Monday, September 13, 2010

Please don't do this to our kids

I was playing a game of pool last night when something amazing happened. I hit the white ball with the end of my beautifully bronze chalk decorated pool cue and it rolled up the table hitting into the red number eleven ball which then started moving, without me touching it directly at all, in a whole different direction from the one the white ball had been moving in, and then this red number eleven ball rolled into the hole in the corner of the table where it fell into a small net! Wow.


I felt the joy John Mainard Billiard, who was the pool boy sleeping with the wife of the guy who invented Snooker, must have felt when he first learned to drive ‘I am no longer stuck only visiting friends within cycling distance, hoorah’ he was heard to gasp at the time.


I was so overwhelmed I felt I needed to pray:


Dear Lord Jesus Christ Son of God and also God, meaning you’re, your own father, that’s weird, kind of like in Terminator when John Conner sent his own father back in time to save his life before he was born.


I feel I need to pray to you today and thank you for your invention of geometry. If not for this wonderful, and yet cruelly un-respected language of mathematics, we would not now be able to enjoy such amazing things as shapes, angles and sinking the red number eleven ball by hitting the white ball into it, but mostly shapes, how awesome are shapes?


Sure in the end, ironically, it was a shape – the cross, that you were nailed too and died bleeding on, and also the source of one of your most mistranslated quotes, I hate to tell you Jesus but


‘Forgive them father, for they know not what they have done’


Has been mistranslated to mean ‘don’t blame my killers, they’re just kind of naive’ when in reality surely you meant ‘don’t blame them for using a cross, it will be centuries before geometrists discover than the triangle is actually a far stronger shape than a cross, and when they do people will all laugh, and be like “ha ha, remember before we nailed people to triangles when we instead nailed people to crosses, man we were dumb back then’”


Also some people believe in you, hear this quote, and still think god might be a woman! Isn’t that weird? That means they think that you may have called your mother ‘father’ and that your ‘mother’ impregnated your other ‘mother’ and that no men were involved at all. Ha ha, like that will ever happen, a child growing up fatherless, next people will be saying it’s possible for a woman to have an orgasm without a skilled male lover on hand, it’s become a strange world since you left Lord Jesus!


Plus, if the triangle is the strongest shape, why do so many women still object to suggestions by their boyfriends and husbands that another woman be brought into bed for a threesome, or ‘triangle-loving’, surely this is merely an attempt to create a strong stable relationship, you should get geomestrists onto that immediately. Also how did you let the Terminator series get so awful, and simultaneously make James Cameron an idea stealing jackass, seems like the inventor of geometry would know better than this.


Oh by the way Jesus, I secretly I call the white ball in pool ‘the white number 49 ball’ I think its cruel all the balls get numbers other than the white one, and it is the ball that is used the most, its just not fair, and I refuse to let unfairness be part of my table based sport experiences. I give Ping-pong balls their numbers based on their individual personalities, not the orange ones though, they are trying to steel the thunder from baby mangos and that’s not nice. I hope you, our unseen master, reward my generosity when I see you up in that heaven dealy we hope you weren’t lying about.


Note: If you were lying about that heaven dealy, shame on you, some people are relying on that!


Note 2: Some people get geometrists and geologists mixed up, that’s funny, one studies awesome shapes, the other looks at dirt and stuff, maybe you should make sure this discrepancy is fixed in that heaven dealy, we’d hate to be confused when we get there.


Amen


I was feeling good. Geometry once again had enriched my life, and I had taken time to thank its inventor, I needed one more thing to make this experience perfect, by creating a triangle of awesomeness, so I went to fix myself a drink.


This is when it happened.


Yes, ‘it’!


The ‘thing’ that may be the ‘thing’ which fucks up this whole ‘thing’.


I was putting ice into a glass when for the first time I realized just what was going on in this world. Perhaps the source of all bad stuff, or maybe just some bad stuff, but bad stuff is bad stuff and this was clearly the source of some bad stuff.


Turns out – ice ‘cubes’ are no longer always ‘cubes’.


That’s right, in an attempt to make them easier to extract from the tray, some ice cube trays are now round on the bottom, and seriously a shape which is square on five sides yet round on one side is NOT a fucking cube!


Do you people realize what this means?


Ok, so say you’re a parent right, and it’s a hot summers day, you are now faced with a vicious conundrum.


Give your child a refreshing beverage and risk ruining his chances of making a career in geometry or move to Finland and keep the geometry dream alive? What a heartbreaking choice to have to make for a parent. I mean, my god, how hard is that to decide (sorry Lord Jesus, ‘your name in vain’ rhymes, and you know how us humans are suckers for rhymes!)(Also - Conundrums, con-mans, condominiums, condiments, condoms, all things which can make your life a misery, and all ‘con’ words, coincidence I think not, or else why isn’t coincidence spelled conincidence?’)


Sure some parents will be able to administer the following test:


‘Hey Bobby, what do a call a triangle when one of the corners is at a ninety degree angle?’

‘I don’t know mom’

‘Ok Bobby, your geometry career is already fucked, here have a coke’


But that’s rare, because most kids know that a triangle with a right angle is called an isosceles. Still how much longer will this be true if we keep pretending ice-roundtopsquareishbottoms are still ice-cubes!


Note: I have been a fan of beverages for a long time, so even though clearly my personal geomometrical knowledge remains flawless I can’t guarantee it stay this way forever!


It may be easy to make fun of at this time, but what happens fifty years from now when you find yourself driving on a road when a corner seems slightly too sharp for your nuclear-powered-energy-efficient-hover-cycle and you’ll be all like ‘where was a geometrist to prevent this disaster’ and then you’ll remember the headline from the paper:


Geometrists officially ‘refreshed’ into extinction – awesome hover-bike inventing now the world’s most popular branch of the sciences



But by then it will be too late!!!


Well I say ‘no’! Let’s prevent this while we can. Let’s call so called ‘ice-cubes’ what they really are ice-roundtop um, um, circle bottom, no um triangle? Oh fuck, it’s begun, I can’t remember what the name of that round bottomed cube like shape is called. Hang on one second, I need to make a phone call.


‘Excuse me operator, can you please connect me to a geometrist immediately, it’s an emergency…. What do you mean that there aren’t any geometrists available to talk right now and that also there is no longer such a thing as calling an operator and having them connect you to a call, has the world gone made? Jesus, Jesus, please help us!!!!!’


Ok I am back, and I hate to tell you but my phone call did not go well. I could not get a geometrist on the phone to tell me what that shape actually is called.


Plus I was informed that even though some people with the natural skill set for a lucrative career in the geometrical sciences who get jaded out of the entire field will turn to awesome hover bike inventing, others, sadly, will go in different directions and in fact may instead turn to, gulp, taxman taxidermy. Yes its true, you may one day go to bring a gift to your beloved tax man, a gift to thank him for all his love and generosity, and, gulp, find that he has been stuffed!


It’s a scary thought, but unfortunately it is now inevitable, and all we can do is try and delay this horror for as long as we can.


So I say this to you right now – are you drinking a beverage right this moment? If so what shape is your ice? If it’s a lying ‘cube’ then shame on you. If it’s like a whiskey on the rocks, then god-bless you, rock shaped ice is cool, because those geologists need a break from their dirt filled shitty lives.