PART of a handkerchief stained with Charles I’s blood after his execution is up for sale. The king handed the hankie to aide Colonel John Penruddock before he was beheaded in 1649. Penruddock dipped the linen in Charles’s blood.
Now the cloth – a quarter of the original hankie – is expected to fetch up to £3,000 at auction in Swindon, Wilts. Expert Chris Albury said: “This is a remarkable historical item.”
Definitely a collector’s item with a difference. Though people are always willing to buy and sell the most (and least) obvious crap. I remember having read that enterprising Germans have sold so many ‘authentic’ bits of the former Berlin Wall, that if you would put all of them together the ‘resurrected’ wall could give the Chinese Wall a good run for its money. I also remember people offering to sell Britney Spears’s hair after she had all of it cut off and there are also stories of people having offered money for the soiled tampons of Paris Hilton.
A handkerchief stained with the blood of a beheaded king, however, is still quite something. Though I’m sure you could find sites that offered bits of the car in which Diana, princess of Wales, bled to death.
Anyway, reading this bit of royalty news I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone has offered to sell that bit of pretzel on which George Bush almost choked to death. With all the millions and millions of avid fans this great president has around the world, it should be able to do much better at auction than a lousy £3,000.
Some years back, Neil Gaiman wrote a wonderful children’s book, called ‘The day I swapped my dad for two goldfish.’ Truly a joy to read - like all of his books, of course. Beautiful illustrations by his regular co-worker Dave McKean, by the way. If you haven’t read it, go and buy it immediately but first this:
You know, I’ve often wondered how depressing it must be to be George Bush. I mean, even he must be aware of the fact that he is hated and despised by millions and millions of people - and who can he really hang out with, or talk to, apart from his direct family? Cheney? Well, I’m reasonably sure even Bush is smart enough not to spend too much time alone with Cheney - not with Cheney’s hobbies, eye-sight and hand-eye-gun coordination.
He can always walk his dog, of course, but dogs aren’t the greatest conversationalists - and neither is Jesus, with Whom Bush says he’s quite close. No. being George Bush must be a lonely business. The guy really could use a friend. Maybe somebody like Comet:
Comet the goldfish may be the world’s most intelligent fish after its owner, Dean Pomerleau, trained it to perform a range of aquatic activities. Comet can play football, basketball and even limbo dance under a bar. The genius of the water world can also play fetch with a hoop, slalom around a series of poles and push a rugby ball over a set of posts.
For the rest of us who have to suffer even more from having to deal with Bush than Bush has with being Bush there might even be a more attractive option, which is to put the 43th president of the USA out of his and our misery and, like Gaiman put it in his marvellous book, swap him for Comet.
It would do wonders for the image of America, at home and abroad, and we wouldn’t have to wonder which country would get bombed, invaded and destroyed next. As added bonus, the new and very much improved president would be unlikely to choke on a pretzel.
You know what? According to some scientists there’s a more important argument for reducing CO2 levels than mere global warming:
Men living in polluted areas are more likely to go bald than those breathing cleaner air, a new study suggests. The ground breaking research, by academics at the University of London, has linked the onset of male pattern baldness, to environmental factors, such as air pollution and smoking. The scientists believe toxins and carcinogens found in polluted air can stop hair growing by blocking mechanisms that produce the protein from which hair is made.
I’m not sure I’m buying this, though. If air pollution played such a huge part in men getting bald, shouldn’t all people who listen to call-in radio stations, ABBA, the speeches of George Bush and the singing of most anthems be bald as a born-again bald eagle balloon?
Honour where honour is due - and you have to give it to the European Union: when it comes to introducing mad policies and laws they are very hard to beat.
Take this one:
The European Union is preparing plans to allow pig remains to be used to feed poultry. The practice - banned in Europe after the BSE crisis 10 years ago - would save farmers millions of pounds as prices of cereal feed for chickens soar, say officials in Brussels.
But the proposal has outraged animal rights campaigners, Muslim organisations and other groups. They claim the move would put families at risk, offend religious sensibilities and lead to a major consumer backlash.
‘There are two million Muslims in Britain and 25 million in Europe and this move would be a disaster for every one of them,’ said Dr Abdel Majid-Katme of the Islamic Medical Association.
Now, admittedly there are not many things that can unite Muslim and Jew but the EU has found a way. They say ‘Pigs will fly before this happens’ but prepare yourself for the unique site of Muslims and Jews marching through Europe’s street, holding up and sharing their banners, united in their demands to keep Europe’s chickens both halal and kosher - while along the route all the little piggies will cheer the marchers on, shouting “Allah is great!” & “Next year in Jerusalem!”
So, I’m having my daily dose of online newspapers - and all the usual suspects make their unsurprising entrances: Obama & Hillary in the US, Gordon Brown & Boris Johnson in England, the torture cellar of yet another Austrian monster, und so weiter, und so weiter.
Then I read about a pet turtle that returned to its deliriously happy owners after a two years’ absence - and that Australian scientists have developed an apple that stays green after you’ve cut it open. And maybe it’s just me being in a bad mood today but those last stories did irritate me somewhat. Not so much the turtle and its happy owners. I just read about the latest developments in Zimbabwe, where many schools haven’t been able to open their doors after the holiday because so many teachers have been arrested, tortured and killed recently by Mugabe thugs that the rest don’t dare to show up for work. Having read yet another piece about Mugabe, reading about the reunion of a turtle with its owners does come as a relief.
That apple story did piss me off though. I couldn’t help but think: Just eat the damn thing before it turns brown, you idiots. It’s quite monstrous, the way the decadent West spends millions and millions on this kind of nonsense - and on developing ever more food and drink stuff with fewer and fewer calories, so the people can stuff their fat faces without becoming even more stupidly fat than they already are - while millions of other people are starving to death.
Still, it’s a bit unfair to blame an evergreen apple (and the people who developed and wrote about it) for all the ills in the world. Same with that turtle: you can correctly claim that there are more important things to discuss than the fate of one turtle - and yet, not talking about the turtle won’t stop a mine killing yet another American soldier, or make a tornado change its destructive course or stop anyone getting killed when their bus crashes.
There’s also that other thing: that I’m neither really touched by the turtle story nor by some bus accident in some very far off place - and I’m not even feeling all that guilty about that either, to be honest. Can we care about the accidental death of people we’ve never met and would never have met, unless and until they died in a way that made it newsworthy enough to write a short article about it? Should we care? In principle, I believe we should. As a human being one should not accept that millions of fellow human beings starve to death or get butchered by their own evil regimes or get blown up in senseless wars.
And yet, all of this remains mostly abstract, for most of the time. The outrage and solidarity don’t last that long. You read another story about Iraq and you mutter something about murderous necon bastards - or you curse yet another Jihadist who calls for yet another 9/11. You get disgusted over an Austrian cellar story, or about some silly apple (or celeb) story, or about famine in the Horn of Africa…
That’s the problem with this rolling news kind of world we have created: too many stories competing for our attention - and we move with incredible speed from Paris Hilton to Iraq, from lost turtles to Gaza, from Hubble pictures to Holocaust memorial services. Does any bit of news still really move us, apart from the truly monstrous? And apart from the cheap kind of sentimentality and group hysteria that follow the death of a princess, or the disappearance of one pretty, blue-eyed child. What is it with people that they can get this sentimental and stupid over one death, while they happily ignore the death of millions of others? Is that a different topic though - or the same one, really? People love and need stories, so maybe people need to personalise some news stories, while others are too gruesome or too distant to be embraced on that sentimental, Oprah like ‘I feel your pain’ scale.
Anyway, I don’t have any real answers. The world is as it is - with a large majority of people living quite horrible, poverty and war stricken lives, while the rest live in decadent luxury, worrying about their weight, or browning apples. And the news itself has become a kind of entertainment industry, where stories about rape, murder and famine will always be followed by a reassuring bit of light relief nonsense about a returning turtle - and no matter how many horrific news stories have gone before, nothing will ever wipe away the smile of the people presenting the weather at the end of yet another news show.
The dilemma will remain, of course: that by being flooded with all kinds of different but mostly horrible stories, we also become immune to them. The more we watch, the less real these stories become to us; the more camera crews we send out to feed the rolling news machine, the less engaged we become on a personal level.
I don’t think this is a paradox that we can ever solve. I certainly don’t have the answers. I still feel that we need to watch the news though. We need to know - even if we can’t change things. I think that as humans we have the obligation to at least be witness to the suffering of our fellow human beings.
There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says, ‘The entire world rests on the tip of the tongue.’ Of course, there’s another one that says, ‘A fool is his own informer.’
Anyway, a long time ago Dutch football star Ruud Gullit dedicated some prize he had won to Nelson Mandela. At the time, I found that somewhat bizarre - to the point of being rude and belittling even, if it hadn’t been for Gullit’s obvious sincerity.
Still, at that time Mandela was already out of prison and elected president of his country. Plus, Mandela was a self-professed football fan, so I thought we could all pass this thing off as a bit of nonsense; well-meant nonsense even.
There is of course, in our sports and film stars and other celebs this nauseating tendency to see themselves as the centre of the universe, and as a kind of arbiters of all matters, from the merely frivolous to the world’s most important political and environmental issues. I suppose it’s all part of a solipsist and narcissistic pathology: to think no thing and no cause is real unless and until the Big Star has given his or her blessings or condemnation to it.
Most of the time, this is merely annoying, sometimes grotesquely so, as when Sharon Stone announced she was prepared to kiss everyone if it brought peace to the Middle East. Sometimes though, the self-centredness of our stars can become absolutely monstrous.
I started with Gullit and his Mandela moment and so now we’ll return to the strange world of professional football: a very self-obsessed world indeed, with very strange ideas about morals and values.
I’m sure that Chelsea’s manager Avram Grant didn’t mean to be as fantastically and grossly disrespectful to the millions of Jews who were killed in the holocaust but he was. I’m not sure how terribly mentally ill someone must be before he decides that his having taken his team to the final of some sporting event is, in the light of the Holocaust, a true victory - and I’m not sure anyone can recover from such a grotesque maladie:
“The fact that I led a great team like Chelsea in a very important match in the Champions League 65 years exactly after the terrible holocaust is the true victory,” he wrote in a piece timed to coincide with yesterday’s visit to Auschwitz.
I don’t wish the man ill but really, mister Grant, shame on you. You seem to have forgotten the name of your fathers, the honour of your children and the house of your God.
‘Give and you will receive’, the Good book says - and nobody knows this better now than 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who gave away a bit of cake and may now receive an extra nine months in jail:
A judge in southern Ohio must decide whether to send a man to prison for sharing a Little Debbie snack cake. The case involves 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who last year was held in a residential community corrections program in Nelsonville for breaking into a bar.
While there, prosecutors said he bought the oatmeal creme pie from a vending machine and shared it with a fellow inmate who was on restriction and wasn’t allowed access to snacks. Prosecutors in Vinton County have asked Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Simmons to revoke Caudill’s probation and put him in prison for nine months.
To describe this case - and the prosecutors - as malevolently insane would hardly do justice to it. Prisons are meant to be correctional institutions but all too often they are used as a kind of Kafkaesque torture places, where sadistic underachievers and politically ambitious prosecutors seem to conspire to turn all the inmates into paranoid, resentful and dangerous serial offenders.
When you abuse the system and the law to such an extent that you slap an extra nine months onto a prison sentence, simply because someone gave a bit of cake to a fellow inmate, I can guarantee you one thing - and that is that the ‘offender’ in question will not interpret this as a fair use of power by the state. Neither will it be seen by anyone sane and good-willing as being a helpful part of a correctional process.
Reading these kinds of stories you can’t be surprised by how many of our prisoners are not reformed by the experience and become repeat offenders instead. The only surprising thing is that not many more of them become so embittered, enraged and damaged by the experience that they choose to opt out of society’s system and rules altogether.
This doesn’t mean we should change our prisons into holiday camps and replace the wardens with Oprah like do-gooders. A prison sentence should not be some kind of ‘time out’ zone for helpless parents who can’t cope with their spoiled brood - but it should be fair and it should leave the prisoners with some personal dignity and some real expectation that he or she can be part of our society again when a reasonable amount of time has been done. Treating prisoners like shit, treating them in a cruel and preposterously unfair way won’t help with this process at all.
Whenever a prosecutor manages to boost his ego and his political profile with these types of ‘extra time for sharing cake’ victories all he manages to do is to destroy whatever is left of the prisoner’s trust in society - and by doing so these prosecutors harm the future security of all citizens. By wilfully creating and supporting a system that only manages to turn people into repeat offenders they put the whole of society at risk, solely for their own narcissistic and political purposes.
At the Democratic dance party we’re getting so close to the moment of truth now that anything can be an omen, a cheap symbol or a horror story - or all of that in one: A frustrated young seal has been caught on camera unleashing its sexual urges on an unconsenting penguin. The Antarctic fur seal was observed by South African scientists attempting to have sex with the king penguin on Marion Island, in the sub-Antarctic region. The incident was recorded in the Journal of Ethology.
The effort lasted forty-five fruitless minutes, according to the BBC. Nico de Bruyn, of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, said that the seal’s motives, beyond the obvious, were unclear.
In the category ‘way too much information’ the following: Cher sharing her Tome Cruise memories with Oprah:
“He was shy,” Cher recalled to Oprah. “He said he felt like such a boob in school and nobody talked to him. We went on a date once for dinner in a New York restaurant and the waitress was from his old school. He told me she never talked to him back in school, but now he was recognised he got all her attention.”
Tantalising the audience with memories of one particular “long night” in Tom’s arms, Cher went on to observe “He was so wonderful. And he was so, like, different.”
Yes, you can say that again.
Of course, none of this should come as a major surprise. Cher has always had a strange taste in men, off and on screen. Compared to some of them even Cruise becomes a lesser (if still nauseating) evil
Speaking of which - and yes, speaking of the Devil…
Ah yes, anything we can do and may start in the West, the Japanese can copy and improve on - and then they leave us gasping in the dust, wondering what the fuck just hit us.
Read and weep, in envy, despair or simply stunned disbelief: An unnamed council employee in the city of Kinokawa, southern Japan, has been punished for accessing hardcore porn websites an astonishing 780,000 times in just nine months.
At his frenzied peak last July, the 57-year-old man was loading as many as 10,000 pages a day - more than one every three seconds of his working week.
However, he has not been fired from his job. Instead he has had to accept a pay cut of 20,000 yen (£80) a month and has been demoted.
Well, of course he wasn’t fired. Are you mad? You know what harm the average Council worker does to OUR environment, peace of mind and overall contentment quotient when he actually concentrates on the loathsome things for which he was hired?
Of course, you want the evil little buggers distracted to the point of actual extinction. A city council that’s too busy to mess with you is each citizen’s dream come true. If we could just copy the Japanese for once and have our own council pests access hardcore porn sites at the astonishing rate of 10,000 pages a day…
What joy that would bring to all of us - what pure and unabridged, uncensored, naked joy…!
