I’ve been storing up a few photos over the past couple of weeks — they’re not mine, they’re just great photos from various news sources. Think of this as a very small National Geographic, with no where near as much editorial.

The first up is this startling picture of self-mutilation — it might look like tomato juice, but it’s actually blood. Shiite Muslims mark the end of Ashoura — the anniversary of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson’s death, Imam Hussein — with a sword-carrying procession that involves self-inflicted slicing. I assume no one actually dies, and they’re just mere fleshwounds. He sure looks fairly laid back!

The next pictures come from our friends at English Russia — not only do they provide glorious pictures of long-legged Slavic beauties, they also publish photos of… napalm-testing caves? It seems the Russians developed an alternative to napalm which would (or could) be used inside buildings. They wanted to test the effect on brick, and these are the results when used on an abandoned Russian fortress:

Finally, again from Russia, a ‘one in a billion chance’ has recently been unearthed: two bullets, Russian and French, that collided mid-air 150 years ago during the Crimean war! Apparently the chance of this happening is pretty damn unlikely — somewhere around one in a billion. English Russia has a few more pictures, if you’re interested.

Who would’ve thought that so much has happened there? I guess when you cover about an 8th of the world’s total land mass, a lot of incidental things can occur!

Forgive me Tolkein for ripping off your beautiful poem from Lord of the Rings. It is perhaps aptly fitting, considering he was quite famously a devout Christian man.

I should preface this rant on monotheistic religion by saying I don’t intend to belittle your beliefs; I firmly believe that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and opinions. It is your God-given and basic human right to be allowed the freedom of thought. What I plan to do here is simply state just how out-dated and perhaps antiquated a lot of our religious doctrine and axioms are. I want you to see that just because you’ve been told something, it doesn’t necessarily make it true. Because someone (or some people) wrote something 2000 years ago, it does not make it accurate or true today.

Let’s begin with the creation of the Hebrew Bible, or the Torah, sometime around 1300 BC, and the major contributing factor to monotheism in the world today.

Curiously, depending on the interpretation, some people claim that the God that exposed himself in the Torah wasn’t the ONLY God — he was just the only God that showed himself to Abraham. He may have just been the God of Israel, an idea which would fit in with the polytheistic pantheon of Greek and Egyptian Gods, and the slew of other tribal Gods that existed all around the world. Over the following years, and as more scripture was divinely inspired and added to the Hebrew Bible, it seems that the Israeli God slowly pushed out all other Gods until he was the only one:

“Know this day, and take it to heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on earth below; there is none else.” Deuteronomy 4:39

And thus, monotheism was born. Polytheism quickly fell by the wayside, shunted aside by the vast strength of the monotheistic belief system. Christianity quickly followed in the first century AD, with Islam following a little later.

Fast forward to today and the belief in a single almighty, all-knowing and dreadful God rules more than half the world.

Humans have long believed in some kind of spirituality. We want to believe that we’re not just lumps of meat that walk around for 80 years and then die, to be consumed by the earth; there’s something in our DNA or our physiological makeup that makes us inclined to believe in some kind of higher power. Somewhere along our genetic time track, between being primordial ooze and the humans we are today, something went click, and we started explaining away certain phenomena as the actions of Gods, or at least some kind of omnipresent force that watches over us.

With so much belief, it’s unsurprising that Gods literally sprung up everywhere. A God of Wine, a God of Battle, a God of Love — you name it, at some stage there was probably a God that ‘oversaw’ that sphere of reality. When Caesar won a battle in Gaul against an army 10 times greater than his, that belief in something greater, that urge to find explicate all things wonderful, he attributed his overwhelming good luck to a benevolent Mars, the God of War.

It is this slightly odd urge to attribute everything that happens to some kind of higher power that makes us susceptible to religion in general, and monotheism in particular.

I wonder if, when a male lion fends off his pride from another male, he stops to thank the Gods or God, or if he just marvels at his own prowess and strength. Why then must we, as humans, always be humble in the eyes of God? Why can our greatest endeavours only be realised and ratified with the grace and benevolence of God? Why can we not be great and powerful in our own right, and why must we thank God instead of the work by other great men and women?

The thing is, monotheistic religion actually had a valuable place in ancient civilisation. Most things happen for a reason, and monotheism was required for the development of the world that we live in today. It’s widely believed that the development of monotheism went hand-in-hand with the development of large cities and trade between countries — as people moved from villages and tribes into larger cities, monotheism began to take hold. In such a large, messy and dangerous environment — a veritable melting pot of different cultures  and tribes — a single religion, with a single God, was undoubtedly a desirable resolution to such problems.

When you swear on mighty, vengeful God to make good on a trade agreement, other believers of the same religion are very likely to believe and trust you. Before monotheism, trading and buying goods from around the world was almost nonexistent. Unfortunately, for the believers, some intelligent people quickly realised something else about monotheism: it’s very good for controlling people.

While polytheism was generally about explaining away unknown phenomena, monotheism is much more about the control of people, and much more importantly about the control of thought. God expects you to act like this and treat other people like that; God tells you what is right, and more importantly what is wrong.

Therein lies the rub: it’s not actually God telling us these things, it’s a bunch of prophets, scribes and priests. Not to be left out, even a few kings and emperors, over the millenia, have leaned over the shoulder of a scribe and said ‘Oh, I don’t like that bit… take it out.’ If an almighty being, one that was  actually omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent had written the Hebrew Bible or New Testament, then we might be on to something. Sadly, they didn’t — humans did. Now, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Religion had its place, historically. Sure, it preyed upon our inherent belief that there’s something bigger than us out there, but it did enable civilisation to grow, and develop. It made it possible for people to live in relative safety, and to develop empires that shaped the world we know today.

Now that we’ve reached modernity, religion seems a little outdated. It still controls what we say and what we do. Once upon a time, eating bacon or shellfish was undoubtedly risky; just as a homosexual relationship probably was too. Today, they are not. Today, religion — organised religion, with a hierarchy, with priests, and with a system for regulating our actions and thoughts — serves very little purpose. It might be argued that religion has killed more people over the past 2000 years than it has saved. It might be argued that the world would be a different, wonderful place if the intellectual and spiritual road-block of the Dark Ages had never existed.

The problem is this: our need to believe in something is so great and so unerring that once belief is instilled in us, it’s almost impossible to shake off. The most monstrous atrocities can happen to a person, and they will still believe in God’s infallibility; they will still believe that God is watching over them, and that he has a mighty plan that justifies everything.

The root of almost every failed civillisation can be traced back to an over-zealous High Priest

I use the term ‘High Priest’ loosely; it could be a king, emperor, president or anyone that is buoyed up by the belief of a religion’s followers.

The thing is if God actually existed, and he actually guided us, there wouldn’t be a problem. He would actually know everything that has happened and will happen in the future. Unfortunately, I can’t disprove God — no one can. That’s the key, the linchpin and the crux to every single organised religion: they prey on our fear of the unknown. That’s why every religion exists and why they are followed fervently — from tribal polytheism to modern monotheism — to explain unknown phenomena. Every single religion has some tie-in to an afterlife, or heaven, or hell, or purgatory, or even rebirth. They rely on ideas that most likely can never be proven wrong. They rely on appealing to that spiritual side of us that we seemingly have very little control over.

Perhaps it is finally time to throw away a God that disables and lessens our vast abilities. Letting someone else decide for us what is right and wrong, what we can and can’t do, is such a damn cop-out! We, the human race, are so infinitely capable; why would we listen to anyone, or a God, that tells us otherwise?

After getting all too serious on the subject of religion yesterday, I thought it’d be a fun idea to run off tangentially and talk about everyone’s favourite topic: kiddie porn.

I should probably cease the sensationalism and just tell you what I really want to talk about: the current fad of teenagers sending naked, or very revealing, photos of themselves to other people. It’s even garnered its own portmanteau word: sexting.

Sexting is the same as texting, only… sexing it up a little, either with a photo, or even a little video clip! People have been doing it for years now — God knows I’ve received my fair share of dirty SMSes over the years (even some very naughty photos from angles that to this day I can’t work out). The problem is, kids have started doing it too; really young kids. I’m talking about 9 year-olds taking photos of themselves in just their underwear and sending it to a friend. More worryingly they’re being sent to boyfriends and girlfriends too.

If you don’t find that idea worrying enough, it’s also quite common for children to upload photos to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo — these kids just can’t get enough!

The reason it’s come into the media spotlight is because these images could be considered offensive, illegal material. If a girl sends a lewd photo to a friend of theirs, their friend could technically be arrested on the grounds of collecting child pornography. If their friend then goes one step further and uploads the image to a website, or sends it to other friends, they are then distributing child porn! This is an even more heinous offence, an offence which can land them some jail time, and a juicy entry in the sex offenders register.

A recent report found that 10% of all imagery and photography involving under-age children is self-produced — and that startling fact was from a child protection agency that has catalogued more than 9 million articles!

The risk here, as always, is that kids don’t know the potential harm that might befall them. Long-gone are the days when children were hardly ever let out of their parents’ sight. Long-gone are the days when innocence and chastity were virtues to be extolled above all others.

But most importantly, long-gone are the days without computers and mobile phones. They are undoubtedly the root cause of the problem, and the reason I am so interested in this ‘outbreak’ of self-manufactured kiddie porn. Computers are so infinitely powerful; they put so much raw, unrefined power at our fingertips that it must come as no surprise that uneducated use of them can result in alarming situations like this.

We, as a population, know so little about just how much a computer enables you. In just 200 years the world has gone from being immensely huge and undiscovered to infinitesimally small, with every nook and cranny inspected and exposed — because of computers! Just 20 years ago you would’ve had to wait 5 days for a response to a query by mail. Today you get antsy if you have to wait more than 5 seconds for Google to return the correct result.

Kids, normal, non-prodigal kids, must surely be unaware of the self-inflicted risks they are introducing by taking photos of themselves. How can they possibly know the risks when the normal source of such  information, our parents, aren’t any wiser? In the past, parents knew what dangers their children could expect. Those potential dangers changed slowly — from poisonous plants, to motor cars, to getting into a car with a stranger with a lolly pop — so slowly that parents could easily keep a tab on developments.

Fast forward to today and it’s simply impossible to keep up with all of the possible pitfalls that your children might unwittingly stumble into. The parents don’t know, the kids don’t know, and I would bet that even the security services are playing catch-up most of the time.

I’ll leave you with this hypothetical situation (although it’s probably not all that hypothetical…)

A young girl sends an older boyfriend a naked photo of herself. The boyfriend uploads it to the internet (not maliciously, perhaps just to another male friend, who knows). Then, an online predator finds the image which helpfully had a filename that matched the girl’s real name.

This predator is only a couple of steps away from finding the girl’s address, checking out her home on Google Maps Street View, analysing the apparent security, the number of cars outside, if there’s a fence or not and… well, you get the idea.

The Internet is a predator’s haven; for your sake of your children, or your friends, tell them to value their little, still-innocent bodies a bit more.

Recently, my geekiness was called into question: ‘You’re not very geeky, Sebastian. All you talk about is sex. Sex, sex, sex. That’s hardly wholesome geeky talk. How about some Star Wars talk, or a list of all the comics you own?’

Let me tell you something, Little Miss I’m-a-bigger-geek-than-you : I AM A HUGE GEEK, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

The thing is, like my sexuality, I am so confident in my geekiness that I don’t feel the need to constantly reassure myself, and you lot, that I’m a geek. So, please excuse me if I don’t always talk about a fantastic new range of marbled dice or if the digital Yoda was better than the original wobbly-eared bogey-coloured rubber model.

However…

This weekend I will be attending a LAN party.

A LAN party, for those of you that don’t know — for those of you not geeky enough – is a ‘gaming festival’. It can be small — just 5 or 10 people — or it can be huge. By huge, I mean thousands of people.

Click it for a larger version. Really, click it. It even amazes me.

DreamHack, the largest LAN party in the world, has over 11,000 (eleven thousand) paying attendees. That’s 11,000  people transporting their computers from all over Sweden and Europe. The one I attend, the i-series, ‘only’ has around 2000 attendees — but really, it’s not like you walk around and shake hands with everyone there. The point is: when you stand up — you know, to check if your legs still work — all you can see is computer screens. And towers of consumed energy drink cans. And pizza boxes.

If you were to take a walk around a LAN to check out what the latest ‘case mod‘ fashions are, or what the other gaming areas are like, the first thing you’d notice is just how well everyone gets along. There’s a constant roar of chatter, and regular outbursts of shouting and roaring when a team wins a tournament match. The overall feeling is very much one of friendship and camaraderie. Geeks, ultimately, are still social outcasts. LAN parties are the only place where geeks can be themselves. The ‘cool’ facade drops. Let it all hang out — literally, in some cases.

We geeks are beginning to emerge, but it’s happening slowly. The massive success of video games in the last few years has certainly helped — it is becoming more and more common to hear discussion of video games (like WoW, or COD4) out in the ‘real world’. It’s still mainly in the 19-35 male segment, but girls are catching up!

Until LAN parties become the social norm — and we still have a few years left, trust me — the antithesis, the polar opposite, of LAN partying is clubbing.

I’ve clubbed. At university I clubbed and pubbed. I did the social thing, often 6 nights a week for 3 years. I get it and I understand why people enjoy it; why people enjoy drinking, and dancing, and losing their mind. What I don’t get is why people would club when given an alternative, like a LAN party, or simply going around to a friend’s house.

I’m going to list the pros and cons of each, so I can prove why LAN parties are so much cooler than the alternative:

Clubbing Pros:

• If you’re ugly, you can probably get laid, with enough alcohol (in you, and the unfortunate recipient)
• You can forget about all your troubles and woes — like Cheers, only with worse music — if you drink enough
• The endorphins (the euphoria) from dancing are actually quite good for you!
• A silent disco has a lot going for it but they’re not very popular… yet!

Clubbing Cons:

• If you’re female, you’ll probably get hit on by ugly guys that think they can get into your pants if they ply you with enough cheap alcohol (and date rape is no laughing matter!)
• You’ll get tinnitus, like me, which is permanent. Enjoy the ringing in your ears as you try to sleep. I hope you didn’t like listening to the quiet bits in songs.  Can you tell that I’m bitter?
• I hear the liver transplant waiting list is quite long
• You can’t hear ANYTHING in a damn club. Communication, other than the ‘point at the body part you want licked’ variety (which can be quite fun), is rendered completely impossible
• Often, you have to listen to really shit music (though it does vary)

LAN Party Pros

• You can hear yourself think — perhaps some clubbers don’t like having to hear their own thoughts? Or they don’t have thoughts… Empty, hollow shells…
• Interactive fun! Video games are healthy for the brain.
• Communicative (not, like, diseases) and team-building! Most of the games played at LAN parties are multiplayer games involving a lot of teamwork (read: shouting)
• You can make money doing it! Pro gamers can take home thousands of pounds/dollars. Eventually they’ll take home the girl too! When there is a girl to take…
• Headphones are required! You can even listen to your own music while you game! And then you can take them off to talk to people! How damn futuristic is that?

LAN Party Cons

• Your gear can get stolen (though it’s rare, and security is generally quite good at larger LANs)
• Sleep deprivation is rife (not quite as bad as liver failure though, is it?)

Wow, that’s a very short list of cons, isn’t it? That’s because LAN Parties are awesome. Clubbing only really has one thing going for it (the euphoria), something you could easily get elsewhere — on a roller coaster, or something!

From Thursday through Monday I’ll be at a LAN party. Admittedly, that’s less of a weekend and more of a ‘half week’, but a weekend sounds a little less geeky. Four of us will be going, and we’ll be sleeping in a 3-man tent. One or two of them actually read my blog, and I’m told they are slightly alarmed by my coming out. Wusses.

Ideally, we’d take some girls with us, but guess what — and this will come as a shock — LAN parties are about 95% male. It was about 99% a few years ago, with that 1% being ‘possibly female’ (it’s amazing how hard it is to differentiate between male and female geeks after a few weeks of growth and stagnation — even facial hair isn’t as much of a clue as it should be). Nowadays there are a few girls dotted around — proper ones, without beards — though they tend to be the token girlfriends of geek boys. There is the occasional bona fide geek girl, but they are rare. And coveted. I hope to get myself one, one day.

Geek girls, go to a LAN party! Don’t be afraid! Geek boys don’t bite — they just kinda… grab… when you least expect it. But don’t let that deter you! Even if you’re an anime girl (that’s only one step away from being a furry), you’d fit in at a LAN. LAN parties are like a modern-day Bohemian dream where everyone, no matter how weird and different from the societal norms can hang out and have fun!

I have a dream. One day soon the phrase ‘Hey, wanna go out clubbing?’ will become outmoded, replaced by ‘Hey, come over my place! We’ll crack open a few beers and play some Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft‘. It will be a better world; a world with less alcoholism and debauchery. Imagine, if everyone knew what it felt like to play on a Nintendo and grin like a kid, giddy with the magic of it all — wouldn’t that be a much more fun world to live in?

Sell your dancing shoes. Buy a console (and read my beginner’s guide to gaming!)

I’ll start with something most people don’t know about me: I can’t drive.

(This will seem like a total non sequitur, but hang in there, I’ll deliver the goods, trust me.)

I’ve driven rally cars at high speed down treacherous dirt tracks. I’ve competitively raced quad bikes. I’ve taken a Dodge Viper to almost half the speed of sound.

But… I don’t have a driving license. A little odd, considering I once dreamt of being the world’s greatest rally driver.

The question that everyone inevitably asks is ‘Why don’t get your license?’ I’ve even owned and insured 3 cars in the vain attempt that it would spur me on to take my test. It didn’t. I’ve taken numerous driving lessons, and even passed my theory test… but still, 8 years on, I still haven’t taken a single driving test.

Why?

Because I always meet interesting people on trains and planes. There are other reasons, like the running costs and how fat I would get if I drove everywhere. No doubt, the benefits probably outweigh the inherent problems of having to get trains, planes and taxis everywhere.

However, if I drove a car, I would never have met Donald Rumsfeld’s chief political analyst. Neither would I have been invited to join the American secret service.

It was a blisteringly hot day in July. I’d just said goodbye to my beautiful, blonde hostess in Los Angeles and climbed into a train that would take me through some beautiful vineyards to Fresno — the armpit of America — and then onto Yosemite. Just a few seconds before the train departed, a small, wiry-haired man stumbled up the stairs into the carriage and sat down opposite me. He smiled at me apologetically as I hastily took me feet off his chair — my comfortable trip to Fresno had been scuppered by a very innocuous-looking, slightly-rotund man!

After he’d caught his breath, I introduced myself.

‘Hi.’ He nods back at me. ‘How’d you do?’ (I actually say that — sue me!)

We banter a little. I explain what I’m doing so far from home, alone; he explains why he’s on a train to Fresno, alone. He seems awfully friendly, but then most middle-aged, geeky bachelors tend to make the most of human contact when they can get it — something I have to get used to, I guess…

‘So, what do you do?’ I’d noticed he had a very expensive-looking suitcase, but that was the only hint of affluence about him.

‘I work for the government.’ He grins. My mouth forms a little ‘o’ and every muscle tenses. An awfully large number of misdemeanors from my younger years quickly flash before me. Was this really going to be the end of my short but sweet tale? He must’ve noticed my alarm because he quickly elaborated: ‘I’m a political analyst.’

I relaxed and sunk back into my oversized, supportive Amtrak chair (they’re made to be comfortable for large Americans, I guess). ‘I’m just back from the Middle East, actually.’

And so we talked, and talked and talked some more. I quickly learnt that this guy had a very serious job: to visit countries that America would soon declare war on, or were thinking about declaring war on in the future. It was his job to visit Iraq and find out if the populace would welcome an American invasion and occupation. He was there, in the Balkans, before NATO bombed Yugoslavia, calculating if the risk was worth the reward.

Who did he report to? How was he actually connected to the government? He finally opened up, a little way past Bakersfield, with the grape vines of Central Valley sliding by in a blur. ‘Donald Rumsfeld. He’s my boss.’ He grinned again, and not for the first time he looked apologetic. Humble, resigned to whatever fate he’d cast upon Iraq, and the other nations he’d visited. He flew around the world, analysed the political climate and then reported back to Donald Rumsfeld; if his findings said ‘go’, they went.

If he had reported back with different findings, Rumsfeld might never have given the command to proceed with such shock and awe. Perhaps that’s why the analyst looked so bashful and minced his words. Sitting opposite was his most loyal and unswerving ally: a man from Britain, an allegiance that had been quite severely tested.

As the conversation twisted and turned — my eager inquisition digging deeper and deeper –  I could tell he wanted to talk about different things. He was single, without kids, travelling to see his mother. He wanted to talk about his life, and how troubling it was to be responsible for so many millions of Americans, and the citizens of other countries that might soon feel the brunt of the world’s only super power.

I listened for the rest of the journey. Eventually, we came to a standstill in Fresno. He stood up and smiled properly for the first time since we’d met 3 hours ago. I don’t know if it was my awesome listening skills, or the fact that he was going to see his mother — I like to think I was at least partially to blame.

As I was gathering my bags, he begun to make his way down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs he suddenly stopped and turned around. He said my name and paused; until he had my attention, or steeling himself, who knows.

‘You know, Donald was always against the war in Iraq.’

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Czech author of fiction, born in Prague, who was unfortunately only successful posthumously. He wrote in German, so that quote is merely a translation: an incredibly accurate and astutely-observed deduction that he only reached

That quote will be the basis for this article. I will expand it out and try to apply some of my own wisdom. I will try to explain why a world once so beautiful is now drab and dreary. Surely it is painfully obvious that the world we live in is still beautiful: those photos in National Geographic, or those TV shows of weird, otherworldly panoramas — they’re not lying. Those places are real and this world is still beautiful.  Objectively, we must be able to agree that the world is full of beauty. You might gripe and balk, claiming things ‘aren’t what they used to be’. You might claim that the world is a scarier place than when you were younger, fearless, running through a field of tall grass to escape your mother’s clutches.

These are subjective views of the world, a view of the world through your jaded eyes.  A view interpreted by your bitter brain. It’s not rational. The world is not ugly or dysfunctional. The world still is beautiful. We just don’t see it that way any more.

I was so easily pleased as a child. An ice cream or a new rattle would make me grin like a fool. Something as simple as a casette tape that I could grab with my pudgy hands and gnaw with my new teeth could keep me entertained for hours. Everything back then was so new and shiny; you really can’t leave any stone unturned when you’re a kid, the curiousity would eat you alive! What happens when you stick your finger in there? Why does the cat scratch me when I put it under the tap? Who comes running if I scream as loudly as I can?

Where does that wide-eyed look of amazement go? Why don’t adults jump out of bed, look out the window and smile? Perhaps they smile, but only until self-awareness returns and reality snaps back into sight. The mantle of stress settles back down upon your shoulders and the smile disappears.

Why, as adults, are we so damn hard to please? Why can’t we find pleasure in the simple act of surviving, or discovering something new? Why does being an adult like feel like nothing more than 60 years of receiving socks for your birthday?

Go back to when you were younger. Shut your eyes, if that helps, and recall a time when you were a child. A time when you were reckless; stomping around the garden, running away from your parents at an amusement park, stealing candy from the cupboard. You probably can’t remember the exact details, but you can probably recall the emotion you were feeling, or perhaps a strong smell or visual memory. You’re grinning now, right, in recollection?

Our childhood is simply full of those memories — the memories of first-time experiences. Adult life is a little more sparse, but you probably still remember your first kiss, or the first film you saw at the cinema — they are probably even more intense, undulled by the passage of time. You also remember the bad first times: when you fell from your bike and scraped your knee, or when your best friend dumped you for someone else.

These experiences (and thus memories) are so intense and so memorable that they inevitably form the basis of who you will become. This is, in fact, nurture. Nurture isn’t just being slapped for eating candy before dinner, or being told that you’ll get hairy palms if you continue so fervently. Nurture is everything that happens to you, from birth through to death. Nurture governs, through good experiences, what will become the love and passion of your life. Conversely, and this is the important bit, your bad experiences dictate what will become your fears and distrusts.

It is through bad experiences — the presence of pain, both mental and physical — that we learn what to avoid in the future. When we are stung by a bee as a child that nearly always develops into a fear of bees when we’re older. When we’re scolded by our mother for running around the house, we’re unlikely to grow into Olympic athletes.

This isn’t a new thing — it’s incredibly ancient, probably going back millions of years. Even the most basic of animals do the same: they avoid pain at all costs. It’s a survival trait! You do something wrong, it causes pain, you don’t do it again in the future. This is basic, basic stuff to ensure the continued existance of your race.

And that’s what causes us to become dull. Eventually, with enough painful experiences, we become jaded. Our decision making is so clouded by every single one of those pains that it becomes very hard to simply have fun. You can’t go skydiving because you fell and hit your head when you were younger. You can’t stand under a waterfall because you almost drowned when you were a child. It’s a survival instinct, but it’s not necessarily rational.

We’re living in a world with an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite source of beauty. Our ability to see that beauty — and reach Peter Pan’s Never Land, if you believe Kafka — is impeded only by our fears. As children we were endlessly energetic and reckless because we didn’t know of the pains that awaited us. The only difference is that now we approach everything with such boring cautiousness.  We don’t pick it up and shake it around — we’re afraid it’ll blow our hands off!

A world composed of people living in fear, unable to see the innate beauty of our surroundings is a world devoid of creative inspiration. When everyone is afraid of getting their hands dirty, or doing something just to see what happens, that’s a dead world.

Just remember, next time you have a wild idea — something fun, something awesome — don’t let what occurred 20 years ago get in the way. Just do it!

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland. With thousands of tanks and planes, the invasion was short and victory was absolute. Two days later, Hitler’s steady advancement across European borders was finally curtailed by the Allied declaration of war. It would be the last, world-encompassing dying breath of an empire that once spanned a quarter of the world, an empire that had already sustained massive social and military erosion since the First World War.

“I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Winston Churchill, Prime Minister

Winston Churchill was not Prime Minister when war was declared — Neville Chamberlain was — so most of his rousing, now-renowned speeches came later, after the fall of France. Ironically, it took Britain’s biggest failure in war to see Churchill become the prime minister. The Battle of Britain followed, as did the joining of the war by the Americans. Bridging both the Atlantic and the 250-year imperial divide created by the American Revolutionary War, Roosevelt effectively, excuse the Americanism, ’saved our asses’.

The rest is history. Messy, corpse-riddled history. But this story isn’t about America, or even England; it’s about my visit to the Poland in 2008. A trip down a cobbled, dark lane littered with the shadows of my Jewish ancestors. I stood where Hitler had stood. Hitler commanded a vast audience that filled the streets of Danzig (Gdansk) as he delivered his first victory speech. While he spoke and the occupants of Danzig gawped at their new charismatic, self-deprecating emperor, Germany’s vastly superior army was busy destroying the scattered, fragmented remnants of the Polish military.

And do you know the scariest bit about his speech? Not his passion, or immensely self-righteous attitude, nor the propoganda or his fantastic oratory control.  It’s the last few words of his speech:

“We are determined to carry on and stand this war one way or another. We have only this one wish, that the Almighty, who now has blessed our arms, will now perhaps make other peoples understand and give them comprehension of how useless this war, this debacle of peoples, will be intrinsically, and that He may perhaps cause reflection on the blessings of peace which they are sacrificing because a handful of fanatic warmongers, persons who stand to gain by war, want to involve peoples in war.” Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the Reich

Another war, another crusade. One more Earth-shaking tirade in the name of God! However, this won’t be about God or the atrocities committed for and in his name, I’ve already written more than enough on that topic… at least for now. No, this trip was simply to see Poland, to see a friend, to sample the food and the culture. This wasn’t the stereotypical trip to Auschwitz; the kind of trip that many Jews take in a fruitless attempt to absorb a tiny fraction of what war-time Poland must’ve been like for our ancestors. I can’t begin to conceive what the Holocaust was like, and I have no idea how many members of my family were mercilessly slaved and later executed.

(Old town Sopot, close to where Hitler delivered his victory speech, and one of my favourite photos!)

I couldn’t hope to experience the past, but I could certainly go and see what had become of the trading city of  Gdansk (Danzig), 60 years on. I had been lured by my Canadian friend Mike, enticed by sleazy, hedonistic promises: 

‘Just come for the weekend, Seb. You just have to pay for the flight, I’ll pay for everything else.’

‘Even the hot, Eastern European kurwas?’ Without missing a beat, I’d used one of the few words I’d learnt from my trip to Serbia (pretty photos and a fun story!)

‘If you want some certified-diseased prostitutes, Seb, we can do that… just bring your health insurance documents.’ Mike sounded awfully experienced in the ways of fleeting, paid-by-the-hour love.

‘I’ll see you on Friday.’

The next part will chronicle my long weekend in the Tricity of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot: the first of many cheap hookers; one of the few times I’ve had acute alcohol poisoning AND… of course there will be more, awful photos of me.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law

In 1968, Clarke and Stanley Kubrick finally finished 2001: A Space Odyssey – the book, and the film. It would change the way the world looked at evolution and ethics; artificial- and extra-terrestrial life. Religion and genesis.

But those are meaty topics that I couldn’t hope to cover in a simple blog entry. Instead, I want to talk about all of them combined, magic. Events that leave you so mystified, so jaw-droppingly nonplussed that you can only call out in disbelief that’s impossible! Perhaps you mumble it incredulously, wiping away an emotional tear, your raw nerves leaving you overwhelmed. It’s the same thing, though, magic: the impossible, in the blink of an eye, becoming possible.

When magic occurs, it’s like the world has been re-written. You have one moment in time, the past, where it seems impossible. Snap. You’re in the future, impossibility split asunder and replaced with a new reality. Magic occurred before your very eyes. The world changed around you. The flat line blips and shows a pulse. The Great Wall of China disappears. Poof.

And that’s all magic is, whether it’s performed by Harry Potter or Gandalf, a heroic doctor or David Copperfield. Now, the fun bit, and the tie-in to religious ‘miracles’ — magic is based on what we, by consensus agreement, deems impossible. We agree that it’s impossible for a man to disappear. We agree that, really, you shouldn’t be able to step through a plate glass window.

Once upon a time we agreed that being chained and helplessly dumped, submerged in a tank of water spelled certain death. And then Harry Houdini did it, and it wasn’t quite so magical any more; it’s only magic once, afterward it simply becomes a talking point, a fantastic improbability. The magician moves us from an impossible past, to a future full of possibilities where his ‘magic’ continues to occur around us, unabated. The cat’s out of the bag. Pandora’s can of worms hasn’t just been opened — it lies broken upon the floor, exposed, the world looking on in wonder — so that’s how it’s done! – our decision of what constitutes reality is rewritten in that moment. Magic becomes mundane.

It’s by this logic, sadly, that you disprove the existence of magic. The last 200 years have more than adequately proven that declaring something ‘impossible’ is stupid and counterintuitive. It’s not impossible, someone just hasn’t done it yet! It’s not a miracle, it’s just utilising mechanics that you didn’t know existed. Perhaps someone close to Jesus invented the sterile bandage and handed one to Our Lord — ‘Here, try this, mate’ — maybe he didn’t actually cure people with the power of God.

That’s what Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law is all about. Technology — a sterile bandage — is magic. Magic changes history, redefining our universal axioms, redeclaring what can and can’t be done. The impossible, as the cliche goes, becomes possible. Stone Henge, the Great Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower — pure impossibilities, paper-only pipe dreams, fabrications only extant in the minds of great thinkers until someone actually devised a way to make them. Technology allows engineers to transport ideas from the realm of fantasy to reality. Imagine bringing a Roman forward through time to modern-day and showing him a computer. Magus he would say. Magic.

It is for this reason that inventors and scientists belong in a higher echelon. Without them, we’d still be in sitting in a cave, lamenting the taste of raw meat.

No, it’s not a review… I haven’t actually seen the film — I probably should… — but I know enough about it to make my OWN!

The premise: a list of things that you’d like to do before you ‘kick the bucket’ (die, for you non-idiomatic types).

I know it’s a flogged-to-death idea, but the thing is… I want to do a lot. If I don’t write down what I want to do, I’m going to forget something. I’m like a kid that sees a butterfly outside, opens the door, stumbles and shambles across towards the butterfly… and then spots a football on the ground, so I run towards that, pace quickening, but before I get there, I trip and fall, face-planting into the soft grass — but that’s OK, I’m now up-close and personal with an ant hill, I’m watching the ants scurry around, living a completely different life to mine. I crawl around for a while and there are worms, rabbit holes, acorns and dead leaves, each one interesting and magical in its own way.

I smile and pick myself up, still marvelling at the other world I’d just discovered.  The butterfly’s flown off and I’ve completely forgotten about the ball, but the journey wasn’t in vain.

I’m an impulsive guy. I think of something I want to do, and do it. I see something or someone that I want, and go and get it. Incidentally, in the words of my mother: ‘Sebastian, you are the single worst person in the world to buy a birthday present for because you’ve already got everything.‘ (It’s my birthday next week, by the way, and I’ve been kind enough this year to leave a couple of things unobtained, just so my mother has an easier time of it…)

The problem with being impulsive is those butterflies get away. Those footballs remain unkicked. I might have an incredibly diverse body of knowledge tucked away in my head, and a lot of worldwide, well-tested wisdom — but sometimes I let the simple things pass me by. When I die, I don’t want to be the authority on ‘Invertebrates In The Sub-Amazonian Delta’ (actually, that’s a lie, I’d love to be the authority on anything, but hang on). When I die, I want to have experienced everything. No matter how big or how small, how expensive or cheap, how important or frivolous — the world has so much to offer, and I don’t want to pass any of it by.

And that’s what my bucket list is for.

Sebastian’s Bucket List

N.B. I reserve the right to re-shuffle this list at any time. I also don’t have to justify any of my choices, though I might be convinced to do so at a later date. This list is also not exhaustive… I’m sure I’ll come across more ‘Oooh shiny!’ butterflies as life goes on. Lots more.

1. Get married in a large cathedral –  we’re talking St Paul’s Cathedral, or St Peter’s Basilica. May entertain the idea of moving to a state like Utah where multiple marriages are acceptable, if potential secondary wife has contacts that enable use of aforementioned cathedrals… (do I have to marry a Princess/Queen?)
2. Live in a castle, one with turrets and multiple wings – a wing for my parents… and an even more distant wing for the in-laws. A turret that I can stand atop and survey my kingdom, like in The Lion King.
3. Lunch with a comedian — don’t mind which, I just want to see who’s funnier in person: me or them. For the longest time, I wanted to have a date with Eddie Izzard, but his recent Twitterings suggest he might be a bit… dull when he’s not being a comic genius on stage.
4. Hold a tiger/lion cub – don’t judge me. Boys want to do this too! Admittedly, an emasculated boy, but…
5. Go back to Italy and eat more pizza — this will make more sense after I write about my trip to Italy, and my 10-day epic journey full of trials and tribulations in an effort to find the BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD.
6. Obtain some kind of super power – a little out there, but I firmly believe I’m of the generation that will live for ever. We can’t, therefore, be that far away from ’super powers’, even if it’s something ’simple’ like heightened empathy. Flight would be neat (personal jetpack might be an easy solution to this one?) but I guess Magneto-like powers are out of the question, right?
7. Get a piano lesson from Ben Folds — favourite musician, favourite instrument. If he then played ‘Emaline’ to me I’d probably swoon and he would catch me. Later, upon waking up in his arms, I would ask him to marry me.
8. Try to make a cola variant that’s better than Coca-Cola – I’m a Coke addict, and proud. But after 24 years of chain-slurping Coke down (yes, my mother was a druggy at the time, so I was even breastfed coke), I’ve begun to wonder if, possibly, there’s something better out there. Maybe… I could make Coca-Cola even better? Unlikely, but I’d like to try.
9. Drive a rally car at high-speed around a mountain track – similar to the previous item, I also love speed. Hah, just kidding. I mean ACCELERATION! G-force! Wild-eyed, edge-of-the-seat, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants break-neck SPEED! If you’ve ever seen the ‘World Rally Championships’ and the kinds of conditions that they do 100MPH in… well, I want to do that.
10. Kiss The American one more time — self explanatory.
11. Dress up in a realistic dog costume, and actually convince someone that I’m a really large dog – don’t ask.

That’ll do for now, I’ll add more as I think of them. I’ll cross them off as and when I do them — and trust me, I’ll do all of them. I told you I was impulsive.

Did I miss anything obvious? (Hah, you all thought I’d miss out the dog-suit one… HAH! I bet you’re all out of suggestions now…)

Welcome to my first American special: Why Americans are awesome. I appreciate that I haven’t actually written a whole lot about America, so you might question my authority — and rightly so! I’ve visited a few times — about two months in total on five individual trips. I don’t claim to know everything about the States but as you probably know by now, that won’t stop this entry from being highly opinionated. Bear in mind then, as you read this, that ‘awesome’ doesn’t necessarily mean really neat, though it often does. Awesome means ‘awe inspiring’ — mouth-agape and stupefied — something you tell your kids about! Awww-sum, dude!!!

That’s why I chose that word in particular. America is awesome, no matter which facet you gaze upon. Either in military might or economic growth, America rules supreme. From the sheer vastness of their natural splendours — Yosemite, Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon — to the rich oil and gold and mineral reserves, America really is an adventurous place.

You have to imagine what it would’ve been like for an Irishman, pushing west across undiscovered America. How it must’ve felt to experience those sense-shattering sights. Mountains, glacial valleys, geysers — it would’ve been overwhelming! As I explored America, I liked to think I felt an inkling of the awe that those tiny colonies of trailblazing frontiersmen felt centuries ago as they pushed west across the New World.

It is perhaps no wonder that Americans retain an adventurous glint in their eye and bounce in their step — an enthusiasm and appetite for endeavour that precious few nations have. I guess, unlike many other countries, they still have something to be enthusiastic about. They’re still looking through rose-tinted spectacles left by their one-sixteenth Irish-blood great grandfather.

They’re big and brash

No matter which way you look at it: over wide, beautiful vistas or around the orbital curvature of an obese chest, Americans are by far the biggest race in the world. It’s no surprise, considering the seemingly never-ending expanse of their virgin habitat, that they’ve evolved into the largest of the Homo neanderthalensis. Animals tend to grow to occupy a given space — in high-density areas, animals tend to be smaller. America is huge and its population equally expansive.

The equation isn’t quite so simple though. The reason Americans are so large is because they are so self-sufficient. They have so many natural resources and such huge swathes of land suitable for agriculture that they have an abundance of cheap, locally-grown food. Couple in the fact that tropical conditions are available just short boat ride away, across the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s really no surprise that Americans are big (see Appendix A).

The brashness comes from being big and knowing you’re a force to be reckoned with, both on a global scale thanks to a huge military, and in the dusty, windswept saloons with your natural body armour. The confidence that Americans ooze is one of the (desirable?) traits that separates Americans from the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s because they’ve never really tasted defeat like most other Western nations, or just because they’re still so incredibly young in the grand scale of history.

The rest of the world knows about its weaknesses only too well. Americans are sure that they have some weakness, some flaw, somewhere… they just don’t stop to think about it. Maybe they’ll stop to think about it after yet another conquest — following yet another war that they can’t possibly lose. Because losing has never been an option.

That’s why Americans are confident.

They don’t have a class system… kind of

While the rest of the Western world is still battling with an archaic, feudal hand-me-down class system, and the undeveloped world still qualifies its leaders by the size of their ears or gonads, America is essentially classless. In England you can spot a millionaire from 100 meters. In America… good luck! A millionaire might wear a suit, or he might just wear jeans and a t-shirt, depending on how he feels. Or what’s fresh out of the washing machine.

This is because America is primarily made of new money. There are certainly a few British-occupation throwbacks — old, rich slavers  — but most rich people in America today made their own money. They struggled against adversity to become stupendously rich. Capitalism might be frowned upon by many other developed nations but people forget that America has only had a couple of hundred years to catch up with the rest of the world! Without capitalism, America would probably still be a farming country (and some of it is!)

It’s only classless by definition though. Americans still strive to be better than their neighbours, it’s just more of a low-key, Cold War affair. Bigger cars. Greener lawns. Smaller dogs. Prom, rodeo and Mardi Gras queens. Beauty pageants. Bigger cows; riding rowdier bovines and horses. America is competitive. Without a defined class system, with nothing more than the equivalent of a league of comparitive penis lengths, Americans go out of their way to be bigger, better, faster and wholly more awesome than everyone else.

That continuing, never-let-it-lie attitude of trying to one-up its compatriots and the rest of the world has resulted in their global supremacy.

You can buy anything

Thanks to capitalism everything in America has a price. Really, anything; it’s shocking and at the same time strangely impressive. In most of the Western world, manners, deference, politeness and etiquette grease the cogs of society. In America it’s money. A big, toothy smile helps too — but mostly it’s cold, hard cash.

My trips to America have been liberating. I’ve known that at any time, as long as I have some money in my pocket, I’m safe; I’m enabled. I can (and did) literally anything I could think of. You’ll have to wait for my travel stories from America before you hear about those!

Back in England and Europe I’m fettered, restricted by social norms and expectations: who I’m friends with matters, and possibly who my enemies are too. I don’t think it’s any surprise that people searching for a new beginning travelled to the New World where there were no limits to what you could do or accomplish — no more arbitrary limitations  imposed by your family’s history or religious affiliations — just an as-far-as-the-eye-can-see, unspoilt horizon and only one way to measure and compare success: money.

Appendix A: American Food

I’ll continue this tomorrow — there’s simply too much awesomeness in America for one blog entry — but for now, I want to leave you with some truly amazing culinary (I use that word loosely) creations, ripped off from thisiswhyyourefat.com.

The thing I love most about this one is the piece of lettuce. God bless America.

Two Danish pastries. And bacon. And is that the yolk of a sunny-side-up fried egg I see in the mix too?

You probably scrolled off this one quickly because it almost looks internal. Entitled ‘The Cornhole’, this… creation… this… monstrosity means I’ll never be able to look sweetcorn in the eye again. Or anyone else for that matter.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: God bless America.
That’s a chocolate cake with crispy bacon sprinkles. You can’t see, but right now I have tears running down my cheeks.
Salty-wet trails of pride. The tears of someone that has glimpsed true beauty in the form of cake.
America, you truly are one of a kind. Thank God.