Glob-a-log

Today, I’m not going to talk about Iran’s justice system…

… or the tempest in a tea cup row between Britain’s Prime Minister and the president of Pakistan…

… or about the first all-female crew to try and sail to Gaza…

… or rightwing Diggers…

… or the latest (fears of escalating) violence in Rwanda…

… and yet, in a way, I’m talking about all of these matters – or, to be more precise, it won’t be me who will do the talking, because, today, my ‘Thought For The Day’ is, luckily for you, not one of mine but something both more profound and articulate than I could ever manage – so take it away, Mr Rushdie:

“So we are paradoxical beings, both individual and social, both of our time and part of history’s flow. We are mortal but have, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, immortal longings in us; and contradiction is our life-blood. There are great social benefits in such broad definitions of the self, for the more selves we find within ourselves the easier it is to find common ground with other multiple, multitude-containing selves. We may have different religious beliefs but support the same team. Yet we live in an age in which we are urged to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to crush our own multidimensionality into the straitjacket of a one-dimensional national, ethnic, tribal or religious identity. This, I have come to think, may be the evil from which flow all the other evils of our time. For when we succumb to this narrowing, when we allow ourselves to be simplified and become merely Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Hindus, then it becomes easy for us to see each other as adversaries, as one another’s Others, and the very points of the compass begin to quarrel, East and West collide, and North and South as well.”

(Milking the immortal Cleopatra angle indeed…)

As T.S. Eliot – more or less – wrote:

“The Naming of kids is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a child must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey–
All of them sensible everyday names.”

Et cetera.

Enough with the poetry though; it’s time to climb that old soap box again.

So, far be it from me to question the wisdom of the New Jersey State Appeals Court but…

… oh well, whom am I kidding: They’re a right set of plonkers – as the following case shows:

“A US couple who gave their children Nazi-themed names, including “Adolf Hitler Campbell, have been denied custody by a New Jersey court. Their children – Adolf Hitler Campbell, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell – have been in foster care since January 2009.”

Let’s first say though that I do think that the parents of these children are most probably unfit to raise dandruff, let alone kids but then they are hardly the first or the last ones you can say that about.

People being people, you will always have a fair share of those who, to use a phrase I’ve used before, would most probably drown in the shallow end of the gene pool.

You have your political nuts, religious fanatics and those who think their children will thrive on a strict diet of Big Macs and jumbo milkshakes. God or the ghost of Darwin knows how many children live(d) miserably blighted lives because of the idiocy of their parents…

… but I’m not sure it’s the state’s place to judge which set of potential parents can become actual parents with the judiciary’s blessing.

There are exceptions to this, obviously. The state should be there to actively frown upon parents who want to sacrifice their children to Baal or Jaweh, or those who mutilate their daughters’ genitals, or those who starve them, beat them or sexually abuse them.

We have, so to speak, been there, done that, bought the headlines – and yet I would say that the state should not interfere if the madness of parents does not directly threaten the well-being of the child and I’m not so sure naming your child ‘Adolf Hitler’ should count as reason enough to take that child away from the parents.

Still, these parents were easy pickings, I presume. They’re probably what’s so lovingly called ‘trailer trash.’ The kind of folks we watch and laugh at on the Jerry Springer Show.

I seriously doubt these kids would have been taken into care if their parents had been rich, or politically well-connected.

I mean, yes, to call your child ‘Adolf Hitler’ is insane and quite vile but not much more so than to raise it in the belief that God is an alien, all psychiatric help is wrong and women should give birth to their children in silence – while even aspirin supposedly interferes with ‘forming mental images’, so good luck with that last bit…

… but even if he had lived within their legal grasp, I seriously doubt the New Jersey State Appeals Court would have taken little Suri away from Tom Cruise.

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…?

(Beats ‘Transvestite mounts dog’ big time, baby…!)

It takes all sorts to make the world go round’, is a well-meaning but rather vacuous cliché.

Whatever wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the earth did, I’m afraid, not cause the slightest of wobbles in the earth’s rotation – and it would take more than a few handfuls of Dr. Strangelove specials to make a blind bit of difference too.

Still, it’s a nice sentiment. Very New Testament-ish – and, in a way, a close relation to that famous Matthew quotation, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

On the other hand, there’s motes and then there’s motes – or, more precisely, moats…:

“A transvestite had sex with a dog in the moat of an English Heritage castle. The cross-dressing man was caught with the animal in the dry moat of King Henry VIII’s Pendennis Castle overlooking Falmouth Bay in Cornwall. The 33-year-old mounted the pet after it chased him out of sight of its woman owner.”

Not exactly a sight for sore eyes, perhaps – and one that could make quite a lot of more Biblically inclined viewers almost nostalgic for those motes & beams.

Happily, a spokesman for English Heritage was soon rustled up to assure the public that this “was a very rare incident.”

Quite – though you can’t help but wonder if this kind of entertainment might not attract more snap-happy sightseers than yet another royal castle.

Yea and verily, the Internet teaches us that humps trump lumps of stone any day of the week, by a billion hits or so.

(To be honest, I don’t think the guy even asked…)

(I predict a riot…?)

You all know Paul: the octopus who predicted that Germany would beat England – admittedly not a biggie, presience-wise – before the Heimat would be defeated by Spain, who would then beat Holland in the final.

Which almost reads like Genesis – that is, all the begat this and begat that bits; which may explain why a Spanish zoo is now pursuing the British-born cephalopod with such religious fervour.

Now, I am quite happy to admit that I also find this tentacled oracle mildly fascinating but I’m pretty perplexed with the paucity of the questions asked of it.

Me, I’d love to do a series in some national newspaper, called ‘Let’s Ask Paul’ but only if I could bring up some serious questions too.

Like:

- Will Paris Hilton ever make another successful home movie?

- Never mind whether Obama can win a second term: With FOX and Palin braying for blood, will he even survive the first one?

- Will the next Dan Brown novel contain language?

- Will Gordon Brown and Tony Blair bury their past grievances for long enough to go kill (and bury the bloody remains of) Peter Mandelson?

- Will the Pope play the Pope in the new ABBA opera, “I believe in angels”?

- Will Sarah Palin kill her unwanted son-in-law from a helicopter in a shotgun wedding frenzy?

That kind of stuff.

Anyway, I don’t need any octopus to tell me that chances are slight that any newspaper will ask me to write such a series, so I might just as well make it a regular feature on this blog.

(Well, it was either that or THIS NIGHTMARE…)

(From the Guardian’s inimitable Martin Rowson…)

It’s still not easy being a active gay member of the Church of England.

Not even an active gay, mind you – just an active member:

“A gay but celibate clergyman has been blocked from becoming a bishop for the second time, following a row over his inclusion on the shortlist for the choice to run the Anglican diocese of Southwark.”

Which reads a bit like that old New Labour crime mantra: Tough on Sodomy, tough on the causes-or-even-the-merest-suggestion of sodomy.

Or, if you like, ‘A small step for a bigoted church, a giant leap for its public relations department… not.’

Not that being heterosexual helps. Not if you’re a woman, it doesn’t. Then, you’re basically told by your Archbishops that there is no room for you in the inn – and not all much wriggle space in the God-bothering stable either:

“London (Reuters) – The Church of England rejected an attempt by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to accommodate opponents of women bishops, dealing a blow to his authority and increasing the likelihood some traditionalists who favour an all-male clergy will leave the Anglican Communion.”

Still, whatever the old C of E is up to, you can always count on the Vatican to go one better:

“The Vatican today made the “attempted ordination” of women one of the gravest crimes under church law, putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors, heresy and schism. The new rules, which have been sent to bishops around the world, apply equally to Catholic women who agree to a ceremony of ordination and to the bishop who conducts it. Both would be excommunicated.”

Nice, no? Rape your allotted three-score-and-ten altar boys and the Pope will almost personally hand you your Badge of Merit but even try to ordinate a woman and you (and she) will be condemned to the everlasting fires of Hell.

Nice man, this once and future Hitler Jugend member, The Arse Formerly Known As Pratzinger, Munich Doctor of Theology – or should that be ‘Doctor No’.

Yes, it would make a nice parlour game: To dream up Bond titles for him and his office. So, apart from Doctor No – a.k.a. ‘O O Sodomy, Licensed to Rape’ – we could have:

-Thunderbugger

-At the Altar Boys’ Secret Servicing

-The Guy Who Raped Me

-Buggering the Living Daylights out of Kids

-Octo…what?! (Don’t Be Disgusting!)

Et cetera.

The only thing never on offer as long as this Pope breathes would, of course, be a ‘Quantum of Solace.’

(By Mike Peters, of the Dayton Daily News…)

One of the things most people don’t think about all that often is what happens on the outside of the earth’s atmosphere. I don’t mean the moon and the stars and all that but the stuff that’s circling much, much closer around our planet. All those manmade satellites and bits & pieces of other space craft. It’s quite a scrap-yard out there, though that’s not what I wanted to talk about either.

No, apart from all the non-organic litter, there’s also rather a lot of human waste out there. As cruise ships pollute the seas with their passengers’ crap, so do space shuttles and space stations empty their slop-filled buckets into space (so to speak.) Like the old alchemists said, ‘As above, so below.’

Anyway, so there’s this enormous veil of organic matter circling our planet – which inspired the late SF writer Arthur C Clarke to write a story about how life on planet Earth evolved from the emptied slop buckets belonging to some alien spaceship.

Me, I don’t think life on earth started with alien poo.

Having just read the following article, I’m quite convinced it must have been vomit:

“Tony Blair has been awarded the $100,000 Liberty Medal for “relentless pursuit” of peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The Medal is a prize given annually by the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia.”

(When England was the whore of George Bush, Tony was her madam…)

(The good old days: When men were men, women were women and dogs were hot…?)

Dogs are man’s best friend, they say.

Which is what men say, I suppose.

I’m not sure what the majority of women think about dogs – and no, Paris Hilton and Chihuahuas don’t really count as either; they’re as close to real evolved creatures as Donald Duck is to an actual Chinese dish – but I’m fairly sure that a certain mister Christopher Bishop, 43, from Florida, will, by now, agree with one famous blonde that when it comes to friendship, diamonds are a much safer bet:

“A Florida man was lying under his car, checking for oil leaks, when his dog jumped into the truck and knocked it into gear. The truck rolled over the man’s left side, but he managed to escape serious injury.”

Which may be more than you can say about the dog, a bulldog called Tassey, after his owner has healed sufficiently to voice and demonstrate his displeasure.

I mean, you’ve taken the eyesoresque mutt into your home, fed it, walked it, gave it a stupid name and now this…?

I can see a Country & Western song being born this very minute…

‘How much is that doggie in the window,

the one with the cute smashed up nose?

They say that all bulldogs look like that but

I bet his previous owner gave him one of those.’

… or some such.

More Marilyn HERE & HERE & HERE & HERE

(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…)

A lot of people in the West go all a-snigger whenever Bollywood is mentioned. It is simply too rich to their pseudo-intellectual taste, with all its singing and dancing, set in a world where choreography is more important than script…

… but then, isn’t script a specious concept, born as it is in that leaky cauldron of Western dreams, from the three Fates sitting around a fire, sharing the one eye, while they weave and harvest the threads of our lives, to the megalomanic concept of free will (or the paranoid visions of predestination?)

Yes, people are story telling animals but not because our lives are like stories. From the most disciplined Chekhov short story to Stephen King’s wildest door stopper, stories are always better scripted than any of our flesh & blood lives can ever hope to be.

So, what if Bollywood movies are not realistic? It’s true that not many of us break out in song & dance routines whenever we feel our narratives are becoming a bit boring – but then how many of us ever reached that ‘happily ever after’ point on which so many of our Western books and movies are based?

If you want reality, go hit your thumb with a hammer. If you want narrative, just stick out that digit and hitch a ride on the old story trail.

Mind you, some folks should probably never go to the movies, not even the most unrealistic ones.

I mean, I know that Eliot claimed that humankind could not stand too much reality but certain Californian construction workers could do with a somewhat bigger dose of it:

“A Californian construction worker has been arrested in northern Pakistan where he was on a one-man mission to find and decapitate Osama bin Laden in revenge for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Gary Brooks Faulkner, 52, who has been dubbed “Rambo” back home, was detained with night-vision goggles, a pistol, dagger and 40-inch sword that security forces believe he intended to use to behead the al-Qaeda leader.”

As I noted earlier, real life is badly scripted, compared to what happens in the world of story. A lazy way of saying more or less the same is the old saw, ‘Life is stranger than fiction.’

I’d still say that it’s just a Hell of a lot messier. Life is strange enough, of course. It’s in the real world where celebrity Chihuahuas fill more papers than war & famine, and where you have a fish, called the candirú, that swims upstream through a slender arch of piss, to firmly attach itself to the inside of your urethra…

Most story tellers would not have thought of that one. Still, whether life is stranger or simply less organized than fiction, I would truly love to see the movie based on the following real life story:

“A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he made a rude gesture at a group of Hells Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a stolen bulldozer.”

(All aboard the story train…!)