Petrol - understanding the problem

A quick note about the use of fuel in cars. Now I understand that censoring newspapers is generally looked down on. But I think that the scenario of petrol inflation causing scaremongering is exactly the kind of thing that should be grounds for masked men taking people away in the night never to be seen again.

The newspaper that caught my eye shall remain nameless (because I can't remember it). But the massive title on the front page was: PETROL SHORTAGES: NO NEED TO PANIC.

Now lets look at this one logically; what will happen when you tell someone not to panic? They will wonder what exactly the emergency is that they shouldn't panic about. Its the kind of statement that is made when a person believes that the logical reaction is to panic, and so therefore prewarns everyone of what is about to happen. In short asking people not to panic will tell them that it is a perfectly rational state to be in.

Of course what the paper should say is "go ahead and panic if you want to. There's plenty of petrol for panickers and non panickers alike". But headlines of "everything is normal" isn't a headline at all.

Petrol is a very weird thing. Very prevalent in the world, it has now been turned into unuseful things, like clouds. Plants realised the usefulness of using waste material for their own ends very early on by absorbing co2 and releasing oxygen. It works in a cycle.

So if we are to learn from nature, then we need a thing that absorbs fuel emissions and turns them in to something that can be used to fuel stuff. An organic being that lives by eating up carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and unburnt petrol.

And what should it release? Well if it is a true cycle, then it should form oil filled leaves, but it should not be flammable in itself, else forest fires would be rather epic.

But perhaps trying to shape nature around ourselves is actually rather egotistical.

Petrol is the by-product of creating water. The oceans formed many millions of years ago when the ground melted and the solid bits sank to the bottom. Many people wonder why it was coloured blue, but this is purely due to the name "blue" coming from the norse word meaning water. As water is often drunk by both humans and some mammals, it is vital to replace what is taken. The Pyro-elastic company of Australia is the world's leader in oxygen dihydride manufacturing; producing over 90 tonnes per minute. This does cause some problems, as no-one has yet built a pipe big enough to handle that kind of hydro-traffic. As a result it is instead poured upwards in to the sky, where the water is forced further and further up by the water underneath it. Once it reaches cloud city it is turned 90 degrees by a series of magnets and from there it falls into the ocean wherever the ocean is at its lowest.

This has caused knock on effects to the country. The perpetual force occurring in one direction is pushing Australia south every year by 3 and 1/8th feet. There has been plans to rotate the water in a "sprinkler effect", but this has been rubbished as causing the country to spin.

But returning to the point of this talk-amble, the petrol is eventually produced by the demagnatised magnets anchored to the clouds via a space lift. These quickly get coated in a layer of dead, magnetic birds sent off course with the alteration in magnetic fields. The magnets are replaced every 3-7 months and are melted down and burnt inside combustion engines, so that there is no record of how many birds died in the water engineering industry.

monkey kung fu

Spoken word versions of games that probably don't work too well:

Where's Wally?
The view is of a roman gladiator fight. Description runs from top left to bottom right:
Builder falling of very high scaffolding, a crow wearing a roman helmet, another crow looking scared at the on-coming crow, cloud shaped like Italy, a "crazy" flying contraption, another 'wacky' flying contraption with air escaping and scared pilot with large flying goggles, people sitting on very high, wobbly seats trying to watch the match, popcorn seller, crucifix seller, souvenir dagger seller, kids fighting with souvenir daggers, man being poked in bum by souvenir dagger, man in red and white hooped jumper but no glasses, a large number of people doing the 'Mexican wave', man running towards a lion but looking behind him, another lion with a bib and knife and fork, two gladiators fighting, a scared gladiator trying to fight with a shoe, Wally, a pile of gladiators all sitting around smoking and playing cards, a football referee blowing his whistle, two paramedics with a stretcher, a small dog.

charades
I'm putting my hands together and then moving them apart so that the sides with the little fingers are still together. I'm showing you 2 fingers from my right hand. I show you the index finger on my right hand. I place my left hand horizontally on top of my right hand, which is upright with the narrow side facing you. I show you two fingers from my right hand. I place those same two fingers against my left bicep and tap them twice. I pull on my ear. I place my left index finger by my left eye and prod gently.

why do we allow it to continue?!

Right clearly two things have happened. Either there is an evil conspiracy to steal the intelligence out of people's brains, starting with one very specific group, or we have grown to love the complete lack of intelligence shown by one group and this has brought about their success and drawn other lackfull cretins to its shiny moneymaking reputation.

I'm talking about birthday cards. Now I know that this is uninspired source of droll stand ups everywhere. But I'm not here to spout "what is the deal with birthday cards?!". Ok, well maybe a little, but my source of muse on this little ditty is hatred. As I stood in a Tesco's queue with a handful of baguettes and pasta meals (yes they make good cold lunch snacks when combined), I heard an unexplainably attractive girl speak to her equally good looking "just friends" guy pal. "Oh cards! I need one because its xxxx's birthday" (no I'm not censoring my quotes, I just can't remember the conversation at this point. Personally if I could remember the person's full name then I'd put it here, just on the off chance that they read this and also got a god awful card recently so that they can now stand up from their computer and shout "Oh yeah! I hated that card!").

So the girl (who now I think about it, I can only remember what her hair looked like, and combined it with her posh/Southampton accent to create a photo fit in my head), started flitting through the cards and announcing each one of them to anyone who cared to have their ears open in the vicinity (hello).

It was actually rather joyous. Each card she picked up she began to read aloud with a sense of "this is going to be great!" obviously forgetting any and every card she'd read before this. And on each of the 3 occasions of card readings she opened the card and announced the punch line. Twice she stopped saying the punch line halfway through because it was at best crass and at worse VD related. The other was just crap. Unworthy even of Christmas cracker publishing.

"wow that's awful" I thought at the end of it. Elsewhere in the world wherever there is an audience to comedy, it is given the highest critique, reviews are given of books and stand-up performances and hecklers are even to be expected. But not here, not in this arena of humanity denying crap. Perhaps a little "how's my joke telling" should be put on the back with the writer's 24hr home phone number on it. That should make them pick up their game.

But perhaps I'm shooting fish in a barrel here. Perhaps like haiku, it is an incredibly difficult field to work in. And so FINALLY I get to my point. I believe that in the next 60 seconds (and no i have put 0 thought in to this) I will come up with humorous comedy cards..... ready ....go!

completely blank cards with "I don't really know you" on the inside.

cards made out of a £5 note

cards which don’t open, and can't be stood up

cards with a link to a funny youtube clip on it

a card with all the numbers of your birthday written in a row with "christ you're old" on it.

a card that turns into a hat

a card with two jokes that reads differently depending on which way you hold it up

cards with a shot in it

cards with built in fireworks

edible cards

....wow, that actually hurt. I think the hardest thing was to try not to think of the god awful tat and doing something very similar. I think the first one started that way, the "christ your old" thing is rather time honoured. Perhaps offensiveness would have been a better route to go down (lets hope next year you won't need a card type ones).

Definitely by the end I think I was on to something. A card and a match. Step back and watch the card launch in to the sky and explode into confetti. Awesome.

Pointless motions against "the bad guys"

Yes its nameless, pointless rant time again. This is a little venting against those who write stuff on the interweb like "e-petitions" (example in a second), which doesn't do a blind bit of good.

In these cases my instinctive reaction is to reply to their messages with a quick outlining of the futility of their actions, but this will lead to the inevitable backlash of poorly thought through, emotionally based responses.

So instead, I'm writing this mainly to myself, and also the few who still read this stuff, because I know you lot are sensible to be able to read something and understand it as "one point of view".

So to the point of my fury then. There is a facebook group (yes I look at facebook), that is a "petition" against an artist in foreign-land #12 who has put a performance art piece of a starved dog on display. This is obviously a piece of rather unnecessary and cruel work. The thing that aggravated me most though is that this piece is obviously designed to get him attention by shouting "look at me!" in the loudest way possible, short of suspending yourself in a glass box on a bridge (maybe he was ignored when young?). So the obvious thing to do would either to write to the local government asking whether this is all legal, or contacting the nearest hippie, manatee hugging group and inform them.

Instead no. Lets form a facebook group to "boycott said artist". BOYCOTT??? What are you going to do, not fly to foreign land and buy his stuff? I know, fly all the way out there, and then turn your back on the dog. Yes! That will do it won't it!? I'm sure that the underground abstract humiliation and torturing artist group survive on the generous donations of internet empowered hippies.

And on the message board reads a rubbish heap of people all bleating the same messages. "oh how terrible". "He shouldn't do that". Yes thank you for your insightful responses to something that doesn't affect you and that you can't affect. It seems to be some modern way of washing your hands of a problem.

"did you see that terrible piece of art?"
"Yes, but its ok, I voiced my opinions rather loudly on a public chat room"
"does the government read chat room?"
"um...well no"
"what about the artist"
"well no"
"what about the supporters of the artist?"
"no...."
"but you feel better now you've done it?"
".....yes"

Hmmm...I'm all for making the world a better place. But what I have a real bugbear for is those people who make token gestures (picking up their 1 piece of litter, putting their name on a petition, giving their £3 to Oxfam every month), and then feel like they have the right to hold people who haven't done that as evil.

I'm not evil, I'm just not kidding myself.

The most delicious bit of this whole story is the possible outcome of this whole publicising of it. Most likely, nothing whatsoever will come of all of this misguided whinging. But, there is a chance that an artist lover will get wind of this group, find out about this art, love it, and then commission the artist for a work of their own.

If you really care about this one, buy a one way plane ticket and a piece of 2x4, go to xenoland and put the little pup out of its misery. Then drape its body around your neck, and beat yourself with the 2x4 around your face until the media turns up. If anyone is going to become an eccentric millionaire artist, it should be you.

From Collateral:

Vincent: Max, six billion people on the planet, you're getting bent out of shape cause of one fat guy.
Max: Well, who was he?
Vincent: What do you care? Have you ever heard of Rwanda?
Max: Yes, I know Rwanda.
Vincent: Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?
Max: What?
Vincent: Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whales, Greenpeace, or something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a hissy fit.
Max: Man, I don't know any Rwandans.
Vincent: You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.

5 minute challenge...

The main thing to remember is to be calm. And also to breath, but that's not something you normally have to remember. Its not like you are holding your breath, then get distracted by a moth, and then die.
So just remember the calm bit. Because if you get stressed and your heart rate goes above a preset limit, I'm going to fill your mouth with bees.
I'm not sure whether it is the fear of having bees in my mouth, or just the word bees that makes me laugh. I don't mean to laugh when I'm afraid, just that sometimes it helps me to relax.
Blabbering aside for a minute I would like to remind everyone that I've never pretended for a second that this blog is for anyone except myself. You are trespassing on my stupidity, so I'll do you a deal, I won't mention this if you don't. But instead of my usual tightly written, sharply witted spirited knocks at the normal, today I have just set myself a challenge: To write for 5 minutes without stopping to think about what I'm going to write next. So please take this moment in this entry to be like a roller coaster, just at the beginning with the slow ascent and clunky chains, pretending to the person next to you that you're so bored that you might fall asleep and wake up only to realise that you're upside down 30 seconds later.
This whole rant came about because of a rather long winded dual sided rant that occurred last thursday/tuesday evening (see I haven't even stopped to recollect properly), I ended up in a very weird situation that involved talking to a friend about nothing, and we instinctively knew that the most entertaining thing to do was not to stop and allow the conversation to start on a new tangent, but to continue and expand on the crap we were currently talking about with more and more ridiculous things. The others standing around listening were all there in rather stunned silence. Half entertained, half wondering if we were ever going to shut the f$$$ up. And of course eventually we did, but not before a good 5-10 minutes of blabbering about anything inconsequential that fell into our heads as we chatted. And when we were done we sat rather out of breath and smiling. Rather like.......um....sports. yes wholesome sports. Like two grown men battling tongues and wrestling in unusual positions and in the end feeling like we had accomplished something worthwhile, but with a rather hollow feeling, like we had let down those close to us....just like sports.

Dr. Pocolypse makes a business trip

Opening scene. View from door looking in to a small office. Door opens without seeing who opens it. Man in the room looks up from his desk.

Employee: ah, you must be my 10 o'clock. Welcome to countocorp.
Customer: (In russian accent) thank you. (sits down in to shot to reveal classic 60's bond villain attire).
E: sorry to keep you waiting, would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee?
C: Ah, oh um coffee please.
E: How about a biscuit? We have bourbons or ginger nuts
C: (pauses and then speaks whilst raising eyebrow) I'll have (camera zooms in) ginger nuts.
E: Ok, lovely. Now I understand that you would like one of countocorps talking clock packages for you office. Is it an office?
C: Well....sort of. More of a.....bunker.
E: Oh! lovely. And I understand that you would like some bespoke features. Normally we just to a (jesticulates) "at the beep the time will be..".
C: Yes, that is of no use to me. I need it to count (another slow zoom in), down?
E: Ok a countdown, lovely. Well we pride ourselves here on friendly voiced announcements of times and events over phones or tannoys.
c: Friendly? hmm...I want something more monotonal, more backgroundish.
E: I see.
C: Yes, I was thinking more like "2 minutes to self destruction and counting".
E: Ah, yes that brings me on to my other query. I've been looking through some of the statements you would like us to record for your business. (gets out list), lets see...yes.. warning...nuclear storage facility compramised.. and also danger...building self destruct in 30 seconds. What....business are you in?
C: I am....in....zoos.
E: ...zoos?
C: Yes, I look after a zoo. Very dangerous zoo. For viruses.
E: A....virus zoo.
C: ...Yes. Very dangerous, needs self desctruct buttons.
E: And sharks?
C: Oh, yes, my precious sharks.
E: And that's why you need the..(consults the sheet again)..."warning...stand clear of shark trap doors"
C: mm...most important.
E: Right, and as far as the countdown goes, would you like it to just say the warning once and then just say times?
C: no,no,no. It must constantly repeat the same warning message along with the time left.
E: And you aren't worried that this will become annoying and take up so much time that it makes it hard to know how much time you've got left?
C: No
E: Even on this one? "10 minutes remain until nuclear spore thermo shield catastrophic failiure causing shuttle hull depressurisation"?
C: Actually no, I rather like that one. And, well I'll never have to hear it.
E: And why is that?
C: Because this time, there is no way that I can fail!
E: Right, so you've failed before?
C: Yes but, this time will be different. This time I have armed guards posted around the nuclear spore thermo shield self destruct button.
E: o...kay. Well, not for me to judge!
C: ...what
E: No nothing. Well it just seems like .... no, nothing.
C: Good
E: Now, payment, I understand that you would like to pay a deposit now.
C: Yes, the rest will come from when my corporation receives a very large sum of money in a couple of weeks from the world's governments.
E: For your zoo
C: Oh...yes...big donation. They really fea...respect my zoo.