Glob-a-log

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.

Anything for the presidency, of course.

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…!

Now here’s a very funny story for you:

Office computer keyboards can be dirtier than lavatory seats, a report published today suggests. Office workers were urged to clean their computer equipment regularly after the survey detected bacteria on keyboards including some that could put users at risk of illness.

The consumer magazine ‘Which? Computing’, took samples from over 30 keyboards in a typical London office. In one case, a microbiologist recommended the removal of a keyboard as it had 150 times the pass limit of bacteria. The keyboard in question was found to be five times filthier than a lavatory seat that was swabbed.

The main cause of bacteria was workers eating lunch at their desks. Food deposits on the keyboard encourages the growth of bacteria. Poor personal hygiene such as failing to visit the wash hand basin after visiting the lavatory may also be a contributory factor.

A very interesting bit of news, really. I hope the people who typed out these reports read it in full before they started typing it. Otherwise, it would have been interesting to watch their faces when they came to the page where it was stated that some keyboards were five times dirtier than the office toilet.

Which would be a bit like eating in a restaurant and then, between the second and the third course, being told by the waiter that the chef has just been carried out through the back door, having only moments before succumbed to the bubonic plague.

I must admit that I find all of this highly amusing - and I hope that all those health, hygiene & fitness freaks who will read about it will fret about their office keyboards for the rest of their unnaturally obsessive lives.

Here’s a nice little disgusting story for you:

An Indian woman has reportedly accused her husband of secretly filming her in bed and threatening to release the video unless her family paid a larger dowry. The woman, who has not been named, was told that footage of the couple in bed together would be posted onto a internet pornography site if more money was not forthcoming, the Mail Today newspaper reported.

The husband and his father have been arrested and released on bail, the newspaper said, quoting court documents. Despite being illegal, the paying of large dowries is a common occurrence in India, and there are frequent cases of brides being harassed until their families pay bigger sums.

It’s quite amazing - and revealing - how so many Indian men don’t seem to mind at all that they so loudly and publicly prove themselves to be the lowest kinds of scumbags on earth.

Mind you, disgusting as this idiot is, at least he hasn’t (threatened to) set fire to his wife - something that happens quite a lot in India. This from Wikipedia:

Bride burning has been recognized as an important public health problem in India. [...] Bride burning, a category of dowry death, occurs when a young woman is murdered by her husband or his family for her family’s refusal to pay additional dowry. In 1995 Time Magazine reported that dowry deaths in India increased from around 400 a year in the early 1980s to around 5,800 a year by the middle of the 1990s. A year later CNN ran a story saying that every year police receive more than 2,500 reports of bride burning.

It is often said that India is fast becoming a thoroughly modern country. In terms of mobile phones per person and other consumer figures that may be so but in other ways India remains a country that holds its women in very low esteem and does nothing much to protect them against vile and extremely violent attacks by men.

One figure that shows more than most how valued women are in Indian society is that of gender specific abortions. Like the following article shows:

Around 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades because of ultrasound sex screening and a traditional preference for boys, according to a study published online in The Lancet.

Researchers based in Canada and India looked through data from a national survey, conducted among 1.1 million households in 1998, and at information about 133,738 births that took place in 1997. They found that in cases where the preceding child was a girl, the gender ratio for a second birth was just 759 girls to 1,000 boys. And when the two previous children were girls, this ratio fell even further, to 719 girls to 1,000 boys.

So, making a secret sex tape of you and your wife having sex and then blackmailing your in-laws in order to get money out of them is incredibly cheap. It’s the kind of behaviour you normally see during certain political campaigns in the USA, where people who used their parents’ money and power to dodge the Vietnam draft, then ‘swiftboat’ their medal-wearing opponents.

Still, in a country where thousands of women are burnt to death by their husbands as a matter of routine and millions of girls aren’t even allowed to be born, doing a Paris Hilton to your wife hardly even registers as misogynistic abuse.

However, this incidence and the more serious statistics do reveal the truly horrible and hardly hidden face of India. Mahatma Gandhi once said poverty was the worst kind of violence - but then Mahatma wasn’t one of India’s many burnt or aborted women & girls.

I am not sure what the outgoing Italian government was thinking of when they decided to publish the income of every Italian citizen through the Internet.

Of course, we are talking about politicians here, so there might not be any reasoning at all behind this act. Governments base their decisions hardly ever on anything that has even a passing acquaintance with rationality - or even reality.

Their policies are mostly based on a combination of popularism, fear, and the vulgar need to be seen as ’strong’. The study of politics might be a (weak) science but the politician’s instincts and actions are not informed by reason but by various superstitions ‘du jour.’

Having said all that, I suspect, like the author of the following article, that this fine example of policy making is more than a little bit informed by the ’sore loser’ principle.

Pathetic playground policies? Well, yes, but then we are talking about politicians, you know - and they are rather pathetic creatures. Pathologically so, I’m afraid:

The incomes of every Italian citizen were published on the web without any prior warning by the government, just days before it was due to leave power.

Claiming it was part of a crackdown on tax evasion, the finance ministry yesterday put details of the declared taxable income of every citizen on the country’s tax website. The site proved hugely popular. Surprised Italians, delighted at the chance to find out how much their neighbours, colleagues, and high-profile celebrities were earning, bombarded the site within hours of it going live.

Critics condemned the publication, however, saying it was an outrageous breach of privacy as the government did not have consent to make the information public. The treasury finally suspended the website last night after the country’s privacy watchdog issued a formal complaint. The tax minister, Vincenzo Visco, was quoted in Italy’s Corriere della Sera saying: “It’s all about transparency and democracy. I don’t see the problem.”

But the timing of the release of the information has been viewed with scepticism. It was one of the last acts of Prodi’s centre-left government before it leaves office next week, sparking accusations the move was motivated by spite.

Now, here’s a strange story for you:

A teen accused of plotting to blow up his high school told police that he wanted to die, go to heaven and kill Jesus, federal authorities said Tuesday.

Prosecutors argued in a federal courtroom that the statements are an indication that 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger needs a psychological evaluation.
“His conduct is bizarre,” prosecutor Buddy Bethea told Judge Thomas Rogers III, who did not immediately issue a ruling. “I think it screams out in his conduct that he be evaluated.”

Defense attorney Bill Nettles said the request was premature, and that Schallenberger was competent to help in his defense.

I can’t say I get this. If even the prosecutors think this guy is crazier than a chihuahua on crack, why would the defence hold that their client is fit to be tried?

Still, it’s a great story and it sure as Hell counters the oft-heard complaint that today’s youth is too fickle, lazy & unfocused and has no ambitions at all.

You can say a lot of things about young Ryan Schallenberger but in wanting to kill Jesus - even though he would not be the first one to accomplish this - he certainly showed enough ambition.

One could question his tactics though. Wanting to go to Heaven in order to kill Jesus seems to be more practical than to hang around on earth waiting for the Man to finally come round for that much touted but much-postponed Second Coming. If you want to kill someone being pro-active won’t hurt - and yet, I am no theology student but it seems that (apart from a few moronic jihadis) not many people would think that blowing up a school would be the shortest way to Heaven.

Ah well, maybe young Schallenberger will come up with a more realistic plan the next time round.

Or wait… maybe he already has! maybe that’s why he told his defence team that he needs to stand trial. Perhaps he wants to go to jail rather than a nut house because it’s a well-known fact that many people in jail find Jesus there.

As Baldrick would say, “My lord, I have a cunning plan!”

So, we can finally close the book on one very depressing bit of history:

Scientific tests have confirmed that remains found in Russia last year belong to the last tsar’s male heir and his daughter, who have been missing since the royal family was executed in 1918, officials have said.

Testing on DNA samples conducted in a US laboratory proved the remains were those of Tsar Nicholas II’s 13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, and daughter Maria, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region where the family were killed.

“We have received full confirmation that [the remains] do belong to the tsar’s children, so we have found the whole family,” he said.

That should mean that we won’t hear any more cheap Dan Brown type of stories & theories about the missing royals and their adventures after they escaped from the Communists.

Sadly enough, this latest bit of research shows that there were, as most of us already expected, no survivors. Which shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The Soviet authorities were incredibly incompetent in almost all things that had to do with normal government but they were extremely good at killing the people they wanted to be dead.

We now know that among all the millions who were killed during the Soviet era, we can now include the whole of old Russia’s royal family. One could say their role in their country’s history was such that we shouldn’t spill many tears for them - and it’s true enough that the Czars were also quite good at spilling the blood of their subjects. Still, it’s a sad little tale: the shabby murder of a whole family, children included - in the dead of night, hidden from view.

Well, hidden from view, at the time: not hidden from history itself. Dictators and mass murderers may not like this but nothing much stays ever hidden from history itself, in the long run. To the victims of history’s many foul regimes and evil madmen this may seem a very cold comfort indeed but it’s the only one remaining.

God but people can be depressingly boring and boorish at the same time:

Thirteen members of a high school lacrosse team have been disciplined for baring their bottoms to extend a prom invitation from one player to a girl. The varsity lacrosse players at Huron High school displayed the question: “Will You Go To The Prom With Me? Yes or No?” on their backsides, which they revealed during a junior varsity game last week.

Very droll, yes. Very original too.

Though I have to say the most depressing part of the story is yet to be revealed:

Carolyn Campbell accepted the invitation to go to the prom with fellow senior Kristoff Wennersten by patting the back of the player who displayed the word “Yes.”

Obviously, a match made in Heaven.

So, let me be the first to wish them a very happy future together. Also, may the good Lord grant me my personal wish never to come within a light year’s distance of them or, God help us all, their severely genetically challenged offspring.

Now, here’s a strange story for you:

Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, faces trial in the military court at the US base in Cuba for conspiring with al-Qa’eda and providing material support for terrorism. However, his lawyers argue that he was merely driving for bin Laden to earn a salary, and never joined al-Qa’eda or knew of its attacks.

A judge, Capt Keith Allred, ruled that Hamdan could send written questions to “high-value” inmates in Guantanamo asking them to describe his work and what role, if any, he played in the organisation.

That might be the oddest case of reference seeking in the history of both job description and character witness testimony. The whole thing also sounds crazy enough to be true. Mind you, since the man’s opponent in court is the US government it is hard not to give him the benefit of the doubt. When it comes to fighting terrorism the USA hasn’t exactly proven to be a knight in shining armour, or anything even close to competent.

I have no idea when this guy was Bin Laden’s driver but I assume it was before the 9/11 attacks. Afterwards, there haven’t been all that many occasions for the Sheik to take the car out for a spin. So, if he was Bin Laden’s on the road Jeeves, he might have been unaware of what this bearded Bertie Wooster was plotting.

That he is still alive could be seen as another bit of proof for his innocence. There are not that many people around who can say, “I was merely flying that plane for Bin Laden for the money and never knew about any attack.”

Anyway, to be continued, I am sure.