Bono’s Blog

Dear Rupert:

Bitchin’ beach party. You were right, next to alligator wrestling, body surfing is the ultimate extreme sport. Now that things are looking up for you buying the Wall Street Journal, I’d like to nominate myself as the new editor. I’ve got plenty of experience and big plans.

1. Make it glossy. If the brass won’t let me turn the WSJ into a pretty magazine, then each paper will come with special edition U2 autographed reading gloves to prevent ink smudges.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve never actually read a newspaper in print before. My sunglasses have a computer installed so I can read the BBC online while shaking hands with AIDS victims or when we have to play songs off Pop during concerts. (I still can’t believe I listened to Edge when he said “All the cool bands are going ambient.”)

2. Reporting should be more temporal. People shouldn’t be told what to think. They need to connect with the spirit of the article to draw their own conclusions. For instance, this story about China enslaving its citizens gets bogged down with suffocating information.

“In early March, Li Yaokai, a skinny 18-year-old from this small mountainside village in central China, embarked on his first trip to the provincial capital. It didn’t take long for him to get dragged into a huge forced-labor scandal whose gruesome details are now coming to light.”

Sorry Mr. Fairclough, you lost me at Li. With some “light” editing, this passage can be pared down to the following stanza journalism sentence cluster:

Trapped in a land of yellow
Torture is freedom from choice
How long must we sing this song*

3. News will now cost $200. Exactly twice as much as a computer and half as much as an obstructed-view ticket at one of my shows. But seriously this news piracy must end. In addition to the standard distribution department, I will create an offsetting branch of equal or greater force known simply as “confiscation”. Confiscators will follow readers and scoop up the papers once the original buyer has finished reading. Delivery boys will be tailed by a collection crew.

Hope you are up to the task delivery team, my accumulation squad will look like this! (Not the bloody guy on the right.) Finally, all discussion of current events between non-subscribers in real time must be limited to a three sentence brief.

That should do it. Oh and just in case it might become a problem later, I will need approximately 250 sick days for touring, etc. I think I might be coming down with something … something known as rock’n'roll fever.

As they say in your country … Good on ya,

Bono

*If I’ve used this line before, replace with “I want to be with you night and day” or “imperialism really fucked Africa … Asia?”

I pretty much began that whole “wanting to save the world” thing. I mean, Mother Theresa did it too, but I looked GOOD doing it. And Jesus did it, I guess. But Jesus didn’t SING!

I was COOL. And I SANG. No wonder George Clooney wants my advice on how to be an activist.

Everything that I do as a humanitarian stems from what I’ve learned as a singer. For example, when giving an impassioned speech, I always project from my diaphragm. So I told George to do the same thing and draw on his acting experience. I’m pretty sure that he had a stint on ER. He should USE what he’s learned from that and provide African children with some much needed medical attention!

So I hear that Sir Paul “Not Dead” McCartney has come out with a new album. It’s hard NOT to hear about it. Every station I turn on, it’s “Oh look at me, I’m Paul McCartney! I’m 64 and still making albums! Where’s my tea?”

Well I’m sorry, World! I’m sorry that I can’t put out a mediocre album too! I guess I’m just too busy saving Vanity Fair and writing for Africa to make an album right now! How about that, Paul? Where’s your issue of Vanity Fair? Oh that’s right, you spend all your time in STARBUCKS now! Do you know how many Starbucks there are in Africa?

Well… I’m not sure. My meals are mostly catered to me on a private jet. But probably NOT A LOT! And if there is a Starbucks in Africa, it probably only has one drink size: Poverty! (Which, I imagine, is somewhere in between a tall and a grande.)

I’m really steamed up over this. I’m about to arrange a throw down. Or take my glasses off again (How long until that loses effect?).

So the U.S. wants to send $86 million to President Mahmoud Abbas, in an effort to legitimize his government and de-legitimize Hamas’ Gaza-centered factions. Now, I know President Bush, he’s a cool guy. He errs a little too much on the side of Hank Williams in the old iTunes playlists, but we’ve bridged our differences. That said, I can’t just sit back and attend to my charities for Third World Debt Relief, AIDS Awareness, and the Product Red Campaign. I have to get involved. So I’m pledging $86,000,001 to Abbas, plus some signed copies of Achtung Baby for Hard Rock Cafe Bethlehem. And a trip! I’ll get a picture for my Wall of me in sunglasses with world leaders or with these fine gentlemen pictured above. Looks like that lad on the far right just heard Coldplay’s “The Scientist”. Posers.

Photo by 2007, urtea.

One of my loyal fans has nominated me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Little does he realize that the Nobel committee is a tyranny. You can’t nominate me directly.

Check out their list of Qualified Nominators:

1. Members of national assemblies and governments of states;
2. Members of international courts;
3. University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;
4. Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
5. Board members of organizations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
6. Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (proposals by members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after February 1) and
7. Former advisers appointed by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

No musicians? It’s obvious the Norwegians are jealous because they can’t rock.

If you know any university rectors or members of international courts, drop the good word.

Douglas Tompkins is a fucking genius. Doug founded The North Face, but he can be forgiven his bad fashion taste (he wishes he had this style) because he’s buying up land in Chile to protect it.

Doesn’t anyone see the big picture here? We can set up environmental reserves as tax shelters to increase the number of wealthy environmentalists.

Photo by my man viajar.

The world’s second best private equity firm is trying for an IPO worth billions. Those pretenders think they know how to party, but it’s obvious that they’re just IPOing now just to beat my private equity firm, Elevation Partners, to the punch.

Blackstone’s CEO, Steven Schwarzman, is even blogging anonymously as a girl to discredit my firm.

Well, enough is enough. It’s time to start planning the Elevation IPO. We’re going to include one share of stock in the liner notes of my next album. Beat that Schwartzman.

The government never had respect for how hard musicians work. First they deny us just copyright. Now they won’t stand up for DRM, and are even allowing a bunch of talentless hacks to petition me into dropping DRM.

Now as we give one laptop to every child in developing nations, the question is will we allow the same injustice that has taken place in the Americas and Europe to pervade this noble continent: DRM-free MP3s?

During a wee bit of turbulence on a flight back from protesting in Heiligendamm, while trying to put thoughts of Richie Valens out of mind, I started reading a copy of the Economist. Apparently the friggin magazine asked Tony Blair to write up the lessons he’s learned before being forced into early retirement, I don’t mean to take the piss, but Blair’s tips on quelling global terrorism at this point are worth about as much as a macroeconomics textbook penned by Robert Mugabe.

What is more, Blair writes:

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be tackling terrorism, I would have readily understood, but thought you meant Irish Republican terrorism.

Bollocks… If Irish Republicans are terrorists, and I am an Irish Republican, than I must be a terrorist? Would a terrorist write “Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World” and “ Do You Feel Loved“? I think not.

In summary, Tony Blair is a wanker:

When I decided to save Africa, I knew I was in for a life of hardship. Gone were the days of sleeping with five women at a time on the U2 bus. Now I have to trek out to places like Tanzania for conferences. In stead of flying out with young, beautiful groupies — I’m now just traveling with tech geeks. While the Google plane is awesome, I have no clue what the fuck people in that engineer sausage fest are talking about. They asked me what I thought of social networking. I thought that meant I was finally being invited to an orgy, but they just asked to befriend me on some fucking website. And now I’ll have to take shit  from Bill about hanging with Google.