been the exact moment that the sniper pulled the trigger.

So, some superstitions have very down to earth and rational origins – though these days you have to worry about other things when you want to light up. As the following article shows:

“Smokers in the “land of the free” are finding themselves increasingly less free to pursue their habit. New York City officials are the latest to consider banning smoking in their parks and outside spaces – and where the US leads, the UK often follows. Having driven smokers outside their workplaces and enclosed public places, city authorities are considering limiting the options for a quick puff.”

Of course, during the first world war it wasn’t forbidden to smoke.

It just added an extra health risk.

Anyway, let’s leave those WW1 trenches and get back to this current affairs article:

“The possibility of extending smokefree legislation was outlined in a public health policy document. However the mayor, Michael Bloomberg – who has championed anti-smoking programmes but is up for re-election – appeared to qualify the extent of the restrictions. He wanted “to see if smoking in parks has a negative impact on people’s health”, the New York Times reported today, suggesting it “might not be logistically possible to enforce a ban across thousands of acres”.

Well, let’s forget the impact on people’s health, for the moment – although more serious research suggests that getting cancer from second hand smoke in parks is about as likely as getting cold called by Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, in order to invite you to come over and have sex with either or both of them.

Still, if mayor Bloomsberg worries about the logistical problems of enforcing such a ban, I think I can quite easily help him out.

Think World War One.

Think snipers.

That should do the trick.

(Yeah, if only…! )

I’ve said it before but I have the hots for science – and the journal ‘Science’ is not so much my Bible as part of my regular staple of erotic literature.

Some forms of science are hotter than others though.

Not that there is anything wrong with studying gall wasps, for instance but that’s not why we remember Kinsey, who started off doing just that.

No, Kinsey still is somewhat of a household name because he interviewed 18.000 Americans about their sex lives (and made some thirty home movies of heterosexual and homosexual ‘couplings’.)

Sex sells better than gall wasps.

Which is also true in the world of science.

Talking of sex, one of the sexiest scientific fields is the study of space and hence we must now return to the journal ‘Science’ and its current series of money shots – or moon shots, at least:

“The Moon’s surface holds as much as a litre of water in every tonne of lunar soil, according to new research. The results, which are published in three papers in the journal Science, overturn a long-standing consensus that the Moon is completely dry. The data do not suggest, however, that there is much water there — or that any of it is liquid or even ice.”

The data do more than suggest, however, that there won’t be many Ryan Air flights to or stag parties on the moon in any hurry.

Still, if you think it’s hard to find a decent drink on the moon – on the rocks or otherwise – spare a few commiserating thoughts for the parched inmates of Her Majesty’s Prison The Verne on Portland, in Dorset:

“Hand gels supplied to a prison to combat the risk of swine flu have been removed after inmates realised it contained alcohol and began drinking it to try to get drunk. At least one prisoner at HMP The Verne on Portland, Dorset, was found intoxicated. The Prison Service confirmed that this case was being investigated but meanwhile antibacterial gel pumps had been removed as a “precautionary measure”.”

(Illustration above by George Coghill…)

(If only Captain Ahab hadn’t been left-handed…)

It’s not quite up there with a cure for cancer perhaps but once more human ingenuity has ridden to the rescue – solving a problem that has bugged mankind since the drizzling dawn of time…

… or at least since man started to wear Y-fronts:

“Male underwear has been cut from the same cloth for at least 50 years. But now a manufacturer has produced a pair of pants for left-handed men. Hom, the company behind the pants, claim the underwear will “save left handed men up to three, often vital, seconds when visiting the loo.””

Of course, if you want to be churlish about this, you could argue that, if men didn’t spend so much time boasting about their sex lives, cars, stereos and mobile phones that they tend to forget about their bladders until they almost explode, they really wouldn’t need an extra ‘vital’ three seconds to locate and extradite their dicks.

Not churlish enough for you?

Okay.

So, let’s say these left-handed pants will give our South-pawed brothers an extra three seconds…

… now, what do you think they will do with these luxury seconds?

- Praise whatever God they worship for the wonders of Creation? (That dicks come with one hole at the end, instead of following the example of the penny whistle, for instance.)

- Think of the influences of the Napoleonic Code on the philosophies of Kierkegaard?

- Try to finish a dirty Limerick even? (“Said the lusty Archbishop of York/’I don’t know Francis Bacon from Pork/But I love Stilton/And Paris Hilton/And eating out …’”)

Of course, they won’t.

Give modern man any handful of extra seconds, measured out in coffee spoons or otherwise – and how should we presume they would begin to spit out all the butt-ends of their days and ways…?

Well, doing stupid shit like this, of course:

“Thousands of people will be paid small sums to translate portions of the original 1851 text of Moby Dick into Emoji, the picture character language widely used in Japanese SMS messages. While the premise of the project – titled Emoji Dick – may be whimsical, it highlights the innovative ways in which the labour pool of bored internet users is being tapped to complete complex tasks.”

Or, translated from senile Smiley speak: ‘A pool of boring Internet losers tapped to do completely useless tasks.’

(Let’s make things better…)

Now, here’s a fascinating little story for you:

“A life-size Lego cello has been built brick-by-brick by an artist. Nathan Sawaya claims that his musical creation is functional but admits that it sounds “different” to normal cellos, which are usually made from spruce and maple wood.”

Okay, so maybe Stradivarius won’t be sweating the competition yet – mostly because he’s been dead for almost three hundred years, I suppose – but, to paraphrase a certain pop critic, “I’ve seen the future of world-rocking creation and its name is Lego.”

There are so many possibilities.

- Think of the Disney Corporation. Thanks to Lego, the Mouse House may soon be able to build young singers and actresses who won’t end up being photographed by Annie Leibovitz, send topless pictures to boyfriends et cetera. In short, thanks to Lego, Disney will no longer have to fear the Britney effect.

- Think science. Any idea how much it cost to build that Hubble telescope, or that damn Hadron Collider – which must be the only man-made toy that can give Britney a good running in the ‘Most dysfunctional’ category? So, why not build these things out of Lego? I mean, even if they don’t work as they should, that would still be a Hell of a lot cheaper than the way we go about building these failing pieces of kit now.

- Think politics. It would be so much cheaper to build a parliament from Lego – and it would be so much more aesthetically pleasing if we then also made our politicians from these decidedly less base materials. Sure, you can say that a cello made of Lego will never sound as good as one made of wood and put together by the world’s best instrument builders. You might also never be able to make a Lego telescope that will be able to watch each sparrow fall…

… but truly, everybody must agree that a Gordon Brown, made of Lego, would be a staggering improvement on the original version?

(Okay, now here’s my open invitation to all readers to join a Worldwide Lego Competition: So, what product, person or public project would you like to give a Lego leg- or make-over?)

(Nope. The other one…)

It just hit me today: That most celebrities must get paid worse than the lowest McJobber, since almost all of them have to work second jobs.

So, Sharon Stone had to go and kiss everybody for world peace, for a while – not something that most of the rest of that world would connect with the term ‘job satisfaction’, of course.

Madonna sells bottled water, with the dedication of one of the characters from a Hans Christiaan Andersen story – but hasn’t, as of yet, frozen and died on the job, alas.

Michael Jackson sold fizzy drinks – before he tried to improve his love life serving Jesus juice to his guests, that is.

What’s more, even when our celebs aren’t doing jobs on the side to keep the wolf from their chihuahuas, they’re supposed to enhance their botoxed and tucked in profiles with guest appearances on ‘Strictly come dancing’, ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’ and other cruel and voyeuristic TV shows.

Which is why it’s nice to see when one of those benighted celebs could actually land a job that’s really made for them.

Something they can really get their teeth into.

Sort of…:

“For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched.”

Yes, that was Ozzie Osbourne, former singer of Black Sabbath, telling a bit more about that bat that he’d bit the head off, during one of the band’s many drugs-fueled gigs.

With those credentials, wouldn’t you love to see him take over from Jonathan Ross as the BBC’s film critic?

That really would put a damper on anyone trying to do yet another tired  ‘Batman returns’ type of sequel, I’m sure.