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IF YOU ARE NOT 18 (or 21 in some countries - my lawyers advised me to add) it should still be OK for you to read the entries below. The language/nudity/violence/drugs rating is minimal and definitely below the level of typical advertising, music videos and song lyrics. Oh yes, I am very sorry kids, but the innocence is over as soon as the TV goes on.
FIRST DAY AT WORK
Make sure you don't have a souvenir like the one below. The day I started my first research job began with queuing up to buy some painkillers and caffeine tablets. It was just 7:04am and the rest of the day was a real struggle. I should have known, it was the 13th.
SOUL OF A MONKEY
Apparently the Vatican is now OK with evolution and admits that it is how things got to the state we see today. I guess they left themselves some space by allowing a certain "pushy force" but I don't know. However, it always baffled me, how did we get immortal souls? If there is a chain of ancestors, getting progressively more hairy as we go back in time, which one was the first to have a soul? Were his parents gutted that they were not given an opportunity of eternal life? Maybe it wasn't a particular generation that got lucky but you had to meet certain requirements on posture, brain size and perhaps the hairiness too? I can only speculate but some explenation would be nice.
EVERYONE'S GRANDPA
In most villages and small towns in Poland there is at least one individual know to the whole community for his excessive drinking and... nothing else really, getting tight is all he does. That is his job, he even gets payed for it. He often has some nice nickname like "grandpa" or "uncle" and can usually be met in front of the local shop with a bottle of cheap wine in his hand while his violet nose acts as an indicator of the concentration of sulfur in his favourite drink. The friskier types sometimes like to feel-up the female shoppers or make confusing propositions to teenage boys. Weeks go by as he manages a delicate balance between spending all the state benefits on drinking and starving himself. Occasionally, the budget does not quite work out or his body is not able to take it any more and he collapses somewhere on the way between his house and the shop. The ambulance is called and he is taken for detox. There he is washed, given new clothes, fed and allowed to recover. It is a bit like a liver-oriented spa. All of it is obviously founded out of the NFZ (Polish NHS) and in the end he is returned to the village to do it all again. A sigh of relief from the taxpayer indicates the simple fact that granpa's benefits cost them less that his visits to the special spa while the kids look up to the coolest person around, planing a similar state funded care-free career. Oh yes, the barbarian days when a lazy drunk was left to rot in a sewage are finally over.
...
Yey, there is a British version too. The profile looks a bit different but that must be it. I know three cases so far. A single unemployed guy lives in a council house, sleeps during the night, smokes pot in the evening, listens to loud music during the night. Compulsory heavy base line (techno, reggae) to make sure those thick walls won't get into the way of waking up your neighbours. I had a chance to ask two of them to turn the volume down. Oh, this lovely fresh feeling of being whipped by cold wind at 4am as you wait for the door to be open. Even though you can sense the beat through the vibrations of the pavement you still feel bad about using a doorbell in the middle of the night. So one told me that he will turn it down and in end he was kind enough to switch it off completely... after about 40 minutes. The second guy stated that "he just can't". He tried to switch the music off but he is unable, he doesn't know how. He was super high and only able to stand courtesy of a door handle. I gave up.
RELATIVITY
Do not worry, this piece is not about some cheap cosmological particle physics thrills involving Einstein and E=mcc. Anyway, the title would be more like "A Brief History of..." in that case. We often hear in the news that some poor people in this or that country have to live for 2 dollars/pounds/euros a day. Obviously that is really bad, but let just look at this example. A head master of a large secondary school of some 500 pupils is earning about 6000 pounds in a year. That means that he works for less than 3 pounds per hour. You might think that this is a case of extreme poverty but you would be wrong. This man was my father and we were a middle class family. We had a nice house, TV, computer and even a car. That again is relative. Having a car may not be something extraordinary but where I used to live only few families could afford it and having two cars was out of the question (except for the priest). As you can see, giving figures without some relative measure of how big or small they are is totally useless and so are all that kind of reports you hear in the news. In addition you may learn that the spending on the army or education had risen by 2 million pounds or 3 billion euros. Is that significant, is it 1% or 10% or maybe 100%? I have no idea.
SAME SCIENTIST
Have you noticed that there are basically like 10 cover stories for the New Scientist magazine and they only get circulated around the year? There is occasionally some new, fresh and never seen before one but usually you can make bets on the following pop culture fantastical beauties:
- Quantum Physics aka "Weirdness begins and... we are all already dead"
- Asteroids aka "The big impact (not already dead but soon enough)"
- Relativity aka "Einstein's unfinished symphony... or biggest bludner"
- Brain aka "What you think is not what you think it is thinking"
- Global Warming aka "The Waterworld in the boiling ice age"
- Black Holes aka "Staring at the galaxy swallowing abyss"
- Time Travel aka "Meet your future self... or Adolf Hitler"
- Theories of Everything aka "What's wrong with gravity?"
- Intelligent Design aka "Darwin was wrong... sort of"
I should perhaps tell you now that there are "hundreds of billions of galaxies and each one contains hundreds of billions of stars" and that an average person spends 63 hours on the toilet in a year. Fascinating? Well then, you should definitely start your career in science. It is easy, you just take lots of explosives and blow up some cars, buildings and dummies.
BETTER BE BIG BROTHER
Ricky Gervais said that for a working mum, Jesus Christ is like an unpaid baby sitter. I think it is more like an unpaind Big Brother for a totalitarian regime. I remember growing up in a little rural community where the church was the highest authority. There was no way anyone could question that. From the age of five you were scared with hell and eternal tortures. You believed that God saw everything you did, read your mind, knew your thoughts. When I think about it now it terrifies me. My childhood was a bit ruined in that way. The sense of guilt you felt after doing some silly things all children do (prank calls, making out in the bushes, making water bombs out of condoms, etc.). And the humiliation of having to tell the priest during the confession. Kids fell so strongly about God that they would even admit smoking cigarettes regardless of the fact that the secrecy of confession was often broken. The priest would go straight to your parents and tell on you. We knew that but we were so mind controlled that we betrayed ourselves all the time. Anyone would. Smoking was the worst thing that a kid could do, the punishment was severe, but then again, your parents would now leave you hung by your genitals for eternity.
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