Glob-a-log

The beautiful game gets Little-Big-Horned again…)

Right, so, after England lost their match against Germany (and I’d done my bit for the Schadenfreude Awareness Campaign) I promised I would also have a laugh at my own national team after they would have been kicked out of the tournament by Slovakia – which didn’t quite happen…

… and did also as quite-ishly not happen in today’s match against Brazil.

Which I do find rather disappointing.

I so prefer Team Orange to perform like a showy fireworks display. I like the idea that the whole world, at times, goes ‘Ooh!’ & ‘Aah!’ when it sees our team in action – only to scratch its collective head and shrug its shoulders and says ‘What the Hell…?’ when the team comes crashing down before any real trophies are handed out.

I enjoy the drama, the brilliance that always dies young.

This time round though, our lion does not roar.

It just bores the pants of everyone who’d come to see another great show – and now they’re through to the semi-finales, which doesn’t exactly fill me with much pleasure, let alone pride.

I’m all with Kipling, when he wrote:

‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same’

Again, I don’t mind losing – Hell, I wouldn’t mind winning a world cup either – but I like the the idea that our national team will always entertain us along the way to either destination…

… which leaves me grumbling and wishing that someone would rid us of this current bunch of impostors, so normal services could be resumed.

Ah well, enough of that – so, let’s end on a happier note, with this old Melissa Etheridge & Joss Stone clip, dedicated to all who love sports and get their hearts broken on a very regular basis:

(Blue Angel beats White Cliffs 4-1…)

Right, onwards and upwards with what may well turn out to become a true Marilyn Monroe week…

… and what better way to celebrate Germany’s 4-1 World Cup victory over England than by opening this post with that photo of M.M., dressed like the coolest & classiest & and most fatally sexy German ever, Marlene Diettrich.

Mind you, the way England played, Germany could have fielded any team of high-heeled women – cool, classy, sexy (or simply alive) or not – without much fear of having to go the full distance and beat the bottling bulldog in the traditional penalty shoot-out.

Enough about the football though – and yes, if Holland manage to lose against Slovakia, I promise I’ll laugh as loudly at them as I did at those pathetic Three Lions and their Italian Jobber boss.

Back to Marilyn though – and bye bye England…

(Damn, the guy even looks a bit like the young Capello…!)

(More Marilyn HERE & HERE & HERE & HERE)

I don’t know why but I feel like a Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s just dying to chase the Web for sites about herb gardens – or like Brutus, who’s drawn his knife to viciously attack a Ceasar salad.

Okay, I do know why. It’s all because of some stupid news story I read.

I mean, I always thought that I was heterosexual but now that I’ve read the following article I’m not so sure:

“Yawning can be a sign of sexual attraction rather than a desire to sleep, scientists have claimed.”

So, there I was, watching the (0-0) England–Algeria match, thinking I’d never seen anything more tedious in my whole damn life…

… yawning, as I thought, like a satyr who’s stuck in traffic with a flock of Tupperware-talking nuns – bored out of his horny little skull, that is…

… but now, if we can believe these scientists, it would seem that I was secretly harbouring the wish, nay, the burning desire, to kiss John Terry on the mouth, eat whipped cream from Ashley Cole’s naked torso or even lick the hairy buttocks of Wayne Rooney.

(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…)

First, to set the right tone, a bit of old news – or, as the old saying goes, “People in glass houses should not play football”:

“Rama Yade, the youngest member of the French government, who caused a stir in France last week when she cast aspersions on the decision of Les Bleus to stay at a “showy” resort for the World Cup, was left embarrassed today by reports that a junior suite reserved for her during a visit to South Africa cost 667 a night – £78 more than the rooms booked by the players.”

Mind you, most people would probably agree with Rama Yade that this generation of professional footballers are a bunch of spoilt, narcissistic wankers…

… which kind of leads to the following question:

If you organize a football tournament, where you will find the likes of Portugal’s mama’s boy Ronaldo, England’s disgustingly greedy John Terry (and alround arsehole Ashley Cole), France’s Thierry ‘your cheating heart’ Henry and all the other overpaid barf bags…

… what’s the kind of big-eyed headlines that you’d really want to see?

A website called bizarremag.com may have the ultimate answer:

“Football. It’s the beautiful game, and the World Cup in South Africa is set to be the greatest show on earth. Right? Wrong! Who wants to see overpaid pansies moaning about being kicked in the shin when instead you could see the world’s most evil killers rip each other limb from limb. We’ve brought together 16 bloodthirsty bruisers from across the globe for a series of bone-crunching, throat-slitting, breath-taking bouts of murderous carnage in our World Cup Of Serial Killers.”

Okay, Bishop Desmond Tutu might not agree but the tournament in South Africa would be ever so much more fun to watch if there were a few highly specialised serial killers around.

At the very least it would mean that we might finally get to see some welcome urgency and accuracy to that stupid ‘group of death’ cliché.

(No disrespect but this beats the crap out of K’naan and his Wavin Flag…)

Had you ever heard of this guy called Terry Eagletone?

Neither had I, till I read yesterday’s Guardian column by David Mitchell.

So, here’s what I found in yet another Guardian article about T.E. He’s a Catholic from a working-class background who became a ‘prominent and unrepentant Marxist revolutionary’ who, in his own words, never changed his views out of “sheer horror of cliché, if nothing else.”

Which is kind of problematic, because, if nothing else, this whole thing about lapsed Catholics finding Marx is one of the biggest political clichés on offer – right there with newspaper revelations that David Cameron and Boris Johnson were once proud members of the Bullingdon Club.

You could almost say that, like child abuse in Roman Catholic orphanages and IEDs in Iraq, it comes with the territory.

Anyway, as so many other revolutionary thinkers did before him Eagleton has jumped on another predictable bandwagon: football – about which he claims that

“Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished.”

Why am I even bothering writing about Eagleton and his cliché comb-overs?

Well, only because his article inspired David Mitchell to write one of the most beautiful and ever-so-polite-yet-devastating put-downs I have come across in a long, long time.

Here goes. Enjoy:

“I certainly wouldn’t be so insulting as to suggest he wrote that sentence sober.”

Brilliant.

(A bloody nuisance: Marxists to the left of me, lapsed Catholics to the right…)

You know how they say, “I can smell a rat!”

Now, would it truly be an improvement if those with a nose for ‘Eau de Rodent’, also got an eyeful of the critters?

In other words, I’m not really sure about this one:

“A French eyeglass designer has come out with a new line of glasses frames, and each comes with one of four signature scents on the earpieces. The frames are offered in “Chocolate”; the “sweet and spicy” “Adriana”; the floral “Coquette”; and the ‘Isle of Kisses,’ which is a fruity mango scent.””

As with those smelly rats I mentioned earlier, we have to ask, “Do we truly need this stuff?”

I don’t know. Would you like to watch a football match on TV and be able to smell Wayne Rooney? Or get all olfactory during Prime Minister’s Question Time?

Smelling glasses? On the whole, I think rather not. You can smell the desperation in the sales pitch but I can’t say I see any real future in it.

(And another damn thing that gets right up your nose…)

Let’s call it John Sedgwick Syndrom. You say something silly and Some Sarcastic Bugger Upstairs makes damn sure you will never be allowed to live it down – though for most of us not in such a literal way.

It doesn’t even need to be anything you yourself say. It may be something you hear – something that relates to ’serendipitous’ the way ‘black hole’ relates to ‘firefly’.

Like Jesus waking up that fateful Friday to His radio alarm clock playing “If I had a hammer…”

Embarrassing, ball-busting bad timing, in other words – unless you’re a stand-up comedian or someone responsible for creating faux funny headlines for the ‘weird story’ page.

Talking of which – headlines and stuff, I mean. So, yes, the joke’s getting a bit stale by now but it was rather good. How, the day after the USA drew against England at the World Cup, thanks to a fumbling English keeper, any number of blogs and papers sported the (head)line, “America delighted with English spill.”

I’m only bringing this up – yes, regurgitating the joke, if you insist – because of something I learned only yesterday. It may be old news to everyone else but on the off chance that there are more slowpokes like me out there, here goes.

So, did you know that BP was one of the main sponsors of the FIFA tournament – or, in their own words:

“BP is a world-class brand with a strong history in soccer. We are proud to be the official fuel supplier, and aim to position BP as a brand which best brings the excitement of the world’s greatest game to soccer fans all over the world.”

I’m sure the people in Florida are very happy that BP spent all the company’s spare cash on this project and not on some boring oil drilling safety measures…

… and they must be thrilled to learn that Thierry Weil, FIFA Director of Marketing, claimed that

“FIFA is delighted to have BP South Africa on board as a National Supporter, because of its sincere commitment to producing products that are environmentally-friendly, recommended and recognised worldwide, and that this ties in with FIFA’s ‘greening’ strategy for the 2010 World Cup™.”

Quite.

Is it too much to hope for that the London Olympics will do something similar…

… and have Trafigura as their official fuel supplier because of its ‘greening strategy’ in Ivory Coast?

(Wives and Girlfriends of Useless Toss-pots…)

Ah yes, where would we be without the EHRC and its bottomless cup of querulous bottom feeders?

More moronic than an ITV executive, more thumbs than an English goalie and more irritating than a fesnying of vuvuzelas, here’s yet another equality watchplonker losing the plot:

“The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has criticised use of the term WAG and said it can be “sexist” and “offensive”. A spokesman said that the word was usually used as a “pejorative” phrase to demean a group of women, and that there were very few positive depictions of footballers’ partners in the media.”

Quite.

On the other hand, it could be so much worse.

I mean, if you think those WAGs are having a hard time of it, wait till their husbands come home, having (yet again) lost on penalties before the last hurdle was more than a glimpse in the stadium designer’s eye.

WANKERS (We Are No-good Knobheaded England Representing Shlemiels) would be the least of it.

Ah well. It’s early days yet – and England haven’t lost its first game… yet. Though the first goal their keeper helped over the goal line was almost as much of an own goal as this latest pointless punt by the EHRC.

The only difference being that the hapless England goalie has at least some chance of improving. Poor Robert Green might actually be able to learn from his mistakes…

… and that’s not something that we will ever be able to say about those Watchdog WANKERS (We Are No-good Knob-headed Ef-all Representing Shlemiels.)

Enough about that though – and it’s time to go watch the Serbia-Ghana game.

I will leave you with a clip I saw yesterday, thanks to the kind offices of the Guardian’s MBM man, Paul Doyle.

Enjoy:

(A case of needing all the help you can get…?)

People can be so classy:

“A fake mourner dubbed “the Grim Eater”, who gatecrashed funerals just to eat the food on offer, has been warned off by undertakers in New Zealand. The man attended up to four funerals a week, even taking home leftovers in a “doggy bag” container.”

Still, we would have to say to those whose gates haven been so vulgarly crashed, Don’t sweat the small stuff. The guy could so easily have been a cabinet minister, being in your face and stuffing his face with your stuff on a daily basis.

Mind you, our doggy bag douche bag could also have had a brilliant career in advertising, where bottom feeding is part of any ad-bot’s brief – as we learn from an article by the ever delightful Marina Hyde, who has cast her disapproving eye (with a sarcastically raised eyebrow) on the cupidinous world of world cup merchandising:

“A £19.99 unisex fragrance [has been] created to promote a TV firm whose name it would be ineffably vulgar to publicise further. According to its marketers Eau De Stade features notes of grass, leather and the musky hints of sweat, plus “the aromas of the host nation”.”

Talking of sweating (small stuff or otherwise), I hope the creators of this Stadium Water realize that most researchers agree that while some people find the smell of fresh sweat quite arousing, virtually no-one likes the smell of old sweat.

This sense of timing becomes even trickier when it comes to those hints of ‘aromas of the host nation’.

You really don’t want those old aromas here, of Apartheid townships, coming with the stench of deadly racist oppression and those combined smells of burning tyres & flesh.

However, there’s just this small aromatic window of commerical opportunity, where there’s that promising fresh smell of rainbows and smartly dressed, cute school children singing uplifting songs on president Mandela’s birthday…

… before said window has to be closed again quite rapidly, to avoid giving access to the later smells of Mandela’s AIDS-denying, Mugabe supporting, corrupt and rapacious successors and to that same old perfume of burning (immigrants’) flesh in many of South Africa’s shantytowns.

(It seems you can’t keep some good ole smells down…)