Glob-a-log

(Only their mother, et cetera, et cetera…)

I don’t know about you but me, I’ve heard quite enough about a certain dead DIY albino - up to and very much including the point that a BBC nitwit more or less compared the dead ‘King of Pop’ with the very much alive ‘King of Tennis’, Roger Federer.

Now, it tells you about all you need to know about our dearly deceased that he absolutely loved that stupid title - and anyone who knows even a little bit about Federer knows he would find this latest coronation acutely embarrassing.

What’s more, he may be too polite to mention it but I am not, so I am quite happy to state that such a claim, certainly in this particular context, is also in very bad taste.

Not quite as bad as a certain other BBC presenter who calls old gentlemen to inform them that he has fucked their granddaughters but bad enough anyway.

Enough about Michael Jackson though - and more than enough about BBC idiots.

There are, after all, more things in heaven and earth, Sue Barker, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. More things below earth too, as the following Telegraph article shows.

Again, I don’t know about you but some news stories just make me very happy - and this is one of them:

“As a thin drizzle fell on the World Worm Charming Championships on Saturday, Stan Allen strummed his guitar and felt the earth move at his feet. This was broadly the idea, although it wasn’t clear whether the worms emerging mob-handed around him were coming up to enjoy the entertainment or to escape from the noise. “They like rock best,” Stan 61, explained between riffs. “Easy listening doesn’t do it for them, and classical puts them to sleep.”

Worm charming is an ancient, noble and mysterious art, which, while intended primarily to bring worms out of the soil also manages to bring out the worst in its ultra-competitive practitioners. Tales abound of dirty tricks and dubious practices. One charmer was banned for life after concealing worms in his trouser legs to sprinkle on the ground – “we got suspicious when we saw him wearing bicycle clips,” says championship organiser Mike Forster. Others have sunk to chopping worms in half to double their totals.”

(Bad but slightly less annoying than a Michael Jackson clip…)

(Give it up, love: You’re well past it…)

Today’s broadcast is sponsored by hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which is running a new campaign, with the somewhat surprising and more than a bit dubious slogan, ‘Over the hill and far away.’

Anyway, as I’ve stated a few times before, I like scientists. Not just the humble white coats who merely slog on, in pursuit of a better type of throw-away pen, a more convincing-looking toupee or a cure for AIDS but also - and maybe especially - the kind of scientist that has his or her eyes firmly on tomorrow’s headlines, like a heat-seeking missile in, well, in heat, I suppose.

Of course, the downside of trying to make the news with such religious fervour is that, occasionally, it makes you look like an utter prat:

“Researchers discovered women feel most confident and happy with their love life and body shape shortly before they reach 30. It is also the period in their life when they enjoy the best sex – but the happiness is relatively shortlived. Because by the time they have turned 30 they start worrying about growing old and developing grey hair and wrinkles.”

Yes, that great time just before you hit thirty. When everything is going ever so well for you…

Just ask Janis Joplin…

(Get it while you can, indeed…)

(Long may he reign indeed…)

So, the king is dead - long live the king, and all of that.

I know the common and probably decent thing, these early moments, is to say how brilliant artist X was, how much he or she was loved and will be missed.

Well, I’m sure millions out there in the World of Blog have already done so - as I’m equally certain that a large number of folks have already shared their joyful and sadistic glee with those who care for that kind of necrophilia.

Me, I never was a fan of his music and I thought his life style disgusting. Like many people on this planet, when reading about this deeply troubled person, I felt a mix of pity and deep irritation.

Yes, he was talented but, like too many other artists, he also ended up being a waste of space and time.

Consider the following story:

“Veteran French cyclist Jeannie Longo, who is hoping to qualify for the Beijing Olympics this summer, won the Trophee des Grimpeurs (Climbers’ Trophy) for the fourth time on Sunday. Longo, who turns 50 years old in October, had already won the event which counts towards the French Cup of womens’ cycling, in 2001, 2004 and 2007. She covered the 62.6km course in 1:40.30 to finish more than three minutes ahead of leading rivals.”

Then look back at the last 25 years or so of Michael Jackson’s life…

He could have used his talents to make more music. He could have used his influence to help promote any number of good causes. He could have done so many worthwhile things or, alternatively, simply have retreated from the public stage and enjoyed his life - but, unfortunately, we already know what he did with his life.

Anyway, enough about this sorry subject.

Because reading about Jackson’s death also reminded me of another news story I had read a few days earlier - so, as an antidote to the reported sad end of a rather sad life, I will end this post with a quote from that older Guardian article:

“He might be almost 90 but Ray Bradbury’s quest to save US public libraries rolls on, with the author appearing last Saturday at an event in California to raise money for a library in trouble. The HP Wright library in Ventura is threatened with closure due to cuts in public funding, unless it raises $280,000 (£171,000) by next March. Bradbury’s event was the first in a year-long series of author appearances designed to help keep the 44-year-old library open. The $25 (£15) ticket offered patrons the chance to hear a talk from the author of Fahrenheit 451, as well as see a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a film based on one of his short stories.

Bradbury said that he had spoken at all of California’s 200-odd libraries. “I have a wheelchair, so they carry me to the car, and they throw me in the car, and throw me in the library, and they sell books and they keep all the money. I talk free, to make money for them so they can continue,” he told the New York Times. “”

Thank you, mister Bradbury, for reminding all of us, especially today, that it is also possible to live a long and creative and gloriously positive life.

(More Bradbury here…)

(Just what we need: More boring Canterbury Tales…)

I admit that it’s almost petty and certainly silly to get upset about a few thousand pounds of tax payers’ money being wasted, while billions  are being spent to bail out failed and corrupt companies and banks - or the many millions effectively stolen from same tax payers to hand out as bonuses to those incompetent greedheads that got us into this mess in the first place.

Silly, yes, perhaps, but I still find it hard not to curse out loud when reading stupid shite like this:

“One of Britain’s most historic cities, Canterbury, has been told it is sufficiently gay – after a complaint sparked a two-month investigation costing thousands of pounds. A government watchdog decided that Canterbury in Kent does enough to promote homosexual culture, rejecting a complaint by local activists. As part of the investigation, the council had to prove its inclusiveness by giving details of “touring plays and musicals, for example, which would be of interest to the LGBT community”. And it had to show that it had “put forward suggestions for small events that it might help fund, as well as proposals for other events such as exhibitions”. “

I can’t remember who it was who said that the love that did not dare to speak its name these days did not know how to shut the fuck up already but I tend to agree with that assessment.

I’m not saying all is cool in the world, when it comes to the casual acceptance of the obvious fact that there are more ways to love your neighbour than within a traditional heterosexual marriage. That day will probably have to wait till a future Pope, chief Rabbi or Mullah will introduce his or her gay partner to a world that will treat this bit of news with the same, rather bored consideration that it bestows on the daily weather forecast.

So, yes, there’s still discrimination against gays. We know that. It’s part of human nature to discriminate against groups and individuals. We are a tribal lot and tribes tend to define themselves partly by what they are not - and by what they won’t tolerate. In effect, this means that there has always been a tendency to discriminate against people, on the basis of religion, skin colour, sexuality, class, age, income, diet, hair colour, length, weight and what have you…

… and if we wouldn’t have any of those markers left, we would discriminate against people on the basis of their eye colour.

Anyway, back to this latest Canterbury tale. So, I would suggest that these stupid activists get a life, or, at the very least, a less self-obsessed life style. There are far more serious issues to consider than the way city councils do or don’t do enough to promote ‘homosexual culture’ - whatever the fuck that is, precisely. It reeks of the kind of ghettoish nonsense we should all try to get away from but that’s a topic for another day.

No, when various schools throughout England have stopped teaching about the Holocaust, in order not to offend Muslims, where the law mostly turns a blind eye to forced marriages and where the rise in attacks on gay men remain underreported for those same, politically correct reasons, we have much bigger issues than a city council’s readiness to spread flyers for the next ‘Romeo and Julius’ production.

In fact, demanding these lengthy investigations, to find out whether a city council X or Y does enough to promote homosexual culture, is just the kind of hysterical crap that will annoy the majority of right-thinking and mostly tolerant people and energise all those who push various anti-gay agendas. As I said, there are far more serious issues that do need our attention and this kind of nonsense can only distract from those.

In other words, these idiots only manage to harm the LGBT community they say they represent.

(Some things really are less helpful to the cause than others…)

(Tear down the wall…?)

“Turn down that damn music: You’re killing me here!!!”

Lines that must be familiar to anyone who ever listened to music in his or her room, with parents screaming, praying and begging for quiet, on the outside.

A nice image, really. With kids playing the role of Joshua blowing his trumpet and the parents as the ancient city of Jericho.

In the eternal fight between the generations, walls are raised again and again - and, as often as not, they come tumbling down again like Wile E Coyote in an Isaac Newton panto.

Now though, scientists have discovered that music can be much more than a weapon of crass destruction in the generation war:

“Music may be used to treat heart attack and stroke victims after Italian scientists found it can affect blood pressure. Researchers found that music with faster tempos increased blood pressure and heart rate, whereas slower music reduced them. The same affect was also achieved by slowly changing the volume of the music. By combining slow and fast music it was possible to control the cardiovascular system and eventually help its rehabilitation.”

Which is all quite nice, of course but for one small detail.

Everyone who’s ever been put on hold and had some Mantovani vomited into his or her ear knows all about the link between apoplexy and certain types of noises.

So, though I wish these researchers and future operation theatre Djs all the best with this musical surgery, I can’t help but feel a bit miffed that I will be forced to carry yet another set of instructions with me.

Apart from that little card that says I am an organ donor who doesn’t want to be operated on when the brain no longer functions, I will now have to add a little list of bands that will probably carry me over the edge if played during surgery.

It would be quite a long list too.

Proudly headed, of course, by ABBA and finishing with ZOEgirl…

(Just one more reason to pull the plug…)

Today, I really don’t know – but still,

with much thanks to Times columnist Dominic Lawson, we say that

Censorship, to give its proper name – can make even the most innocent excision appear suggestive of infamy and depredation. For example, the nuns in charge of the Belgian Ursuline convent where my wife was educated used to “redact” both incoming and outgoing letters in an attempt to control the thoughts of their unfortunate pupils.

The girls responded by composing the following redacted version of lyrics from the then popular musical My Fair Lady: “I could have XXXXXXX ed all night! / I could have XXXXXXXed all night! / And still have begged for more. / I could have spread my XXXXXX / And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.”

Perfect, or else. Sort of…

Dear Gods, can noone rid us of this terrible woman?

“A new history by Suzannah Lipscomb, a doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, and research curator at Hampton Court Palace, suggests that 1536 turned Henry VIII from a gifted, handsome and companionable king into the fat, wife-killing tyrant of popular imagination. In 12 months Henry suffered a riding accident, an alleged cuckolding, the death of his beloved illegitimate son and a rebellion. As he turned 45, then regarded as the beginning of old age, these separate traumas accumulated into a midlife crisis from which he never recovered.

“Looking at the events of Henry’s life, I had never noticed that so many of them coalesced in a single year. There was a considerable difference in the King before and after,” she said. “No one had written this before.””

Maybe because it’s a load of crap?

A traumatic year, a midlife crisis…

It all does sound terribly, depressingly familiar, doesn’t it?

By the way, when I misquoted another king in my first sentence, I wasn’t talking about getting rid of la Lipscomb. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like to run into her at any party but she’s probably quite harmless.

This is just one of those cases where a bored journo hears about some silly bit of business and decides it will make a nice filler article. You know the deal:

‘MAN WHO MURDERED TWO OF HIS WIVES CLAIMS HE IS THE VICTIM!’

A victim of the whips and scorns of time, no less.

Still, long after the Lipscomb woman will have returned to well-deserved obscurity, the rest of us will still have to suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous blame game culture.

To paraphrase a certain prince, ‘Thus cop-outs do make cowards of us all.’

Hamlet, at least, was tormented by an honest to God Freudian ghost. We, on the other hand, are beset by the spirit of Oprah Winfrey – and there seems to be no getting away from that kind of shit.

It is ridiculously easy to imagine how, in a not too distant future, on the couch where Tom Cruise jumped, we will see the big O fawning on a very familiar, white-robed figure, who is stroking his recently trimmed, now mostly white beard and who, looking straight into the camera with big, soulful eyes, will blame everything on a riding incident, or the death of his pet bunny, or something…

All of which will be rewarded with a standing ovation by the public, a tearful hug from Oprah and a fading shot of Osama’s upcoming book, ‘Tora Bora: The road to inner peace and self-fulfilment’.

(Okay, here’s the whole of that monologue I took such liberties with…)

Okay, another lazy Sunday. The weather is quite miserable here and I’m sure the papers would be happy enough to conform to that and to piss on whatever’s left of anyone’s parade, so I’m not even going to read any of today’s headlines. I’m sure the world will be able to continue to be fucked, without me making generally unhelpful remarks from the sidelines.

So, let’s do something fun instead.

I worked through my old archives and came up with ten very weird YouTube clips, which I will present below in a sort of Top 10, be it in a more or less random order.

My question now to all of you, of course, is to add one or more of your own.

Let’s see if we can transform this silly little list into a genuine Top 100…

1) Kevin Rowland: Concrete and clay

2) The cock is dead, le coq est mort, der Hahn ist tot

3) Christopher Lee: Drinking song

4) William Shatner: Rocketman

5) The Muppets: LOTR spoof

6) Nina Hagen and Freaky Fukin Weirdoz: Hit me

7) ANON: The garden gnome to space song

8) Dr Seuss and Bob Dylan (sort of): The Zax

9) Paul Young, the mime version: Wherever I lay my hat (that’s my home)

10) World of War: The porn song:

(When he says “I’ll be back” you better believe him…)

If you haven’t heard of the English comedy quiz ‘Have I got news for you’ you haven’t really lived – or lived to see TV as it should be.

So, yesterday I was watching a few HIGNFY clips on Youtube and having a fun time of it, when, in an episode I must have missed the first time round, one of the two regular panellists, Paul Merton (blessèd be his name), came up with what must be the best idea I ever heard for a new TV show:

“Dig up a dead celebrity after five years and let people guess who it is.”

Brilliant.

Anyway, I had to think of that one when I read the following, very welcome bit of news in the Guardian, a few minutes ago:

“Christopher Lee, whose acting roles have terrified generations of film-goers, is knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. He is one of the most prolific actors ever, appearing in more than 250 film and television productions. His prolific career has seen him earn several Guinness World Records, including Most Connected Actor Living; Most Films with a Swordfight by an actor and Tallest Actor in a Leading Role. At the age of 87 he is still working hard, and his representative said he was unavailable for comment on the honour as he was filming in New Mexico.”

High time he got that knighthood too, I say.

It’s so stupid how most honours, from knighthoods to literary prizes, still are such highbrow affairs. The various worlds of creation are vast, numerous and often wonderful but you wouldn’t know it from the feeble noises that never quite make it beyond the heavily shuttered windows of the Ivory Towers.

If it’s not a part of the ever shrinking and ever more anaemic Canon, the Guardians of Culture don’t want to know about it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the world of art. It’s just that I believe you can love the Stones as much as you can love Bach, or enjoy Shakespeare as much as Stephen King.

My problem with the Ivory Tower crowd is that they are such useless snobs. If they had lived in Elizabethan times they would have looked down upon Shakespeare as a common, commercial wordsmith, a foul-mouthed yokel upstart.

Hence my great joy, when I read that Stephen King got a medal from the National Book Foundation, for his ‘distinguished contribution to American letters’ – or when, like now, a fine but too often ignored actor like Christopher Lee is honoured for all he has done.

Not just because I do think they deserve it but also because I love the sound of gnashing Ivory teeth and Towering indignation.

(And here’s Stephen King on the subject of Ivory Towers, from the 4th minute on…)

As we all know, one of the function of fairytales is to teach children some basic truths about life. That it can be tough and scary. That things are not always what they look like and that you need to be smart and resilient to survive.

Fairytales say more or less the same thing as that grizzled desk sergeant in the old cop show, Hill Street Blues: “Let’s be careful out there.”

I was reminded of the nature of fairytales when I read the following news article. It’s such perfect story book material.

It also serves as a very timely parable. Yesterday’s results of the European elections showed that those few people who bothered to turn up had decided to give the ruling parties a damn good kicking. What with the economic crisis, the lack of faith in ‘Brussels’ and the widely held view that Muslims and other undesirables are rapidly overrunning cozy Fortress Europe, it were the smaller, more wide-eyed, populist parties that profited most from the voters’ growing fears and chagrin.

Because those smaller parties are telling it how it is… Because they listen to the people… Because they understand where normal folks are coming from… Because they rage against the posh, bureaucratic machine…

Right.

People will always fall for snake oil merchants, of course. Nothing new there but it’s still very funny how these good citizens will march behind any banner that promises that ‘things will be different’ if you vote Brand X.

It’s quite insane but your average voter will willingly worship any damn frog that can change its colour for long enough for people to stop noticing it’s still a stupid, old frog but there you go: Democracy and human nature in synchronized action.

As yet another European election result and the following story show:

“A frog that constantly changes colour is being worshipped as a god in India. The creature was discovered in a flower bed and now draws hundreds of followers to the home where it is kept in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Now one of India’s top zoologists has decided he will study the unusual creature – provided it can be kept alive. Reji Kumar, 35, a lift worker, said he is doing its best but the frog has lost its appetite.”

Anyway, back to those fairytales and this inconvenient truth:

You can embrace and kiss most frogs as often and passionately as you want but most of them will stubbornly refuse to magically change into princes.

(They went all the way to the polls and all they brought back was this lousy Geert Wilders…)