What Boredom Has Wrought
Idle hands are the work of the devil, goes that old folk saying. When people have attained to a stage of material sufficiency where their physical (or mental) labour suffices them to a living wage they realize they have leisure time on their hands and look to be entertained, amused. We now have ample time in some societies to look about for ways to challenge our sense of amazement, amusement and credulity.We explore all the options available to us, and some of us choose to find ways to challenge our intellects, others their physical prowess. While others prefer to sit back as indolent observers, passively awaiting entertainment delivered by skilled performers; singers, dancers, magicians. Transform my life, give it meaning, I am so bored. When people lack a sense of their own potential for adventure, when they turn to the entertain industry they soon become satiated with the same-old and demand new tricks to turn their heads.
There must be a resident pyromaniac in so many people. Why else would we be so in awe of fire and combustion and the transformation of chemicals into an arsonist's wet dream? How many times, on how many stages, in how many venues have audiences gasped with appreciation and demanded yet more when entertainers flirted with that ancient element that brought us out of the stone age? Seems some people even in our modern era belong back there in the stone age.
I refer to the Neanderthals at Moscow's "911" strip club (911; some message there) watching women slowly disrobe while a stuntman-cum-barman tipped burning alcohol on himself triggering a fireball, filling the club with deadly fumes. The barman's clothing was aflame, spread to a five-litre container of ethanol and the stage caught fire. The legality of the fire show is being checked, solemnly intoned a spokesman for the Moscow division of the Russian emergency service ministry, post-blaze.
Some show that: a fluid performance, from mildly boring erotic bemusement to a hotly-fled pyrrhic conclusion. Six men and four women died in the resulting conflagration. Clubs offering ever more outlandish and extreme entertainment are in hot demand in this post-Soviet social era. That was some wild performance; the fourth accident in the past two weeks in Russia.
Plane crash, methane gas mine explosion, another fire at a nursing home, fire at a drug rehabilitation centre. Who says life isn't a challenge?
Labels: World News
posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 26, 2007
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