“Oh no! Tom just pushed his Tweedle down the apples!” You probably don’t know what any of that means, but someone from London might. I’m in London (The Grumpy Apple,) and after infiltrating my local shop, several pubs, and a dog track, I can now confirm that the people of London really do have a secret language. In Cockney Rhyming Slang, a word, typically the second in a two-word phrase, is replaced by a rhyming one. In the above example “Tweedle” is short for “Tweedle Dum”— mum, and “apples” is short for “apple ‘n’ pears”—stairs. Tom has only gone and pushed his Mum down the stairs! What a character. And these are just two out of a million phrases designed to spin your Tonies (Tony Blairs—ears.)Here are some facts about Cockney Rhyming Slang:
1. Cockney Rhyming Slang is a cryptolect invented in the 19th Century by London merchants to confuse their wives.
2. Cockney Rhyming Slang was the earliest form of Rap, probably.
3. During the war the British Secret Service used “Slangers” to talk bollocks on the radio to confuse and annoy the Germans. This is where the term “Wind talkers” comes from.
4. The only other culture to speak in Rhyming slang was the Ewoks (“Yub-jub” — grub).
5. EVERYONE in London speaks it, from Stephen Hawking—“People should not be scared of Hadron Colliders” (spiders)—to the PM—“When we said Iraq had WMDs, we may have been talking Jacksons (Jackson Pollocks—bollocks). Even the Queen. Just have a butcher’s at this excerpt from her last Christmas address:
“It has been a challenging ginger beer (year) for all. Hard working people are boracic (boracic lint—skint), children are brandishing Derek and Clives (knives), and innocent people are ending up Dodi Al-Fayed (dead). Frankly, if I didn’t have Vera Lynn (gin) I don’t know what I’d do.”
Based on the success of the British model I am proposing our own version, a Kiwi Rhyming Slang, if you will. Here’s a few phrases to get us started:
Fish and chips — Lips. Buzzy bees — Knees. Mince and cheese pies — Eyes. John Campbell — Ramble. Tame Iti—Treaty/Sweety. Khyber Pass—Arse. Sir Ed—dead. John Banks — Skanks. Coutts and Butters — Nutters. Cab-merlot—Blow. Don Brash — Cash.
Now let’s move onto some lessons where we see KRS used in common situations. Read each lesson and then practice it with your family co-workers.
Lesson One: on the farm. Geoff is telling his wife, Sheila, about his difficult day.
Geoff: So I took the Krypton (Krypton Factor—tractor) down the Murray (Murray McCully—gully) to pull a Bo-peep out of the Dawson’s (creek).
Sheila: Sure.
Geoff: But I forgot to bring a Benson (Benson Pope – rope).
Sheila: Common farming mistake.
Geoff: Yeah, so I tried doing it by hand. Got kicked in the Hudsons (Hudson and Halls).
Sheila: Weren’t using your Vogels (Vogels bread—head) were you.
Geoff: No.
Sheila: Where are your clothes?
Lesson Two: at a popular Wellington bar. John is meeting Simon for a drink.
John: Sorry I'm ladies (ladies a plate —late,) the heavens (heaven forbids—kids) caught Pineapples (Pineapple Lumps—mumps) so I had to take them off to the Michael (Mike Proctor—doctor). Frankly, they’ve been driving me round the Rainbow’s (Rainbow’s End—bend).
Simon: Oh dear. Buy you a beer?
John: Yeah, can you get me a Nelson (Nelson Mandella—Stella) while I go for a Melissa Lee (Wee)?
Simon: Sure. Two Nelsons thanks mate.
See how easy it is? Once you master these basic lessons you’ll be ready to use Kiwi Rhyming Slang in a variety of situations, at a wedding …
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered in this Bill Birch so that Jonathan and Britney can be Hillary Barried (Married). If you can just stay awake for 15 minutes we can all have some Sir Peter (Sir Peter Blake—cake) and drink until we can't feel our Laurie Mains (brains).”
Or reading the news …
Simon Dallow: “In the wees-and-poohs this hour: the Government moves to tax pollution despite opposition from Huntley and Palmers (farmers), naked John Banks invade pitch at All Blacks test, and the East Coast suffers record Marties (Marty Drysdale—gale). Officials have declared the area a Registered Master (Disaster).
Now, I can see obvious complications. What if you ask a friend if she can get you a cab? You’d either be asking her to get you an actual taxi cab, or you’d be asking her for a cab-merlot—blow. This could either turn out to be very embarrassing, or very awesome. But these are issues that can be ironed out over time. If you have ideas for terms for our new national language, please send them to ... kiwirhymingslang@googlemail.com and I’ll forward them to the appropriate Government agency. With a bit of imagination and a lot of practice we’ll soon all be speaking Khyber.
(Microphone on: 11.09am. General chatter: Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers.)
MS: Right. Thank you all for coming. We have a lot to cover so please answer your name when I call it. Quinn.
Quinn: Quinn.
MS: You can just say ‘Here’.
Quinn: Oh. Here!
MS: Liam?
Liam: (Heavy sigh) Here.
MS: You ok?
Liam: Yes.
MS: Ok. Alexis.
Alexis: Here.
MS: Skylah?
Skylah: Here.
MS: Right. Jordan?
Jordan: Here.
MS: And Zara.
Zara: Here.
MS: Good. So the magazine wanted me to come and talk to you about all the problems in the world.
Jordan: The recession …
MS: Exactly. There are a lot of pr …
Liam: Global warming.
MS: Global warming is definitely ...
Skylah: Petrol was a problem last year.
Alexis: Yeah, it went, like, peeeyoooong!
Liam: Oh, and the cost of money, everyone’s gonna go keeeooowwwahhh! [Flails arms] I need money this, I need money that. What’s with it?
Zara: [Softly] Landfills?
Liam: What’s with it?
MS: Yes. And Zara just had a good one, landfills.
Zara: We will not really have a place to put everything, and we’ll have to live in rubbish.
Jordan: And landfills never break down.
MS: No, they just keep going, like the Queen. What would be a solution? Anyone?
Skylah: At school, like in the junior syndicate, they have all these boxes, and they make all-new stuff. Like, they reuse lots of stuff.
MS: So recycling?
Liam: Can I have a word?
MS: Sure.
Liam: Even though 60% could be recycled and reused, it’s still only a matter of time before that’s used up again, and it goes to the sea, and, uh … the circle of rubbish—I forgot it’s name.
MS: Circle of rubbish is fine.
Liam: … will just get bigger and bigger until no fish, no food sources, no oil, no money, lack of resources. And that’s it. End of life! I don’t know what else to do.
MS: It’s ok. So what you’re saying is that the amount of rubbish we’re generating is moving us towards an extinction event?
Liam: Could cause extinction to all life as we know it.
MS: Wow. I think, Zara, you were going to say something?
Zara: In this school, some teachers, their pens don’t work and they throw them out, they could recycle them.
MS: You’ve seen teachers doing that?
Zara: They throw them out all the time.
MS: That is terrible. What about the recession?
Jordan: Yeah. Everyone’s running out of money, so all the prices of everything is going up.
MS: Yeah. Are you guys noticing the recession in your family?
Zara: Well, my Mum said we have to save our money for food, so she can’t buy stuff for us …
MS: So this brings up an important point. Quinn, maybe you can talk about this, what is the role of kids in helping with the recession? What can we do? And when I say we, I mean you.
Quinn: Well, my Nanna, when we go over there, we do gardening, and she gives us ten dollars, and I think that we should just work for five dollars an hour.
MS: And that would make it a lot easier on the Nanna economy?
Quinn: Yeah, because they just had a dog die.
MS: Oh no.
Quinn: And they’ve got a kiwifruit orchard to look after as well.
Liam: Ok. About that …
MS: Just hold on a second, Liam, because we have a backlog of people with their hands up. Skylah, you have a point to make about what Quinn was saying?
Skylah: Well, I think that grandmas know better than the adults do, because adults are too fancy in thinking that everything matters, but grandmas just have an old, small TV, and sometimes they don’t even have a TV, they just spend all day …
Jordan: … gardening
Skylah: … doing the dishes and gardening.
[Overlapping voices.]
MS: Ok a lot of nanna stories. So what about law and order?
Jordan: What’s law and order?
Skylah: There’s a law, and there’s an order, that’s what I think.
Jordan: And it’s a TV show.
MS: Well, we probably won’t talk about the TV show.
Jordan: The police aren’t always that good.
MS: No?
Alexis: Some policemen, they aren’t that good, but then there are other people that could be good policemen, but they’re not. They think they’re gonna be too scared.
MS: Right, so we need to find better people and make them into police?
Skylah: Well, on TV, some advertising is really good, but the police advertising is not that good.
Jordan: They should have happy ads, because some ads they have it’s all raining.
MS: What about crime? Is there too much crime, or do we need more?
Zara: There’s too much.
Alexis: The tagging’s absolutely horrible.
[Loud agreement.]
Quinn: On the first day of the holidays I went down to play some soccer with my Dad, and someone had spray-painted on the grass, ‘F-word’ and then ‘Off’.
MS: Oh dear.
Skylah: Well, that sort of attaches to the police issue, because they’re not really going out and looking in the places they should be looking.
MS: Looking in the wrong places.
Skylah: Yeah, because the taggers go to places where the police don’t go, and then in the morning the police show up and say, ‘Oh, look, someone’s tagged here.’
[General clamour.]
Quinn: Um, there’s this cool stuff you spray on walls, and when you tag on it, it washes all the tagging off.
MS: So we could just use planes to spray our whole country with that stuff. Solve the whole problem.
[General agreement]
Skylah: But it has to be something good for the trees.
Skylah: One thing, I think, is that they just shouldn’t sell spray cans, and that would solve the solution forever.
MS: Ok, I want to move on to family values.
Skylah: Oh, like the value of families, like, how much your family is worth.
MS: In a way, yes, but it’s more a term grownups use for the things they think are important in every family, and the things that a family should be.
Zara: [Softly] Like how good they are.
MS: Yeah.
Zara: Like if they do something naughty you don’t need to …
Jordan: … hit them.
Zara: … smack them, you can just say, you shouldn’t have done that, can you go to your room and I’ll come and get you.
MS: Yeah, that’s very sensible. Ok, Liam, you have something to say on the family?
Liam: Ok, um, [Reading from piece of paper] since it’s a lot of money flying in a plane that’s said to be safer than a car, well, I’ve heard that a plane disintegrated in mid-air ‘cos someone put an extra engine on.
[General silence.]
MS: Wow.
Alexis: Are we still on family values?
MS: We’re still … technically …
Skylah: Sometimes there are ads on during the day that shouldn’t be on until after 7.30, because …
Quinn: Like crash ads.
MS: Yeah, so they’re scary for kids?
Jordan: I don’t like that ad that goes, [Sings] ‘Do you love the muffin man?’
Zara: And there’s that ad where that guy spins that wheel. That gave me a nightmare the other night.
MS: I hate nightmares. So I asked you to form pairs and to brainstorm on particular subjects. Jordan and Skylah, you had children’s rights?
Skylah: We got that children need to explore. I think parents are too concerned, and … children need their personal space.
[Loud agreement.]
Zara: You just wanna say, “Can you stop bugging me, I just need some time by myself.”
[Loud agreement.]
Jordan: ‘Cos when you’re upset you just want to cry and they come in and pat you on the back and say, “Are you alright?” And you just wanna … well, can’t you just let me …
[Louder agreement.]
Skylah: What my Mum said is that you need to let boys cry because usually boys think it’s [in deep voice] unmanly to cry.
Liam: That’s …
Skylah: They need to cry or otherwise they’ll be all grumpy when they’re old, because they haven’t got all the sadness out.
MS: Ok, that’s very good. Liam?
Liam: [Sighs] Yeah, I was just getting offenced.
MS: Offenced? By what Skylah was saying?
Jordan: Why?
Liam: Well, you know, the boys crying thing [trailing off.]
MS: You don’t think that boys should cry?
Liam: Only on necessary … occasions.
Alexis: Like, don’t be a cry-baby, but cry every time it really, really hurts.
MS: What if you’re just really sad?
Quinn: Like if someone dies.
Liam: Well if someone dies in your family, that’s actually a very appropriate time to cry. If it’s someone you love, I’d say yeah, it’s ok.
Skylah : At my last school we had a disco, and this boy asked this girl and she said no, and he just cried and cried and cried. Like, you don’t really need to cry, because there’s a million girls in this school that you could ask.
MS: Yeah. Probably damaged his chances with all the crying, though.
Skylah: Probably.
MS: Now, Zara and Alexis, you had crime?
Zara: Well, first of all the first thing we wrote down is that we need more policemen. And put spy-cameras up to spy on bad people.
Alexis: Um. Have a school where police can get more training, like with guns and tasers and stuff.
Zara: They need to be brave. And they have to be calm when they’re doing everything.
MS: So maybe bravery training?
Alexis: They should train at night and have things behind bushes to see how brave they really are and what they do. If they shoot it, that’s probably not good.
Jordan: You could have fines for, like, small things.
Jordan: Or lines.
MS: So criminals could write lines?
Skylah: Well I think they should have a punishment, because they just get to stay in their cells, dancing around or whatever.
MS: Lots of dancing in prison.
Zara: They could hit rocks before they get out, so make them do jobs in jail.
MS: Jobs in jail. That’s very catchy.
Jordan: It’s not very good if you’re just smashing rocks, because it doesn’t really do much. They should do useful things.
Alexis: So then they have some good things to do when they go back home.
MS: Right.
Alexis: Yep. So when they get home they know how to scrub toilets so then the family members might be nicer to them.
Skylah: That’s sort of like on The Hulk, he gets really angry and he smashes stuff and it makes him feel good. But he needs to do something that makes him feel calm. Like writing something down … like sort of like lines, or writing down an apology, or …
MS: Alright. I think we better move onto the environment. Liam and Quinn
Liam: Ok, we have solar-panelled vehicles. Submarines to planes.
MS: … Explain that one?
Liam: Submarines that turn into planes or something. And there’s cars in Australia that have solar panels on them and they go at 40kph.
Jordan: What about, like, in winter?
Skylah: They should have a car that runs on the cold, and you can only use it in winter and autumn. But on sunny days you have to use a bicycle instead of being lazy.
[General agreement.]
Liam: Ok, let’s just say this: there’s two cars, one’s a cold-absorbing car, one’s a heat-absorbing car, and one’s a carbon dioxide absorbing car.
MS: Right, brilliant, what’s next? I can’t wait to see.
Liam: Make forests so we get a greener view from outer space, and more resources.
MS: But how do we get more resources, because that’s one of the prob …
Liam: No-no, what we’re saying is more forest means more animals and more resources, which means there’s more vegetables and berries to pick and sell. Which means we can have more longativity, ‘cos we’re … instead of doing things that shorten down our lifetimes, we can have longer lifetimes.
MS: Right, so you’re calling for a better quality of life.
Liam: Yes.
Jordan: I was gonna say that New Zealand should get rid of all possums. ‘Cos they’re eating all the kiwis.
Liam: So you’re saying no more un-native transfers?
MS: I think that’s what he was driving at.So what else do you have on your mind-map there?
Liam: Well, the other thing is stalactite bacteria hills.
[Silence.]
Skylah: Oh…kaayyyy.
MS: Stalactites are the ones that grow down?
Liam: Yeah, stalactites in Australia have bacteria unlike any other, not even like trees. What I’m saying is that scientists take bacteria, and over time we’ll put it on rocks and it’ll expand over everywhere.
MS: And what’s the benefit of this bacteria?
Liam: It turns carbon dioxide into oxygen.
MS: Gotcha.
Liam: So what I’m saying is put it all over the world and that’s it, no more carbon dioxide.
Jordan: But if we brought over these stalactites from Australia …
Liam: We wouldn’t be bringing over the stalactites, just the bacteria!
Jordan: Yeah, but what if when we bought the bacteria here it created some new disease?
MS: Interesting point, Liam, that’s one of those un-native transfers you were talking about earlier.
Liam: True.
MS: But don’t be discouraged, it’s still a great idea. So the last thing we need to do is to think up a name for our think tank. Because the other think-tanks that I looked up on the internet, they …
Skylah: … Don’t deal with real problems.
MS: Um. Yeah. And their names … I’ll just go through them and you let me know what you think. So, Centre for Strategic Studies.
[A pause, laughter.]
MS: What do you think?
Skylah: Lame.
Zara: Boring.
MS: Ok, what about The Institute for Policy Studies?
[Groans.]
MS: No good?
Zara: What about the Save The World Group?
MS: Excellent. Write that down. Another one I found on the net was Maxim Group.
Skylah: Guhh.
MS: Yeah, a lot of people say that.
Jordan: What is it, even?
MS: A lot of people say that, too.
Zara: I think Save The World New Zealand.
Quinn: What about Sporting Studies Group?
MS: Interesting.
[Thoughtful silence.]
Jordan: Ooohh. I know. The USG—United Solutions Group.
Skylah: Oh, that’s perfect!
MS: I like all those ideas. And we don’t have to decide now, we can think about it. Can I just say how amazing you all are.
[A profile on comedian Ricky Gervais. Sunday Magazine, June 28]
To be honest, I doubt it’s even him. The voice on the phone sounds like someone doing an impression of Ricky Gervais doing an impression of David Brent. It’s possible he employs a team of sound-alikes for lesser gigs, like a comedy Saddam Hussein. I picture the real Gervais reclining on a crimson chaise in his Hampstead apartment—the one he shares with a woman named Jane, a cat named Ollie, and a salamander named Tel —in a loose, flowing pyjama outfit similar to the one David Brent wore for his cover of If You Don’t Know Me By Now, and laughing, laughing at the world that made him famous. But it probably is the real Ricky Dean Gervais, he knows so many fine details.
RG: “Yeah. Ricky Dene. D-E-N-E. The rumour goes my dad was drunk, my mum gave him the form, and he spelled it like that.”
Ricky Dene would be perfect if you were a northern comic.
RG: “Or a country singer.”
The beginning of the life of Ricky Dene Gervais sounds, suitably, like the beginning of a joke. A French Canadian soldier meets a Church of England dinner-lady in London, during a blackout. They hit it off, and there in the darkness of a converted tube-station, amid the thud of bombs and hiss of falling dust, love blooms. That’s lovely. Is it true?
RG: “Weeeeelllll, no, I don’t know if that’s literally true. They met in the war so there was obviously a lot of …”
Darkness.
RG: “Yeah, but no, they met during the Second World War.”
In comedy, what’s true is less important than what’s sweet and funny. They met, the soldier and the dinner-lady, and they made a cosy post-war family. Pre-fame Ricky lives in Reading. As a child he writes speculative scripts for cartoons he sees on the telly. At 8, a stray comment from his brother magically turns him into an atheist.
You were a believer?
RG: “Yeah. I loved Jesus and I used to go to Sunday school, and I was in our kitchen drawing a picture from the Bible, and my older brother came in and said, ‘Why do you believe in God?’ and my Mum went bonkers. And I knew.”
Cos your mum was …
RG: “… Protecting me, yeah. A typical working class mum.”
Boy Ricky grows to become a fine young man, attends University College London where he studies philosophy. Student Ricky is so poor that he nurses single pints through long evenings. Shares them, even, with new girlfriend Jane. At last our Ricky gets a lick at stardom, a fleeting pop career which sees him crack the top 200. The main use for his group’s two music videos now, it seems, is to embarrass him on chat shows.
RG: “See, they assume I’ll be embarrassed by seeing myself back then, but I’m not. I look at myself then, and I see how much I’ve let myself go. It would be more embarrassing if they held up a mirror.”
Then, a turning point. Pre-fame Ricky meets a gangly gent called Stephen Merchant. They make a pilot for a show set in the offices of a London paper firm. The Office wins every award possible: Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Gervais’s fame now exceeds his wildest fantasies. He appears in movies, on talk shows, and eventually nails the golden three, the trio of gigs that prove you’ve absolutely made it: a guest-spot on The Simpsons, an invitation to appear on Inside the Actors Studio, and the chance to go on Sesame Street and sing to a Muppet.
RG: “Oooohhhhhh, yeah, that’s … I’d go along with that. As a failed pop-star I always try to sing, I did it in the office, I sang to Marge [Simpson] and now I’m singing to Elmo. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
How can it get better than that? Most comedians would be paralysed by his success. Gervais counters by remaining an enigma, a phantom. A comedian-slash-writer-slash-director-slash-author-slash-activist. A rebel and an establishment figure, a massively famous regular guy, a chronically lazy hyper-achiever. What’s a normal day, Ricky?
RG: “Well, I try to only do a few hours. I’m not one of these guys who does 16 hour days. I like to spread it out.”
See? And yet he’s always busy, always slung with several major projects. His last movie, Ghost Town, saw him tackle the kind of role normally tossed to the likes of Hugh Grant. Being British, and having a slightly unusual middle name, is where similarities between Ricky Dene Gervais and Hugh John Mungo Grant end.
RG: “No, exactly, I think people were a bit confused at first, going, why would they give a romantic lead to the fat bloke from England? Well, it’s not really a romantic lead in that sense.”
In Ghost Town, Gervais plays Dr. Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist who wakes after a simple medical procedure to find that he can see the dead. One of these dead people is the spirit of a cheating husband (Greg Kinnear) who recruits Pincus to break up the engagement of his widow (Téa Leoni.) The movie surprised many. It isn’t edgy, it doesn’t have those classic Gervais moments that make you squirm in agony. It’s a gentle movie, with the sensibilities of a golden-era picture.
RG: “Yes, it’s like Jimmy Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a bit of an antidote to 14-year-old boys laughing at erection jokes. It’s about this guy who’s lonely, and he meets someone; it’s much more real and low-key. But I can see on paper why they wouldn’t go, well, why haven’t they cast Hugh Jackman?”
The fact that they didn’t cast Jackman means that we can actually appreciate the downfall and redemption of Pincus. It’s a common theme in Gervais’s work: the idea that every idiot gets a second chance.
RG: “I agree. There’s no greater feeling than redemption, and I’ve always done that. We made David Brent get better, we made Andy Millman [Extras] see the error of his ways. And with Pincus, he realises that he’s missing out on the best thing in life, which is human contact.”
As far as human/non human contact goes, Gervais is a staunch non-believer.
You don’t even believe in ghosts.
RG: “No. Or ghouls, or ESP.”
You went off at Karl Pilkington for his belief in telekenetic babies.
RG: “Yeah!”
Another Gervais achievement was to create the most successful podcast series in history. At the heart of these podcasts is a round-headed, high-functioning moron called Karl Pilkington.
RG: “Yeah, the next one we’re doing is philosophy, and if you think Karl doesn’t know anything about natural history, or art, I mean, the stuff he doesn’t know about philosophy is staggering. I was trying to explain to him the mind/body problem, you know …”
Descartes …
RG: “… Yeah, and the problem of existence, and I said, ‘How do you know this isn’t all a dream?’ And he said, ‘Because I haven’t been sleeping much lately.’”
[We break here for a bout of childish giggling.]
Of all your many projects, I was most disappointed not to see more of Ricky Gervais Meets …
RG: “[Sustained laughter] Ooohhhh, oh god, I can only assume you’re being sarcastic, which is fine by me.”
No, I’m serious. For those who haven’t seen it, Ricky made a series in which he talked to other influential comedians about their work. He visited comedian Gary Shandling, and, through various methods, managed to make him angry. Most notably, by comparing him to … what was the cartoon character you said he looked like?
RG: “Ooooohhhh, why did I do that? It was, um … Bingo, from The Banana Splits. And then he didn’t know who it was, so I got someone to print it out and show him.”
You can hear the pain as he recounts the story. For a brief time Gervais was in a scene that could have been written for David Brent.
RG: “And it was so funny ‘cos he went, ‘No, why would I be insulted?’ And I could see he was thinking, ‘Jesus Christ.’”
But comedy is pain, someone has to get hurt, and Gervais is the master of the art. How many people watched parts of The Office through the cracks between their fingers? How many people wanted to run from the room as David Brent did his robot dance? Watching modern comedy, and Gervais’s comedy in particular, is like watching a horror film: we suffer, but in a way that delights us.
Shandling was painful, but your meeting with [Seinfeld creator] Larry David was like the reuniting of long-lost twins.
RG: “Ha. Yeah.”
You both decided that you’d like to be more like his character, Larry [David plays an exaggerated version of himself in his cult show, Curb Your Enthusiasm,] and be able to say what you really thought.
RG: “Well, that’s a very good point, I mean, you make these heroes and villains, and that way no one gets hurt, because you can’t just go around saying exactly what you want in real life. So that’s what’s fun about Bertram Pincus: he goes around saying exactly what’s on his mind, and it’s funny, because what comes later is redemption.”
But I also remember you saying that when you become famous you’re no longer able to complain about anything.
RG: [Laughter] “Yeah, they go, ‘Oooohhh, he’s changed.’”
Gervais came in the other day and complained about how long he had to wait for his panini.
RG: “Exactly!”
You and Larry reminded me of what happens when you get two slightly racist people in a room, and they start testing the waters, and by the end they’re planning the next Reich.
RG: “That’s so funny, I’m just working on a new stand-up act, and there’s a bit in there where I talk about pretending to be racist to offend your girlfriend. And then she gets wise to it, so you have to up the ante, saying worse and worse things to get a reaction, and the punchline is, ‘Do you think Hitler started out like that?’”
How is Jane?
RG: “Speaking of Hitler?”
No! Girlfriends.
RG: “Very well. She’s busy writing books and stuff.”
Jane Fallon is a British television producer and writer whose work includes the comedy-drama, Teachers. She wrote the bestselling Getting Rid of Matthew, and her second novel, Got You Back, reached number 5 in the bestseller list
RG: “Yeah, they’re making a film of her first book and they’re looking at the second. But she’s definitely more concerned with the novel now, that’s pretty important.”
Do you get to see each other?
RG: “Well I’m home every day. And when I go to America she comes with me. But otherwise I’m home by 6pm in my pyjamas most nights.”
The pyjamas, the cat, the chaise. A boring life.
RG: “See I don’t think it’s boring, I think being out is boring. I’d rather be home at night, watching what I want on telly, with a bottle of wine, with the cat quacking like a duck [Long story.] That to me is … that’s great.”
And that’s the opposite of what fame is perceived to be about?
RG: “Oh God, I hope so. I hope I’m the opposite of what fame is about.”
So you wouldn’t recommend fame?
RG: “No. Not in the slightest. Someone said there must be advantages, and I suppose, meeting David Bowie, but I met David through my work. I assume he meets other writers and directors. The only, ONLY advantage I can think of is that you get to jump the queue at airports.”
Recently, though, Gervais has been leveraging his ample fame and boundless free time to pen letters to world leaders. He wrote to Gordon Brown, complaining about the fact that the hats worn by British Foot Guards are still made from bear fur.
RG: “Yeah. He said it was a problem because they couldn’t get the synthetic fur to act the same as real fur. So I sent back another one saying, ‘So? It’s a hat.’”
What about Barack, has he written back?
RG: “Noooooo he has not.”
Gervais wrote an open letter to the US President about Paris Hilton's decision to buy a house in North London, proposing a simple exchange: Hilton sent back to Beverly Hills in return for Victoria Beckham. What a great initiative.
RG: [Laughs] “Yeah, you think I’m busy but I must have too much time on my hands.”
Are you worried one of your pranks will backfire, like it did for Ross/Brand? (Fellow British comedians Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross caused outrage this year when they made a prank phone-call to Andrew Sachs, the man who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers.)
RG: “People are gonna be annoyed if you say anything interesting. It’s the way of the world. The important thing is: is it funny? That’s the only thing. And my blog is a fortress, I’ll put anything I want on there. I count it almost as my private life.”
Yeah, a few weeks ago it was nonce c---s wasn’t it?
RG: [Shrieks] “Yeah, I’m just like Oscar Wilde!”
Well you both lived in Reading.
RG: “Exactly! I mean, do Aussies and kiwis use that word?”
MS: “Yes. Mostly in the South Island.”
RG: “I mean it’s lovely, it’s almost Chaucerian, or Shakespearean.”
MS: Yeah, you mean like the “O thing.”
RG: “Exactly! It’s literary.”
We’re very literary.
RG: “I just love Flight of the Conchords, by the way. They’re so funny, so engaging, and so sweet as well. I told them when I met them that the first time I saw their David Bowie spoof was when David emailed it to me.”
Actually, I was thinking the other day that the real pleasure I get from both the Conchords, and your work, is how invisible the material is. I don’t know if you know what I mean.
RG: “I’m intrigued though.”
Well, the musical numbers aside, when you watch their stuff, and especially yours, you’re given the rare opportunity to forget that it’s material you’re watching.
RG: “Oh that’s nice. I like that.”
Well, it’s just that so many sitcoms today sound like comedy writers talking to each other.
RG: “Oh, yes, definitely. Me and Steve [Merchant] go, “No, that’s a writer’s joke.’ As soon as you write something and think of two nerds in a room looking smug, lose the line. We definitely had to do that a lot in The Office, particularly with the character Tim.”
And at the start there wasn’t even a script anyway.
RG: “That’s right, we did a little video. And that was shot in my office, the one I worked in.”
And it would be hard to imagine that if you had handed in a script for The Office …
RG: “It would never have happened, it’d still be in someone’s drawer.”
Because there’s no jokes!
RG: “No, it’s just a man who isn’t very funny, makes a bad joke, and touches his tie. They’d go, ‘Well what the fuck’s that?’”
You could spend hours talking to Ricky Dene Gervais and still be confused about what he is, and what, if anything, he represents: the profane intellectual philosophy major and lover of nob jokes; the mega-famous despiser of fame; the rebel establishment figure; the extraordinary regular guy; the comedian-slash-writer-slash-director-slash-author-slash-activist; the enigma, the phantom; the ghost in the machine.
Bit pretentious?
RG: “A bit.”
What is your job, then?
RG: “When someone says, ‘What’s your job?’ I say, comedian, and when someone says, ‘What’s your job in film and television?’ I say writer/director. But some things come along, some things you can’t say no to, the Simpsons, Sesame Street. I’ve never really planned a career. I’ve sort of done what I want, and then you look back and go, oh well, that was good.”
This was good. Time to let you go.
RG: “Well that was a pleasure.”
For me too.
RG: “Let’s do this again, when I’ve got something else to plug mercilessly.”
[From the series, 'Know Your Popular Country-Themed Songs']
Written in 1969 during a bout of alcoholism and despair, Kenny Roger’s classic song juxtaposes an up-tempo backing with the tragic story of a crippled war veteran, unnamed, and his only companion, Ruby. The lyrics tell us little about Ruby, her physical dimensions, her nature and temperament, though most leading critics agree that the name Ruby would suggest either an elderly lady or a rescued circus chimp. Given her behaviour, I think it’s easy to deduce which one is accurate. Let’s begin.
You've painted up your lips And rolled and curled your tinted hair Ruby are you contemplating Going out somewhere?
We are thrown right amongst the action with a startling image: an adult female chimpanzee sitting primly at an ornate civil-war armoire, adorning herself in makeup and curling her shining tresses, holding a pearl drop-earring loosely, perhaps, between her lengthy, painted fingers, and admiring herself in the reflected golden light of the falling sun. It’s a tragic, yet poignant image, and the narrators choice of word, “Contemplating,” (In the song pronounced “Contemplatin’” only serves to make it sweeter, and more bitter. We can almost see her lurid red lips, the dark roots of her peroxidised hair. The narrator’s question, inquiring, yet fearful of the answer, hangs in the air like the lingering odour of Chanel.
The shadow on the wall Tells me the sun is going down Oh Ruby Don't take your love to town
A simple shack, maybe, with few adornments, besides her treasured armoire. Not even a clock on the wall with which our desperate narrator can tell the hour. He starts to plead with his companion, don’t do it, don’t take your love there, of all places. That town doesn’t understand you like I do. Here we have the exposition of the source of conflict in this very modern, but very classic, relationship. On the one hand this lonely man wants his only companion to be there for him. But how can he expect the monkey to abandon its primal urges? Would he ask of the rooster not to crow? The songbird not to sing? And would he expect the chimpanzee not to paint her face and seek the love of strangers? She’s only human … and yet … she’s not. Let’s continue.
It wasn't me That started that old crazy Asian war But I was proud to go And do my patriotic chore
It is unclear which war our narrator is talking about. The war between Guangwu and Wan Yi during the Xia Dynasty, 2100–1600 BC, is widely thought by historians to be the “Crazy Asian War.” Yi’s forces dressed as ladies to lure Guangwu’s forces towards a trans-dimensional gateway. When they appeared again in 1912 they had not aged. And yet it’s unlikely that the narrator is talking about that war. It’s more likely he’s talking about a modern conflict, such as Vietnam, or the consumer electronics war of the 1980’s.
And yes, it's true that I am not the man I used to be Oh Ruby, I still need some company
This man has given up something of himself to be with this lusty chimp. Theirs is a relationship that is unconventional—illegal, perhaps—and he has had to change his identity. Whatever his sketchy past, he’s a man, and he needs “company.”
It’s hard to love a man Whose legs are bent and paralysed And the wants and the needs of a woman your age Ruby I realize.
Ok, he’s disabled. This is an interesting development. He’s disabled, and this chimp was once, perhaps, his helper, bringing him his absinth, his pipe, his chicory. Over the years he has grown to love his chimp, some would say a little too much. He has come to love her so, so much that he now even thinks of her as a woman. What pathos. So he’s been paralysed, this man, possibly in the war, or from trying to perform some kind of difficult stunt.
But it won't be long I've heard them say ‘til I am not around
It is unclear who’s saying such things. Perhaps a jealous suitor is plotting against him. This man, though crippled, no doubt still has friends in the community.
Oh Ruby Don't take your love to town
That refrain again.
She's leaving now cause I just heard the slamming of the door The way I know I've heard it slam 100 times before And if I could move I'd get my gun And put her in the ground
Murderous thoughts assail his mind. And why wouldn’t they? If you’d been in a crazy Asian war, had your legs busted up, and been cuckolded by an adult female chimpanzee, you might also feel aggrieved. If this woman keeps making a monkey out of me, he seems to say, I might just have to have her euthanized. And she better stop slamming that door, also.
Oh Ruby Don't take your love to town
Oh Ruby for God's sake turn around
Turn around, Ruby. Just one more time, so that you can look into my eyes and see the love that’s still there for you, and so that I can look into yours and confirm for myself what I’ve so long expected: that the love I know still burns like a prairie blaze on a hot July night.
To the stock-holders, staff, and concerned loved-ones:
Well, it has been quite a year for the global economy, and for Acquired Immunity Group Incorporated. Sometimes I have to smash myself in the face, just to see if I’ve lapsed into some kind of sobbing, fear-induced coma. But no, I’m very much awake. You will be pleased to hear that our firm has had another astonishing quarter, generating record levels of Negative Growth (NG) and amassing spectacular pools of Inverse Revenue (IR) on behalf of shareholders. In addition, our Investor Panic Index (IPI) has broken all previous marks, leading to a Fiscal Credibility Deficit Margin (FCDM) of 280 percent. Creditor anger levels have never been as healthy, nor has the acrid cloud of doom ever wafted so near. And yet some of you are not happy. I know this, because you are camped outside my house. You are a long way away, behind the electrified fence, but I know you are there because when you shout you frighten my game-hens
My Leadership: Decisive? Yes.
I like to think I have been a strong, decisive CEO. I have been compared to Captain James Cook, (and not just because I got beaten up on a trip to Hawaii.) Yet sheer brilliance is sometimes not enough. It is true that many experts failed to foresee the impact of speculation in mortgage-backed derivatives and its effect on the banking system. I was one who did, and as proof I’d like to point you towards my 2003 white-paper: Speculation in Mortgage-backed Derivatives: How It Will Make Us Rich As Popes.
Obviously, many of you are worried about your future, and you look to me, your superior, for guidance. Let me tell you what I see right now. At this very moment I’m sitting in my den, in my Japanese memory-foam chair. The financial district burns like a sun in the distance, turning night into unquenchable daylight. Traders, naked save for crude loincloths stapled together from charred office supplies, dance on the roofs of skyscrapers while holding signs written in their own blood, or perhaps the blood of a co-worker. “Send brie!” That was one of them. The authorities are paralysed. They have cordoned off the entire district and left it as a kind of abode of anarchy. The whole scene casts my office in a lovely warm glow. The point is: even when things up close seem dire, if you sit far enough away, everything seems fine.
The World Economy: WTF?
The state of the world economy has left our company vulnerable, moody, and a little needy. A chart of the global economy presented by the World Trade Federation (WTF) shows how monetary gravity has caused world stocks to fall below their 90-day moving average. The “head-and-shoulders” pattern shows the market shrugging—as if to say, ‘Whaaaaa ..? I don’t know. Why don’t you put your money in a ban … Oh no wait! Don’t do that!’ The real question is: who is to blame? Greed-engorged traders? The leaders of the financial institutions who built speculative investments on frangible mortgages? You? The answer may surprise you.
Your Concerns: Important?
I have received many letters outlining your concerns about our future. Many of them were hilarious and cheered me up a great deal. 12-year-old Chrissie Walkin writes:
Dear Sir
My Daddy lost his job in the bank and I was very sad. Daddy took me on a birthday trip to imagination Disneyland. It was fun. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, neo-liberal economists have preached the merits of an unfettered market. Ironically, this free-market experiment has left us on the brink of both economic and environmental collapse, and forced us to consider a program of state intervention much closer to Marxism. Perhaps it is time to find a sustainable balance between market freedom and state involvement. Your thoughts?
Chrissie
To that I say ‘Shut up little girl’. Also, if you’re so smart, why are you only 12?
The bare fact is that a million economists working for a million years on a million stock-screens could not have predicted the terrifying chain-reaction that would result from granting an Appalachian racoon farmer a loan to buy his first relaxin’-shack.
Getting Through One Day at a Time Towards a New Tomorrow
And that’s just one of my ideas. I still expect the road ahead to be rough and paved with the skulls and pelvises of the less fortunate. But things will get better, of that I’m confident. ‘How?’ you ask, as you take another limp pucker on your corncob pipe and adjust the strap on your banjo. Oh, I don’t know, maybe because of a little thing called Inversed Gravity. Inversed Gravity Theorem states that whatever goes down eventually has to come back up again. Planes, submarines, even whales, all use IGT. It’s just good science. Economics is a precise forecasting discipline and just as with meteorology, astrology, or political contests, it is possible to tell the exact future by using a few precise measurements.
But even taking IGT into consideration the time ahead will be tough. I cannot lie to you. Not any more. Many of you wonder how you will even feed your family. The news there, I can tell you, is good. For although the prices of many food items have soared dramatically during the past few quarters, the price of cake has remained relatively stable.
So let us all eat cake and look forward to brighter times.
2009 is going to be a very big year. There’ll be famine, zombie hordes, nuclear hellfire, all-singing-all-dancing tween-legions, Necro-Mutants, an outbreak of weaponised smallpox—and that’s just what’s happening in the cinemas. Of course there’ll be non-fictional challenges too: The global economy is poised delicately on the edge of the abyss, mother earth palavers in agony, and the price of cheese is outrageous. But gather, children, and I will tell you a story: a story about all the other days the world was supposed to end. This tale starts 2000 years ago, and ends 5 billion years in the future, so bring snacks.
1.1 In ancient Israel there lived a man named Jesus who said many things, “Love one another,” “Get lots of fibre.” One of the things he said was that the world would end soon. “I say unto you,” he said, “there be some standing here who shall not taste of death ‘til they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” It was the worst best-man speech ever, and the bride was livid.
1.2 There were people even before Jesus who foresaw the end: the wailing, the gnashing, the soiling. Archaeologists found an Assyrian tablet on which was engraved a warning: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common. I for one will be voting conservative.” But Jesus was the main one.
1.3 Jesus was the inspiration for a man called Montanus. Montanus was a charismatic preacher, wont to speak in tongues—but knowledgably— and he travelled the land with two women, Priscilla, and Maximilla. In 155 AD he formed his own group—they called themselves the Montanists—and despite the failure of all his prophecies, and despite being denounced by the church and cast into the mountains, his group endured for centuries beyond his death and formed the template for modern Pentecostalism.
1.4 Christians had high hopes for the end of the first Millennium. This would be the time when it all came together. The predictions of Book of Revelations, the last book of the Old Testament, had long held them in rapture. They described in detail the end days: the epochs of the church; the judgments; the one-thousand-year reign of Messiah; the last test of Mankind’s sinful nature by the loosing of Satan; the destruction of the current heavens and the earth, to be recreated as a “New Heaven and New Earth.” Then, the final, triumphal return of “Classic Earth”. It’s all in there.
2.1 But the thousandth year came and went. Nothing. In 1284 Pope Innocent III predicted the Second Coming. He based his prediction on the date of the birth of Islam, then added 666. Then he took the afternoon off.
2.1 In 1524 a group of London astrologers convinced some 20,000 people to abandon their homes for high ground in anticipation of a second Great Flood that would start from the Thames. The flood never came. In 1648 the Turkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, having studied the Kabbalah, predicted that the Messiah would make a triumphant return in 1648, and, astonishingly, that his name would be Sabbatai Zevi. With 1648 having come and gone Sabbatai revised his estimate to …
2.2 … 1666. This would be the year. Definitely. It’s easy to look back on the hysteria of the time with a sense of smug superiority, but I would like you to imagine yourself opening the front door of your small flat in Shoreditch to find plague victims piled high in the streets, streets that are literally on fire, all during a year containing the figures commonly accepted as the biblical Number of the Beast, and then to say to yourself: “Probably nothing to worry about.” 1666 is an object lesson in not believing bollocks about the end of the world.
2.3 William Miller, an American Baptist preacher, prophesied that Jesus Christ would return to the earth during the year 1844. Jesus did not make his appointment, and October 22, 1844, became known as “The Great Disappointment.” Henry Emmons, a Millerite, wrote, “I waited all Tuesday and dear Jesus did not come. I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber, as my natural strength was leaving me very fast, and I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain–sick with disappointment.”
3.1 And so came the 20th Century, an age that would bring more disappointment than we could reasonably handle. The First World War was known as “The war to end all wars that specifically involve a Kaiser,” but the end bit is often truncated. When the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, some scientists on the Manhattan Project worried that it might superheat the atmosphere and incinerate all life on Earth. Shows what they knew.
3.2 In 1955, a Chicago housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech, was sent a message from alien beings on the planet Clarion. They revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21. Keech and her followers left their jobs, schools, spouses, gave away money and possessions, and waited for their departure on the flying saucer. Her progress was closely watched by a group of social philosophers who used the events as an example of what they termed “Cognitive Dissonance”. Leon Festinger and his colleagues correctly predicted that when the arrival of the aliens failed to materialise, Mrs. Keech and her friends would rationalize the events and minimise the ego-damage of failure by mounting an enthusiastic effort at proselytising, an attempt to regain some social standing and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.
3.3 To understand the power of cognitive dissonance in our age, just exchange the words “arrival of the aliens” with “success in Iraq,” and “Mrs. Keech and her friends” with “Bush and Blair,” in the last sentence of the paragraph above.
3.4 In February, 1962, a close grouping of the visible planets during a total eclipse of the Sun was thought to be a portent of the birth of Sheryl Crow.
3.5 On November 2, 1983, NATO began Operation Able Archer 83, a ten-day exercise that spanned Western Europe. It simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear release. The realistic nature of the exercise led some in the USSR to believe that the exercise was a clever ruse, obscuring preparations for an actual first strike, so the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. This relatively obscure incident is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which we kind of forgot to mention.
3.6 The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when one of its founders convinced 38 followers to commit mass suicide. The chosen ones believed that their souls would be transported onto a spaceship, which they said was hiding behind a comet.
4.1 The new millennium would usher in an era of scientific enlightenment that would have scant tolerance for the hysteria of ages past. In the year 2000 there would be no fire or brimstone, no apocalyptic equestrians, and no spacecraft. We simply believed that when the new-year ticked over, aircraft would fall from the sky and our dishwasher would try to eat us.
4.2 High School Musical is an American television franchise charting the highs and lows of two juniors from rival cliques – Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), captain of the basketball team, and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a beautiful and shy transfer student who excels in math and science. Although not often cited as a portent of the coming apocalypse, the tortured smiles and loose-limbed spasmings of this tribe of wailing acne-zombies is seen by some to be the most obvious sign yet of the impending end times.
4.3 The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. It is 27 Kilometres long and is loosely based on a design conceived by Stephen Hawking while lying in a darkened room and listening to Afrika Bambaata’s Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. The launch of the LHC sparked fears among the public that it would cause the world to be sucked into a black hole. This prospect was so frightening to some that protests were held, court injunctions were filed, and a girl in India took her own life rather than face the grim prospect of a black hole death. They haven’t even started the real experiments yet.
5.1 Now we race toward a future full of chaos and uncertainty, of that I am certain. The economy has imploded, food riots are sweeping the developing world, Al Qaeda is rumoured to be filming a TV movie called High School Jihad. The folks at 2007rapture.com have bought a new domain: 2009-rapture.com. ‘THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH COULD HAPPEN, THIS YEAR, 2009,’ the site announces. There are flocks of animated doves and a photo of Jesus embracing another man under the headline ‘YES, I AM COMING QUICKLY!’ proving that, though Armageddon is painful, it can still provide big laughs.
2012 is held by apocalypticists to be a particularly big year. The Mayan calendar completes its thirteenth b'ak'tun cycle, and 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record, will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km). The last transit of Venus will occur, and the sun will reverse its polarity after reaching the end of the current 11-year sunspot cycle. In the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck proposes a global psychic awakening in the year 2012, and the creation of a noosphere—which is an atmosphere consisting entirely of flatulence. Plus, the numbers in 2012 add up to 5, which is a number.
5.2 The fact is that no one knows when the end is coming. But we should prepare, get our Rapture kit together: water holifier, shotgun, flame-retardent undergarments, Kevorkian machine, a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “No way am I abandoning another bloody house!” you’ll say, and I take your point. But my prediction is that the world will definitely, absolutely end in the year 1,148,782,431. Then, our Sun will increase its output by 10%, broiling away the oceans, destroying all life. In 5 billion years our Sun will spend its remaining fuel and die, leaving the black cinder of our planet floating in the cold infinity of space. Around this time, an advanced being a billion light-years away will suddenly leap from his chair and shout: “F***! I was supposed to pick up those humans in that commune in Nebraska!”
Imagine you’re sitting down to brainstorm a brand identity for the entire human species. What images would make your list? Bleeding Heart? Flaming sword? Chimp with an Uzi? Those are all excellent suggestions, but if you want an icon that captures the hopeless thrill of existence, the fact that we rise from dust, return to dust, and do a lot of dusting in between, you’d struggle to find a better insignia than the human skull (or possibly the chimp.)
The skull icon holds a unique place in human culture. Other symbols evoke “Power,” or “Glory,” but few can capture the terrifying duality of human life. “Behold!” it says, “I drink mead from the skull of my enemy whilst riding in my boat—which is also made entirely from skulls—am I not a total bad-ass?” But it also says: “Is life not fleeting? I am so depressed. More mead!” The skull anchors us within the mortal realm, reminds us that life is but a blink, yet consoles us with the fact that while we’re here we can wreak havoc.
History knows this. The Aztecs respected the skull’s raw power, its ability to inspire undying loyalty among friends, enemies, (and even frenemies.) They invented the skull rack, a wooden framework designed to display the skewered heads of sacrificial victims, ($89.95—from Ikea.) At the Great Temple of the Aztecs archaeologists uncovered a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls, most of whom looked surprised. The Aztecs are also rumoured to have carved 13 crystal skulls which they scattered around the earth. Legend has it that if you manage to find and gather all 13 skulls a god-like figure will appear and inform you that you’ve wasted your life.
On a bottle, a skull and crossbones might signify “Don’t drink!” but on a flag on a ship it signifies “Let’s drink, then see where the night takes us.” The pirates turned the skull into the world’s first rebel insignia. The Dutch Vanitas artists turned it into another kind of warning, using unconventional still-life imagery to remind us of the rush and violence of life: a skull, a watch, an overturned wineglasses, a snuffed candle, a used condom, the spare key to a lover’s apartment, a stack of CDs. "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" the picture seems to say, reminding us that death comes to us all, and also that we need to pick up wine. One of the best-known examples of the skull in art is in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character sees a skull he can’t place, until he suddenly realises: "I knew him, Horatio; he was alright—in small doses.”
The skull arrives in our century caked in blood, history, half-baked mysticism, gothic pretentiousness, and fascist chic. Now you can find the skull withering like old newsprint on the arms of elderly bikers, dribbling from the lobes of slack witted hotel heiresses, or smeared on the K-mart sweatshirts of a million teenagers. (It’s a great irony that the modern teenager, the most skull-adorned since Black Pete initiated a “Bring your son to work” day, is perhaps the least ‘bad-ass’ figure in history. Sedentary, self-obsessed, lubed in pessimism, he has never fought a war or gone to work up a chimney, and his idea of an outlaw act is to continue skate-boarding on the museum fountain when the elderly security guard told him not to.) The skull, once the mainstay of kings and empires, has now been reduced to an empty logo—Satan’s smiley-face. Everywhere we look, we see skulls, fierce and unblinking, on shirts, ties, sneakers, dresses, phones, bikinis, torches, umbrellas. You can buy a screaming 3D skull cover for your PS3, a Terminator skull DVD player, a Sex Pistols-inspired skull headset from Nokia, skull-wear for your child, your dog, a million billion skull-branded products all designed to put you on the burning edge of fashion with the minimum of effort. The movies and console games that feature the skull are too numerous to list. Is the effect of all these skulls to remind us of death, of the impermanence of life? Or is it to show us—as Andy Warhol did in his prints of soup cans, and starlets, and, yes, human skulls—how the relentless repetition of an image can render it meaningless? British artist Damien Hirst also feels that the skull carries a certain mythic power. Once famous for his pickled animal carcasses, he is now most well known for creating a stunning diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of an impoverished 18th Century European male. Hirst is a rich and powerful 21st Century European male and “For the Love of God”, the most expensive piece of modern art ever created, places him firmly at the head of the modern art pantheon. Not since Warhol has an artist’s work stirred so much debate.
And what are we to make of Ghostbusters star Dan Akroyd’s web-infomercial presentations for Crystal Head Vodka:
“Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today … “
Crystal Head Vodka is a unique liquor, made from pure ingredients and filtered by diamonds. Most importantly, it comes in a bottle shaped like a freakin’ skull. “But why vodka?” you ask. I’ll let Dan field this one.
“Such a symbol that speaks to our own common universality should have joy associated with it, shouldn’t it? … We have this mystic symbol in which we have chosen to enclose joy in the form of a very pure alcoholic beverage.”
So, the skull is ancient, timeless, non-denominational, flexible, luminous, wonderful, an ideal vessel to hold your precious liquor, a perfect home bedazzling project. The real question, I suppose, is: out of the two products, Akroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka, and Hirst’s diamond skull monument, which is the most cynical, most banal, most derivative, most unintentionally hilarious, and—and I mean this ironically—most empty-headed? Which one reveals the most about our species in our age? I visited Sotheby’s auction house last year for Beautiful Inside My Head, a collection of Hirst’s latest work. Part of me now suspects him of being cynical beyond any measure the makers of a brand of skull-themed vodka could ever achieve. His exhibition featured bulls with golden hoofs, pickled sharks, a flayed angel, winged piglets, stained-glass mosaics made from butterfly wings, giant, spinning psychedelic skulls, Roger Taylor from Duran Duran, (not part of the exhibit, but magnificent none the less,) all beautiful but all completely empty. Every single piece reeks of its own frail concept. In every gallery, gaggles of posh young women swoon before pictures which they probably imagine gracing the dining-room feature wall of their new Kensington apartment, while groups of art students in scarfs and skull-emblazoned clothing huddle in corners and dream of possessing just a sliver of Hirst’s great power. So this is how far we’ve come? After countless millennia of human art and culture I find myself looking at Hirst’s skull as, at best, an artistic nod to Paris Hilton: an empty head encrusted with diamonds that smiles a crooked smile from the covers of magazines in a way that once might have said “All life is vanity,” but today just seems to say “Look at me. Am I not beautiful? And ever so thin.”
New Zealand. Luminous jewel of the deep Pacific. our national song is Black Magic Woman, by Santana, and our God is a Maori warrior who by night turns into a hawk, or so is my understanding. But in New Zealand (as in any Zealand) there are certain subjects best avoided in polite company, and certain opinions best kept to yourself, if you value your friends, and your health. But I’m writing this from an undisclosed café in Vietnam, so I don’t have to worry about that. Through the miracle of mass communication, I can now say all the things I’ve longed to say, without fear of physical harm.
1. On the whole, we’d have been better off French.
Close your eyes and imagine: croissants, fine cuisine, wine for brekkie, an inflated sense of our own worth. We could be sitting right now beside a sunny café, on one of our 50 days of annual leave, enveloping moist treats with our perfect lips while discussing philosophy in an accent that would turn any foreign brain to gooey fromage. But no, Mother England had to step in, clasp us to her pallid bosom, and condemn us to two centuries of pies, wars, lager, and sexual diffidence. If we were French, we could have weazled out of history’s deadliest wars. Brittain is the reason so many of us are dead, and why those alive are fairly boring. But oh, what we could have been: a neo-Gallic paradise, a new-Noumea. Sure, we would have had to put up with an at times oppressive colonial master, gay-ass berets, and a country that glows in the dark, but that, mon ami, is a small price to pay to not be British subjects.
2. I hated Whale Rider.
A strange thing happens when a New Zealander hears the eerie whistle of a traditional Maori flute and the low ‘whoooooooooom’ of that instrument you swing around your head like a cat, (you might know it as the Once Were Warriors instrument.) The average Kiwi falls into a semi-hypnotic state where she believes that what she’s watching is something as deep and ageless as a river, something that will allow her to unravel one small corner of the cultural fabric of New Zealand. In this state, she’ll be oblivious to the fact that what she’s really watching is a pretty average film with a moronic, sub-film-school script, one dimensional characters, and a plotline lifted from the movie Footloose.
Whale Rider pretends to be deep and searching, but the fact is that Taika Waititi was able to paint a more realistic, more nuanced picture of life in a small Maori community in hist short Two Cars One Night than Caro could in an entire film. Meanwhile, a vastly superior film like In My Father’s Den goes relatively unheralded. Maybe it was too gritty, too complex. The world loves a simple film, and the world loved Dances With Whales.
[NOTE: The writer would like to particularly apologise to his Mum, who enjoyed the film very much, and who bought him the DVD for his birthday.]
[2.1. Peter Jackson is the worst thing that could ever have happened to New Zealand film.
It was our proudest moment since Ed Hillary snuck to the top of Everest while the other mountaineers were sleeping. LOTR: the monsters, the mayhem, the incomprehensible dialogue, the plots that dragged like a dog with an impacted anal-gland, the camera soaring over lavish tracts of our best scenery while famous actors chewed on it. Some people, though, might not think it was such a proud moment. They might point out that when a small nation becomes a new cog in the international film production machine, their home-grown industry becomes over-extended, prices rise, and it becomes harder for smaller, local productions to get made. The big players, meanwhile, have a field day with your lavish tax-breaks and other incentives. Some people might also point out an irony in the fact that Jackson would have found it difficult, perhaps impossible, to get his early films made under current conditions. Not me though, I think Jackson is awesome, and there was no better way to honour him than with a giant portrait at Wellington airport made entirely out of toast.]
3. Statistically speaking, of the roughly 1000 All Blacks that have served our country, roughly 100 have been gay.
I have no point to make here, I just wanted to see the look on your face. Priceless. In 1948, renowned sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey shocked the world when he claimed that a third of American males claimed to have had at least one same-sex orgasmic experience by age 45. Furthermore, approximately 10 percent of the males admitted to having been predominantly homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55, and four percent of white males described themselves as exclusively homosexual. The exact figures are still the subject of debate, so for argument’s sake lets assume a reasonably conservative measure of 10% of males with reasonably strong homosexual urges. That means that in a group of 1000 men you would expect there to be at least 100 men who fancied their mates. Who could they be? Mexted? Hayman? (he looks like a cuddler,) Smokin Joe? (A stage name? Seriously) The big question is: does being in a group with strong taboos against such behaviour enhance or diminish these tendencies. Common sense would tell us that strong taboos will make us focus on the things we’re not supposed to think about, (Don’t think of a pink of elephant.) This could explain why conservative politicians and religious leaders are so often caught in compromising positions. Likewise, anyone who’s spent time with rugby players, or watched an episode of Matthew and Marc’s Weirdly Homo-erotic Adventures, or whatever their show is called, will possibly find the number of gay jokes that fly around … intriguing.
This theory can also be applied to political parties, (parliament in general,) to religious groups, and to all other sports, except perhaps cricket, where out of 1000 players, roughly 100 would be straight.
4. Giving women the vote was probably a bad idea.
I want to be supportive, but man, we men had it good. A fresh country to call our own, women who baked and knew their place; now the place is theirs, they run the show: PM’s, Gov Gens, CEO’s. It’s like we said, “Won’t you share our dinner, M’lady,” and she said, “Yes. Now nob off to the kids’ table.” Great plan boys. Now look at us: subservient creatures, metrosexualised, mercilessly parodied in shows and TV ads. Most galling is the fact that our women’s rugby team seem to win World Cups with one powerful arm behind their back, while the All Blacks are repeatedly, embarrassingly, unable to. Bloody hell.
5. We need to increase immigration by at least 400%.
The consensus around the dinner tables of mainstream New Zealand seems to be that immigration is a bad thing. “We need to put a lid on it,” they say. “You walk down Queen Street and you’d think you were in bloody Shanghai,” they babble. Well, as someone who frequently returns from such dinners with bite marks on my tongue, I can now confess that not only do I disagree with that, I think that New Zealand should aim to double its population in the next 20 years. You heard me. 8 million kiwis. I like immigrants, I like their smiles and their interesting outfits. I like their stories. Most of all, I like their money. New Zealand is massively underpopulated and this puts a huge burden on the tax-payer. 8 million would still leave us plenty of room to paddle our boats, while also allowing us to adequately finance our schools, roads and hospitals. Finally, it would force us to become a truly multicultural society, instead of one that just pretends to be so.
6. If anything, we should work to increase the brain drain.
Incentives, tax-breaks, lollies, whatever it takes to get the kids out of home and learning and earning in exotic locales, (or Brittain, whichever’s easier.) We have a reputation for creating world-beaters, but Rutherford could not have cracked the atom here. Bill Pickering couldn’t have sent America into space if he’d stayed at Canterbury. But those are old examples, what about a modern case. In 1981 a man called John Key received his Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Canterbury. After working as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Finance in Wellington, he rose to the position of head foreign exchange trader before moving to Bankers Trust in 1988. In 1995 he joined Merrill Lynch in Singapore and was quickly promoted to Merrill's global head of foreign exchange, based in London, where he may have earned around US$2.25 million a year including bonuses, as well as the nickname "the smiling assassin" for maintaining his cheerfulness while sacking large numbers of his co-workers. Some say that if you see him you should stay very still, for he can only sense movement. In 2001 he returned to New Zealand to enter politics. We should all remember John’s story as the debate over the brain-drain becomes central this election.
7. Brian Tamaki would make a great PM.
And speaking of brain-drain, I think it’s time we gave Bishop Brian Tamaki, God’s answer to the Fonz, a bit more credit. Ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative governments are huge right now. We need a leader who’s as rigid and righteous as the sultans of China, Russia, and the U.S.. We need a black/white thinker, someone willing to switch off the rational part of his brain and to answer our most complex socio-political questions with a set of basic, pre-conceived principles lifted straight from an ancient book of Jewish folk stories. Adoption for same-sex couples? Just don’t do it. Sex education for teens? Just don’t have sex. See? Easy. We need to be lead by someone who knows best, and who’s willing to send black-shirted men into the streets, if necessary, to keep order. Most of all, we need someone to teach us that if we follow his principles, (and perhaps surrender a teensy percentage of our income,) we too could have a shiny motorbike in this life, and salvation in the next.
8. Wellington dub-music sucks:
Our mums have their finger on the pulse of what’s harmless and agreeable in the world of popular music, though they usually get the names wrong. “Those Trinity’s Drops are nice,” or “I quite like that Fat Freddy’s Roots.” Well, how could they resist the Welli-sound; the true apotheosis of wallpaper music. These are songs that lend a laid-back vibe to any occasion—beach, bbq, latte session with the girls— without being distracting or dividing. You could have your boss, your mates, and your Nanna at your BBQ and still be certain that none of them would be offended by your musical selection. And then there’s the lyrics:
I got nothing left to loose, Like a bubble never had no shoes, Walking these streets, deep and dark as night, I wanna love I don't wanna fight.
It’s like something David Brent would sing. There’s some great bands in the Capital that don’t employ horn sections—So So Modern, Disasteradio, The Phoenix Foundation—but by all means keep your worn copy of Based On a True Story cranking. It would hardly be a lazy Sunday in Wellington without it:
Just short people look up high, can't help but spy from my wandering eye, something beginning with the capital cool, capital you, if you could only check my view.
Nice.
9. This Sun-Smart business has gone to far.
What are we up to, SPF 90? 100? What are we expecting, exactly, a passing comet? And what’s with dressing your kid in more layers than a Siberian hobo. This kid here, for example, only wants to play with the ducks in the park, to feel the sun on her mottled cheek. Instead it looks as if a clothes-chest accidentally discharged in her face. She’s a kiwi kid, but her feet are sandled—“The bees! The bees!”—and her tiny face is caked in a layer of white goo that makes her look as if she’s been set upon by a roving gang of incontinent ducks. We’ve gone too far, we need a reality check, a little sun is a good thing, it’s where we get Vitamin D. We don’t need to go back to the 80’s, when we used to douse ourselves in a bucket of cooking oil then lie on the lawn until we passed through three stages on the ethnicity spectrum. Maybe we just need to restore a sense of balance.
As kids we were told lavish bedtime stories about the looming apocalypse: the end would come quickly, falling upon us in our sleep like a black, obliviating blanket. Reagan sleeps with the nuclear trigger next to his snooze button; the Russians are pretty much drunk all the time, and the nuclear early warning systems can be triggered by migrating geese or a stray Superbowl blimp. Well, sleep tight.
I suspect today’s kids are told a very different story: the earth’s defences are crumbling like the edge of a glacier; there aren’t enough resources to sustain us all; that Nintendo Wii will have to go. As the dregs of precious oil are mopped up we’ll be thrust into a simpler mode of existence. Without the gadgets and comforts we’re used to we’ll face a creeping apocalypse, an Armageddon of leisure, our days will be filled with the salty tears of perpetual boredom.
But cheer up, kids! There’s loads of fun activities we can use to fill the void. This is an opportunity for a simpler life. As my old scout-master Don Sanchizi used to say: “Be prepared! Learn your skills, your weaving, your hunting; keep a fake passport and $1000.00 cash in a pair of soiled underwear, and don’t never love no one!” He may not have been a real Scout master, but he was one heck of a neighbour, and he knew that in the future, although we may not be facing nuclear hellfire, or battling mutant rats through the husk of a burned out school, we will probably have to darn our own socks. I have all the “learnin’s” you need.
1. How to darn a sock:
In this simple future you’ll need socks to go with your sandals. Also, some kind of shirt made out of muesli.
You will need: Sock with hole Darning needle Light bulb Yarns (Not story-yarns, although these are useful. “You can’t darn without a yarn,” as they say.) Scissors The eyes of a friggin eagle
Place a light bulb in the sock and position the hole over the bulb. Your needle will glide smoothly over the bulb's surface, making your stitching go faster. In my experience it is best if the bulb is both unlit and removed from its socket. Start your work on either side of the hole. American Dressmaking Step by Step, 1917, suggests the following:
1. Begin a little distance above the worn place and work downward. Follow the warp threads, weaving over and under the woof threads. Carry your weave a little beyond the worn place.
2. Turn and work upward, passing the needle over the threads which you passed under as you worked downward. Pass under the threads which you worked over while coming downward, keeping the weave as even as possible.
Continue stitching back and forth until you've completely filled the hole. Trim excess thread. Now you will have either a perfectly darned sock or an extra sleeve on your jumper. This is a complicated process and it’s no coincidence, I think, that “darn” is also a mild curse.
2. How to make your own wine:
To succeed in this simple future we’ll need to be resourceful, inventive, and drunk. With scarce resources and a fragile climate, booze may be harder to source. You might want to think about making your own. To make a simple table wine you’ll need:
Grapes Campden tablet (or 0.33g of potassium metabisulfite powder) Tartaric acid Sugar Wine yeast Pails, bottles, tubes and corking devices too numerous to list A powerful thirst
To make your wine, simply place your chosen grapes in a nylon straining bag in the bottom of a pail. Firmly crush with the appropriate tool or a small child. Crumble your campden tablet over the must. Cover the pail with cheesecloth and let sit for one hour before measuring the temperature and acidity. (It should be between 21° and 24° C.) Take a break. Next, pour a yeast solution directly on must and agitate your bag. Cover pail with cheesecloth, set in a warm area and check that fermentation has begun in at least 24 hours.
Once the must has reached "dryness,” squeeze any remaining liquid into the pail. If there is no liquid then your wine is too “dry” and you should start the process again. Rack off the sediment into a container, topping up with a little boiled, cooled water to entirely fill the container. Fit with a sanitized bung and fermentation lock. After 10 days, rack the wine into another jug. Top up with dry red wine of a similar style. After six months, siphon the clarified, settled wine off the sediment and into clean bottles. Cork with the hand-corker. Store bottles in cool, dark place and wait at least six months before drinking. Arrange your party. Serve your wine. If your guests say, “Yummy,” then good. If they grimace or vomit then be ready to say “Ha ha! It’s joke wine. Suckers.”
The process of making quality wine is delicate, absorbing, and never ending. You should probably just go ahead and get a divorce now.
3. How to write the next Walden:
You will need: Pen Paper A hut
In this simple future it will be important to learn to enjoy the silence and solitude that has been cruelly thrust upon us. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau spent a year in a self-built hut beside Walden Pond near Massachusetts. His experiences formed the basis for Walden, one of the great novels about living a simple life of self-sufficiency. Here’s an excerpt:
“Occasionally, after my hoeing" (consorting with prostitutes) "was done for the day, I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning … There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines .” (Cocaine or "snuff").
It’s a cracking read, but many of the ideas in Walden are old fashioned and the world is crying out for a fresh version. Maybe you could write your own great novel about your experiences with self-sufficiency. I’ve started mine. It’s called Walden II: On Walden Pond. Here’s an excerpt:
“Went fishing today. The water gleamed with rainbow sparks like the haunch of a great trout. I sat there for hours, many fish broke the surface, mocking me, but none took my line. So I took a stick of dynamite and that night I had a mighty feast.”
4. How to grow an apple tree:
The tree: nature’s tree. The trees don’t deserve our support after such a feeble effort in absorbing the carbon dioxide we’ve produced, but unfortunately we need them to live, so we should each plant at least one tree this year. I recommend the apple tree. The fruits repel doctors and attract teachers, which might not be good if you’re trying to find a spouse with a decent income. Otherwise, follow these instructions:
1. Save a few seeds from an apple you’ve eaten.
2. Gather your children to plant the seeds in a small container of potting soil. Water every day.
3. When you have a small seedling, move it to a bigger pot, and continue watering daily. Add fertilizer if you want.
4. Once your tree is big enough, carefully transplant it to a nice location. When it’s big you no longer need to water it. The rain will take care of it.
Now imagine a montage scene: you and your family beside the tree as it grows with you through the years, a silent witness to picnics, birthdays, anniversaries, stolen romantic moments, and, finally, the scattering of your pale ashes beneath its boughs by your children and grandchildren, all accompanied by the wistful strains of Turn Turn Turn by The Byrds. Isn’t life a strange and fleeting merry-go-ride.
5. How to carve something from wood:
You will need: Wood or a suitable tree Chisels and gouges A first aid kit
There can be few greater pleasures than carving something out of wood. The thing that was once just a stupid tree is now a magnificent facsimile of a barn-owl lifting away a hamster, or Beethoven thinking of his next hit tune. Carving wood is a meditative pursuit, whether you’re whittling up a new church-hat or prosthetic arm, or carving the word “Ass-hat” into your ex-husband’s wedding pagoda, you will become involuntarily lost in it’s sweeping grain. By the time you rouse, days will have passed and the recycling will need taking out.
You need the right wood for carving. Prominent New Zealand carver Guy Tuterangiwhiu O`Connor has hewn over 4,500 frozen moments from wood, cow-bone, and the jaws of stranded whales. Custom wood is the best for beginners, he says, although sooner or later the novice is going to have to get used to the tribulations of working with grain. He says that the main mistake new carvers make is choosing a design that is too large or complicated, which is probably why my carving of the Taj Mahal looks like an Elizabethan dildo. Don’t be discouraged; if you stick with it anything is possible. Guy has carved for the king of Spain, Nelson Mandela, and the actor Michael J. Fox. You can find Guy on his website kiwibone.com. (Please type this address carefully.)
If you want to see the culmination of generations of wood carving prowess, visit Amish.net. The official website of America’s Amish country. Here you can source Amish Made Hickory Rockers, Armoires, Quilt Racks, and Amish Outdoor Patio furniture. Apparently a no technology rule can be set aside when you’re trying to create a global web-presence.
Enjoy your carving, be sure to keep your work area free of dust and debris, and keep several tourniquets on hand.
6. How to write a letter
You will need: Fountain pen or quill Ink Stationery Someone to write to
When was the last time you sat down and wrote one; felt the sweep of your pen as you crafted every phrase, felt love as you wrote “Dear Mum,” or wrath as you penned the words: “To the editor,” or, “Dearest Ass-hat”? As Emily Post screamed:
“The art of general letter-writing in the present day is shrinking until the letter threatens to become a telegram, a telephone message, a post-card … The difference though, between letter-writers of the past and of the present, is that in other days they all tried to write, and to express themselves the very best they knew how—today people don’t care a bit whether they write well or ill.”
How true. When you suggest letter writing to a young person today they say, “Wy wd we evn nd 2 wrt a ltr anywy? It tks f-n ags.” But like it or not, letter writing is part of our heritage. Where would we be without Jane Austen’s letters, or Einstein’s correspondence with Roosevelt, or Ian Wishart’s letters to God?
When writing a letter it’s important that you don’t skimp on your pen and stationery, go for the best you can afford, as this will make the best impression on your recipient. Make sure your letter is well formatted, contains a date, an address, and a polite salutation. For example:
My Dearest Agatha
What’s crackin’, bitch?
Yours with deepest affection Ernest
It’s that simple. There isn’t time here to go into every subtle nuance of the classical letter, but everything you need to know about letter writing can be found in the book The Fashionable American Letter Writer: Or, The Art of Polite Correspondence. In it you will find many appropriate and relevant examples of good letter writing which you can use in your own letters. This for example: A letter from a gentleman to a lady, disclosing his passion:
“Every one of those qualities in you which claim my admiration, increased my diffidence, by showing the great risk I run in venturing, perhaps before my affectionate assiduities have made the desired impression on your mind, to make a declaration of the ardent passion I have long since felt for you.”
Or this: From a gentleman to a young lady of a superior fortune:
“Believe me, my dearest A -, were our circumstances reversed, I should hardly take to myself the credit of doing a generous action, in overlooking the consideration of wealth, and making you an unreserved tender of my hand and fortune.”
Or my favourite: From the Earl of Stafford to his son, just before his Lordship's execution:
“Lose not the time of your youth, but gather those seeds of virtue and knowledge which may be of use to yourself, and comfort to your friends, for the rest of your life. And that this may be the better effected, attend thereunto with patience, and be sure to correct and restrain yourself from anger.”
To which the boy no doubt replied:
“Sweet. Hv fun. C U in hevs.”
7. How to build a quantum super-computer:
You will need: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine (NMR) Cup of coffee
Computers have been our masters for the past three decades, keeping us bewitched with their games, tools, and exotic pornography. In the future we may no longer be able to rely on the energy needed to run these beasts, but we’ll still need them to organise our supplies of yarn and wood and other such things. Fortunately, computers of the future will not be encumbered by transistors, circuits, or reality. Quantum computers will read the spins of atoms and molecules to perform unimaginable computational feats. In quantum computing the atoms’ “spins” can be read as either positive, negative, or undecided. The effect of this “undecided” state, as New Scientist explains, is similar to being in many places at once. You could send one self fishing, one to the yarn store, and another to kill a former business partner. The only problem with these computers is that they’re very fragile, but scientists have discovered that they can use the atoms suspended in ordinary liquids such as coffee, or beer, to make computations. That steaming cup you just brewed or purchased for an unreasonable mark-up has all the answers to the universe bubbling away inside. Can you feel the potential burning at your fingertips? All you need to make your own quantum behemoth is a question worthy of such a device, a way to input the question (you’ll need to use a bit of imagination here!) and a simple way to read the final answer. (I would use a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance device, such as you might find in a typical garden shed.) Good luck!
8. How to read the night sky:
You will need: The sky Eyes
Have you ever lain beneath the night sky, the heavens wheeling and burning above, and thought, “What is it all about, this universe? Also, where is the roof of my hut?” This is the same unfathomable cosmic mess that has fascinated us for the entire course of human history, the same sky that guided the old tribes to our shore, that accompanied Cook as he travelled south to find a prostitute named Venus. This is the sky that Hobson lay beneath and said, “Imagine, Busby, if all this was just, like, part of an even BIGGER universe. I love you Busby.” Heke, Hillary, and everyone since have marvelled at this same great sky.
Your viewing of the night sky can be enhanced with telescopes and other equipment, but there’s no reason you can’t enjoy the sky with your own eyes. Stand anywhere and look south. Trace your finger down the pale smear of the Milky Way to the horizon. Find two bright stars: these are the Pointer Sisters. Just above is the Southern Cross, the constellation that graces our flags and tea-towels. Now move your finger gently upward, past Carrina, Vela, Beta Carotene, Fox, Viacom, and The Riddler. The map of stars we see at night is the legacy of tens of thousands of years of concentrated effort by countless civilisations and they betray our fanatical desire to order a universe that defies order. The night sky, beyond all else, silences thought, theories, and philosophies. As my old Scout master Don Sanchizi used to say: “That’s a whole lotta wow out there.” He was right. In the face of infinity our technological discoveries are meaningless. We are held utterly powerless by the heavens which leave us to murmur a deeply felt but barely audible “Ha.” Only the night sky can do this. Also maybe babies.
