Glob-a-log

Yesterday, I came upon a great little sentence in Ray Bradbury’s short story collection ‘We’ll always have Paris’. It was just one line in a story called ‘Massinello Pietro’.

This is it:

‘Those with talent must mind the world.’

The longer I look at it, the more it speaks to me.

(Obviously, the flip side of this sentiment is that the world should try not to mind the talentless too much – and here I’ll give you the ‘poet’ William Topaz McGonagall. No, truly, keep him, please…)

Anyway, I do love the idea that those with talent should mind the world – which more or less implies that they actually could do so.

I wish I could believe that but I fear that the forces that gave us the Big Brother House are stronger than the poet who gave us these immortal lines:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

or the guy who wrote these:

‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.’

‘Those with talent must mind the world.’

Perhaps – but then again, is it really worth it, minding a world that has such people in it?

“A German company has designed an aroma, based on vaginas, for men. Vulva Original offers “the genuine scent of a woman” via an easy-to-use roll on applicator.”

Quote the company’s boss, one Guido Lenssen:

“Vulva is real. We tried several samples from women of all ages. We didn’t take the scent after someone had run a marathon or anything, but it is a combination of urine, sweat, and female arousal.”

(Though I prefer THIS VERSION…)

There’s a very nice article about Kierkegaard in today’s Guardian. Even better: It’s only the first part of a promised series of articles about this philosopher (or ‘Christian thinker’, as some have tried to pigeon hole him.)

Though I am an agnostic myself I’ve always had a soft spot for Kierkegaard. He has both an entertaining and an original way of looking at (and writing about) the world….

… and I do think he has some interesting – and even important – things to say about the way we live; things that seem to have become even more relevant today.

To quote the writer of the article, Clare Carlisle:

“For Kierkegaard, the most pressing question for each person is the meaning of his or her own existence, which arises from this relationship with the self. For example, we can be more or less self-aware; we can wish to be other than how we are; we can trust or mistrust, like or dislike ourselves. Perhaps we can even make decisions about who we will become.”

Which is self-evident in the way things only become clear after someone who is truly articulate has pointed them out.

Anyway, what Kierkegaard suggests, in one of his books is that

“people in our time, because of so much knowledge, have forgotten what it means to exist”.

He wrote that in 1846 – almost one-and-a-half century before the Age of Internet…

Again, quoting Carslile:

“[Kierkegaard] is not arguing that knowledge is a bad thing, but pointing out that its pursuit, however worthwhile in itself, can be a distraction from existential issues.”

Amen.

I mean, information – which word I would have preferred to ‘knowledge’ here – is fun. Details are fun.

So, while it is, for instance, nice to know that the smallest house in Great Britain (the Quay House) measures a cool 10 by 6 feet (≈3 by 1.8 meters), it’s ever so much more satisfying to learn that the last person to live there was a man called Robert Jones – a fisherman who was 6ft 3in (≈2,15 meters) tall.

On the other hand, if your life and your mind’s eyes have become as disintegrated as an overheated Google search engine and when your soul is shackled to a thousand pub quizzes…

… then you could do far worse than turn off your computer and turn off your mobile, for a few weeks or so, and retire to a comfy couch with one of Kierkegaard’s (many, many) books.

Thus endeth today’s sermon.

(Okay, so we’ll just have to be philosophical about Kierkegaard’s absence here…)

Leave it to Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker to have us sobbing into our chips, while contemplating the tricky nature of time (’The King of Things’) and channelling the ghost of Kurt ’so it goes’ Vonnegut and the Tralfamadorians.

So, yes, here’s a short quote from yet another one of his brilliant columns. Go and read it immediately after you’re done here:

“Still, it’s easy to picture a collapsing bridge. Picturing a collapsing environment is trickier. Hollywood has tried its best, but all I learned from sitting through The Day After Tomorrow is that, contrary to my previous expectations, the end of the world might be boring.”

More excerpts from the Gospel according to C.B.:

- Time will outlive you, your offspring, your offspring’s robots and your offspring’s robots’ springs.

- Perhaps joggers have a few additional Tralfamadorian synapses; only by experimenting on their brains can we be sure.

- [T]he closest thing we have [to Tralfamadorian grey matter] is LSD, which must be pumped into the water supply as a matter of urgency.

So, perhaps, if we have worlds enough and time, we could pump LSD into a statistically significant sample of joggers and then experiment on their brains?

Though that might be a waste of LSD and a good experiment.

I’d rather go for another test group. It might not be good science (since the group is, despite its claim of the opposite, anything but representative) but I’d love to have LSD pumped into the chambers of the European parliament, the House of Lords, the Kremlin, the Knesset, the House & Senate and everywhere else where politicians gather to enrich themselves and fuck with us.

If I could see that happen during my life time I would not give one self-pitying squeak when that King of Things would come for me but go gentle (and grinning like mad) into that good night.

Bleh! That’s such a toss of terrible tripe - So, let’s end with this one:

(Yes, much much better…!)

Now, this is a truly inspired idea:

“The Spanish practice of napping in the afternoon should be declared a protected art form, Madrid’s conservative government has been told. lt comes following the announcement earlier this month by Esperanza Aguirre, the President of the conservative regional government in Madrid, that the bullfight was to be included on the list of items of “special cultural value” that were protected by law.”

Like I said, brilliant…

… but no more than a good start.

I can see other countries following this example.

Like Germany demanding that ‘Invading Poland’ should be put on that list – or France insisting that short megalomanic leaders should be recognized as having special cultural value.

England could then put their football hooligans on the list, Scotland their pregnant teenagers and Kindergarten glue heads; North Ireland could enter knee-capping and Wales… Well, damned if I know what Wales could put on the list – though the rest of the UK could put ‘putting up with Wales’ on it, I suppose.

As for my own country…? Well, we’re spoilt for choice, really.

We’ve got Endemol and Edam, silver skates and skunk, windmills and Wilders…

Ah yes, and then to think there are still people who say the European Union is a complete waste of time.

(Now, this one really should be on that list…)

(Nothing to do with anything really but that suits the Silly Sunday Leitmotiv…)

Okay, it’s Sunday. The sun is shining (somewhere behind these bloody clouds anyway) and I’m so not in the mood to read any newspapers today.

So, let’s have some fun instead…

… and let’s start with some very weird video clip indeed:

Trololololololo (Russian torch & torture song…)

I’ve got more where that one came from – and you’d never guess where it did come from, so I’ll tell you.

Chances are none of you here have ever heard of the so-called MBM reports in the Guardian. MBM stands for Minute By Minute (report) and that’s what it is: One reporter with a TV who gives live bloggy comments on football matches (and sometimes cricket or even tennis matches.)

It’s mostly tongue in cheek (if it’s not all out sarcastic) and readers are always cordially invited to send their e-mails (and routinely insulted when they do.)

Sometimes, the reporter (or one of the readers) starts a riff about something or the other – preferably about something that has nothing at all to do with the match being played.

So, a few days ago, readers sent in links of weird & disturbing video clips – and they really came up with some beauties, like this one:

Salad fingers

Scary shit.

Less spooky but no less weird was this one. Not exactly a Teddy bears’ picnic but then again, if you cut down all their woods, those bears don’t have any place left to have picnics – or to shit…

… and then whose fault is it when they come to our cities and misbehave?

Here’s that clip:

Bears & Cars & Stuff

Okay, enough with the clips already, for now – though I will stick with the weird, if you don’t mind…

… so we will leave the bears to do whatever else they want to do…

… and move on to toads.

Yes, toads – and dead poets, and spendthrift Hull City Councillors:

”In a novel way to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of the poet Philip Larkin, a council is to spend £200,000 on 65 giant fibreglass toads. The oversized amphibians will be displayed at locations around Hull for 10 weeks later this year. According to Hull City Council documents, “This project is designed to spark interest in Larkin’s poetry among people who are made curious by the unexpected presence of their local ‘toad’.” The move is intended to honour Larkin’s two poems, Toads and Toads Revisited.”

(Here are those poems, by the way, if you care about that kind of stuff: Toads & Toads Revisited)

Okay, one last clip, before I go – another Salad Fingers episode. Enjoy:

Shore Leave

(Samaritans from Hell…)

The word of the day is ‘intervention.’

It’s a blameless little word. At its very worst it was used (and I quote my Oxford ALD) in the context of ‘armed intervention by one country in the affairs of other countries.’

These last few years though, it has been been hijacked and cruelly abused, so that when we now read about an intervention, our mind’s eyes see Elton John offering his help to George Michael or, even worse perhaps, Kelly Osborne offering to intervene on behalf of Amy Winehouse.

Celebrity interventions…

I’m not sure but given the choice I might prefer to be interfered with by the likes of Bush & Blair rather than being samaritanized by Elton & Amy.

All of which, more or less directly, leads us to the ‘Thought for the Day’, which is:

‘Nature might abhor a vacuum but television and tabloids absorb them.’

Celeb culture…

All of these idle & tasteless thoughts, by the way, came to me, care of a delightfully vicious & funny little book called ‘A Snowball in Hell’, written by the truly inimitable Christopher Brookmyre.

(Inimitable, yes but, to me, part of an unholy triumvirate of very funny and very clever writers, the other two being Christopher Moore and Colin Bateman.)

In this book Brookmyre has, amongst many other things, a sadistic serial killer targetting all kinds of celebs. The killer is by no means the hero of the book but I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only reader who quite enjoyed counting the celeb road kill on this very wild ride.

Ah well, on the whole I agree with the cliché that each culture gets the politicians – and celebrity industry – it deserves…

… but that should, in all fairness, also mean that the smallish part of the culture that doesn’t watch Big Brother and/or read tabloids also deserves the light relief that writers like Christopher Brookmyre bring us…

… or the balm to seething brows that Marina Hyde rubs in, on a near daily basis, on her ‘Lost in Showbiz’ blog.

So, I will end with a small excerpt from one of her posts, in which George Michael reacts to the news that Elton John wouldn’t mind doing yet another one of his interventions:

“He will not be happy until I bang on his door in the middle of the night saying, ‘Please, please, help me, Elton. Take me to rehab.’ It’s not going to happen. You know what I heard last week? That Bono… Oh for God’s sake…” He’s choking on his laughter. “Geri [Halliwell] told Kenny that Bono, having spoken to Elton, had approached Geri to say, ‘What can we do for George?’

…

So Bono could save him? “As if Bono gives a shit what I do with my private life… Elton just needs to shut his mouth and get on with his own life.”

Amen.

(They’re playing your song, George…)

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is Graeme Gibson’s ‘The Bedside Book of Beasts’.

Here’s a quote from it:

“Once we discarded animal spirits and adopted anthropomorphic Gods, we began to thank them [for the food] – and by implication, our selves – instead of the creatures who gave their lives to feed us. This shift served to depersonalize our relationship with the meat on our plate, in the same way that technology later depersonalized the killing of the living beast.”

There’s much more really good stuff in the book, so go out and buy a copy when you’re done here, if you can.

Anyway, I was reminded of that quote when I read the following nit of nonsense in today’s Guardian:

“A member of the New York’s legislative assembly has introduced a bill that would ban the use of salt in restaurant kitchens. The ban’s proposer says it would give consumers the choice about whether to add salt to their meal. Restaurants trying to sneak a bit of sodium chloride on to the plate would be fined $1,000 every time they were caught.”

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? We moved from those Lascaux caves, where we left those beautiful drawings on the walls and now we send out rockets into space – but we’ve become very strange in the process: So far removed from our ancestor bones and our ancestor souls that we think we’re no longer part of nature.

Which is probably why we inhabit and treat our bodies as if they were our adversaries and why we have such a deranged and unhealthy relationship with our food.

Okay, one more quote from Gibson’s book before I go:

“Now, of course, few of us thank anything or anyone for the gift of our food. Which in the light of industrial agriculture seems appropriate: it would be adding insult to injury to offer thanks to a battery hen or turkey, considering the horrors we’ve inflicted upon it.”

(There are worse things than being a one horse town…)

I’m sure there will be people who will condemn the actions by the town officials of Topeka (Kansas) as a cheap stunt – or the shoddiest sell-out this side of a certain mess of pottage.

Let me state firmly though that I’m not one of those nay-sayers.

I think it’s a brilliant idea. So, my best wishes to The Town Formerly Known As Topeka:

“An American city, Topeka, has renamed itself “Google” for a month, as it bids for the chance to host the search engine’s new high-speed broadband network.”

As I said, a brilliant scheme…

… and one I plan to emulate.

So, for fairly obvious reasons, I will change my name to Brad Pitt…

… trusting that this will lead to a high-speed connection with Angelina.

(If you want another kind of love, I’ll change my name for you…)

(INCOMING: I just found this clip - Dance me to the end of love, indeed.)

It seems only yesterday – okay, it was only yesterday – that I linked to a story about breast milk; to wit, about a woman who was charged with assault, after she had “squirted milk straight from her breast into the face of a female deputy.”

Well, you know what they say, ‘It never rains but it pours with the sticky stuff’, so I wasn’t all that surprised when I came upon the following story:

“Take four cups of breast milk, add rennet, salt and yoghurt – yes, four cups of breast milk, according to a recipe created by New York chef and restaurateur Daniel Angeler who posted his formula for maple caramelized pumpkin encrusted cheese on his blog, and offered “whoever wants to try it is welcome to try it as long as supply lasts”.”

It’s a kind of progress, I suppose – and it’s what human beings do best.

99,999% of all animals will ignore a branch that has fallen from the tree but one of our ancestors thought ‘Hang on a minute!’, picked it up and brained one of his fellow human beings.

We never leave well enough alone, you might say.

So, we steal milk from cows and turn it into ice-cream and milkshakes – and then we take our own breast milk and use it as an assault weapon or turn it into a Yuppie type cheese.

Oh, and for those of you who made these ‘yuk’ noises when you read about that breast milk maple caramelized et cetera cheese…

… you ain’t seen nothing yet.

May I present to you something that runs faster through your entrails than a fried Mars bars, smells more powerful than a deep-fried cheeseburger and is better able to leap up your throat in a single bound than a vengeful haggis.

Look! Up in the charts of the most disgusting food products ever…

It’s Pork Chocs – Sugar free chocolate dipped pork rinds

(You don’t need to have Superman’s stomach to swallow this but it helps…)

(Only their mothers could tell them apart…)

I’ve got Leonard Cohen on my brain – again…

I don’t know why – maybe it was something I read about the Chilcot inquiry: That lukewarm affair that was supposed to take a close & stern look at all the snake oil merchants, misfits and weathervanes who bungled & lied us into the Iraq war. Or maybe it was something else entirely: So many stupid news stories, so little time

Anyway, this morning, coming out of bed, I was humming Cohen’s song ‘The Future’. (Yes, I know, ‘Closing Time’ might have been more appropriate but my sleepy brain was insisting on the former…

… and just before I started to write this (after reading yet another silly news story in the Telegraph) I was quietly singing (and searching for the words of) one of the master’s much older songs, ‘Nancy’:

It seems so long ago

Nancy was alone,

looking at the late late show

through a semi-precious stone.

In the house of honesty

her father was on trial”

Okay, Nancy was Reagan’s wife, not Bush’s (or Blair’s) daughter – but it’s nice to think about an alternative world where George & Tony would rant crazily about ghosts at the banquet, shouting ‘Iraq has murdered sleep!’, before a world wide walking forest worth of editorials would have seen them arrested and brought before the International Court of Justice.

Well, even the smallest pebble can dream of the fall of mountains – though I admit that the above scenario is about as likely to come to a theatre near you as it would be for Bush & Blair to do a John Belushi at a press conference, shouting ‘YES! YES! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST… WE HAVE SEEN THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!”

Ah well, that was in another country and besides, James Brown is dead.

Anyway, talking of weapons of mass destruction – and that news article that had my head playing haunted house to Leonard’s ghost…

… as assault weapons go, it’s perhaps not quite up there with those famed Weapons of Mass Destruction but this one, at least, was quite real…

… and pretty personal…

… and damn well up close too:

“An American woman has been charged with third-degree assault after she squirted breast milk in the face of a female police officer. Toni Tramel, from Kentucky, had been arrested for public intoxication and was changing into her prison uniform when the incident allegedly occurred. She reportedly squirted milk straight from her breast into the face of a female deputy.”