Glob-a-log

You know that old slogan, the one that’s so popular with the merchants & facilitators of quite avoidable death: ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’

Technically, they are right, of course, though I’d love to see those Columbine idiots, or that Virginia Tech moron, or the promoters of your average Shock & Awe campaign try and kill as many people as swiftly and easily with a catapult and some brightly coloured balls of paper.

Gods don’t kill people. Priests kill people.

The Little Red Book doesn’t kill people. Megalomanic arseholes kill people.

McDonald’s doesn’t kill people. Lazy gluttony kills people.

Death doesn’t kill people. Living kills people.

Et cetera, et cetera, et ad absurdum…

Spiders do kill people, of course – but not all that often, really. Mostly, it’s stupidity that kills people or embarrasses the shit out of them, as the following article shows:

“An 28 year-old man suffered severe burns after attacking an arachnid with an aerosol can at his home in Clacton in Essex. The man was summoned by his wife to deal with a spider she had seen scuttling behind the lavatory on Bank Holiday Monday. Not being able to reach it, the man decided to kill it by spraying it with the can. However he was unable to see whether it was dead because the bulb in the bathroom light had blown. At this point he turned to a cigarette lighter to illuminate the room, but in the process ignited the gas fumes and caused an explosion. The blast was so strong it blew the man off his feet and lifted the loft door off its hinges.”

Talking about spiders, and about idiots, and about religion, and about religious idiots with a spider fixation. Here’s a little something I found on that most omnipresent of Webs:

“Because its webs are traps for the unwary insect, Christians use the spider as a symbol of the Devil and the elaborate traps he prepares for souls which are represented by flies.”

Right…

Meaning that the good God-bothering flies would go to Heaven and the wicked Richard Dawkins flies to That Other Place…

… which would turn both God and His Adversary into a kind of B-movie type good cop, bad cop Lord of the Flies team.

Christians against arachnids. What next?

Hindus against holograms? Jews against geography? Muslims against muesli?



(Okay, so it’s not really a new dining movement…)

Did you ever wonder why so many German Nazis ended up in South America?

This following story might provide part of the answer – sort of:

“In a prominent advertising campaign on the internet, in German newspapers and on television, restaurant Flime is appealing for willing donors and diners to become members of what it hints at being a new dining movement.”

What’s so interesting about yet another bloody restaurant being fawned over by boring life style sections in the world’s online newspapers, you might well ask?

Or might have asked, if that term ‘a new dining movement’ had not kept you too busy puking out whatever blameless meal you had last.

Wipe your mouth, brush your teeth and bear with me, though; it is getting quite interesting, about now:

“The soon-to-open Berlin restaurant is touting for diners willing to donate body parts that it says it will turn into gourmet meals according to the age-old cooking habits of an Amazonian tribe infamous for its cannibalism.”

Okay, I grant you that it is a bit rich to call something that people, in various parts of the world, have been doing for millennia ‘a new dining movement’.

‘Cannibalism: the new dining experience’ makes about as much sense as the marketing slogan ‘War: the new wave of human intercourse’ but I’d still say the whole thing is, pace Stephen Fry, quite interesting…

… and you might argue that the following bit of the story hints at a kind of ‘third way’ thinking, vis-à-vis the old cannibalism experience – or experiment, if you like:

““Members declare themselves willing to donate any part of their body,” the advertisement reads, adding that any resulting hospital costs will be taken on by the restaurant. They say they are also looking to employ an “open-minded surgeon”.”

I think the latter won’t be an insurmountable problem. It is, I am sure – and excuséz le mot – a bit tasteless to bring up but Germany does have some history with open-minded surgeons…

… though I’m not so sure the rest of the world – or the vast majority of modern Germans – are quite ready to book their table at restaurant Mengele.



(“Nothin’ to eat, nowhere to go”? Not anymore, my friends…)

Ah, how the mighty have fallen…:

“In July, one of the longest losing streaks in the history of culinary combat finally came to end. According to the Nielsen Company, 52-week dollar sales of packaged wheat bread topped those of white bread for the first time in U.S. Supermarkets.”

On the other hand, and talking of the end of another long losing streak, it’s not all bad news…

… for today we can announce that things can – and will – only get better in Afghanistan:

“In a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with The Washington Post, [General David Petraeus] said he sees incipient signs of progress in parts of the volatile south, in new initiatives to create community defense forces and in nascent steps to reintegrate low-level insurgents who want to stop fighting.”

Ah yes, my friends, the dance goes on and on…

Now in the Post there are two pretty pieces
There is one where Death comes to cry
With a lobby of Afghanistan salesmen
Made of trees where the doves go to die
There’s a piece of white bread torn from the morning
As it’s banned from the fridge and your plates

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws…

… or something. (Sorry about that, Leonard!)

In yesterday’s column I was a bit rude about people believing in virgin births, Gods with elephant heads, et cetera…

… but earlier today, under the shower, I was thinking it was perfectly understandable that people believe in Gods.

Not so much because of the usual argument – you know the one: About early man not having much in the way of concrete knowledge, so that it was easy for him to interpret natural phenomena as supernatural…

… or because man was afraid of the vast emptiness and ultimate meaninglessness of the universe and felt the need to fill it with his stories, his bogeymen and his Gods…

… or because mankind is so incredibly self-centered that it couldn’t fail to create an all-powerful God in its image.

Valid reasons all, I guess but perhaps a bit needlessly abstract and cumbersome.

Maybe man made God because we always tend to come up with stupid answers to even vaguely complex or potentially embarrassing questions.

For instance, I just did a quick wooden shoes Google search and found the two most popular answers parents give to their children when the latter ask where babies come from.

In second place came the somewhat counterintuitive explanation that babies came from cauliflowers.

Which might be some typically Dutch obsession but in first place came that more traditional and internationally accepted theory: That babies were brought to their parents by storks.

There’s not much you can say about the cauliflower theory. Like virgin births and angels carrying Prophets to Heaven, there’s only so much science can do before it has to take a handful of digestion pills and go lie down for a bit…

… but storks delivering babies? At least there you can take the average weight of a baby, the musculature of a stork’s wings and the structural integrity of its beak…

… and treat the whole misconceived theory with the massive contempt it deserves.

Which is what I would have done anyway – until I read about the following, improbably uplifting story, featuring another bird that was definitely punching (or carrying) above its weight:

“Medics in Taiwan had to use a crane to lift an obese woman out of her flat.”

Okay, so I was wrong about that stork – as I might have underestimated the cauliflower.

I still draw the line at Gods though…

(Some storks are more welcome than others, of course…)

Let’s start with a simple question: Do you, like me, hate stupid products like tofuburgers? They’re a bit like those plastic flowers – as if the people who make & sell these products want to tell their prospective customers:

“I know you desperately want the real thing but since you can’t be trusted with that, I’ll sell you something that’s made in its pale (and rather shitty) image.”

As if the majority of vegetarians can only get their digestive juices flowing if they see something meat-shaped on their plates.

Anyway, hold that thought – or not, if you can’t be bothered – ’cause I’m going to take a slight detour now…

… starting here:

It is often said that one of the greatest things about the Internet is that it’s the biggest library in the world, taking up just a tiny bit of space in even the humblest one room apartment.

Which is true – but even more fun (to the curious & lazy likes of me) is the way you can get pleasurably lost inside this library.

Yes, you will find unexpected trifles & treasures in any reasonably stocked paper and mortar library but when you’re surfing – no, surfing is a much too macho and deliberate image: When you’re leisurely paddling in that vast but shallow digital sea, you’re always getting distracted by one shiny pebble here, an interesting bit of driftwood there – and there are no kids with boom boxes or German towel fetishists to annoy and distract you.

Anyway, yesterday I was looking for some information about orchids, when, via several diverting clicks, I came upon the following bit of info:

“Carnivorous plants grow in low-nutrient environments, so trapping and eating insects is how they obtain the nutritional elements that would otherwise come from organic matter in the soil. A large number of carnivorous plants live in bog ecosystems, where there is full sunlight due to lack of tree cover, and ample water, but thin soil with limited nutrient content. The plants secrete enzymes to digest their prey, and then absorb the nitrogen and other materials that are released.”

There’s an obvious (if convoluted) moral here.

As I started to say, I hate those gimmicky tofuburgers but, unlike some, I have nothing at all against vegetarians – and neither should anyone else, if they know what’s good for them.

In fact, it would be wise for the rest of us to make sure our supermarkets and restaurants are well-stocked with all manner of vegetarian goodies…

… since the above story shows that carnivorous plants are, in fact, just very frustrated and hungry herbivores…

… and I’m not sure I want to find out what happens when a bunch of dedicated animal lovers gets equally frustrated and hungry.

‘Night of the Living Dead’ would probably be – excuséz le mot – a picnic compared to that…

Oh, and just one more thing about the whole WikiLeaks affair; something that would easily make it as Quote of the Day, 364 days of the year – and that’s the hilariously outraged comment by one Admiral Mullen:

“”Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Admiral Mullen said.”

You know what? The good Admiral is right. Team Assange may indeed have blood on their hands.

To be honest though, with the army’s recent proud record of collateral damage in Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s a bit like the McDonald’s and KFC companies accusing animal rights activists of endangering the lives of test animals when they set these sad critters free.

Technically true, that is but perhaps just the tiniest bit hypocritical…?

Among party games, the one called ‘What would Jesus have done?’ has always been one of my favourites.

Sometimes, the answer is straightforward, sometimes, less so – but let’s take this quote from Matthew…:

21  Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.
22  And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
23  But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.
24  But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
25  Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.
26  But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.

… and use said quote to illuminate the following story:

“An Anglican church in Canada has become the focus of controversy after a vicar gave Holy Communion to a dog. The priest gave the Host – considered by Christians to represent the body of Jesus Christ – to an Alsatian cross called Trapper. St Peter’s Anglican Church in Toronto has since been deluged complaints from Christians all over Canada.”

So, would Jesus have given bits of His body to feed the dog?

Probably not – though, in the end, He did decide to help out that woman of Canaan.

Still, given His impatience with the forces of smug self-righteousness, as written down in Matthew 7:3, for instance, or John 8:7, it’s quite likely He would have admonished this multitude of moaning Mounties to get a fucking life already…

… and ending on a less Scriptural note: If Christ’s official body double is happy enough to invite the likes of General Pinochet and Tony Blair to the Vatican and break bread with them, I can’t see much harm in tossing a few holy crumbs to a blameless Alsatian cross either.

Jesus loves me! this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little doggies to Him come;
feeding on the Saviour’s crumbs.

(Out, Damned Spot, Out, I Say…!)

It is a small step for man…:

“Britain’s pavements could soon be free from the “unsightly stain” of chewing gum, which costs the taxpayer £150m a year to remove. Pioneering Flintshire-based company Revolymer has come up with a gum which can be removed from the streets using only water.”

Which really is good news.

It’s funny though how so many typos go unspotted. It’s desperately easy to make them, of course. On many keyboards, for instance, the ‘y’ is cozying up to the ‘t’ – as it must do on the machines used at the Telegraph…

… which explains the typo in the name of this Flintshire-based company.

A company dealing with a loathsome substance like chewing gum must obviously be spelled with a ‘t’ and not a ‘y’.

Anyway, yes, it’s a welcome first step, this – be it a small one.

What we now really need is some incredibly clever invention that makes the people chewing gum look like moderately intelligent humans instead of the aggressively bored looking, mentally challenged cows that litter up our societies.

That would be one giant leap indeed but probably much harder to achieve than simply putting a man on the moon.

(Of course, it might have been an other daddy…)

Now, here’s a bit of alarming news for you:

“Men and shopping really are a toxic mix, claim scientists who have discovered that a spot of retail therapy could make them impotent.”

Which makes this almost as bad a bad letter day as that other awful occasion when a horrified world learned that eating peanut butter could make women infertile – though it did seem to have quite the opposite effect on Elvis.

Still, forewarned is forearmed and all that, so now we know what kind of things we need to avoid if we want to sign up for the old diaper tour of duty.

Mind you, if you’re a guy and your girlfriend sends you to the shop to buy her a jumbo size tub of peanut butter, she might just want to tell you, ever so subtly, that she’s simply not that into you…

… especially if she’s humming Marilyn Monroe’s ‘My heart belongs to daddy’, while she hands you the shopping list.

(More Marilyn HERE & HERE & HERE & HERE)

As I wrote earlier, I baked my own bread for the first time today. Here’s the result: