Monday, April 23, 2007

Geldof to Bono: It's on Bitch!

The media would have you believe that Bono from U2 and Bob Geldof from that “I don’t like Mondays” song are best friends. But it’s actually a little known fact that if Bono and Bob Geldof really were best friends, the combined might of their self importance would actually tilt the Earth off its axis and plunge our little celestial globe into the sun.

No, the reality is that Bob Geldof and Bono are actually bitter arch rivals locked in an eternal epic battle for the title of “World’s smuggest Irish rock star turned shrill do-gooding prat”.

For a while now, it has been pretty obvious that Bono is kicking Bob Geldof’s arse. While Bob Geldof was re-releasing
that preachy Chistmas song yet again, Bono has been flying around telling literally everyone in the whole world how shit Africa is. While Bob Geldof was off guest starring in Spiceworld: The Movie, Bono was winning every Q music award they could conceivably throw at him. And while Bob Geldof was reviving the careers of tired has-been rockstars with all those Live8 concerts, Bono was being compared to the greatest musician of all time.

But now, Bob Geldof is fighting back. According to
Reuters, Geldof announced this week his intentions to catalogue all of human existence in partnership with the BBC: “The Dictionary of Man website will be a limitless repository of content, an immense digital catalogue of all current human existence and an enormous resource for the exchange of ideas and information.”

Admittedly, this idea actually sounds pretty cool…that is, it would sound cool if it was headed by, you know, an actual anthropologist or something rather than just some stylishly unkempt rock star who wrote one crappy hit song in the seventies then made a whole second career for himself by self-righteously telling people much less rich than him how they should be spending their money.

Allegedly, the idea for the project came to Geldof when he heard a Governor of North Niger tell of how 300 languages were wiped out during a two year famine.


"Even though I never heard those languages, I already miss them. In these ways the lights of human genius wink out,” Geldof said, determined to outdo Bono in the wanky, glib statement department.

"Ultimately, I suppose in some ways we're also building the world's family photo album," he continued, displaying his talent for summing up extraordinarily complex concepts and ideas with nice media friendly sound bites.

He then went on about “homogenization” and “globalization” and probably lots of other big words often used badly by boring self-important liberal celebrities.

But not to be outdone Bono will be counter-attacking Geldof by living up to his reputation as a “musician” and actually produce some music.


Early reports suggest that, headed by alleged lead single the feel good sing-along “Hey everyone! Africa is shit!” U2’s awkwardly titled twelfth studio album “Making Money is Easy (just write easy listening pap then promote it for free by causing a political stir wherever you go)” will be out later this year.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Christian Groups Protest Chocolatey Wang of Christ

The Easter holiday season is cluttered with so many references to rabbits and eggs and chocolate and that episode of Vicar of Dibley where Dawn French wackily dresses up in a bunny costume and some old lady dies, that it seems we’ve forgotten what Easter is really all about: the promotional campaign for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

But Passion of the Christ has come, snatched about a zillion dollars from the wallets of a million gullible idiots enlightened filmgoers and gone and still we’re stuck with this mediocre holiday and all it’s weirdly homo-erotic statues of Jesus in a loin cloth bleeding from his wrists like some sort of half-naked middle class Emo teenager in the middle of a “cry for help”.

Now, most people I know decide to celebrate Easter by getting drunk on Good Friday then spending the rest of the long weekend lying in a puddle of drool, watching the special features on their Goonies DVDs and convulsing involuntarily every time an add for booze comes on the telly. Allegedly, other people celebrate Easter by eating chocolate eggs brought by diseased myxomatosis suffering animals and by going to Church to hear stories about a man getting nails rammed through his hands and feet.

But a whole bunch of people in the USA have decided to dispense with their usual Easter traditions in favour of shouting a lot at an American artist for sculpting a block of chocolate into a statue of Jesus’ holy piss rod and then displaying it in an art gallery.

Reports CNN: “A life-size sculpture of a naked Jesus made out of chocolate has angered a Roman Catholic organization and forced a Manhattan art gallery to reconsider exhibiting it during Easter week.

The sculpture "My Sweet Lord" by Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited for two hours each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan."

This is an assault on Christians during Holy Week," said Kiera McCaffrey, director of communications for the league, which describes itself the largest U.S. Catholic civil rights group. "They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the prophet Mohammad naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan."

What with all the angry catholics, the liberal use of the word ‘genitals’ and the references to ‘chocolate’ one could be forgiven for thinking the artist had crafted some sort of hideous sculpture of Jesus in the act of conceiving Amelie like in that Da Vinci Code movie, maybe with a bit of Screech endorsed Dirty Sanchez thrown in for good measure. But in reality, it’s just another statue of a mostly naked Jesus except unusually made out of chocolate and with a nice wink to the least overrated Beatle George Harrison in the title.

Yet it looks like this is set to become the biggest public furore over an exposed penis since the last time Harry Potter decided to flap his dong about like a Yoyo. The sculpture has already been taken down, the gallery’s creative director has quit in protest and Americans are running around shrieking the words “Free Speech” like it’s the latest catch phrase on My Name is Earl or something.

But let’s face facts people, 98% of everyone bothered by this are actually pissed off because the artist decided to sculpt JC out of dark chocolate instead of white. Yeah, you read that correctly. Which really raises the big question: where the hell is Mel Gibson on all this? I thought giving a voice to all those wacky, unspoken, latent bigotries in certain religious communities was Mel Gibson’s raison d'existence!