THOUGHTS AND BOOK REVIEWS...
A glimpse into the abyss

THE ICE MAN COMETH
It’s all over. And we didn’t even see it coming. People said that it was going to be Global Warming. Nuclear Holocaust. World Famine. But no – all wrong. The thing that is going to finish us all. The final straw that will break humanities back will be…Our own unbelievable stupidity!
Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of seriously bright people out there, but the many will weigh down the few. And how did I come to this Earth-shattering conclusion? Well – yesterday I purchased a bag of ice from the supermarket. That’s all. I had no inkling that it would provide immutable proof of mankind’s final slide into the pit of brainlessness from which there is no return. You see…the bag of ice had instructions on it.
Use ice to keep your drinks cool. Place two or three ice cubes into your drink to keep it cool!! (Their exclamation marks – not mine. I see nothing surprising in the fact that ice makes things cold).
Place ice cubes in a bucket and then put a bottle of beverage in the ice. This will keep it cool!! (Wow, more exclamation marks…really? The ice will magically cool my wine).
Use it to cool down your mocktails!! (Okay…clutching at straws here. Basically a repeat of the first instruction but replacing the word ‘drink’ with ‘mocktail’ Still – nice use of exclamation marks again).
Finally, they ask us to send in our ideas on “Cool things to do with ice”. This would be funny if it wasn’t true. But all that it has done is convince me that humanity has run its course. Any species that needs instructions on how to use ice no longer deserves to exist.
So – I bid you farewell. I will be freezing my body in a huge Tupperware full of ice. Someone defrost me if humanity improves anytime in the future.
I KNEW AN OLD LADY WHO...
My son told me that we swallow an average of 8 spiders a night while we sleep…yuck. Now I’m not saying that I got paranoid about this but I decided to do a little research.
Turns out that it’s rubbish – The Internet states; Back in 1993 a columnist for PC Professional named Lisa Holst decided to prove that you could make up anything on the Internet and people would believe it. So she made up a ridiculous set of facts, the spider myth among them.
Problem solved…but then I decided to delve deeper – you know what? I cannot find any proof that this ‘Lisa Holst’ actually exists apart from the articles on the net saying that she is responsible for the 8 spider thing. But nothing else. Even the alleged magazine that she worked for; ‘PC Professional’ did not exist at the time.
Now I have become totally convinced that we do swallow 8 spiders a night and that a bunch of concerned arachnophobes got together to start the whole Lisa Holst story to prevent us all going insane.
But then I also believed that suicides peak over Christmas, men think about sex every 7 seconds, we only use 10% of our brains and that you should wait 30 minutes after eating before swimming. All of these are wrong.
Suicides actually go down during the Xmas season, a lot of men almost never think about sex, we use most of our brains (but can still function if we lose parts) and swimming is no more harmful than walking. So why don’t we all start our own Internet scary fact?
Did you know that a single portion of Stilton cheese has enough bacteria in it to kill an average 4 year old child? There you go – sounds factual…lets go with it!

Why does everything have to do everything else?
I woke up late this morning. It wasn’t my fault. My alarm clock just refused to do the simple task that I bought it for…wake me up. No – it was too busy taking the surrounding temperature, working out the relative humidity whilst adjusting the brightness of it’s display to coincide with the ambient light in the room. My old alarm clock was made out of tin. It had two silver bells on the top, a winder like a model T crank handle and a tick as loud as the knock of death. But it worked. And that’s because it only had one job and it did it well.
But nowadays everything has to do the work of everything else. I wish that I could find a mobile phone that simply made phone calls. Then they could make it small enough to fit comfortably into your top pocket. Not like my current mobile – it’s made from stainless steel, has a full QWERTY keyboard, a touch screen, a satnav, a scanner, blutooth, G3, a camera, a Dictaphone and enough Apps to upset an Apple cart. Oh – get this – it also has a setting that makes a sound like a Star Wars light sabre when you move the phone around. Unfortunately – it’s lousy at being a phone. Bad reception, tinny sound and a battery life of about 4 seconds.
And what about E-books? Why do they have a keyboard? What is it for…are we meant to argue with the book? Rewrite any sections that we disagree with? No – the keyboard’s there because it won’t be long and our e-books will be ‘Personal home office lifestyle enhancement pads.’
And they’ll be rubbish at storing books but really good at making phone calls.

Yes please – I would like a bigger penis.
I got another one of those emails. You know the ones…would you like a bigger penis? Add inches in just two days or your money back. In fact – I’ve been getting so many of these lately that I wondered if my wife had been contacting the sales departments of the companies as a subtle hint to me. But, after thorough questioning, she denied all knowledge. This may have something to do with the fact that we are at that stage in our marriage where all that we have is corridor sex…that’s when you pass in the corridor and shout F**k you at each other.
Well – to cut a long story short (Hur hur) I clicked on the link to see. Now – I am not a particularly squeamish guy but what I saw had the instant opposite effect to what it was advertised to do. I was greeted by a full page photo of a naked man with what looked like a cross between a stainless steel grease gun and a kitchen blender strapped to his…er…member. He was built like the proverbial brick outhouse, spray tanned to within an inch of his life and had a smile like rigor mortis had set in. And no wonder. This contraption was obviously some sort of stretching machine and whoever had attached it had decided that the advert was going to show the product in full swing. It looked as though someone had made a penis out of flesh colour bubble gum and then stretched it to a length of…oh…say, ten feet. Okay – maybe twenty inches. It was the most grotesque image that I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.
But it did prove one thing to me – those enlargers seem to work. If you really want something as long as your forearm and as thin as a piece of spaghetti.