Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 4: Roadkill

Okay, so I’m stretching this with the modern I know. There have been roads for a bloody long time, but there haven’t been super speedy motors tearing about the countryside for a bloody long time, so it evens out.

I have never killed anything on the roads, primarily because I don’t drive and therefore am never in charge of anything that goes fast enough to cause a poor little critter to get dead. I do, however, get rather upset when I see ex-critters littering the sides of the roads. Especially if said dead things used to be precious, red squirrels for example. And deer, though they don’t appear to be precious to everyone, but I love deer, and I particularly like seeing them alive, not mortally wounded by some stupid 4x4 driven by someone who probably wouldn’t even consider going ‘off-road’. But, my dislike of pointless cars can wait for another day.

Roadkill is on my mind today because a friend hit a rabbit last night. He’s a little upset and while some people don’t seem to have the compassion to care, I do and I would be upset too if I had been in his place. It’s not pleasant to be driving along, minding your own business when suddenly your wheel thumps over a poor little critter that had really bad timing. I was in a car a while back when it ran over a small mammal, we could have swerved to avoid it, but as there was another car coming the other way squishing the animal seemed preferable to squishing ourselves. Apparently these are the decisions we have to make when we take on the responsibility of four wheels and a motor.

Anyway, I got to thinking about that little rabbit that kicked the bucket last night, I don’t think it died for nothing. Think about it, rabbits breed like there’s no tomorrow, and for a lot of them there really is no tomorrow. How many of them die from myxomatosis? I don’t know the exact number, something like half of infected rabbits die. Pretty grim figures, but they still seem to thrive, so it’s all good. A stoat can wipe out an entire nest of baby rabbits to feed her family. Still, the rabbits keep going.

I appear to have digressed. This is my take on last night’s events…

There’s a fox, or another carnivorous creature, and he’s got a family, he can’t reproduce in the numbers rabbits manage and back home he’s got a vixen caring for two little cubs. It’s been a hot couple of weeks, he’s been having a hard time finding food and his family is threatened. He’s out one night, feeling hungry and sniffing the air hopefully. Then he catches a scent, there’s blood on the air. Bounding up to the side of the road he discovers a slightly flattened rabbit just waiting to be taken back to his vixen. He snatches it up, leaps back into the undergrowth and disappears. The fox family eat well tonight.

Something good comes of something bad. Sure, it sucks to be the cause of something cute and fluffy coming to a sticky end, but nature has a way of making up for these things. Why do you think kestrels can be seen hovering above motorways? Roadkill. It’s an all you can eat buffet for our wildlife.

And sometimes, when your tyre kicks as you drive over something small and brown in the road, it is just a shoe!

Queen's inspired poetry

Wrote this little poem while waiting for Andy Roddick play his quarter final match and thought it would be nice to share it. It's about Roddick, if you hadn't already guessed.

The Sharpshooter

A four-time champion
Here at Queen's.
Going for a fifth
By any means.
How many aces will there be?
I'll just have to wait and see.

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 3: TV Audiences

Apparently they let any old moron into a studio for a live recording. While watching a US rerun the other day the host asked the audience to call out things they liked about the modern world. One idiot shouted out “beer” while the slightly clever masses yelled things like “TV” or “computers”.

If you’re going to shout something out to the whole world “I am a moron” isn’t usually on people’s short list. If you want to call out something modern trying an item that wasn’t invented thousands of years ago. There isn’t much that’s been around longer than beer. As long as humans have had spare time on their hands they have played around with fermented crops. So, pretty much all the while there has been agriculture there has been alcohol. And beer. All throughout history there have been records of beer consumption. Hell, even the ancient Egyptians had beer. Sure, it was lumpy, had to be strained before drinking and barely resembled the hop and barley mixture we have these days, but it was beer nonetheless. They even had beer festivals. Nothing really changes, does it?

So, if someone ever asks you to shout out something you like about the modern world, think carefully. A lot of what we enjoy these days has been around for centuries, even millennia.

Here are some handy suggestions…
The Internet
High Definition TV/DVD/etc
Film merchandise
iPod Touch
Plastic

And some things that would make you look silly if you suggested…
Books (they’ve been around in some form or another for donkeys years)
Wall art (cave paintings anyone?)
Tattoos and body piercing (the good old Egyptians and many other ancient cultures started that trend)
Boats (how d’ya think we spread so far over the world?!)

I’m gonna shut up now and go enjoy something modern…

6:15

Woken out of slumber,
By a massive clap of thunder.
Would I get to sleep again?
I was left to wonder.

...the invisible man

Or so he would have you believe.

...fun with shadows

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 2: Gaming

If you’ve just spent the last five minutes searching around for Part 1 then let me be the first to tell you that you’ve just wasted five minutes. It’s not here. I lost it. If I remember correctly it had something to do with organisational skills. Clearly I don’t possess any.

So, on to Part 2: Gaming

Gaming (as in video/computer/etc) is, by its very nature, a modern phenomenon. The ancient Egyptians had their own games for sure, but there was a severe lack of Wiis and Xboxes. This is down to an equally debilitating lack of mains electricity. I’m quite sure that if the Romans had a healthy supply of games like Halo they might not have felt the need to conquer other nations and the world would be a very different place. BBC programs would have 2008 at the bottom of them instead of MMVIII. Less confusing but not so impressive and intellectual looking.

As far as I can tell there are three types of gamer…

The would-be professional: These people (probably the least likely to be married or have social lives that include going outside their basement homes) tear through a new game in the smallest time possible, probably not even noticing if the game is any fun at all. The object of the game, to them, is to find out the quickest way to get to the end and then post their findings on a website so that anyone equally not interested in playing to have a good time can race through just to be able to tell their mates they “did it in three hours”.

The second type buy a game to play it and enjoy it. They don’t mind taking their time over their game just so long as they get everything out of it. They’ll spend months if they have to on one game just to get to the end without checking a cheat site for a tip on how to get the last vital clue that leads to the final completion of the game. If they do resort to the cheat website they feel dirty for several weeks and probably don’t go back to the game for a while to let the smear of cheating wear off before starting all over again as a kind of penance.

The third group is generally populated by the older generations of hapless people who don’t know what the words ‘opposable thumb’ mean. This type of person will have a go at a game and laugh at themselves the whole time as they barely get a grip of the controls they need to use to make their character walk let alone perform any useful tasks. Gamers in the second group choose these people as their opponents in multiplayer games so they look good and get a chance to win most of the time. The flip side of this opposable-thumb-challenged group are the people incapable of laughing at themselves. Their games of choice are usually puzzle games that they can do in isolation with no fears of people laughing at their feeble attempts to get used to a piece of technology that doesn’t have a simple stop/go function.