How Copper Wire Invented

Today I heard a man who runs an NHS Trust, a man responsible for millions of pounds of tax payers money use the phrase service user rather than simply saying patient. Come on who are you going to offend by using the word patient, or is he afraid that by using the word patient he makes the person sound like a victim. It's not an admission of guilt its what we call people who go to hospital when they aren't well. Everyone is too busy worrying about who they are going to offend or who is going to not like them because they said something bad. How much energy do we waste dreaming up weird and wonderful ways to remain completely magnolia with a hint of beige.

Look I'm not saying its alright to publicly humiliate a quadriplegic whilst wearing a turban and face paint then goose stepping your way across the local Jewish cemetery. That's not on, but surely some friendly banter should be okay and everyone should be a bit more sensible about things. The classic for this is the old and much maligned stereotype. Whilst being a complete caricature of the real thing they do have a little hint of the truth in them, that's why they can be funny. Although if there is anyone out there that actually thinks all Irishman dig ditches, lay tarmac and enjoy nightly get togethers involving formation dancing and pipe bombs then the joke is on them. They are slightly less dense than a neutron star but slightly thicker than a whale omelette (Blackadder I think).

Everyone doesn't hate the English, but until the Americans came along and we started giving everyone their countries back, with better schools and public services I might add, the fact is we weren't the most popular people around the world. I'm sure the Romans and the Mongols had the same popularity issues, but if you spend a couple of centuries nicking people's land and taking all their money you're not going to be top of their Christmas card list. The Americans have taken this hate thing to a whole new level, it took us 300 years to be that hated they've managed it in a matter of months.

Now I was born in Scotland and the Scots do have one very obvious national characteristic that revolves around the collection and more importantly the retention of their fiscal amassing. Thankfully I'm not blessed with this genetic marker, but I would be lying if I denied the fact that a larger than expected proportion of my countryman seem to display this frugal tendency. It's the reason why the Scots are renowned for their scientists, engineers and boffins. All kids in Scotland are taught their times tables up to 43, this allows them to split any dinner bill into the right individual contributions whilst factoring in children, desert eaters, the person who had the extra After Eight and allowing for the usual 3.725% tip. Not all of us are tight, but if you wore a skirt all the way through a Scottish winter and didn't own a pair of pants you would naturally find yourself becoming tighter.

Are the French all good lovers? I'm guessing not, but if you are the English's arc enemies then that is going to make you more popular with zero effort. My enemie's enemy is a friend of mine and all that. We all know that a way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but quickest way to a woman's knickers is through Champagne and we all know where that comes from. That sounds like the pub landlord but I'm sure it's not.

Now the Aussies I've mentioned before, maybe more than once but I feel it's still worth mentioning again. Our Antipodean brothers have a reputation for all being blond, tanned, happy go lucky bar stewards (people who work in a pub, please I do have standards). The reason for this is three fold. One, if you lived in a country where it's sunny all year long then you are going to be blond and more tanned than the average Brit. Two, if I'd escaped from a country where the spiders, crocodiles, kangaroos, sharks, jellyfish, snakes, scorpions, fish and rays kill you I'd be relieved as well and lastly they are all descendants of cheeky cockney criminals who everyone knows are genetically prone to bouts of inane grinning and saucy joke telling.

So let's talk Americans shall we, now I was lucky enough to live in America and Canada, or America Lite as I referred to it in 1988 many years before Al Murray. The Yanks are renowned for being loud, crude, Gung-Ho, 'in your face' airheads. How I'm not saying that they are not, what I will say is at home they are less so than they are when they are away from the land of our fathers. The reason for this reputation is quite simple. Up until the invention of mass transportation by air there were only two possible types of Americans to be found in England. The first was the filthy rich who could afford to come here on a posh cruise ship. Now very rich people the world over, regardless of where they come from are so far up their own arses that they would naturally exhibit many of the suggested American's national virtues. The second Uncle Sam type on general display in good old blighty would have been the American GI, usual around the time they were bailing us out of some ghastly war and to be honest if I was looking to fill an army with able bodied soldiers guess what I'd be looking for in my grunts. If you guessed, sensitive, well spoken, demure, sophisticated gentlemen then you would be talking about the Italian army in error.

We all know that the Welsh aren't all ginger and still follow the national pastime of sheep shagging, the Italian aren't all greasy lazy mummie's boys, I'm sure the Top Gear boys got it wrong about the Mexicans and I'm pretty certain that the Germans can tell a good joke and make the odd bad car from time to time. Lets stop taking everything so seriously, lets stop worrying about upsetting each other from time to time and enjoy life a whole lot more. Laugh at yourself, laugh at others, laugh at babies eating ice cream too quickly, but most of all laugh at men when they get hit in the balls.

Nut Cutlets From Beyond The Grave

On the 12^th of September 1962 John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He said We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

The reason it is so memorable, other than the fact that he bedded Marilyn Monroe, was way too good looking for a Politician and 2 years later he had his brains splatted all over the back of his presidential Limo just down the road in Dallas, is because he set out to do what humans rarely try to do, what is hard. Please no penis innuendos.  We just love an easy option.

Although the pinko leftie liberals might tell you otherwise, we are basically animals and we live by our animal instincts. Every animal in the wild only worries about the 3 basics in life, food, shelter and horizontal gymnastics. In the pursuit of these needs animals will almost always take the easy option. It’s natural and it’s normal, it aids survival. Picture a giant panda taking an afternoon nap in his favourite bamboo forest, the warmth of the late afternoon sun begins to pierce the tree canopy. As the beams of light begin to slowly flicker across his face, Yang Yang leisurely stirs. Slowly rolling onto his side the master of all he surveys begins to consider the day ahead. “Food, me want food” or whatever that is in panda talk. What does he do now? He farts, scratches his nuts and reaches for the closest bamboo shoot to eat. He doesn’t consider the days to come and possible changes in the seasons, walk 2 minutes away to eat something else and he doesn’t create a Ven diagram to work out the best plant to eat based on distance, colour and mineral content. He does what’s easy. He uses the least amount of energy possible to get by because that’s what keeps him alive and gets him to his next shag.

In life we nearly always do what’s easy rather than what we know is right. Our instincts tell us what to do and this conflicts with all the other bullshit we have dreamt, stuff that just complicates things. Look at what we eat and look at how many fat, yes I said fat not horizontally challenged or chubby, or cuddly people there are. Why is that? It’s not because we don’t know what we are doing to our bodies, we do, even the thickest, sorry mentally challenged moron knows that eating burgers, cream cakes and pies all day while drinking coke, beer and Bacardi Breezers all night is going to kill you or at least make you look like Jabba the Hutt’s fat brother. So you’re a touch on the rotund side and you’re feeling a bit peckish, you’ve just put down the letter from the doctor saying your arse is bigger than your 50” TV, what do you do?  We do what is easy and ignore that rocket and garden vegetable salad in the fridge because we can’t be bothered to cook the succulent skinless chicken breast that beautifully compliments the salad in both taste and texture and order that 47” meat feast pizza from Dominos, especially when you get free wedges and a 2lt bottle of Pepsi cola with every order over £93 this week. Pass me the phone, they deliver.

Food is energy, its just fuel nothing more. What we should do is eat enough food to fill full up, the right food that our body needs and wants and then stop eating. We wouldn’t do to our car what we do to our bodies. With your motor you drive around and after a while the car tells you its hungry and needs dinner so you go to the petrol station. Now if your car is an omnivore car you give it omnivore food you don’t think, no today I’m going to feed it nuts and berries because if you do that you get a big fat bill from the garage and all your mates take the piss and rightly so. You’ve decided to give it the right fuel, even veggies like bacon, in goes the nozzle and you squeeze the trigger. The numbers on the dial go around and around at an alarming speed until you get that clicking that says the stomach can take no more. What do you do now? Do you a. continue pulling the trigger so the petrol pisses all over your shoes, wasting another £20 and a perfectly good pair of trainers or b. stop filling, pay the bill and drive home?  We all know the answer is c. Fill the car then before paying the bill, pick up a super size snicker, a bottle of something fizzy and a Thinsulate hat and glove combo that at £2.99 is too good to pass up.

We just over complicate things we eat because it makes us feel good, then feel bad when we eat too much, then feel bad when we put on weight, so we eat and feel better, but then feel bad because our arse doesn’t fit in our new jeans that you couldn’t afford anyway, but put on your credit card because shopping makes you feel better. Now that is completely stupid, which for the most intelligent species on the planet seems like a bit of a waste of 4 billion years of evolution.

Life would be so much more fun if we just kept it simple, removed all the crap and enjoyed ourselves a bit more. Don’t listen to those high and mighty plonkers you see a TV. If god wanted you to be a vegetarian he would have made cows run really fast, never have invented brussel sprouts and made bacon taste like sweaty football socks. If people could predict your future by just using your star sign then surely they might have thought to do something important with this skill, like stop all the bad bombers in the world. Why is it that people who say they have lived other lives are always the reincarnation of someone famous? They are never the village idiot from Great Wakering circa 1746.

And last but absolutely least if people can speak to the dead then why do they always speak to someone completely pointless, who has nothing to say, but makes someone in the audience cry and pay £40 a week for the next 2 years for more of the same shit, rather than dragging up someone really important who could tell us who really shot JFK, where did they put the Lost Ark that the raiders are looking for and who nicked my bike from the golf course in 1986? Wankers

A Trip to Cloud Cuckoo Land

So the festive period is done and life is returning to normal but it seems most of society has decided that life is much more fluffy in cloud cuckoo land and they've decided to stay there for an extended holiday, warm weather, cheap beer and plentiful sunbeds included. The more I think about it the more I've come to the realisation that a rather large slice of the population actually live in the land of cuckoo's and only rent a small weekend holiday home here in sunny England.

I haven't written for a while and I'm sure my desire to mini-rant about the things I see has been dulled by the general goodwill to all men that abounds during the Christmas holidays, but my "how can you be so stupid" threshold has been compromised and it's definitely time to vent one's spleen.

Honesty is a great thing, but reality is something all together more powerful and practical. What people say to someone with a camera or microphone is completely different to what they really feel like because the honest truth is altogether too selfish and scary. Andy Gray ponit in question. Today lots of people have been banging on about the NHS and what they think is right and best for us. What people say is they want the best service in the world, but if you asked them to pay for it you would be met by a chorus of sucked teeth and the mechanics "well....." The fact is if you asked almost everyone what would you like more, lower taxes or a better health service you know what the answer will be and it won't be more plasters and consultants earning £150K a year.

People are just looking after themselves, it's not wrong, it's just natural. It's just the way it is, most of the population are more interested in football, beer, posh shoes and who Katie Price is divorcing this week. Not alturistic thoughts of improving things for the greater good. Some people do think of others first, they become politicians and as soon as they get some power they just feather their own nests and fail miserably like the rest of us. They can't help themselves they just have a higher selfish overload alert default overide level to most, but they nearly all crumble given enough time. Even John " The Gray" Major succumbed. He was the most boring prime minister ever and an upstanding pillar of society, but he still found time to sort out the right honourable Edwina Curry whilst still managing to run the country.

 If you lived in a shoe box in a back water northern mining ghetto as a nipper where your dad worked 27 hours a day and your only childhood toys were a bike tyre and a barbie doll with no head what do you expect will happen. You get to the Houses of Parliment on the back of your mining buddies union, full of brother comrade idiology and heart felt  principles, then you get a strong whif of crisp £20 notes and you're game for just about anything as long as it doesn't involve rectal penetration. How many poor Labour MPs are there after they have done their time in the big house, not many.

But I digress from the NHS. Look I know that the best way is to do things, for the common good, but it doesn't work, it's a shame but it just doesn't. If it did then everything would have stayed nationalised and no one would have invented money. Life is a big game and money is the way we keep score. No man wants to come last and that's the problem. The fact is if you want something done effeciently then you have to motivate the people to do it and the best way is money. If everyone got a cut of the savings you would be laughing, but that sounds way to capitalistic for anyone to agree with. As I said it's honest and practical, but no one would agree to it on TV.

Here is something my old papy said to me when I was young and it's as true today as it was then. If I want to spend £1 I can walk to the shops and get £1 worth of food for my £1 which is a good rate of return. If my government wants to spend the same £1 it needs a shed load of civil servants to decide what to buy, where to get it from and how much to pay for it. After 2 years they finally spend the £1 and get 2 penny chews and 4 cola cubes. It's just the unfortunate truth. Smaller government and less tax is better for just about everyone, but it's not very fluffy.

There is a simple cure for all this, in fact there are two of them, but unfortunately one is highly unlikely and the other is even more so. Firstly get rid of money, stop the game altogether announce a winner and give him a prize, maybe even stretch to a runners-up trophy. Get everyone to do things for that greater good I spoke about and all pull together. What a beautiful picture, but there are 2 major draw backs firstly everyone would need to agree and if you get 5 people in a room they couldn't agree on what pizza toppings to order let alone dismantling the global order and world peace. Secondly the people with all the money and the most to lose are the people with all the power, there is no way they will end the game unless they have all their hotels on Park Lane and everyone else is in jail.

The second cure is what I like to call the Will Smith effect. We need some world wide catastrophy, a disaster of biblical proportion or an alien invasion. Something that kills most of us or leaves us so shit scared of what might happen that we forget about all the petty stuff, reject the need for greed and Simon Cowell and live a better life and what is left of the scorched planet. This option is a touch extreme, but slightly more likely than the first.

It's a shame, but Gordon Geeko was right

Jacknifed Reindeer on the M25

Christmas is a time of cheer and happiness and a time aimed at those on the right side of 20 rather than those of us well over 35. Most the the seasonal magic is lost on those of us that have finally decided that perhaps the fatman in the red suit isn't real and that the scarlet nosed flying wonder is about as realistic as a liberal election pledge. Christmas is a time that usually divides us into our little interest groups which invariably leads to conflict over the holiday break.

The youngest are mainly interested in the magical visit on the 25th and the sack of well earned presents that appear mysteriously at the end of their bed. They happily believe that pixie dust not only stops time to allow Santa to visit 2 billions kids in one night but also allows Santa to deliver the presents even if you don't have a chimney. All mum and dad think about is firstly how are they going to pay for all this stuff, secondly if both kids have exactly the same amount of gifts with each pile being absolutely equal in both cost and weight and thirdly if the 20lb of turkey that would usually feeds 30 people will be enough for the 8 people sitting down for lunch on Christmas day. For those in-between the break is an excuse not to work for nearly a week and the only time they use advanced mathematics all year. They have to carefully calculate exactly now many Jagerbombs they can consume allowing for a kebab chaser and maybe even a bottle of very cheap champagne substitute and still be able to make it to boxing day lunch without emptying the contents of their stomachs into uncle Barry's brussel sprouts.

This year I've experienced a couple of small events that have lead me to stick two fingers up at middle aged boredom and flash my buttocks at those who think that life is all about working hard and putting away something for a rainy day. Now these weren't moments of great joy or some kind of religious epiphany but just little moments in my week that made me smile, feel good for a few minutes and gave me a warm glow. The first was the best made of a bad situation.

Picture this, Tuesday evening, it's raining, not hard, but a constant drizzle that forces you to keep switching the wipers from on to that delayed thing that either leaves a horrible dirty streak that needs constant washing or makes that wretched scrapping noise. The M25 is crap as usual and as you enter the road works you hear on the radio that the road is blocked at your junction. Taking this bad news in your stride and rather than shouting at the lorry in front you you do something positive and text the radio station to let them know it's got worse and you are in fact stationary and have been for the last 15 minutes. Now you are happy that you've shared your pain and that would be enough, but imagine how you would feel if the lady on the traffic report actually reads out your text and tells you that you, yes just you, that the accident has been cleared and that you and only you will be home in time for your tea. I smiled like the proverbial Cheshire cat and I carried that joy all the way home. Now I know it's a little sad and almost no one knew other than me, but it was a moment of childish giddiness. I was on the radio.

My second moment was even more touching in a completely insignificant way, but it made me feel great. A different day, a different road, no road works and no break lights, but an average drive home. I'd left work a little early, the snow was coming again and as Michael McIntyre said I didn't want to get snowed "out". It was not completely dark, but it was getting that way. Everywhere was covered in snow, the fields were covered in a fair dusting and the street lights reflected off the whiteness to give that strange semi dark effect. The roads were passable but way too dangerous for school run mums in their massive 4x4s, so there were only a few cars on this stretch of road. Then on the other side of the road my attention was grabbed by a bright red lorry with it's main beam piercing the gloom. As it came close I realised it was a Coca Cola lorry, but not any old delivery lorry, but the American style Mac tractor unit with a large bright red trailer on the back, bedecked in lights on all sides and with a massive picture of Father Christmas on the side. It was the lorry from the adverts, from the tele all those years and it was here and it was magical.
It was the bollocks and it instantly turned Monday into Christmas eve.

So when you are feeling a touch on the old side, when you feel that your life has passed you by just find any reason to enjoy yourself. Children smile five times as much as adults because they are having more fun. Take some time to roll back the clock and do something for shits and giggles, not because you have to or need to just do it for the pleasure of being able to smile. Come on people all the crap we get wrapped up in is exactly that, crap. You live this life just once, it's about the journey not the destination and you might as well smile all the way there.

John Paul Mohammed III

In the beginning there were the gods and the humans marvelled at their majesty, trembled at their power and shat their pants when something unexpected happened. When we couldn’t explain something we blamed it on the god of this or the goddess of that. The early gods were simple primeval beings the sun, the earth, the moon and alike. Later on we gave them areas of responsibility, nice names and even made up little stories about their parents and how they seduced fit looking mortals. It was a loose relationship which seemed to suit everyone involved.

The root of all evil is of course money and the humans burgeoning desire for wealth and power was a real turning point for religion. When mere subsistence was the be all and end all, the ways of the gods seemed far removed from your every day goat herder or dung eater. The regional wandering vagabond zealot had very little to offer the man in the street. When the amount of gold in your cellar became important suddenly the god troopers had something for sale, the salvation of your mortal soul. This was a sweet operation; no stock issues nothing to go mouldy, nothing for anyone to nick and everyone needed it. For the right price a holy man could guarantee you entrance to heaven and the killer was no one could prove otherwise.

At about the same time people decided to start writing things down and this was really good news for your religious types. Once things were on papyrus people had something to reference and if it looked old enough and official enough then it became the truth. It even got mistaken for factual history from time to time and if you’re a Looney Alaskan governor/ soccer mum it still does.  When it got really old it took on a mystical property and it became the word of god. The god squad now had a winning combo. No one could do anything without god’s say so and only the priests could give you access, but it would cost you. Usually a shed full of cash, posh frocks, somewhere nice to live with a constant flow of hot totty to keep you warm on cold starlight nights.

As life became more complicated so did the religions. They took all their little stories and put them into great big books. These books then became the corner stone of the religions. Now you would have thought that this would help make things more stable. Everyone would know the rules and following them would be a piece of cake. No such luck, there was no way this kind of power could be given to the masses so the priests pulled out their trump card “interpretation.” Only the religious big knobs could understand and interpret the word of god. Only those that were divinely blessed or who knew someone who knew someone were bequeathed with this gift. The scam was stronger than ever.

At this point in the story I think we need to clarify a few things. Faith is a beautiful thing, for someone to have absolute confidence that someone or something is looking out for them, be it a god, a friend or public body with no facts or evidence to base a reasonable decision on is both amazing and humbling. Religion demands that of its followers, but it’s run by human beings that more often than not fail the faith test with monotonous regularity. Power corrupts and absolute power is like having 12 blind men try to cross the M25 in thick fog. Impending chaos with wanton death and destruction thrown in for good measure. Science, while not a religion per say has all the characteristics of one. Flashy books, mantras and dogma, very impressive people saying complicated things that you don’t understand and a personal aversion to sexiness. The two sections of society that seem to repel the opposite sex the most are definitely priests and geeks. Science is an anti-religion but that Dawkins bloke (Not the one in the chair) is frankly the biggest plum ever. He doesn’t believe in anything unless he can prove it in an experiment. Get a life and live a little mate.

Back to the story, for the next two thousand years the world’s religions held the whip hand, wars were fought and people died on the back of warring faiths and hateful despotic leaders. Wars in general are fought for two reasons, gold and religion, both are the power to control others, the power to live in a big house and have people do stuff for you so you can get fat and get sexually gratified by whom ever and what ever you want.

The control of your mortal soul was supremely important and the religious leaders would go to any lengths to keep that power. Religions split and splintered as different factions grabbed as much power as they could. More Christians have been killed by their fellow Christians over the centuries than anyone else. The Muslims are the same, they have different factions and in Iraq and Afghanistan they spend much more time blowing up each other rather than the infidel crusaders. Why is this then? Simple - it’s all complete bollocks.

Over the last century science has gone from strength to strength and now all bets are off when it comes to religious control. Okay science has invented ways to kill millions in a single press of the button, but we at least we don’t go to war because some bloke in Rome with the silly hat on had a bad dream and he says so.

Gods were in place to explain the unexplainable, the need for us to feel we were part of something bigger and better, to reinforce our need to be the centre of the universe and to give us something to look forward to when we die. Science has replaced or dispelled a lot of this and religion is becoming more and more marginalised.

Religion is just the god system that got out of hand crossed with the human desire to get rich and lazy as fast as possible. I admit that sometimes good people got entangled in this mess. They try to do selfless generous things but they are swamped by the mire of complete tripe and rubbish. Also contrary to what they tell you godless people are just as good as anyone else. They are two completely separate concepts and being holy doesn’t make you a nice person. Religion just complicates things. If you believe in a god and an afterlife then treat others as you would want to be treated, look after the weak, help others when you can.  Do that and I reckon you should be all right.

Hercules you're going to hell for that

December marches on and everyone is focused on the best holiday of the year, you know presents in excess, drinking to excess, food to excess followed by more cold meat and pickle than you can shake a stick at. With the odd hang over and family fight thrown in for good measure obviously. The original reason for this frivolity, back in the day, was to celebrate the winter solstice, a pagan ritual; basically a bit of a party to say thank god we survived till now and any chance we could make it to spring please? Then along came Christianity and before you can say turkey and cranberry sandwiches they’d nicked it, moved it a week and got 3 clever blokes with posh presents involved. They started banging on about mangers, angels and shepherds with not a single flake of snow in sight.

All this because of the one true god rather than some plank of wood that looks like a crow, but why do we have gods, what purpose do they play? It really is much more straight forward than we make it today and I’d like to share it with you. I call it my practical guide to mythology, theology and gobbledygook.

In the beginning we were mere monkeys who picked our bums and the bugs off the backs of anyone that would have sex with us. Life was simple then; contentment was derived from blissful ignorance born of massages, cheap nookie and an abundance of fruit.  Then one day evolution brought three ingredients together that would change things forever. Opposable thumbs, a big brain and a single word, WHY? (Not sure about the question mark, but you get the idea) From that day forward everything we did was driven by the need to know, the need to understand, explain and control. This is when the gods slipped quietly onto the scene and took control.

For your average caveman who could just about fashion crude flint tools knowledge was fleeting and without any kind of language or means of communication any inspirational leap in understanding or thought was lost when the hide clad genius was either eaten by a roving beast or when he drowned in the nearby lake. There were a lot of whys then and very few answers and to bridge that chasm of unknowing, people basically made it up, blaming everything on a strange magical higher power that controlled everything. The sun was a good start and it was worshipped and feared in equal measure.

For the next few millennia people all round the world started to learn some stuff, rudimentary cooking, looking after sheep and what berries not to eat, but they didn’t amount to that much. They continued to ask lots of whys. So we continued to make shit up and why not. Hey presto the gods took major control and religious dogma was just around the corner. We started to write bits and bobs down so we didn’t forget it, but if some bloke (women weren’t trusted) who looked vaguely clever, think Charlton Heston in a beard, said something that kind of sounded right people believed it to be so. If something else happened then it was blamed on the gods. Things often went badly and death and famine stalked the land like two large stalking things (yes, I know it's Blackadder but it’s a classic). So the gods were very busy. The unclean lived in fear and would do just about anything to stay in their local god’s good books and the more bizarre the better. Nothing like sacrificing a virgin or eating cow dung just in case.

Then in areas around the world pockets of clever people appeared, in China, India, Greece and Central America to name a few. On top of asking why people started to prove why. The people in charge didn’t like being questioned and they tried to stop people asking why. This simply didn’t work because some people would still ask why even if the devil was going to stick sharp objects in their butt for eternity. Sometimes this proof was embraced and sometimes it was seen as upsetting the gods, but it often turned out particularly nasty for someone in the piece, usually the so called non believer.

This was the sign of things to come and ever since science has battled religion for the hearts and minds of the masses. Reason versus faith, proof versus dogma. In the early days religion had the upper hand, but as the science improved so the need for faith has reduced. The gods had a big head start and it took a long time for common sense to catch up. The problem was the people running the religions usually ended up with all the money and so the power because people who were about to pop their clogs would do just about anything to get into heaven. Strangely enough no matter how many peasants you had slaughtered giving all your money to a church turned out to be the sure fire way. No surprise there, but what a great scam, no one came back to disprove you and the science lot couldn’t prove anything either. So faced with three options either, A) never ending agony with the devil roasting your wedding tackle over the fires of hell. B) Rotting in a box in the ground or C) eternal bliss with your every wanton desire serviced by half naked goddess' guess what people chose.

Gods were invented to help us explain the unexplainable, to slate the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the give us something to look forward to when we die. Nothing more than that, but like all good ideas it got completely out of hand because humans by nature are greedy, selfish and self-absorbed. These are basic animal instincts that should have been overcome by our civilisation, but I fear we have a ways to go yet

Next Religion ……

Physics, Kola Bears and Beer Goggles

November is over and as with every December thoughts turn to Christmas, you know that religious holiday, the one that worships at the altar of the great god consumerism. It’s supposedly a time of joy and good will to all men, but if that’s the case then when is the time for us to be unholy arses and horrible to a bunch of women. The universe has to have balance, there has to be a counterweight to everything, it’s the way of the world. For every good a bad and a couple of uglies thrown in for good measure.

Everything we do is based on balance, good v evil, day v night, east v west. It’s the struggle that keeps us from flying off into oblivion. They say that opposites attract and nothing could be more true. Without Darth there would be no Luke, without ying there would be no yang, without the devil there is no god, without a hole there would be no polo and without zig zag would just be another line like all the rest. Balance is so important, especially for tight rope walkers and garden Jenga players and I see this equilibrium everywhere I look.

Newton’s first law of motion states that a body will travel in a straight line and at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force. Which is all about balance, positive and negative, this is important for many circus acts especially those with high falls. The positive being if the tightrope walker stands still he won’t fall off unless something pushes him off, the negative being if he does fall off then gravity will ensure it hurts when he hits the ground.

Take Australia as a perfect example, the country has the best weather, it has great outdoor sports, the beaches are great, it has stunning natural beauty, the standard of living is good and people are warm and friendly. What could be better? But which country has six of the ten deadliest spiders? Some that even live in your toilet! You can’t go swimming in the lakes because the crocodiles eat you, you can’t go swimming in the sea because the sharks eat you. If you don’t get eaten by a great white then be careful as they have 2 types of jelly fish that kill you and not even pissing on yourself helps. If you decide that swimming is too dangerous and you just want to paddle in the shallow water you would think you would be safe, but no, they have a fish that looks like a stone and if you tread on it you’ll be dead in 2 hours. If the stone fish doesn’t kill you then the blue ring octopus will, it's small and quite pretty, but when it bites you all your muscles stop working and you’re toast. Get this - they have a killer shell fish that shoots you with poisoned darts.   The snakes kill you, 1 is aptly named the Death Adder, the spiders kill you, the scorpions kill you and if you annoy a kangaroo it can kill you with one kick. There is a good reason god stuck it at the bottom of world around the back. It’s where he put all his maddest creations he just gave them nice weather to make up for the awful company.

Look at Saudi Arabia, it's a large sand dune of a country that doesn’t have a single river to help sustain life. It’s unbelievably hot during the day and freezing cold in the night. In fact it’s so hot during the day that most of the animals live under ground and their snakes have devised some strange wiggling crawl thing because the sand is so hot. You can’t drink beer and if you touch a woman in public they get to give you a proper whipping for the pleasure.  Not very nice at all but to ensure balance is maintained they’ve got a stack load of oil that they sell to the rest of us to support their camel and Bentley addictions.

France is another point in question and I know I’ve mentioned it before but it needs to be said. It is a great country, warm weather for the beaches in the south, skiing in the north, good farming land in the middle, great food to eat, the best wines, cheeses, fine art, culture, history (not as good as England though, calm down) and beautiful places to visit and see. Unfortunately the people are horrible to you, unless you’re French as well. They are so beyond superior that I can’t even find a word in any language to describe them, they think that the European way is basically the French way, if not then they are out on strike. Just because they’ve got their own kissing they think they are better than the rest of us.

You see this balance in the smaller things in life as well, medicine being one. The plus side is that it makes you better, but to work it has to taste nasty. This holds true for food as well. Chocolate and alike taste nice but is bad for you, food that is bad for your waistline tastes lovely and makes you feel good but makes you look like a certain French tyre advertisement. This is why vegetables taste bad; if they tasted good then no one would have invented toffee popcorn. There has to be balance so anyone who thinks vegetables are nicer than chocolate is probably nasty to puppies all the time.

I know women are complicated creatures, but they still have to live within a balanced universe, their counter balance is of course men. Women usually have a wardrobe full of shoes, men just the ones they need. Women have an outfit for every occasion; men only have shirts and ties that match because they can buy them in a set. Women buy a house because they see the potential and how it can be changed and improved. Men buy a house because they like it. Women don’t want men to ask them what they want; they want men to surprise them and do the hoovering without being prompted. Men are just confused. Men ask for what they want, women are playing some strange opposites game that men don’t know the rules to. Beer makes women more attractive and makes men less attractive. Those are the rules and who am I to say otherwise.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction Newton said and that is just the way of things. So just remember for all this happiness in December there is a cold, wet, miserable day in April when your car will breakdown in the middle of nowhere. When the battery on your phone dies and you miss the series finale of your favourite TV show just remember you were happy before and this payback means the universe doesn’t explode in a massive fireball of death and destruction.