Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena

by Philomena Cunk

Anyway, in order that there could be sex, God made Eve, a woman, who evolved from Adam. Eve came second, like women usually do, but was more evolved. Unlike Adam, whose leaf was just for show, Eve could have babies out her leaf, and so the whole population of Earth was invented.

Caterpillars are like insects, except they’re more like a haunted sleeping bag.

One ant can carry up to 5,000 times its own weight, but the webpage I found this fact on didn’t say which ant.

It’s important to feed your tiger enough Frosties to stop him biting your head off, a lesson that either Siegfried or Freud learned tragically too late.

Buildings used to have stuff all over them that made them interesting, and be made of things you can see, like bricks, but now they’re like sort of fishtanks made of graph paper and you can’t remember where they are, or if you’re in one.

There used to be nine planets in the solero system, but scientists recently found out they’d made a cock-up and one of them, Pluto, was not a planet after all, but Mickey Mouse’s dog.

The year is 1066. (It isn’t any more, but you have to pretend it is to tell the story, apparently.)

The Big Bang was an explosion, but instead of destroying stuff, it made more stuff, like when you try and close a window on a mucky website and it just makes loads more little windows and you can’t stop it.

In our culture, a book is read from front to back, with the eye traveling along the line of text from the left to the right. The eye then travels back to the left and down to the next line of text. And then from left to right again. And then across to the phone, in case anyone’s said anything on Twitter. And then back to the book for a line. Then back to the phone. And down the screen on the phone for about ten minutes. And then back to the book, but back up a line or two to remember where you were and what was happening. Then to the phone again. And so on.

Climate change is a big challenge for all of us. Like when it looks like it’s going to rain, and you put on a big coat, and then it’s really hot and you have to spend all day carrying your coat and sitting on it. But for the whole planet.

There’s a difference between thinking climate change is man made, and thinking climate change is made up. But I can’t remember it. Because I’m too hot. And that might be a warning to us all. A global warning.

Democracy means that it doesn’t matter who you are, your vote matters exactly the same: not very much.

Britain is a proper democracy, yet a third of the population still can’t be arsed to vote, so instead, they exercise their democratic right to moan. Moaning is a bit like voting, except you don’t have to go to a primary school and stand in a cupboard to moan. You can do it wherever you want. Which makes it more convenient for people with bad feet or a dog.

You don’t have to stand up and be counted. You can sit down and be ignored if you like, because that’s your democratic right: you can choose not to matter. And that matters. If you want it to. It’s up to you.

There’s no point being king unless you can ask for stupid shit.

To know how the world will really end, we have to turn to science. And science says it won’t be a giant destructive seven times table after all. It could be Artificial Intelligence—which is when the Speak & Spells and Gameboys and Bluetooth speakers rise up and take over the Earth—or man-made climate change (unless we decide to only use natural climates)—or a nasteroid giving us a good clout—or a supervolcano. There’s a supervolcano hiding under America, apparently. Let’s hope nobody finds it or there’ll be hell to pay.

Something had to be done, and that something was poems. Which is why the environment is in an absolute state to this day, because the only people who care are hippies.

One thing is clear: if it weren’t for evolution, none of us would be here today. Or we would, but we’d be gibbons. And nobody wants to be gibbons. Not even gibbons. You can tell by their bums.

Evolutionary psychology can even explain things like why we hate our neighbors (in case they’ve moved in next door to kill us, making our homes even more frightening) and why people have children (to become so tired that death isn’t such a big surprise) and I could go on, but all I can think about now is Tizer.

Facebook is a sort of pub in your computer, where your mates and you can all meet and fall out with each other without having to pay for a drink or some nuts or put up with a fucking pub quiz taking place.

When Facebook figures out how to do smell, everyone will be as disappointing as they really are. And maybe that’ll be better.

Fashion works by making all your clothes feel disappointing after a bit. There’s probably chemicals they put in new clothes that’s the same chemicals that’s in Turkish Delight, that makes you think you really want it, and then, like, as soon as you have it, you don’t want it because Turkish Delight’s rubbish. (To be honest, I’m surprised those kids stayed in Narnia as long as they did. I’d have gone back to the wardrobe and spent the afternoon trying on tops.)

Why has the word “governmental” got the word “mental” at the end? Is it a warning?

Then, in the 1980s, the world of ice cream went absolutely fucking berserk. The Viennetta came out. No one had ever seen anything like it before, not even in their dreams. It was what ice cream would look like on its wedding day. Suddenly ice cream was big news. It made everyone forget the IRA and AIDS and now if you look at the history pages on the internet, they’re never about 1980s wars or politicians, they’re mainly about the history of Viennetta!

Steam is what you get when you make water absolutely furious. It’s hot, unpredictable, powerful and lethal, like Mel Gibson.

You could say the train was the most revolutionary animal that mankind had ever domesticated, until the Furby.

This was a device which revolutionized our attention spans, crushing them down smaller than ever before. Now we didn’t need to be drunk to walk straight into lamp-posts. Now we didn’t need to pay attention to the TV any more. Now we could have conversations with people miles away from the comfort of the cinema. Now we could sharpen our reflexes by only noticing the car in front had stopped at the last minute when we looked up from Facebook.

Jazz is sort of music, but clever. It’s not as clever as classical, which you need exams to understand, but it’s a lot cleverer than, say, grime or Coldplay.

There are only so many notes in the world, and one day they’re going to start to run out. Future generations might see jazz in the same way we now see plastic—a terrible waste of resources, tipping loads of notes into landfill, polluting the planet with saxophone solos and trumpet noises. Hopefully science will one day work out a way to recycle notes, perhaps into new music, hopefully not for Sting.

Jazz even has its own language. It’s called scat, and you definitely shouldn’t Google it. I don’t even want this millionaire’s shortbread now.

Christ was born around 4BC, four years before the birth of Christ, in the oh little town of Bethlehem, in what is now one of the countries they have on that map on the news all the time. Jesus’s mother was Mary, a professional virgin, and his two dads were Joseph, a carpenter, and God, an all powerful mega-being. It’s amazing that Mary and him got on. They had nothing in common, and the power dynamic would have been very one-way. It’s a bit like when you go out with a teacher. It’s just wrong.

In the olden days, one way of medicine was to release the bad ghosts by drilling a hole in someone’s head. This is why people today have nostrils. To let the ghosts out, in the form of a sneeze. And that’s why it’s important to say “bless you.” Otherwise you might go to hell.

There hadn’t been any fun in Britain before—just wars and stones and going to church. Suddenly, everyone was dressed as playing cards, and it was permanently like being at Glastonbury—with jugglers, jesters, a chill-out tent where you can play chess and something called minstrels, which wasn’t chocolate buttons, but a sort of olden days Mumford and Sons, but worse.

Some of the best stories were written by a lecherous old cork called Geoffrey Chaucer. Although he might sound like a smelly maths teacher, Chaucer was the raciest writer of his day. His stories, like parks at night, are full of sex and poo.

So what is money? Put simply, money is the best way we have of telling how much money you’ve got.

Some people ask: Is money real? The answer might surprise you: Yes. I’ve got some ten pees in my purse, so I can prove it. On one side it’s got a lady, to show it’s money for humans, and on the other side it’s got a lion in a crown, to remind people not to give money to animals, because they’ll only spend it on stupid shit.

By the time Mozart wrote his first opera at the age of fourteen, it was clear he wasn’t normal at all. For a start, he was fourteen and could sit through an opera. Something had to be done.

Newspapers are a sort of paper version of Twitter for your nan. Apparently they still exist, but only outside petrol stations near the briquettes, behind little plastic windows, like a little news zoo.

A “journalist” is what we nowadays call a “content provider,” someone who copies and pastes what people are saying on Twitter and puts it into sentences, and it’s those sentences that make Twitter into news. But in newspaper times, people in the news didn’t just type up what they were thinking and doing, journalists had to actually go out and find out what was going on themselves, usually by hacking people’s phone messages. It was a different world.

Holding that day’s newspaper was a sign that you were keeping up with events. Either that or you were helping your kidnapper prove to the police that you weren’t dead yet.

Without newspapers we would never have heard of Piers Morgan, Rupert Murdoch or Jeremy Clarkson, so it’s understandable that in the 21st century the average person no longer buys a daily paper, in an attempt to stop it happening again.

The Olympics are an international sports contest that take place every time we have one. It’s a chance for all nations to gather together and find out who’s the best at running, jumping, throwing, horses and corruption.

In the olden days, there used to be two types of pasta: spaghetti and spaghetti hoops. Then a new pasta was discovered—tinned pillows called ravioli. Since then, science has had pasta breakthrough after pasta breakthrough, and loads of new pastas have been found.

Pasta’s brilliant.

Nobody knows how photocopiers work. Even the man who invented them, the Earl of Photocopier, didn’t ever open one up to find out, for fear that it contained the devil.

Magnets are proper fucking weird. They’re either facing one way or the other. They’re like the Brexit vote, but with somewhere to go, instead of nowhere to go and no idea of how to get there.

There are, famously, eight senses. Here are seven of them.

One thing we know for sure about school in Shakespeare’s time is that it was far easier than now, because you didn’t have to study Shakespeare.

To the Elizabethan audience, a play was a sort of film, but one you couldn’t pause unless you knew everyone in the cast and had a very loud voice.

Here, he put on play after play—Romeo And Juliet, which is about a war between some sort of Kardashians and some sort of Baldwins; Macbeth, which is a play about Macbeth, whose name (Macbeth) you shouldn’t say in a theater, even though it says Macbeth’s name in the script and people call him Macbeth in the play and it says Macbeth on the posters; The Tempest, which is sort of like Lost except there’s a wizard on the island—the nearest Shakespeare ever came to writing a proper Super Nintendo game; Richard III, which is about a sort of elephant man who’d give anything for a horse; King Lear, the really complicated one where someone loses an eye, like a boring Thor; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his sort of Disney one, with all woodland animals and fairies and songs and that.