Glob-a-log

(WAGs: Whores And Goats…?)

I was trawling the Net, looking for strange stories and factoids about the Football World Cup, when I came upon this site. I have no idea if any of the facts listed there are, in fact, facts but it’s a funny list anyway.

Here’s ‘fact’ number seven:

“Garrincha, Brazil’s World Cup hero of 1968 and 1962, lost his virginity at age 12. To a goat. He went on to father 14 children.”

We trust he didn’t have those children with same goat.

Mind you, there’s something to say for marrying into a family of goats. I’m sure mister Garrincha never had the kind of relational problems that mister David Makoeya of South Africa had with his soi-disant sapient family:

“Johannesburg — Police say a South African man who wanted to watch a World Cup match was beaten to death by his family. David Makoeya, a 61-year-old man from the small village of Makweya fought with his wife and two children for the remote control on Sunday because he wanted to watch Germany play Australia in the World Cup. The others, however, wanted to watch a gospel show.”

Back to that website I mentioned earlier and to the story that made it, not all that surprisingly, to the top of the list:

“The 1990 ‘art’ film Cicciolina And Moana At The World Cup features two porn stars who sleep their way through the opposition, tiring out star performers like thinly-disguised versions of Jurgen Klinsmann and Diego Maradona and enabling Italy to win.”

Greater love has no woman, et cetera, et cetera…

… or so you would think, until you read the following story – which is not about the raptures of sex, not even oral sex, though it does feature a ruptured throat:

“A South African woman ruptured her throat while taking part in a vuvuzela-blowing competition, but said Friday she was recovering with no permanent damage. [T]he next day she went to the doctor. “The doctor was really enjoying it, he just kept laughing at me and said it was his first vuvuzela injury.””

(Educated fleas? Good old days indeed…)

Right, it’s the final day of 2009 – if not the actual final day of the decade – so, as promised, here’s my final installment of the calendars-we-really-need-to-have-in-2010 series.

I don’t have much blather time, today, because I have a largish meal to cook as well. So, let’s get this one over and done with quickly:

1) Sports are always a great cash vehicle, so what better way to make a few easy bucks than to present the gullible world with yet another ‘Golden Sports Moments’ calendar: Featuring Thierry Henry’s handball, the fake blood rugby scandal, Formula One’s deliberate car crash, followed by Tiger Wood’s less deliberate fire hydrant crash, the whole of the drug-addled Tour de France, etcetera, etcetera.

2) The whole Darwin versus Creation debate boils down to the question whether man is a rising ape or a fallen angel. Still, wherever one stands in that particular fight, most people would agree that mankind has come a long way since it climbed out of those trees – and what better way to celebrate this than by producing & selling the ‘Human Progress’ calendar: With photos of that recently stolen ‘Arbeit macht frei’ banner at the entrance of Auschwitz, pictures of Cambodia’s mountains of skulls, Quantanamo Bay (or Abu Ghraib) and Lubyanka prison, action pics of Japan’s rape of Nankin and the bombing of Hiroshima, a photo of Robert Mugabe, und so weiter, und so weiter.

3) Again, we can try to bring together two of the best things in the world, with a ‘Food is Better Than Sex’ calendar: Featuring photos of a naked Nigella Lawson swimming in a huge bowl of minestrone soup, Johnny Depp doing someting rude (in the raw) to a man-sized sprout, Carla Sarkozi’s naked struggles on an XXXL plate of spaghetti, Brad Pitt’s nude climbing over mountains of mashed potattoes and one of a naked Angelina Jolie not quite mounting a gigantic fish stick.

Right, I’m off to the kitchen, to do something really mean to an innocent chicken – fully clad, I might add.

You all have a very happy New Year.

(You can find the three earlier Calendar posts HERE & HERE & HERE.)

(Hey, if I had to do it with Monsieur Sarkozi I’d also say ‘Pas pour moi’…)

Yes, like yesterday and the day before, I’m still in end-of-year mode, which means that I will continue with my list of calendars the world will want to see in all the better shops, this coming year. Like it was with the invention of the wheel, the deodorant spray and the chocolate flavoured condom, people will shake their heads and ask, ‘Whatever did we do before this was invented?’

So, here are three more calendars we need to be able to give pride of place in our lavatories:

1) A really simple idea this but no less delightful for it. Ever since old Walt drew his first mouse, cartoons have become one of the world’s biggest businesses. God knows how many billions Mickey and Donald and the others have made for the Disney conmpany. Talking of which – God, that is: The world’s religions have also been always quite inventive about making money, so one could do far worse than combining these two money makers. Which is why I think it would be a splendid idea to make a ‘Danish Mohammed Cartoon’ calendar.

2) Of course, there is much more that you can do with religion (and calendars.) There are thousands of interesting stories in the Old Testament alone. It used to be that the church windows depicted scenes from the Bible, so that the illiterate masses could be instructed in this way. Nowadays, not many people go to church, so we need to find other ways to bring these stories to them – and what better place than a calendar, hung in that small room where everybody goes at least once a day to medidate in blessed peace? So, yes, we do need a straight religious calendar, with pictures of the most engaging Biblical scenes: With Lot having sex with his two daughters, God answering Elijah’s prayer by sending the bear that devoured the mocking children, the tribes of Israel obediently smashing the skulls of their enemies’ babies against rocks and trees, Jezebel being eaten by dogs, etcetera, etcetera.

3) Enough of the religion already, you say? You want more sex? Okay, why not? The world can indeed do with more kinky calendars. I’m sure the Kama Sutra would have sold even better if the author had gone for the calendar format. Which might still be something its publishers may want to consider but I was thinking of something else. What I would really like to see is for someone who is good at Fotoshopping to produce something we could call the ‘Crazy Coupling Calendar’: With images of Berlusconi and Angela Merkel in the shower, Gordon Brown and Carla Sarkozi on the kitchen table, President Sarkozi on a waterbed with ex-president Putin, Amy Winehouse pleasuring her royal majesty the Queen and eight more unlikely couples going at it.

Okay, that was the third installment of this special fantasy calendar issue. I had planned to keep it at that but the year still has another day left and if I would go for one more calendar post, then the total score of calendars would be twelve, which is kind of fitting, so I will probably be doing that tomorrow.

For now, I’ll leave you with the suggestion that you, again, could flesh out the calendars mentioned above and share the results in the comment section below.

(You can find parts 1 & 2 & 4 of this series HERE & HERE & HERE)

As I said yesterday, the end of the year is the time where people go all out mad about actual and metaphysical clocks. Well, I didn’t say that, to be honest but I could have.

Now, I can do herd animal behaviour with the best of them, so yesterday I started with a list of calendars. Not actually existing calendars but ones that one could wish were there to be bought.

Here are three more of those:

1) Sex sells. Perhaps not as much as hatred, fear and religion but in any get-rich-quick scheme sex will always be a handy XXX Factor. It has been claimed that about 90% of the Internet is about sex, so I can’t see why this percentage could not be equalled – or bettered – by calendars. So, here’s one for the sleaze heads, called ‘Mouseketeers go pro’, with upskirt shots of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell et al.

2) In terms of selling power, it may not quite be up there with sex but where would our tabloids be without Schadenfreude.We put people on pedestals, because it’s much more fun if they have to go some distance when they do fall. Britney at the hairdresser, Hugh Grant with the street hooker, Amy Winehouse and her drugs: The public love to read about all of that – and to look at the pictures, of course. Which is why a ‘Famous Divorces’ calendar could be quite a hit: Paul McCartney & Heather Mills, Britney Spears & Kevin Federline, Jordan & Peter Andre, John Cleese & Alyce Faye etcetera.

3) It’s what water is to fish and air to birds – or birds to Tiger and lies to a politician: What makes the global blogs go round? Yes, indeed: Conspiracy theories. Why admit to the possibility of coincidence and chaos, when you can point the finger at invisible bogeymen and cry ‘Conspracy!’. So, anyone producing a calendar that was dedicated to this weird hobby, would make quite a bit of money from selling such a ‘Conspiracy Calendar’: With Kennedy and the grassy knoll, 9/11 and the Truthers, Global Warming and those leaked e-mails, the Elvis lives brigade, Roswell and Hangar 18, the Moon Landing deniers, und so weiter, und so weiter.

So, your homework for today is to flesh out these three calendars. I’ll be back tomorrow with more.

(Calendar posts 1 & 3 & 4 are HERE & HERE & HERE)

(The perfect celeb song, really…)

Four more days to go till this year closes down. What better way to celebrate this than to (more or less) quote that old Clint Eastwood movie, “Play listie for me.”

Or I could do a calendar. They are always popular. (My own favourite: The Zombie pin-up calendar.)

Or I could do both: A list of calendars. Yes, that should do the trick.

Though I can’t be bothered to deal with the calendars that are already out there. It’s much more fun to make your own – which is what I will be doing these coming three days

So, let’s start simple

1) Sports calendars are always popular. Anything with sports usually is. Look at the success of ‘Sports Illustrated’, for instance, though that may have more to do with its cover (girls) than with any sport in particular. Which is why I would go for a calendar called “Tiger’s Titful Trophy Barbies. Surely we are on twelve by now?

2) Animals also give good calendar. From the mighty lion to the celebrity chihuahua, you can sell this product faster than you could flog an up skirt pic of the Pope. Add a few spoonfuls of fame to the mix and you’re really cooking. Which reminds me: Cook books by famous chefs are also big, so why not combine all three of these elements and do a calendar, called ‘Famous pet recipies’. So, January could be tuna-canned Flipper month, February a Chinese Lassie special, March could be barbied Skippy time, April would have us longing for Donald à l’orange, et cetera, et cetera.

3) Politicians do not make a pretty pin-up picture, on the whole (though cartoonists do like to work with this base material a lot.) Still, I think there could be a market for a political calendar, if you play the Schadenfreude card. So, I could see a calendar called “World leaders in trouble”. There’s quite a range of suitable candidates. You have Pope pushing, Berlusconi bashing, Bush with his shoe (or pretzel), Sarkozi and his jogging collapse. There surely must be enough politicians taking pratfalls to get us through the calendar year?

To be continued tomorrow…

… but in the meantime you could have fun trying to flesh out those pet recipies & political pratfall calendars.

(Compared to this my calendars look pretty damn good…)

(Calendar time, Part Two & Three & Four are HERE & HERE & HERE)

Last year I wrote a column with the title ‘Seven great investment tips for 2009′.

So, if you’re not a millionaire by now, you’ve only got yourselves to blame.

This year, I will, once more, try to make all my faithful readers obscenely rich, by way of yet another get-rich-the-lazy-way list.

Here goes:

1) Write a best-seller series of books about a chick raised by two lesbian dragons, who subsequently goes to a magic dragon school, where it will find friends, adventures, & evil wizards and will discover various things about magic, wisdom, midnight snacks and snogging.

2) I’ve mentioned this before but it’s still an excellent piece of advice, so: Paint a Pollock.

3) Write a movie script about a reality TV show that’s set on Mars. The show is a boot camp for strippers and pole dancers. Each contestant has her own bubble, in which she performs. Each week the viewers back on Earth vote which bubble will burst and which stripper/pole dancer ends up dying from this ultimate form of exposure. Then an army of alien sex & brain-starved zombies lands and paints the planet even redder. (The last shot has the zombie leader chewing on a still quite shapely thigh, then grinning into the camera and saying “A small snack of a stripper, a huge meal of mankind”.)

4) Write an i-Phone app that shows buskers, chuggers and other pests by way of Google Street View.

5) Write a TV RomCom about a slick Junior Minister who falls in love with a female Church of England do-gooder vicar. Describe their weekly domestic arguments about bankers, gay priests, ministerial expenses, Muslims, more ministerial expenses, minorities, ministerial expenses, the poor, ministerial expenses, paedophile priests, moats, sharia law, floating duck islands, God, Tony Blair, the Devil, porn movie expense claims, etcetera etcetera.

December comes with lists – and when it’s the end of a decade these lists start to fall like the leaves of a cartoon calender.

No, this is not a list column. I might still do one before the year is done but not today.

One of the somewhat predictable topics of the current set of lists is the question what it was that best defined this last decade.

You could say Big Brother, the TV programme that would have pleased Andy Warhol and his fifteen minutes of fame claim enormously…

… though I suppose that everyone would, in the end, perhaps grudgingly, agree that that one September morning in 2001 cast a bloody shadow that fell over the rest of the decade. Terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ were the topics that disgraced the front pages of the world’s newspapers almost every day since 9/11.

Still, it’s an ill hooker that blows nobody good and all that, so you could say that the world’s professional cartoonists never lacked for topics, the last eight years and a bit.

Saddam, Osama, Bush and Blair: From the White House, through Baghdad and to the mountain caves of Afghanistan, all of them appeared in numerous cartoons, prancing & preening like the Marx brothers in a Romero flick.

It’s a sensitive issue though and lately an English stand-up comedian got into a bit of media bother when he made a joke that, thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, England would win a lot of medals at the next Paralympics.

Cue the tabloids foaming at the paper mouth about the depravity of mocking ‘our brave boys and girls’.

So, should we all kneel down and pray, with closed and down-turned lips, in the Church of Shock & Awe…

… or can we, occasionally, admit that there is a funny side to all the madness?

I’d claim the latter and I call the following news story as witness for the defence:

“Chinese police were held in a hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber only to find the man was armed with sausages. Police believed that the straps and bulky items around Sing He’s waist were dynamite and detonators Mr He, 23, threatened to blow up a restaurant and its customers in Benxi, norhtern China, unless the staff handed over the contents of the till. But a specialist bomb unit called to the scene quickly determined that the device was assembled with pork products.”

Right now, I’m rereading Susanna Clarke’s wonderful (and wonderfully weird) novel ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.’ Okay, not really right now, because ‘right now’ I am writing this. On the other hand, when you will be reading this I might very well be back in Clarke’s world again in that particular ‘right now’, so let’s just stick with that time tabling.

Yea verily, in the weird world of writing & reading time does behave more oddly than any quark or other quantum thingie.

Anyway, yesterday (while I was right-nowing in some pub) I came upon the following brilliant sentence:

‘Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric, if left too much on their own.’

Clarke explains this theory in the next few sentences, which I will not quote here. Not because they are not worth quoting (for they are) but because I’d rather have you buy or borrow and read the book for yourselves. (If you have already read the book and have – like I myself had – forgotten about this passage, I will tell you that in my hardback copy it can be found on page 452. Yes, it’s a big book.)

Enough about that though, because reading that passage had me thinking a bit further about this house & people equation. I mean, if houses and people resembled each other in this one aspect, what other similarities could be found between mortar and mortals?

Or, to bring matters down to a pleasingly simplistic level, could we make a game out of this and play, ‘Which famous person resembles which famous building?’

You could make a case, for instance, that Dick Cheney looked like the Lubyanka. (Yes, the former headquarters of the KGB.)

Silvio Berlusconi (after the attack) could be said to resemble Rome’s very own Colosseum – in so far as that if you could look inside both of them when they were in working order, you would see some pretty ugly things happen, while both, of course, are now in quite a sorry state.

Michael Jackson is a slightly harder (or bigger) nut to crack but you could argue that M.J. would have been the result if you could have got the Taj Mahal drunk and then fuck & impregnate Euro Disney.

It’s a really fun game to play – so, of course, I would like to invite all of you to come and play with me. In other words: Tell me which celeb you think resembles which famous building.

(I’m not sure ‘happy’ is the appropriate word here…)

I’m back in Prague – and I can inform anyone who cares about these things that the neighbourhood pubs are still going strong.

I’m getting too old for this pub crawling game.

Meaning that I’m not in the mood to read (and comment on) any newspapers today. So, here are some links to a few other old stories, if you feel the need to spend some more time at this blog today.

I really need to go and spend some quality time in the shower house.

Enjoy:

1) Setting fire to dicks

2) Get thee behind me, Satan (and bring on the lubricant)

3) There’s something about Viagra

4) Outreach pastors and sex toys

5) Forced to watch porn

(There are some things even Jesus would find hard to swallow…)

I’ll be on the road for most of today, so I won’t be reading (and commenting on) any newspapers.

Those in serious (if somewhat dubious) need of  looking at the world through my ever rantful beholder’s eyes, could read some old columns instead.

They could do so at random – or follow the following few pre-selected links:

1) Reading the Ann Summers sex chain catalogue

2) Why men never look at a woman’s tits

3) The condom war continues

4) Little green men with little green dicks?

5) Better than a Russian bride

Normal services will be restored tomorrow (and tomorrow… and tomorrow…)

P.S.: Those who think they can’t get through life without a daily sample of my (mostly tasteless) YouTube clip links should either get a life or follow this here link…