Dylan Ratigan and Steven Hawkin...phew!

That was a close....I flicked on MSNBC trying to catch up on a bit of news, and instead got blasted by Dylan Ratigan (the MSNBC Glen Beck wannabe) using confusing (and poor) analogies about banks and government bail outs. Anyhoo, so I was about to switch off and continue contemplating my naval when Rati shouted something about next up being Stephen Hawking warning about alien contact.

There was more than the usual hint of smug in his voice and so for a moment I thought it meant that I'd be witnessing the ignominy of Ratigan loudly debasing professor Hawking, unarguably one of humanity's greatest ever minds. I guess should’ve switched off then and there, my brain police were screaming at me to 'move along now, there’s nothing to see or learn here sir'. But, it was too late, my masochistic curiosity had been piqued; how would Rati's psuedo-intellect go about defaming a real thinker?

Alas, there was no need to worry, someone on the show had advised him not to question the professor, but simply pass on his observations.

The kafuffle was over an opinion the prof had offered in a new (Discovery Channel) show of his called Into The Universe. Apparently he'd suggested that it may not be the wisest thing for humanity to try and make contact with other intelligent alien civilizations, concluding that any we made contact with were likely to be nomadic and looking to colonize a planet. Therefore it was probably best to keep quiet in the first place.

Dylan played it safe by displaying a little of the skepticism of science that is expected of all God fearing Americans. He scoffed slightly as he pointed out the shocking findings of a formula called The Drake Equation, which scientists use to work out the probability of the existence of other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way...numbers were crunched and the formula spewed out the likely number of intelligent societies as...drum roll...wait for it...10,000!

Dylan's reaction was no different to the rest of the US media who found themselves caught between a number of contradictions. Sensitive to the fact that we don't live in the 1950s anymore, they were unsure whether to laugh off the suggestion of there being other intelligent life out there or, scoff at the professor for inferring that the US military couldn't handle them if they did exist.

It's a different world today and humankind has moved on, and there's something scary about Professor Hawking speaking matter-of-factly about the existence of aliens. Furthermore he wasn't on about friendly ET types, but the nasty Mars Attacks/War of the Worlds type.

Ten fucking thousand and that’s just in our little galaxy!

Academic's butt hole stuns Bogotá...years ago

Today I watched a Sundance documentary about Bogotá, famous for Pablo , cocaine, coffee and beautiful coffee colored women on coke. Anyway, the film follows Bogotá's transformation by an unlikely force - a politician.

Back in the mid-90s philosopher mathematician Antanas Mockus was the little known and less liked vice-chancellor of the Colombian National University in Bogotá. Antanas had been minding his own business doing the stuff that unpopular chancellors did when he was confronted by an angry mob of students fed up with his too clever by half, mathy, philosophicy ways. Unable to defend himself with fancy long words as someone had taken his microphone away, Antanas did what any cornered academic would...he mooned. Or, more specifically he turned around, dropped his pants, bent over, and very deliberately spread his cheeks flashing his arse to a stunned auditorium. Hours later the evening news had begun broadcasting his butt hole to a wider audience and within a matter of days the entire population of Columbia had become acquainted with his sphincter.

His bosses at the university weren't best pleased with his actions and despite protestations from his mother (whom Antanas still lived with) forced him to resign as vice chancellor.

So, without money, a job, or much prospect of finding one, the man notorious for flashing his butt at a bunch of students decided to run for election as Mayor of Bogotá and launched his campaign from the small apartment he shared with his mum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fair and open-minded people of Bogotá chose to give poor Antanas a second chance and consequently elected him to office.

Early 90s Bogotá was a place consumed with violence. Controlled by crooked cops and politicians on the take, the city had become grid locked with corruption, but Antanas had other ideas.

First, he took on the culture of violence head on by convincing people that it was better to be a ‘carrot’ than a coke baron, which makes complete sense to me. Then, he moved against the city’s traffic congestion by handing out ‘thumbs up’ J stickers to drivers that yielded at traffic lights, and ‘thumbs down’ L stickers to those that didn’t. Sure, some would say that Antanas was struggling to shake the teacher in him, but who wouldn’t want to have a thumbs up sticker, eh?

Next, in the flowery firing line were Bogotá’s traffic police who were renowned for taking on the spot bribes. Mayor Antanas approached the city council with an ingenious plan, he would fire the lot of them, and naturally only re-hire those who’d agree to enroll in mime classes….yes, mime classes….mime, as in that form of painted face entertainment considered by most to be even duller than clowning, and thought to have only one performer that French bloke (the late) Marcel Marceau. Still, Bogata’s council members could see its brilliance and wasted no time voting the Mayor’s plan into law.

Most cops simply couldn’t face explaining to their wives that the bribe money had dried up, and that they’d getting home later than usual because of night school. After years on the take in one of the toughest urban environments on earth their badass gun wielding husbands were gonna enroll at school to learn how to mime around make belief sheets of glass. Of course, with the vast majority of the force refusing to go along with the Mayor’s demands, Bogotá was left with no traffic department.

Now, most industrial cities would be brought to its knees if its entire traffic department quit, but the core of Mayor Antanas’ plan was to replace the fired cops with professional mime artists. Immediately the media and the people saw the simple genius of the plan - professional mime artists needed no training, so they were a silent force ready to roll. What’s more, the fact they needed no training meant the city would save shit loads of cash too.

Within days the new and newly trained old police were at work on the mean streets of Bogotá pretending to sit on seats that weren’t there.

Mayor Antanas had managed to transform Bogotá from a vibrant, dangerously exciting city full of life and death to a bourgeois academic’s idyll of quiet streets policed by silent mimes, with fucking loads of clean parks, and silent libraries full of books about pottery, civil engineering and Ghandi, and it all started with some do-gooder math teacher flashing his shitty crack…..unbelievable, but TRUE!

and here's Antanarse...


Filmed by Andreas Møl Dalsgaard Bogotá is part of The Danish Film Institute's Cities On Speed series.

Yeah well I'm back now....

So, I admit that was a long sabbatical, but after all the excitement of the election I felt I needed a rest, but I tell you 18 months of keeping schtum is plenty long enough, and it’s time to get that great big gob of mine yabbin' agin'.

Of course a lot has changed over the last 18 months or so...

and I’ll get into the meat and two veg of it over the coming weeks, and months. But, I thought I'd briefly touch on a couple of things I’ve found pretty dissapointing.

First, is the ‘win at all costs’ culture that's poisoned the Democratic Party, and what’s left of its base. Democrats seem to think that getting elected is what's important, and have forgotten what it is we’re supposed to do once that happens. Honestly, I feel like I was duped into helping elect fucking George 'H' Bush Mark II become president.

There’s a Pant’s diary I wrote a couple of days after BO’s election, which just about said it all for me. I’d become concerned over (then) Senator Obama’s vote on HR6304 (FISA) and I was reminded of the let down I felt after the Blair election 12 years earlier, the diary was to serve as a gentle warning that if something looked, smelt, and tasted like republican policy in all likelihood it was republican policy. The rah-rah-O-ba-ma brigade over at The Daily Kos took great umbrage at someone daring to suggest there may be similarities between the two, but I wonder how they feel today?

Second, is fucking Twitter, did we really need more stupid invading our consciousness? Don't we get enough of the inane ramblings of our fellow man? I mean do we really need to know what the fuck some idiot says they were doing five minutes before?

Twitter appeals to our very worst traits, and has given birth to a whole army of people who believe the rest of humanity will be better off for knowing what they’re doing. It appeals to the over inflated egos of everyone from frustrated housewives to their soap star politicians, all doing their best to fill that endless void of virtual space with snippets of themselves and their pointless existence.

I guess the launch of Myspace did something similar when it inspired anything with a heartbeat to form rock bands. It was as if users were in a fierce competition to form the most meaningless rock band in history. Now, Twitter is doing the same for….I really don’t know.

Perhaps the single most unpalatable moment for the burgeoning Twitter was during the very real, and now very forgotten Iranian people’s opposition to their election results. The world was forced to bear witness to a nation's dream of freedom being snuffed out 140 characters at a time.

Twitter acted as virtually the only media outlet for the opposition. But, within hours any genuine information from the ground was being drowned out by a chorus of disinformation perpetuated by Iranian government and advice on organizing urban revolts offered up by US based TWATs (I hope I have the correct term for Twitter users!) sat in their comfortable armchairs and reading from their copies of the Chuck Norris Xmas '92 Survival Handbook.

That's just great Canada!

You pump that greenhouse crap out, you just pump it out...

Black hole confirmed in Milky Way...WTF!

So, I get back home, check into the BBC site, and screaming from the top of their front page is this little nugget...



I guess it's a relief we're in the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy then, phew!

STOP PRESS! scumbag Wall Street banker keeps big sack of cash!!!!

For anyone who's spent the past couple of months comatose, or just in case this happens to be the only surviving chip of silicon referencing the great Wall Street theft of ’08, then for the sake of historical record here's the lowdown (btw if you happen to be reading this eons from now, and your world still debates whether they can afford to provide universal health care, buy an apple)...

Recently, Congress, supported by leaders from both major parties, voted to give nearly a trillion dollars to one man, an ex-Wall Street banker, after he promised to get the struggling US economy moving again. There's a recent picture of him taken during his morning cash inspection just below

He told the people in Congress, some wore old-fashioned wigs, that it was all about credit, that Americans just love using other people's money to buy things, but the banks just hate it, when they don’t get their money back, and have threatened to stop playing. He told them that he had a plan for getting it back to how it was, he asked everyone if they could remember the good times a few years ago, when teenage drug dealer’s could qualify for a mortgage...they could and nodded in approval.

Then he told them his plan to get things back to normal; he would do this by giving money to banks so the banks would start lending money to people again...they thought this sounded like a great idea and they nodded their approval.

Then he asked that they all come closer, and he lowered his voice and told them some really, really scary shit. It was all so scary that he told them they could never tell anyone else, especially the people whose money he wanted them to give to him. He told them that if the public knew, out of sheer panic they would immediately run into the street and shoot themselves and other people, and that would be bad for the economy...they nodded in agreement, this was truly shocking and the public should never know.

To Congress, whose passing of legislation was normally known to be slow, and could be measured in geological epochs, the consequences of the banks not being around to play anymore were so shocking, that they actually gave up a Saturday so they could look for a pen and sign the massive check.

Call me old fashioned, but ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?

This is the very same bunch that needed to see a couple of thousand American soldiers die before they’d give the military a few grand to buy some metal to glue onto their cars, palpably they’d wrongly assumed that Baghdadi weaponry had not moved on from the thousand thieves and their curvy swords and daggers.

Now, all of a sudden they're happily handing over trillion dollar checks to some bloke, so that he could give it to a few banks, so they'd stay alive by charging taxpayers fees for lending them the money the taxpayers had given them to lend back to them....Uh?

I mean the deal doesn’t even make sense in the first place!

Why the fuck would taxpayers want to give banks money, just so they could loan it back to taxpayers at a profit? Surely, if they wanted to work along those lines they could cut out the middle man and have the government give them the money directly, for free! That would get the fucking economy rolling, right?

Not surprisingly none of it happened – well, actually that’s not entirely true, none of it happened except for the bit where Congress gives all the money to the bloke who'd put the shits up them. That bit happened, but not a jot of the other lot; no loans, banks didn’t start playing again because of it, in fact not a single loan was made to a taxpayer as a result of it, the bloke who said he would save the economy didn’t save the economy, and he didn’t get it running smoothly again. Apparently there was no oversight, just heaps of hindsight, if only they’d shown a little foresight.

Now, we have to read through the acres of newsprint and online rants and raves and radio commentary from fat blokes with ponytails complaining that they could see this coming, as if they were some kinda fucking guru for spotting it! Fuck me, congratulations you joined the ranks of the rest of the world, sorry strike that, the rest of the world got it right they bought preferential stock on behalf of the taxpayers, but of course that would be idealogically wrong. It’s ok for share holders and management to make money off crap companies begging for handouts, but you can’t have the public doing the same, I mean the thought of it, the people actually profiting in some way from corporate America, where would it end, the next thing you know they could have safe bridges, roads, who knows maybe even universal health care, oh no, that's right, that would be idealogically unsound...phew!

So, just as we thought it turns out that the Wall Street bail out was all a big scam, just so Paulson, Bernanke and Bush could divy up the swag between them and their mates.

Though I have to say their timing was quite brilliant, I mean this is supposed to be a free market economy and 'Dubya' is supposed to be Ian Ideologue himself, yet he managed to scare all those cowardly lefties, and even a few of those crazy GOP wingnuts, who couldn't give a shit about bailing anyone out least of all a fucking banker.

A few of them must've been in on it, which is why so few of them backed it in congress, just genius!

He even got the sparklier than sparkly Prince of Darkness to vote for it, and go on record half a dozen times saying how much he dug Paulson and Bernachy and how
thrilled he was that he had managed to get oversight included into the bill, and didn’t he do ever-so-well. The very same oversight that didn't see Paulson stuffing his underwear and socks with wads of $1,000 bills as he left the office every night. So, as a parting gift from the Bush administration he's left BO right-royally fucked, up shit creek without a paddle, as we say sans Inglaterre!

Apparently there is one piece of good news Bloomberg News reports that Bush has decided he's not gonna try and hit up Congress for another $350 Billion!!!!! Can you fucking believe it? He actually has the audacity to speak the words like it’s his choice, the man is a scumbag of the highest order, but if the democrats only reward bitter political shysters like Lieberman what hope is there of ever seeing justice served regarding the Bush administration?

He doesn’t even need to bother courting anymore controversy by offering a blanket pardon for himself and his staff, he doesn’t need it! Obama’s administration are not interested in seeing justice served. Though knowing Bush he'll probably do it just to rub it in....what a prize wanker!

Pants Entertainment News…Lieberman/Palin - The Affair, The Movie and The Interview - Maher on Clooney…

Rumors of a parallel Universal studios picture to be directed by Ocean’s 13 star George Clooney focusing on the 2008 election battle between the Prince of Darkness and that old duffer whose name we forget, have reached fever pitch. Not wanting to be left chasing this bandwagon as it screeches out of town, the Pants entertainment crew got right on it, soon discovering that the movie was far more than mere feverish rumors.

Now, hot off the Pants press we can inform the world that not only is the picture a work in progress, but that it features a salacious affair between Senator Joe Lieberman and Governor Sarah Palin. What’s more, we can confirm that superstar Clooney has wasted no time securing two of America’s favorite TV personalities to play lead rolls; none other than SNL’s Tina Fey is to play Governor Palin, no doubt borrowing heavily from her popular TV characterization, and the steamy senator is to be portrayed by his comedic doppelganger Bill Maher.

The movie will be a departure for standup funnyman Maher as he tackles his first serious acting roll, and Pants wanted to find out more.

Maher on Clooney, and himself
Maher told Pants....

‘This was one opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss’

Maher, well known for holding ‘alternative’ political views, went on to tell Pants about his admiration for Julia Robert’s ex...

‘I’ve always admired George’s work, he’s a realist, always challenge the audience, he’ll bravely take them to places they don’t really want to go, sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming, with laughter of course!’

He talked a little more about the departure to serious acting.

‘I’ve had a burning sensation in my pants, no, no just kidding…you see, I can’t stop myself sometimes. Anyway, no, where was I, oh yeah, for years now I’ve had a driving desire to play a serious roll, you know, so my fans can really see me....see the real me. They know me as the guy next door who’ll have them in fits of laughter with his razor sharp wit, one of the few celebrities that can really understand them, who knows how normal people think, and what they find funny, but now they’ll see that there’s more to me than just a brilliant comic mind. Did you know that Chaplin had an IQ of over 200?’

We told him that we didn’t, but that it sounded exciting. We asked about his relationship with George and whether he’d ever had the pleasure of meeting Senator Lieberman.

‘ George and I go way back, we met when we were only commanding a couple of million in fees, but now, well now George is off the scale and me, well I’m doing very well thank you very much. Man, they were fun times, struggling can be good for the soul, we worked hard to get to where we find ourselves today, at the top of the celebrity food chain. So, that’s good, and....yeah, I haven’t met Senator Joe yet, but George says he’s gonna hook that up, I think it’ll be important to meet, I mean I’ve been working off bare bones.

‘George had a very specific idea about how he wanted Joe played, but it’s like I said to George it’s not in the look, what people don’t realize is that I don’t look anything like him, it’s all an illusion, it’s because I can do the little things right, you know get his idiosyncrasies down,once you’ve nailed those you can play anyone convincingly, in fact, for me it’s not like playing them, I become them.

Imagine how it’ll all look once we’ve done the mask fabrication and makeup and stuff -- you’ll not be able to pick us apart.’

We mentioned that we hadn’t heard about any mask work, when we pressed a little further he admitted that there may not be a mask, because his idiosyncrasies are so good;

‘George thinks we may be able to get away without one. You know I have Joe down that well, can you imagine, me? I mean me, passing as Joe Lieberman, it’s hilarious he’s gotta be at least a good three years older than me as well, just brilliant, sometimes I just love being me, I just…just love it...’

We contacted George Clooney’s office but he wasn’t available for comment, however, we did subsequently receive this email regarding the movie and the casting...

‘Mr Clooney is extremely keen on realism, he feels attached to this project and wants to get it right. He’s of course aware of Tina’s phenomenal ability to play Governor Palin, and felt that she was a shoe-in. Regarding Bill, well, as anyone can see, he’s the senator’s doppelganger, the likeness is so startling that Mr. Clooney was willing to take a flyer on Bill’s acting, although we know Bill is the consummate professional and will commit himself to the work.’

So look out for Palin/Lieberman, but it’ll be sooner than 2012!

For more from parallel Pants, wait...