Life under the glittery Jackboot

I've not blogged in quite some time. Nothing personal, it's just that as of March 7th I've been a dad. Babies in the house tend to take up a lot of your time. Who knew? 


So that's why I've not said much here. I've got an actual full-time job to keep up with, which, coupled with my myriad new responsibilities, means I've got much less time to play with, and priorities have to be made. Long-winded blogposts which will only be read by a few people with nothing better to do? They're not very high up on the list, I'm afraid.


But, sometimes you just have to speak out. Someone says something that strikes a chord, and you can't just remain silent while a great injustice continues. 


Today, in the Telegraph, Lord Carey, former Archbishop, stated that Christians and those who wish to express themselves are suppressed, forced underground, vilified by the homosexuals who have essentially taken over society.


He has been widely mocked for this, via that there Twitter, the Guardian, and elsewhere. But the people mocking his stance clearly don't understand. They must live abroad or in elitist enclaves in the more modern 'hip' cities. They clearly don't know how it is for normal people and wealthy peers who have lived in palaces. I am neither homosexual nor Christian, but ever since the tyrannical homosexuals started running society, life is a constant struggle for anyone who deviates from their tyrannical views on what is 'normal'. So, to enlighten you and show to truth of Carey's words, I've decided to describe a typical day in my life, as a suppressed heterosexual living in homosexual Britain. Or 'The U-Gay' (as in UK, yeah? Geddit?), as it should be called these days. Just so you know Carey is speaking the truth, not living in some deranged fantasy world.


The day starts with me waking up before the wife. She has to feed the baby during the night, so needs to sleep in. I notice in the fridge that we've no milk yet. It's getting harder for me to get milk now, the homosexuals who control society don't approve of milk. It's a symbol of heterosexual reproduction so is considered offensive, especially if a male drinks it as this constitutes transfer of organic material across the genders, which is 'clearly immoral' I'm told. Milk isn't banned yet, but it's surely only a matter of time.


I get dressed for work. I usually wear a combination of tight trousers and/or vests, sometimes with studs or rainbow accessories. I don't suit this stuff at all, and don't like it in the slightest. I'd much rather wear something more sober and plain, but it's really not worth the risk of offending the sensibilities of some of the more flamboyant people I work with, they're likely to lodge a complaint against me if I do. I'd like to just be myself, but that's not a good idea at present.


I head towards the train station. On the way, I pass many gay bars, they're so commonplace these days. One that I pass was recently in the news after throwing out two Christians for public praying. Some of the more tolerant media highlighted their harsh treatment, but most papers and news services just flamed them for threatening to destroy the fabric of society. Seemed like quite an unfair accusation for what was just a bit of public faith between consenting adults, but most media is on the side of the silent majority of gays these days, although whether these people exist is debatable


On the train, there is a group of flamboyant homosexuals loudly singing show tunes and Lady Gaga numbers. They're annoying everyone and making people quite uncomfortable, but you can't stifle people from expressing their views, so everyone just lets them carry on. A conductor does ask them to possibly keep it down, but they are outraged by his attempts to curb their freedoms. They tell him to 'talk to the hand'. I've never been able to work out if/why this is offensive.


I distract myself by reading the free newspaper. The main story is about a community of Bears being bombed by a hard-liner Twink group. It's down to some fundamental difference in views regarding which Madonna album is better. It seems utterly ridiculous and superficial to me, but then I'm not part of that community so am told I'm not able to understand the importance of the dispute. Fair enough, I suppose.


Spend the next few hours in work. Am occasionally pestered by my annoying co-worker who keeps telling everyone they should attend her LGBT pottery class. She keeps telling me I should go and how much good it would do me. I keep declining, she wants to know why. I eventually tell her that I'm not a part of the LGBT community and I just find pottery immensely dull. She's polite about it, but is clearly very angry. That's probably going to get me ostracised for the next few weeks. 

(This happened in my last job. I said I wasn't going to Mardi Gras as it didn't really apply to me, and then I stupidly asked why an event with the name 'Fat Tuesday' always occurred on the weekend? This resulted in a massive backlash, and accusations of me aggressively undermining the true meaning of the occasion by trying to change the name. Madness! I had to leave that job, it was too much. My boss made a decent effort to be supportive, but what with his office filled with Mardi Gras merchandise I don't think he really saw my side of things)


I nip out for lunch in town. I'm waylaid by and incredibly camp man with giving out flyers about how essential it is to become homosexual. He tries to give me one, but I decline, saying I need to be back in work. He gets very angry and remonstrates me, telling me that unless I embrace homosexuality I'll never get into heaven. He means it as a threat, but I don't really have much of a concern. I've never cared for night clubs anyway.


Back in work, a meeting with HR. I've got to sort out paternity leave and the like. It's quite complicated. My wife and I are, logically, married, but society doesn't recognise it as 'true' marriage, what with it being mixed-sex. After all, they argue, men and women are so different, they're practically different species. We're mixed-race as well, which just makes it worse. It's no better than bestiality, they say. I try not to let it get to me, but it's hard going some times. We don't have the same protections that 'normal' gay couples have under the law. 


Could be worse I suppose, at least we're not religious. The treatment they get is worse again. It's not natural, they say. Some of the arguments seem to make sense, sadly. Homosexuality is natural, you can't help that, but being religious is a choice. A wrong one, clearly, judging by this society. But still, the vendetta against religious people seems a bit much, given that they're not hurting anyone with their beliefs. You'd think the gay organisations running society would have bigger things to worry about what with the economy and so forth, but apparently not.


I eventually head home. On the way, I pass a hotel I stayed in once. Fairly low budget, but even then they had the obligatory copy of Alan Carr's autobiography in the bedside drawers. Never read it myself, but apparently it's become the homosexual text which they tend live their life by. From what I know of Alan Carr, he is a very amiable friendly bloke, but in the book there is apparently a miss-print. One sentence should read 'I said "God, no!"', the typical exclamation meaning immediate denial. But instead it reads 'I said "God? No!"', and this is what all the religious persecution is based on. Seems flimsy justification, but like I say, I've never read it. There's also apparently a part that uses the phrase 'straight to hell', which is interpreted as a condemnation of heterosexuals. you could argue that these are very much open to interpretation, but it's never any use.


So I get home. Wife, son, all one happy family. We can't go out much, but we probably wouldn't anyway. Modern society means our lifestyle and relationship isn't really approved of by many, even if those who disprove don't really know why. I'm fairly sure that most homosexuals have no problem with what other people do, but that's not really helpful to us. It's the aggressive, shouty ones who get to dictate what happens. Nobody ever pays attention to the people who aren't saying anything, for obvious reasons.




So there you have it, an account of life in a society run by dominant homosexuals (pardon the double meaning of that). At least Carey has had to guts to speak out, hopefully many more will follow and bring about real change, ending this injustice once and for all.






DISCLAIMER: Sadly, odds are I'll need to state this for clarity's sake; The above anecdote is entirely fictional. It never happened. It is a (probably weak) attempt at satire, intended to portray what life would be like in a society under the control of what are clearly ridiculously exaggerated homosexual clichés, which a worrying number of people seem to be convinced is the case, despite the substantial evidence to the contrary. Any analogues between this blog piece and the real world are obviously intentional, but the society portrayed only exists in some possible parallel universe, and the heads of myself and Lord Carey. I write this disclaimer to show that I, at least, am aware that it's not real.




Twitter: @garwboy

Valentine's Massacre

Today is Valentine's Day. SAINT Valentine's day if you want to give it it's full official title. I was told in school that St Valentine was a Roman soldier who was imprisoned for many years and wrote a love letter to his girlfriend/wife/horse every day (it was the olden days, details are sketchy), and that's why we give romantic messages or gifts on the day named in his honour.

This raised several questions, like; since when did they have a functional postal service in ancient Rome? Was it customary practice for the less-enlightened enemies of the empire to provide their prisoners with writing materials and generously deliver their letters for them? What was someone with the ability to read and write doing in a combat situation where they could get captured anyway? This suggests more of a noble background, they didn't do grunt work like that, surely? Maybe all of my arguments are valid, but it happened anyway? This would most likely count as the miracle required to achieve sainthood, so at least it's consistent in a way.

This is all academic anyway, seeing as my attempts to find this account of the origins of St Valentine's day drew precisely nothing. I can't find any mention of this bizarre origin story online. I suspect my rambling old headmaster accidentally picked up a Mills and Boon book instead of his prepared notes for the assembly where he told us about where Valentine's day originates, and as such I have this implausible anecdote lodged in my memory.

But any attempt to find out exactly where Valentine's day comes from is tricky. Just try it. St Valentine was a composite of 14 different people. Or 7. Or just the one. And he was a Roman nobleman. Or not. There are very little (if any) reliable records about who he was and what he did. He's essentially the 'Where's Wally' of saints. The festival in his name appears to have just come from nowhere.

That's often the way with well accepted themes and symbols though, their origins are either arbitrary, unknown or quite surreal, e.g. Father Christmas's red outfit being due to a Coca Cola advert. Some things are even more sinister though, like the supposed origin of the phrase 'Rule of Thumb'. Again, that's not so certain. It's believed to derive from a law that states men could beat their wife with a stick 'no thicker than their thumb'. However, this law never existed. 'Never base a cliché on domestic violence' would, ironically, be a good rule of thumb.

So where do all these Valentines symbols and themes come from? What does chocolate, love notes (later cards), flowers, cherubs, hearts, arrows, all that, where does all that come from? Again, the origins are nowhere near as twee and gushy as that.

The heart seems to take precedence as the organ that most represents Valentine's day. This is most likely due to the fact that the heart perceptibly changes it's activity in response to stimuli like arousal or anything involving hormone release. Arguably, there are certain other organs which noticeably respond to hormone release, and probably have a more direct link to romance, but society has deemed that these are not suitable for children to see, not even in cartoon form.

So where does all this symbolism come from? Well Valentine's day as a festival was, supposedly, introduced and emphasised to supplant pagan festivals with similar themes. A lot of pagan rituals have a fertility emphasis and so on, convert-hungry Christianity at the time would have noticed that offering chastity and discipline wouldn't have been much of a marketing strategy in getting people to sign up.

So you have this Christian ceremony of romance and passion, but presented within the paradoxically rigid framework of the religion which teaches self-discipline and that pre-marital anything is a sin. Religion in general has never had much of a problem with illogical teachings though, so this problem wasn't really of any concern.

Life when Valentine's day was introduced would have been largely based in rural communities, and this would have been the case for some time. The melting pots of cities are harder places to enforce strict religious dogma, but the traditional, rigid, land-based regions are much more amenable to discipline and hard work. Farming, woodland areas, that sort of thing, small communities ruled over by an fearsome preacher or pastor who whips them into a frenzy when it's time to go burn/drown a witch (depending on which country we're talking about).

Such places would take a very intolerant approach to youthful high jinks and deviance from the strict rules the Bible (or any religious text) demands. Fundamentalist areas are the same today, they just now usually have inconvenient 'laws' to stick to before dishing out the brutal punishments.

But if history has taught us anything, it's that horny teenagers can't be stopped by strict rules. If anything, that makes them worse. So in these strict religious communities, on St Valentine's day, when romance and passion were [technically] encouraged, teenagers who have been developing a mutual attraction to each other would arrange an illicit meet up in a secluded area, knowing there'd be dreadful punishment if they were caught. As being seen talking together would automatically arouse suspicion in communities where everyone knew everyone, they communicated via letters and notes, if they could write (hence the Valentine letter, later cards, tradition, and of course they had to be anonymous in case somebody else found them and they got into trouble).

If they couldn't read and write (which was more common) they had to leave a symbol, something romantic but easy to get hold of in rural communities, like flowers. The recipient would then look for the person carrying around the same type of flower, so they knew who had asked them for a 'hook up'.

Of course, fundamental religious communities don't look kindly on this sort of thing. Those teenagers that were caught mid-dalliance in the woods or other secluded areas, committing the cardinal sin of lust, were punished brutally. As the heart was believed to be the seat of emotions and behaviour, and these teenagers were guilt of a deadly sin, they were typically shot by crossbow through the heart, in front of everyone, in order to set an example, or to 'release the demons in them', or something like that. And so we get the image of an arrow through the heart.

Some wilier or well-off culprits were able to negotiate being spared their lives, if they made a substantial donation to the church and agreed to marry their partner immediately, hence the tradition of expensive gifts and proposals.

Of course, small communities with limited law enforcement authorities can't police the wide rural areas in an attempt to catch unruly teen lovers, so it was traditional to co-opt the local children who would go out exploring or playing. If they saw a couple up to 'no good', they could run back and tell the local magistrate or whoever, and they'd be caught and executed in the 'traditional' way. The child informants would be rewarded with sweetmeats and stuff, and so we have the tradition of giving chocolate on valentine's day, and also the image of the cherub, an innocent child shooting young lovers through the heart, seeing as many young kids actively went searching for courting couples to rat out, and essentially get them shot.

So there you have it, a rather grim and brutal story of intolerance, betrayal and death underpins all of our Valentine's traditions. It's essentially based on ritual massacre of young lovers. The 1929 Valentine's massacre was just keeping up the tradition.

You may be wondering why you've never heard any of this before. Is it some corporate or church cover up, to preserve the pleasant image of the annual event and keep people participating?

Or is it because I've just made the whole thing up? Because I have. Valentine's day symbolism is just a mish-mash of Greco-Roman mythology, symbols of fertility and a big helping of commercially manufactured elements. But my version sounds quite believable, doesn't it? So feel free to tell any sappy gits who keep banging on about the gushy, twee aspects of the holiday, perhaps making them think the whole thing is based on child informants and ritual execution might put them off finally?

The origins of Valentine's day are largely artificial constructs anyway, so there's no reason why we can't introduce some darker elements to the story, to try and offset the overly-saccharine elements of the holiday as it currently stands. Consider that my gift to you.

Happy Valentine's!

UniLad to the bone

[This piece was originally written as a more concise audio rant for The Pod Delusion]

[Also, this is quite a long one. I've tried to keep it amusing or interesting, but if you want to give up by paragraph 5 then please feel free]

        

Before I start with the main point of this piece, here are some facts about me that are worth bearing in mind for what I’m about to discuss.

Firstly, as you can probably tell from my name and picture, I am male. I have XY sex chromosomes. Counter-intuitively, the Y chromosome is quite a weak and feeble chromosome compared to the mighty X. Perhaps this is why us males tend to be so big and aggressive, we’re all compensating for small-chromosome syndrome. It’s like small-man syndrome, but it goes right down to the bimolecular level.

My being male means I’m probably not a feminist. I support gender equality in all its forms, but feminism is such a broad and diverse ideology these days I’d hesitate to label myself as one due to ignorance alone. I feel similarly about Jedis; I agree with what they say, I think it would be cool if I was one, but I just have no idea how to go about achieving this. I did wonder what the term was for a militant feminist who was male. I suggested an effeminate militarist, but apparently this isn’t right.

Also, being male, I think this makes me immune to any accusations of being a lesbian. Although I do share their appreciation for the female form, that’s where the similarities end. You could say there are some lesbians that have hair as short of mine, or wear the same size boots, but those are just superficial choices that happen to overlap. There are some very pronounced reasons (well, averagely pronounced if I’m being honest) why I can’t be a lesbian. Also some very obvious logical ones.

I am also a married man whose wife is currently pregnant with our first child, so I can claim to be sexually experienced to a certain degree. I’m no Casanova or renowned ladies man, but I know how it all works in that department, and obviously I’m proficient enough with women to have convinced one to live with me forever. That may just be pity on her part, admittedly, but you work with what you can.

I have also been doing stand up comedy for about 7 years now, and have been writing and creating comedy in other formats for almost as long, with a surprising degree of success. I'm not a household name as a comedian or anything, I've just done a lot more high profile gigs than I'd expect to as someone who's not actually pursued comedy as a career. This is probably due to some niche appeal via my science career no doubt, but still.

I say this not to brag, but to demonstrate that I clearly have A sense of humour. It's an odd one, and many would argue that it's a crap one, but I unarguably do have one, that much is obvious. If you're reading this now, the evidence is on this site. It might make you chuckle or shake your head in despair, but that's the beauty of a subjective medium.

Why am I telling you this? Well, it's in relation to Unilad, a website that became notorious this week and has now been taken down. I don't know who spotted it first, but it quickly entered the social network sphere via women who were outraged by it. I didn't get to see a great deal of it before it was taken down after a deluge of complaints, but what I did see warranted a few raised eyebrows, to say the least. Advertising itself as a guide to being a successful 'lad' in university, it seemed mainly dedicated to the degradation of women, disabled people and pretty much anyone who doesn't conform to their masculine ideal. One of the passages I read was a bizarrely detailed mathematical analysis of how many women are sluts and how to have sex with one, and ended with the observation that 85% of rapes go unreported, so you're likely to get away with it if you force yourself on a slut if she ends up rejecting you.

Or something like that. I may be mistaken, it's hard to read clearly when you're brain is trying escape through your eye sockets.

Obviously, once it became known about, a lot of people had some serious complaints about the Unilad website, and complain they did. From what I saw, the Unilad team, demonstrating reasoning skills in-keeping with their writing skills, seemingly resorted to one of 3 responses to these complaints.

1. Accuse the complainer of being a lesbian.

2. Accuse the complainer of being a feminist

3. Accuse the complainer of having no sense of humour.

Undeniably, a lot of those complaining were women. This is understandable, seeing as it was largely women who were being denigrated and degraded by Unilad. If you break into someone's home, it's usually the home owners who end up calling the police. Cause and effect, that is.

So, as a heterosexual white male non-feminist, non-lesbian, working class background comedian who's been a member of a university for over 10 years, I'm clearly part of Unilad's target demographic. And they claimed it was all for comedy, all a collection of jokes and 'banter'. If we accept this claim at face value, then those who object to it are 'wrong' to do so as it's not serious. Any criticism for it should be delivered in the context of comedy and humour, not political ideology and serious stuff like that.

So, taking this into account, as a comedian with a sense of humour, what reason do I have for not liking the Unilad website?

In a nutshell, it's crap. From a purely comedic perspective, viewing the whole thing as one big collection of jokes as they assured us it is/was, all the jokes are very poorly thought out and lacking in any element of subtlety or nuance that elevates crude jackass level physicality to genuinely good comedy.

The argument Unilad use that those who don't like their site lack a sense of humour seems very counter-intuitive to me. Only someone with only the most basic sense of what humour actually is could find their work genuinely funny. Anyone who has a working sense of humour and appreciation of good comedy would find the Unilad website as painful as Unilad's theoretical targets would find the consequences of their advice.

Perhaps I'm being unfair, perhaps there are many men who found Unilad funny, but I'd imagine they're not the sort of people I'd want to share a night out with. I'd probably prefer not to share a country with them, if that was possible, but that's just me. 'It's funny because it's a good joke' is a very different thing to 'it's funny because it agrees with my prejudices', and I distrust anyone who champions something based on the latter.

I should clarify that I'm not reflexively offended by the subject matter in principle. I've heard many feminist friends say that rape jokes are never acceptable, and I respectfully disagree. I see the arguments for this, but I don't believe there is such a thing as a subject unsuitable for comedy, as long as it's done right. Undeniably, it's never pleasant to hear someone make crass jokes about a subject that's emotive and painful for you, believe me I've experienced it myself, but a blanket ban is a level of censorship usually employed by totalitarian regimes, and it only ever gives power to those willing to make the jokes anyway. But that's a discussion for another time.

                My point was, making jokes about any controversial subject can be funny if it's done well. Unilad, for all their bluster at being humorous and just 'banter', do not do it well. It's seen as fashionable in comedy these days to be deliberately dark and bad taste, but this isn't that. This is just bad.

I've lost count of the number of aspiring young male (they're always men) stand ups who are relatively new to performing, who will go out in front of an audience of people and casually discuss graphic stories about rape, paedophilia, murder, racism and lord knows what else.

Bad taste comedy has been around for a long time now, from the shock comics like Frankie Boyle, and the stalwarts of bad taste comedy like Jerry Sadowitz, or the Americans like Doug Stanhope. Comics who use bad taste and push boundaries, like Boyle, Carr and many others, have become more successful in recent years, and this has had a questionable affect on the comedy scene. It means you can get away with more now, as people are more familiar with controversial statements or material intended to shock, thus widening the areas of what is acceptable to talk about. But on the down side, you get this slew of imitators, who see these comics becoming famous for saying these horrible things and decide that they can do that too. But they usually miss the point entirely.

Whatever you think about Boyle and Carr and all those guys, it's hard to deny that they are good at what they do. They make people laugh at things they know they shouldn't laugh at. And there's the key. You can usually say shocking things, controversial things, anything you like, as long as it's funny and obviously a joke. I know funny is a subjective measure, but it's often obvious to see where an attempt to introduce humour has been made, even if you think it's an unsuccessful one. If a comedian says something shocking/offensive and it looks like they actually mean it, then they've screwed up.

The funnier the joke, the more offensive it can get away with being. That's not an established fact, but it's a good rule of thumb to go by. But where many younger/newer comics, and Unilad in particular, seem to go wrong is assuming that, in comedy, offending people is an end in and of itself, when it really isn't. I've seen so many just come out with obviously horrific statements (that they clearly don't mean) as a short cut to getting a reaction. Rather than putting some effort into constructing some well thought out jokes, they just say some offensive statements and count the audiences shocked reaction as a successful response. But it isn't a success, any more than getting booed and having bottles of urine thrown at you is a success if you're a stand up. It's just lazy and short sighted.

 Pretty much every comic who goes down this offense-for-offense-sake route has some excuse or rationalisation for it.

Some claim they're being ironic. This may be the case, as irony is such a slippery concept for many. But irony which isn't funny or has any obvious purpose is pointless, and if the irony in a statement is very hard to detect then it should, and will, be evaluated on its own merits. Ergo, it's often not really an excuse.

Many others use an excuse that particularly gets on my nerves; they say that what they're doing is 'challenging people's politically correct preconceptions'.

Why? Why is that a thing that needs doing? I don't deny that political correctness can be ham fisted and over the top quite regularly, but I'd say that's by far the lesser of two evils. To me, the phrase 'political correctness has gone mad' is often an alternative way of saying 'I resent being made to feel guilty about my bigotry'. That doesn't apply to everyone who uses that phrase, of course, but it's repeated use suits the needs of those who do mean that. The phrase itself has such negative connotations, suggesting that if it wasn't for self-serving busybodies we'd all be regularly using racial slurs and oppressing people, and everyone would be happier for it.

So why do politically correct preconceptions need challenging? This has never been fully explained by anyone. You going to come to my house uninvited next and knock out some load bearing walls? Under the premise of 'challenging my architectural preconceptions'? How about you try saying something genuinely funny before attempting to undermine the accepted norms of society for questionable reasons? Run before you can walk, and all that.

(I'd wager there are many people who will object to my previous statements as they are deeply offended by it. Now, THAT'S irony)

But however much I might criticise these comics, I can't fault them for having the courage of their convictions and getting up on stage and saying these things. As far as I'm aware, that's not something Unilad have ever done. They're not exactly anonymous, but they prefer to convey their horrible attempts at humour via the safety of the internet, where anyone offended is likely to be many miles away.

One of the rules of the world of comedy is that it's a bad comic who automatically blames their audience. It's a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance. A comic who has had a bad gig must consider the possibilities that a) they're not, or weren't, funny and must work on their act for next time, or b) every single person in a room full of people (who have usually laughed at every other comic) are all deliberately not laughing at them for some reason. A bad comic will go for the latter very quickly. It's worrying that they do so so often. Unilad's first line of defence was to blame the audience, always a bad sign.

You could argue that the people complaining about Unilad weren't its target audience. Well that's tough. You write deliberately offensive comedy and put it out in the public domain, you have to be prepared for people who don't like it. I won't be surprised if I get a few 'you're an unfunny pompous prick' comments under this article (albeit probably not spelled as accurately), but that's an eventuality I'm aware of when I write this guff. You don't get to cherry pick your audience in advance, that's not how it works. If you promote yourselves as a deliberately offensive comedy website and include warnings beforehand of what people are likely to expect, then that argument may have some weight. But if you don't, you deal with the flack you create. Unilad apparently promote themselves as providing everything you need if you're a lad to succeed at university. As someone who approves University applications, let me say that the advice they give you will let you succeed at getting arrested, but not much else.

Robin Ince once said that, if challenged about something said for comedic effect, you should have a stronger defence than 'it's just a joke'. If you don't, then that's not a justification, unless you're Bernard Manning, apparently. If you truly believe that what you say is harmless fun, then you should have the guts to defend it. Unilad just took down the whole website when challenged. If they thought what they were saying was harmless banter, wouldn't they be willing to stand by that?

It didn't come across as harmless banter, it came across as the classic behaviour of bullies, victimising someone for their own amusement and to make themselves feel big, and when the victim finally turns, accuse them of being unable to take a joke. Having your testosterone cake and eating it isn't an option, 'lads'. As someone who grew up in a pub in an impoverished working class community, I've known many 'lads', and here's a hint; although having 'balls' is often referred to as a sign of manliness, a real man usually has a backbone as well

So, in summary, Unilad claimed that all their material was just harmless fun and jokes. If this is the case, the problem still stands that their attempts at comedy were dreadful, nowhere near amusing enough to make up for the horrific bile and misogyny they contained. So even if it was all a big joke, that's not really an excuse.

You are of course free to look up my comedy output online, and odds are you'll find it terrible, all nerdy and weird and incredibly laboured. That's fine, but my comedy victimises no-one but myself and individuals who usually don't exist.

And if anyone has been upset or offended by anything I've said so far, then don't worry, I'm just joking.

That's how this works, right?

DECEMBER 20th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 20th: Sprouts

There are lots of really good things about Christmas, but then there are many parts that nobody likes at all. Namely; Sprouts! Everyone hates sprouts. Even the people who claim to like sprouts secretly hate them, seeing as everybody hates sprouts, apparently.


They sit there, on your plate, being rubbish and awful, spoiling the dinner for you with their small, green, evil, spherical presence. Why do we even have them? It's 'traditional', they say. Like having a tangerine in your stocking or having to endure the critical and racist proclamations of increasingly inebriated elderly relatives. It's the done thing, so you've got to do it.


Thing is, unlike the majority of other things on the Christmas dinner plate, sprouts are green. Why is that? Obviously, being a plant, they contain chlorophyll. You might not know chlorophyll, but it's the pigment that allows photosynthesis to happen, a process which is essential for pretty much all life on Earth. So that's nice.


Unlike all the other bone idle vegetables like potatoes, who just sit there underground, not doing anything apart from getting fat and sprouting feelers to spawn more greedy, useless offspring, sprouts are up and about, storing nutrients and also generating oxygen for us to breathe, essentially pulling double duty as both a source if vital gas and mass for us non-photosynthesising life forms.


And how do we repay them? We boil them to death, devour them en-masse, and complain about how crap they are the whole time. Is that was Christmas means to you people?


Ungrateful gits


Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 19th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 19th: Uranium-235

Christmas can be described as a time of year where there is great deal of anticipation and work towards it. Then when it's finally arrived, it requires a lot of work to keep it under control, because if you don't keep an eye on it then it will get out of hand, and possibly cause devastating carnage in the brief space of time where it occurs.

Also, the presents. There's usually one thing you want. Possibly two. There are many things you'd like, but few things you actively want. And sometimes you get them, or you get something that gives more than you were expecting. That's always nice

Encapsulating both of these things is uranium-235, an isotope of Uranium that is the one we use to generate nuclear power. Uranium-235 has an odd atomic structure that means the nucleus can be split relatively easily, by the addition of another neutron. This releases a lot of energy, as there is a net loss of mass when the nucleus splits. This mass becomes energy.

Thing is, when the uranium-235 nucleus splits, it releases neutrons. These could feasibly hit another atomic nucleus and cause it to split, releasing energy and more neutrons, which could feasibly and so on and so on.

In the enriched form of Uranium, there pretty much always another atom within neutron-spitting distance, hence the chain reaction used to give us nuclear power, or nuclear weaponry.

Bright lights, followed by uncontrolled carnage. Isn't that just like Christmas?

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 18th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 18th: The Necker Cube

The build up of exciting, chunky presents under the tree is synonymous with Christmas. The soft, edgeless presents are fine, but everyone knows they're just socks. And since where were socks exciting?

No, it's the boxy, cubic/rectangular ones that really stoke the imagination. It could be anything? Anything that fits in a box. It might even be an Xbox, in a box. Like some sort of 'box squared'. Which, considering that squared is one step below cubed, which is what a box is, then a 'box squared' might suggest some sort of sub-box? It's a mathematical-philosophical minefield.

But one fun thing you can do with basic, transparent boxes is look at them. Yes, I said look at them. What's fun about that?

Well, if you look at a Necker cube, it's an image that can be perceived as both angled downwards, or upwards. There is nothing to distiguish the two states, so people either see it as pointing 'up', or pointing 'down'. Then, if you look at it long enough, it switches from one to the other. Then back again. Then back again. And so on.

It's just a good example of how the brain's perception system doesn't deal with ambiguity, so it tries to impose order on a visual stimulus when perhaps there is none. 

So there you go, an example of how, in response to the most basic stimulus, your brain overshoots and gets things all messed up. So it's important, at such a hectic time as Christmas, to load up on as much stimulation as you can to keep it quiet, or maybe just obliterate it with excessive booze

Your choice, but either way, the doctor recommends!

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 17th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 17th: Coal

The traditional Santa mythology emphasises how he discerns between naughty and nice children. Nice children, they get toys. But what do naughty children get? It could be anything; reindeer dung, wood shavings, beard clippings, unwashed Santa pants, anything that the big man can get his hands on that he and a child are unlikely to want.

But apparently, he gives them coal. This makes a superficial amount of sense. Coal is ‘dirty’. Coal can’t be played with. Coal is mundane.

That is, unless you’re a science fan, of course. If you are, what Santa Clause is essentially saying to you is; “you’ve been very bad, so what you’re getting is a mass that is essentially the compacted remains of dinosaurs and prehistoric plants, that is millions of years old and has been processed by the incredible heat and pressure applied by the very Earth itself, and extracted from the ground in conditions that are extremely dangerous and regularly kill people”.

Any bad kid worthy of the title should be very happy with coal. But maybe they’re not? Maybe I just don’t understand kids. It’s an old tradition, of course. But imagine the consequences of it all.

Bad kids get threatened with coal, don’t heed the warnings, and then actually do receive coal. Children arguably don’t really have enough appreciation of the consequences of their actions to completely alter their behaviour to appease some omnipresent magic bearded man (whatever the Pope may tell you), so the receiving of coal convinces them that life isn’t fair, and you have to look after number 1 in this world, every man/woman for himself etc.  All other kids would have the cool toys they so desire, but can’t have. This would be compounded further by the revelation that there was never any Santa in the first place, so you can’t even trust your family.

What you’d eventually end up with a large proportion of the adult population who had no real grasp of ethical behaviour, a fierce sense of self interest, a covetous desire for the possessions of others and access to a lot of coal.

What could possibly happen there...

(Short one today, and probably tomorrow, v busy of late)

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 16th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 16th: Ducks

There is one group for whom Christmas is not exactly a joyful time of year. It’s the exact opposite if anything. I refer, of course to the fowls.  That’s ‘fowls’, no ‘Fowlers’, the desperately unlucky Eastenders family, although it works for them too, as it probably does for any British soap opera family at Christmas.

But even more than unfortunate fictional families, fowls (Galleiforms, if you prefer) have good reason to fear Christmas, as it pretty much translates to ‘mass slaughter’ for them. Something about Christmas makes humans, in the west, at least, want to consume the flesh of a deceased relatively-obese bird. Not that we don’t do that at other times of year of course, but it becomes a bit more intense at Christmas time.

Turkey has to bear the brunt of the festive lust for flesh, although chickens come in for it too, but then when do they not? This is likely to be a result of Christmas occurring in the past when meat was somewhat more of a luxury, rather than something that you can find discarded in gutters the morning after the day people beak up for work. If the quantity of meat was the priority, rather than the quality, then it’s no wonder Turkey came to the forefront of holiday foodstuffs, usually being the biggest, chunkiest of the fowls. Although given Christmases pagan roots, it does make you wonder where this whole ‘kill something big and consume its flesh’ ritual originally came from.

If that’s a bit of a dark way of thinking of things, I have precedent. Coming from a small Welsh village, by family growing up were part of a small rural community where ovens large enough to cook whole turkeys were very rare. I’m told that, on Christmas eve, it was normal for groups of the women to travel with their Turkeys en-masse to the local crematorium, which wasn’t in use at that time of year. You can figure the rest out for yourself.

I have no evidence to back this up, it’s purely anecdotal. But still, put’s sprouts into perspective, doesn’t it?

But apparently, before Turkey (in the UK at least), it was goose. This makes sense; goose can be obtained in Britain, whereas Turkey is indigenous to America. And it’s a fairly hefty bird which, like turkey, doesn’t really get a lot of sympathy from people, as they’re believed to be nasty, unpleasant creatures. But this does draw up the fowl/waterfowl disparity.

One bird that seems to get off relatively lightly at Christmas (but not completely) is the humble duck. People have a bit of a soft spot for ducks, with their comical waddles and lust for bread. It’s possible to interact with ducks in a pleasing, slaughter-free environment, so they are relatively innocuous.

Although maybe that’s not it? Maybe ducks are largely avoided, and goose was replaced so readily, as festive food, because waterfowl (anseriformes, if you like) are relatively very fatty. Cooking and eating them is, therefore, more of a chore. Goose fat, which is smokeless, is still used to roast things, but it’s been separated from the goose long beforehand.

Evolution-wise, this makes perfect sense. If you end up spending a lot of time in the water, being made up of substances that increase buoyancy/insulation is obviously going to be an advantage. So ducks and geese are packed with fat, which is made up of a variety of fatty acids, which are hydrophobic and insulating.

Interesting chemistry anecdote, apparently fatty acids were originally called aliphatic acids, but during the preparation of a paper in the early days there was some dictation issues and the person typing it up thought, reasonably enough, that they were called ‘fatty acids’. The name stuck, for obvious reasons. (My chemistry teacher told me this, I don’t have a reference)

Also, did you know a ducks quack doesn’t echo? Well you shouldn’t, because it does.

So, ducks are like the new expensive toy that children want for Christmas. Looks cool, should be fun, but a lot more complicated and fiddly when you realise how many bits are involved, and it never does exactly what you think it should

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 15th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 15th: Susan Greenfield

You get a lot of fictional pop culture stories about Christmas. Some are good, some are crap, some are surprisingly violent, but the common factor that unites a lot of them is that there is often a character or some sort of body that, whether by design or by consequence, seems hell-bent on ruining Christmas for everyone involved.

Scrooge, the Grinch, King Herod, all fictional characters (apart from Herod) who's selfish desires mean they are at best nonplussed, at worst pleased about the fact that their actions ruin Christmas for innocent people. King Herod could, arguably, plead ignorance given the context, and also given the fact that it's unlikely that he did any of that stuff in the Bible, but that's by the by.

Of course, in the real world, we don't have people who would be so honest about their festive-cheer-destroying actions. Ruining Christmas is frowned upon. But then, some people still do their best.

We can't eat too many of those treaty things, that's bad for you. Don't undercook the Turkey, that's probably poisonous.  Drinking too much? Don't do that, you'll probably die. Have you not spent enough on gifts? then you're ruining the economy. Have you spent too much on gifts? Then you're stupid for not having enough money saved for the months ahead. Are you a Christian? Then how dare you not appreciate Jesus enough at this time of year. Are you not a Christian? Then how dare you not appreciate Jesus enough at this time of year. And on it goes.

But at least, once all the health and morality concerns have weighed down on you with their guilty burdens, you can enjoy some time playing with your gifts (if you're a child), or playing with the children's gifts (if you're not). Nothing wrong with that, surely? With all the other guilt-inducing health-destroying elements of Christmas, a bit of harmless play is fine, right?

No. It's not. So say's Baroness Susan Greenfield, previously celebrated Neuroscientist, tabloid darling and apparent nemesis of all things technological and fun.  In this society, most entertainment items are a lot more high tech than they used to be. But that's bad! Anything that over stimulates you, anything that might be enjoyable that comes with a plug or battery (within reason, pervs) is bad for young minds, because it might corrupt them in some ill-defined way.

Susan Greenfield is seemingly opposed to anything which needs a screen to work. Be it video games (except the ones she makes money from, presumably), the internet, or even porch doors (possibly). That last one might seem like a wild accusation based on nothing, but that seems to be the way she does business. I've made my opinions on Greenfield's views quite clear before now, so please see that if you want a thorough critique of why her views are so much hot air. But it bears repeating here as it's a Christmas, and you might possibly end up letting kids enjoy their new games worry free, and we can't have that now can we?

So keep it in mind, if you see a child enjoying themselves with something electronic this Christmas, be sure to wrench it from their gasp, berate them for befouling their young minds with too much stimulation, and kick them outdoors to play, where it's clearly just as stimulating, but colder and with more dog crap, so it doesn't count for some reason.

Next time, Andrew Wakefield explains to us how coloured fairy lights lead to diabetes and premature balding (in men and women)

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 14th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 14th: Quantum Entanglement

All this talk of Father Christmas travelling around the world in one night, visiting every child and delivering at least one gift for each of them (or something unpleasant for the ones who have not met his ill-defined but thoroughly checked criteria for being  'nice', but either way, mass is donated to each child), it's all well and good. But how could he do this? It's all very well saying that he's 'magic', but that's not really an explanation, that's hand waving and invoking the mythical Macguffin.

In this day of instant internet access and Children being better at computers than their parents, it's harder and harder to fob children off with blaze non-explanations. They'll just go and look it up if you don't provide a satisfactory answer, and then they'll realise the whole 'Father Christmas is real' thing is just an elaborate con told to kids for ill-defined reasons. Their ignorance will be shattered by finding out the harsh truth at too-young an age, they will lose all trust of their parents and become a cynical and ill-disciplined child, eventually becoming an authority-bucking teenager who will have no qualms in experimenting with drugs and casual sex, eventually dropping out of the education system and becoming a homeless derelict who survives thanks to petty theft and small-scale drug dealing. All because you couldn't think of a good explanation for the activities of Santa Clause. Is that what you want?

So, here's an idea. Is it possible that the Santa-system is one based on quantum entanglement? That mysterious system whereby previously connected particles/molecules/miscellaneous remain entangled by some unknown mechanism. Quantum mechanics has given us a lot of weird stuff to consider, and this is one of the good ones. You split two entangled particles and separate them by a great distance, then manipulate one, and the other will show direct signs of that manipulation, despite the fact that it's very far away. A direct connection that transcends space and time? That would come in handy, wouldn't it.

So maybe Santa is the master of quantum? If he was capable of large-scale quantum manipulation, it would explain a lot. Let's look at the arguments.

·         As previously pointed out, his naughty/nice list has to take into account the vast fluctuations in the Earth's child population, their associated behaviours and locations, and as a result this list has to be constantly updated and checked at least twice. This would require an extraordinary degree of computational power. Modern CPUs may not be up to the task, but a quantum computer? That should be easily capable. But the processes that would support quantum computing are notoriously fragile, and would probably require a very stable, low energy environment to function properly, so Santa would have to spend a lot of time in some very cold, isolated environment...

·         Actually, how can Santa possibly know if every child is being bad or good? The songs suggest he personally watches every child which, as well as being creepy, is a big task. But what if he had a direct quantum connection into the home of every child? For someone with his manipulation of quantum processes skills, it wouldn't take much, just a small sample of matter from something that is still in the child's home, per se. Let's say, I don't know, the ink from a pen or graphite from a pencil? But even then, the establishing of a quantum connection to every child would require every child to write something and send it directly to Santa. Which is ridiculous...

·         How does he get to every child's home in a single night? Well, one possible explanation for quantum entanglement is that entangled things stay connected via wormholes, that Science-fiction go-to favourite. Connecting two disparate points of space to allow instantaneous travel between them in a manner that is outside the usual temporal constraints, that would be handy wouldn't it? Using the initial connection established by the child's scribbling (see above), Saint Nick could establish more reliable connections with each visit, all he'd have to do is leave something in the child's possession that he created and that's entangled with something in his home base. So it would have to be something the child didn't have before, but that they'd be unlikely to panic about or dispose of. Like a toy, for example. Teenagers eventually stop writing to Santa and put their toys away, so he stops coming.

·         Actually, what would this wormhole travel look like, to someone who was lucky enough to witness it? It's bound to be a very high energy process, so it would look like a large fat man emerging from a bright, high-energy opening that appears to lead to a tight tunnel that he couldn't possibly fit into according to normal spatial laws. But people who see this wouldn't have the vocabulary to explain this, so they'd have to describe it using metaphors they can relate to.

·         But Santa isn't often spotted, is he? You'd think with millions of children trying to catch a glimpse, a few hundred would be successful, just based on the law of averages alone? But if Santa has control of quantum processes, he could well have the ability to manipulate his superposition. Santa may exist in a condition of unspecified possibilities. If someone does see him, it should be feasible for him to collapse the quantum wave function to a state where he isn't there at all. Or maybe he can transfer into some parallel world where he's in the room but the child isn't. It's quantum, why the hell not?

So there you go. If a child ever asks you how Santa does what he does, feel free to give them the full Quantum explanation.

'But Dean', you may say, 'how does he do all this? What gives him such mastery of quantum processes? And what's the deal with the Reindeer?'

I don't know. He's not actually real, so just chill out, no need to get carried away.

Twitter: @garwboy

DECEMBER 13th [Science Comedy Advent Calendar]

December 13th: The Periodic Table

One phrase that keeps popping up a lot during Christmas is ‘making a list, checking it twice’. This suggests a few things, namely that Santa Clause has a LOT of time on his hands. Making a list of every eligible child on earth, that’s an arduous task, and possibly a never-ending one considering the birth rate of human society (let alone checking it twice). I would suggest that it’s unlikely that he could ever have it done within the space of single year, when you include the births, accidental deaths and children graduating from childhood to teenage/cynical phase that occur constantly throughout the year. It’s like painting that bridge.

But then again, if we’re starting to go through all the things that Santa claims to be able to achieve that aren’t logically possible, that is, ironically, a list that’s never going to end.

Speaking of ongoing, overly complex lists, science has one in the form of the periodic table. Never mind checking it twice, the periodic table has been ‘checked’ countless times, with adjustments being made whenever required. Much like Christmas gift lists, it was all much simpler in the old days. It was just a block of wood and an orange then (or Earth, wind, fire and water from an elemental perspective). But these days it’s all PS3 games and tamagotchis! And in terms of the periodic table, it’s noble gasses, transition metals and transuranium elements. Particularly with regards to the latter, it’s hard to check them twice when, being the products of nuclear reactions, they have a fraction of a second. But saying that, some have a half life of millions of years. So, you know, no rush.

But how could I summarise the complexity and detail of the periodic table in an understandable and entertaining way in just one blogpost?

I can’t. Simple as that. So instead, here’s the awesome science rapper Jon Chase to do it in the form of rap for you. Merry Christmas.

Twitter: @garwboy