A soft Hovis loafish catastrophe. A white sagging mess with blue accoutrements in the opaque soup of a cold and second-hand bath.
“A man should get married, because if he has a good wife he’ll be happy, and if he has a bad one he’ll learn to be philosophical” – Socrates. I wonder what the great philosopher’s wife made of that.
Yours faithfully,
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
– Albert Einstein.
Turns out Einstein was better at Physics than jokes.
“In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebon void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought… I really must repair the roof on this toilet.”
– Les Dawson.
That’s more like it.
Sit down and prepare to be terrified. The following picture is of a region of the sky smaller than this full stop.
Figure 1. The Hubble Deep Field. It is unclear whether the correct response to this is laughter, screaming, or suicide. Bear in mind that each little spiral is a whole galaxy. Bear in mind that if the universe is infinite then the whole observable universe is itself a negligible part of the whole universe. I often have a bear in mind (Yogi, if you must know).
I advise printing this out and looking at it whenever your life blows.
I was sittin’ on the bog in an Odeon on an industrial estate the other day (Prometheus 3D (washout)) and the picture above slipped out of my pocket on to the floor. I looked at it and then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and had an epiphany.
Here endith the front matter and any pretence of humour.
This blog post makes the following assumptions:
I aim to show that if these two assumptions are sound then we are immortal. Furthermore, if they are true then Hell exists, and your actions have no consequences.
1 You are the motion of material. I call this your Shape.
2 Your shape depends on its environment but part of your shape is unchanged by this process. I call this unchanging part your Essence.
3 Your Essence is composed of a finite number of objects which can have a finite number of arrangements.
3.1 In an infinite set of randomly arranged finite forms there will be an infinite number of each type of arrangement if and only if the total possible number of objects is finite.
3.2 You and your Essence are composed of a finite number of objects.
3.3 In an infinite set of arrangements of the objects that are contained in your Shape there will be an infinite number of realisations of your Shape and your Essence.
4Â If you want to believe the truth then you must base all personal decisions on the assumption that there are an infinite number of your Essences making all possible decisions in an infinite number of both identical (your Shape) and different (your Essence) environments.
5 All your choices have an infinitesimal impact on the universe since they are repeated and contradicted an infinite number of times by an infinite number of yous (your Shape).
6 For as long as you are possible you are. You are immortal and will always exist if and only if the universe exists.
 * * * * * * * * *
Every major scientific discovery (starting with realising we have a bum-hole around 1 million years ago) has essentially told us ‘you are less significant and unique than you thought you were’. Â Currently, we base our significance on believing we are the only life. Come off it. No serious person does not believe in aliens. The next realisation will be we are not alone. Then we will realise that we are not the only version of us in the universe.
And then I realised it wasn’t an epiphany… it was diarrhoea.
Best regards,
Life is tough when you’re a white, male, heterosexual, old Etonian like me. My constant struggle against prejudice has, however, yielded philosophical insight. What follows is a translation (from Eton slang) of my [cod] philosophical investigations. Please do not be so intimidated as to think you might not understand this profound exposition of the truth. Remember, I am but a mere great intellectual.
Raph Shirley, Vienna, 2011
1 This statement exists.
2 I am embarrassed by the word fart.
3 Yes.
4 (Poo poos and bums and wee wees. Willys etc.)
5 One remembers great literature and asks: Is Raph Shirley so great a mind that his bodily functions might be comparable to, say, War and Peace?
6 I am forced to remember a dream I had when I was ten, in which I asked ‘does God exist, my massive mind?’.
7 The TV section of a newspaper.
Yours, ever humble and meek, yet wise and everlasting,
My mother, Sharon Shirley, recently made the unreasonable demand that I put the seat down after using the toilet. Here is my response.
Allow me to neglect poo-poo for the purposes of a thought experiment.
Imagine there are two social groups A and B who require the toilet to be in states A and B respectively, for wee wees. There is some effort incurred in changing the state one way, EA-B, which is essentially equal to the effort incurred in changing the state the other way, EB-A.
What system of use would be fair and proper? Is it the current system, where state A is considered to be philosophically superior to state B and that group B have to change the state to their required state pre-toilet and then change it to the opposite state post-toilet to spare group A the indignity of changing the toilet state? Pompous group A pricks.
Figure 1 A hypothetical, perfectly fair toilet for which equal effort is required of all genders and creeds.
I put it to you that group A’s position is entirely bogus, and I will no longer change the toilet state for them. There will be net lower indignity if this mode of operation is adopted worldwide. Moreover, there will be equal distribution of indignity between the two groups.
And what is a lid even for? Can we please get rid of that? Also, we are out of toilet paper and duck.
Now I will consider the impact of number 2s.
Of course, groups A and B agree on the toilet state for number 2s. This complicates matters slightly because some of group B will be saved effort by other group B members changing the state for them post number 1. However, you will see that net effort is still lower if my system is adopted because only necessary state changes occur.
I apologise for discussing this delicate matter with you. I feel the situation has come to a crisis point requiring brave men like myself to come forward and speak up against prejudice and hypocrisy.
I rest my case,
p.s. mum, could you give me a lift to the pub tonight around 7.04pm? and not Chicken Tonight tonight again please. I do not feel like Chicken Tonight tonight. I might be persuaded by Sausages Tonight…
… tonight.
The banana in its sluttish yellow overcoat eyed me from across the hall. The way it draped its slender ripe figure provocatively across that pawn of an apple. The way it affectedly brushed past the orange. Oh that banana had it coming, and don’t let no one tell you different.
I pretended I hadn’t noticed. I went on about my business. I constructed a look of busy action at the computer face. Staring into the abyss of an excel spreadsheet displaying tawdry accounting jargon such as ‘costs’ and ‘total’ when all I could really think about was that fucking banana.
Tony Blair famously said education three times. And of course, I, in my way, am painfully aware of the simplicity of the mechanisms of it. The straight forwardness of combining two objects like this sickens me even as I spew it, although I must admit that that ‘even’ is out of place given the tautology.
But at least I stopped it in the middle, even if my intention was to disregard your generous attention and to thank you for visiting by flippantly giving you nothing of worth.
Unfortunately this is not a wedding and I can’t get one of the band members to give me a late, drunken, and drummed out joke announcer.
It has all fallen to pieces. I’m not quite sure where it happened but its lost now for ever.
Do you follow?
To some people dancing comes naturally. To me it comes supernaturally. That’s right, fasten your seat belts because this post is about to take a nose dive directly to a more academic style of prose.
“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” – Friedrich Nietzsche1
Dancing is typically thought of as a light hearted and fun exercise. Exempli gratia2 “Hey, I love to dance, it just makes me feel great”. But many people forget that as recently as 1518, it could lead to mass hysteria and death3. Dancing began around 50,000 BC when early4 man first started dating early5 woman. Cinema at the time had become staid and uninspiring and young people were looking for a more exciting pastime6. The gunpowder was there, all it took was a match in the form of a primitive dance called the ‘kick’. The dance involved a simple motion of the leg upwards and forwards and that was the end of it. Teenagers gathered in their ones to take part in this and so was coined ‘teenage kicks’.
“Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.” – Mr. Miyagi7
But we arrive now at the winter of the post and still a thrust to the argument seems as unfortunately absent as an erection on your golden wedding anniversary8. You no longer dance. The leaves are falling off the trees and there is a quiet sadness in your eyes as you sit in your chairs and watch each other slowly die.
Yours disingenuously,
Footnotes
1 The internet.
2 ‘e.g.’ or ‘for example’
3 See Wikipedia article, The dancing plague of 1518.
4 As in ‘with ears’.
5 As in ‘like an earl’.
6 Cinema in the early 50,000 BCs consisted mainly in staring at a rock. Only the French avant garde was so bold as to include such complicated allegory as the smashing of two rocks against each other.
7 The Next Karate Kid, 1994
8 Simile is often the shortest path to a joke.
Love from
(and Anthony)
I can’t decide.
Everyone knows the old hack debates about roses looking better to a poet than a scientist or some shit. I’d always written them off but am starting to agree. Who cares what the world is actually like? What has that got to do with me? Genuinely. Stumbled across Blake’s Newton on google images and thought “yeah, he’s right, Newton was a wanker”. Also, they’ve put a copy of it outside The British Library. What exactly are they trying to say with that? They have science books in there but they are simultaneously taking the piss out of it in the forecourt.
Quite a few people go on about how good it is. It’s not that good. I mean at best it’s fine. If they make a terminator I’ll concede it’s good. There’s your challenge science. Come back when you’ve done something other than tell me we live in an unsympathetic universe. Yeah, thanks I really needed to know that.
Tell you what, I’ll work on talking about something I have a fully formed opinion on next time.
Thanks for reading,
I’m hoping this will be the first in a series of educational/inspirational videos.
Thanks for watching,
I reckon this is a really good idea right. Therefore there are three possibilities:
1) I’m wrong it is a stupid idea.
2) I’m right it is good but someone else had it ages ago.
3) I’m right. Praise please.
In the absence of evidence lets assume they are all equally likely. What is the actual idea? Well, lets say that a central aspect of postmodernism is revealing process. i.e. you know there once was a man who wrote a blog by thinking of stuff. He’s called Raph. Hello etc. If that is the case then there is a fundamental limit to the degree to which the process can be revealed. This limit is that specified by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. You can put a mirror in front of a camera but still can’t see the back of the camera so need another mirror. That mirror then needs another mirror etc. If this is true then another of Gödels achievements will be to rubbish the current aesthetic and intellectual viewpoint. Postmodernists are forced to make their work either incomplete or inconsistent. Ha ha.