I think people who litter should be shot. It is totally beyond me how people can throw away their shit in the street. Even dogs try to bury theirs. Whenever I see someone littering I’m always tempted to approach them and ask if they’d mind if I pissed over their shoes or wiped my arse with their hair.
Is this rant going anywhere? Well, yes, in a way.
Because I read something that really annoyed me. It’s to do with another pet hatred of mine: Mobile phones.
Though, in a way, you could consider it part of the same problem, since I do think that the use of mobile phones in public is a form of aural littering. It’s a kind of egocentric verbal incontinence I find deeply offensive.
So, I wasn’t truly amused when I read the following article in today’s Times:
“Two hymns had been sung and the sermonpreached when the Rev Canon David Parrott lifted his right hand to begin the blessing of the smart phones. The congregation at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London raised their mobiles and iPods above their heads and Canon Parrott raised his voice to the heavens to address the Lord God of all Creation. “May our tongues be gentle, our e-mails be simple and our websites be accessible,” he said.”
Truly, if I didn’t believe mobiles where invented by the Devil, this crapulous canon’s actions really would have tempted me to become a Satanist.
(I was looking for the telephone song but this one is much better…)
Now, I’m not saying the following is news but bear with me for a bit and read this Wiki quote:
“The Ganges river has been consideredone of the dirtiest rivers in the world. The extreme pollution of the Ganges affects 400 million people who live close to the river. The river waters start getting polluted right at the source.”
Of course, I’m not claiming that the Ganges is the only polluted river on our much abused planet but there aren’t that many rivers around that feature in news stories like this one:
“Close to a million Hindu pilgrimsbathed in India’s river Ganges today in an immense display of colour and devotion at the start of the world’s biggest religious festival. Braving chilly weather, hordes of pilgrims rose before sunrise at the northern town of Haridwar and walked in darkness to the banks of the river to immerse themselves in the waters which are considered sacred by Hindus.”
So, I guess your average Hindu pilgrim doesn’t really believe in that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ line.
(Of course, religion & self-harm go together like Hooters & hard-ons…)
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 seriesHERE & HERE & HERE)
Four more days (and a year, if you want to be pedantic about it) to go till the decade ends. The last three days I want to spend writing & posting a three part end-of-the-year special. Today, I’m not much in the mood for reading the papers, let alone commenting on them, so you will have to settle with another one of those ‘Thoughts for the Day’. Here goes:
Remember those family photo albums, the holiday snapshots and home movies…
… and how you hated having to watch them and having to listen to the accompanying stories, again and again and again and again…?
Well, if you think you had it bad, then spare a thought for our all-seeing God, Who has to watch us and listen to our prayers all the fucking time.
Bad weather brings out the worst in our European public and private transport systems. With the kind of defeatism that would make the French army proud, the moment the barometer drops, all railway services will hide under the umbrella of ‘wrong kind of snow.’
Which is quite irritating (not unlike the French army, I suppose, behind their silly Maginot line, grumbling about the wrong kind of war.)
That’s old Europe for you in a nut shell: Inefficient and more than a bit pathetic and, like any grumpy old man, moaning about life, the universe and everything, making as charming a picture as a piece of soggy cereal caught in the false teeth of Father Time.
Of course, it could have been even worse.
We could have been Americans, making a cholestrol rich meal of our arrogant incompetence and adding a generous helping of religious mania.
Enter the good Rev. Joseph Mirowski, of the Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration of The Wrong Kind of Snow – so to speak.
You remember that spot of bother they had in the Mid West, as reported by ABC?
Nasty indeed – like those nasty Nazis who just wouldn’t fight fair…
Anyway, as I said, enter Rev. Joseph, who, like his famous namesake, could only look down upon what God hath wrought impotently and mumble the silliest line this side of eternity:
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.
Dan Simmons, who is one of my all time favourite writers, has this thing about certain words. Or, to be more precise, the incorrect use of certain words and phrases.
Like the way people indiscriminately use the word ‘decimate’, when they actually mean ‘a Hell of a lot.’ As in ‘The plague decimated Europe’ Which it did not; it killed many more than one in ten people – which is what decimation actually means.
It was a Roman form of punishment: To randomly select and kill one in ten persons for a crime committed by some other person.
The Nazis adopted a similar approach when it came to discourage the various resistance movements in Europe. The Nazis were really big on all things Roman, as they were on superstition.
Anyway – and I am slowly coming to some vaguely point-shaped point here – Dan Simmons also once commented that he didn’t get people who used the term ‘organized religion’, because all religions, by their nature, are organized.
Which is true enough. It’s just a lazy way of comparing private beliefs with the collective & hierarchal form of belief systems that comes with its own buildings, officials, clothing and rules…
… and, always, sooner or later, with discrimination, demonisation and the killing of both infidels and dissenting members of these churches.
It doesn’t matter much whether we consider ourselves the children of God or the children of Darwin: We are deeply irrational beings and we don’t play very nicely in groups.
The moment we start putting flags, or crosses, or crescents on official buildings is also the moment we start killing people. That’s just one of the things that make us human.
It’s kind of funny, when you come to think of it (though I’m sure Dan Simmons won’t approve) how people, so often, claim that such and such a crime or certain types of behaviour are ‘inhuman’.
When they are, of course, anything but.
When it comes to human nature, we are always more likely & willing to take Abraham’s knife and kill on the say-so of some demon or some God than to think for ourselves.
Talking of Abraham’s knife – and the dirty tricks we claim our Gods play on us: That story did end well. One of the few times a child was saved by the bell, instead of that bell being dropped from great (church tower) height on its fragile head:
“And [God] said,Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.”
It’s a pity God is no longer in the divine intervention business. On the other hand, He and His angels would have a hard time of it, what with priests abusing children, Taliban madmen murdering school-going girls, armies using child soldiers and all the other horrors religious & political leaders (and, of course, millions of individual citizens) routinely inflict upon children.
About that step-father though, who so loved his partner that he would suffer all those needles being stuck in his own child…
… I’m sure it would be possible to grant him his wish, not to be ever separated from his lover.
As long as both of them will get a life sentence, I don’t see why they should not be allowed to share the same cell…
… and as long as that cell would hold one of those fakir style beds of nails.
Ah yes, ’tis the season to waste your precious time doing stuff you really hate doing.
Putting up prickly trees, putting up with schmalzy shit coming at you from every direction…
… and, of course, this:
“Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Mannersis slightly more helpful. It advises: “Those who do not wish to send cards should place an announcement in the press reading: ‘Mr and Mrs Larry Lazy are not sending Christmas cards this year but wish all their friends and family etc’.””
Well, I’ve never sent a Christmas card to anyone, so I won’t start getting into that habit.
That would be like suddenly deciding that what I really needed was to start using crack cocaine.
So, if you want me to send you yet another boring, faux funny card, wishing you this, that or the other: Well, you’re not going to get any.
You could, if you are really desperate, print this column out and draw some festive trees, cows, cribs, wise men, shepherds and a bawling Baby Jesus on it and call the whole sorry mess a Christmas Card.
Then you can show it to all your friends and say, “Look, he even wrote ‘Happy Christmas!!!’ on it.”
Now, I’m not saying all believers in Bearded Tooth Fairies are morons but I’m afraid our former vice-presidential candidate and, no doubt, future presidential candidate very much is.
Since God didn’t bother to call in and give His views on such small matters as the Crusades, the black death, the Holocaust…
… and perhaps even graver issues like the guilt or innocence of the late Michael Jackson, the ‘not rape-rape’ status of Polanski or the latest words of wisdom from Rihanna…
… I do have my doubts that He will see fit to come and talk to us about America’s health care, energy and national security.
Ah well, even though I doubt that there are Gods, there seems to be a certain ironic cosmic justice.
Sometimes, our lives become a traffic accident, as it so famously did for Ted Kennedy, while others, like John McCain, appoint their own Alaskan versions of the ‘Chappaquiddick Event.’
Which is the slightly more polite way of saying that Sarah Palin is the kind of stupid cow you would love to see take centre stage at certain Hindu festivals…
… as the following article explains:
“The world’s biggest animal sacrifice began in Nepal todaywith the killing of the first of more than 250,000 animals as part of a Hindu festival in the village of Bariyapur, near the border with India. The event, which happens every five years, began with the decapitation of thousands of buffalo, killed in honour of Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power.”
Summer used to be journalism’s silly season. Then, hard news – or those who made and reported on it – took some sandwiches, a bottle of sun cream and a towel to the nearest beach and stayed there for at least a month.
In the meantime, newspapers and television journalists made do with the monster of Loch Ness, the odd UFO (or oddly shaped vegetable) and, as a token gesture to international affairs, a Bigfoot, or a Yeti, or a fat American who got stuck between the automatic doors of his favourite McDonald’s outlet.
These days, it seems that – not unlike the Christmas season – the silly season keeps expanding. Of course, there is also news about Afghanistan, Iran and even Switzerland but these kind of hard news stories have to share or even leave the limelight for tales concerning all manner of celebreties. So, we have almost as many column inches for the Afghan troup surge as we have (in some papers) for the news that Robbie Williams’s hairdresser was found dead.
Not that I’m complaining.
If you write a daily column, silly is good. So, when I’m feeling lazy I can always bring out the old soap box and cry, ‘Health and safety gone maaaaad…!!!’, because not a day goes by without stories like the following…:
“A council in the West Midlands has apologised to Linda Langford, one of its tenants, after ordering her to remove two garden gnomes from outside her front door for health and safety reasons.”
… and if I feel like pontificating on the sorry state of Western civilisation, and the general incompetence of our politicians, army chiefs or police services, there will always be articles like this:
“A police force has apologised after deploying 30 officers, a fleet of vehicles, dogs and a helicopterto arrest members of a rock band on the basis of false information. The four members of the band were arrested at gunpoint after a gig in Staffordshire after a CCTV operator told police they had a handgun in their car. The musicians, their manager and a friend were detained overnight, had their fingerprints and DNA taken, surrendered their clothes for scientific examination and had their hands swabbed for firearms residue. On closer examination, however, the security camera footage showed the band unloading their instruments and equipment and using jump leads to start one of their vehicles. “
Sometimes, though, the actual season meets the silly season in quite delightful ways, so, today, I will leave you with this excellent bit of cheerful silliness. Truly heart-warming, cold comfort soul food:
“Scientists have created the world’s smallest ’snowman’,measuring about a fifth of the width of a human hair. Experts at the National Physical Laboratory in West London made the miniature figure which is just 0.01mm across.“
(When it comes to classical silliness, you can’t beat Henson’s babies…)
