Wearing out the sandals on the streets of Rome.

Rome. Famous for it’s sandals and giving the world toga parties. There are a few other things but those are two biggies. So I was buzzed about finally being able to visit the place. First thing you notice is that Italians dress really well. Maybe it’s because they spent all that time wrapped in matching white sheets and now they want to make up for it.
Did you know the Romans also invented the toilet? I thought that was quite ironic because the one in our hotel room didn’t work.

We only had half a day in Rome so we went to the Coliseum. It looks really shitty but it is really old so that makes it ok. Thing is, there must have been a long period of time where the Coliseum was just shitty but not actually really old. During that time it could have been pulled down and replaced by something new but no one got around to it and then after a long time of no one doing anything, they suddenly realised that it was now really old and the whole shitty thing kind of worked in its favour. So the coliseum is really a great example to local body politicians round the world that sometimes just simply doing nothing can be good for you town.

Around the Coliseum there were men dressed like Roman soldiers that you could have you photo taken with. My daughter wouldn’t go near them till I explained to her that they were kind of like Santa in a short dress with a sword. After that she was all over them.
Skipped the Vatican but saw little pictures of the Pope for sale in souvenir shops everywhere we went. I thought a good Catholic Church souvenir would be a little jumping penis wearing a priest’s collar. I asked the lady in one of the souvenir shops if they sold anything like that but she was Korean and didn’t understand me.
Rome is a very civilized city. You go into a shop to buy your daughter an ice cream and there is a fridge full of beer. No wonder so many countries round the world submitted to Roman rule. Speaking of Roaming I’m off to Tuscany now for a 4 day tour of the locations used in that crappy Russell Crowe film where he made wine.

Tomorrow’s pirates

Back in the day pirates struck fear into the hearts of sea travelers across the globe. Black Beard, Long John Silver. These were scary men. But they must be turning in their unmarked deserted island graves now when they see what has become of their bloodthirsty terrifying tradition. I wonder how Black Bart would have reacted if someone had told him that by the 20th century dressing as pirates would be a favourite for 4 year old boys celebrating their birthdays. Rather than the wind blowing across the deck of the cake it is the blowing out of candles that happens now. Yo ho ho and another plastic cup of lemonade for little jimmy then out to the sandpit to dig for buried treasure.

300 hundred years ago it would have probably been considered in bad for a kid to have a pirate party. I wonder how little Johnny will celebrate turning 5 300 years from now? Nautical themes will always be popular, so maybe Japanese whaler birthday parties will be the big thing. Dad could turn the garage into the deck of a Japanese whaler and pour fake blood all over the floor and after a glass of non alcoholic sake the kids could play pin the harpoon on the humpback.

Lindsay Lohan Rehab Part 2

Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab so now I know of more rehab centers she has been in than movies. That is kind of sad. Not just for Lindsay but for me too because it shows I have an addiction to crap tabloids and gossip rags.

Bombing Iran. Be part of the action and buy the soundtrack.

Cost money to bomb the hell out of foreign countries and the Pentagon in an effort to soften the blow on the American tax payer without compromising the blow to the Iranians has formed a record company and they plan to release a soundtrack album to their upcoming attack.
The theme song will be a rerecording of the 80’s hit by the Flock of Seagulls ‘I ran’. Other tracks on the album may include Saturday Nights Alright for fighting but this depends on the bombing happening on a Saturday. If it happens at the start of the week it will be ‘Tell me why I don’t like Mondays’ but recorded by a popular Iranian singer.

The soundtrack to the war is just the start of a plethora of self-funding plans that are being implemented to make ‘War pay its way’. An exciting use of technology is the plan to install web cams on the cruise missiles to allow viewers to experience a first hand look at the leveling of Iran’s nuclear sites. ‘Go in with the first wave’ is the slogan for the cruise cams. The beauty of these little babies is they are programmed to detach moments before the missile hits. The camera then parachutes down to earth and becomes a bomblet, which will explode when the emergency services turn up to look for the charred bodies of Russian nuclear technicians in the ruins. Cruise cam subscribers will have to pay more to stay logged on for the second phase of the operation.

Another exciting project being considered is sending in CIA spy drones to scrape up radioactive debris from around the bombsites and sell it off in special radioactive proof glass boxes on EBay. Be the first guy in your office to have a piece of Iran’s nuclear program on your desk. Cruise missiles make a big hole in the ground but they don’t need to make a big hole in the American taxpayers pocket thanks to the bean counters at the Pentagon.

Baking a better world.

The French have one and the Lebanese, despite all their problems have one to.
Bread, every country has it so it must be a great source of pride to a nation to have a type of bread named after them. Kind of like the way a town feels when they get their first university. But there are a lot less breads named after countries than there are universities.
Good on you France I’m glad my great granddad and his mates and my granddad and his mates were able to help you out twice last Century. And thank you Lebanon. It wasn’t enough for you to send out thousands of your most highly trained kebab makers to feed the late night drunks of the world. You also gave us your bread. It might not be much in the way of thanks but I have written a letter to the United Nations suggesting that France and Lebanon get a 5% discount at the UN cafeteria.

Gaza Strip business opportunity

As I fancy myself as a bit of an entrepreneur I am always on the look out for new ways to get filthy rich and watching young Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers on TV for the millionth time the other night gave me an idea. Business is all about supply and demand and it seems to me that in the Gaza strip it must be getting really hard to find hand sized rocks because they have all been thrown at the Israeli soldiers by Palestinian youths. But just across the border the Israelis have the opposite problem. So here is my cunning plan. I am going to go to the Israeli Army and offer to clear up all the rocks that are littering their positions and generally making things look messy and then I am going to truck them over to Gaza and sell them back to the Palestinians who will pay good money for throw able rocks. I know what you’re thinking they are used rocks the Palestinians would pay more for new rocks. But I will market them as ‘Pre tested’ thus being able to charge a premium for them. Maybe I will put little pictures on them and make them collectable thus increasing there value even more. The Israeli army could set up a scheme where if a soldier gets hit with the same rock more than once he wins a prize like a drink holder for his jeep or a little glow in the dark star of David. Take a fresh look at the conflicts happening around the world folks. There are plenty to choose from and if you don’t make money out of them, an oil company or an arms dealer will. So get in there.

Religon and booze. And why they wont serve chicken in church.

Where can a sober well dressed man or woman get a drink at 9am on a Sunday morning with other respectable people? Church. It’s called communion and it is served with a snack. But there is a catch. The only booze on offer is red wine and you have to pretend it is the blood of Christ. And you have to imagine that the snack. A small wafer of dried bread, is Christ’s flesh. I was thinking about this because I am working on a book at the moment. The working title is ‘Christianity. The bollocks behind what probably started off as one guy with some not entierly original, but decent and simple ideas about how we can all get along better if we are nice to each other that got twisted and distorted by power and money hungry bastards who took advantage of the fact that man is basically a gullible creature who can easily be controlled by fear…… Yes I realise the title is a tad long. That was kindly pointed out by my publisher. I did it on purpose. That way when I change it they will feel like they had some input.

Anyway. Back to Communion. My parents dragged me along to church on a semi irregular basis as a kid and my early understanding of communion was that it was like halftime at the movies. A chance to have a quick drink and a snack during what seemed to be a very tedious and drawn out process. Kids I noticed were never given a drink or the chips just a hand on the head. When I asked dad why I didn’t get a sip of what I thought was cordial, he explained it was red wine. Even back then I remember thinking it seemed a little early to be hitting the hard stuff. So I wasn’t allowed the wine. What about the chip? Dad explained the chip, which was actually a wafer of bread and was impossible to swallow without the wine to help wash it down. It was only later I discovered the ghoulish back story behind the wine and bread. The wine I get. It’s red. And like xmas morning it is a legitimate excuse to drink booze in the morning. I get it. But the bread thing has always confused me. The bread represents the flesh of Christ but is that really the best they could do? Why not chicken? Isn’t that what human flesh is supposed to taste like? OK so maybe chicken isn’t a breakfast meat. Fish then. Jesus could make that appear at will so it would tie in nicely. And you could serve it cold. Churches could buy it from local Japanese restaurants. They could make it on a Saturday night and leave it for the church people to pick up on a Sunday morning. There would be a problem if there was any left over. Fish wouldn’t store as well as dried bread wafers. But I used to watch with amusement how at the end of communion the priest would finish up the last of the wine in the expensive goblet himself. I noticed he never bothered to gobble up all the left over bread. Funny that. Guess he was more of a blood man than a human flesh man. But perhaps the fish would be more to his liking. He could take the sashimi home each week and have it for Sunday lunch.

Americas aerial landscaping of Iran. Put September in your diary.

The War President has told the American people that they can expect to know if the surge is working around September. The evidence will come out that the surge has not worked not matter how much spin Bush tries to put on it. So what happens then? Bush isn’t going to admit defeat. He has publicly stated that the US won’t leave Iraq while he’s in charge. Lack of public support for the war and his Titanicesque ratings haven’t put him off. He is in this to the end. What he needs is a distraction and a chance to refocus the public’s attention on the worldwide war on terror. So I am predicting that around September is when Iran is going to get a visit from some heavy-duty made in the USA airborne ordinance. I’ve bogged about this before so I’ll try not to repeat myself. On paper it might seem crazy to provoke a new fight, the American military is overstretched as it is. But this wont be an invasion. This will be a powerful concentrated attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Think about it. Neither the Saudi’s nor the Israelis want to see Iran gain nuclear capabilities. Sure Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations will denounce the attack but behind closed doors they want it to happen. There is no way Israel will ever let Iran get the bomb but the yanks know Israel cant attack Iran because that would force the other Arab countries to side with Iran and possibly trigger a bigger middle east conflict. No. The yanks will do it because everyone wants it. And when Iran responds that will be the perfect ammunition for the Republicans to use in their assault on the 2008 presidential race.

Hardcore tourists

I love airport bars. Perfectly respectable well-dressed people can get a drink or four without being judged at any time of day. Beer for breakfast, no problem. Bar staff at airports assume you just arrived from a different time zone or you’re afraid of flying and need a little liquid aid . The other week I was at Cairo airport at 9am. Beer was the last thing I felt like that morning. I was propped up at the bar inhaling double shots of espresso. Now if a bunch of English soccer fans has walked in I wouldn’t have given it a second thought but instead, up rock two cheery middle aged South Korean couples who scanned the menu and ordered a round of Heinekens. Their hardcore efforts were offset slightly by the fact that they ordered straws for their beer but it kind of added to their, ‘Watch out. We’re jet lagged, South Korean tourists and we’re getting drunk’ aura they had about them. Now every Korean tourist I’ve ever seen has a camera strapped to his or her hand. I think they are handed out by customs when they leave the Seoul airport. But these Koreans didn’t waste valuable drinking time by taking photos. You can guarantee the pommy soccer fans would have ‘Yeah mate, this is us on the piss at Cairo Airport. Guess what time it was? Go one you’ll never guess. Guess. Go on. Go on.’ Maybe the happy Heineken holidayers had so many photos of them sinking a few early morning brews that they had just stopped keeping records of the occasion. I had my camera so I snapped of a sneaky shot. If I had been busted I would have pretended I was taking a photo of the stunning knitted cap so I could get my grandma to make me one.

Osama Bin Laden’s favorite show is the A Team

Remember the A Team back in the 80’s? They were a bunch of highly trained soldiers convicted of a crime they didn’t commit and on the run from the US Army. But they didn’t exactly keep a low profile did they. For a start they were hardly trying to blend in. Driving round in a big black van was bad enough but why Hannibal let B.A Baracas wear a Mohawk and three tons of gold round his neck I’ll never know. That aint gonna attract suspicion. And despite the fact that the full resources of the US army were dedicated to hunting them down, the A Team still found time to help out people in downtown LA every week. Sure the army couldn’t find them, but if a solo mother of one in a poor neighborhood was trying to run the burger joint her life savings had been put into, but was being forced to pay extortion money by the local bikie gang who were working for the local fat cat whose ulterior motive was to force the lady to sell the burger joint to him before the big motorway company bought the land at an inflated price, then she could find the A Team no problem. An episode of the A Team was only on for 1 hour a week and she had to find them in the first 5 minutes so there was enough time for them to help her. And every week people like her found the A Team. When you consider that it puts the hunt for Bin Laden in perspective. Watching re runs of the A Team from his remote cave somewhere on the rugged and inhospitable Afghan/Pakistan border, he must be feeling pretty confident that he’ll never be found.

Jordon’s web of intrigue.

Remember Lloyd Cole and the Commotions? Great pommy group from the 80’s. Do ya self a favor and goggle them. Anyway heard an interview with Lloyd once and apparently they were big in Portugal. The place Port comes from. Be cool to have a type of booze named after your country. Especially a classy after dinner one. But back to Lloyd. It got me thinking about celebrities begin famous in other countries and I wondered if Jordon’s manager (the big boobed chick married to Pete Andre) had ever looked into whether Jordon would be big in Jordon. I don’t know much about the country or the chick but they could do great things for each other. She could be their spokesperson at the UN. That would glam the place up a bit. She could do ads in skimpy bikinis with headlines saying ‘See more of Jordon’…… Anyway, I got bored thinking about that and then I got to thinking about how imagine if Jordon’s (the chick) Manager had been onto it and registered Jordon.com and then Jordon (the country) found out and approached them and said. ‘Give us the web site that is ours by right’ and the manger says get stuffed and then it becomes a matter of pride. The Jordanian ambassador to the UN get laughed at by some of the other ambassadors who think it is a hoot that a chick with big hooters won’t give Jordon their web site. So. Jordon send a crack squad of Jordanian secret service blokes to England to knock Jordon off. I mean this wouldn’t happen I don’t think Jordan has crack squads of secret service blokes. But I thought it might make a cool movie. I bet I can get funding from the Jordanian Film Fund Commission. All they ever get given are scripts with blokes on camels in the desert and here I am with one that has secret service guys, the Internet, a chick with big boobs and a soundtrack by Pete Andre. I’m going to call it killJordon.com

Welding for God

So I had this idea for a t-shirt it and I got my mate Jeremy to mock one up for me. Idea came to me in a conversation with another friend Chad. I don’t know many people named after a small country in Africa. If I was him I would go to Chad and demand a free holiday and I would buy heaps of souvenirs with Chad written on. His wife could wear an ‘I love Chad t-shirt, his daughter could wear a t-shirt saying ‘I come from Chad’. One other cool thing about Chad. He’s from Texas and his dad is in oil. Of course. Anyway, when Chad’s daughter was born Chad’s dad named an oil well after her. How cool is that. Anyway, so me and Chad are talking about how he is gonna do a welding course. Just for fun. Someone comes over the see him and the wife says ‘Chad is out the back welding’ I’d like to know how to weld. If anything broke round the house I could weld it. When you weld shit it stays welded. Handle comes of a coffee cup. Forget the super glue. ‘Give it to me honey, I’ll take it down to the garage and weld it.’ My daughter comes home with a school project. Say, Whales. No problem. Down to the garage and we weld up and life size whale using old car parts. So Chad is talking about his welding course. Chad’s Texan accent is hard to understand and sometime I tune out. He was going on about the shit he was gonna weld and I started thinking about an idea for a short story. This bloke who discovers god and is also a welder. So he goes off around the world welding for god. Orphanages, churches, water wells. Anything that can help people with a bit of welding. This guy wears sandals because Jesus did and monks do. But he wears a mask cause he is safety conscious. Anyway I got to thinking how the mask could have a cross instead of a slit. Then I realised that would make a killer t-shirt so I sketched it out. Still working on the short film.