Glob-a-log

The Pope will not approve, obviously but I do find this an uplifting story:

“In 2007, Britain was the largest country donor of condoms to the developing world. For every occasion when the US preached abstinence, the British quietly upped their shipments of condoms.”

Of course, the Bush administration didn’t preach abstinence for quite the same reason that the Roman Catholic church does.

With the Republicans the ‘Just say no’ response is largely Pavlovian. Whether it’s gun control, sex, drugs, immigration or gay marriage, the Elephant will always go for those three scorched earth syllables.

It’s slightly different for Team Pope. They have an entirely reasonable – if self-serving – excuse to be against any form of birth control.

The Pope embracing condoms would be a bit like Trade Union bosses coming out in favour of bankers’ bonuses – and it would cause the same kind of uproar amongst the lower orders.

I mean, you can’t seriously expect priests to embrace birth control when so many of them see child abuse as their main form of recreation.

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…)

(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.)

Okay, I’ve worked my way through various international newspapers but I just couldn’t find anything that caught my fancy.

Yes, there was someone who spotted Jesus’ face on a pizza sauce bucket and there was another Jesus related article that told us about a nudist church in Virginia.

I also learned that the man with the longest hair had died, though that one was trumped by a story about a man who spoke from his grave.

Also, to stick with death related matters, there was a woman whose life was saved by her size-D breast implants, one of which caught the bullet of a semi-automatic assault rifle.

Then there were those two guys in Mozambique who were caught shagging a goat, whose owner now demands they do the honourable thing and staying in Africa and staying on (sex) topic, there was this school dorm in South Africa that was closed after a reported outbreak of lesbianism.

So, Jesus, death and sex are doing just fine in the world’s Sunday papers, which hardly comes as a big surprise, but right now I can’t be bothered to comment on any of these stories.

Well, there was this one thought that sprang to my mind while I was reading a story about a guy who had seen the hand of God and wanted to shake it when he discovered that a picture of Jesus was the only thing to survive after his house burnt down.

The thought being that it was rather strange to bestow the epitaph of ‘Saviour’ on Someone who is quite happy to survive while everything around Him burns to a crisp.

Enough of that and enough of all these stories that take the sapiens out of homo sapiens. Time to put this (non)column to bed and to start cutting up the vegetables & herbs for what will, hopefully, become a glorious fish soup.

See you tomorrow.

Have you seen the SuperBowl, last weekend?

No?

Well, neither did I. Life’s too short to waste half a day watching commercials, interspersed with the antics of weirdly dressed men, doing incomprehensible things with something not even shaped like a proper football.

Still, even those of us who did not watch cannot have failed to hear and/or read about the controversial choice of geriatric pop band The Who as the Half-Time musical act.

In 2003 the band’s guitarist Pete Townshend had been arrested for ‘accessing child pornography online’, so the Child Abuse Watch Group tried (and failed) to stop The Who from performing at the SuperBowl.

Why am I rehashing this tired old stuff?

Well, because I’m afraid that we may expect far worse in the time leading up to (and no doubt during) the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I mean, if you can create a screaming row in most of the world’s newspapers when an aged guitarist who once watched child porn appears live on TV for a few minutes…

… then it’s not hard to imagine the media melt-down when the Net’s most infamous paedophile will have a starring role during the whole of those two-and-a-half snow-draped weeks in Vancouver.

As the following newspaper shows, this one is even bigger than the Michael Jackson trial:

“A Polish newspaper mistakenly identified “Pedobear”, a notorious internet meme, as one of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The Gazeta Olsztynska published an image showing the bear alongside genuine Olympic mascots Quatchi, Sumi, Miga and Mukmuk to illustrate a feature about the Games. It appears that the newspaper lifted the picture from Google Images, unaware that it had been created as a prank by Michael Barrick, a Canadian artist and graphic designer.”

Today, I have two vaguely related stories for you – and we will move from absurd comedy to unintended satire…

… helped by two protagonists with sex on the brain…

… and who are both quite willing to let their feelings be known in both an unrepressed and quite maniacally agressive manner.

First, there’s this story of a New Zealand kakapo parrot:

“The New Zealand prime minister has given the country’s most famous parrot a job in his government, it has emerged. An endangered kakapo parrot, named Sirocco, which rose to fame last year after it attempted to mate with the head of Mark Carwardine, the wildlife presenter, during the BBC’s ‘Last Chance to See’ series, has been appointed by John Key as the world’s first “spokesbird for conservation”. “

It’s kind of cool to have an avian sex addict as a spokesbird of anything – though one feels it would feel more at home as spokesbird of Playboy. It would be interesting to see what the parrot would do to Hefner’s head (or to that bunny, come to think of it.)

Anyway, let’s leave the parrot and move on to the second story, in which an old guy that dresses up like a bird is also making the news - again… - ranting about his favourite obsession: The things that other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Though I, for one, would prefer to be fucked by a parrot than listen to the hateful homelies of Herr Ratzinger:

“Benedict XVI says legislation safeguarding rights of same-sex couples violates ‘natural law’. Pope Benedict XVI has condemned British equality legislation for running contrary to “natural law” as he confirmed his first visit to the UK later this year.”

To which the only sane reply would be to tell him to – quite litterally – mind his own fucking business.

(Of course, this would be funnier if the Norwegian Blue had been a Papal White but you can’t have it all…)

(Who’s been telling porkie pies this time then…?)

Sometimes, it’s hard to be a Muslim. I mean, look at the state of the world. When the IRA was bombing the shit out of England and knee-capping God knows how many of their own country men, did the international airlines start to strip search priests and nuns? Did the police stop & search anyone wearing a crucifix?

No, they did not – even though the IRA was much better at this whole bombing business than those demented Muslim ‘martyrs’, who would be much better off if they joined some self harm group instead.

Still, because of some imbeciles who set fire to their own shoes and underwear, all Muslims are now treated as potentially rabid dogs. Which ain’t very nice.

From Muslims now to Jews though. So, if it is, at times, hard to be a Muslim, it’s always hard to be a Jew. The writer Dan Simmons once told a story about how he and a few colleages, in 2000, were asked to write a SF story that had to be set in the year 3000.

Now, predicting what will happen in the next ten years or so is tough enough but speculating about stuff a thousand years from now is sheer madness.

Until, as Simmons wrote, he realized that, however vast the oceans of times between now and any possible then, there would always be people who would want to kill all the Jews.

Anyway, you know all of that – and I wouldn’t have brought it up if I hadn’t come upon a news story that, once again, proved that life always lands Muslims and Jews with their peanut butter side on the floor.

Here it is:

“Eating pork is at least as effective as popping a Viagra pill to spice up your romantic life, according to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who claims to have tested the theory. “Pork consumption improves sexual activity,” Mrs Kirchner informed a gathering of business people at a meeting at the presidential palace. “This is not a small detail,” she said at the gathering to announce a reduction in the price of pork. “Besides, some nicely grilled pork is much more gratifying than taking Viagra.”

(She should have fed him pork, I guess…)

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.

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…