Kevin MacPherson's Blog

Genealogy, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:12:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:11:00.003-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:11:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:10:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:09:00.003-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:09:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-31T10:08:00.001-07:00

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.)

Pornography, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:07:00.002-07:00

Pornography is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What pornography is, is looking at pictures or, sometimes, films, of people who are partially clad, or semi-clad, or not clad at all, and deriving pleasure from it. Clad means having clothes on. Not clad means not having clothes on. Mostly, the people who are in pornography pictures and films are ladies, but quite often there are men in them as well. This is because the main users of pornography are men, but so that they feel less guilty about it, they try to include their wives or girlfriends (if they have any) in their enjoyment, and they think that putting men in the pictures will cater for their partners' interests. The truth is, though, that the women have no interest in looking at the pornography and are only joining in because they think it will please their boyfriends or husbands. It certainly reduces the guilt associated with enjoying pornography because it tacitly condones men using it, but in truth the men would rather the women weren't there and also that there were no men in the pictures because it means they have to look at the pictures with one eye closed, blotting out the man.

I am not entirely sure if there is a specific way in which pornography is intended to be used. I asked my mom what people do when they use pornography, and she said that sometimes they kiss the pictures of the ladies or lick them—the paper is usually shiny so that you can wipe them afterwards (I guess this means some men wear lip balm when they look at pornography). Other times they spread the pictures out on the floor of their bedroom and kneel over them. Sometimes in front of the mirror. I know! But this what my mom said, and she isn't in the habit of lying. And sometimes, she said, they find a picture that they like particularly, and they rub it against themselves. She said this with a straight face, but I'm sure she was winding me up. Who on earth would do that?

My favourite pictures in pornographic magazines are the ones where the lady is smiling at me. These are the best ones. They are the best ones because the lady in the picture looks like she likes me, and also that she is enjoying the experience as much as I am. She looks like she would like to have a conversation with me and perhaps a drink as well, and hang around with me for company. I do not like the photographs in which the lady is looking stern. It is as if she is saying, "Don't pester me now. Can't you see that I'm baking cakes?" or "I don't think it's appropriate for you to be deriving pleasure from looking at this picture of me. You can see that my daughter was murdered and that I have had an operation that renders me unable to conceive again. Only someone who is totally unfeeling or else sociopathic would imagine that it is acceptable to rub me against their tummy."

Even though the Internet has become a major source of pornographic material in recent years, traditionalists and those who want more flexible access to their pornography far prefer the print medium. Collecting pornographic magazines continues to be the number one hobby among British men aged 14 to 92, and that includes darts, football, fishing, drinking beer, and farting. In my collection, which I keep under my bed, I have a combined total of 348 magazines, going as far back as 1996. This total is made up of 213 issues of Woman's Own, 112 issues of Woman, 7 issues of Marie-Claire, 5 issues of Cosmopolitan, 3 issues of Closer!, 3 issues of Bella, 2 issues of Hello, 2 issues of OK!, and one issue of Ladies Volleyball. I have more Woman's Own than any other magazine for two reasons. One is because it is the best. Two is because it is the magazine my mom gets. This shows that pornography is indeed something that can be enjoyed by both sexes, but my mom principally reads the articles and does the crossword. Some people get confused by the title, but it is a pun. Just like Boyzone (Boy's Own) is really a musical pop group aimed at girls, so Woman's Own (Woman Zone) is principally a magazine aimed at men, although girls are allowed to read it as well.

The ladies in Woman's Own are generally very nice and often look a bit like my mom, which I like. Woman's Own and Woman are the most popular pornographic magazines because they aim at the mainstream, accepted definitions of sexuality, which is why everyone finds it acceptable to have the magazine lying about the house. The ladies in the magazine are usually clad or partially clad but sometimes unclad, particularly in the adverts in the back for breast enhancement or cancer. Magazines like Marie-Claire and Cosmopolitan are a bit more risqué, and you will find more unclad ladies in them, but in order to compensate and disguise this naughtiness, these magazines will frequently contain articles on apparently serious issues such as female genital mutilation or genocide in Rwanda, so that if you are caught with these magazines you can say that you buy them for the articles, but the truth is that nobody reads the articles in them unless they are sat on the toilet. Cosmopolitan is the drink that the ladies in the pornographic movie Sex and the City drink. Marie-Claire is a French girl's name and is therefore exotic and a bit kinky, like a girl who doesn't wash.

Magazines like Closer! and Bella and Hello and OK! are what is known as fetish magazines, which means that they are aimed at a readership who become aroused by unusual pictures. Usually it is pictures of famous ladies' cellulite. Personally, I cannot see what the attraction is, but lots of ladies also enjoy this magazine, so I suspect the men who get turned on by these pictures are gay. Not that I know a lot about homosexuality. It is a perversion that I have not explored.

Ladies Volleyball is not as exciting as it sounds. I was quite disappointed.

Collecting and reading pornography is a perfectly healthy, enjoyable, and commonplace activity that can be fun for all the family. Indeed, my mom is frequently making fun of me, saying things like, "Kevin, I don't know what on earth you could possibly get up to spending all that time in your bedroom. It isn't like those girls can talk to you." But she is wrong, because with a bit of imagination you can have really interesting conversations with the ladies in the magazines. Last week I had a roundtable discussion with two ladies from Woman's Own, three from Cosmopolitan, and Kerry Katona about the Holocaust because I'd read a book on it. Did you know the Holocaust never happened? That's what Kerry told me.

I really hope that you will do pornography now that I have shown you how brilliant it is.

And that is the end.

(Kevin MacPherson is James Brown Chair of Voyeurism in the Department of Women Studies at Newcastle College of Coarse Art.)

Barbie, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

Collecting Barbie dolls is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What collecting Barbie dolls is, is either buying or stealing the various dolls brought out by the Mattel Corporation in their Barbie range. Barbie is a lady doll principally targeted at pre-teenage girls and homosexual men in order to acculturate them to social norms such as shopping, bulimia, and bitching about others, but for some strange reason the doll has also acquired a phenomenal popularity among antiques dealers, bodybuilders, masseuses, interior designers, and librarians. Interestingly, according to statistics, 90 percent of collectors of Barbie dolls and Barbie doll–related ephemera and accessories are women, with an average age of 40 and an I.Q. of over 65, which undermines the stereotypes both of Barbie collectors as weird inverts and of women as lacking business sense and being unreliable with money: A 1965 mint condition Midnight Red Barbie sold for a record £9,000 in Sotheby’s a couple of years ago. If the owner had invested the £1.30 she paid for the original 43 years ago elsewhere, such as in gilts or Krugerrands, it would now be worth £1.45. Which just goes to show, doesn’t it?

There are hundreds of different Barbies, brought out by Mattel in an attempt to meet the insatiable demand for novelty among collectors. Each time a new Barbie is released or “born” (although she is born as a fully grown non-menstruating woman), there is mass hysteria among the collecting sorority, although I do not mean to use the word “hysteria” in a sexist derogatory way to imply that the collectors’ minds are in some way dominated by their wombs and that the birth of Barbie in some way represents for them an irrational opportunity to revive their own failing fecundity or else to fill a yearning hole in their lives formed by the absence of their own flesh-and-blood children. On the contrary. This hysteria is much more like the bloodlust of crazed, one-breasted, Amazonian she-warriors determined to dominate the ultracompetitive, cruel, and unforgiving Barbiesphere, as the world of Barbie collecting is known. Besides, if you have been doing mathematics for any length of time, you will have worked out that one in ten of those hysterical collectors are men, and men do not have wombs, so how would you account for their berserkery? It is not like Barbie is a real lady and they are mad after her because they want to have sex with her. Barbie is nothing like a real lady. For one thing, you cannot splay her legs like you can with a real lady. Also, if you lick her between her legs, she tastes of polyethylene resin, not fish sweat and wee. And I have the Miss Nude Universe Barbie.

The great thing about Barbie doll collecting is the Barbiefest, which is the bi-annual get-together of all the leading Barbie collectors, distributors, accessories designers, marketers, and clinical obsessives, who gather in a location usually somewhere in Brighton (but also once, and notoriously, in Milton Keynes, which was supposed to have kitsch value but which also coincided with an MK Dons home match, with the result that the fest was packed beyond capacity and human endurance) to share information, compare collections, swap gossip, generate unsubstantiated rumours, exchange phone numbers and photographs of one another dressed up as Barbie (the men) or Ken (the women), and get horribly drunk during the daytime and then start a fist fight outside the convention centre with a small girl and her parents over the significance of Batgirl Barbie.* Attendees also get the chance to bid for rare and highly coveted limited or special editions, such as Valentino Barbie, Space Walk Barbie, Abu Ghraib Barbie, and Ladyboy Ken. It is almost impossible to put a price on these items before they come to auction. This is because, by definition, an auction involves putting a price on items. Afterwards, it is much easier. Usually they go for about £350.

During the many years that I have been collecting Barbies, I have had many fascinating and unusual encounters with a diverse range of people from all walks of life and involved in all manner of professions, trades, and businesses. That has nothing to do with collecting Barbies, but I mention it just so that you know that I am not one of those sad, deluded, emotionally stunted shut-ins who comprise the majority of Barbie doll collectors, Barbiefests notwithstanding. No. I am one of the sane clever ones who regard the process as purely a business enterprise, a sound investment option when everyone else is putting their money in the bank or in property, like the fools they are, reading their newspapers and listening to so-called financial experts and advisers on the radio wireless and television and following the herd like the dumb animals they are. I fully expect that, sometime soon, western capitalism will self-destruct, poverty, pestilence, disease, and despair will cascade through society in an ever-accumulating vortex of horror, and all that will be left of civilization will be me and my Barbies, concealed in my secret underground lair out in the woods behind the campus. And when everyone else is dead and decomposing in the fields or in their cellars or on the toilet, it will then be down to me and my Barbies to start the human race all over again, from scratch. And a good thing it will be too. This time we will be able to get it right.

(Kevin MacPherson is Halifax Building Society Chair of Cognitive Dissonance at the University of Reading and Writing.)

* See also Geraldine Buttock’s article “Hol(e)y Unacceptable! Batgirl Barbie: Cashing in on Crass Consumerism or Commenting Ironically on Career Options for Women in the 21st-Century Post-Postmodern Marketplace?” in the forthcoming issue of The American Journal of Barbie Studies, University of Minnesota Press.

Geocaching, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:06:00.001-07:00

Geocaching is brilliant. A lot of people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What geocaching is, is finding hidden treasure using your handheld GPS receiver. GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It uses a constellation of between 24 and 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, which allows GPS receivers to determine the location, speed, and direction of the user. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense and its official title is NAVSTAR-GPS. It is used by the United States Air Force in its jet fighters and bombers and missile systems, by the CIA to locate operatives and take secret photographs of enemy installations, and it is also used in map-making, land surveying, the scientific study of earthquakes, and synchronization of telecommunications networks. I use it for geocaching.

With geocaching, what you do is you go to a geocaching Web site (there are literally millions on the Internet, with names such as geocaching.com or geocaching.co.uk, but not geocaching.fr) and you decide where you want to go to look for treasure. Let us say you live in Birmingham, like I do, and you want to spend a pleasant day not in Birmingham. Then you will go to the geocaching Web site and type in, for example, Hockley Heath or Warwick Castle or Stratford upon Avon or the Lickey Hills or Packwood House. Packwood House is very nice and you can take sandwiches which you can eat in the grounds and they won't throw you out. I take a Tupperware box with a tomato a banana an apple and luncheon meat sandwiches and a Fanta. I give my tomato to the peacocks because I don't like tomato. Packwood House also has a walled garden that you can hide in until your sister cries.

So you type in the name of the place not in Birmingham that you want to be in, and on the Web site, if you are lucky, there will be the very precise GPS co-ordinates of the nearest geocache to that place for you to find. So what you do is, you key the co-ordinates into your GPS system, and you activate it so that the receiver also finds your current location, and then you put on your socks, your pants, your vest, your trousers, your shirt, your pullover, your Casio watch, your glasses, and your shoes, and you go to the toilet. When you have been to the toilet, you get undressed and have a shower, get dressed again, say goodbye to your mom and dad, and go home for breakfast. After you have had breakfast, you pack your Tupperware box, put on your bicycle clips and cagoule if it looks like rain; if it does not look like rain, you can pack the cagoule in a haversack or pump bag for when it rains later.

If you want, you can invite friends to go with you geocaching, but usually that ruins it. They will always think they know better, and they never do, and then they will race to find the cache, and it is a pain in the hole when they get it first, because they always pull the gonk out and wave it around and say ha ha ha, look Kevin it's you. People are just stupid.

What a gonk is

A gonk is a small troll-like toy with fiery pink or orange hair that girls put on the end of their pencils.

What a gonk is not.

A gonk is not a term of abuse for people with red hair. Anyway, my dad says at least it proves my ancestors were born in this country. Where do your ancestors come from, Stephen Higginbotham? Probably Russia or somewhere.

The GPS system used by the American military is precise down to millimeters, so they can locate and destroy something as tiny as an ant living in Moscow using an intercontinental missile fired from the Persian Gulf, say, or Poland. The GPS system that we civilians are allowed to use is not so precise, however, for fear that a nutter should get hold of a nuclear bomb and decide that HE wants to kill ants without permission. What this means is, is that when you get to the geocache site, there is always an element of suspense because you will not be able to locate the cache straight away. Besides, the person who has hidden the cache does not want just any old thicko finding his cache. They would not appreciate it and would probably treat it derisorily. Derisorily is a word that means "with contempt." That would spoil everything for geocachers, but there are some people who are like that. In my class, even.

So you have to search for the cache, usually hidden under a bush or down a drain or inside the base of a statue. Once, in Hockley Heath, I found a dead dog in the canal. It was nothing to do with the cache, though. In fact, over the years, I have found more than one dead dog in Birmingham's canals. I expect they committed suicide. Birmingham can do that to a dog.

When you find the cache, you take a photo of yourself holding it to post on the Web site to prove that you found it and not just saying you did to impress girls. In the typical cache, you will find a gonk, a Blue Peter badge, a 3-D or Magic Eye picture, a puzzle like a Rubik's Cube that you can solve and then mess up again for the next cacher, a photograph of Stephen Hawking, a model Darth Maul, and a piece of paper for you to sign, indicating who you are and the date on which you found the cache, and what you took out of the cache and what you put into it. This is the particular joy of geocaching, because you are allowed to take a piece of the treasure and in return someone else gets the chance to choose something of yours that you put in. As you can see from the above list, however, you can't just leave behind any old crap. It has to be something that you know other geocachers will treasure. Also you cannot put in food or living creatures, even if they are crap ones like ladybirds, not because it is cruel but because who wants a dead ladybird? If everyone did that, the cache would eventually contain nothing except dead ladybirds, and there would be no point to the entire exercise, would there? No. You have to put in something which shows (1) that you are clever and (2) that you are considerate of the interests of other geocachers. I usually leave a page from one of Douglas Adams's books. All geocachers like Douglas Adams, and reading the page will give them happy thoughts. Also, the Independent on Sunday gave away a whole load of Douglas Adams's books a while ago, so they cost me nothing. I got them off my dad. He didn't want them anyway. He was just annoyed that the paperboy hadn't delivered his Mail on Sunday. I think he went to the paper shop and got the boy sacked.

Anyway, I hope that you will do geocaching now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.

(Kevin MacPherson is head of psychogeography at King Edward VII School for Boys, Edgbaston.)

Butterflies, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:05:00.002-07:00

Butterflies are ace. Some people think that they are not ace, but they are wrong. Famous people who have collected butterflies as a hobby include Robert Mackenzie, the Canadian man who operated the Swingometer on election nights on the television, but he is dead now; Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born novelist who courted controversy with his publication of Lolita, about a grown man lusting after pre-pubescent girls, and who is also dead; and Julius Caesar, a Roman. Non-famous people who have collected butterflies include Xavier McWhirter, Hilary Collins, and Harry “Mad Dogg” Dog. I mention Hilary Collins for a reason. The reason is that she is a lady. The reason why her ladyness is important is that collecting butterflies is usually regarded as a hobby that only men do. It is not. It is a hobby that predominantly men do, but some special ladies can do it too. The reasons why it is a predominantly male hobby are that 1) men are better at collecting things and 2) men are better at killing things. These factors are both important in the collecting of butterflies because 1) collecting butterflies involves collecting and 2) killing them is the best bit. The reason why men are better at these aspects of collecting butterflies is that men are far more likely than women to be autistic. It is scientifically proven. In the past, this has meant a restriction in popularity for the hobby, but with so many more diagnoses of autism amongst children these days, there is great optimism among the butterfly collecting fraternity that the hobby will increase in popularity. We have the MMR vaccine to thank for that. Except that this is unsubstantiated pseudoscientific hogwash.

WHAT YOU NEED

In order to collect butterflies you need a net on a stick, a cultivated field not too far from your home, a mounting tray, a killing jar, some fixative, some preservative, and some pins. The best pins are flat-headed ones because those are the least visible when you push them through the butterfly’s body. You can also use pins with a black head, since blackness also has reduced visibility and does not attract attention. It is possible to buy pins with different coloured heads, such as red, blue, green, purple, orange, mauve, yellow, violet, brown, taupe, puce, russet, indigo, cerulean, azure, caramel, purple again, grey, pink, montenegro, scarlet, cream, and cerise, but none of them are any good for butterfly collecting. You cannot get pins with lemon heads because lemon is not a colour. It is a flavour. The reason why you cannot get pins with lemon-flavoured heads is that the manufacturers of pins do not want people to eat them. That is why they deliberately make all pins metal flavoured. It is also why they make one end of the pin particularly sharp. So that, if you swallow a pin as an experiment, you won’t do it again.

SOME CLARIFICATION

Collecting Butterflies has nothing to do with the BBC television comedy series called Butterflies and written by Carla Lane and featuring Geoffrey Palmer, Wendy Craig, Rodney and the other one. This statement is not entirely true, however: There is a vague connection, because Geoffrey Palmer’s character collected butterflies in the series. Sadly, however, the programme hardly ever focused on his hobby and instead spent most of the time following Wendy Craig around while she fretted about cheating on her husband. Butterflies have very little to do with adultery. This series was a solid gold opportunity to introduce butterfly collecting to the nation at large, but because Carla Lane is a lady, she failed to see the significance of the chance she had been given.

ANOTHER TRAVESTY

The lyrics to the theme tune of the programme Butterflies went as follows:

Love is like a butterfly
As soft and gentle as a sigh
The multicoloured moods of love
Are like its satin wings

Love makes your heart feel strange inside
It flutters like soft wings in flight
Love is like a butterfly
A rare and gentle thing.

There are a number of problems with these lyrics. The most obvious one is that they were written by Dolly Parton, another lady, and one who does not collect butterflies. It is clear that she has no idea what butterflies are like. One thing is for certain, and that is that they are nothing like love. And I speak as someone who doesn't even know what love is!

WHAT YOU DO

You catch the butterflies in your net, study them to see if they are ones that you have collected before or if they are different, kill them if they are new ones, take them home, then mount them in your display tray and put them in the attic.

There. I hope that you will take up butterfly collecting now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.

(Kevin Macpherson is Archangel Lepidopterist at the Royal Society for Killing Things, Walthamstow. Hilary Collins is a man.)

Kung Fu, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

Kung Fu is really brilliant. Some people think that it is not really brilliant, but they are wrong. The reason why they think that it is not really brilliant is because kung fu requires years of dedication to become as good as the people on television and they are too lazy to make the effort.

Kung Fu, or gung fu as it is called in China because they cannot pronounce their k's properly, is a martial art invented by Bruce Lee, who was, at that time, the best kung fu master in the world. Lee was a Chinese Buddhist monk born in San Francisco in 1940 who did not believe in violence but who was constantly being beaten up on the way to the monastery every morning on account of being a Chinese in America and therefore much smaller than everyone else (Buddhist monks usually become as fat and obese as Americans, but it is only after years and years of sitting around training). Although he was a pacifist, Lee kept having his dinner money stolen, so it became a matter of principle for him. In order to resist the bullies, he learned himself kung fu, only it was called Wang Chung back then, under a wise guru named Master Po, who was an expert in Chicken-style kung fu, which mostly involves running away. Unfortunately, Lee was not a very fast runner, having only short Chinese legs, so he decided he would learn himself another kung fu that involved less running of the legs and more the kicking of them. There were many different styles of kung fu, such as Tiger style, Monk style, Doggy style, Emu style, Drunken Wino style, and Randy Goat style, and Lee became proficient in all of them, taking from each one the most lethal manoeuvres and incorporating them into his own system, which became proper kung fu.

Once he was able to decimate all his opponents and keep his sister out of his room, Lee was approached by Hollywood who wanted to make films of him showing off his skills to the world for a lot of money. At first, Lee said, "No way! These are valuable, esoteric treasured cultural traditions that should not be reduced to circus antics performed by trick ponies for the delectation of decadent Western audiences," which was true, with the exception of Trick Pony-style kung fu, which was invented for precisely that purpose. Nonetheless, Hollywood was very persistent and promised not to demean Chinese culture in any way. So, in his first film, Marlowe, Lee played a Chinese henchman who accidentally jumps off the balcony of a skyscraper doing kung fu after James Garner calls him a gayboy. In the next film, The Big Boss, he plays an ignorant Chinese yokel working in an ice factory that is a cover for heroin smuggling. In The Way of the Dragon he plays an ignorant Chinese yokel who travels to Rome, with hilarious consequences.

It wasn't until Lee got directorial control over his movies that kung fu became world famous, however. In Enter the Dragon he plays an MI6 agent infiltrating a martial arts tournament organized for no apparent reason on an island full of prostitutes and drug addicts. In Game of Death there is nothing but kung fu, but Lee was killed before the film could be finished by sinister kung fu masters who thought he was revealing too many of its secrets to the Western world. Since then, Lee's mantle has been taken over by Jimmy Wang-Yu, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme, and Will Smith's baby. None of them are anywhere near as good as Bruce Lee, of course, and I think he could have taken them all on at the same time and whipped their arseholes.

Kung fu itself has survived Bruce Lee's death, however, and you can easily find a kung fu school near you where you can learn how to defend yourself against your sister, bullies in the staff common room, and snidey quips when you ride your bicycle on the campus and people say "that's a girl's bike," which it isn't, just because it has a basket on the front. It depends on where the crossbar is, so there. I have been doing kung fu now since I was 13 and have a green belt. This is very good. The highest belt is purple belt, although many people think it is black belt and they are wrong. The grades go white, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, purple. If you see anyone wearing a red belt, it is probably Timmy Mallett.

When you do kung fu it gives you a greater level of self-respect but also more self-discipline because you become aware of the awesome power at your disposal to be able to poke someone's eye with your bare finger. With great power comes great responsibility, and therefore all kung fuers are required to take an oath when they become grand masters that they will only use their ability to maim, disfigure, and kill for good. This means most you cannot use it at football matches, against traffic wardens, or against the man in the newsagents with the funny voice who always makes conversation but you can't understand what he's saying and everyone looks at you. No. You can only use it in self-defence, which is why most kung fuers find they have to go looking for fights and then provoke their assailant into making the first move. Otherwise learning kung fu would be a waste of time.

I hope that now I have shown you how good kung fu is that you will join your local kung fu class straight away. Tell them Kevin sent you.

And that is the end.

(Kevin MacPherson is Grand Sifu and Kwai Chang Caine professor of Modern Dance at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Hereford. His book The Dying Swan: Contemporary Ballet and the Triads will be published one day.)

Comics, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:03:00.001-07:00

Comics are ace. Some people think that comics are not ace, but they are wrong. The reason why they think comics are not ace, I think, is because they confuse stand-up comics with lie-down comics and lie-down comics with sit-down comics. Stand-up comics are men (and, increasingly, two women) who stand up in front of an audience of people and tell jokes. Examples would be Jimmy Carr, Jimmy Tarbuck, Jimmy Cricket, and Jimmy Riddle, although you do not legally have to be called Jimmy to be rubbish. Lie-down comics are comics who are dead, such as Harpo Marx, Bill Hicks, Lenny the Bruce, and Jimmy Tarbuck (again). I agree with people when they say that stand-up and lie-down comics are not ace, but not when they say that sit-down comics are not ace. Unless they mean Ronnie Corbett.

Sit-down comics are pieces of paper folded several times, or cut and stapled together to form a collection of "pages," which are then printed with drawings and text that tell a story. One of these is called The Incredible Hulk. It is very good. Another one is called The Spider-Man. NOT Spider Man. It is also very good. Another one is called Catwoman. It is rubbish. It is for girls.

Sit-down comics are called sit-down comics because you read them sitting down. Usually in a chair or a settee, but also sometimes on the toilet. Sometimes if my latest copy of Iron Man is missing, it will be because my father is reading it on the toilet while he is having a dump. Then he will deny it completely and say it was my sister who had been reading it. But that is a lie and he knows it. My sister hates Iron Man. When she has a dump she takes her mobile phone in and sits there texting her friends things like "Im hvng a dmp. Wht r u dng?" Comics are beyond her.

Comics are becoming so popular now that Hollywood has decided to make them into films, which are really just real-life motion versions of comics. I think this is a terrible development because it means that viewers (which is what readers of films are called) do not have to use their imaginations any more. Needless to say, those of us who read and collect comics look down on people who think they know all about Spidey and Bruce Banner just because they've seen films about them. Movies are clearly an inferior form of medium to comics, appealing to the great unwashed and the lowest common denominator, thick people who are not intelligent and need to have everything depicted for them explicitly rather than saying the words on the page to themselves in their own heads, like normal people do. People who go to the cinema are people who move their lips when they read. You will also notice that all the comics that have been made into films are really good ones, which is to say, superhero comics, not crappy football ones like Roy of the Rovers or useless girls' ones like Bunty. This is because superhero comics are ace. Which is what I meant at the beginning.

Collecting comics can be a really rewarding pastime, and because most comics are thin, they can be stacked in piles in your attic or under your bed or in the shed by the hundred. Unlike books, which take up much more space. If you want, you can have decades of years of comics in your attic, and you don't even have to look at them, just read them once and put them up there safe in the knowledge that nobody else can mess with them or that Michael Sutch will have to get his own copy the tight-fisted shitter. Personally, however, I think that collecting comics and hiding them like this is a bit childish and a sign of immaturity. What is the point? When you have read your comic, you might as well get rid of it. I make a point of only ever having 31 comics in my collection at any one time. Thirty-one is a prime number. That way, you always have enough space for your collection, and you can be sure that your collection is made up only of the most recent, brand-new, shiny glossy comics, not faded crappy badly drawn comics from the 1960s. My uncle Tony left me his collection of D.C. and Marvel comics from the 1950s and 1960s. There were thousands of comics, all in cellophane wrappers. I think he must have been a bit of a mentaler. I burned the whole lot of them. Who wants to be a mentaler?

Anyway, I hope that you will collect comics now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.

(Kevin Macpherson is the incumbent of the Jack Kirby Chair of Sit-Down Comics at Warrington School of Art and Design.)

Stamp Collecting, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:02:00.001-07:00

Stamp collecting is ace. A lot of people think that it is not ace, but they are wrong. Stamp collecting means collecting stamps that are used on envelopes, envelopes being folded pieces of paper that are used to send love letters, birthday cards, electricity bills, ransom notes, death threats, lockets of hair, money, fingernails, and so on, through the post (but not ears—you are thinking of the film Blue Velvet, which was fiction—the envelope would fall apart because of all the blood). Stamps can be used as an alternative to currency, and because all the mail in the United Kingdom belongs to the queen, this makes her a very rich woman. Most of her wealth comes from stamps. People generally do not realize this, which is probably why so many of them think stamp collecting is crap instead of really good.

Another man who made a lot of money as a result of stamp collecting is the slum landlord Nicholas van Hoogestraten. He got his start in slum landlordism from selling his stamp collection for £30,000, which was a lot of money in the 1960s, which is when this was when it was. Hoogestraten had such an excellent stamp collection because his father was a shipping agent, who obtained stamps from all over the world for his son as a result. My father works for the Gas Board in Cheltenham. When I began my collection in the 1970s, it was with Green Shield stamps. Green Shield stamps are like postage stamps except they cannot be used as postage. Nonetheless, they can be exchanged for real things, such as the Ronco Electric Cat Brush/Harmonica and the K-Tel Telescopic Oven Radio. My father would let me stick all the Green Shield stamps in the special Green Shield stamp album and for a few weeks the entire collection was mine, until he went to the shops and exchanged it for something useful. This, for me, was like magic and inspired me to begin my collection.

Some people who are "into" stamp collecting like to collect stamps from lots of different countries from all around the world, but what is the point of that? There are millions of stamps in the world, and they will never collect all of them. Personally, I prefer to focus on one stamp, which comes from a country in Africa known as Zaire. The genius of this is that Zaire stopped making stamps in 1997, probably when everybody got mobile phones and email, so there is only a finite number of Zairean stamps to collect.

Zairean stamps come in two denominations: the 12 makuta stamp, for local letters, and the 3-zaire stamp, for overseas letters. There are far fewer 3-zaire stamps because people in Zaire did not send many letters abroad. They didn't get on. Consequently, this gives me a much better chance of cornering the market in 3-zaire stamps. So far, I have 4,713 3-zaire stamps. Some of them are mint. I am not entirely sure how many 3-zaire stamps were made altogether, but there can't be many more to go. Then I shall have a monopoly and will be able to charge whatever I like for them. Alternatively, I could use them as my own personal stamp, putting them on envelopes so that the recipients will know that they are from me. But that would probably be a waste.

Do not forget when you are mounting your stamps that you should not lick the reverse of the stamp when you put it in your album. If you do this, it will be impossible to remove the stamp from the album when you want to use it to send letters or to sell to someone, and your mother will have to cut around it very carefully, using scissors. Not normal scissors, either, but those special crimped ones that give wiggly edges. Like a stamp has. And even then the prospective customer may spot what you've done and not want to buy your stamp off you after all.

No. You must use special mounts. This will cut into your profits, of course, but it is probably still a worthwhile expense, because the last thing you want is to have book after book of entirely useless stamps worth bugger all on the open market festering in your attic. That would be a calamity. People would laugh at you, if they knew.

There now. I hope you will take up stamp collecting now that I have shown you how good it is. If you would like to buy some stamps from me, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Most of them are in really decent condition.

Thank you.

Kevin MacPherson is Stanley Gibbons Professor of Philately and Anal Retention at Guildford College of F.E.

Taxidermy, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:01:00.001-07:00

Taxidermy is a very interesting hobby that will interest a lot of people. What taxidermy is, is stuffing dead animals, mostly with sawdust but also sometimes with cotton, wool, cotton wool, bits of rag, cloth, hair, your sister's scrunchies, shoelaces, and cardboard. Sometimes I use torn-up copies of Just Sixteen magazine.

Some people think of taxidermy as a barbaric practice, but they are wrong. They think this because they are based on a misunderstanding, which is that taxidermists kill animals and therefore are some kind of genetically inbred shut-in from the country who wears glasses and breeds rabbits just in order to kill them, like that man in Copycat or the one in Father Ted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most taxidermists buy their animals pre-killed, and already with their insides removed, so they are not even as barbaric as someone such as a housewife who takes the giblets out of a chicken and makes them into gravy. That is really sick. But I have not told my mother.

The advantage to buying your pelts pre-cleaned is that it is not messy. This is what pre-cleaned means. Also the packaging is flatter, which means that the postman can easily put it though the letterbox and does not have to knock on the door to disturb your parents and say "I have got a parcel here for Kevin MacPherson from Glaxo SmithKline Beecham laboratories. Sign here please. It is two monkeys." Also, it means that you can order in bulk and it does not cost the earth. The current piece de resistance in my attic is a diorama I have made of Geoff Hurst's third goal in the final of the World Cup in 1966, when England beat Germany, complete with some people running on the pitch who think it's all over, as described by Kenneth Wolstenholme. Out of squirrels.

Before you think I am mad to take on such a major project, I should disabuse you of the idea that I reproduced the entire scene. I cannot afford 100,000 squirrels. How I wish I could! No. My diorama just consists of Geoff Hurst, the German goalkeeper, the referee, a fan running on the pitch, and the rest of the England and German teams. And Sir Alf Ramsey. I didn't even have to trim the eyebrows for Alf Ramsey.

If you want, you can dress your stuffed animals in clothes or in the uniforms of your favourite team. My favourite team is MK Dons. However, this requires some sewing skills, and this essay is not about sewing. It is about taxidermy. You can ask your mother to make the kits for you, but then she will ask what they are for, and you may not want to say that they are for your dead animals in the attic. The alternative is to buy the kits ready-made from a specialist supplier who makes football strips for stuffed animals, but I am afraid to say that there aren't any. I have looked.

Once you become an expert at stuffing animals, there is no limit to what you can stuff. There are shows in America where expert taxidermists put on display their stuffed bears, stuffed horses, stuffed worms, stuffed deer, and even stuffed peppers, although peppers are not strictly speaking an animal. In some countries, such as Russia and China, they even stuff their dead leaders, such as Lenin and Chairman Mao, and they put them on display for the residents to admire their work, although for some reason they never put their leaders in exciting poses, such as haranguing the masses or swimming the Yangtse. My father says that this is because the quality of the workmanship in Communist countries was always much poorer than in the West, and that Lenin and Mao are lying down probably because they have sawdust pouring out their anus.

Anyway, I hope that you will take up taxidermy now that I have explained it all to you and shown you how good it is. Send me pictures of your stuffed animals and I will pin them up on my shrine.

Goodbye.

(Kevin MacPherson is Jeffrey Dahmer professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins Open Prison.)

Astronomy, by Kevin

2011-03-31T10:00:00.001-07:00

Astronomy is fantastic. There are so many things in space for you to see that the limitations are endless, and only the power of your viewing instrument limits what you can see. For instance, if you have a radio telescope, you can explore the furthest reaches of the known universe, such as the Oxcox Hadron Filamental Spiral just south of Alpha Centauri, which is fucking miles away, or the methane clouds of Hasbro, which are the furthest colloidal entities discovered by humanity and which is also where you will now find Laika, the dog shot into space by the Russians in 1957 (because she is travelling close to the speed of light, Laika is now younger than when she first left Earth, whereas all the Russians who were involved in devising her space mission are now all dead or lying drunk in a Moscow gutter without a pension. Ha ha ha. Laika has the last laugh. In space.)

The really great thing about the radio telescope is that it enables you to see things that you could not see with the naked eye, because in order to see them with the naked eye you would have to be within a few miles of them, and as a result you would explode in the vacuum of space, your insides would be frozen solid, and you would suffocate. Therefore, radio telescopes are a good thing. Radio telescopes are very expensive, however, and also they will not let you look into the neighbour's windows at night-time when you are pretending to be out doing astronomy. For that you need an ordinary handheld optical telescope, preferably with an adjustable focus so that you can see everything. Binoculars are another possibility, but you would have to take into account the problem of shaking hands, which makes the image less discernible. Also, using binoculars to do astronomy just sounds less plausible to the police. Still, they are not as bad as night-vision goggles. If the police find you with night-vision goggles on, there's just no point arguing at all, even if they do leave your hands free.

Optical telescopes function by using curved glass and mirrors to gather light from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum and focus it on the retina. The retina is in your eye, where you see. To make it easier for you to see, you should use Optrex, which keeps your eyes moist. Also, avoid strong lights, eat carrots, and don't masturbate. All at the same time. You should also build an observatory in your back garden or you should turn the lights off in your bedroom to reduce the ambient lighting. Unfortunately, the street lights will still interfere with your viewing, but the alternative is to go outside into the street or out to the countryside, in the dark, where there is no lighting at all, just wild animals, cattle, and gypsies, which makes it very dangerous and spooky. I met a gypsy once.

My mother will not let me go out to the countryside in the dark. She doesn't even like me going out into the street at night-time, especially not without my balaclava and scarf. Or my mittens. But she does not understand that you cannot manipulate a telescope with mittens on. Not even a Bushnell NorthStar Goto 100-millimeter Maksutov-Cassegrain Compact!

The real advantage of astronomy is that it allows you to see so many worlds in the universe without ever having to leave your street. There are astronomy clubs you can join, but most of the people in them are weird, and anyway you always have access to the kitchen and the toilet when you are at home. I always think there is no need to see anything of this world when there are so many billions out there in space that are much more beautiful and with far fewer people on them. In fact, with astronomy, you can explore the entire known universe, other than Earth, without ever having to leave home. And that makes it the best hobby there is.

After trainspotting.

(Kevin MacPherson is emeritus professor of dictionaries at Sir Keith Joseph University, Stanmore.)

Trainspotting, by Kevin

2011-03-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

Trainspotting is good. A lot of people think that it is boring, but I do not think so. I do not think that it is boring because there are lots of things to see when you are trainspotting. When I go trainspotting, my mother gets me up early, so that Father can give me a lift to the station in the car. He drives an Opel. He works for the Gas Board in Cheltenham and he makes spot checks on the workers "in the field" to make sure they are working. We are proud of him because he contributes to the efficiency of people. My mother is a housewife. My mother makes me a packed lunch because the food in the buffet bars is not nice and costs alot of money and also you can meet some nasty people in the buffet bars. That is why she does not let Paul come with me. Paul is my brother. He is 9.

What you need

To do trainspotting you need a plastic blue anorak with a hood, or a Parka with a woolly hood, because sometimes it rains. Sometimes, if you wear a Parka, people think you are a Mod. Also you should take a packed lunch with you if you like and a notebook which you must keep dry and a pencil to write with. Then you must buy a book that has a list of siding numbers in it, so that you can find out where the train has come from and where it spends the night. Once, in Banbury, we saw an InterCity 225 with a Dumfries number. I like to spot 225s. I think because they are elegant. And because they are fast. My father used to spot trains, when he was younger, but I do not like old trains. They are slow and dirty and not elegant.

Next you must find a station and it is best to stand at the end of the mainline platform because when you are there, the end of the train with the number on it is facing you. I think, for example, you should go on the platform at King’s Cross or Euston, because their trains go a long way, but there are often funny people at King’s Cross. It is also a good idea to go to a station like Tring or Leamington Spa, because mainline trains pass through there alot. Even 225s. At night, we catch the bus home, or even the train, so you would need some money to get home. Unless you have a car.

People say that trainspotting is boring, but I think they are stupid. We do not like doing the silly childish things that the others in the street do, like playing football and cricket, or talking about football and cricket. They are silly games. Also they have parties and kiss girls and some of them even smoke, because they want to be grown up. I think that they don’t know anything.

When you go to do trainspotting, you can go all over the country. I have been almost everywhere with my Dad. It's a shame we spend all day on the platform really. Still, I hope you do trainspotting now I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.

(Kevin MacPherson is Professor of Applied Social Structure at the University of Macclesfield.)