Here Today Gone Tomorrow

So how was your Rapture?

I had fun putting a scare into Mrs B.

Mrs B is a pretty hard case - think Sarah Palin on steroids suffering from industrial strength PMT and wearing a fright mask. But she can be credulous if something like The Rapture is repeated in the news often enough and she had been drawn in.

She says she married me for my sense of humor, and I married her out of conviction, or the possibility of getting one if I hadn't married her. I'm still not convinced you legally have to marry a girl just because you left the toilet seat up in her house on the first date.

I'm so careful about that now.
 
Ayhoo she got a shock on Saturday evening, Rapture Day, when she came out into the garden to find I was nowhere to be seen and my sole earthly garment, vacant of its occupant, on the lawn.

From my hiding place up in the tree I heard her gasp, "O-M-G,  O-M-G. He's been RAPTURED"

Ruptured would have been closer, I don't know about you but I haven't climbed a tree, naked and in a hurry, since I was about 12. Apart from our honeymoon. But it was worth the effort.

I was shaking with mirth so much the tree was swaying,  spooky, because there was no wind. Not yet anyway. But when I crammed my fist into my mouth to hold down a fit of giggles what was suppressed at one end found an exit at the other. Yea the trumpet shall sound!

Even that sulphurous blast could have passed for one of the signs and omens of doomsday if only my cap hadn't fallen off, causing Mrs B to rumble me and look heavenward.

"Hey Baldie, your end is in sight. And it ain't pretty."

With some effort I got down from the tree and Mrs B, seeing the funny side of things (she certainly laughed each time she looked up), helped by letting me stand on her shoulders and lowering me to the ground. It was just like the old days when we scrambled over the back wall to avoid her mother's visits. Ah memories!

"What's with all the goo on your ankles Baldie?"

"That's Vaseline honey, to help me slide back down the tree"

"Jesus you're weird"

It wasn't true: just in case the rapture really did arrive on Saturday night I'd smeared my ankles with Vaseline so Mrs B couldn't hold me back or hitch a ride.

Nurse! Nurse!! Quick, the screens.

Jeez! What's Gordon Barlow been smokin'? Is he about to check into the rubber room?

The brain-dump that was his blog on the shooting of Osama Bin Laden makes for worrying reading.

 

I don't see how his blog intro, using a mildly racist Irish joke, and the peppering of Dead Osama 'jokes' squares with the normally tight-assed PC credentials of Oral Gob Drown (anag.). Perhaps it was intended to leaven the over excited, nay spittle flecked, body of the post. Still, perhaps I shouldn't be judging him by his own standards.

Opinion varies on what happened, not helped by the authorities providing an initial (possibly wishfully pre-scripted) account of events that needed correcting - and then that correction needed correcting and so on.

So Osama Bin Laden is or isn't dead and did or didn't plan and commission the 9/11 attacks on NY and was or wasn't shot while armed or unarmed in front of his or someone else's 12 year old daughter who was or wasn't in the room.

To help Old Groan Brow (anag.) reconnect with reality I'll state this:

Bin Laden is dead - if he wasn't all he had to do is pop up on Al Jazeera reading that days Jihadi Forecast.

Bin Laden took credit (and hence a bullet) for stuff he may not have done because he was a fantasist and a dreamer

However, he incited the killing of civilians for political ends on many occasions and said he'd squared it with the Koran - making him a liar as well as a terrorist.  What he was all about can be read, in his own words, in media interviews he gave if you trouble to search the web.

Did he deserve to die? Well he kinda talked himself into it over the years.

Did he deserve to die the way he did? Well it was quick compared to roasting alive in one of the Twin Towers.

Should he have been killed in front of his daughter? No. And the same goes for the parent(s) of the  8 children, all younger than 12, who were killed in the planes used for the 9/11 attacks.

The American political establishment hasn't ever looked far beyond it's own immediate imperatives in pursuing 'The War on Terror' and sometimes, to the wider world, their actions come across as ill considered, breathtakingly insensitive and counter productive in propaganda terms. The Islamists are often the more subtle propagandists - doesn't make them right though.

Oft times one side acts no better than the other in any conflict but, if it's a choice of systems, I'm going for the one that has separation of powers in a written constitution, that lets you pick your God (or no God) and allows both men and women to become whatever they are capable of becoming. And I even apply that to Mrs B.

Note to Gordon: Mellow out man - try and find a nice little Merino, maybe the bleating will attract one.

A Monument to Myopia

In one episode of the UK radio comedy the Goon Show parliament debates criticisms of extravagant and wasteful spending by the government. Defending against the naysayers the Prime Minister points out that no lighthouses were built in The Strand (think Broadway in NY) last year, only a single tunnel was constructed from the House Of Commons to the The Folies Bergère in Paris and it was lit with plain chandeliers and not gold and diamond encrusted ones as originally planned.

He finishes with a flourish, "Efficiency, Gentlemen, that must be our watchword. Efficiency! No expense will be spared to ensure money isn't wasted".

The comedic hallmarks of the Goon Show, twisted logic and demented schemes are,  in the Cayman Islands, the engine of its politics. For example government 'saves' money by doing something that didn't need doing in the first place in a less expensive manner.

The $9million  'Hurricane Hilton' shelter on Cayman Brac sounds a lot like a lighthouse on Broadway to me.

Brac politics is basically family politics. The political foundation of MLA Juliana O’Connor-Connolly, whose brainchild the Hurricane Hilton is, is a large extended family that procreated an entire Brac constituency to vote her into. They vote for her, she votes for them.

Some wags say Juliana O’Connor-Connolly's twin surnames are to maximise electoral appeal on the Brac, however, more and more, you hear a shorter name, 'Juju'. And though names may be shortened to convey affection I guarantee this diminutive isn't for that.

'Juju' has especially unfortunate heathen connotations for an in-your-face type of Christian like Juliana, being a name applied to traditional West African magical beliefs.  You know witch stuff.

Wikipedia defines Juju thus:

"An object of any kind superstitiously venerated ... and used as a charm, amulet, or means of protection; a fetish".

Hmmm  -  sounds familiar.

Juliana was flaunting her 'protective' credentials, the better to be venerated, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Hurricane Hilton - groundbreaking in the sense that ground was broken not in the sense of something original happening - policians have been dreaming up these overblown, self-agrandising projects for the last two decades.

In her speech Juliana played the martyr, the target of outrageous press and blog commentary and all because of her vision to provide 'her people' with the best hurricane shelter other people's money can buy. She was above it all however going on to state:

“When one studies history, one finds that great buildings were rarely appreciated until the person who had the vision had passed on and you read about it in the obituary,”

Juilana your political vision is so shallow it could be used to calibrate a laser for eye surgery.