History books are full of clever quotations said by clever people (mostly men) about clever things. We all know that Isaac Newton said ‘Ouch’ when he invented gravity. And that Greek guy said ‘Eureka’ when he learnt how to make a Roman ship-killing death-ray in the bath. But do we ever know what people said about discoveries that predate the discovery of making historical quotations? In the spirit of Stanley Kubrick channelling his energies into a bunch of apes looking at a big monolith and suddenly thinking ‘I’m hungry’ here are a few attempts by myself at correcting this wrong:

Planets
‘Hey, Dave, you know, I was looking at the stars last night and I noticed something. Some of those stars don’t move the same way, they’re like, wandering all over the place. Weird huh? D’ya think we should name them or something?’

Milk
Hey Del, you know, I saw Terry yesterday afternoon. No, no, not Terry Maker-of-spears, no, Terry Botherer-of-Animals. Yeah, not sure what he was doing but he was sitting down by one of the cows, on a rock or something. Dunno. Well a few hours later he came to our party and he had this drink I’ve never tasted before. Not water, no. Kind of white and cloudy. It was delicious. No, don’t know where he got it from. I’ll have to ask him.’

Money
‘Oh, hi Pierre, sorry, haven’t seen you in a while. Been up in the hills gathering rocks. Yeah, found these weird shiny ones, kinda yellow-ish and glittery. I know, pretty eh? I know a few other have got a few, but I know I’ve got a lot more than anyone else now. And you know? I suddenly feel like a much more important person than other people. Somehow more important, better. So get lost.

ProstitutionSay what Pierre? You said you want some glittery, shiny yellow rocks too? Well, we can't have everything. Just sit over there and I'll think of something...

Russell Brand is probably one of the great 'outside-the-establishment' thinkers of our age. His body of work, progressing from Big Brother presenter or something to comedian to film star to probably the most thought provoking and popular icon of our age is a fantastic story that we should all follow. I love watching his amazing way with words in his video messages and his truly modern and original journalistic output. I cannot say enough good things about this colossus. So much that, in the spirit of artistic competition I thought I'd write something in a similar vein to the great man, nay, great Zeitgeist, nay, great intellectual giant of the modern world. And to truly dedicate something worthy of his thought, I challenged myself to write something metaphysical to show the actual feeling I experience, the true meaning, if you will, of his words when I listen to them. So here we go:

'Cliché, cliché, cliché, logical fallacy. Overwhelmingly fatuous statement. 2+2=5. cliché. Pithily phrased statement. Cliche. Cliché. Aren't I cute. Cliché. Thought terminating statement. Cliché. Straw man, cliché. Fucking mindbogglingly poorly argued statement. Cliché. Grandstanding rhetoric. Annoying phrase that is actually pretty well expressed. Cliché. Thought provoking cliché. Poorly argued logical statement. Cliché, cliché, cliché. Love. Cliché. Complicated word poorly used, cliché. Cognitively dissonant statement. Cliché. Good=bad. Cliché. Something heart-warming. Cliché.' 

The End.

As we grow and evolve mentally toward that final, dark, resting place we ask ourselves many important questions that nourish and shape our world-view. Questions such as ‘Why am I here?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘At what point does Transcendental Logic divide into the Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Dialectic?’ But the most important question for all of us at some point in our life I think is ‘Who would win out of a fight between Batman and Superman?’ 
(Answer: Batman (But he cheats. With Kryptonite.))
Superheroes present conundrums to us throughout our lives, from earliest childhood through to fully grown adults. I remember an important life lesson when a debate based on my foundational statement that ‘Batman must be able to fly, otherwise he wouldn’t have a cape, my mum said so.’ established a new political order of my peer group with Alex from Form 2 (statement: Batman can’t fly) the new gang leader and me sent to the school nurse with a nosebleed and grazed knee.
Of course, a fellow blessed with a considerable reasoning faculties I've taken these defeats as life lessons and honed my outlook to accommodate all possible viewpoints on any given issue reasonably and thoughtfully.
However, as that rapidly approaching (and arbitrarily named) phase of life ‘middle age’ approaches I am drawn more and more towards questioning some fundamental aspects of super heroes characters. It’s good to know that I use my time constructively:


Batman 
What’s with Batman? Why does everyone love him when he so clearly belongs in that parasitic pariah-caste of the modern age known as ‘the one percent’. This faceless, free spending playboy billionaire does not also project the image of an uncaring rich man to the masses, he also preserves the status quo by preying on the lower classes’ most vulnerable and infirm, terrorising them before beating the shit out of them and then throwing them into Arkham for the government to pick up the bill. If he actually took time to sit down a really try to understand the Joker or Two Face, perhaps so much more can be achieved. Maybe if they all took a weekend retreat to some out of the way place, did a drum circle, smoked some cool tobacco and chatted about their feelings like real men, perhaps they’d find some common ground.
But no, he spends obscene wads of cash on fancy hi-tech toys with little practical value other than to look cool and give him options. The development cost of the Batmobile alone would cover the wages of three Gotham police precincts, two homeless charity soup-kitchens and with enough left over to fund several dozen mental healthcare community support projects. You must be ashamed of yourself Mr. Wayne (also Mr Stark).

Superman
Superman is the evocation of modern day passivity, that representation of contemporary facile entitlement in a generation that thinks not of helping itself but rather expecting everybody else pick up the pieces. Stuck up a tree and can’t get down? (can’t be bothered to get down I say.) Call Superman. Stuck hanging from a crashed helicopter that is slipping rapidly from the top of a skyscraper? No, rather than taking responsibility for your own actions and trying to get out of the situation with your own effort, no, you cast words blindly to the heavens, hoping for help. Three camp, PVC-clad thespians turn up at the oval office and demand you ‘kneel’ before them what do you do? Fight back? Resist? Give ‘em a good ol’ fashioned right hook of the free world. No, you bend the knee and hope some wayward love-stricken son of Krypton will come and sort out the whole sorry mess. A poor moral message for all of us. Awful.

Footnote: Since 1989 I think it has established that Batman can in fact fly. If gliding counts as flying. Which it does. Alex is a wanker. He’s also a lawyer now.

I remember once having an argument with my grandfather about history. 
‘History’ he said, ‘is nothing but trouble, we shouldn't remember it because it makes us all enemies’.
‘You’re wrong’, I said, ’History is great and interesting and stuff’.
At which I punched him in the face and we never spoke again. Which is ironic because according to my Grandfather’s philosophy he should have put that little incident behind him.
Like all great lovers of history I am drawn to the most interesting and bloody parts first and the boring stuff second. Although it is normally the boring stuff that sets the precedent for the interesting and bloody stuff to happen.
In this interest I have recently started writing an original history of my own, concentrating on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Please take a look and enjoy.

'Barbarians and Gentlemen'

‘The fall of the Western Roman Empire came about through its interactions with the four main barbarian tribes of the time; the huns, the vandals, the goths and the hooligans. Encroached upon from all points of the compass (if compasses were invented back then), the Huns to the east, the goths to the north, the hooligans to the west and the vandals probably from the last direction, the south. The Huns and the vandals we shall set time aside to examine in greater detail later, but we must first set the stage for the goths and the hooligans.
Imagine the year is 432 and Rome is crumbling. Justinian (or maybe Constantine) has fucked off and left the west to its own devices. The hooligans, a tribe of vaguely Germanic peoples emerge on the European continental mainland from the British isles, ready for conquest. Formed from a loose confederation of sports-dress loving hovel dwellers, these fearsome pot-bellied warriors arrived emblazoned with the fetishes of their gods and local holy men and ready for war (or certainly a good drubbing). Over the decades that followed, names such as Fred Perry, Peter Storm and Adidas would strike fear into Roman citizens as they had their heads and testicles ritually pounded by these gangs of lager-crazed ‘sons of Mars’. But just as they began, their time was over, a newer more invasive tribe arrived, the goths. Driven by their love of death and all things ghoulish, these black-clad, cider-guzzling mopers cut a gloomy swathe through the classrooms and parties of the cooler continental kids’ dominion. Constantly bringing everybody down with their  going-on about how they’d like to have met Saint Ian of Curtis or how nobody would miss them if they were dead, their dreary, electro dirges and ritualised side-to-side dancing to (un)popular bardic groups such as the Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus poisoned Western Europe and generally made everybody feel a bit uncomfortable. The stage was now set for the final collapse of…’

If you want to read any more of my ground breaking work on this tumultuous period of European history, just wait a few years before I get around to doing anything more, you’ll be able to read it then.

Thanks for your time and see you soon!

As a mind prone to wander (and wonder) in these modern times I find myself drawn to all facets of human thought and discovery. On this particular occasion, I would like to draw your attention to science. Not the boring, logical science of maths, the periodic table and falsefialbility but the much more interesting science of fiction. The science of fiction (or ‘science-fiction’) uses the most powerful force in the universe, the force of the ‘imagination’. And unlike boring real science, the science of fiction can do much cooler stuff. Like allowing you to fly to another galaxy in 2.3 seconds, or make space lasers go ‘pew’ rather than making a boring ‘no’ sound in the vacuum of space, or not inevitably die of solar radiation if you don’t want to.

As my procrastination is often a blessing as well as a burden, I decided to write a micro science fiction story, one that blows apart the boundaries  of conventional literature by exploring the key tenants of existentialism, intrasolar meteorology, class and feminism. For you my friends, enjoy the fruits of my overwhelming creativity.

‘By Jove’

Lady Marian Threeblethwaite had found herself in a spot of bother. As a lady of uncommonly adventurous spirit she did not often find herself as perplexed as she was now. Allowing herself a moment of brief respite from her otherwise normally fortuitous personality she uttered a phrase often considered undignified to someone of her stature.
'Oh bother', she said.
Because, rather than awaking in a bedroom in the north-facing wing of Threeblethwaite Manor, as was her regular experience, she instead found herself being buffeted in the more-than-stormy winds of the great red spot of Jupiter, dressed in nothing more than her night gown and a pair of stout leather hiking boots.
'However did I get here?' she thought as she tumbled through the methane clouds.
'And however can I breathe?'
The answer was, she couldn't. As the compressed icy methane crushed the life from from her atrophying lungs her cellular structure collapsed, smearing her body into a dirty red paste across the crests of the ammonium hydrosulfide clouds. Jupiter didn't mind. Jupiter was used to this kind of thing.

The End.

Like any great thinker and artist in history (who simply wasn’t rich, or a trust fund child in the first place - I’m looking at you Mr Shakespeare and Mr Burroughs) I was drawn to a particular place at a particular time. That place was Prague, the great Gothic city that many people think lies on the Danube but doesn't. (No people, you get to Hamburg if you get on a boat on this one, not Vienna and then the Caspian Sea or something.) Prague lies at the heart of the Czech Republic (or if if you prefer its cooler, artier name, Bohemia) and in it’s winding Gothic and baroque streets you walk in the footsteps of greats like Kafka, Dvorak, Capek, Cimrman and Gott. I would however advise you to only walk in the winding Gothic and baroque streets because if you go much further you might find yourself in the majestic Art Nouveau and Art Deco streets and then the okay late Victorian industrial streets and then the slightly grubby modernist and Bauhaus streets and eventually the quite frankly fucking horrible prefabricated socialist realist streets. But then, the cheek-by-jowl juxtaposition of architectural motifs is interesting isn't it? And unending beauty is a folly of the romantic age and the romantic age is even less cooler than the seventies right now.
Inspiration is everywhere here, from the cold, miserable indifference of the supermarket cashier to the tangible horror of the realisation that you only have a two thousand crown note on you when settling the bill for three beers and a fried cheese to the nearly-getting-run-over-on-a-zebra-crossing by some ‘debil’ not paying attention to his surroundings. Each ‘Prazaci’s life is a rich collage of icy comportment framed crisply with a nobly stoic and tenacious indifference to humanity (and personal space). 
Come here, exercise your artistic will and and just remember, you’ll be unique here because there is unlikely to be some other delusional washed-up expat in a bar believing the beauty that surrounds will somehow ignite their inner muse.

Religion is a tricky issue and in this modern world we all try to figure it out. I find that dogma helps and dogmatically adhering to a system gives you a better sense of surety. Lots of people have issues with Islam at the moment for obvious political reasons. The main problem with Islam I have is that when I get to paradise it's going to be very difficult to single Mohammed out in a crowd as I have no visual reference. Jesus is easy, he's going to to have a beard. It may be difficult to find him in thirty or so years when the hipsters all die out but I'll just look at everyone's hands. I guess Jesus will be the one with no tattoos but at least some evidence of extreme body piercing. Also he probably won't know much about that latest bands unless he takes a quick peek at Pitchfork. I also presume he's not much of a coffee drinker. Was coffee invented when he was around?

Like many great minds I have a wealth of fantastic ideas for short stories and novels. I often like to get these down on paper when I can be bothered. However procrastination often gets in the way of ever completing these. Naughty procrastination. (Also, lack of talent). In my life I've started thousands of short stories and novels but sadly the weight of my genius prevents me from ever writing more than the first paragraph. Sometimes not even that. It is very difficult and most people don't understand what it is to be like when you are this talented and lazy. Here's my latest attempt. 

'The Butcher'
'In hell, there's a special room, or rather more of an auditorium, in which all the people who, throughout history, have been called 'The Butcher of'' meet and chat and take a light buffet lunch. Surprisingly, there's usually quiet a few Germans there. Unfortunately, due to the stringent entry qualifications, Mr Gavin Steeblethorpe (Steeblethorpe and Sons Family Butchers of Massey-on-the-Wold) found himself rubbing shoulders with Klaus Barbie and Reinhard Heidrich over cantaloupe and coffee one morning after being suddenly taken by a brief but violent heart attack.'