Topic: Well, let’s be generous, and say I’m using a specific recent example to talk about controversial art.

So, where is everybody on Aliza Shvarts, then?

In case you’ve missed it, Ms Shvarts is an Art Student at Yale, and her latest piece includes blood from 9 months of self-induced miscarriages.

Well, maybe. There was a tediously predictably appalled set of noises from both the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies and Yale University released a statement saying the Ms Shvarts is a performace artist, and specifically:

“Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.”

That the whole thing is a fake, and the press release is part of, rather than simply about, the art.

Shvarts has since said that no, that’s not entirely true – the for 9 months she has both artificially inseminated herself with a needle-less syringe (from a panel of anonymous donors that she gathered for the purpose of the art) and then took an abortifacient, timing the insemination for maximum chance for conception, and the abortifacient with her natural cycle, so she cannot say with any certainty whether or not she was actually pregnant at any point. This lack of certainty, is, to her part of the point.

So, the first question to be asked is “is she telling the truth?”

Let’s assume she is, because even if she isn’t, well, I don’t think the questions she’s trying to pose are in the line of “what is art?” and “what is truth?” There are any number of far easier ways to set up those questions.

So first question: is this moral? Well, not if you’re pro-life, obviously. And there are a number of people who are only pro-choice up to a point, and this probably exceeds that for a lot of them. Except…

Even if this is real, there’s no certainty that she did concieve or abort. Even she doesn’t know, and it’s explicitly part of the work, that actually, the controversy only exists in the telling – she’s had to make a physical object to provoke the reaction, but actually, her intent is to create a reaction out of the uncertainty.

Is “it might be over the line” enough of a justification to judge her art in that context? If we believe in innocent-until-proven-guilty, then how can we presume that she did? And even if intent does changes our presumption, why does it do it in a less “real” case, than in actual criminal law, where, say “murder” and “conspiracy to commit” are different things?

And there’s another interesting angle to this. In the artist’s words:

“Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.”

And it’s hard to argue her point. If it’s acceptable to do things to your body that are not entirely in line with what nature intended, surely every possible “unnatural” act deserves at least a bit of time considering whether or not it is also something there is value in doing. She’s come up with a delibarately polarising example, of course, but nothing succeeds like excess, and all that…

For myself: well, I’m pro-choice. She gets to chose how she treats her own body, just like we all do. So for me, this isn’t over the line. It can’t be. Yes, it does make me a little uncomfortable, for reasons I can’t really articulate very well, but that’s my failing to live up to my own principles, not a judgement I can make on her.

And well, I’ve never been bothered by art that’s “trying to be controversial”, because if art isn’t trying to provoke a response, then what the hell is it doing? You might as well protest that someone throwing water on a crowd is “trying to make people damp”. I get slightly more bothered when it’s prefixed by “just”, but I don’t think this is “just” anything. Yes, it was an attempt to create controversy, but it’s on a subject that’s worth discussing. We’re currently stuck in the bodies we have, and I think it’s worth looking at the limits to which society will permit us to have control over them.

Do I think it’s legitimate for someone to claim a press release, and people’s re-telling of the work on commentary on it as part of the artwork? Yeah, I do. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s just making explicit what is implicit in a Turner or Monet – that art is created with the intent of reaction. If she wants to claim that this post is part of her art exhibit, I’m happy to let her. It couldn’t have existed without her, after all.

What do you think?

Topic: “Alasdair!” I hear you cry, “What happened to your minimum of 800 words a week plan?” Fear not, I haven’t forgotten, it’s just that I wrote this lot, a basic summary of supermarket whiskies, for the excellent food and drink blog Very Good Taste, and wanted to give them a chance to run it first. And now they have, so I can post it here, and catch up on the last couple of weeks.

In his book Eat Britain, Andrew makes the suggestion that whisky seems like a drink that it requires time and effort to understand. I don’t think this is exactly true, but I can understand why it seems that way. Luckily for you, I’m here to simplify it all for you all, so that you too can get into whisky, and bore the arse off your mates pontificating about the latest “malt” you’ve discovered. I took a quick trip to my local supermarket, and noted down all the single malt whiskies that they had on sale, and I’m going to tell you a bit about them in general terms, so that you can either decide which one(s) sound like they might be your sort of thing, or at the very least, you can bluff it when you’re trying to impress someone down the pub. For the sake of honesty: there are a couple here I’ve never actually tried, and few that it’s been a long time single I had any. I have referred to the 5th edition of the late Michael Jackson’s superb Malt Whisky Companion to supplement my memory in places. (Yes, I know I said it wasn’t that hard. It isn’t. I’m your actual obsessive, OK? No-one’s saying you have to be like me.)

All of these cost between 20 and 30 quid in my local supermarket – they may not be the cheapest thing on the shelf, but I promise you, even the worst of them is miles ahead of that 12 quid bottle of Bells sitting next them.

So, as you may or may not know, whisky production is divided into regions, much like wine. And like wine, you can generalise a bit about each region – of course, there are always exceptions within each and every region, but the generalities remain true, so I’ll tackle them by region.

Speyside

I’m going to start here, because there are more distilleries in this region than any other – there might even me more here than all the other regions put together. This is probably the closest region in general taste to what most people think of as whisky – if I had to pick one regional characteristic, I’d go for a sherry taste – some of them would be dry sherries, some (most) erring more toward the sweet, but a lot of the whiskies here have a fairly heavy touch of sherry about them. (Whisky, is, of course, traditionally made in sherry barrels, so it’s not a surprise to find that taste there, but it’s in the Speyside area that the characteristic is most generally noticeable.)

Glenfiddich 12 (year old – single malt whisky is generally refered to by it’s age, which is how long the whisky has spent in barrels, maturing).

I suppose I’d better get this one out of the way first. This is cooking whisky, at least as far as I’m concerned. There’s really nothing that interesting about it. There’s a sort of general sweetness about it, you might get a hint of pear drops, or acetone on the the first sniff, and the taste is sherry, with maybe a little bit of smoke somewhere in the back. It’s inoffensive, and unremarkable, and you can get in most pubs exactly because it’s inoffensive and unremarkable. I’ll drink it if I really can’t get anything else, or the beer is off.

If you like this, try: Despite the fact that their 12 year old is really very boring, some of their other varieties are superb. I would unhesitatingly recommend both both their 15 and 21 year old varieties, especially as the 15 still comes in at around the 30 quid mark. The 21 is pricier, but is a serious contender for being one of the best whiskies in the world.

The Macallan 10

Here’s one I’ve never had. I actually quite like another 10 year old they do, the Macallan 10 (Fine Oak), but this isn’t that. Jackson describes this it as sweetish, without bit too sweet, well rounded sherry without too much richness, and a hint of smoke.

If you like this, try: The Macallan 10 (Fine Oak). A couple of quid more expensive, it’s essentially the same sort of thing, just a bit sweeter and richer, with a little more, you guessed it, oak.

The Balvenie Doublewood 12

This is matured in 2 kinds of barrel – first barrels that have been used for bourbon, and then those that have been used for sherry. It’s a very easy drink – lots of sherry, some orange flavours, and a little spice.

If you like this, try: Glenrothes. Glenrothes don’t put the ages on their bottles, preferring instead to label the year the whisky was laid down, so you’ve got some general idea, but they’re open about the fact that they’re not trying to make the same thing every year. Still, they’re generally pretty (even extremely) sweet for a whisky. I’m a big fan. In fact, I’m off to get some now.

Dalwhinnie 15

My personal favourite of this bunch. There’s still sherry in here, but it’s tempered by a rather nicely floral nose, with hints of honey in the drink, and a bit more peat than other Speysides which give it a peppery sort of finish. Really very nice indeed.

If you like this, try: Oban 14. A little less sweet, a little more peppery – a bit more of peat and the smell of the sea about it.

Highland

These are often quite like Speysides, if perhaps a less sweet, a bit drier on the palette.

Glenmorangie 10

Despite that fact this it’s an absolutely classic whisky, one of the really big names in the industry, I just don’t get on with Glenmorangies’ whiskies – I’ve never had one that I could get excited about. I can’t tell you why, which makes me think the failing is in me, not their product. Jackson calls this spicy, flowery and sweet, with a creamy, almost buttery finish. Sounds quite nice.

If you like this, try: No idea. Try an older Glenmorangie.

Old Pultney 12

Dry on the nose, with a grassy, peaty edge. It’s quite a light whisky, with a nutty sweetness, and a finish that is oily, and strangely salty.

If you like this, try: Another one I’m not sure about – it’s a distinctive enough distillery that you’re probably best sticking to just getting an older version of the same. I’m tempted to suggest a Talisker, but you’ll see why I’ve got reservations about it in a moment.

Islands

This does not include Islay, which is a region to itself, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit, but does include all the other scottish Islands. This region is perhaps understandably very hard to generalise about, but I’ll say this much: they’re all pretty good, often for wildly different reasons. There’s often a certain sea-air type saltiness about them, combined with whatever else they’ve got going on.

Jura 10

Jura put out a strong contender for my favourite whisky I’ve ever had. This isn’t it, because the my favourite was a limited edition bottling, now sadly sold out, but still, it’s a damn good drink, and one that has been getting more popular (and therefore easier to buy) in recent years, which pleases me immensely. This is sweet, well rounded stuff, with a nice dry edge in the finish.

If you like this, try: This one’s probably no help, but Jura’s special 1984 edition is the one I particularly like. If you happen to see a bottle of it anywhere, grab it, because you won’t get another chance. It’s utterly beautiful stuff.

Talisker 10

Talisker’s a favourite of mine. Huge, smoky, peaty, a lovely sea air tang to it. There’s more sweetness and sherry in it than Islay malts (more about them in a minute) but there’s still a big, peppery, slightly medicinal taste.

If you like this, try: I’ve had a Scapa that reminded me of a lighter, slightly more mellow Talisker, and if you like the peaty, medicinal taste, then a Lagavulin might bit a good bet – the 16 year old is pretty damn tasty. If you like something a bit less medicinal, you perhaps go for a Highland Park.

Islay

Islay whiskies are often so different from well, most of the others that they might almost be a different drink. The common taste here is generally described as medicinal – there’s a phenol component to the flavour, that you might associate with iodine, or dental mouthwash.

Ardbeg 10

I don’t really know this one at all. Jackson says it starts out sweet, then turns mean, finishing with a healthy does of iodine.

If you like this, try: You could try some older Ardbegs Their 25 year-old “Lord of the Isles” is generally considered the best of the type, which picks up some fruity sweetness to balance the medicinal tastes.

Laphroig 10

And if you like the medicinal taste in the Ardbeg and the Talisker, then this is the sine qua non of iodine. Often described as being like sucking a wet rope, or like licking wet tarmac, this is a real love it or hate it drink. I didn’t used to like this much, and it’s still not in my top malts, but I’ve learned to appreciate it, and those that love tend to really, really love it.

If you like this, try: Laphroig’s as medicinal as they come. Try the 15 year old version, which has a little bit more sweetness to round it out, without dropping any of that huge nautical-rope edgy. Lagavulin’s the only other distillery to come close to Laphroig’s massive medicinal flavour, so again, their 16 might be a good bet. The other option is actually a blend, made by an artisanal blender called Compass Box, called The Peat Monster, which is superb.

Irish

Of course, Scotland isn’t the only place that makes whisky. Well, to be strict about it, Ireland makes whiskey. The Irish version of the drink is actually made slightly differently to most Scottish malts – in Scotland the spirit is generally distilled twice, and in Ireland, it’s distilled three times. Irish malts tend to be a little bit smoother, as a result, which some people find more appealing.

Bushmills 10

There’s a creamy, slightly oily, vanilla feel to this one, cut with fruity citrus notes that are one of the hallmarks of the Bushmills distillery. Bushmills was the first whisky I really got into, and I have some very fond (and sometimes very hazy) memories of this stuff.

If you like this, try: The 16 year old version is a superb drink – sweet and well rounded. You might also look south to Jamesons, who do a very nice 12 year old single malt that a cut above the version you find on optic in many pubs.

Topic: Budgie gave me the title “No Gentleman, No Lady” (and the word “ambigram” to use. I’m afraid I let him down, in that I haven’t managed to use the word. But ever since I wrote that little origin story for John Dials a few weeks back, I haven’t been able to entirely exorcise the urge to actually write that story I was talking about, Earth Died Screaming. So I went back to my outline notes, and I started writing the damn thing (as a comic, because as ever I just can’t make prose work in any form other than a short monologue). Here’s the first four pages of script. You may see more of it over the next few weeks/months if I’m happy with how it turns out.

(There is more coming about whisky, by the way. Bear with me.)

Page 1:

Panel 1: Split this page in two, horizontally. The top half of the page is moorland, ending in a clifftop, a single tree sitting to left of the shot. Knock the whole panel out to bleed. It’s a bright, sunny day, birds wheeling in the sky overhead, and the whole scene, if this were in colour, would be lush and green. The tree is verdant, spreading and very, very alive, if somewhat bent by years of the prevailing wind off the sea.

Panel 2: Exactly the same shot, except that this time, the sky is slate grey, and the whole scene is *dead* Not so much as a blade of grass is growing, and our tree is very dead, and very very scary, and monstrous, skeletal thing, like the hand of some maleficent god reaching out of the earth.

In the border between the two panels (make if thicker for the purpose) we’ve got our title: EARTH DIED SCREAMING.

Page 2:

Panel 1: A study in disarray, viewed from the door. Papers are strewn everywhere over the desk, over the floor between us and the desk, books are disarrayed on the shelves, a burea in one corner has all its drawers open, more papers poking out. The desk is a huge old mahogany affair, with a backboard that completely prevents us us from seeing one corner of the room behind it – the chair is off at an angle from it’s proper position where it would be facing us across the desk. Behind the desk, half visible behind the blackboard is a large window, looking out that the skyline we saw in panel 1.

VOICE (off): JOHN DIALS, I SWEAR YOU ARE THE MOST DAMNABLE CREATURE.

Panel 2: Same POV but a head sticks up from behind the desk. Mid-thirties, hair about two inches too long, and looking the owner has just stuck his fingers in a lightsocket. Slightly overdone Edwardian fashion, the tie/cravat disordered and the top button unfastened. Goatee beard, surprisingly neatly kept. This is someone that could look very presentable indeed if they bothered, but they don’t, generally.

DIALS: WHAT WAS THAT, EMILY DEAR?

Panel 3: A shot from a corner of the room – a three-quarters shot past Dials, allowing us to see Emily for the first time. Emily’s dressed in a fairly fetishistic version of Edwardian garb. Don’t overdo it – this is her everyday wear, but at the same time, she’d not someone who would blend in on the street, even in this era.

EMILY: I HAD THE SERVANTS TIDY THIS ROOM JUST YESTERDAY, AND LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE.

DIALS: IS THAT WHY I CAN’T FIND ANYTHING? HAVE YOU SEEN THAT PAPER THAT AUSTIN SENT UP THE OTHER DAY?

Panel 4: Emily points to a piece of paper midway between them, on the floor, as Dials strides round from behind the desk.

EMILY: IS THAT IT?

Panel 5: Dials stoops to pick it up.

DIALS: WHY, YES, IT IS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’D DO WITHOUT YOU, MY LOVE.

EMILY: FLOUNDER HOPELESSLY, I’M SURE. HAVE YOU MADE ANY PROGRESS?

Page 3:

With the exception of the first ballon, all the dialogue on this page is voice-over ballons, no tails.

Panel 1: A shot past Dials, looking more clearly out of the window we can just see a bit of Dials face. The scene out of the window has changed slightly, though – instead of the afternoon view, we’re looking at night time now, the tree visible against the moon. There are some leaves on it, because this is before the horror – but it’s autumn so they’re sparse, and we can some get “scary tree” value out of it. There are three figures running up the hill toward it, just ahead of a mob, the frontrunners of which are visible at the the very bottom/front of the panel.

DIALS: YES, I BELIEVE SO. WITH AUSTIN’S HELP, I’VE TRACKED DOWN SOME LOCAL HISTORY ABOUT THE BONE TREE.

Panel 2: Move past Dials, for a high shot, over the heads of the mob (pitchforks and torches, please – I want a proper lynch mob…) so we can see the three of them, huddled together backs to the tree. One of the women looks terrified, the other furious, and the bloke looks curiously calm. I think it might be worth keeping just a small part of the window in shot – a corner of frame, of some of the lead in the panes, or something.

DIALS: IT SEEMS THAT ABOUT A CENTURY AGO, THREE PEOPLE WERE KILLED THERE. TWO WOMEN AND A MAN.

EMILY: MURDERED?

Panel 3: Three bodies hang from the tree, and we’ve zoomed in a bit more, lost all trace of the window.

DIALS: NOT EXACTLY. THEY WERE LYNCHED FOR WHAT’S CHARMINGLY REFERED TO HERE AS “UNNATURAL CONDUCT”. IT SEEMS THE TWO WOMEN WERE SISTERS, WHO WERE BOTH SHARING A BED WITH THE SAME MAN.

Panel 4: Zoom in closer, so that we can see the three dead faces, twisting on their ropes. This close, we can see that the man’s eyes are two different colours – one light, one dark.

EMILY: SOUNDS POSITIVELY DELIGHTFUL, BUT WHERE DO WE COME INTO IT?

Panel 5: A shot of the blasted heath as it is today.

DIALS: WELL, THE MAN’S NAME WAS RECORDED AS SIMEON MORROW. AND A YEAR TO THE DAY AFTER THEY DIED, EVERYTHING WITHIN HALF A MILE OF THE TREE DIED. NOTHING’S GROWN THERE SINCE.

Page 4

Panel 1: Back in the study, focused on Emily, who has moved closer to the desk while we were in flashback, and who looks a little shocked. If we can see Dials, then he’s setting the chair.

EMILY: BUT WHY WOULD MORROW LET HIMSELF GET HUNG?

Panel 2: Dials is sitting down at the desk now, pushing some some papers to one side. There’s a book open underneath them.

DIALS: WELL, I’VE GOT A FEW THEORIES ABOUT THAT. HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A GYTRASH OR MAYBE SHAGFOAL?

Panel 2: Emily shrugs, while Dials picks up the book and hands it to Emily.

DIALS: LOCAL BELIEF-FORM. BIG BLACK DOG OR HORSE, HARBINGER OF DEATH. HELL HOUND, BASICALLY.

Panel 3: The main panel on this page. A shot of the pages of the book. One of them, the focus of the shot is, illustrated – up to up if it’s a woodcut, or something a bit more detailed, but it’s a big (unnaturally huge – put a frightened looking man in the illustration in for scale – on all fours, this thing is three quarters man height) black dog, with fire burning in its eye sockets, maybe around it’s jaws. This is a book printed in the 19th century, so don’t go overboard on the illustration quality, anyway. On the other, we can just make out the title GYTRASH.

EMILY: I DON’T UNDERSTAND. WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH GETTING HIMSELF HUNG?

Topic: Hugh Hancock asks What’s So Good About Whisky, Then?

“I like the little things. The way a glass feels in your hand, a good glass – thick, with a heavy base. I love the sound an ice cube makes when you drop it from just the right height. Too high, and it will chip when you drop it. Chip the ice and it will melt too fast in the Scotch…” – Leo McGarry, The West Wing, “Bartlet For America”

This is by way of being a preface to a few other essays that I intend to write, in response to several people’s requests about whisky. If I’m going to spend time talking about whisky, I should probably set out my own stall first, as it were. And yeah, I should imagine a few of my friends are looking at that talk of ice in whisky with some horror. I’ll come back to that later.

Whisky ticks a number of boxes for me. Firstly, and most importantly, I love the taste. I love big flavours – red wines, onions, garlic, dark chocolate, butter, cream, coffee, red meat, cigars. (Yes, I am going to die of heart failure. I have made my peace with this.) Whisky, even a comparatively light, floral variety (and they do exist) is a big, big, flavour.

Secondly, there’s probably very little point in pretending it doesn’t also tick my “geek” box. Specialist knowledge? A certain amount of collector mentality? Sign me up!

And lastly, it’s an intoxicant. Let’s be honest here: I like to get drunk on occasion (for occasion read: “at any reasonable excuse, like, say, weekends”). So do any number of people. I especially like to do this in good company. Whisky is practically self-selecting for similar people.

Like McGarry, above, there is a ritual element to it that appeals to me. I like to have the right glass, somthing that varies with my mood – sometimes it’s a good cut glass tumbler, sometimes, like tonight, it’s a proper nosing glass – the common thread, as Leo says, is a good heavy base, a bit of reassuring weight in the hand. I like the pop as the cork leave the bottle, the gentle sloshing sound of the pour, holding the drink to the light to admire the colour, that first sniff of the marvellous smell, and then that first magic sip, rolling the liquid around my mouth…

Which brings me back to taste. And, while I’m here, smell. Let us, for the sake of an example, talk about what I am drinking right now, which is the last of my bottle of Compass Box’s superb blend Spice Tree.

Held up to the light, it’s quick a clear yellow-amber colour, and on first sniff, there’s a sweetness to it, a light sweetness, more like a honey than say, toffee. Going back again there’s strong element of spice to the sweetness, festive spices like clove and cinnamon. Sipping it, and rolling it around the mouth, it’s rich and sweet, with hints of fruit to start with, and it finishes long, and very dry, almost to the point of being astringent. There’s no way you could drink this and not notice that you were drinking something of character. You might not like it, and that’d be fine, because then I could have yours, but there’s no way you could fail to notice the shift in mouthfeel, and the changing range of tastes that come together like liquid magic.

I could write that amount about any of the whiskies in my collection. (By the standards of some people I know, I don’t keep a huge collection – after finishing this Spice Tree, I only have five different bottles on the go at the moment.) And were I to do so, you’d be able to understand the differences between them. Even just in text form, there’d be no mistaking one for another. Now part of that’s the specialist knowledge I was talking about earlier, but part of it just is the sheer variety that’s available. I love the fact that there’s such a range, that every new whisky I try will be different from the others.

My friend Andrew, in his very fine book, Eat Britain, makes the point about whisky that it feels like an elite club, that it requires special training to understand and appreciate. I don’t think it does, but I can understand why it feels that way. I’ve met a few people who get terribly snobby about “wasting good whisky on people who won’t appreciate it”. The technical term for these people is “arseholes”. On a similar subject, I said I’d come back to McGarry’s remark about ice. Firstly, it should be borne in mind that McGarry was talking about Johnnie Walker, a whisky that is more popular in America than anywhere else, a drink that is made with the American palette in mind. And one of the things that’s expected is that it will be drunk over ice, because that’s the normal way to drink whisky in the States. So it’s quite likely that the ice will suit the drink. And secondly: the only correct way to drink whisky is the way that tastes best to you. If you prefer it with ice, have it with ice. If you actually prefer the taste of your 70 year old single malt with coke in it, and have found that a scotch and coke made with a cheap blend just isn’t as good as one with something criminally expensive in it, well, fine by me. As long as you feel you’re getting your money’s worth out of what you’re drinking. Anyone who claims anything else is just wrong.

I don’t feel that I’ve had special training, and I don’t think does take any training beyond maybe sampling a few different whiskies, just to find out what you like. A basic understanding of the differences takes less time than you’d think – in any reasonably well stocked pub, I could sit you down with four or five whiskies, and take you on a quick tour of malts that, even if you’d never tasted a whisky before in your life, would all taste distinct and different. They’d unquestionably have something in common – that huge, rich, explosive taste, but I promise you, you’d be able to tell the difference. And you could probably find a preference, and a place to start exploring for yourself from. That’s what I did, after all. You don’t need to try everything to find something you like, and there’s no shame in finding something you like and sticking with it. Whisky may seem elitist, but actually, it’s open to anyone who is willing to buy a bottle or two, and share it with friends. If you’re enjoying what you’re drinking, it can’t possibly be a waste.

And it really is such an enjoyable drink.

This is a small thing, but it is a perfect illustration of why the public should not be allowed to vote for things, ever.

The 2008 Bloggies were announced the other day, and I may write more about them later, if I can be arsed to form some opinions on the others, but I just wanted to comment on this result.

Best photography of a weblog: I Can Has Cheezburger? (I’m not fucking linking to it.  You all know it anyway.)

Also Nominated: Smitten Kitchen, Dooce, The Sartorialist, 101 Cookbooks

Of that lot, only one of them consistently produces a reasonable range of different kinds of photography. Dooce. Who, fair enough, probably couldn’t have carried another award home. But I find it tremendously frustrating that not one single dedicated photoblog even got nominated, and most especially that the one that never fucking features any good photography, is the one that won.

If you saw most of those fucking photos without text, they’d just be yet another shitty fucking photo of someone’s mangy fucking fleabag, cluttering up the internet. With the text, some of them are occasionally funny. But they’re still shitty photos, and often not original.

I get that despite the name of the award, which would seem to me to imply a certain level of expected quality, the full explanation of it is “Photoblogs and other weblogs that regularly feature photography” . But still, why in fuck, given how popular photoblogging is and how much seriously *good* photography there is out there, must they honour what is basically a joke that has long since ceased to be novel? Surely a little fucking quality control wouldn’t be out of the question?

(FWIW: Of those five, I think The Sartorialist is probably the most deserving winner. The photography isn’t top quality, or terribly interesting simply as images, but it’s of a standard, has a clear voice, and is unquestionably what the blog is about.  Personal taste would probably have had me voting for 101 Cookbooks, but I thing The Sartorialist is the one that would have most deserved the win.)

Topic: Alasdair Stuart has very generously given me an unlimited budget, and access to every comic creator on the planet, and the remit to build a company that publishes comics and OGNs, and asked what I would do.

Obvious answer #1: embezzle the budget, live out the rest of my days in luxury.

Clearly, what he meant is that money’s no object, but I do have to turn a profit on it.

Obvious answer #2: Hire top grade talent, then get out of the way.

Except I’m not 100% convinced of the viability of that. I think everyone, absolutely everyone will do their best work if there is someone set over them with the authority to tell them that their work isn’t up to scratch, and that they’ve got to go back and do it again, or at least, tighten the damn thing up, and make sure it fucking sings. However much I like a creator, I tend to remember Bill Drummond’s views on Julian Cope – that Cope is undeniably a monstrous and vitally important talent, but that the single greatest blight he’s suffered is that post-The Teardrop Explodes there was no-one to tell him to get back in the studio and try again, because what he’d just produced wasn’t up to the level of his own ability.

(On the other hand, if there had been, he might not have evolved into the hugely interesting auto-didact of ancient sites and religions that he is, and I might never have gotten Cope’s “Discover Odin”, of of the best albums I own. So you know, swings and roundabouts.)

Obvious answer #3: Hire the usual predictable list of names. Moore, Morrison, Ellis, Rucka, Ennis. Equivalent grade artists. (Obviously, I am still all about the clever writing.)

And you know, I probably would. The deal is straightforward: create me two properties – the creators can decide if they’re ongoing, OGNs, whatever, so long as they are (to within 10% or so) the same number of pages in length, and I can reasonably expect similar production and distribution costs for both. One of them, the one that is published first, the company gets a 50% stake in, across all media, and tie ins (and yes, gets approval on the tie ins – this is the company’s cash cow), and will attempt to shop around, and will shoulder 50% of the marketing costs. The other 50% of the profit will be split among the creators as they dictate.

The other, is 100% creator owned. I’m not going to shop it about or anything (well, I might, if the opportunity arose, but I’m not going to look too hard for ways to exploit it), as all the profit from it, and from any other media sales at all, that all goes to the creators – all my company takes are any production/marketing costs. If it fails to cover costs, any losses it makes are recouped by my company from the cash share of the profits from the first that that creator makes.

There’d need to be a bit more fine print (to allow for then running the one I see cash from into the ground with production/format costs, while coining it in off the 100% creator owned one), but you get the idea. A genuine, honest to god, codified “one for the studio, one for the love of the art” (or you know, whatever reason the creators have to make their book, anyway) system. (Should creators wish to do more that two books, I’m delighted. Extra books are still done in pairs, on the same basis.) Creators are completely free to ask for a page rate up front for either book, and I’ll pay more or less what they demand, but their page rate is a production cost for the book, and gets deducted before profits.

All of this, contains the caveat: I am not going to bankroll anyone’s project that is obviously not going to make us both a profit. Anyone demanding a page rate/production values that are likely to have a net effect of rendering both books together unprofitable will be told to piss off.

So there you have it. Is it earth shattering? No. But Al gave me as much money as I could possibly want, didn’t he? Well, yeah, in that case, there’s other things I’d add to it. This would be aimed at making a profit over a five-to-ten year period, because apparently, I’m well capitalised enough to work like that. And the initial ad campaign would cost a fucking fortune, because it’d need to do a Playstation-grade job of branding these things as aimed at hip 20-somethings, not mouth-breathing nerds, and it would need to raise the level of awareness of them to something quite huge. So I’d be looking to launch with a line of 12 Watchmen-length (and hopefully Watchmen-quality) OGNS, none of them featuring superheroes. And I’d attempt to support it with interviews in mainstream press – Esquire, GQ, hell, even FHM and Loaded, including buying enough fucking ad space with the relevant magazines that I could be sure of having these things and these people treated as cool, rather than getting “Biff! Bang! Pow! Comics Are Back!” treatment. The point being: I have time, and I am explicitly intending these things as long term investments, like Watchmen, or Sandman. Because I am very rich, it turns out, and can afford to.

Of course, that last paragraph isn’t much besides a lovely pipe dream. You really do need absurdly deep pockets and a willingness to take a huge risk in order to run something like that. And very occaisionally, you do find a publisher with one of those two things, but you’ll never find one with both.

Topic: Hugh Hancock amongst other suggestions, gave me this one: “I’d never pay 200 quid for a meal. Discuss.”

I’ll state my position from the off: I have already paid over 200 quid for a meal. Twice. I hope to do it many times more. Having had three-Michelin-star food once, I want to do it again. And again. And again.

When I tell people this, and yes, I do mention it a lot, because the first time I did was a life-altering experience, I get a number of reactions, the most amusingly extreme of which to dat has been “That’s a sin!”.

No, seriously.

A couple of my family members genuinely believe that spending that amount of money on a meal is a sin. In their defence, they are from Northern Ireland, where atheism is either Catholic atheism or Protestant atheism. Anyway, that’s the most extreme form of the “why would you want to spend that amount of money one meal?” camp. It generally varies between those who think one meal cannot possibly have been worth that amount of money, and those who just think it wouldn’t be worth it to them.

Obviously, I can’t entirely rebutt the latter group there, but I can have a go at the former, which I shall do by providing a link to something I’ve written before.

So, as I’ve said before, the sort of meal you get for over 200 quid is not like any other restaurant meal you’ll ever have. In terms of comparable experiences, you don’t want to be comparing it to three course at even a one Michelin star restaurant. I’ve eaten at quite a few of those. I like eating at them. They’re not the same. I wrote in the neighbourhood of 5000 words, the first time I ate at a three-star restaurant. I have ex-girlfriends I couldn’t write 5000 words about.^[1]

Anyway, I provide that link about to stop from feeling like I need to wax lyrical about whole experience, and why it specifically was worth the money, because that’s not really what I was asked to do. I was asked to discuss the proposition that 200 quid is too much to pay for food.

I am, I must admit, suspicious of people who say they wouldn’t pay that much for food. I wonder what’s wrong with them. I wonder how they cannot instinctively understand that yes, good food is worth it, and more than worth it.

Because let’s face it, we are a collection of attractive^[2] bags of meat on a lump of rock that’s hurtling around at quite astonishing speeds in an essentially meaningless universe. We are biologically required to do a number of things, in order to remain here, and one of them is eat. And since the alternative is not being meaninglessly sexy high-speed meat, well, not eating is pretty much unthinkable.

So, if we’re going to do it anyway, my thinking goes, then it ought to be bloody amazing. And you know, most of the time it is. Think of the fresh crunch of a really good apple. Or that marvellous oozing smoky-salty bacon delight that is a good hot, thick, bacon sandwich, made with good bread, and good butter, and maybe just enough brown sauce to add that fruity vinegary sharpness to cut the other tastes and textures. Or some rich, dark chocolate melting on the tounge, or a cup full, bitter coffee. Tell me at least one of those doesn’t get you going.

But even I would grow bored of eating nothing but bacon sandwiches.^[3] And so I want other things, different things.

But that on its own isn’t really enough to justify my suspicion, is it? I mean, I could probably make quite a lot of different kinds of sandwich before I ran out of tasty options. And that’s before I get on to the kinds of food that don’t come installed between 2 slices of bread.

So let’s move away from mere taste. If fact, I’ll even forget about looks, smell, texture and sound as well. Let’s talk about what food means beyond the purely nutritional and sensory.

Food is one of the things we all have in common. Everyone. In fact, it extends beyond the reach of mere humanity – all things that live must also eat. (Or so I was told in Biology in school.) Food is ingrained into us, right down into the animal hind-brain. It’s one of the ways we used to ensnare a mate, demonstrative the ability to feed them. And obviously, it still is. But it’s more than just a means to get laid, or it can be. At its very best, it’s a means to communicate. A means to pass ideas from one mind to another, to evoke emotion. It becomes Art.

And I know that some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking that this is a thin justification. Tough. You’re wrong, I’m right, and I can prove it. What do you call serving all the flavours of a cooked breakfast as a dessert at the end of posh meal? Wit. What do you call serving passion fruit with Fruits de Mer? A pun. What do you call using a variant on a sherbet fountain as palette cleanser, if not an attempt to evoke the playfulness of childhood?

Really good food can be Art, not just because it takes skill to produce, but because you feel the chef is saying something in his choice of offerings. It may not always be that clever or sophisticated, but it is often very, very intense. Smell is the sense most closely allied with memory, remember. Food is something that reaches past all our clever centres of reasoning, to touch our most basic thoughts and feelings. Tell me there isn’t a dish from your childhood that you don’t recall with a misty smile, be it a family recipe that no-one else can do right, or a favourite dish from a beloved restaurant.

Now maybe a master chef isn’t going to produce that dish, but my point is that the really, really good ones, the ones who command 200 quid a meal, have spent years studying the power food has. Eating their food is ever bit as worth trying as reading classic literature or a virtuoso musician. Adoring Nabokov doesn’t mean that Terry Pratchett isn’t still rewarding. Being a fan of Green Day doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy Beethoven. If fact, appreciation of one informs and improves my appreciation of the other. And so with food. And unlike literature, or music, there is no means to mass produce the very best versions yet. There are very few economies of scale to be had – a dish takes the same amount of prepare, and requires fresh ingredients and skilled labour. So the best costs more.

I would also add this final coda: the 200 quid food was also inspiring in the most literal sense. Eating at The Fat Duck (and a few other places) has changed my outlook on cooking. Cooking has never been something I enjoy, and probably never will be. But prior to eating there, I cooked almost nothing. These days, I cook a variety of different things, because I’ve come around to the idea that with enough practice I might produce food that other people enjoy, and even, if I practice very hard, might say a little about the way I see the world. Right now, I’m still at the stage where I’m happy if I don’t burn it to a crisp, mind. But maybe one day…

^[1] OK, that’s a lie. I might have trouble writing 5000 words of effusive praise, without revealing things that were very personal about a couple, though.

^[2] What, you thought I was going to call us ugly? Look, it doesn’t do anyone any good, thinking like that. Call yourself ugly if that’s what you really want, but I think you’re lovely.

^[3] Well, probably.

Topic: Squid challenged me to come up with a piece of fiction from the point of view of people watching the a human deliberately make fire for the first time. This was, politely, a total bastard (and it’s given me a whole new appreciation for the first chapter of The Voice Of The Fire), and I’m only half happy with what I’ve produced, but it’s what I’ve had time to write this week, and part of the point of this is to force me to produce and publish something. So here’s a very short story about shamanism, enlightenment and a few other things.

Prometheus Rising

He was bad luck. He slept away from the rest of them. Invisible things spoke to him. Hidden people. Secret whispers. No-one wanted to hear them. It would make them bad luck. They would twitch and mutter to themselves, and clutch their heads. They would cry out in the night, when hidden things attacked them.

Except.

Sometimes, when the voices spoke to him, they told him things. Sometimes, he would tell them to hunt in one place, and they would catch a big beast. Sometimes, he would tell them where to find the best fruit. They listened to him when he told them what he heard. They listened to him, and they left him food at short way from the group.

They did not want him to die. If he died, the hidden voices would find someone else to talk to. They would make someone else like him. Everyone felt them pass by, but they only spoke to him.

If he came too close they would throw rocks at him. Close enough to talk, if he shouted. Not closer.

When it was cold, they left him a burning branch, and some wood, and let him build his own fire. They would not let him share theirs. He had told them where the storm beasts would touch the ground, where they could find a burning tree to make their fire from.

He talked to the fire. They heard him muttering to it. Whispering. Sometimes, he would shout, and dance and scream at it. Sometimes it was “Leave!”. Sometimes, it was “Come back!”. Sometimes, it was just noise, and made no sense at all.

On some nights, as their own fire burned low, and they heard him dancing and shouting, half a mile away, so of them felt something move past them, almost like a wind, but not moving, and they shuddered. The secret things were going to talk to him.

It was like this as long as the oldest person knew.

It was the hot season. Even in the hot season, it was cold at night, so they still kept a fire. They were by the river, where the beasts came to drink. They had not seen him for many days. His fire had gone out. Some of them said he had died. Some of them said that the invisible things had made him go. Sometimes they did. Some of them were glad. Some of them wondered if it would be harder to find food if he did not tell them where to move to when it got cold again.

It was like this for two full moons. Even the oldest person could not remember him ever being gone as long.

He came back. He was not the same. He walked straighter. He did not twitch. He did not mutter. They asked him if the invisible things spoke to him, and he said yes, and that they did not have to be afraid that the invisible things would talk to them. Still, they would not let him close to them.

He went apart a way, and sat down a while. Then he got up again, and walked around, stopping now and then to pick up small sticks and bits of grass. The he came back, and sat as near to the them as they would allow, just a little further than the rocks they threw at him.

It got dark, and some of them said they should give him a piece of their fire, but others were scared of him now, and they said they they should not, that he was not the same, and that he was more bad luck than before, and nobody moved.

Then there was a light. There was a fire by where he was sitting, and there was no light and sound of storm beasts. He had made it.

He had made it.

Fire.

He had made it.

They were afraid.

They heard him laughing in the dark. They could see him, beside his fire, that he had made, laughing. There was the rushing of the invisible things. They were scared, and they fell on the ground, hoping that the invisible things would pass them by. His fire got big, and theirs went out. They could feel the invisible things all around.

He reached into his fire, and pulled out a burning stick, and walked over to them. They were so scared. The could see the light of the fire in his eyes, and his white smile. He put the stick in their fire, and it grew up again.

“The invisible things showed me” he said. “They are called ‘gods’, and they teach me many secret things. I am master of fire now. I will make the ‘gods’ be good to you, and you will bring me food. That is how it shall be.”

He did not twitch and he did not mutter. He smiled at them, and they were scared.

Topic: A meme – get someone else to pick a year of your life for you to write about. Sally Brewer asked me to write about 1998.

1998 started badly. I went to a New Year house party with some friends, and while I was assured there were no cats in the house, what no-one mentioned was the reason there weren’t is that the usually-resident cats were in a cattery (that is what you call the places that you send the little furry shitbags, right?), and in as it turned out, I spent several hours more or less sitting in a catbasket. So my eyes swelled shut, my lungs packed it in, and I wound up heading for home at about half ten, having trouble with this breathing business. I can recommend against sitting in cat baskets.

But comedy New Year allergies aside, I was pretty profoundly unhappy at the start of 1998. In November 1997, I had moved back to London from Edinburgh, and at the time, I thought that was possibly the stupidest thing I could have done. I’d left behind a large number of friends, and a girlfriend I was pretty besotted with – enough, in fact, that we continued our relationship despite the distance, and had gotten engaged that Christmas. For now, let us simply say: I no longer do long-distance relationships.

January itself was pretty shitty. I was living with my parents, who were, to put it mildly, disappointed in me. I’d quit my second degree, and at least as far as my mother was concerned, I was a scruffy-looking unemployable weirdo. (My mother hated my long hair with quite some passion, and has never really quite got the hang of hobbies or interests.) For my part, well, I was 20. I still knew everything, and was prepared to fight anyone that disagreed. This did not make me a very tolerable human being.

When I had moved back to London in November, for the purpose of finding a job in the internet business, it had been agreed that there was very little point in my looking for work before Christmas, but my failure to acquire a job by late January seemed to have been taken as some kind of sign of lack moral fibre. For one thing, Mum didn’t seem to appreciate that I was applying for any entry level web jobs I could find on uk.jobs.offered (Usenet still being, well, a thing that humans used back them) so probably didn’t feel I was doing enough to get a job. She and I could agree on almost nothing, and I can’t imagine anyone living in that house at the time enjoyed themselves much.

In early February, I did two things in order to get some peace and quiet – I went to Edinburgh for a fortnight, and I cut my hair. The first was, as I recall, pretty good. Ellie (my fiancée) was living in a tiny box room in what was otherwise a pretty nice flat in Morningside. There was just about room for a double matress, a few books, and the cage for her snakes, but the flat itself was decent, and her housemates were hardly ever in, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

I got a decent break, and I started looking for jobs in Scotland, spotting several that looked promising. But before any of my applications went anywhere, I got a phone call – a telephone interview for a job with (then) the UK’s third largest web agency, a place called Hyperlink. It went really well, and an interview was duly fixed for a few days after, cutting my break short by a few days, but there you go. The second thing, by the way, made me utterly miserable. It was two years before my hair got back to a length that felt like me when I looked in the mirror. Even then, I honestly couldn’t tell you why long hair was so important to me, but it was.

Anyway, I went home. I did two further interviews with Hyperlink, and I got the job (the combination of the haircut and the job improved matters at home almost overnight), as an “Internet Researcher”, and frankly, it was both very stressful and spirit-crushingly dull. I wasn’t technically capable enough to do something of the things they wanted me to do (and I’m still not – Perl is a language for mutants and weirdoes), and the other stuff was, well, rubbish. These days, for example, if you want to know how well a site is doing for a given search term, there are applications that will scan Google and Yahoo, and maybe a couple of other places, and tell you where your site ranks. Back then, there were 6 search engines (Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek and Webcrawler) plus Yahoo and it was part of my job to check various search terms for client sites against all of those, down to three hundred places, by hand. The rest of the job was, if anything, even less interesting. Add to that the fact that they had a “work hard, play hard” culture (which, as anyone who has worked for place that says they have one of those will tell you, means that you’re expected to work an hour to two hours a day more than your contract says, just so there’s enough time to get the work done, and somehow the “play hard” bit never quite materialises) and well, I did not enjoy it.

So I started job hunting again after about six weeks. I’m sure that if I’d stayed, I’d have made a tidy pile out if when they were eventually sold to C&W at the height of the internet bubble, but honestly, I’m sure I did the right thing. For one thing, if I hadn’t, I’d probably be in marketing now…

By May, I managed to find a job with Newsquest, a local newspaper company in my parents area, who were just moving online, and who basically needed someone so that this internet business wouldn’t get in the way of the real work that the systems department needed to be doing to make sure that the papers got published. Knowing HTML, a bit of Perl, some marginal ASP and understanding email put me streets ahead at that point.

I quite liked that job. I got to do technical work at a level I was ready for, I had time to teach myself more in the technical skills way of things, and I had an office to myself, after a fashion – there wasn’t room for me in the office with the rest of the Systems guys, so I got stuck in server room on my own, although there tended to be people coming and going most of the time. That was pretty good in summer – it was air conditioned to fuck, after all. It was less good in Winter, or when I caught a cold – then I was quite often seen sitting at my desk, wearing a fleece, trying not to die. Amusingly, the company didn’t actually have a leased line, or anything, so while I was online seven hours every day, it was via dial-up modem. And not even toll free. I shudder to think of the phone bills I must have racked up for that company.

And in between all this, I was going up to Edinburgh as often as I could, which was more or less every other weekend. I would get the train, or the night coach on the Friday after work, and then back again on the Sunday afternoon. Even with a young person’s railcard, it wasn’t cheap. Well, it didn’t seem cheap, anyway. I still wanted to move back there very badly. Ellie and half my friends were there. In one of life’s minor ironies, the two people from Edinburgh I see most often these days (as in more than once every 12-18 months), Hugh and Sally are both people I got to know there there after I’d moved away myself.

Oh, and I was trying to write. That was what I’d decided I wanted to do with my life – be a writer. I was, to be charitable, bad at it. Very few of the ideas that I had back then were anything I’d want to own up to today. I improved a bit over the course of the next year or two, but in 1998, my writing was, erm, poor, at best. So let’s gloss over that, and mention instead that the Warren Ellis forum started around March or April, and Andrew moved to London in late 1998, and well, that was pretty firmly the start of a large chunk of my social life for the next decade, right there.

And so life went on, until November. I’d just come back from a week’s holiday in Edinburgh – the wedding of a couple of friends providing the excuse for a longer break – when Ellie broke up with me. We remained friends, but, putting it charitably, I did not cope in a stern and manly fashion. Not even close. I’m not sure anyone does, the first time they get their heart broken. I have since become cynical and entirely without decent feelings, of course.

To compound the stupidity, since we were determined to stay friends, it was decided that I should not cancel my New Year break to Scotland, and should in fact, stay with her, in one of the spare beds that were available while her flatmates were away over Christmas. The pair of us mostly spent that holiday picking at emotional scabs, and frankly, it was one of the worst experiences of my life, and can be pretty much summed up by the events of New Year’s eve itself. We had planned to go out clubbing to The Mission, where a number of our friends would be, but we had failed to account for the fact that the venue was (just) behind the barriers of the Princes Street party, and that the guards there would be deaf to our pleas of “look, we don’t want to do to the party,we just want to get that that club there”. So we spent it alone together in her flat, drinking shitty cheap wine and watching Dead Poets Society. Cheerful, n’est pas? Obviously, that was the sort of thing that two people that couldn’t spend more than half an hour in each other’s company without one of both of them getting a bit over-emotional should be have been doing. Assuming they couldn’t find any rusty barbed wire to flagellate themselves with, that is, and I assure you, we looked.

So that was 1998. I started it miserable, ended it even more miserable, but in the middle bit, I had a pretty good year, on balance and, pretty solidly laid a lot of the foundations for the next decade and more of my life. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but looking back on balance, it was one of my better years.

Fiction, titled suggested by Alasdair Stuart. Some time around 2002, back when I wanted to, y’know, do this shit for a living, I came up with a character called John Dials. The basic idea was that he was a hyper-intelligent time traveller, shagging his way around various kinds of historical fiction, and solving crimes by really unlikely methods or even by accident. You know, comedy. The first was was going to be a Bronte parody, full of overblown violent landowners, windswept moors, and amusingly graphic incest.

But I don’t really do light comedy very well, and I was constantly frustrated by my inability to make it work. But then a year or two later someone asked me to come up with a horror thing with “scary trees” in it for them to draw. And I went back to Dials, and re-imagined him in a more mad scientist/stark horror vein, and came up with something titled “Earth Died Screaming”, set in 17th century Dorset, about Black Shuck, the devil hound, and a hangman’s tree.

But when I saw the title “The Atom Waltz”, it reminded me of him. So here’s John’s recounting of his own origin story. John Dials, my own personal Doctor Who, back before all this revival bollocks.

The Atom Waltz

The hippies will tell you we’re made from stars. That all the matter of our planet, and our own bodies was all born in that white hot furnace in the heart of the sun. And they’re not actually wrong. They’ll get all excited about protein chains in some primordial soup, and a lightning strike. They’ll tell you’re we’re born in fire and lightning, that we’re somehow holy or remarkable for it.

Fuck ‘em. I am John Dials, and I am a scientist, and I tell you straight: fuck ‘em. In the eyesocket.

We’re mud that sat up, and about as fucking bright. We’re bastards who spend our lives looking from things to hump, kill or eat. Just like every other animal on the planet. That fact that we’ve got a language means nothing what so fucking ever. Whales have a fucking language. And no, it’s not fucking deep and moving and beautiful. It’s just vast fucking cow noises. Get over it.

We’re nothing but an accident of chemistry and physics. Bear that in mind. Sure, people will waffle on about the astronomical odds of our universe happened. Of us happening. There’s a fucking massive number of zeroes on the odds of anything. Great. But it still doesn’t make us special. There might be a massive number of zeroes on the odds, but there’s an even more massive number of zeroes on the amount of time that everything had to happen in. You can pick your own metaphor, if you have to, but I’m not helping you dress it all up in something like it means anything. It’s all just fucking maths. Physics. Whatever.

The point is, the expanse of nothing we came from is so fucking vast, that however massive the number you need to stake against one is, still, there’s enough of it to make sure that we happened in it. In fact, the odds are pretty good that we’ve happened an infinite number of times. That actually, despite the vastness of the odds, actually, we’re tediously inevitable. That everything is.

But the really sad thing is that stupid fucking inevitable accident of cosmic-scale science that we oozed our way out of, somehow equipped us with brains that like to find patterns and meaning. Impose order on things. Whatever. So we scrabble around a meaningless universe, and we find patterns, and we make shit up that gives it all meaning.

That’s all your fucking gods and magic and hippy star children rubbish are. The heavy grey bit in the top of your strangely shaped bag of dirty water making shit up, so that… so that…

I don’t fucking know why.

I’m the smartest fucking man on the planet. You think anyone else could have invented all this shit? I’ve looked inside quarks, I have. You know what’s there? Vibrating string. Vibrating fucking string. You get down small enough, it’s always vibrating fucking string. You look inside one vibrating string, you know what you find? A smaller vibrating string.

That’s the face of your god, cunts. Vibrating fucking string.

So I started drinking. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I mean, every last one of us is all alone in a pointless universe that contains not one iota of detectable meaning, but at least all that fucking starstuff has come together in a few forms that will get our brains good and fucked up.

Anyway, some time around the third week, I had an idea. It’s all vibrating string, all the way down. And there’s this thing where time works differently when you get down to the really small scale. Look, there’s maths, OK? Give me a blackboard, and about three weeks, and quite a lot of really expensive scotch, and I’ll write it down for you. You won’t understand it.

But to cut a long story short, I invented a fucking time machine. Yeah, I really am that fucking smart.

Of course I’ve used the fucking thing. You know what I did with it? I came back in time of course. So I’m standing here in a my sealed suit, in the middle of the most unpleasant fucking storm I’ve ever seen, and in about two minutes, lightning is going to strike this pool of horrible smelling sludge at my feet. Probably. Well, certainly, but I’m standing here with a big copper pole. I’m just trying to decide if there’s any meaning in killing all life on earth before it starts or not.

Yeah, it’ll work. Don’t give me that killing your own grandfather rubbish – I’m the one that did the maths, not bloody you. It the lightning his the pole, rather than this slime, I’ll have wiped out all life on earth for ever.

But I can’t decide if it means anything that I’m in a position to do this.

I’m the smartest man on earth, and I have no idea if it means anything.