Lieb' vaterland magst ruhig sein! (Dear Fatherland be at peace)

According to the Telegraph World War 1 ends this Sunday when Germany will pay its final repatriation payment of £59.5 million this Sunday. This must be a huge relief for the 4 veterans of the War who are still alive (the total number of participating personnel of the war was 65,038,810). Finally all this mucky business can be put behind us and the Treaty of Versailles will be resolved amicably, well except for that small hiccup with the Nazis and all.

In case you didn't notice this was just a thinly veiled excuse to use the above picture and my personal favourite, the below picture. Hoorah for xenophobic early nineteenth century cartoons.

Wednesday Wednesday! American Conservatives Clutching At Straws

The 99 is a comic book written by Naif al-Mutawa, designed to present Muslim children with the kind of archetypal heroes that have inspired American and European children for decades, teaching them concepts of justice, morality and social responsibility. It features a mostly Islamic cast of superheroes fighting for peace in the Middle East.

It's also going to be one of the front running shows on The Hub, a new digital kids TV network launching later this year. Which, of course, has sparked controversy with many Americans, including Adrian Morgan of the organisation Family Security Matters, a right wing group who tend to get worked up every time the words 'Muslim' and 'America' are mentioned within 500 words of each other.

These patriotic souls with nothing-but-the-sanctity-of-the-American-Way at heart fear that, instead of promoting tolerance and awareness of the wider world, this show will serve to indoctrinate American youths into... well, shit, I dunno.

The headline of the article is

Meet the Muslim Superheroes who are Ready to Indoctrinate American Kids

but then the author doesn't really seem to be able to pin-point what the fuck they're being indoctrinated into. He goes on to quote al-Mutawa's story about wanting to create a show that promoted closer relations between Islamic and Western people after overhearing anti-western sentiments at a mosque.

He also says that in comic book form this whole thing wasn't so bad, because people choose to read comics, or not.

But on TV, goddamn it, that's just not the case. The TV is the omnipresent dictatorial presence in the corner of the room, and once you enter that room, well, you're gonna sit down, shut up, and do whatever it says.

Wednesday Wednesday! The Japanese are Awesome.

Dr. Hideto Tomabechi is a Japanese scientist who has harnessed the power of sound in an effort to beat one of the great challenges of the 21st century; How many ways can we find to make boobs bigger?

Because surgery, hormone treatments, excercises and specific diets just weren't enough for this man, he set about developing a subliminal ringtone that will stimulate certain biological imperatives in a woman, causing her boobs to swell. It's even been featured on the Discovery Channel, and we all know that their science is always sound.

But this man is not just a pioneer in the art of making boobs bigger, no, he's also responsible for the research that was used to de-program brain-washed members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, who were responsible for the 1995 Tokyo Subway sarin gas attacks.

Japan is responsible for many of the best things in the world, Godzilla, robots, Mario, Hot Japanese Girls, and now, pioneering, multitasking super scientists.

bad rpg!!

Wednesday Wednesday! Man Has Hangover, Country Shits Itself

On Monday night Brian Cowen attended the Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party Conference, giving a speech and then partaking in the kind of socialising that anybody who has ever been to conference, no matter what their field of profession may be, partakes in; he got pissed and had a sing-song.

Yesterday morning, Brian Cowen (pictured above in one of his more graceful moments) did a radio interview. During the interview he sounded gruff, annoyed and evasive, he answered questions poorly and gave misleading or mistaken answers. Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney then tweeted that Cowen sounded "Half way between hungover and drunk". This lead to a media shit-storm with everyone, especially George Hook, climbing atop their high horses and riding them till they exploded in a shower of moral outrage, and ill-considered political suggestion.

Now, I'm no fan of Brian Cowen's. He's uncharismatic, largely incompetent and arrogant. Add to this the fact that WE NEVER VOTED FOR THE FUCKER and you can see why I have a problem with him being Taoiseach at this topsy-turvy time of global recession.

But for fuck's sake, this is ridiculous. He turned up for work hungover. Well, shit, we've all done that. Now, I know he's not working in Tesco, that he has an important job and it was unprofessional for him to do it. I get that, but the man is entitled to a session every now and then, I will never begrudge a person that. The real mistake he made was scheduling an important radio interview for an early morning show the day after the biggest piss-up of his annual professional calendar.

Really, having listened to the interview, I can say in my opinion that he doesn't sound any more disinterested or incompetent than any other interview of his that I've listened to.

But hey, If this leads to Cowen losing his job (It probably won't), then I guess I can't really complain.

Wednesday Wednesday! Canadians Try to Make their Roads Safer. With Ghosts!

The British Columbia Automobile Association (BCAA) Traffic Safety Foundation, and other Canadian road safety organisations are starting a new road safety inititiave, using optical illusions to scare motorists into slowing down in built up areas.

An image of a young girl will be painted onto the tarmac outside a school, elongated and indecipherable to the eye until you reach a point on the road 30 meters away as you approach. At this point the image will be lined up perfectly for the human eye, and - HOLY SHIT THAT LITTLE GIRL JUST APPEARED FROM OUT OF NOWHERE!!!

Yeah, this seems like a good idea.

Wednesday Wednesday! Nerds and Musical Theatre; A Potent, Pungent, Mix.

News recently broke that the long-talked about Spider-Man musical was finally getting made. Featuring music and lyrics by U2's Bono and the Edge, it promises to be a big stinking pile of overly spectacularised shite. Presumably the pairs legendary lyrical subtlety will produce such classics as 'I can shoot webs now!' and 'my costume has two colours; red and blue'.

But it's not the only thing that will be drawing the great unwashed into the wonderful world of musical theatre in the near future. A production company is soon to premiere an opera of the story of the very first Klingon emperor, Kahless. The epic tale of Kahless and the woman he loves, Lady Lukara will be told entirely in Klingon.

Yeah, that's right, Klingon. Because what we needed was for the opera to be even harder to understand.

What gets me most about this though is the fact that opera singing is a very specific talent, and requires years of intense training and discipline. Which means that when this thing hits the stage, there's gonna be a bunch of highly trained, dedicated people posturing on stage with shitty melty-chocolate face and rejected 70s disco outfits wondering "is this truly what I've trained for? What the fuck am I doing here?', while a bunch of fat, sweaty nerds take the whole thing entirely too seriously.

Like this, but fatter.