Catmachine

Our memories are a very useful manual on how not to live your life. Never mind the rose tinted spectacles, for a lot of us the events that really spring into sharp relief are those viewed through blush-tinged goggles. We torment ourselves over and over again over how much of a fool we made of ourselves in such-and-such situation, despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person that remembers these faux pas is ourselves. There is one exception to this rule. When we get drunk and make a fool of ourselves there is a tendency of some people to never let us forget it. However this behaviour is most often observed in people who often do the same thing themselves and their attempts to get everyone else to remember that time you went swimming in the fountain in the town square at the end of the evening are merely an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they pissed on a policeman's shoes the week before. But most of the time we're the only ones cri...

As a child I was absolutely terrified by skeletons in general and skulls in particular. I am curious now as to where this fear sprang from. Of course skulls are associated with death but as a very young child death is something you are blissfully unaware of. Is the fear of the skull something built in, an instinct that evolved over time or is it something that is learned? Very young children do learn to recognise faces very early on, and smiles in particular. You would expect that a baby's instinct upon being presented with a skull would be to smile - the skull is, after all, a very simplistic representation of a smiling face. One way of testing this would be to experiment with babies and pictures of skulls but this could very well turn out to be unethical and cruel should the findings of the research be that that a fear of the old bone face is not learned but is in fact built in... It could well be built in. In prehistoric times human bones would generally only be found in...

I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of procrastination. The bulk of human behaviour can be traced to an evolutionary advantage at some point in the past, even if it's one that no longer applies. Wanting to gorge oneself on carbohydrate and sugar rich food ? Yes, an advantage in times of scarcity. Xenophobia ? Repugnant these days but undeniably an advantage in days when you and the tribe in the next valley were competing for the same food source. Love? But of course, love leads to sex and sex leads to children; miniature copies of yourself to act as vessels which will carry your DNA down the road of time into the future. There's no intent here, it's all cold mathematics . Those people who were greedy / xenophobic / loving simply survived marginally better than those that weren't, with the result that the world now consists of us, their descendants. And rather annoyingly we now have to unpick all that instinct because some of it is quite clearly a supernormal s...

Increasingly these days I find myself waking up in the night and worrying about death. Worry is far too mild a word for it. Blind panic would be more appropriate. Logically of course I know there is nothing that can be done to escape it. Intellectually I can be certain that the idea of an afterlife was only made up, initially to stop people going insane with fear and spending all their time in a blue funk instead of getting on with whatever it was they needed to do in order to be a valuable member of society and perpetuate the species. After a while the concept was adapted in order to control people and make them obey out of a fear of the quality of the place they would be allocated after shuffling off this mortal coil. My fear is not this kind of fear, the fear of Hell. It's just the fear of Not Being. But I'm not quite sure why this fear is so strong. When I cease to be I will have ceased to be and there will be no me. There will be no me to know that I'm not there. ...

Awoke early this morning and spent a miserable couple of hours tossing and turning whilst hoping that the severe headache that had me in its grip would just GO AWAY . In the end it didn't which was most unsatisfactory. I had to get up and go in search of painkillers. Luckily I didn't have to go very far - they were in the kitchen. This is a marked improvement on the occasion when, whilst still living in Astra House , I had to actually get up at 3.30am, get dressed and stagger up Preston Street and along Western Road and into actual Hove before I found a twenty four hour store where I could buy some piss weak generic painkillers (not even something with added codeine oomph). I learnt a valuable lesson that night; always keep painkillers in the house. You'd have thought that by now we'd have evolved out of tension headaches  which are no good to man nor beast. I mean, from an evolutionary point of view they're a terrible burden... Thugg the Caveman sleeps in a ...

"God does not play dice with the universe" Albert Einstein I find it astonishing in this day and age that the whole business of "should Creationism be taught in schools?" is even discussed. It's not an issue of religious freedom - people should free to believe in whatever they like however stupid it is. It's an issue of whether what should be taught in schools should make fucking sense. By all means teach people about religion in schools ( some people believe this whilst other people believe that and sometimes people kill other people for not agreeing with them ) but anything about the way the universe actually works should be based on facts or at least as close to facts as are currently available. When something is unknown that too should be made clear. But , argue the Creationists, Evolution's just a theory too, goldarnit! No. No it isn't. It's just logic. To be honest I don't even think it should be dignified with the epithet "t...