Glob-a-log

Those of you who are still stunned by the break-up of the Jolie and Pitt marriage should look away now…

… cause I have another heart break story for you, today.

To be sure, the couple involved hasn’t got the same name recognition value as, let’s say, your average Heather Mills & Paul McCartney. They didn’t meet, Jordan & Peter style, live on television.

She has not been involved in knickerless up skirt shots and he was never arrested for beating her up.

Still, it is a sad, sad day for romance, again:

“Experts have told of their surprise after witnessing a rare “divorce” between a pair of swans at a Gloucestershire wildfowl sanctuary. The Bewick’s swans have returned to winter at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre at Slimbridge - but both have brought new partners.”

So far, so Hollywood, you might say. Like Tom Cruise dropping partner number one and replacing her with victim number two immediately.

You can almost hear Brad Pitt’s first wife shrugging and murmuring, ‘Been there, been done, got the T-shirt’ – but the article continues:

“It is only the second time in more than 40 years that a “separation” has been recorded at the centre.”

Now, imagine a far flung, alternative universe, where you could read a newspaper article that started with the line, ‘It is only the second time in more than 40 years that a “separation” has been recorded in Hollywood.’

No, I can’t imagine such a world either, to be honest.

(Who would you prefer to hang out with…?)

I don’t know what is happening but there’s a lot of talk about aliens today, in various newspapers. One claims that aliens would look just like us, while another states we wouldn’t recognize them (as sentient alien beings) if we met them - and yet another states aliens won’t be able to hear us over all the digital noise we’re making.

Then, there is that old debate about what will happen when we meet an alien species. Will they be nice ET types or the kind that will even give Sigourney Weaver grey hairs – and should we risk trying to contact them?

Or, as this Times article has it:

“Fifty fruitless years of scanning the heavens for signals has prompted some astronomers to abandon their roles as passive listeners and to start shouting across the cosmos. There are plenty of observers who believe such hopeful hollering to be deeply unwise. Sir Bernard Lovell, the founding director of Jodrell Bank, together with the physicist Freeman Dyson and the intellectual Jared Diamond, believe that the terrestrial hand of courtesy should be extended with extreme caution. Their hesitancy is based on uncertainty about whether any extraterrestrials belong to the Spielberg school of cute’n’cuddly, or the Tim Burton institute for the murderously deranged.“

Well, I’m not convinced of any of the above. I think that there may be a huge number of alien races that already know all they need to know about us.

Call it the ‘universe as a bus’ theory – which goes like this:

Picture the universe as a bus. More specifically, the last bus to leave the centre of town, just when the pubs have closed.

Now, all kinds of perfectly normal people will have perfectly normal reasons to take this bus from various points A to quite respectable points B – and all of them have spotted the disgusting drunk, sitting at the back of the bus.

He’s vomited all over his grubby clothes, he smells like the love child of a Victorian gin house and a sewage plant, and he’s shouting insanely at invisible enemies, while waving his arms in a threatening manner…

… so, none of the other passengers want to go near him, let alone ‘contact’ him.

Yup, you’ve got it.

Humanity is that drunk. The aliens are the normal passengers, who don’t want to have anything to do with us…

… and who could blame them, really?

(Earth: The sick bed of the Galaxy…)

I’ve always thought that explorations would be so much easier if you could skip the actual exploring.

Why would you have to go to Africa and machete your way through jungles, where poisonous spiders & snakes, hungry lions and disrespectful monkeys dwell, when you can make a simple phone call to Mr Livingstone (I presume?)

Also, why go all the way to Scotland, to some miserable lake, when you can stay at home and hunt for elusive prehistoric monsters in your own comfortable hot tub?

No, it’s no use calling me a lazy so-and-so, because science is firmly supportive of this laid back approach to exploration.

Enter professor Paul Davies, of Arizona University:

“The search for alien life forms should be conducted here on Earth rather than in outer space, scientists have claimed. Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona University will tell a meeting at the Royal Society that the best way of proving that extra-terrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe is to use evidence from earth.”

(I’d rather be eaten by lions, or have a threesome with  Nessie and an alien…)

I’m totally with Jeremy Clarkson on this one:

“To my mind, the world would be a much better place if Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan had been imprisoned at a very early age. And if Andrew Lloyd Webber — whom I like very much as a chap — had been born deaf.But there is nothing that Gilbert, Lloyd Webber, Rodgers, Rice, Sullivan or Hammerstein could have conceived that could even get close to the remorselessly twee and hateful Mamma Mia!.”

Gods, how I loathe ABBA – let me count the ways…

… or let’s not. Life’s too short to spend more than a percentage of a nanosecond on those Swedish aural pollutants.

Still, as Bad as ABBA is in its original form, as a musical it must be a thousand times worse. That’s what musicals are for: To remind us that there are far worse things than burning in Hell for eternity.

Anyway, so normally I would agree that the world would have been a better place if Gilbert and Sullivan would have been the two first atom bombs to have landed on one metropole or the other, instead of becoming the most famous musical composers in history.

Still, I do admit that, sometimes, they knew what they were talking about – as the following lines prove:

“Our feelings we with difficulty smother. When constabulary duty’s to be done Ah, take one consideration with another. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

I was reminded of that when I read the following article:

“Eighteen pigs wrapped in protective Kevlar blankets were blasted in a bid to help scientists understand more about the effects of bomb blasts on victims. The animals were placed less than three yards from an explosive. Before being blown up, tubes were inserted into their blood vessels and bladders, and their spleens were removed. A wire was also put into a major abdominal blood vessel to ensure the vessel became lacerated in the explosion.”

Take one consideration with another, a pig’s lot is not a happy one, indeed.

(Abba made me do it…!)

Some things are too horrible to allow to live – or to be put in the hands of the public.

As the following news story that appeared in the Telegraph shows:

“Pregnant mothers can now introduce their babies to music before they are born through a new speaker system which wraps around the stomach. The Ritmo pregnancy sound system plugs into an iPod or mp3 player and allows women to play their favourite tracks to their unborn children in the womb.”

No, you’re terribly wrong; this is not cute. Not some nice bonding experience between mother and child.

It’s much more bondage than bonding. I mean, talk about a captive audience.

Imagine yourself in some darkened disco, where a demented DJ plays the most horrible stuff…

… and you can’t get out, ’cause all the exits are cemented over…

… and you will be forced to listen to this shite, over and over again…

… for nine fucking months.

Still think this disgusting ‘Ritmo pregnancy sound system’ is such a hot idea? Thought not.

Gods, I love my mother but if she’d played ABBA songs at me throughout her pregnancy, I’d have come out screaming after those nine months, foaming round the mouth…

… and the moment I would have started walking, I’d have picked up the nearest axe and gone totally Lizzie Borden on her.

zxx } –>

Sometimes, you read something and you immediately think, ‘That is so absolutely true!’ - which was my reaction when I read the following article by a guest contributor in the online Times:

“If you make things, you need to understand ideas, materials, markets, skills. If you make money, you just need the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.”

Of course, while you’ve still not lost that radiating smile of the newly converted, you read the following article in the Telegraph…

… which showed that manufacturing knows about whoring too, without any added dancing masters’ manners, I’m afraid.

Ah well, so it goes.

Anyway, here’s that story that disconverted the newly converted:

“The world’s first “sex robot”, a life-size rubber doll called Roxxxy, has been unveiled. The dark-haired, negligee-clad, life-size robotic girlfriend comes complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin. Standing five feet, seven inches tall, the doll weighs 120 pounds, comes with five “personalities”, is “ready for action” her developers said. Aspiring partners can customise her features, including race, hair colour and breast size.”

Aspiring partners… Give me strength – but it gets even worse:

“Roxxxy, who can chat with her flesh-and-blood mate about subjects including Manchester United, also elicits comments depending on how she is touched. The anatomically-correct robot, who can even snore, has an articulated skeleton that can move like a person but can’t walk or independently move its limbs.”

Yes, that’s all you need: Someone in bed who either talks football or snores.

Mind you, there is an almost spiritual side to this story.

Sort of:

“Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, the inventor said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever.”

A while back, everybody’s role model Kate Moss got into a bit of bother when she claimed that nothing tastes as good as slim feels – which partly explains why she’s on that coke diet.

So, she got accused of promoting anorexia and the press and all the angry-letter-to-the-editor types had a fun time frothing round the mouth and all but calling for her to be publicly stoned.

Not that our Kate needs any help in getting stoned in public, of course.

Anyway, as I said, that was some time ago but I’m sure all who wished Kate Moss had never sung the glories of being slim will be happy to learn that scientists have found that being fat makes you look young.

Sort of:

“Women who have plump full lips look younger than their years, scientists have said.Even if the woman in question has wrinkles, eye bags, sagging jowels and greying hair, a rosy and firm set of lips will make them appear younger.”

Meaning, I suppose, that women who have no lips at all look timeless…

‘Paris Hilton eaten by her own chihuahuas.’

That would be news.

‘Tony Blair, eaten up by guilt.’

That would be a stop the presses moment too.

The following article, however, does not at all qualify as news:

“Researchers found the average male turns their thoughts to sexual intercourse 13 times a day - a total of 4,745 times every year. In comparison, women think about sex just five times day – or 1,825 times a year.”

Men think of sex a lot.

That’s as earth shattering a statement as, let’s say, ‘Things tend to fall if you let them.’

That men think of sex more often than women do is also not exactly an ‘Elvis lives and will be joining Manchester United at the end of this month’ kind of headliine.

Mind you, it’s not exactly a problem that men think of sex three times more often than women do. Most men would be happy enough to settle for having sex, five times a day.

Now, it really would be have been news if someone had discovered a way to synchronize the male and female watches, so to speak

So that, at least for those five times a day men and women would think about having sex at exactly the same moment. Now, that would be the kind of scientific break through that would have my vote for a Nobel prize.

(SIsters under the skin…?)

I wanted to open this post with a moderate ‘Every so often’ but, these days, that would be saying that George Bush invaded countries and/or said something profoundly stupid only every so often.

Truth is that, in the last few years, vain-glorious and highly silly scientists have been shovelling the results of their extremely dubious ‘research’ into the intrays of our world’s newspapers almost every bloody day.

Obviously, since all the various new News corporations have been more interested in filling their owners’ coffers than covering any serious news, not one wacky white coat has ever been refused to parade on paper and to preen on screen.

Hence, the endless Escher loop of UFOs and monsters, cancer & cholestrol related health scares, a mass of wonder diets and psycho babblesque self improvement schemes and a pick & mix mess of Hitler diary diarrhoe type stories.

Nothing is ever too wild, too exploitative or too tasteless for our media – and no research is ever too self-serving, frivolous and improvable for a large number of soi-disant scientists…

… and so I was not at all surprised to read the following bit of nonsense in the Telegraph:

“The intriguing smile of the Mona Lisa was the result of very high levels of cholesterol, according to Vito Franco of the University of Palermo, a medical expert who has studied famous figures in Renaissance art. The facial expression shows signs of a build up of fatty acids around the eyes of the subject.”

Yes, I know, it’s not as harmful a piece of shite as some of the other moronic stuff you read. It’s not offering eternal youth, cures for cancer, serenity or serial orgasms…

… but still, what’s next?

An in depth analysis of Popeye’s physique, proving that either spinach or pipe smoking causes severe muscular deformity?

A life style magazine special about cartoon heroines, showing how all of them had breast implants and/or wore wonder bras and ‘What This Could Mean For You!!!’

Ah well, I have made my (rants’ interrupted) peace with the fact that we now do live in the Age of Fluff – but it would be nice if we could just stare at our own collective belly buttons and cease to point rudely at the fatty acids on the painted faces of our Renaissance models.

(Even blunter than the scientist’s butcher’s knife…)

(Now hand me a sickbag and my shotgun…)

Don’t you just love those fairly useless bits of information that fall like digital confetti through our computer screens.

These following two statements (be they true or false) came from a Times review of what would seem to be a rather wonderful book, called ‘Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World’, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Just follow the link if you want to read the full review of the book:

“Americans, in order to have a nice day, every day, have to consume two-thirds of the world’s antidepressants”

&

“The US market in “motivational products” is worth a staggering $21 billion a year.”

Obviously, it’s not exactly news that snake oil merchants, shamans and other conmen hardly ever fail to find new customers.

It’s not much of an evolutionary leap from some Ming dynasty healer doing rude thing to a tiger penis with mortar & pestle to those computer spam messages promising to enhance your dick.

Like the poor, the stupid and the greedy and the lazy and the desperate will always be with us – and where they are, there will also always be enough shysters who get rich selling whatever will be the nonsense du jour.

I’m not sure people are much more stupid and more stupidly self-centered & demanding creatures now than, let’s say, in the days of the Pharaoh.

It’s just that, in the West, the majority of people now have the kind of disposable income only a tiny percentage could have dreamt of in earlier periods of human history – that plus an amount of leisure time past generations would not have thought possible.

Humans being humans, you don’t need to be a Newton or Einstein to fully grasp the following equation:

Lots of money + lots of time = Lots of stupid behaviour.

It doesn’t make for a very edifying sight, of course but then, that famous ‘Age of Aquarius’ the hippies were singing about never stood much of a chance against the forces of demented consumerism.

This is the Age of L’Oréal: “Because I’m worth it.”

Which is almost enough to make any less self-obsessed soul reach for the whiskey, or a semi-automatic…

… because there are days that you do ask yourself what would be more satisfying: Going for the Prozac or simply going postal.

(Of course, those hippies also knew a thing or two about narcissistic self-indulgence…)