Editorial: Ninth of May 2011

The hills heard the jive of Osama’s footsteps

Long ago, the hills were alive with the sound of bombing but all that carnage never once got near him, he escaped from that hideout as a large bounty was placed on his head.

Time and again we heard as a refrain, how shall we solve a problem like Osama we cannot say what it took to climb every mountain, search high and low, follow every highway and every path you know.

We imagined he was high on a hill in a lonely goatherd but when he was found every single brand name of interest showed up in a room. Cola, the inadvertent pastime of Spanish pajero, wild oats, Vaseline, milk, conjugated posteriors of popular football and ganja make up a list that was bordering on unlawful and criminal.

The realisation dawning when the slug hit, when the head split and when we were feeling had, we simply remembered his favourite things and then we don’t feel so mad.

Dreams and things all up on a tight rope

I have not been to a circus in a long time and when I’ve had the opportunity to I have avoided the secluded kiosk of Madam Safira who was a compendium of futures you will believe if you crossed her palm with a coin that once had huge value.

Close to the hedge, the well-oiled castors just made you wish she was close to a steep incline that brought her bets on your life to a terminal end.

It would appear Clive Capital, the largest commodity hedge fund closed their palms to Madam Safira as her abode careered precipitously down to the rocks and between palms $400 million fell through the cracks because the oil price went south.

One has never been sure if the one-armed banditry of hedge funds who are no good at making things but are geniuses at making things up are better than Madam Safira at making dreams up, in all cases, one is well advised.

Impossible dreams of extreme privacy

As dreams go, the holy book tells a story of an albeit strange dream had by a king who knew he had this recurrent nightmare but refused to tell his dream and expected someone to both remember the dream and interpret it too.

Enter Daniel a gifted seer whose ability just transcended anything possible it was out of this realm at least that is what we thought when the judges in the UK put super-injunctions on the press.

The analogy is however apt, imagine having to interpret a dream you have not been told and compare that to someone taking an injunction out on the publication of a story and then an injunction on preventing information of that injunction being made public.

One can only wonder to what purpose as the same persons would willingly make public their saintly acts but seek the cloak of extreme privacy in terms of their sinful deeds.

We are only entitled to a single story of good behaviour and amazing role models, people without fault or blemish that they be demigods at worst and because they can pay for it we are none the wiser that they are also flesh and blood doing the unspeakable, the unmentionable, the reprehensible and the atrocious – but we cannot judge until Twitter tosses up the whole travesty and the law is left looking like an ass, once again.

Acknowledgements

Inspirations for this editorial are drawn from the lyrics of the Sound of Music in expressing a view about Osama bin Laden’s favourite brands courtesy of the Rogers and Hammerstein Organisation that owns the rights, from news that a commodity hedge fund lost $400m as reported by the Financial Times and the revelation that a Twitter user had revealed the murky details of super-injunctions as reported by the BBC.

The second chapter of the book of Daniel tells of the dream of king Nebuchadenezzar.