Friday 29 May 2009

102 Humans/Misunderstandings/Oxymoron

Most think that an oxymoron is a conjoining of contradictory terms. Examples often cited are United States, military intelligence or a funny Jew. All of those examples by that definition are not oxymoronic; the States are united in their love of massacring the English language, military intelligence is very clever but often misguided, and there are funny Jews; Woody Allen and Leet Fabric are just 2 fine examples, both annoying yes, but also funny.
Oxymoron is actually a chemical compound yet to be discovered. It is a combination of oxygen and a super heavy element that will eventually be synthesised called Moron. Moron is a radioactive noble gas with an atomic number of 150 and a half-life of 10-44 seconds. The Planck time is 5.4 x 10-44 seconds, the earliest time after the Big Bang that theoretical physics can describe. But as discussed previously they are wrong (see 83 Entertainment/Comedy/Urban Myths). There is only one thing quicker than Moron’s half-life, Leet Fabric opening and closing his wallet at the bar.
Moron is so named because you would have to be a total mental defective an utter Planck to try and detect it.

Wednesday 27 May 2009

101 Control/Social Management/Invisible Policemen

The quaint religion of Catholicism has 37% of the world’s population following its musings. The confessional, a small, enclosed booth, is a fabulous invention and a very powerful invisible policeman. People will enter and under the ruse that no one but God and his representative need know, sins are confessed.
However, the priests were missing 63% of the world and were convinced the flock were holding back on the really lurid stuff. They craved deeper sordid titillation and so invented the ultimate confessional, the Internet Search Engine. The suggestive ‘Go Ogle’ was the original engine, and the initial success at extracting confessions was remarkable. Not even the Spanish Inquisition could get people to admit they had a penchant for www.slutsinburkas.com. However, there was a problem, the number of closet homosexuals and cross dressers it revealed was alarming. The clergy thought it had controlled those problems by inviting known miscreants to join their ranks. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.
The shear numbers unearthed by Go Ogle presented a very big problem. There simply was not enough room to house them all. Advertising executive Brandon O’Yeah (see 57 Pastimes/Rituals/Sunbathing) partially solved the problem by inventing New Labour and thus creating a large number of public servant and administration jobs with time consuming but wholly pointless occupations like Cornish Language Officer, Problem Otter Counsellor and Lesbian Ham Carver in order to distract them from thoughts of frocks and bottoms. Some were squeezed into the all ready over burdened entertainment industry and more still were shoe horned into Human Resource Departments. Diablo Ex Machina. Throngs of deviants are being discovered every day and the Church is despairing.
On the plus side people have become more honest.

Monday 25 May 2009

100 Puzzles/Mysteries/The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything

In 1977 the genius Douglas Adams deduced the answer to be 42. Leet and Fabric have since performed a more detailed study using the techniques of neutron particulation, slepton stretching and graviscalar baking and have found the more accurate answer of 42.001656. They expect the Noble Prize for Comedy for this discovery.

Saturday 23 May 2009

99 Linguistics/Conversations/Marital Arguments

Arguments can start for the silliest reasons and quickly escalate. Couples that have been co-habiting or married for 25 years can stab each other to death over whether Greenshield shopping stamps were better than Co-Op Blue Chip. The point of cataclysmic failure, the straw that breaks the feltcher’s rehabilitation attempts.
It is fortunate these couples haven’t got nuclear weapons and a real grievance. Even better that they are not generally mad. What would happen if say they had an imaginary friend to which they prayed for guidance, 10,000 nuclear warheads and some one threatening their philosophy and way of life?
The first exchange would be in the bedroom, a tactical nuclear strike right where it hurts. Not a big explosion, just enough to take out the genitalia and leave a message. The retaliation would be swift and just as brutal, in the bathroom replacing the Colgate toothpaste with chemical tactics, mustard gas in the bidet and anthrax in the Optrex eye drops. The children will then be asked to take sides with bribes of sweets and toys and the chance of going to heaven. A savage and pointless ground war will follow, involving ingenious conversions of KerPlunk! and PlayDoh Hairdresser into weapons of mass destruction, such a pity that a cheap and renewable source of fun can be used for such horror. When it is realised that neither party can win the house will be destroyed and the garden scorched, leaving nothing but a playground for the cockroaches. And all because of a trivial disagreement over collectable shopping stamps.
Fortunately no one is that mad.

Monday 18 May 2009

98 Employment/Jobs/Lawyers

Some view lawyers as cripples that hate dancers, old serpents who cannot shed their skin and call others naked and shameless, oxen that love their yoke and deem the forest deer a vagrant thing, vampires that turn their back to the sun and see only their shadows, and these shadows are their laws. But to most they are simply venal molluscs in league with the Devil.
The most repellent Lawyer is Maximally Von Lucrative the inventor of Jurisprudence- Jurisprudence. The philosophy and theory of law is Jurisprudence, and is complicated enough. Max created the philosophy and theory of the law of the philosophy and theory of law. So labyrinthine that the definition alone could make Albert Einstein’s ears bleed.
Philosophers are a subclass of magician - concept magicians, and so deserve the same scorn as magicians (see 56 Jobs/Entertainment Industry/Magicians). Lawyers are a type of magician too – word magicians, and so also deserve contempt.
Essentially Von Lucrative is a magician four times over. Ordinarily this would mean that the whole of nature and its laws would shun Max. No creature would be able to stand his presence; no light would reflect from him, no strata would support his passing, he would be banished from the Universe. However, Von Lucrative managed to find a loophole. Nature has appealed, but there is nothing natural about Law so will fail.
Max is currently working for Bill Gates trying to outsmart Benedict Farse.

Wednesday 13 May 2009

97 Entertainment/Games/Board Games

In the early 70’s before television became so unbelievably rubbish, board games were an extremely popular form of family entertainment. Ker Plunk and Buck-a-roo were the Ant and Dec of the day.
More fascinating are the ones that didn’t quite make it, the Terry Christian/Vernon Kay/Mickey from Magpie board games:
Mouse Feltch. – No one really knows what a feltch is and this game was an attempt to explain. It was like the original Mousetrap but with straws.
Ladders and Ladders – This amusement was over very quickly so wasn’t much fun. Snakes and Snakes didn’t fare much better for being impossible to finish.
Open the box – After the success of the surgery-based game ‘Operation’; ‘Open the Box’ was targeted at budding gynaecologists.
Hungry Gippos - Players have to support their incredibly large and ever-increasing brood of colourful tykes by gathering lucky heather and clothes pegs before PC Plod investigates their tarmac business.
Pat-a-Hake - like Pat-a- Cake but with fish.
Tiddlywanks – this was a game against the clock involving a twelve-inch ejaculating clockwork dwarf. Tiddlywanks has been voted the worst concept for a game ever but is never the less a collectors item.

Monday 11 May 2009

96 Entertainment/Music/Brass Bands

Brass bands used to be about colliery pit closures and harsh redundancy policies, juxtaposed with a strong undercurrent of renewed childhood romances. Since the Americans have got involved the game has changed. Now steroid abuse, exotic interpretation and horn tampering has bought the noble art into disrepute.
As usual the Americans have totally missed the point. Life is not all about being the best. A large part of life is about gritty working class unpleasantness and using a trombone as a political tool. It’s about losing your job and reclaiming your soul, smiling through coal dusted tears while contemplating suicide but instead deciding to get dressed up as a clown.
The Americans have entered a game they don’t understand. Brass Bands are more complicated than cricket and they should leave well alone.
At the recent World Brass Band Championships the Americans came a humiliating 98th out of 96. Their version of the Black Dyke Band, an all female ensemble of Afro-Caribbean decent, performed an Elgar influenced hip-hop fusion that put the girl back into Flugelhorn. The original Black Dyke band, so named after the geological basaltic vertical igneous intrusion in West Yorkshire, were horrified to see them attempt ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ by the Eurythmics. They had no idea that the euphonium could be so versatile.

Wednesday 6 May 2009

95 Mysteries/Puzzles/Why Do Women Talk About Nothing?

Women chatter. They can talk for hours about almost nothing. Often on public transport they will gossip at one another with abandon. No information will be relayed or received by either party. It is like an idling engine, the parts are moving but the vehicle is going nowhere. It is as if they are keeping ready for something. Like a warrior will still train for conflict in times of peace, a woman trains linguistically in times of confusion.
Woman’s primary role is as a chaos maker. All the clues are there: Eve and the apple, damming the entire human race to an eternity of suffering. Boadicea gave the Romans a beating and in the process doomed the British to deep fried lard with everything instead of a healthy Mediterranean diet. Joan of Arc threw the French into shock and chaos by actually winning wars for them. Sharon Osborne enough said. And marriage.
The world is currently in such disarray that this discordant womanly skill is not needed.
It is in no ones interest to achieve total annihilation of the human race, so if it looks like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to invite the Hoards of Hell to a barn dance, 3 billion persuasive linguistic engines will shift into gear and the soothing words ‘Leave it John, he ain’t worth it’ will be heard and the balance will shift towards peace and harmony. However, this state will never be achieved because women love shoes and chocolate. A satisfied human would only require a small piece of chocolate after a modest repast, and one pair of well made comfortable shoes. Where is the fun in that? So just as peace is about to be realised, ‘I’m happy, but something is missing’ will be uttered, sending the balance back towards war.
And so the human race is doomed to an ever-repeating pattern of war/peace/war, until someone invents the chocolate shoe to confuse women and render them speechless.