The Jehovah’s Witnesses have invited me to a meeting

Somehow I’m on the radar of the local Jehovah’s Witnesses. They nabbed me outside of my house by saying (in Spanish) “You’re English right?” which I found quite interesting since I hadn’t said a single word.

I know the local Nuns now understand to keep clear after two rather unfortunate incidents when they came to visit me to discuss helping the poor and I suggested that they may find all that money they spend encouraging Africans to die from HIV might be useful to their cause. But somehow the Jehovah’s Witnesses know where I live, that I am English, and that I’m not very impressed with religion and now they want to “save” me.

They’ve invited me to come to a talk they are giving on Monday, which they describe as the anniversary of Christ’s death. It’s actually the most important day of their year and will be used to begin the brainwashing process of various fops that will also attend their cult’s event. I’ve agreed to attend on the proviso that I can ask questions. They have very foolishly agreed.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are an interesting lot. For starters they’ve firmly predicted the return of Christ and the end of the world seven times in their short history (they began as the Bible Students in 1870) and they’ve watched each and every one of these dates pass. Ripe fruit for the picking, I must say. How can they claim such certainty when their track record is 100% failure?

They also firmly believe that Heaven will be on Earth and that God will be in charge with Jesus as second in a government over the Earth. Their religion is really a political doctrine, waiting for the return of the great dictator to whom they will obligingly subjugate their every thought and right. Another ripe fruit. I wonder how clear they make it in their preliminary talks that they are anti-democratic. But it gets even better than that.

They absolutely believe that 144,000 people of all those that have ever lived will be in heaven and everyone else will just be dead. They have no belief in hell or an after life for those outside of the select group. There are currently around 6.5 million actively preaching Jehovah’s Witnesses on Earth and it is estimated that there are around 16 million in total. So what exactly is the hook to get people to join up? Well, absolutely fucking nothing if you can handle a little simple mathematics, since even if you are one of the really active, gung-ho, motivated, shout it from the hill tops, piss people off by interrupting their hangovers by knocking on their doors in the morning, Gawd-fearin’, word spreading, numbskull believers then you still only have a 2.2% chance of getting into Heaven if you are willing to ignore all the non-preaching members and all the ones that have already died. And of course, everyone before this nonsense started in 1870 is just fucked anyway. Hahaha, you’ve really got to laugh.

So I think I might take them up on their offer and head over for a chat on Monday night. I might mention the topics above or I might have chat about the morality of withholding blood transfusions from children and the fact that the incidence of death during labour within their group is 100 times as high as that from people that don’t have a hard time accepting some life giving blood. If I do I’m sure they’ll get rid of me pretty quickly since they immediately shun anyone from within their own ranks that raises any issue of doubt.

If I go I’ll record the lot and transcribe it here. Feel free to add any tips or useful arguments you might think make good ammunition between now and then.

If I go then I’ll have succeeded in making the danger list of the local Catholics, the Muslims and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That only leaves the local Hindus but I’ve already met them (there are only about 5 of them anyway) and they don’t mind at all that I completely disagree with their religion and we get on pretty well.

UPDATE: 2007-04-02 10:28
Due to an absolute failure to sleep last night and the fact that I'm almost certainly going to have a really shitty Monday at work, I suspect that I will neither have the energy or the patience to attend the Jehovah's Witness meeting tonight. We'll see, but it's really not going to be productive if I turn up tired and pissed off as then I'll play right into their hands by appearing to be the angry, evil atheist as opposed to the pleasant, good natured, atheist. There'll be plenty of other chances.

The lack of sleep was due to an unusually severe bout of unhappiness. I usually don't suffer from it having become quite comfortable with meaninglessness. Recently however I've been realising how at most times in my life I've at least had some chance to still meet and talk with people that at least are aware of some of the things I'd like to talk about even if they don't agree with my opinions. For two years now I've not met anyone that doesn't seem utterly uninterested in their own existence and I think the angst was just another bout of feeling irretrievably isolated. Just another reason to move somewhere with more options and also time to dust off the CV and change jobs.

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God makes you pointless.

God is probably the square shaped peg that many reality-challenged individuals are continuously trying to hammer into the round hole left in their minds by the utter meaninglessness of their lives. This is something I find quite ironic.

It’s pretty simple. If God is this absolutely everything of everythings then his existence makes you pointless. Nothing you do is outside of the plan, and upon completion of a life dedicated to His idiotic rituals and obsessively stupid rules you get to go to heaven to spend life in the perfect state of being with god. In other words you become immutable.

Being in the perfect state means that all time will be the same. You can’t have a bad day in heaven since all days are the best they can possibly be and that means all days are absolutely equal. There is no variety in perfection, which is another logical nail in the coffin of the theistic fantasy that is already just one big mess of a billion nails and a few splinters of shattered wood waiting to be swept up from the floor of the reality.

If something doesn’t change then it doesn’t exist because any and all interaction is change and so no change means no interaction and no interaction is exactly the same as not existing. If you don’t believe me then you are free to try and pass a nanosecond without interacting. You can’t do it can you? Nothing can. Everything that exists interacts and it is only by its interactions that we can say anything exists. Everything therefore changes and this is abundantly clear.

So for there to be a perfect state, the acquisition of which is your purpose, your purpose is actually to become purposeless and pointless – to become null. Your goal is to become nothing. It’s kind of hard for me to figure out in this case why you are all so afraid of death and feel such an enormous need to believe obvious nonsense since your ultimate objective is to race right towards something which is equal.

But then, religions never do make sense and rarely are religious people able to think sense. It really is time you all just grew up and stopped behaving like frightened children. You are going to die and not exist any more – big deal! Get over your ego and get used to it. It’s really not so important and really not so bad and even your fantasy doesn’t save you from the fact that there is no ultimate meaning to your life. Just try to have a life you find fulfilling and stop using your idiot philosophy to make other people’s lives worse.

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Try to help these women.

Ms. Amouna Abdallah Daldoum (23 years old) and Ms. Sadia Idries Fadul (22 years old) are two very unlucky women. They are about to be stoned to death for the crime of adultery in Sudan whilst the man involved has already been acquitted. I don't agree at all that adultery should be a crime but even in backward dark age recesses like Sudan, where it is a capital crime, how is it possible for the one party (male) to be acquitted and the other (female) guilty? What a disgusting caricature of justice this is and of course we have religion to thank for it all.

You can try to help them by signing this online petition. Please do so!

Now, you may be thinking, and probably quite rightly, that your signature on this petition will make no difference at all. I ask you to consider however that there is a small chance that it will and that it is worth a couple of minutes of your time to attempt to save another living person from the horror of their death. What we do not achieve today by our efforts we accumulate to achieve tomorrow. Your signature is not wasted.

If you are not familiar with just how brutal stoning is and you are "comfortable" with watching extreme violence then I suggest you watch this video of death by stoning. If you are not "comfortable", as I am not, then I still suggest you take a deep breath and watch it anyway. This is reality and you must be prepared to face it. It will not change unless you do.

Please sign.

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It’s the end of the world as we know it.

I’m going to make a bold claim. Those living today are amongst the very last of the human race. In fact, we are so close to extinction that very many of us alive today will be around to experience it. This probably seems like an extremely stupid claim. We are, after all, greater in number than we have ever been and we have more knowledge of how to survive than ever. We are seriously working, and indeed we have had much success, on projects to protect ourselves from invisible enemies that infect our cells and cause our deaths. With accelerating advances in genetics it is very probable that it won’t be very long before there’ll be nothing viral or bacterial left to kill us that we can’t stop with readily available therapies. With our telescopes and rockets pointed to the skies we are just a few short decades away from immunity as a species to giant space rocks. Global warming might be an issue but even if it kills lots of us it isn’t going to kill all of us, not even close.

So where exactly do I see the threat that is going to form the ribbon we cross at the finishing line of the human race?

Well, that’s a bit of a misleading question. I don’t see it as a threat any more than I would see the ground as a threat if I were to fall out of an aeroplane without a parachute. I see it as an inevitability, the logical progression of observable laws. And I think it is pretty simple to demonstrate that this is true if we follow the logical progression of our technology. But first, let’s be honest about ourselves.

Yesterday I was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room waiting to have an extraction. I’m not particularly fond of pain and discomfort but I’ll also admit a slight curiosity. Since I’m going to suffer it anyway I might as well be interested and get some value for my suffering, which is why I asked for a mirror to allow me to watch the proceedings. It’s a worthwhile thing to accept that you are meat and it reminded me of a time when I was at university and I bought a sheep head to dissect – it’s pretty difficult to get some of bits, the components, off. But this is irrelevant, so back to the point. Whilst waiting at the dentist I picked up a number of magazines. One of which is a lay science magazine published in Spain called Muy Interesante. It tends to be full of brief explorations of the most marketable topics, such as the anatomy of the breast, the hideously deformed, killer bees, asteroids, aliens and that sort of thing. An article that took my brief interest was about the capabilities of the human brain. They stated some performance characteristics without stating any evidence to support these claims but it doesn’t matter how accurate or far off their estimates were. What matters is that the human brain like any of the human body’s components has limits, wherever they are. Just like my teeth seem to have performance limitations, so does my mind. So does yours.

In the last hundred thousand years or so there is little doubt that the hardware specification of the human brain has changed by approximately nothing at all. The software we run on it, programmed by accumulated knowledge through education has improved quite a lot, but it is unarguably true that there is a limit to how fast we can process, how much information we can accumulate and at what rate and how much of that information we can correlate at any one time. For example, there is nobody alive that can simulate protein folding in their head, despite the fact that it is occurring constantly within every cell that makes up their head. We simply don’t have the capacity to perform such tasks. Computers on the other hand do. It’s an extremely laborious task for even the most powerful of supercomputers or grid computing networks, but previously it was impossible and now it is just slow. Soon, computers will be fast at this task whereas we will still be absolutely incapable. Similarly, there is nobody on this planet that has equivalent knowledge to that contained in Wikipedia. Our technology is advancing ever more rapidly whilst our brains are staying the same. Our technology can and does already out-knowledge us and out-perform us in many ways and in more ways literally every day. It appears to be inevitable that at some point our technology is going to be able to out perform us in every way. I think there is good reason to believe that the day when that happens is not far off.

Let’s explore an example - Robots. Right now the robot industry is starting to take off basically because robot capabilities are becoming more useful. We already know for instance that robots can weld cars together faster and more accurately than humans. When this technology was first coming into use there were job losses and people weren’t very happy about being replaced by machines but replaced they were because the machines were more cost efficient and arguably more reliable. We adjusted to this. Now we take it for granted that robots do some of the work in making cars. This was not a new situation – previously manual smelters had been reduced to a niche market by the use of machines in the industrial process of metal supply. Economies of scale and efficiency forced machines to take over where once we had been. After a short time nobody cared and I don’t think I’m wrong when I claim that not a lot of people have a problem with machines being good at some basic jobs. But it isn’t going to stop there. Trials are underway right now of robotic surgeons. Within ten years it is expected that some surgery will routinely be carried out by robots for the simple reason that they have advantages over us. They can work more hours, suffer no fatigue, and they perform in tight little areas with exceptional accuracy that human surgeons would find difficult to match. Machines are improving but we are not. We can design them to have abilities that we do not have and all the time their intelligence is improving. It is intelligence that is the key.

If you have used a computer for any number of years you may have noticed that they are getting more complicated. They are able to do more and do it faster. My sister has a web cam on her notebook that is able to perform face recognition and accurately overlay a moustache upon her face, even when she moves her head. One of my computers that I use for music is able to hear me say “Daisy (the name I gave it as I know nobody called Daisy), house, jazz, play” and respond by stating “Playing Little Louie Vega” before firing up my media player and filling my house with music that I like. This may seem irrelevant but what is obvious here is that computers are learning to do things that previously only we and other animals could do. They are learning to recognise faces, voices, words, objects, all sorts of things. Computer monitoring systems and instruments recognise things we cannot recognise, such as radiation levels, toxic odourless gasses, particle trails, and so on. Computers are developing the skills we do have and the skills we don’t have. They are catching us up in some ways and have already far exceeded us in many others. And all the time we are staying the same.

So, whilst you may be comfortable with automated welders, automated safety systems and maybe even automated surgeons (I know I will be once they are demonstrated to be effective) have you even thought about the fact that it probably won’t be very long before technological systems are able to do other things better than you as well? You should think about it, because the day is coming. The day is coming not just when they can build your cars but when they’ll be better drivers. When they are, how do you justify the risk to others of driving your own car? They’ll make better police officers, better lawyers, even better judges and politicians. They’ll even be better prostitutes, able to monitor your neural activity, blood flow, hormonal levels and brain chemistry and adapt their behaviour, their skin temperature, dimensions, motions and murmurs to be the best fuck you’ll ever have – every single time.

What I’m getting at here is that there will not be one thing we do that they can’t do at least as well and almost certainly better. From poetry to neurosurgery, we are rapidly nearing the time when computers really will do everything better than us. So what will we do and more importantly what valid argument can we make that we should be allowed to do anything at all?

Think about it. If a machine is a fairer, more observant, more loyal, more effective police officer than a human can be then we are punishing other humans if we allow a human to continue in the role. If a machine is a better brain surgeon than any human then we are risking lives to allow a human to continue operating on her fellows. If a computer teacher can educate my child more personally, more efficiently, more enjoyably and to a higher level than a human counter part then what right do I have to condemn my children to the relative ignorance and social disability of having been educated by a fellow ape?

So where does this leave us? Well for a time I expect that we are going to begin to improve ourselves with technology and we will do so by choice. I’m having an artificial tooth implanted in my head and most people are comfortable with this. It enhances my ability to chew over what my “natural” abilities had become. Amputees are quite keen to have better prosthetic limbs; visually impaired people are quite keen to have corrective technologies also. But it will not stop at just repairing what is wrong and indeed it has already passed that point. Laser Eye surgery can now provide better vision than 20/20 and people are opting for it. Designs and concepts are already published for implanted mobile phones that vibrate bones to reproduce sounds and monitor the vibration of the jaw bone to hear your voice. Implantable headphones are already designed to give you your music as loud and clear as you want without damaging your hearing. But maybe this doesn’t convince you.

Then how about this - I work in technology. A vast majority of the people I work with have a Blackberry to give them access to their email all the time. Wi-Fi and other mobile technologies give us access to the information we need all the time. Hours are spent on messenger sharing lines of code, discussing issues and coordinating efforts. More hours are spent googling to find key information and instructions that we need. Wouldn’t it provide an advantage, just as mobile Internet access does, if I could search Google by thinking and have the information reported straight back into my brain? You bet it would. The internet has already become my memory. I can safely forget pretty much everything and just remember the process of how to find it again. Would I be a more effective employee if I could just think to find that information instead of use my fingers on a keyboard and have to read it all again? Absolutely! Am I already more effective than the guy that has to try to remember every little detail because he makes no use of the reference potential of the Internet. Of course I am, and I prove this everyday. I work with lots of people with more knowledge than I have in specific fields but I solve problems faster than they do because they only do what they know. I retrieve the correct information for the specific task every time instead of sometimes trying to knock square pegs through round holes and the process of doing that is getting easier and faster all the time.

An example might help to prove the point. Let’s imagine that I decide to undergo an upgrade. A technology is available that allows me to put a calculator in my head that I can use by thinking. In my job I regularly have to work with numbers. I switch between hex and octal and decimal and aside from the smaller numbers I do most of this with a calculator. This requires me to open the calculator, or find it amongst the 25 apps open on my screens, tap in the numbers and hit the right button. The upgrade will allow me to think a number and immediately see it in my mind in all three notations. This is a tiny difference but I’d guess it’s going to save me 20 seconds or so every time I have to convert a number, which may be 100 times in one day. Suddenly I’m 20 seconds faster than the guy that’s using the calculator, 2000 seconds faster in the day. By itself that might not make much of a difference, but if you add a few extra features such as the ability to reference information, access and answer my email, use MSN messenger, answer my calls, securely login to servers, write documents, read documents, query databases, etc, my efficiency will go through the roof and all I would have done is remove the keyboard and for that matter also the screens. I’ve cut out the middlemen, my fingers and my eyes, and there is no reason that far more can’t be cut.

Just as people adopted the mobile phone and the Blackberry they will adopt technologies that over power those. At first these will be external but they will migrate inside the body for the interface benefits that this will provide. And once we are interfacing directly with the brain, able to enhance some of its functions we are back to where we started with technology as a whole. Every part of it will improve whilst what is left of us will remain the same. We can enhance up to a point, but then we can only replace. Ultimately we lose the race because there is no part of us that will not eventually be better if we replace it with a machine and not to do so is irresponsible. To make our limitations sacred is to declare our failings a sacred right to impose upon those around us and it is inevitable that those that ignore what is sacred will be more capable than those that don’t. Natural selection thus applies.

The end of the world as we know it is the end of us. Machines will be better than us at everything and they will be better than us soon. We can either pace them by augmentation for a while or just abandon the race and become their pets. Either way, we have no choice but to accept that we are becoming obsolete and that our days as the so called superior species are close to over. If you follow technology and you have an interest in AI, nanotech, quantum computing and the like then you are no doubt aware that we are already crossing the imaginary line to some really fantastically important technologies. I don’t know exactly how this will proceed, but I expect within 30 years we’ll have a good idea whether the human race has 50 or 100 hundred years left in it. I seriously doubt that it will be any more.

So assuming you buy my bold claim, which is of course up to you, do you think this should change our dreams of the future and our fantasies of what is to come. Does the idea of Star Trek not start to look a bit silly? Don’t you think that other races, if they are out there, are on their way or have already crossed the technology boundary too? Biological evolution, without wanting to demote it because there really are so many fantastic solutions many of which we are no where close to equalling at this time, is just the beginning. Technological evolution is the future of this world and probably every other upon which life starts and is given enough time. The world as we know it is almost over and I see it as no different to Homo Sapiens ending the world of the Neanderthals. We are not permanent and we are fortunate to live in such an interesting time – we get to live on the boundary that marks the most important transition that life has taken on this planet since the first cell wall. Some of us may even pass that transition, but certainly many of our memories, thoughts and ideas will. That is your immortality. You don’t get to take it or leave it – it’s going to take you.

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A nice excuse

I think I'll update this post later with some of the various excuses I have used in my life when I get the chance, but for now I just wanted to share that I've just given a nice excuse at work as to why I won't be working on something later today.

"I'll be on drugs and I won't be useful"

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Why not?

If you have ever thought about how it would be to suddenly find yourself a few hundred years back in time then maybe you have also wondered how much you would respect the people around you, their convictions, their beliefs and their behaviours. This is how I feel everyday. I’m not saying that I know a perfect way to be, because above all I know that everything is pointless and that better and worse are subjective and as meaningless as the suffering we may measure them by (which still we do not). I’m only saying that I recognise everything around me to be stupid. It pisses me off to think that I live amongst witch doctors and warlocks and the thronging masses of retards that think this is truth.

As far as I can see we live in a world full of clueless idiots, and I count myself amongst them with no pride nor feeling of compatriotism. Even the wise are disabled by their education as morons within their moronic cultures. “I’m so proud to be Catalan, or African, or English, or Christian or just plain fucking stupid and preoccupied with meaningless meaning and insignificant significance” - I fucking hate it all, the drain on my time and energy, and I just want to be free.

But what is freedom?

To me it is telling my boss to go fuck his father in the ear and saying good bye to all the constraints of companionship, familiarity and responsibility that my loyalty currently binds me to. And I am bound only through choice, only through my understanding and appreciation of the shock it would cause to those to whom I wish no harm if I lived as I want to. Life is the credit card with the unknown limit and the unknown expiration date. I wish to spend it, not cautiously but wildly until it runs dry and collection day is here. I fucking hate this waiting, pretending that something meaningful is happening when really all that is happening is that the unknown date on that card is drawing closers every second. I want to throw it all away, jump on a plane and start off again back in India and then wherever I go from there. I know my life means nothing and so I want to live it in a way that means something to me. I want to live it in a way that keeps me interested, even if fearfully so, of what happens next. I am tired of living in the past, remembering to fear the future as I was taught.

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Other interests

I know from my stats that I have a handful of regular visitors. I notice them mostly by the fact that their referring URLs are blank instead of the usual slew of theistic phrases peppered with profanities. So out of respect for that appreciated handful I thought I'd let you know what I'm up to.

First off I've just had a very nice holiday with my children. We enjoyed a mix of sea and mountains and the days I get to spend alone with them count amongst the most special in my life. On top of that there was the addition of four puppies to my household fairly recently. As they've bene growing they've become much harder work and just cleaning up after them, which seems to be a near impossibility thanks to their ability to make mess faster than I can clean and organise it, is leaving me feeling pretty tired. With the work that piled up during my holiday now rolling back over me like a mud slide I need another holiday again and I have suprisingly little time but that which I do have I'm not using for blogging and there's a very good reason for this.

When I started blogging I really just wanted to try out writing again. I've not been very impressed with the results and the obvious culprit has been a lack of dedication. Religion is such a huge topic, thanks to the potentially infinite variation of the imaginary, and to write about it properly requires more research and fact checking than I've so far given. The result is stuff that I really don't want to write. I want to be clearer, cleaner and more precise.

I've also been figuring out what I want to write about. It's important to have an objective and I've not really fulfilled any of those that I do have. On the one side I want to write personally. I want to share thoughts and experiences in a more emotional and personal way, without caring for the facts any more than you care to check your blood oxygen and glucose levels before you write in your diary that you are feeling tired. On the other hand I want to deconstruct religious nonsense and add something genuinely beneficial to the fight, and it is a fight we are in, between madness and reason - between progress and retardation.

So the result of all of this is that in the small amount of time I do have I have been setting out the projects that do deserve my time. There are essentially three of these, but they split into many subcategories and there is considerable cross over between all three.

The first is that I want to improve this blog. I've started work on a redesign having listened to the odd comment about the dark background being difficult on some eyes. It will be changing soon. I've also got every intention of making this a far more serious effort at genuinely offering a resource of interesting arguments and information against the theist crap still being used to fertilize (although it might as well be 'sterilise') the minds of children everywhere. At this point there is considerable cross over with my second project.

I've begun researching, planning, and even writing a book directly targetted at Christianity. Since no child is born christian it might be considered a deconversion book. It's a difficult objective for sure and anybody reading my blog is welcome to doubt my ability to deliver, but I think I'm on pretty solid ground. There is a great deal that I have not written about on this blog or in the comments sections of any others that has made planning the book a doddle so far. Adding the meat to those bones will require a great deal more effort but I think I'll do just fine.

And that leads me into my third project, which is a precursor to the second. I've come up with a new idea for books which I will not go into at this point. I've eplained the idea in some detail to a patient friend of mine and the feedback is more than positive so I think I shall invest the effort and complete it. My own book will depend upon this idea and I will make it freely available for any other budding authors to use when I am done. It's sort of a book on steroids. Book 2.0, you might say - but without the hype, just the good ideas.

Anyway, just to give you something to read whilst I'm finishing the redesign I thought I'd post a few paragraphs I wrote way back when I decided to start blogging but about a year before I actually got around to it.

Here it is:

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Ok, so I’ve decided through some deep and nagging need that I want to publish some of my thoughts on a web site and maybe someone will read them and instantly the troubles begin. What should I say? What’s my objective here?

Straight away the little ego demons start to bite my ankles telling me to jump up and down and scream to everyone what a clever individual I am. Or more precisely it’s the fear. “You’d better be clever” the demons say, “Or the real demons of this world, the people, will jump up and down to tell you what a worthless fucking fool you really are. Maybe you’ll believe them”.

These thoughts do not seem conducive to an honest expression of whatever little point it is that’s bugging or exciting me at any particular time. For this reason, all hopes to impress or even satisfy will remain well and truly damned and forgotten.

Here’s what I think. Random and free from even my own expectations. Take whatever entertainment from it you can.

The difference between writing for a book and writing for film and TV basically boils down to the censorship. You can make a movie as strong as you like, but you’ll get a huge amount of shit and probably scenes cut out if you push just a little too strong. But with a book it’s different. You can go as far as your imagination (or personal experience) will let you go. No one serious is willing to come out and suggest banning a book. And if they do you’ll instantly have a million active defenders, even if they hate what you wrote.

A stiff hard cock, gently pushing into her womanhood is standard fare in many respected novels and I’ve read far stronger in many. But when was the last time you saw that on TV? I’ve seen Richard Gere, sadly it must be said, in a significant number of love scenes in dire romantic comedies but it has to be noted that I’ve not once seen his thrusting prick, proud and erect staring like a giant throbbing cyclops at me from the cinema screen.

Movie makers of course are hard pushed at points to maintain integrity when bringing versions based on books to a cinema going public mostly too lazy, too busy and too stupid to read. Sometimes the scenes must be changed in order to pass the various regulatory commissions of morons deciding what it’s safe for the public to see.

One scene that springs to mind is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, during their stay at the Flamingo Hotel when the maid unexpectedly enters the room. Various factors of the scene, like the vomiting, have been toned down for the screen and other parts are changed, but it’s still a good scene. In the book, both Dr. Duke and Dr. Gonzo are naked. In the film, they are both clothed. In a film full of drugs and the most socially abhorrent behaviour known to man, the spectre of the penis would still cast a shadow over the future of the scene. Cut, cut, cut. What is it with all these freaks wanting to cut penises everywhere?

The director, or who ever came up with the idea, made a good attempt to recapture the severity and ridiculous nature of the scene. They dressed Dr. Duke in huge rubber lizard legs and feet and an enormous green strap on lizard tail, amongst other things that is. It went someway for me towards providing the scene with the stupidness necessary to make the point and good for them. However this makes me wonder about other ways to beat the moral guardians and get true book content to the screen.

Hell, use animals I thought. It’s obvious. Why not when Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are just getting down to it in a romantic comedy version of a Clive Barker novel, can’t we just substitute the actors for animals to keep the full strength of the scene? Watching two humans fuck is of course obscene, but it’s practically natural history education to watch a Viagra powered chimpanzee chase a female chimp around the screen. So what if the setting is a Manhattan apartment with a hugely expensive view and football pitch sized terrace instead of some leafy grove where the banana is still king? Who could complain about that? Surely the chimpanzees are happy.

It seemed so simple. This was how to truly bring literature to screen. And why use only chimpanzees? Maybe mountain goats or crocodiles would serve to bring more sensitivity to these intimate moments. For violent scenes like rape, use penguins to deliver full power to the drama, not just to arouse, like for instance a comely duck. Tax exemptions for using endangered species would be helping art and nature. Perhaps the WWF will get behind the idea – that‘s the World Wildlife Foundation and has nothing to do with wrestling, as far as I know.

But I’ll not be writing a book, or at least not yet. I’ll be writing a blog – a stupid web site from which to scream my thoughts and opinions at the world as though I have any right to. There’ll be no room for animals to help me through difficult or strong topics and I’m damn sure nobody would even consider objecting to my deletion as they would if I wrote the same in some book that some other idiot wanted to burn. I’ll be fucked from the start, it’s obvious. But I’ll do it anyway. Something worthwhile will come of it maybe. I will see. And if it doesn’t I’ll head to the zoo and steal the penguins and try to remake Requiem for a Dream or Train Spotting. “Choose fish. I didn’t choose fish I chose heroin”. I wonder how difficult it will be to get their beaks and the audio to synch.

It doesn’t matter. If people the world over pay again and again for Richard Gere and Julia Roberts to pseudo-fuck within the cock and cunt free constraints of Christian cinema morality then the last thing I need to concern myself with is caring what others think. Most of them very certainly do not.

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