Glob-a-log

One of the things I truly hate about the ever lengthening Christmas season is the way that people like me, who don’t enjoy this time of year at all, get Scrooged by those who do stay with the programme.

Now, I will readily admit that I am not a very social person but I am not a Scrooge. Scrooge had this strange lactose intolerance. That is, he had problems swallowing and then keeping down the milk of human kindness.

Me, the older I get, the more pessimistic I become about human affairs. I don’t think people are very good at getting and keeping their shit together collectively. On the other hand, I do like my fellow humans on a personal level and I’m slightly embarrassed to have to confess that I am also becoming more sentimental on a small scale level. Give it a few more years and I will probably be one of those persons who cry on cue while watching movies.

Coming back to Christmas, I object to this (ludicrously outstretched) season because I really cannot stand the zombie like masses who go shopping and shopping, the relentlessly Disneyfied carols, the gory splatter fest of please-clap-for-Tinkerbell-cause-it’s-Christmas lights – or, to sum things up, the whole, relentness exercise of greed and need.

(Not that Christmas shoppers are really like zombies, of course. Zombies are aware of the fact that they need to shop for – or at least chop up and eat – new brains.)

So, yes, I hate Christmas. That does not make me feel proud. If anything, it makes me feel like a boring cliché. Which is not a very nice place to find yourself but it does not make me a Scrooge. Scrooge, I’m sure, would have very much appreciated our modern, commercialized Christmas. He’d have enjoyed any kind of human mass activity that would have made him shit loads of money.

In other words, you could even say that I am anti-Christmas, because I’m anti-Scrooge.

(Though THIS ONE is probably more appropriate…)

(Strange we can believe in…?)

Oh well, ’tis the season to be silly and all of that:

“Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life. Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country’s Space Research Institute said. They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research. He said the centre’s researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.

Yes, and it is so obvious, if you really think about it!

Aliens with the kind of technology that enables them to travel across the great vastness of space, without being noticed by any of our own telescopes, radar thingies and what have you…

… and who then move about all over our planet, still undetectable…

… and who then, in their alien wisdom, forego the stage of the UN, the lane of the White House, the Kremlin or the Chinese parliament…

… in order to make that so important Head & Shoulders type first impression by choosing to get in touch with the good folks of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences…

… by way of fucking crop circles.

Yes. Now I see the inevitability of it all – and the almost scary alien intelligence of it.

Mind you, as Mr Filipov states, he has more important converts than me:

“Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time,” Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media. He also said that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed. “

Of course, nay-sayers would argue that the Catholic church is not the most perfect character witness.

Until recently it also believed it was best to protect child abusing priests and it still believes condoms cause AIDS…

… so these negative souls might say that most of the reasonable world would not give a good Goddamn about whatever the Pope’s position is on any bunch of crop circling, little green men…

… but since this blog takes a harsh view on cynicism and negativity of all kinds, we won’t bring this up, of course. We will simply rejoice that we now are no longer alone in the universe.

Until now we only had the brotherhood of men. It’s so great that we now can join a larger, nobler community. I could even suggest a name for it.

Let’s just call it the galactic crap circle.

Now, this is just such sad, sad news…:

“The BBC has abandoned plans to screen a ballet featuring a deformed Pope who rapes nuns that it had announced as one of the highlights of its Christmas schedule.”

It would almost have been worth buying a TV and watching this programme, in the certain knowledge that it would have offended so many righteous Christian folks.

Which is not a very grown-up attitude, I admit – but then I guess I never really grew up. All that “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” was never my thing.

When I was young all I wanted was to become one of the Muppets and I’m not sure I ever grew out of that.

Still, I’m sure many other people still live with those old childish ambitions not all that deeply buried in their hearts – and I dare say quite a number of us males would see the following story as a a very old dream job come true:

“The University of Leeds is advertising for a lap dance researcher. The advertised position, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, is for: “Research Officer - The rise and regulation of lap dancing and the place of sexual labour and consumption in the night time economy”.” The advertisement further stipulates that “prior experience of conducting research in the female sex industry” is essential.

Yes, of course I will leave you with an old Muppets clip. Enjoy!

(Now with Barack and Biden…)

When Obama was running for president, I happily admit I very much liked the idea of a black guy becoming president. I also liked the idea of a woman becoming president but I felt little warmth for that particular woman. So, Obama would have been my choice, if I’d been allowed to vote. I’m not, so, like the majority of Americans who do have that right, I ended up not voting for any of the candidates.

Anyway, even though I can’t say I liked Hillary much, I would rather have supported her than the McCain/Palin ticket. Once a seemingly honorable man, McCain chose to sell out to the bigots and moneybags in his party. There hasn’t been a more pathetic deal this side of that famous ‘mess of potage’ and McCain deservedly lost.

Still, politics is, as the saying goes, the art of the possible – as practiced by the contemptible, I would add – so I can’t say I had that much faith in anyone who had been able to work the system to such a high degree that he (or she) ended up in the position of presidential candidate.

There are not many virgins in a whore house – and it hasn’t taken Obama long to show the world that his is just another case of ‘Hail to the new chief; same as the old chief.’

I mean, truly, what’s the use of Obama, if stories like the following show he is just a more suave version of the old Bush Mark One & Two?

In two weeks’ time, Barack Obama will accept the Nobel peace prize in Oslo for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples” and his commitment to “disarmament and arms control negotiations”. Yet on Tuesday, as Americans’ attentions were turning to the Thanksgiving holidays, a state department spokesman, Ian Kelly, quietly announced that the Obama administration would not sign the international antipersonnel landmine ban. He also said that the Bush-era landmine policy, a regression from Bill Clinton’s position, “remains in effect”.

(New look, same shit…)

So, Stephen King is thinking about a sequel to one of his most famous books, The Shining:

“Jack Torrance’s little boy Danny was last seen recuperating in Maine after escaping the insane evil of the Overlook Hotel, but Stephen King is now plotting a sequel to The Shining which would age the clairvoyant boy to 40 and transport him to a New York hospice.”

Nothing new in writers revisiting old haunts, so to speak and I have a lot of faith in King’s story telling abilities, so I’m sure that, if he will write the book, I will have as much fun devouring that one as I’ve done with most of his other work.

It can be a bit tricky though, picking up a story more than 30 years after the fact. Would we be much interested to read about Tom Sawyer, at 40 – or about Alice, Dorothy & Wendy as grown-ups?

Well, okay, I admit I did enjoy meeting up with those last three again, in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls.

Of course, sometimes, people go the other route. Like the adventures of a young Sherlock Holmes, the young Indiana Jones, et cetera, et cetera. Most of those trips are as nauseating as they are saccharine…

… and yet, what fun could you have with such a concept!

I’d love to see a Stephen King write a book about the young Dick Cheney – or have Alan Moore do for the Kennedy clan what he did for Alice, Dorothy and Wendy.

Now, those would be projects worthy of both these craftsmen and the intended prey.

So, please, Messrs King & Moore, go and sharpen your pencils & claws and do your worst.

(Hot stuff…?)

Do we like hot girls on this blog?

In the privacy of our fantasy life we may do so, yes. On these blog pages, hopefully not overly so – and some of them we like as much as we would enjoy finding Hitler meatballs in a kosher chicken soup:

“A blog hosting an offensive image of Michelle Obama with monkey features has removed it and posted an apology. The image, which has been appearing at the top of search results when the words “Michelle Obama” are put into Google Images, was posted on a blog called Hot Girls, which is hosted by the Google-owned blog service, Blogger.”

It’s kind of funny that Google, at first, refused to remove that pic, choosing to place an editorial comment that explained its posting/hosting policies instead.

In principle, I do agree that censorship is bad.

So, I guess I do support Google in this.

I do wonder though if Chinese users of the Internet also get a rather officious Google editorial, explaining the company’s position on censorship whenever they can’t get access to something on the Net.

I’ve used the phrase before but it’s so apt I will have to use it again. So, here goes:

‘We are Google: Proud leaders in the field of World Wide Wankers.’

Last week was not a very good week for two of the world’s major religions, what with a troublesome  priest shot down in Moscow and a coke & crotch sniffing rabbi standing trial in Britain.

So, there was not much reason to hope that this following bit of news would give the world anything more to sheer about:

“The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope agreed to seek closer relations between Anglicans and Catholics at a meeting in Rome, the Vatican has said.”

On the other hand, our Archbish of Cant is known to be in favour of Sharia law and we all know what the Pope thinks about the position of women, so it may be that these two old men have more in common than you might expect.

So, when the Pope will visit England next year, perhaps we will see both prelates, arm in arm, talking about those good old days when the whole of womanhood could be qualified as cage girls…

… and they might even find time for a bonding field trip to a certain Somerset village, where they would, no doubt, give their communal blessings to one of the candidates for this year’s Turnip Prize – and no, I don’t mean the ‘Wallace and Vomit’ exhibit:

Entries have been invited for this year’s Turnip Prize for bad art. The award, an alternative to the Turner Prize, is presented by the residents of a Somerset village. In what the organisers have described as “an insignificant development” pieces entitled Wallace and Vomit and Knickerless cage have been submitted. The Knickerless cage shows a collection of naked Barbie dolls encaged in wire mesh.”

(I prefer the original but I bet the Pope and the Bish liked neither…)

(Singing, ‘Fuck you, I can do what I want to’ or something…)

In the aftermath of what should now, I suppose, be officially called Thierry Henrygate, we can only hope that the two countries involved can get over themselves.

Maybe some sort of Truth & Reconciliation Commission is in order – under the benevolent eye of Sepp Blatter and Nelson Mandela, perhaps. (Well, we know that at least the latter of those two actually cares about football…)

Not that everything is now a Disneyfied fairytale in South Africa.

This became most painfully clear, last Friday, at a rugby union international in Toulouse. Yes, France was again involved in an unholy sporting row, be it in a less hands-on capacity.

When the South African reggae singer Ras Dumisani stepped up to the microphone to sing his country’s national anthem, his performance showed that here was at least one black voice that was more than willing to tell the world that it was far from reconciled with any past injustices.

As the following clip proves beyond any doubt:

(All I’m saying, Don’t ask U2 to do the French anthem for the next fifty years or so…)

It is, no doubt, of no concern to anyone but me and a few handsful of people who read what I write but it’s been a few months now that I haven’t written anything but blog posts. I’ve had these periods of inactivity during my whole writing life, so they don’t worry me, per se. With me it’s never writers’  block: It’s sheer laziness.

Still, it’s always nice to feel these dry periods coming to an end. Yesterday, I started jotting down the old but very familiar odd notes again. My more active periods always start like that – as if that probing part of the brain slowly & hiccupy starts to wake up again, like an old generator that’s been hiding out in the shed. Not immediately all buzzing and revving and generating real heat but getting there…

… and that feels just fine. Good enough to share some of those jottings here with you. Some may want to become poems; others could be short story fodder. Maybe none will make it anywhere in any still recognizable form but it’s good to see some shapes starting to form.  Anyway, here goes.

Call it small change – or early bird shadows:

1) A candidate’s prayer: “I want to be it: I don’t want to work it.”

2) You cannot love some works of art; only admire them.”

3) [It's getting dark now and I'm] still vaguely sober.

4) There’s no divorce from life but many seek a separation.

5) It’s called a belief system for two very good reasons.

6) The headlines scream ‘We need some anwers!’ but most questions are much better at posing.

I know. It ain’t much yet but it’s a start…

(Every day? Well, perhaps not quite like that…)

I really have no time today to spend on this blog. I have to cook for six people – and do the shopping as well…

… and just four-and-a-half hours to do all of that…

… and post my daily column…

… so I better get my house in gear, my shit in order and more of that good old running-around-and-waving-my-arms-and-going-I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m-bloody-late type of stuff…

… but not before I have shown you why cats make poor police dogs (but should always be on hand when you have to deal with the boys in blue.)

Enjoy:

“A police department in Texas in the US has released footage of an over-affectionate cat distracting a policeman trying to issue a ticket to a motorist.”

Now, move it on over, ’cause this cat’s cooking…

… and is also officially really, really late.

See you tomorrow, I’m sure.