Glob-a-log

Right, it’s the final day of 2009 – if not the actual final day of the decade – so, as promised, here’s my final installment of the calendars-we-really-need-to-have-in-2010 series.

I don’t have much blather time, today, because I have a largish meal to cook as well. So, let’s get this one over and done with quickly:

1) Sports are always a great cash vehicle, so what better way to make a few easy bucks than to present the gullible world with yet another ‘Golden Sports Moments’ calendar: Featuring Thierry Henry’s handball, the fake blood rugby scandal, Formula One’s deliberate car crash, followed by Tiger Wood’s less deliberate fire hydrant crash, the whole of the drug-addled Tour de France, etcetera, etcetera.

2) The whole Darwin versus Creation debate boils down to the question whether man is a rising ape or a fallen angel. Still, wherever one stands in that particular fight, most people would agree that mankind has come a long way since it climbed out of those trees – and what better way to celebrate this than by producing & selling the ‘Human Progress’ calendar: With photos of that recently stolen ‘Arbeit macht frei’ banner at the entrance of Auschwitz, pictures of Cambodia’s mountains of skulls, Quantanamo Bay (or Abu Ghraib) and Lubyanka prison, action pics of Japan’s rape of Nankin and the bombing of Hiroshima, a photo of Robert Mugabe, und so weiter, und so weiter.

3) Again, we can try to bring together two of the best things in the world, with a ‘Food is Better Than Sex’ calendar: Featuring photos of a naked Nigella Lawson swimming in a huge bowl of minestrone soup, Johnny Depp doing someting rude (in the raw) to a man-sized sprout, Carla Sarkozi’s naked struggles on an XXXL plate of spaghetti, Brad Pitt’s nude climbing over mountains of mashed potattoes and one of a naked Angelina Jolie not quite mounting a gigantic fish stick.

Right, I’m off to the kitchen, to do something really mean to an innocent chicken – fully clad, I might add.

You all have a very happy New Year.

(You can find the three earlier Calendar posts HERE & HERE & HERE.)

(Hey, if I had to do it with Monsieur Sarkozi I’d also say ‘Pas pour moi’…)

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 series HERE & HERE & HERE)

As I said yesterday, the end of the year is the time where people go all out mad about actual and metaphysical clocks. Well, I didn’t say that, to be honest but I could have.

Now, I can do herd animal behaviour with the best of them, so yesterday I started with a list of calendars. Not actually existing calendars but ones that one could wish were there to be bought.

Here are three more of those:

1) Sex sells. Perhaps not as much as hatred, fear and religion but in any get-rich-quick scheme sex will always be a handy XXX Factor. It has been claimed that about 90% of the Internet is about sex, so I can’t see why this percentage could not be equalled – or bettered – by calendars. So, here’s one for the sleaze heads, called ‘Mouseketeers go pro’, with upskirt shots of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell et al.

2) In terms of selling power, it may not quite be up there with sex but where would our tabloids be without Schadenfreude.We put people on pedestals, because it’s much more fun if they have to go some distance when they do fall. Britney at the hairdresser, Hugh Grant with the street hooker, Amy Winehouse and her drugs: The public love to read about all of that – and to look at the pictures, of course. Which is why a ‘Famous Divorces’ calendar could be quite a hit: Paul McCartney & Heather Mills, Britney Spears & Kevin Federline, Jordan & Peter Andre, John Cleese & Alyce Faye etcetera.

3) It’s what water is to fish and air to birds - or birds to Tiger and lies to a politician: What makes the global blogs go round? Yes, indeed: Conspiracy theories. Why admit to the possibility of coincidence and chaos, when you can point the finger at invisible bogeymen and cry ‘Conspracy!’. So, anyone producing a calendar that was dedicated to this weird hobby, would make quite a bit of money from selling such a ‘Conspiracy Calendar’: With Kennedy and the grassy knoll, 9/11 and the Truthers, Global Warming and those leaked e-mails, the Elvis lives brigade, Roswell and Hangar 18, the Moon Landing deniers, und so weiter, und so weiter.

So, your homework for today is to flesh out these three calendars. I’ll be back tomorrow with more.

(Calendar posts 1 & 3 & 4 are HERE & HERE & HERE)

(The perfect celeb song, really…)

Last year I wrote a column with the title ‘Seven great investment tips for 2009′.

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.

I was reading a column by Victoria Coren in the Guardian, in which she dealt very effectively with the Ann Summers marketing people who, when they received some complaints about their new Merry XXXmas slogan, said they were proud of it.

I’m always curious why churches always think it’s necessary to do the marketing for the Enemy. Whether it’s ‘The life of Brian’ or ‘The satanic verses’, or indeed that pathetic Ann Summers slogan, it’s the religious moaning & threatening that does more for the sales of these products than any original marketing could have dreamed of.

Anyway, Victoria Coren has already dealt with the Ann Summers crowd. So, I’m not going to spend more words on it. You can find her column through this link.

One of the commenters to her column said that the Ann Summers idea to link Christmas to sex was hardly a new one and left a link to this song.

That made me think that surely an organisation as boring as Ann Summers could not have been the first one to come up with this XXXmas concept.

One Google search later proved that they were decidedly not.

So, under ‘Merry XXXmas’, I found, among other things, Amazon.com: The Merry XXXmas Book of Erotica (9781573442206 … , Perez Hilton: Merry XXXMas and the somewhat intriguing Museum of Kitschy Stitches : Merry XXXmas.

Though I had already found my personal favourite when I first had ordered a less traditional ‘Happy XXXmas’ search – which also delivered the goods but none as good as the following, to wit:

Zombie Hooker Nightmare XXX-mas - A Free Flash Game From Adult Swim

This from the intro to the game:

“As the last living hooker on earth, Lola has taken her trailer all the way to the north pole to unwrap a few choice packages. But where Lola goes the zombies follow – and if she wants a roll in the snow with St. Nick himself, she’ll have to fight off the zombies one more time.”

Lovely.

“Durex: Because I like birdies…!”

A bit of William Blake always comes in handy – as in:

“Tiger, Tiger running right/into hydrants in the night”

In all honesty though, I’m getting rather sick of this whole Tiger Woods story.

It doesn’t help that he plays golf – which is truly a very boring sport. On that one I’m firmly with Times columnist Rod Liddle, who wrote,

“I know nothing of the sport and wish to know even less; for me, the difference between a bogey and an eagle is that the latter hurts a hell of a lot more if it is lodged in your left nostril.”

What really doesn’t help is that Wood’s taste in women runs to Barbie look-alikes – but then, you know, he’s a golfer. Boring, and predictable, and stuff.

So, no more Tiger stories – though I do have a rather nice story about another animal and one that was much more engaging than Tiger ever will be, even if the latter humped a thousand more hydrants.

Talking of which, humping inanimate objects, that is, Kiki (the tortoise) did that much better than Woods (the Tiger) did as well. As the following, quite poignant story makes clear:

“France was in mourning today for one of its oldest and best-loved lotharios, a giant tortoise named Kiki, who died at the age of 146. According to Marie-Claude Bomsel, a vet at the zoo, he was so vigorous in his pursuit of female tortoises that his grunts could be heard from the other end of the zoo and the Jardin des Plantes.

“To be honest, from time to time I even saw him go after a wheelbarrow. You see what we were dealing with,” Bomsel told French radio. “That was one of his characteristics. We all loved him.”

Kiki weighed 250kg and had to be moved about using a forklift.”

(White coats beat Ho White every time…)

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love science and adore scientists. Whitecoats are to me what crotchless knickers are to some men (and George Clooney to most women.)

In fact, if I weren’t so shy (oh, okay: so lazy) I would spend all day day-dreaming about making love to all manner of female scientists – in the nicest possible way, of course.

I mean, not like those cheap xxx.come movies nobody ever admits to watching on sites like tornpube, where they do all of that schoolgirl uniform, wet nurse, drunk Russian bride and leprechaun contortionist stuff.

Chacun à son goût and all of that but I do prefer my fantasies to be not quite of such industrial strength.

Anyway, so yes, I like scientists, even though they can be slightly exasperating, from time to time – especially if they explain how our common sense is almost always wrong.

They do love that annoying little word ‘counterintuitively’ altogether too much, I think.

So, it’s nice to hear about cases where scientists run into trouble when their studied subjects behave as most normal folks already suspected they would.

Which is almost as much fun as watching some porn addict getting more and more frustrated when he finds he really can’t beat the smut filter his wife installed on their home computer.

Talking of which, porn and scientists and all of that good stuff – here’s a nice little story for you that I found in yesterday’s Telegraph:

“Scientists at the University of Montreal were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.”

(Which is not QUITE what I meant but never mind…)

First, the most beautiful sentence of the week, by A.A. Gill, in one of his Times columns:

“Scotland doesn’t have history, it has current affairs with a long memory. “

Then, the most stupid remark made, this week, by any public figure, care of pop singer Rihanna, from a tabloid interview.

“Every woman should have naked pictures taken. In five years my body might not look like this.”

Now, this quite funny story – which is also kind of stupid but not exactly in the Rihanna league:

“A vicar has warned his congregation of an increase in “satanic activity” after he found a severed sheep’s head mounted on a pole outside a church in his Gloucestershire parish. The Rev Nick Bromfield warned that “dark forces” were on the rise in the area and revealed a series of mutilated animal carcasses had been found.”

To be honest, I doubt all of this has much to do with any dark forces, be they on the rise or otherwise employed.

It’s more likely it’s just kids being bored out of their stupid, tiny skulls. We are talking about Gloucestershire, after all, which is not so much the armpit of the universe as one of its discarded toe nail clippings.

Anyway, the article continues:

“The “offerings” had been ritualistically laid out in circles or around stones in his three Forest of Dean parishes – Drybrook, Lydbrook and Ruardean. Bromfield has issued a warning to parishioners against dabbling in occult events, even those that may seem harmless, such as crystal ball readings or pub psychic nights.”

Such a brilliant idea…

Take away the few existing public pastimes still on offer in Gloucestershire.

That will surely stop those bored kids from putting any more sheep’s heads on poles…

Okay, perhaps it will stop them long enough to take Rihannaesque photographs of themselves and put them up on Facebook first.

(Can’t think, can’t dance, can’t sing…)

Now, this is just such sad, sad news…:

“The BBC has abandoned plans to screen a ballet featuring a deformed Pope who rapes nuns that it had announced as one of the highlights of its Christmas schedule.”

It would almost have been worth buying a TV and watching this programme, in the certain knowledge that it would have offended so many righteous Christian folks.

Which is not a very grown-up attitude, I admit – but then I guess I never really grew up. All that “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” was never my thing.

When I was young all I wanted was to become one of the Muppets and I’m not sure I ever grew out of that.

Still, I’m sure many other people still live with those old childish ambitions not all that deeply buried in their hearts – and I dare say quite a number of us males would see the following story as a a very old dream job come true:

“The University of Leeds is advertising for a lap dance researcher. The advertised position, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, is for: “Research Officer - The rise and regulation of lap dancing and the place of sexual labour and consumption in the night time economy”.” The advertisement further stipulates that “prior experience of conducting research in the female sex industry” is essential.

Yes, of course I will leave you with an old Muppets clip. Enjoy!