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…)

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.)

(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.”

Okay, so, Gorillaz in the Mist it ain’t.

Which is probably a good thing. Meryl Streep with Clint Eastwood: I can see that – Hell, I did see that. Meryl Streep with the likes of Lou Reed & Snoop Dogg, well, maybe not.

Anyway, yes, the new Gorillaz project is ready to take on the world and leave it, no doubt, a much changed (and slightly bewildered) place.

Here’s the Gorilla Formerly And Still Known As Murdoc:

“Some people I had to physically smuggle to Plastic Beach,” says the Gorilla known as Murdoc. “I had them drugged and FedExed over. Then there were people like Snoop and his entourage who cruised up dripping in gold on a private yacht, amid a cloud of pimp fur and weed smoke …”

So, in honour of the Gorillaz and all who sail in it, I’ve selected a few music clips that have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

They are just pleasantly weird. Here goes, in completely random order:

1)The worst rap clip, the worst rap lyrics and the worst presentation and adaptation of any poem ever written in this or any other universe

2)The worst election based song this side of Bush & Cheney singing ‘Love me tender’ at the NRA convention

3)The best ever and very extraordinary rendition of what used to be The Who’s signature song

(Talking of Clint Eastwood…)

Sorry, I have no time to write. I have to go to some (work related) party and I’m running very, very late indeed.

So, I’ll just give you a link to a video clip, where Clive James (yes, him again…) reads three short excerpts from his Cultural Amnesia book.

Here it is:

http://del.interoute.com/?id=8a6527a5-0a6b-4667-a51e-157140daf89f&delivery=stream

I know: Not exactly Saturday Night Party material but if I could I would show it in every high school, all over the world.

You’re in luck though: I just saw I had another link going – or open, or whatever you call it. Something I’d started to watch yesterday and then forgot about.

This is definitely more weekend fun stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHc08ITjDU&feature=related

‘Kay. I really have to go now. See you tomorrow but I will leave you with this very beautiful song.

Clive James and Louis Armstrong were right: sometimes white folks can play jazz. Enjoy: