Automated inspiration

Well, its been too bloody long since I've written anything. Perhaps my mind has calmed down a bit; perhaps my boss has started slipping sedatives into my morning coffee; perhaps this is all a giant conspiracy to stop free thought that has not affected anyone else because.... well, looks like I'm fine afterall. So to help quench this drought, I've written another fantastic piece of software that comes up with inspiring topics of discussion. Observe!


Why do old people get cold?
How do you make the universe end up inverted?
Who made old people become exploding?
An encyclopaedia of communists
Why can't goal posts start off hot?
Why old people?
Why do clouds get drinkable?
The history of 50p coins
What if badgers turned invisible?
The origins of knives and forks

English language

I had been meaning to write this one for a while now, but like a lubricated cloud, its was rather hard to keep hold of.

So without further a do; I would like to introduce my first book:

Verbular and noundic plurelacise.
A guide to the tricky world of plurals, singulars and tensing in the english language.

Introduction:
We all know that working out when something should get pluralised and what form this should take is not something that can be equated from a simple set of rules. Often many words have their plural version bear no resemblance to logic. Similarly, singulars cannot be derived from their plural equivalent.
In the course of this book, I hope to provide you with some much needed answers to your question or questicies.

Some universal laws:
Some rules can always be applied, and should be learnt first:
(i) x->ces
Some basic examples first:
Index->indices
Matrix->matrices
prix->prices
chox->choices
box->bocies

but they can also be used in making more irregular words
1 voice-> 2 vox
1 horse-> 3 hoax
1 oak -> 3 oxen (notice how the word is past tense due to the tree now being dead).

(ii) past tensed
Tensing is another tricky area that we can help. Just remember, if it happened then it needs oldering.
dead->deaden
breath-> brend
pig -> pork
navigate->navigot
dog->dug
3-> threed
triplicate->triplipacised
tree->trod
divided->dividend (a past event happening again, in the past).
jump->jimped

(iii) present past continuous.
Possible the toughest of tensing. Best described in a scenario:
Mark would like to tell Peter about a time he was fishing when he fell in to a lake. He tells this story as if he was there at the time, but with reference to the fact that it is in the past. Mark begins:

"I had fished when fallen went water and wet."

Unfortunately, this is not english, and gramatically much closer to Canadian, or Indian.

Instead it should follow simple english rules:

"I was fished and whilst fisheding did I felling and watered." - Much better I think you'll agree.

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.