Thursday 21 June 2012

Goodbye Cruel World

It is with great sadness with which I bid farewell to this cruel cruel world.

Goodbye to all the cruel irony.

Cruel irony that pairs the sweet nectar of an aged single malt with the agony of the morning after.

Cruel irony that pairs the aroma of a summer meadow with red eyes and a 6 month sniffle.
Cruel irony that pairs the sublime taste of oysters with uncontrollable vomiting when visiting a school friend you haven't seen in years who suggests a "local special" oyster lunch.

Cruel irony that pairs the appeal and amusement of the whole concept of irony with stupid people unable to comprehend or correctly use this concept, whilst still insisting on calling it irony.

Cruel irony that places a black fly into your Chardonnay.
Anyway, enough about Irony. The biggest irony of all is that I don't want to end it all, yet have brought the end upon myself.
I've spent a good chunk of the last 28.5 years investing in life. I've invested in education. Invested long hours into the lower rungs of the career ladder. Invested in a house. Invested in relationships and now it's payback time.

Thankfully, the investments have started paying off - I got a pretty good job thanks to education1; work less hours for more money than I used to thanks to investing time in corporate politics and (to a lesser extent) working hard2; pay bugger all on a mortgage due to my timely purchase and prudent remortgaging3; and should shortly be reaping all the cooky-cleany-lunchmakey-sexy rewards that come with marriage thanks to 11.5 years of relationship investment4.

Quite frankly, now I should be cashing out these investments and living the high life - jetting off on Safari to Kenya, or to a private villa in Zanzibar, staying in Ice Hotels, jumping off high objects and lighting cigars with £20 notes - all of this before I am forced to succumb to the obligation to do my bit to reverse the dumbing down of society and pass these "grade A" genes onto the next generation.

Instead, four men, men I considered friends. Best friends. Family. Are conspiring to take this from me. You see, this is no suicide note. Far from it - I am quite fond of life these days. This is a cry for help, an accusation, a note from beyond the grave to highlight the murderous actions of these so called "Best" men.
Tomorrow I embark on my stag weekend. I know nothing, except to be at Heathrow for 7.15am and to fear for my life.

So if this is the end, I regret nothing...

...except for selecting four best men instead of one. That was pretty stupid.

1 and a lot of luck
2 and a lot of luck
3 and a lot of luck
4 and a lot of blackmail material

Friday 15 June 2012

On the origin of the species

Tell me. Seriously. Who doesn’t like daffodils? They're awesome


Daffodils bring back happy Summer memories from my childhood. Memories of a round-faced little me (complete with Dame Edna style giant round spectacles) romping through the grounds of a manor house (that had been transformed into my Dad’s place of work) with my angelic blonde brother in tow.

We selected only the finest Daffodils – not yet opened but always with a fully bloomed, healthy set of peers so to give them the best chance of growing up to be the same (that’s right, even six year old me had an inherent grasp of probability and genetics).

Throughout the Summer our house was emblazoned with yellow. It was great.

However, in a travesty that would never be allowed in the modern molly-coddled society, my negligent parents never instructed me nor my brother to, at all costs, avoid eating the daffodils.

They never told me that daffodils were poisonous. They never told me of the risks of abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhoea or (worst of all) loss of appetite that could come from eating daffodils.

I am truly blessed to still be here today given all of the opportunities to eat daffodils that have confronted me over the years.

Or am I?

Alternatively, Is it actually the case that because I was endowed with (debatably) more than a full gnat’s goblet of common sense and an IQ that miraculously stretched out of the single digits that I decided that eating flowers, pretty flowers that are there to look at and smell, was a bad idea?
Given the plethora of Daffodil Poisoning advice websites and recent news stories such as this1 you’d think this trend warranted one of those apocalyptic-disease-pandemic Hollywood films (or at least a series of 24). Supermarkets genuinely had to attach multi-lingual “do not eat” labels to daffodils in order to contain this deadly phenomenon.



Whatever happened to natural selection? Why do issues like the daffodil one and signs like these even have to exist?

Throughout the ages (unless you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible, or scientology etc.) natural selection has promoted survival of the fittest. If it’s been good enough for the past few billion years, why are we trying to resist it now?

There’s quite often a theme in object of my invective. Stupidity, incompetence and ineptitude figure pretty damn regularly and this is the reason that the “death of natural selection2” scares the bejesus out of me.

Here, I am going to artfully sidestep all arguments involving social class, religion, politics, the education (and in particular higher education) and stick to the cold hard statistics3

Quite simply. Intelligence is genetic. Statistically, the number of progeny is inversely proportional to intellect (i.e. stupid people have more children). Thus, the average intelligence of the population is being diluted.

Peoples is done getting stupider.

It’s for this reason that whenever one of my friends or colleagues (assuming they are intelligent of course) announces impending child-based emburdenment I am not just happy for them but also happy for me.

To these fine folk I say “Go forth saviours of tomorrow and reproduce!”

“Let it be known to your young - and their young that follow - that they are of a dying breed and it is their duty pass on genes that society has forgotten!”

1OK. OK. I get that this was mainly caused by cultural differences with the local Chinese population, Daffodils being placed near produce in stores and Daffodils looking like a Chinese cooking herb but give me some artistic license here please?!?

2Technically “the death of natural selection” is completely the wrong way to look at it. Natural selection involves the survival of those who adapt best to the environment that they are in. What has actually happened is that our societal environment has developed in such a way that it has eradicated certain selection pressures that would otherwise exist. Namely, there are fewer and fewer selection benefits of intelligence.

3As provided by the music video for Korn’s “Evolution” and the (terrible) 2006 movie “Idiocracy”. An Indisputable pair of statistical sources if ever I saw them.