Have you killed a man? Pray for forgiveness and thou shalt be forgiven.
Have you molested a child? Pray for forgiveness and thou shalt be forgiven.
Have you embezzled money? Pray for forgiveness and thou shalt be forgiven.
Have you fastidiously broken every single commandment and laughed all the way through? Pray for forgiveness and thou shalt be forgiven.
But send one tweet, just a single tweet from the Papal conclave and thou shalt be damned forever.
Amen.
So it is finally confirmed that the skeleton found in a Leicester car park does indeed belong to Richard III, who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field.
The findings are a great advert for the science of archaeology, and also a confirmation of how truly ancient the noble English tradition of fighting in car parks is.
Of course everybody knows that the Internet/Google/Facebook/smartphones were all created by the CIA to snoop on everyone. (Well, everyone except the Chinese, who use them to snoop on the CIA.)
Hand on heart it’s hard to be enthusiastic about them, they’ve been around for decades, chewed, spat out and chewed again a thousand times. So instead of all the tired old cliches here are some fresh conspiracies that are a lot cooler to believe in:
Microsoft are secretly collecting recordings of your stupid victory celebrations when playing Kinect Sports. They’ve developed advanced pants recognition algorithms just for this purpose.
User comments are in fact a clever RIAA ploy to put people off listening to music on YouTube. It is by far their most successful programme, their army of automated morons (commandeered by only a handful of real ones) have driven millions of people to utter despair.
Memes were invented as a tool for human behaviour research, somewhat similar to how observing seismic wave propagation is used to map out the interior of a planet. Aliens use it as a cheap, outsourced alternative to the fiddly and rather messy probing.
Loyalty cards are used by supermarkets to keep track of what kind of condoms you buy. Size and flavour are displayed on the cashier’s screen, so if they appear to be unusually cheerful, now you know why.
It’s a well-known fact that a cake can be divided into two equal slices in cooperation by two players, who each only want to maximise their own share of it. All we need to do is tell one of them to cut the cake in two and the other to pick a slice.
Without even attempting any calculations it’s easy to see how their greed balances out and guarantees a fair outcome, exactly as game theory predicts.
Except…
Here, in front of us are two people desperate for cake.
And we’ve just given one of them a knife.
“Yes, it’s those bloody scientists again. If they can’t even predict such a simple thing as an unpredictable natural disaster, of course they should be held responsible for all the destruction! I mean, what are we supposed to do? We don’t have magical powers or see visions, do we? Look, just look at the state of that altar! Awful.”
What with all the patent wars raging on between tech companies, patent trolls and various others all over the world, I too have decided to enter the game.
My resources are obviously meagre, so buying an ailing company for its patent armament is a non-starter and inventing something useful would require talent I don’t possess, and it may even be hard work, which is frankly the last thing I want.
Luckily “inventions” patented nowadays don’t have to be useful, tangible or indeed even original, so I might still be in with a chance. But what already existing thing can I possibly patent that would bring me the millions I so desperately crave?
And then it struck me while I was leafing through the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, one of those reassuringly reliable UK institutions, filled with bizarre non-stories and endless pages of readers moaning about everything.
Yes.
That’s it.
I’m going to patent the concept of disappointment.
And if you now think “Damn, why didn’t I think about that?”, expect a letter from my lawyers soon.
Isn’t it somewhat ironic that one of the oldest and most dependable internet scams is IQ testing?
“But…”
“I don’t want to hear you mentioning the M-word again!”
“But why, dad?”
“It’s not natural.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, it’s like light and dark, right? Things have to come in pairs.”
“But isn’t dark just the absence of light?”
“Night and day then, you cheeky sod. One can’t exist without the other. They were made to appear together.”
“By whom?”
“That’s not important. The only thing important is duality. Together they represent completeness. You can’t fit two Yin’s together, only a Yin and a Yang.”
“But couldn’t you just rotate a Yin and…”
“No, you couldn’t, young sir. And don’t ask me why, it’s because I said so.”
“But Ettore Majorana said…”
“I don’t care what loony Italian physicists say. When you live in your own house, you can do whatever you want in it but in my house I’m not having any particles that are their own antiparticles, so switch that cooling unit off and put your superconductors away.”
Quantum gravity: tough on causality, tough on the causes of causality.
We announce with regret that the 2012 Summer Olympics will be cancelled due to an unforeseen shortage of summer.
