The Outdoors indoors....

So, today it was our trip to the outdoors show... at the NEC in Birmingham.... several of my fellow Scout leaders and my son went along, got lost in the labyrinthine set up, went on a bouncy slackline, did some climbing, caving and looking about, ate expensive sausage, and two of us completed the Guides Go For It challenge, gaining us certificates and folding frisbees..... got lots of brochures, chatted to lots of Guide Leaders, several Scouts from Bude (where we camped last year) and I possibly applied for a new job in Telford of all places... it was the idea of working two days on four off for two thousand pounds more than I already get for five days on two off that appealed, as much as the fact that working with children with challenging behaviour has to be easier and more rewarding than working with my current colleagues.... also while there I purchased several Sporks, a strange hybrid of knife fork and spoon, that seem like a good idea, but after plenty of thought seem less and less so.... it begs the question why hybrid tools are not more common.. good old black and decker of course do multi attachment tools, which are almost hybrids, but not quite... but why not a spade with a hoe the other end (the hade? the spoe?) or a wierd cross between screwdriver and spanner (the spandriver? the scranner?).... or how about the drencil, a drill with a pencil action... or the prouse, a printer that can be used as a mouse.... ??? then there could be the so-ike, a sofa that doubles as a bike... or should that be a bofa...??? the possibilities are endless... and very reminiscent of a joke i told at the Castle Rock school review, that had at least one teacher attempt to storm the stage to prevent the punchline....

"hello," I said, in my white lab coat... " I'm a famous scientist, and i specialise inthe crossbreeding of birds, mainly pheasants... This morning I crossed a pheasant with a robin... I call it phobin... then I crossed a pheasant with a sparrow.. I called it pharrow... Then I crossed a pheasnat with a duck.. (scraping of chairs as Mr Miller figures it out!) and I called it Nigel..." massed relief from teachers... howls of laughter from school..... glare from Mr Miller....

But it was a good joke, as all things should be.... life is a joke... but, as The Comedian (heads up Watchmen fans...) admitted.... "I never said it was a good one..." and to be honest the punchline stinks, and most people just don't get it... but a joke none the less... I've often felt that nothing much matters, not really, and nothing that has happened to me has ever disavowed me of this... lets be honest, as Rick said in Casablanca "the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans.." and the problems of our world amount to nothing on a universal scale.... lets be honest, we can reverse climate change, save the whale and the tiger, and still in ten million years there will be no one who remembers what a tiger was, let alone that we tried saving them... lets be honest, no one alive can remember the napoleonic wars....let alone the dinosaurs... it is humanities greatest attribute that we can bring ourselves to seem to care about such ephemera as the survival of the red squirrel... one hundred million years ago there were no squirrels.... eventually there will be none again... but what else is there for us to care about... we don't know about the big things, even if they exist... lets be honest, most of us are happiest believing that no one outside our immediate sensory reference even exists, even if that person is someone important to us.... for centuries well meaning people have tried to make us care, but eventually we allfail to care... how many people out there pretend to care simply because they see it as how they should behave.... and then sag inside because they don't care.. I think we'd find that those people are probably in the majority... few people care, the rest pretend they do in order to fit in, just as people smoke, drink or beat up racial minorities to fit in... not because its what they want to do, but just because someone else is doing it... but I digress.... I leave you with this... the Turing test.. what did the self aware computer say when it looked in the mirror.... ? answers on a postcard please... until we all realise that nihilism is the truth, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!