I wish Hesketh would get a shift on and
forward me that strand of a hundred insults because "Jesusophile", as he
terms himself here, lacks them all. Lack. Exactly. It's a lack. He
should have them because it's a lack. (Sorry, you'll only get that if
you've seen the video, which you mustn't). Videogum
drew this Shitwizard to my attention after he posted an argument for
the okayness of inflicting pain on women during sex. Someone else then
posted a video where he demonstrated AIDS passing through a condom with
some off milk and a strainer, at which point I smelt a rat and went and
did my own research. It was the interview above that convinced me he was
actually for real. Except he isn't. It says so on his youtube channel.
Oh curse you, Internet. "You obviously have no idea how evolution
works." "People always tell me this. It's such a weak argument." Okay
so he doesn't exist, and he's Dutch, but I didn't know that three hours
ago when I had to walk him off, and a good thing too, it was a
beautiful day and I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the
animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not
only he but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be, and became
thrilled by the idea that dinosaurs had once been covered in feathers,
not a new idea I know but one it became impossible to shift. Every
animatronic now seemed very obviously plucked, and how would we know? I
thought of those brilliant medieval bestiaries in which geese grew on trees and all that's known or cared about the crocodile is that it weeps after eating a man.
("Meh,
that's a crocodile, yeah it'll do. Might have got the wings the wrong
colour but sod it, it's a naturally occurring allegory, no need to sweat
the details.") And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its
teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then
that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something
and paint it killing something else. And for the first time since I was
probably ten I yearned to visit the Cretaceous period and find out what
it was actually like, which was GREAT because until that point all those
post-Jurassic-Park, CGI"reconstructions" had
pretty much seen off my childlike di-curiosity. But THIS, seeing the
bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of
antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made
me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE. I wanted a time
machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk
trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass
while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace. Bliss.
One
of the best things about my stay in Crystal Palace was that the train
pulled up right next to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' placid - downright
pekinese - dinosaur enclosure. Googling "hadrosaur" I found an
illustration of Hawkins in his studio in New York working on new
wonders. Yes, New York: Apparently there was going to be a Paleozoic
Museum bang in the center of Central Park until the evil Boss Tweed
broke all the molds. You can read about it here,
lots of nice pictures... Now when I used to work at Quinto's
the second-hand bookshop - sorry if I've already told you this - there
was this anti-semitic, ghastly-headed twenty-something, Joe, a bright
and polite former monk with some very bad ideas. Among these was that
"the Passion of the Christ" was "accurate", and that the world was six
thousand years old. I took him up on this, and heard his thoughts on
dinosaurs. They'd drowned in the forty days of rain caused by the
bursting of Earth's original meniscus, an ozone layer of water that made
all carbon dating useless. He believed in evolution and "Survival of
the Fittest" but when pressed had no explanation for coal, or caves or
tectonic plates. Shortly afterwards he was dismissed following a chat
with our Spanish manager about Franco. But if ever you meet a
creationist don't raise the subject of dinosaurs. Surprise them with
coal, or stalactites. I mention Joe here merely to explain my
gullibility in the face of Jesusophile, and I post Jesusophile's video
up even though he doesn't exist, and isn't funny, because this is the
internet and I'm an atheist and it appears that that's what we do, we
like to make ourselves mad.
Finally here's something I wrote for "Money", which fits fine here:
'I
want to show you something. I want to show you what we will look like
in 200 thousand years time. And before I do, remember: survival of the
fittest does not mean survival of the best at running. It means, or
did mean “Who fits here? They can stay”. Okay. Behold. The man of 200
thousand years time...And they say variety is dead. And they’re
right. Because look around, look – we didn’t adapt to this. We adapted
it. Evolution can stop now.
Variety is dead.
It’s “Where fits
us?” now, not “Who fits here?” Where fits us can stay. And the rest,
the deserts, the tundra, the bits with snakes, they go. And on their
remains will be built a city without frontiers.
And it will be very expensive.
But we’ll be able to afford it.
That’s
the other thing about the future. We’ll obviously all be able to afford
it. Something to do with technology. Thank you, man of the future.'
(Man of the Future comes courtesy Paleo-Future, another cracking source of odd and ahh.)
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