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August 27 - August 29, 2024
The alt right are the alternative right. You’d think alternative meant “different” but in this case it means “exactly the same but worse.”
They fight for white rights and men’s rights, which is why it was a big deal when they finally managed to get a white man to be president.
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.
The national National Theatre is one. It’s designed to be so ugly that people are glad to be inside watching boring plays. It’s in an architecture called Brutalism, which means punching, and is why it looks like a skinhead.
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.
Some of these planets may be able to support life, but we’ve already got one of those and it’s much closer, so looking for other planets humans can live on is a bit like being married to someone you get on with perfectly well and then wasting all evening not talking to them and staring at Tinder.
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.
A really big bestseller may be read by as many people as watch a ten-minute YouTube video about a teenager unboxing mascara brushes, so books are still a very important part of our culture.
He had eight wives, all called Catherine, so he wouldn’t shout the wrong name in bed. He was a Catherine-aholic, sometimes shortened to “Catholic.”
how can the human mind be so confusing to the human mind? After all, the human mind can understand some of the most absurdly complexated things, like tennis and recipes and insurance.
Fullosophers, who are like scientists (but scientists who don’t bother actually doing anything) have for centuries asked questions about what the mind is for, and never come up with any proper answers, so maybe that answered their question: it’s for thinking about proper things, like whether you want dippers, not all that rubbish, which it can’t do at all.
The iPhone wasn’t just a phone: it was also a camera and a diary and a television and an address book and a notepad and an atlas and a radio and a torch and a calculator and a clock and a hi-fi and a cupboard full of games and a pile of remote controls and a minicab office and a bookshop and a fitness instructor and a tour guide and a translator and a weather forecaster and a travel agent and a genius. It was like a cross between the contents of a school bag and everything else in the world. This was a device which revolutionized our attention spans, crushing them down smaller than ever
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The many different languages make it much easier for humans not to understand each other, which is a great help to both arms manufacturers and racists.
Lies are meant to be bad, and in the Bible they’re one of the worst things you can do that doesn’t involve an ox. Even though we all know lies are wrong, lots of people tell lies for a living: magicians, actors, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has a different definition of lying from most other people, just like he has a different definition of sexual assault, or thinking, or hair. When he lies, he points at other people and says they’re lying instead,
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.
When is science going to stop mucking about with 5G and driverless cars and answer the really difficult questions? Things like: • Where does your lap go when you stand up? • Is wind just angry air? • What’s the heaviest day of the week? • What happens down holes? • Is a computer actually a slave? • Where do they hide the music in a piano? • If I kept a monkey long enough, would it evolve into a boyfriend? • Where do clouds go at night? • What’s the most political thing that’s ever happened? • Are busses ticklish? • What’s it like not to be here? • Who discovered the one times table? • Why
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Some of the sports they do at the Olympics are sensible (running as fast as you can, getting rid of an unwanted hammer you can’t be arsed to eBay) and some are stupid (horse disco, running as fast as you can but also a bit slowly at the same time, waving a ribbon in a foundation garment).
After he’d become rich and famous, Shakespeare bought loads of property and built a second theater. He was in many ways the Donald Trump of his day, except he had loads of talent and hadn’t completely publicly lost his fucking Maltesers.
The government has a special department of sky-boffins called The Met Office. It’s their job to try to predict what sort of mood the sky will be in from one day to the next, and, as is obvious when you think about it, they get it right about half the time. For some reason you have to be highly qualified to get a job at the Met Office, even though it’s just guessing for a living.
