DNA

Augustus the strong was the king of Poland. A long time ago.

As his name would indicate he was a big guy. He was so big and strong he would break horseshoes with his bare hands just for fun. Now, even knowing that Polish horseshoes are rubbish and easier to break than the British equivalent, this is still fairly strong.

He was also the world champion at fox throwing.

Fox throwing is a sport which has long since dropped off the Olympic schedule but in long time ago Poland it was hugely popular. It was their version of football and Augustus was the best. He was their Cristiano Ronaldo. He was also the king, good looking and judging from some of the paintings of him as metrosexual as the modern day equivalent.

He could also throw a fox down a field further than anyone else.

Yes, Augustus was very very strong.

Now before you get a bee in your hand knitted hemp bonnet and start screaming that such a sport shouldn’t be celebrated or that this was horribly cruel to the poor cuddly foxes. You should know foxes back then were a very different breed to the modern version. They were much less cuddly, bigger, tougher and, according to contemporary records, actually quite enjoyed being thrown.

So there. All good.

Augustus also knew there was a big difference between foxes and kings and for a long time most people agreed with him.

Then along came a man called Charles Darwin. He went on a cruise and developed a theory. Ever since naturalists have been telling us we are basically just the same as our dung eating or furry, fly through the air, relatives. Flesh, blood, live, die, eat, sleep – we are just the same.

We are separated by the tiniest, smallest, smaller than the smallest thing you have ever seen, piece of DNA. We have a ‘C’ whereas a gorilla has a ‘D’ or something like that. Change my C to a D and I will instantly be dragging my hairy knuckles in the mountains of Rwanda and eating nits from my partners head.

But I don’t buy it.

I think it’s just another scientific discovery which can’t be proved either way. Draw something with unintellible symbols and it must be true right?

Nope.

Let’s look at the evidence out there and when I say evidence I mean evidence I can actually see and understand. Not some computer generated spiral helter skelter thingy with letters stuck to it. That’s not evidence, that’s just CGI.

Dolphin DNA discovered to be very similar to humans reads the headline.

How can this be? How can any sensible thinking person actually read this nod thoughtfully and think ‘hmm, yes makes sense’.

They are fish!

Yes fish, the kind of slippy wet animal with flippers, fins and other fishy type things sticking out.

I look nothing like a fish so how on earth can you say that I am almost 98% fish? Without even bothering to delve deeper into the scientific study and so called evidence underpinning the headline I know it’s rubbish.

The easy way to tell is to look and ask the simple question; does it even vaguely look like a human?

I don’t look like a dolphin, a giraffe, a pig or a giant spider crab so please don’t insult my intelligence by trying to persuade me otherwise.

The BBC took another angle on this last week with an article on the sexual perversions of our animal ‘cousins’. Apart from being a thinly veiled excuse to write golden showers, group sex or cross dressing on their normally staid and sober website it also attempted to prove we are not that far removed from the jungle floor based on some unique and similar sexual proclivities.

Take the giraffe as an example. Apparently male giraffes sample the urine of female giraffes to gauge how good a mate they will be. The BBC has taken this and said look there are some obscure and borderline illegal German websites out there doing the same, so we are not that different.

No BBC, we are, very, very, different. Well I sincerely hope the vast majority of us are anyway.

Snakes engage in group sex, monkeys masturbate, wombats look like they are wearing gimp masks and so the article goes on.

I would be more likely to believe a young earth argument than I am to believe that animals have similar perversions or vice versa.

No, I prescribe to the theory, my theory, that animals are animals and humans are significantly different.

I’m not saying we are better but we are bloody different.

We invented cars, airplanes, houses, dishwashers, lasers, diet coke and the internet. Show me one thing, and I mean one simple little thing any animal other than a human being has invented.

Note: Wool, leather and steak don’t count.

If you don’t believe me, if this blog hasn’t managed to change your mind then next time you find yourself stranded in a cave, high up in the Andes, try asking a passing Llama help.

A human would help you, a passing human being, one possessing 100% human DNA that is, would in such a situation be very useful indeed.

A Llama which possesses 97% human so called ‘DNA’ will most likely look at you, chew some grass and perhaps helpfully urinate in your direction before plodding on.

Augustus the strong for all his wardrobe and sporting issues knew the difference.

And, regardless what Charles Darwin and DNA tells me, so do I.

Svelvik

Tablet is a versatile word.

Could mean pill. Could mean electronic gadget, could mean a heavy stone thing Moses supposedly lugged down a mountain. Could also mean a very heavy sugary Scottish sweet.

Four meanings for the same word only separated by its contextual usage.

The sweet version is always plural i.e. he bought some tablet. Its never he bought a tablet. If I heard he swallowed a tablet, I instantly think medicine. If its he swallowed some tablet it has to be a sweet so heavy it has its own gravitational pull.

The electronic gadget and Moses version are part of the same family. They essentially mean the same thing. They’re just separated by a few generations of design, innovation and the odd microchip.

So four (or three if you count Moses and i-pad as one) usages for the same word but today if someone says tablet, out of context, I immediately think small sleek book sized electronic gadget. This is the first thing which pops into my head.

So what this means is that in less than ten years the word tablet has taken on a whole new and predominant meaning.

And I think this is just lazy.

If you go to all the trouble of inventing something new don’t stop there, at least come up with a new name for the thing you have invented. It could be anything, anything at all. You have the option of inventing a whole new word  but no, you choose an already existing word and take it over. Yes very lazy indeed and also a huge missed opportunity. 

Inventing words from scratch has got to be fun.

IKEA do it all the time. In fact they go further and come up with new and largely unpronounceable words for common items of furniture which already have names.

Take bed as an example.

Bed is a good word. Easy to understand, no alternative usage, easy to spell. There is nothing wrong with ‘bed’.

IKEA seem to think otherwise. Take a trip into the blue and yellow scented candle hell and bed becomes the impenetrable ‘FJell’ or a saliva inducing ‘Svelvik’.

If IKEA can do it, and probably have a lot of what is considered fun in Sweden in the process, why cant the tablet makers? I know I would.

The worlds largest and most technologically advanced telescope in the world is not called ‘Goliath’, ‘Collosus’ or ‘Hercules’ all of which would befit such an man made achievement. No, after years of cutting edge engineering, impossibly difficult logistics, the worlds most refined mirrors and mathematics which would even make Stephen Hawkins raise an eyebrow they just stopped.

They stopped, sat down and had a cup of tea as the worlds media gathered around.

Journalist ‘Wow, that’s cool’

Chilean engineer ‘Yup, good huh?’

Journalist ‘What’s it called?’

Engineer ‘Called? Does it have to have a name?’

Journalist ‘I would give it a name, but then I’m a girl and I name everything’

Engineer ‘Everything? Do you?’

Journalist ‘Yup, everything’

Engineer ‘Ok, hmm, let me see’

Journalist ‘Well its very big ….’

And so became the VLT – Very Large Telescope.

And this brings me on to the overall point, if there ever is one, of this blog. Text speak.

I dislike it immensely. I do. Its lazy and there is absolutely no need to use it. When I receive a message which includes the number 8 or the letter z I tense up in the same way I do when I try to press the lift door close button and realise there isn’t one there. Its irritating and unnecessary. 

Fit a fucking button and just use the words properly please.

Adding LOL to the end of every sentence for no apparent reason also baffles me. I very rarely laugh out loud so why on earth would I do so when you tell me you are going to Tesco’s or have a cold? Its not funny and certainly a million miles away from laugh out loud funny.

Language is a constantly evolving thing, its changing all the time. 

I was asked the other day, what the acronym ‘ok’ stood for and I actually stopped to think about it, what could the two letters stand for? This is an example of an abbreviation and of lazy English which I use everyday without thinking twice about. I very rarely use ‘okay’ even in my business correspondence.

So if ok is ok for me, then why not m8, 2moro, ysterdy or shld?

Its probably because ok already existed whereas the rest is changing within my lifetime and I am having to adapt, or not, as the case actually is.

Is it wrong? I don’t know. I do know that in say fifty years from now this short hand lazy arse way of writing, spelling and communicating will most likely be commonplace and accepted however depressing this might be.

I never speak like Shakespeare and that’s probably a good thing but he would probably wince at the ‘proper’ language I think I am using.

Its changing, I don’t like it but there is nothing I or you can do about it.

I guess I just need to accept it however difficult this might be.

Remember though, if you send me a txt or email using such bone idle, grammarless, fat arsed, tablet eating bad English the response you get may be surprising. If you add LOL to the end it might even be painful.

Okay?

I Love Me

I generally dislike travelling to the US.

Not because it involves a >10 hour flight, jet lag and an immigration process built on the presumption that I want to stay forever, carry out illegal stuff and blow something up.

It’s not because if I choose to smoke I am treated like a Middle Eastern leper with a worryingly oversized belt.

It’s not because I still get carded and have been refused alcohol because my British passport was not, to quote a Jurassic sized Polynesian doorman with an oily smile, ‘a valid form of identification sir’.

It’s also not because they have gun laws which should have been cast aside at the same time they stopped burning witches.

No, the main reason I dislike travelling to the US is that it’s a place where as soon as I land I start to feel wholly and horribly inadequate.

Self-confidence is a trait so ingrained in the American psyche it really should be added to their constitution. All men are equal, the pursuit of happiness, the right to arm yourself to the teeth and the right to be so self-confident that it borders on narcissism.

I am British and all that means. I would consider myself to be reasonably self-confident but even after living in liberal Europe for over ten years I still carry the baggage. I still struggle at the point in a job interview when the interviewer asks ‘So tell me about your strengths’. I giggle uncontrollably in mixed nude saunas and worry about rising. I feel distinctly uneasy when someone decides to discuss a deep personal issue with me and fully support ‘because I was drunk’ as a reasonable and forgivable excuse.

So how does your average, arse the size of a settee, American immigration officer become so self-confident and at what point does his or her self-confidence shift from endearing to ugly Kardashian-esq?

I don’t know, but I do think we are all right at the edge. We are teetering at the tipping point, clinging onto the edge of a self-confident/self-love cliff and very soon will find ourselves plunging headlong into an abyss where the words restraint, modesty and humility do not exist.

America has already jumped. They are lost and through the medium of Facebook we will probably (and I include myself here) join them soon.

On that, Facebook is a strange medium. I along with the other gazzilion users quite happily post without restraint or thought. I then sulk when no-one ‘likes’ or comments on my check in, my blog post or my hilariously funny joke.

Why do you not like the fact I have just checked in to the Holiday Inn in the arse end of nowhere Germany at 9.24pm? Probably because they don’t really give a fuck that’s why not but I still sulk for a brief moment before making up, or stealing, another joke and going for it again. Someone will like something I post eventually. Please.

The photos of me picking my nose, lying flat drunk or waking up looking like a 1,000 year old peat-bog man never make the cut. Why not? Because I choose what other people see and delete the ones I am tagged in if they show me in a light which I dislike.

I am, like everyone else, a real person. I am good, I am bad and I am ugly but two of these don’t make it onto my Facebook page (you might argue differently) and thus I am probably displaying a narcissistic trait which I have written about to this point in such disparaging terms.

Is Facebook to blame? Probably not, we would have gotten here anyway. How is less relevant.

In the Big Brother house, within days, the contestants descend into a manic state of inward looking self-absorption. He said this. She said that. How do I look in this? Me, me, me. Without other, more important distractions: a global war, famine, biblical plague or Mayan apocalypse its basic human nature to go all Lord of the Flies and I think this is exactly what is occurring.

So what is next?

Are we doomed to tip over the edge, fall madly in love with ourselves and suddenly become super self-confident?

If our collective Facebook pages are anything to be believed, then yes.

The Cult of Christmas

I know exactly how many hours it is until Christmas.

I know this not because I am particularly good at figuring things out. Its not because I have any Rain Man tendencies towards time or dates of significance.

I don’t sit there and go ‘3….2….1. Its Christmas! Hurrah’ (resets clock in head) ‘Right everybody its (pause, eyes flickering)….. its 144 hours till New Year! Come on everybody lets count!’

Contrary to what my job title states I’m also not really that good with numbers and time is a concept I sometimes have issues with.

No, the reason I know exactly how many hours it is until Christmas because I see it every day on Facebook, Google or any other number of electronic places I drop into during the day. When I log on its there, normally accompanied by a large man in a red suit grinning manically.

It‘s as if suddenly someone has woken up this year, created an app and the whole world has gone countdown mad.

Last week before the non-event which was the supposed end of the world there were more Christmas countdowns than ‘we’re all going to die a fiery death’ ones. Even knowing we were not going to vapourise on Friday I would have thought someone would have leveraged this new, state of the art, technology to count it down for us.

But no. Not one. Now prioritisation isn’t my strong point but……

The whole woo-ha around Christmas does baffle me. I have pointed out my religious viewpoint a number of times in this blog so you wont be surprised that the impending anniversary of the birth of a major player in Christendom doesn’t really float my boat much. I therefore find it somewhat odd to see grown adults excitedly clapping their hands like Priscilla Queen of the Desert as the big day approaches on their Facebook countdown app thingy.

Given its such an alien concept to me and in keeping with my other blogs I have tried to understand why this is. What is it which drives people to act like yuletide lunatics with no concept of self esteem or fiscal responsibility during the month of December.

Without wanting to bore you and as this is a short blog I will dispense with my usual heavy technical analysis to prove to you my study wasn’t soiled with any form of bias. Suffice it to say it was lengthy, I used large complex mathematical models, a big computer and a laser.

Now complete I can say that my findings astonished even me. I have proven, statistically & mathematically proven that is, that I am not wrong. Even on the ‘Harold Camping’ scale, the measure of mental-ness regarded by most of the worlds leading scientists as the only true measure, the results are off the chart.

A short extract of my findings which I have summarised into ‘Facts’ for easy simple digestion:

Fact 1. A significant segment of the population turn into cheesy grinning, boozy red faced idiots in the week(s) before Christmas.

Fact 2. The same segment also seem to forget the rules governing what is considered acceptable social behaviour as offices close for the period.  

Fact 3. The vast majority of us shop like a piggy squealing, Iowa bomb shelter dwelling, patriot just before the government start closing in.

Fact 4. ‘It’s a wonderful life’ was actually a sober study into the effects of mixing different hallucinogenic drugs.

The conclusions of this study are as frightening as they are undeniable and I can only conclude that we are brainwashed by this creepy cult called Christmas. Why else would we act in such a way in the middle of Winter. This blog is therefore a call to arms. Please see it as a shining beacon of sanity amongst all the dribbling lunacy.

Reject Christmas. 

Reject the bondage of Christmas cake, brussel sprouts, eating, drinking and spending far too much. Reject Ant & Dec’s Christmas special, reject Bambi, James Bond, the Great Escape and reruns of Morecambe and Wise.  And yes, sorry but you have to reject Jimmy Stewart too.

Then and only then will we all be truly free and sane. Probably.

Either that or I’m just a boring c*&t with too much time on my hands.

P.s. Merry Christmas in 8hrs, 9mins!

Living & Growing

I will start this blog off with an admission: I’m not gay.

I’m also not Christian. I’m not Muslim nor am I a scientologist. I’m not black. I’m not Asian.

I’m a heterosexual, Anglo Saxon, atheist, white male. To compound this damning description I also work in finance and have voted Tory ever since I was legally able to.

Essentially I am about as far away from the urban street as its possible to be, well perhaps Boris Johnson is a bit further away but its safe to say I won’t be appearing as an extra on The Wire anytime soon. Unless it’s to get mugged that is.

It doesn’t really matter though, I don’t care and I’m sure 50 Cent and his chums don’t care much either.

I remember when I first learned the real truth about human reproduction.  I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was the summer holidays and I was idly walking back from the park with a friend kicking an old plastic football between us.

‘Fuck off! No way! Who told you that?’ I shouted after he had just, out of the blue, told me about it using terms like ‘Your dad put it there, they did this and then you appeared’

‘Its true’ he said nodding solemnly

I thought about this for a while, trying to exorcise the image from my brain.

‘That means your mum and dad must have done the same then?’ I grinned, throwing it back at him.

‘Nope' he said 'not them, just your mum and dad' then he ran off laughing and waving for me to pass him the ball.

I didn’t believe him at the time but within two years the horrible truth had been broken to me through the medium of pencil and chalk drawings in school. Living and Growing is a TV series I will never forget, for all the wrong reasons. Two years later it was a topic which had taken over my mind almost entirely. My forearms bulked out. Childhood was nearly over.

Anyway, it turned out to be not as bad as I thought it would when my friend told me about it that summer’s day in the late 1970s.

My three kids will find out one day, one already has. The other two have some time yet but eventually they will too. They might turn out similar to me, who knows. Two are half Asian so they already have a significant headstart in the street credibility stakes long before that even matters to them.

The good thing is regardless of their ethnicity, their sexual preferences or their career choices there will generally be no bias one way or another towards them. In general, and I am of course generalising here, the world is a pretty unbiased place to live. Rio Ferdinand might argue differently but we are certainly some way away from the world as it existed say, 200 years ago. Pockets of resistance exist in amongst some segments of the population and there is the odd country still believing themselves to be ethnically superior to another but these are rare.

Religion is different though.

Science is right, of course it is, 2000 years of scientific study and clinical evidence cant be wrong, can it? With such an overwhelming volume of work, postulating, hypothesising, proving and disproving how could it be anything but the truth? Well it cant be but it is certainly not the whole truth. It is still someway away from explaining the whole truth. Which leaves me in the difficult situation of there being some scientifically accepted scientific concepts I personally find impossible to understand no matter how tight I screw up my eyes; infinity, higgs bosun, warp speed to name just three.

So what is wrong with having a get out of jail card called faith in your back pocket? If you don’t understand it simply say it was gods will and move on. An omnipresent escape clause as John Loftus would describe it. But think about it, having an escape clause, omnipresent or otherwise has to be preferable to trying to figure out how the Starship Enterprise doesn’t bump into planets during warp speed. At least I think it is.

Christian bashing seems to be in vogue. There are multiple websites, facebook pages all with the intention of throwing unanswerable questions at creaky old men in robes safe in the knowledge they have no valid repost.

Its too easy. These sites seem to be awash with smug atheists actively seeking a fight then sniggering or arguing about creation and in the process trying to persuade some poor soul that his or hers belief system is flawed.

Are these the modern day equivalent of missionaries traipsing around Africa trying to convert the heathens?

Probably not.

To me it feels less of a conversion process and more of a bullying/self promoting ‘I am right and I want to hear you admit defeat’ type of process.

Either way its not very pleasant, in the same way it wouldn’t be acceptable to have the scientific community going out of its way to prove that man-love isn’t correct. ‘Its not supposed to go in there you know?’ is a pretty valid argument but I’ve never heard Stephen Hawkins say so and does it really matter? 

Not really.

Anyway religion isn’t all that bad. The vast majority – 99.9% - of people with faith practice it without any negative consequence on the rest of us so what’s the problem?

If you have to throw anyone to the lions why not focus on the 0.1%. The door knocking Jehovah witnesses, scientologists, Islamic terrorists and anyone who carries out violence in the name of religion. Leave the rest alone to whatever it is they believe.

Just a suggestion though, it might be an idea to keep your thoughts on the existence of god to yourself if you happen to find yourself in the middle of Helmand province.

Who knows at some future point the bearded chaps at CERN might discover the god particle and reveal to the world it was actually made by the big man himself. They could prove that Mary did conceive immaculately and not how my friend described it and they might prove that god exists and is a hazy man with a white beard.

What will you say then? Bullying atheists? Huh?