Merry Lobster

...and a very fatuous new year!

Comparative Religion

If you love something, set it free.

"If you love something set it free, if it comes back to you it's yours, if not it never was".

It's a popular saying but not always practical advice. For instance, I loved a rabies-infected dingo.

The place I set it free was a kindergarten. There were some interesting finger-paintings that day. Mainly due to the blood. Oh so much blood.

In a sense, that dingo did come back to me. When the police finally arrived they shot the shit out of it and brought me the carcass to dispose of. It was very upsetting - I loved that crazy thing. And I'd just seen several infants savagely bitten to death.

The other sense in which it came back was less physical. It's still with me today - law suits, class actions, fines, restraining orders and medication. It lives on not only through my memories but also in my dreams. In that sense my beloved dingo will always be with me.

Good night, sweet prince.

Welcome to Monday

So here we all are again, doing what we do, wondering what it's all about and inevitably in some kind of pattern. Whether its working for the man, waking up from the 5th hangover this week, or trying to get motivated enough to do whatever it is you do on a Monday... here we all are again.

And then all of a sudden something happens that shifts your perspective. Sometimes it's subtle like a personal epiphany when looking into an intricate and beautiful flower, and sometimes its not, like when you get hit by a car. Either way, you start to wonder why you are, where you are and whether you've been there for too long.

Part of this perspective is the realization that, if there is an omnipotent force guiding the direction of your life, that force has designed the entire universe to fuck you up. Starting with the very fabric of the cosmos, this all-knowing prick has woven a tapestry of death to ensure that any life that does occur is doomed to fail. Black holes dominate the universe and the vast majority of the rest of it is scorched and frozen into submission. The tiny, amazingly irrelevant areas where the right conditions exist for life are tempered by constant bombardment of radiation and rocks continually resetting these small remnants of life into cosmic retardation.

If that wasn't enough, sentient life is then vexed with the cruel and competitive chaos of evolution, forcing it to remain on-gaurd at all times lest it falls victim to its neighbors ever increasing advantages. The biological arms race continues pitting everyone against everyone vying for a niche on the unstable, irrelevant rock they inhabit.

It's of little consequence when the super-monkeys begin to assert their intellectual dominance on their rock, Earth. For while it is somewhat protected by big brother Jupiter and big sister Saturn's big fat gravity shield, the planet flips between extreme climates periodically plunging its inhabitants between ice-ages and scorching droughts like some kind of divine joke. The weakened survivors are forced to regroup and rebuild.

But wait, there's more! The super-monkey's don't get the joke at all. So enamored are they that they begin to believe the omnipotent sky-father has a favorite group of super-monkeys and has been trying (in vain no less) to smite ethnic monkey groups, thereby delivering the promised rock to the deserved group of super-monkeys. Despite being of the same genetic and mythological descent the monkeys are hardwired to fuck each others shit up.

Because everyone and everything is intelligently designed to fuck each others shit up, the super-monkeys turned to technology to help. Vehicles, industry, personal weaponry and energy go some way to stemming the tide of death. That is, until you get hit by a car, crushed by an industrial robot, capped in a drive-by or electrocuted trying to fish your toast out with a fork.

Then one day you wake up, and someone or something is fucking with your shit again, and you get the joke. In fact, it makes you laugh... big whooping, full belly laughs of recognition as you look into the eyes of universe on Monday morning and you don't twitch. You feel connected, as one with the star dust of the ages - you take that wager, and grin. "Bring it on".

I'm still alive, despite indications from the universe that perhaps I should not be.

I got a lift home yesterday. About 3 minutes after getting in the car, the driver of the car I was in ran a red and we got hit by another car. It wasn't a big crash and everyone was okay.

I was in the rear pasenger seat, in the door where the impact happened. I didn't even know what was happening until an instant before the collision, when I thought "there shouldn't be a car there".

Things like this make me tend to appreciate the fact that I'm alive and well, walking around, and not in a hospital bed with a breathing tube down my throat and a catheter in my dick.



Was it a message from God? Or the Universe?

I think it might be - and I've got a message for the God/Universe - FUCK YOU. Come and get me. As long as it doesn't involve tubes in sensitive areas, I'M WAITING, PUSSY.

In other news, I am quitting smoking today, fulfilling my fatuous claim that I would give up the instant that John Howard lost the seat of Bennelong. Today Howard will officially lose his seat, and I will officially quit. I'll keep you posted. If I haven't chewed off my own arms, or been smite by God for my goading.

Teacher gets Whipped for Poor Choice of Teddy Bear Name

A British teacher in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, let her students name the class teddy bear, the students call the bear 'Muhammed'; Islamic hilarity ensues.

Something hasn't sat quite right with me with this whole story.

The incident happened at Unity High School. And the students were 7 years old. They must be some smart students. A little too smart if you ask me. The students conspire together to name the bear 'Muhammed', tell the authorities and BAM jail time for teacher. That's got to be a few days out of work, and now they don't have to write some stupid diary entry for the bear.

So we've got an entire class of 7 year old who have somehow been fast-tracked to high-school, and now they've been set the mundane task of writing diary entries for an inanimate object.

It would be easy to blame the students - as it is clearly their fault - and suggest that all the whipping and jail time be divided equally amongst the class. But I think there's something else going on.

Via the Fatuous network I've managed to obtain a student's diary entry in the days leading up to Ms Gibbon's arrest:

T +1 hrs : Muhammed continues to sit lifelessly, it's beady dead eyes starting at the ceiling.

T +2 hrs : Muhammed has not moved

T +3 hrs : I was in the other room and heard a bang, when I came in to check on Muhammed all the spoons had been removed from the kitchen table. Muhammed apparently had not moved. I went looking for the spoons and when I returned they were back on the kitchen table. Muhammed seemed to be smiling.

T +6 hrs : Muhammed has not moved, though his eyes follow me. I feel them burrowing into my soul and it sends cold shivers up my spine.

T +8 hrs: Still no movement from Muhammed. I think I heard him whisper something, but it was like the whisper was coming from inside my head.

T +14 hrs: In the early morning I was drifting in and out of a troubled sleep, dark silhouettes of bears floating around the room. I could smell and taste blood. My head was heavy, and my skull felt like it was full of a thick, viscous liquid. Muhammed's voice was quite clear. My brains have turned to honey and he was telling me over and over again to break open my skull, letting the honey pour over him, which would increase his power.

He also asked that if it wasn't too much trouble I should violently slaughter that bitch Ms Gibbons, which seems like a bit of a shame because she's a pretty cool teacher.

T +15 hrs: I'm glad this stupid assignment is over, this bear is really giving me the shits. Prophet indeed.

Who knows how deep Muhammed psychotic influence extends? Where is Muhammed right now? He could be sitting right behind me, feeding me ideas. No one is safe. Especially not that bitch Ms Gibbons.