All in all, life’s not too bad.

Well, it is, for millions of people but here, in the West, we already won quite a handful of prizes in the kind of lottery that does give God(s) a pretty bad name:

All of us who made it here didn’t have mothers who died from complications stemming from clitoridectomy and/or infibulation or who were stoned to death for looking at (let alone sleeping with) the wrong guy.

Our mothers didn’t suffer from the kind of malnutrition that makes it impossible to conceive or carry a baby to full term…

… and we, before we were born, weren’t aborted because we were girls…

… and, when born, we didn’t almost immediately die from any number of perfectly preventable diseases, or from hunger, or from polluted water, or from ‘precision’ bombardments…

… and we weren’t shot or maimed because we were girls who wanted to go to school, or blown up in school buses because we were Jewish, or shot dead for throwing stones at heavily armoured soldiers.

On the whole, most of us who were born in the West have been luckier than billions of others - now and during any other time in history. Not because we are more deserving than our fellow human beings but because we weren’t born in any of the way too many Hell holes that did and do and will, most probably, always exist on planet earth.

(Thinking of that doesn’t make me turn to any God: All I can picture here really is some smart-dressed, smart-arse TV presenter, smiling like Satan and shouting, “YES! It all really IS about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION…!!!”)

Anyway, I know that not everybody in the West has an easy ride. Hell, Hell, ask the Fort Hood victims and their family members. Ask any parents whose young children, one day, simply disappeared. Ask the families of those who died in drive-by shootings. Ask the women who were raped (and then raped again by the criminal justice system.) Ask the children of addicts and sexual abusers. Ask the parents of the children who are bullied or ended up on death row…

Wherever you will have human beings you will find these man-made Hells and horror stories. We are truly and fundamentally flawed…

… and yet, I do think that most of us, here in the West, complain much too much – and you don’t need to be religious to understand that it truly is a sin not to count your blessings.

You wouldn’t think so though, if you listened to the endless moaning, the petty jealousies and shallow cravings of people who have homes and families, who have food and clean running water and central heating; whose fridges and local supermarkets are filled with the kind of riches the vast majority of people will never be able to afford or even imagine.

In Europe, we don’t have Thanksgiving Day. Today, in North America, it’s about midway between Canada’s TD, which fell on the 12th of October, and TD in the US, which will be on the 26th of this month.

Still, let’s try and be a bit more thankful for all the things that we in the West so casually, and often so gracelessly, enjoy – and let’s all at least try and remember to do this a bit more often than once a bloody year, perhaps.

(End of sermon)

My thought of the day comes by way of Hilary Mantel’s astonishing novel, Wolf Hall.

It’s an old Petrach quote.

A fitting end to this beautiful book - and quite appropriate for these dying stages of the ‘naughties’. A moniker that is deserving of  an even more brutal & painful fate than the one Thomas More suffered.

Anyway, here goes:

“Between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. We are always dying - I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.”

Nice one…:

“One in 20 children, aged 9 to 15, surveyed believed Adolf Hitler was a football coach, not the leader of the Nazi regime.”

Of course, many of our more populist newspapers will see this as yet another bit of proof that schools in England are beyond even the whitest shade of pale…

… and, for once, they’d not be much wrong: The educational system in England (and in Holland as well, I might add) is, most probably, fucked beyond repair – not unlike a (now sadly flattened) guinea pig that’s been gang-banged by a frat pack of drunken elephants.

Still, it’s not all bad news.

I mean, this survey does show that, despite the efforts of these same tabloids…

… despite the self-centered greed and fears of a growing number of Europeans, wishing the rest of the world would leave their continent well enough alone and voting, en masse, for quick-fix, right-wing parties…

… and despite illustrious alumni like the Pope…

… the Hitler Youth movement doesn’t seem to be doing all that well in the come-back tour department.

Of course, it’s understandable that both the ’so-many-to-so-few’ and the neo-Nazi crowd will be a bit shocked by this lack of historical knowledge but they should be able to get some comfort from the fact that it was not a personal vendetta against their (somewhat differing) role models.

I mean, most Western kids, at that age, if so asked, would probably state that Jesus Christ was just some guy who once was in bed with Madonna.

These days, ‘cultural relevance’ has as much to do with product placement as anything else.

‘Product placement’, that is, as in ‘The ability to place – or recognize – a product.’

Call it one of the joys of consumerist capitalism.

I was reminded of that when I read another column by the ever delightful Caitlin Moran, of the Times, in which she mentioned a sweet, called Haribo.

Originally from Germany – but a disgrace to the taste buds wherever it travels – it seems particularly (and inexplicably) popular in England. (I could have understood it if this loathsome sweet had been a hit in Scotland. I mean, they deep fry Mars bars there…)

Anyway, I was thinking of mentioning and linking to her column when I started to ponder over this whole brand recognition issue. Most of the people who visit this blog come from the USA and I had no idea if they (or the few stubbornly returning people whose address seems to be ‘Ile-de-france, Paris, France’, come to think of it) would ever have heard of this stupid sweet.

So, I Googled ‘Haribo USA’ and found a rather curious site that mentions all kinds of German products you can order in the US, amongst which dubious delights is Haribo – in bulk packages or retail packs…

… which means that I could mention Caitlin Moran’s column, without being accused of being culturally irrelevant…

… at least not because of a reference to Haribo. I do plead irrelevance to almost any other charge.

Anyway, here’s a quote from that column. It’s about Halloween – which is another cultural (if mostly commercial) artefact that has travelled quite well:

“[G]enerally, though, I like the idea of Hallow’een. I’m a former Goth who likes Haribo, and is thrilled by the idea of accessorising with flashing horns. The over-all concept sings to me on a fairly profound level.”

Talking of brands that do travel well, the Beatles have gone further and conquered more than even the love child of Genghis Khan and the Mexican swine flue could have dreamt of…

… which is not quite an excuse for silly stories like the following…

… but I will sign off on it, nevertheless:

“The face of the Beatles’ drummer, Ringo Starr, has been seen in a droplet of water bouncing on a lotus leaf.”

(Okay, some things ARE crappier than Haribo…)

Restaurant critic A.A. Gill is one of my favourite writers in the Times – though he’s more than merely a restaurant critic. He’s also one of the paper’s television critics and more general columnists and feature writers.

He really is a very good writer, with – as the blurbs have it – an ‘acerbic wit.’ (Blurb & sports writers truly are the sons and daughters of Homer and his ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’)

Anyway, Gill got himself in a bit of trouble, last week, when he wrote in one of his columns that, while in Africa, he had shot & killed a baboon.

The uproar was as predictable as it was fun – and I’m sure Gill enjoyed every pre-planned minute of it. He’s an intelligent man who, among other things, gets paid to comment on popular culture, so he was obviously aware of the fact that, these days, in Britain, admitting to shooting a primate will get you more rabid hate mail than if you were caught fucking your neighbour’s dog (or underage daughter.)

I’m sure Gill had a lot of fun contemplating the millions of apoplectic readers, who’d just finished his ‘I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead,’ confessional column.

Me, well…

…while I kind of like my neighbours’ cat (but not in that way…)

…and they don’t have a daughter…

…and I’ve never shot or eaten a baboon…

…I’d still be willing to ignore these and any other of A.A. Gill’s trespasses, as long as he produces lines as the one he wrote in his last column. He wrote this about a chef (whom he didn’t shoot.)

Enjoy:

“He has the naturally relaxed, unclenched, unconcerned demeanour of a New Orleans funeral band.”

Sometimes, life is kind to time-pressed, autumn-weary columnists. When looking out of the window is like hearing an endless loop of Supertramp’s Godawful ditty ‘It’s raining again’, it’s hard to think of things to write.

You read about the ‘Slumdog Millionaire director [wanting] to tackle the tale of Aron Ralston, the trapped climber who amputated his own arm with a pocketknife in 2003‘…

… and you think, ‘Good!’.

Not ‘good’ that someone is making a film but ‘good’ that someone, at some point in time, had a demonstratively worse time of it than you are having now. Thinking of someone having to saw off their arm with a blunt Boy Scout knife can be strangely comforting.

So, it’s nice when the online newspapers, occasionally, bring us bits of news that columnists and lowly bloggers can copy/paste without having to add any suave comment, bon mot or sniggering aside. Something like the following, in other words:

“Riga- In an incident that is sure to warm the hearts of news editors everywhere, a man is alleged to have bitten two people following a dog show in the Latvian capital, Riga, on Sunday, the Baltic News Service reported Tuesday. Police were called after a 27-year-old dog handler from Slovenia reacted in canine fashion when the dog he was parading failed to perform as well as he had hoped.”

Obviously, you could try to add more spices to the story broth, using this sad dog owner as a stand-in metaphor for the debt-ridden, apathic, dumbed down, celebrity obsessed people in the West, whose sense of entitlement is even bigger than their flat screen TVs…

… but why bother?

Why bring coal to Newcastle – or, to use a slightly more modern equivalent: Soldiers to Afghanistan – when the stories themselves have better built-in metaphors than any commentator can hope to make up?

What can you do but shrug when you read about ‘poppy fascists’ – and what more can you do than whisper ‘But of course…!’, when you read the following story?

“Fans hoping to catch a glimpse of U2’s free concert celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall will have - in the words of one of the band’s biggest hits - to “scale these city walls”, after organisers threw up a massive barrier to block the view for those without tickets.”

To be honest, I’d rather have my ears amputated than listen to Bono but chacun son goût and all that rot.

Anyway, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to looking out of my window, staring at the rain and contemplating how nice it would be to amputate the arms of all the members of Supertramp with a blunt and rusty pocketknife…

See you tomorrow.

(Yes, I know it’s bloody awful but I don’t see why I should be the only one to suffer here…)

(Very fucking Elton John indeed…)

Now, I don’t know why exactly but I still feel that the following announcement is ever so slightly disappointing:

“Astrologists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry took light measurements from more than 200,000 galaxies, broke them down into their constituent colours and then averaged the colours out to produce a single shade visible to the human eye. The result was beige.”

Beige…?

It’s a bit like being a little girl and dreaming of marrying an honest-to-God prince…

… and then doing so…

… and becoming a media darling…

… and having a verrrry public Paul McCarthy/Heather Mills type of divorce…

… and dying a true Hollywood celebrity style death…

… and THEN having a so-called friend recycle some damn old song about Marilyn fucking Monroe as a ’special tribute’.

Beige…

Thanks ever so much, God.

Oh, and if You want to know where You can stick our collective votive, thanks-for-the-colour-scheme candle, ask Sir Elton.

(I managed to watch for 21 loooooooong seconds…)

Okay, so someone asks you to come to his place for dinner.

Then, on your way over, you get mugged.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should sue the person who invited you to leave the safety of your home…

… or cuss him out…

… or remove him from your Christmas card list.

That would be silly – and more than a bit petty.

On the other hand, it would be rather strange to call that person and say, “I’m awfully sorry that I couldn’t make it to dinner – but I feel truly grateful that I wasn’t shot…

… so, I really, really owe you one!”

Which is, more or less, the way a 70 year-old grandmother-of-six reacted, when something similar happened to her:

“A motorist credited divine intervention after she escaped unharmed when a 65ft tree was blown down onto her car. Chris Challinor, 70, was driving to church on Sunday morning when the beech crashed onto the bonnet of her Volkswagen Polo. The front of the car was completely crushed by the trunk - meaning she would have been killed if the vehicle was just a few yards further along the road. She suffered only shock during the incident at 10.30am on Sunday and the grandmother-of-six says she is ”very lucky to be alive. I was sorry not to make it to church but I think someone may have been looking down on me after all.””

Mind you, when it comes to falling trees and divine intervention, I can’t help but feel that, on average, it’s trees  - and whole bloody rain forests – that are more in need of divine intervention than us humans ever will be.

(Of course, some trees could do with a dollop of napalm…)

(Like one of those ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots…)

Granted, I’m an inmate in a mental institution…

No, that’s not me doing the talking. Those were the opening words, spoken by the dwarfish narrator of Günter Grass’s newly translated and much celebrated novel, ‘The Tin Drum’.

Of course, they could also have come from movie producer Barrie Osborne – or, that is, you feel that he should be committed to such a place, for his own good.

As far as cunning plans go, even Blackadder would have trouble finding properly dismissive, hyperbolic similes for this one:

“Producer Barrie Osborne cast Keanu Reeves as the messiah in The Matrix and helped defeat the dark lord Sauron in his record-breaking Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now the Oscar-winning American film-maker is set to embark on his most perilous quest to date: making a big-screen biopic of the prophet Muhammad. Budgeted at around $150m (£91.5m), the film will chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings. Osborne told Reuters that he envisages it as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam”.”

Building bridges… Educating people…

Dear oh dear oh dear…

The only thing that will happen is that such a movie would unite all the mad hatters of all lunatic stripes in their loathing of such a project. Those who want to burn the Koran in the street and those who don’t mind mad Mullahs extolling the virtues of suicide bombers will finally agree on this one thing: That Barrie Osborne is a mad (Islam hugging Chamberlain type/Islam bashing Crusader type) bastard who should be very publicly hung & quartered.

One word to the wise – and, more to the point, to our $150m madman: You don’t come between a junkie and his fix…

… be they militant Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Hebrew or Atheist.

That way lies madness – and quite often a world of hurt.

Ask Theo van Gogh:

“Amsterdam - A small ceremony was due to take place on Monday to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a muslim extremist. On November 2, 2004 Moyammed Bouyeri murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh - known for his provocative stance on social and political issues.”

Better not make movies about Gods and their prophets.

Apart from anything else, you will never be able to capture the spirit of prophets & that ‘vision thing’ better than Charles Simic did – in two simple lines – in his poem ‘Old man‘:

“Visions of unspeakable loveliness
Must’ve come to you in your misery”

(Prophets make lousy celluloid heroes…)

Right, permit me to gloat for a little bit: My team, Ajax Amsterdam, just beat their old rivals Feyenoord (Rotterdam) 5-1. Ah yes, Amsterdam versus Rotterdam: The only thing these places lack is some bard giving these rivals the old ‘Capulets & Montagues’ treatment.

Well, maybe not.

I’m a big fan of Shakespeare but Romeo and Juliet has never been a play I warmed to. I prefer my teenage suicide pact to take slightly less time than a full five acts.

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Woeful, indeed.

Like Feyenoord today – though the club’s despondent fans can take some cold comfort from the fact that it would have taken longer to sit through that dreaded play.

Okay, it won’t bring them any comfort whatsoever, of course. Ah well – or, as an old Dutch sage once wrote, “Such is life and it gets sucher every day.”

5-1 though…

Brilliant!

Anyway, enough of the football. We’ll exeunt with a bit more Will. Do you know who once said the following about Hamlet?

“Well, yeah, well, we must think about bums on seats,
Bill.  Let’s face it: It’s the ghost that’s selling
this show at the moment.  Joe Public loves the ghost;
he loves the swordfights; he loves the crazy chick in
the see-through dress who does the flower gags and then
drowns herself.  But NO-ONE likes Hamlet — no-one.”

No? Then you better WATCH THIS OLD YouTube CLIP…

… and here’s another one, to round this silly column with a sleep(less night for all Feyenoord fans – okay, enough already…):

P.S.: To those complaining about the use of the word ’soccer’ in the title: Get a life…