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If you've never been to London, here's a simple and inexpensive way to recreate the experience in your own home.
Find a picture of Big Ben and stare at it. Take whatever money you have on you, and throw it out the window. Finally, press a yelling drunk with a shaved head and a football (soccer) shirt tightly to each ear. Before you can say Lord luv a duck, you're in Leicester Square...
I see on the news that Johnson & Johnson, purveyors of quality baby powder for baby asses of quality, is suing the International Red Cross for using its red cross symbol. Apparently they've owned it for over a hundred years, and have just been lettting the Red Cross use it. Now this is a pretty well known symbol, so I can understand them wanting there to be some clarity. But it's also a political symbol, with real meaning, and has been historically respected worldwide by warring factions (unless they're in a Balkan conflict, in which case all bets are off).
There's also the Red Crescent, of course, which is used in Muslim countries that, for various reasons, may wish to disassociate themselves from a Christian Symbols.
I think there's even a Jewish Red Star of David. But I could be wrong about that.
This isn't the first case of a cross/crescent commercial copyright kerfuffle of this kind (whew).
You may remember back when Switzerland was sued, unsuccessfully, by J&J, because their flag bore too close a resemblance to the "Alternative", or "Reverso" version of Johnson & Johnson, which was created in an attempt to cover all their business bases by selling products that make you desperately ill, and which is named, in a stroke of brilliance, Johnson & Johnson, to make it clear that it's sort of a backwards version of their company.
It will come as no surprise to many of you that I have a suggestion that may solve all of this, and that I bring to it the considerable powers of evenhandedness, empathy, dispute resolution and calm, steady diplomacy that have served me so ably in my many, many years of dealing with assorted assholes, jerkoffs, and foreigners.
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of Johnson & Johnson is a baby's butt. Upon that I think we can all agree. With that in mind, I've created the International Red Butt symbol, currently owned by no one, and which not only signifies the area to be treated, but gives a hint of the kind of symptoms that J&J's fine products can tackle in a jiffy.
I'm willing to donate this to the cause, and all I ask in return is a lifetime supply of those cool little round Band Aids that are pretty impossible to find these days.
In case you're wondering, that took me about 2 minutes in photoshop. Just think of what could be accomplished in, say, 5 minutes.
Sorry for the silence, but I've been sitting here frozen in front of my laptop for the last several days, trying to think of something to say about this series of memorial scuptures of dead babies.
I can see why some people would feel they need this, and it's moving, of course, and sad, but it's TOO sad; shrinkingly sad. Unredeemably sad. Curdlingly sad. It's not the kind of sadness that makes us feel good and clean and lifted up afterwards. There's a kind of sadness like that isn't there? Anyone?
Anyway, if there's a good kind of sadness, this is the opposite of that. Not that it's bad, or stupid; it's just sadder than it has to be, in an unending, self-reflexively miserable way. It's a Moebius strip of sadness.
I think you see where I'm going with this; I'm driving a beat up station wagon with no windshield to a trailer park in the dangerous section of Sadville, and I'm going to throw all my food and furniture out the window onto the "lawn" and then sit in the middle of the stained, stinking carpet and see if there's any beer left in any of those cans under the sink.
That kind of sad.
Of course it makes me think immediately of Martin Amis; not only because he wrote a book called "Dead Babies", but because as he moves through the middle section of what I hope will be a long, healthy and productive life, he also has begun to resemble, in a strange way, a slightly malevolent and highly literate baby.
I don't enjoy his novels as much as I used to, but I understand from talking to other parents that this is normal with kids, and it's pointless trying to hold onto these fleeting moments with children, be they first steps, first words, or first four or five novels. Sigh. They just grow so damn fast. Except, of course, for the ones who die.
Damn it, now I'm sad again.
