Kevin MacPherson's Blog
Genealogy, by Kevin
Genealogy is brilliant. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. It is.
What genealogy is, is finding out who your real parents are. And then who their real parents are, or were, if they are dead now, and then who your real parents' real parents' real parents were, and so on ad infinitum until you get back to monkeys. Monkeys do not have the institution of marriage, so at that point it falls down. They did not keep records.
You are probably already reading this and being enthused. This is probably because you always wanted to find out who your real parents were. The scientific evidence is pretty clear that 75 percent of the British population is either adopted or the result of sexual intercourse. So the people you think of as your parents are almost definitely not. Or at least one of them. This does not mean they have been lying to you, only that one of them has. And even she might not know who your real father is if she put it about a lot.
One thing that puts people off the genealogy is all the research. Because, if you think about it, you have two parents, that you know of, and each of those parents also has at least two parents, which means that you already have at least a minimum of four grandparents, and you may not necessarily get on with all of them, and the one you loved the most is dead. Which means that, if you are going to make a video about it, like the television series Who Do They Think They Are?, you're going to have to interview the grandad you hate, the one who swears and has yellow hair from nicotine and smells of bonfires and fish. The one who calls you Keith. And then also, beyond that, you must then have had eight great grandparents, all of whom you will have to research to find the one who was interesting, and sixteen great great grandparents, and this is only three generations back and all your summer holiday is already wasted. But you'll be damned if you're going to give up before you find a better relative than Michael Williams's great great uncle, who was Sherlock Holmes.
Genealogy is particularly interesting if you are a man or interested in men, because most of our ancestors are men. It is a well-established fact that men have more sexual partners in their lifetimes than women do, and therefore it stands to reason that 1) men will have more descendants than women and 2) you are more likely to be related to a famous man than a famous woman. As well as this there is the additional fact that more women than men die in childbirth, which means that many of your female ancestors will have died prematurely, either as the mother or as the baby. This not only means that the fewer female ancestors are reduced in number even more, but also that a lot of women in the past had less of an opportunity to become famous because they either had children, or they died in childbirth, or their mother died during childbirth, leaving them as an orphan, or at the very least with no female role model to look up to. And even if they had a mother to look up to as a role model, she was unlikely to be famous because she had children to look after.
This is not to say that there is nothing in genealogy of interest to women. If you watched the TV series Who Do They Think They Are?, several women were in it. Usually it was a famous woman, which only proves my point, elaborated on above, but there were other women too, such as librarians and translators. Both librarians and translators are central to helping people trace their roots and find the famous men they were related to. Also, if you are a man, genealogy is a good way of meeting non-threatening women, such as librarians and translators. You have a ready-made excuse for talking to them and you can impress them with your knowledge of things.
What You Will Need
To do genealogy you will need a pen, a pencil, a notepad, a Thermos flask filled with hot chocolate or Bovril, a Tupperware box with sandwiches in, and a cagoule. My mother makes my sandwiches. Usually they are Marmite or peanut butter, but sometimes she gives me a surprise and puts luncheon meat on instead. You will also find that the library will not let you eat your sandwiches or open your Thermos flask in the library and you will have to stand outside or sit on a bench in the bus station. This is why you need the cagoule.
Next you will need the names of your relations, which you must look up in the local library. First, go to the library and see if they have any record of you. If they have not, then you are stumped, really. Unless you have a copy of your birth certificate, on which you will find who you are, where and when you were born, and who your parents are. You can get a copy of your birth certificate by going to the photocopy shop in town, where they will make a copy of it for you.
Once you know who your parents are, you must repeat the procedure again, and the same for their parents and their parents' parents and so on. Sometimes you will not be able to locate the identity of one of your ancestors from the library, so then you must go online and use the Census records, which is brilliant, because you can do that yourself without ever having to talk to anyone. I like to look up all the people in Great Britain called Hitler. Or Arsebandit. Once I found a man born in Stirchley in 1877 called Michael Bublé. This was seven years ago, though, before anyone knew who he was, so I didn't tell anybody. It's too late now.
If the Census or library is of no use, you must go to the relevant church authorities because a great many births, marriages, deaths, divorces, adulteries, and murders were recorded in the local parish registeries. In the olden days, the vicars were the main source of gossip and spying, so they could tell you everything about everyone. Most churches still have the vicars' diaries going back to the Middle Ages, but they won't admit to having them or show them to you unless you're willing to cough up a few hundred quid. But come back in a couple of weeks and the current incumbent will show them to you and you'll be amazed at the legibility of the typing. Even from 700 years ago.
Eventually you will discover that you were related to somebody famous, and your research will all have been worthwhile. If you do the mathematics, everyone in Britain is related to either a famous aristocrat or a famous murderer, or, in the case of the royal family, both. You have to be careful what conclusions people will draw from your relation though. It is no good being related to rich people from the past if you are now a pauper because it means somebody in your genes squandered the lot and you are now a degenerate downwardly mobile low-life. If, on the other hand, you are from a long line of plebs and peasants but are now very comfortable thank you very much, people will say you have ideas above your station. In the course of my research, I discovered that I am directly related to Robert Kilroy Silk. I told Michael Williams this, and he just said, "That figures." I assume he meant that we have the same rugged good looks and healthy pallor.
There. I hope that you will do genealogy now that I have shown you how good it is.
And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson is the illegitimate king of France.)
Ouija Boards, by Kevin
Ouija Boards are brilliant. Some people think that they are not brilliant, but they are wrong. What a Ouija Board is, is a special type of wooden board with writing on it that students use to roll spliffs on. However, Ouija Boards have many other uses beyond the obvious: They can also be used by teenagers to scare themselves shitless and by professional psychics, such as Derek Acorah, Shirley Ghostman, and Darren Brown, to fleece the emotionally vulnerable. This is because you can move a glass around the board and pretend you are spelling out words from the Dead. You don't need a Ouija board to do this, actually. You can write out the alphabet on pieces of paper, along with selected words that the Dead are likely to use—burning, dark, angels, intestate, and so on—and spread them around your mom's dining table. That way, you can confuse the Dead by putting letters in the wrong place, so that they say things like "The money is under the floorboarks." However, your mom is likely to complain about the glass scratching the polish off the top of an expensive heirloom, especially if you contact a particularly talkative ghost.
You can find Ouija Boards in all sorts of places. In auctions, on eBay, in Joke shops, in jumble sales. But mostly when the houses of dead people are being cleared out. This strikes me as quite ironic. Now, more than ever, you would think, the dead person could do with a Ouija Board. And what does their family do? Give it to the Church for a raffle. You'd think before donating it they'd have a go and try to contact Uncle Steven to see where he'd like to have what's left of his body buried and what they should do with the cats. But families generally are quite thoughtless in my experience, especially when someone's just died. They get so wrapped up in their own grief they don't step back and think things through properly. Which makes it a particularly good time for psychics to cash in or God botherers to take advantage while they're not thinking straight.
Not that there's anything to it, of course. There are no such things as ghosts. Nevertheless, I do like to keep an open mind about the phenomena associated with the paranormal, such as table wobbling, regression therapy, seances and the production of smegma, and of course, ESP. In the case of Ouija Boards, since there are no such things as ghosts and it is incumbent upon us to adopt a scientific approach to explaining associated phenomena, the apparent communing with the Dead must have some more rational explanation. My favourites are these:
(1) We are contacting the spirit or essence of past owners or users of the board, who have somehow left their psychic imprint on the board.
(2) Ouija Boards function as a portal to parallel universes. Since physics has now established the existence of infinite multiple parallel universes running alongside our own, the most likely explanation is that we are getting messages from people who have died in our universe but who are still alive in millions of other universes and who have an important message they want to get their loved ones, who are still alive in our universe but, perhaps, dead in theirs.
(3) Like (2), but we are in contact with a parallel universe in which the Dead can still talk and communicate with the living, and that universe comes into contact with ours at the point where the Ouija Board is being used, even if it's only being used to get Susan to not want to be alone tonight.
(4) We are contacting the spirit of the people who made the glass we're pushing around. Or all the people who have drunk from it. This would explain some of the bad language and filthy suggestions most ghosts seem to use.
(5) It was Michael Williams all the time pushing the glass, which is why the message from beyond the grave was "Kevin MacPherson will die next week of exploding goolies."
Whichever is the actual answer, I think it is important not to poo-poo that which we do not immediately understand. Important historical figures have resorted to Ouija Boards to guide them in major decisions. Napoleon Bonaparte based his decision to advance on Moscow on advice given to him from beyond the grave. Ronald Reagan based his entire Latin American strategy and his policy on Iran by consulting Russell Grant in the Daily Express every morning. Adolf Hitler, who was extremely superstitious, also decided to invade Russia on the basis of a recommendation from the other side, possibly from the same spirit who advised Napoleon. And Leon Trotsky was bent over the I Ching, trying to divine his future, when he got an ice pick in the back of his head. All of these examples demonstrate that we mock the paranormal at our peril.
What is more, when you have collected enough Ouija Boards, you will have enough psychic power concentrated in one place to make your house collapse in on itself like that one in Poltergeist. I keep all my Ouija Boards in my sister's bedroom. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I bang on the wall and make barking noises, so she thinks it's her dead dog, Shandy, trying to get in touch. Or a ghost with Tourette's.
Anyway, I hope you will collect Ouija Boards now I have shown you how brilliant they are.
And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson is Bishop of Bath and Wells.)
Coin Collecting, by Kevin
Money is brilliant. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. It is. If you think about it, money can be used to buy anything. Darts, newspapers, Matlow’s Refreshers, season tickets for the MK Dons, blowjobs, cheesecake, pints of lager, shoes, forests, cars, Whitesnake DVDs, after-shave, knee-pads, haircuts, Ph.D.’s, Swiss army knives, passports, drugs, and Windolene. And that is just a made-up list I invented from looking around my bedroom. There are several more things you could buy as well if you really needed to, such as, I don’t know, cows and stuff. There’s even a book you can buy by the 19th-century German sociologist Georg Simmel entitled The Philosophy of Money. If you have too much money, you could buy that. But if you have a copy of The Philosophy of Money, you can’t buy anything with it at all. It's totally useless. Unless you exchange it for money.
This is a metaphor that proves my point. Philosophy gets you nothing. Money gets you whatever you want.
However, those of us who are really smart know that some money is better than others, and it is by collecting those monies that we distinguish ourselves from the idiots. I don’t mean the trivial point that £100 is better than £1, although obviously it is, but in order to get £100 you normally have to pay £100. That is how the exchange process operates. No. What I am referring to is the skill of Numismatism, not, incidentally, to be confused with Pneumismatism, which is the science of inflatables and a whole other different way of making money.
What Numismatism is, is collecting coins that are worth more than their face value. I had a 1940 farthing once that was worth £2! That is an appreciation of 16,000 percent over a period of 70 years, which no investment portfolio could ever match. Unless there’s a war. And bear in mind that I wasn’t even born in 1940. No. I got if off my grandfather for nothing before he died. He used to give his grandchildren money every time we went to visit, and he thought he was being generous because when he was a boy you could buy 10 Capstan Full Strength for a farthing. We didn’t have the courage to say anything at the time because we were small and he believed in corporal punishment. Besides, he wasn’t to know that they didn’t make Capstan Full Strength any more, nor than farthings were no longer legal tender. It was a shame, really that I put all those useless farthings in the tray at church. It was only several years later that I looked them up in a book and found out their value. The Church is probably laughing up its sleeve now at all the money I gave it. It must be worth a small fortune.
Old people are a good source of money, and not just when they die. Every year, the Queen gives out bags of coins to the deserving poor in a ceremony of ritual humiliation on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter. This is to remind them of the time they took the king’s shilling and fought in the war for king and country instead of having a revolution like the Russians did. It is also an act of gratitude on behalf of the Queen for her subjects’ continued deference, obedience, and subservience. This Maundy money is not hugely valuable but does have some special healing powers, having been touched by the monarch herself, so if you have some in your home you never get ill, which is why the recipients are reluctant to part with it, and most Maundy money on the market is stolen or counterfeit. You can tell if it is counterfeit because it doesn’t glow orange in the dark. If it glows blue, it is because someone has coated an ordinary 50 pence piece in luminous paint and tried to trick you because he knows you are now a Numismatist. And anyway, Michael Williams, I saw that pot of luminous paint in your Dad’s garage ages ago, so I knew it was fake.
My Dad reckons Maundy money will be going up in value in the next few years. With the recession and everything, he says, the Queen will be tightening her belt, so the deserving poor will be getting less from her, and the concomitant scarcity of Maundy money will raise its value. This is a simple example of the law of supply and demand. If you are thinking of investing your money in the near future, make sure the investment portfolio you choose includes stocks in Maundy money. That’s not just me saying that. That’s my Dad too.
You can also collect foreign money, if you are looking for a way to improve your language skills, but remember that foreign currency is of no use whatsoever and is frequently more expensive than English money because of the exchange rate and German duplicity. Indeed, collecting foreign money could almost be seen as a form of conspicuous consumption, like throwing money onto the fire. It’s just showing off. It isn’t serious Numismatism, and in the long run won’t earn you any friends. Maybe a few pen pals in Antwerp, but nothing that will endure. I advise against it.
My final observation about money is that even though money has its own aesthetic attraction, especially for people who like looking at the Queen, money in itself has no intrinsic value of its own. In the old days, when doubloons, sovereigns, quadroons, and mulattoes were the currency, the coins themselves were made of gold, so that a guinea coin was made of a guinea’s worth of gold. However, this tradition didn’t last very long because people used to clip the edge off the coins and keep the gold for themselves and melt it down to make into ear-rings or ploughs. So the Mint, who make all the money, decided instead to make money from cheap metals that cost next to nothing but which nobody else has access to, such as lead, copper, brass, uranium, and plantagenet. This soon put an end to coin clipping, especially because copper is radioactive and will kill you if you put a coin in your mouth. This is where Freud got his ideas from.
In fact, anything could be used as currency. On the Isle of Man they used to use conch shells, until they realized that everyone was just going down to the beach and picking them up for free without doing any work. That’s why the Isle of Man is a tax haven. My dad used to say the government should make dog shit the national currency. That way there’d never be any left lying around on the street. Someone would always pick it up. I pointed out, however, that everyone would be following him into the park when he takes Gnasher for the evening walk. Gnasher is our dog. She is a miniature schnauzer. My dad said men follow him already.
There. I hope that you will become a Numismatist now that I have shown you how brilliant it is.
And that is the end.
Kevin MacPherson is governor of the Bank of England.
Libertarianism, by Kevin
Libertarianism is brilliant. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. It is.
What Libertarianism is, is this: It is a philosophy of the world which holds that everyone should be allowed to do what they like without any interference from anyone else and so long as they do not hurt anyone else. Libertarianism should not be confused with Libertinism, which is what the Marquis de Sade, Bernie Ecclestone, and Silvio Berlusconi believe in. Libertinism is doing what you want regardless of the consequences to others. Look where that gets you.
Libertarianism also is not anarchism, which believes in the abolition of private property. That is just stupid. Libertarianism believes that everything without exception should be made into private property. That way, in a free market, all commodities will accurately reflect their true value and we will know what everything is really worth.
There have been lots of well-known Libertarians throughout history, ever since Adam Smith’s brilliant book The Wealth of Nations, in which he explained how free markets and the division of labour guarantee freedom and happiness for everyone. He also wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments, but that was rubbish. Other Libertarians have included Mary Harney, Margaret Thatcher, and the beautiful Virginia Postrel, but not all Libertarians are women. There are also male Libertarians, although I cannot think of any at the moment. Adam Smith was one. Sometimes. And Cato, out of the Pink Panther movies. Apparently. Men who are definitely NOT Libertarians but who some people think are, are Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Allen Stanford, and Alan Greenspan. They are definitely NOT Libertarians. They are just sociopaths who give Libertarianism a bad name.
Also, it needs to be made clear, not all women are Libertarians. Some people make the mistake of thinking that Ayn Rand was a Libertarian, but she was not. She was an Objectivist. There is a huge difference. Libertarians believe in freedom whereas Objectivists believe in Ayn Rand. And money.
Also you do not have to be a person to be a Libertarian. For instance, the Monsanto Corporation is a Libertarian. You can tell by the way it is trying to privatize Nature. And they are right, too. Only when the patents to the DNA of all the species on the planet are in the hands of private individuals and corporations will a perfect free market finally emerge, and if this means tinkering with their genome because governments won’t allow “naturally occurring” species to be privately owned (kuh!), then so be it.
Libertarians hate government.
Government is bad because it distorts the market and prevents us from knowing what things are really worth. This is a bad thing because it also applies to people, and this means that people are not priced according to their worth. For example, members of parliament and bureaucrats and civil servants and members of the public service industries such as teachers, nurses, soldiers, and so on are paid far more than they are worth because the government has a stranglehold over society and can bend the market in its favour. Because we have no choice whether we pay taxes or not (the government will use its monopoly over the courts and prisons and police to put us in prison if we do not pay), it means they can demand whatever they like from us and pay themselves huge sums of money while we still have to live at home and my Dad has to top up his income as a quality control supervisor for the gas board with cash-in-hand transactions involving stolen car parts and selling the odd bit of blow to schoolchildren. He is an extremely valuable member of society but he is not allowed to reach his potential because the private sector is deliberately discriminated against by government. Especially in a democracy.
Other things that Libertarians are against are trade unions, the professions, such as lawyers and doctors and surgeons, and cartels, which is when huge corporations combine to fix the price of their goods. This doesn’t happen very often, however, which is why you rarely hear Libertarians talk about it. Also they are opposed to monopoly. Not the boardgame. A monopoly is when an organization, such as the government, has control over an entire sector of the market and can therefore charge whatever it likes for its products. Have you seen how much prescription charges are now? If the health service was totally privatized, everyone could choose to pay as much as they wanted for their drugs, and drugs would be priced according to their effectiveness and not because the government had decided it needs more taxes to build more prisons to keep the Prison Officers Association happy.
The Prison Officers Association is a very bad thing.
There. I hope that you will all be Libertarians now that I have shown you how brilliant it is. And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson was chief economic adviser to Dr. François "Papa Doc" Duvalier between 1967 and 1971 and was the founder of so-called Voodoo Economics. He is currently in hiding at his mom and dad's.)
Dungeons and Dragons, by Kevin
Dungeons and Dragons is brilliant. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. They are wrong because it is brilliant.
What Dungeons and Dragons is, is a role-playing fantasy game using dice and maps and charts and sometimes models and the power of your imagination to visit the most amazing incredible places that can only exist in the furthest furthest reaches of the universe if they ever existed at all or else in the depths of your psyche or else in a world that never existed anywhere ever whatsoever, such as Mystara, Ravenloft, Eberron, and Luxembourg. It is a multiplayer game, which means that you have to know other people in order to be able to play it, although I have on many occasions played it on my own in my bedroom in order to sharpen my imaginary powers. It is not always more fun to play with other people; it depends on whether they have the required superior intelligence that normally accompanies the creativity necessary for this game. People who like Monopoly or Scrabble or Subbuteo are probably not smart enough, and it is always a mistake to let one of them join in since they are too literal-minded and almost need you to draw them pictures. It is also a mistake to let ladies play, because the best D&D games are when you do not feel self-conscious about shouting things like "I Thwart Your Blade of Silent Shadows with my Wanking Spell!" while standing on a kitchen stool in a black cape and baseball cap on backwards. Ladies inhibit full enjoyment of the game and the player's freedom to express himself and immerse himself fully in the role. She'd think he was a div.
What you need in order to play
In order to play D&D, what you need is male friends, a rulebook, the relevant dice, and a character sheet. Everyone decides what character they are going to be or to use (regular players have whole books with the details of their characters in) for a particular game, and someone is chosen to be the Dungeon Master (not dungeon mistress, note. Also note that if you Google "dungeon mistress" you do not get ANY links to D&D sites. What does that tell you?). Each individual's character has a set of ability scores, which you determine by means of the dice, which tell you the character's strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Then you decide if your character is going to be a warrior, a wizard, a cleric, a thief, and whether he or she will be good or evil. This is all very important. It is no good deciding to be a warrior, for instance, if you have only rolled a 2 for strength or a 3 for constitution. It would be better for your character to be a priest or a virgin. On the other hand, if you get a high charisma score, it is better for you to be a thief, conman, politician, or ninja. In this respect, D&D is just like real life, in that you have no choice about your talents, it is just the luck of the draw. And also, like in real life, the most charismatic people are the best politicians, thieves, mass murderers, and the weakest and frailest people are girls, priests, and the elderly. A lot of people say that fantasy games are a waste of time, but in fact you learn a great deal about real life from them.
Once all the characters are assembled, they enter the Dungeon. The word "Dungeon" refers to any environment in which the game takes place. It is not literal. It is a metaphor. Your dungeon can be the treacherous gombeen salt mines of Nottingham, the labyrinthine palaces of Theowalcott Six, or even the Dark Realm of Shining Stallion Forests, a brilliant Celtic tundra, except for the forests, where dwell the unbelievably well-endowed and beautiful Jizzdrinkahs and the day is spent battling wild-eyed Nordic berserkers and the fifty-legged eyeless beast Kagnaknarok, he of the invisible sharpened beermats and paper-cut-inflicting vinegar breath.
Or it can be a dungeon. It all depends on who the Dungeon Master is, because it is he who decides which creatures you will encounter and at which point during the game. It is up to you, as a member of the company, to decide how to use your talents to respond to the particular situations that the Dungeon Master presents to you. The good thing is that, as you progress through the game, usually you acquire experience, which is also like in real life, so that you increase your skills and your wealth and other talents. You need to keep track of these improvements in your character book so that you can use them next time. If the Dungeon Master is Michael Williams, however, you will die. You will fall into a pit of Excretagoths and be forced to swallow faeces until your stomach explodes. It won't do any good complaining.
More Than a Game
Some people complain that Dungeons and Dragons is dangerous because it encourages participants to develop an interest in the occult, and this is just the start of a slippery slope that ends up with them becoming Satanists and slaughtering cats on makeshift sacrificial altars in the graveyards of deconsecrated churches in the West Midlands. They said the same thing about Harry Potter, too, you will remember. Except they said it about Dungeons and Dragons first, and Harry Potter is just a cheap rip-off that J. K. Rowling won't admit to even though I remember her when she was a bloke. You will also know, of course, that complaints like that are utter nonsense. And anyway, what's wrong with slaughtering cats on makeshift sacrificial altars in the graveyards of deconsecrated churches in the West Midlands? There's nothing better to do.
Besides, Dungeons and Dragons is so much more than just a silly fantasy role-playing game. There is a whole culture and lifestyle that has grown up around it. Not just the literature, although Lord of the Rings is unquestionably the finest literature ever written and proof of the superior intellect required to play D&D, but also the art—what D&Der didn't experience his first orgasm across a Frank Frazetta painting?—and, of course, the music: Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Rainbow, Judas Priest. All brilliant. And the world is filled with other genius artists who are secret D&D players but keep it secret because they know the public at large is too thick to appreciate it (My favourite record of all time is Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares Chthulu," which was written by Prince, a level 15 dwarf!!). It is perfectly possible, and perfectly reasonable, in my humble opinion, to spend your entire life in the Birmingham area playing Dungeons and Dragons and have no need whatsoever for any cultural references or experiences outside of a 20-mile radius of the Bull Ring (and even that's pushing things because it includes bits where black people live).
There. I hope that you will play Dungeons and Dragons, now that I have shown you how brilliant it is. Just don't expect to be as good as me at it.
And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson is the Mighty Celtic Warrior Nivek Nospheracam of the Aston University Alternative Realm Dwellers. If phoning before 6 p.m., leave a message with his mom.)
Fish, by Kevin
Keeping fish is a brilliant hobby. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. On the contrary, keeping fish is brilliant. It is brilliant because you can do it indoors or outdoors and all year round without getting wet, except for your hands, and also your shoes if you slip on the rockery and accidentally step into the pond. Also the bottom of your trousers will get wet, so it’s probably best not to wear any trousers when you are tending to your pond. Unless it is wintertime, when it is really cold, in which case I recommend that you invest in a pair of specialist insulated waterproof trousers. You can get them in any fish shop. Just ask.
It is possible also from time to time that all your clothes will get wet, but this is not a direct result of keeping fish. It is a direct result of having a pond and Michael Williams as your next-door neighbour. If you have a pond and a next-door neighbour who hates you and calls you specky mongo and enjoys pushing you into your pond when you’re squatting down beside it while tending to your fish, then the best thing you can do is to fill in your pond with concrete and buy an indoor aquarium. That way, your neighbour will not be able to either enjoy or kill your fish or push you in the pond. He will only be able to grind your face into the concrete and pull you through the stingers and dog poo round the park.
There are many different kinds of fish you can keep, whether you have a pond or aquarium. There are big fish, small fish, medium-sized fish, flatfish, roundfish, dogfish, catfish (but no mousefish; that would be silly), stingrays, eels, zebrafish, angelfish, devilfish, piranhas, marlin, tarpon, bream, cuthbert, dibble, and chubb. My favourite fish of all kinds is one called Hypostomus plecostomus, also known as the suckermouth catfish, but my fish-collecting friends and I always refer to it as Hypostomus plecostomus because then it sounds like we know more than everybody else and also that fish-collecting is very scientific and technical, which it is. The name itself just rolls off the tongue and is very nice to say. Try saying it to yourself mentally now: Hy-pos-tomus Ple-cos-tomus. It rhymes! See. Say it again. Now say it out loud. Now say it to the next person you meet on the street, in the shops, or in the barbers. Don’t say it in an aquatics shop, though, unless you’re willing to fork out £250 and have everyone else in the shop go “That isn’t how you say it” and you will look stupid.
Hypostomus plecostomus is also a very useful fish because he eats all the algae off the side of your pond, which helps to keep your pond clean. He does not eat other fish, either, which makes him one of the more decent species among what is, let's be frank, a rather unsavoury bunch. A great many different species of fish simply do not get on, and you have to be careful not to put them in the same tank with one another, otherwise you will come down in the morning and find the tank smashed, blood everywhere, half your fish half-eaten and the other half suffocated on the carpet or else escaped out the window. Also, do not have a cat. Or worse, two cats who can use a hammer between them.
Another advantage to keeping fish is that it is a matter of the individual collector’s taste how much he comes into contact with other collectors, or indeed other human beings. If you are the sort of person who feels more comfortable in the company of exotic fish than people, especially ladies, then keeping fish could be the hobby for you. There is the additional advantage that there are not many lady fish collectors, so when you do have to meet other collectors, they are invariably male, which means that when they make fun of you or humiliate you for your pronunciation of Latin words or ignorance of the reproductive cycle of the guppy or when you refer by accident to sea monkeys as space monkeys, there will be no ladies present to witness your humiliation, so you will not have to cross them off your list of possible sex partners.
Novice fish collectors should be aware that fish collecting can be a highly competitive, dog-eat-dog hobby, and that most of the other people engaged in it, like people in general, are not very nice at all, so it is probably best to order your fish by post, not leave the house at all, and have your mom answer the door when the postman delivers the mail. That way, the only person you have contact with is your mom, and you don’t even have to let her into your room, so nobody will see your fish but you.
Fortunately, I have devised a novel way of collecting fish that gets around having to visit the aquatics shop and its snooty habitués. There is another obvious source of fish in your locality that doesn’t involve getting wet or spending extortionate amounts of money and which will also provide you with a hot meal, which means you can cut out your mother as the middle man in the process: Yes, the local chipper. I have discovered that if you ask them nicely, they will give you fresh cod, haddock, halibut, ray, roe, plaice, rock salmon, and Mars bar, and in some chippers you can even tell them if you prefer your fish in breadcrumbs or batter. These fish are rarely found in aquatics shops, making them all the more exotic, and although they do not move much around the aquarium, choosing either to sink, float, or slowly disintegrate according to species and coating, they don’t require feeding and are very low-maintenance, which means you hardly ever have to visit the aquatics shop any more to be ripped off by those know-it-all bastards with their nitrogen cycles and specialist insulated waterproof trousers that don't work.
A word of advice, though: Do not mix fish from the chipper with fish from the aquatics shop. It tends to make all of them very nervous.
There. I hope that you will start keeping fish as a hobby now that I have shown you how brilliant it is. Write to me and tell me what fish you have at home, and we can make a list.
And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson is Derek W. Dick Professor of Ichthyoanthropology in the Patrick Duffy School of Fish at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Margate.)
Photography, by Kevin
Photography is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What photography is, is taking pictures using a camera. There are three types of camera: old cameras, new cameras, and spy cameras. There are also video cameras, but they are not used for taking pictures, they are used for making videos, so they do not count. They are not cameras in the sense that professionals or normal people use the term.
Old cameras are based on the use of mirrors and a shutter and photochromatic paper. They produce photographs in black and white of old men's faces. Very often the photographs produced using this old technology was blurred and of a low quality. This is because old cameras used a technology called SLR, which stands for Significant Lens Recoil. The longer the lens on an old-fashioned camera, the bigger the recoil, and the therefore the more likely that a shot will be blurred. The old cameras were very similar to guns in this respect, which is why photographers who used old cameras always talked about "photo shoots" and "taking shots." You will be pleased to know that old cameras are largely defunct now and only used by the elderly, by Luddites who are scared of computers, or by poor people who can't afford the new cameras. You can tell photos that have been taken with an old camera because 1) they are rubbish and 2) they look like they come from the olden days, before photography was invented. My dad still has an old camera in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, but he won't let me use it because, he says, it's too dangerous. Even he doesn't use it anymore for shooting things, but it has a ginormous lens that could take out a gnat's eye at 300 yards. If it was a gun. Instead, he just uses it as a telescope to watch the au pair next door hang out the washing. He thinks she is a secret agent for the Belgians, but I'm not to tell my mom because it will only scare her.
New cameras, also known as proper cameras, use the latest digital technology and have to be plugged into your computer to retrieve the images, which is how you know they are brilliant. They use the most cutting-edge technology to take pictures of amazingly high resolution and once you have them on your computer you can manipulate them using Photoshop. Once I put my sister's head on the body of a gorilla. It was very funny and everybody laughed. You couldn't see the join. When my friends saw it, they all asked for me to email copies to them. You can see it now on myfuglygirlfriend.com.
The other brilliant thing you can do with proper cameras is transfer all your photos onto a CD-ROM so that you can watch the pictures on your television set. If you have a big-screen TV, the photos can be bigger than real life. You can have a photo of your head, for instance, in which your head is bigger than your real head. Imagine that! Imagine if you had a head as big as your head on a poster. You'd fall down the stairs. And land on your head.
You do not have to put your photos onto a CD-ROM though. You can post it onto the Internet, for instance onto your blog or onto Flickr, so that everyone can see it and make sarcastic comments or link to it as examples of an inbred family or use up your bandwidth, the bastards. Also you can put them on a memory stick and put them into someone else's computer, or you can go to a photo shop or even the supermarket and put your memory card into the machine they have there and they will print your photos off so that you can have what is known as "hard copy," or what the people who used old cameras used to call "photos." These are the same images that you have on your computer, except on a special thick, glossy paper which does not smudge but loves fingerprints. There are hundreds of things you can do with a proper camera, in fact. You should go to Flickr and have a look at the things that people take pictures of. You'll be surprised by what people deem fit for public viewing.
The third type of camera is the spy camera. In some ways this is the best type of camera, although the image resolution is not normally as good as on a proper camera. This is because the spy camera is designed for circumstances that would usually be described as illegal, such as taking pictures of ladies' bottoms in the supermarket, which you cannot do very easily with a proper camera, because they are too large, and you cannot do with the camera on your mobile phone because they are deliberately designed to make a camera noise when you take a picture, so you would have to cough loudly at the same time, which often draws attention to what you are up to, which is exactly what you don't want. This is why mobile phone cameras are rubbish.
Spy cameras have a low resolution because they are designed to be inconspicuous, such as in the clip of a ballpoint pen or as an attachment to a keyring. I have one that is in the clip of a ballpoint pen, and also one as an attachment to a keyring. The ballpoint pen one is useful because you just place the pen in your breast pocket, and when you want to take a picture of something or someone, you just kneel down close to it, pretending to be doing up your shoelace, say, and then you press down the tip of the ballpoint pen half a dozen times while nobody is looking, pointing it in the right direction of course, and then you run home and lock the door and upload the pictures to your computer. If you are really daring, you can pretend you have dropped your pen on the floor very close to a lady who is wearing a dress, and then, when you bend down to pick it up you can press it several times while it is in the general area of looking up at her knickers. I have dozens of photographs like this except most of them are very dark and blurry and you have to use your imagination and they don't enhance very well no matter how many hours you spend of Photoshop and also your friends won't believe you when you tell them what it is and I can't go back and do it again because I'm banned from Waitrose now.
Anyway, I hope that you will take up photography now that I have shown you how brilliant it is.
And that is the end.
(Kevin MacPherson is an extracurricular field worker in the David Bailey School of voyeurism at the University of Keele ladies' changing rooms.)
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