Apathy Sketchpad

This is my idea. To make money for the government, there should be a police department which exists purely to solve crimes which are clearly very easily solved. For example, let’s say there is adware on your computer. Someone comes round, looks at one of the popup windows that appear, and then investigates whatever company it’s advertising. Case solved, no thinking required.

Or let’s say you’ve been 419 scammed. Send the phone number and email address supplied to the Department Of Easily Solved Crime and let them make the arrest.

Or let’s say you’ve been sold a product that doesn’t work, have a full reciept, and they’re still refusing to replace it or refund it for you. No reason to drag it through a court. Just tell the Department Of Quick-Fix Policing and they’ll fine the company and make them replace your purchase.

It would be like a tax on committing particularly brainless sorts of crimes. Good idea? Yes? No? Yes?

About a week before I drew this, a Jehovah’s Witness cornered me on the street and asked me “how would you describe your relationship with God?”. If it happens again I’m going to answer “The same as my relationship with Harry Potter: I don’t think he exists and I don’t like his book”.

Recently I notice that one of my brothers bought a little hardback yellow book purporting to be a guide to using the English language. It’s very self-assured, and its title is a rather appaling pun that doesn’t really work.

What? No. The book is not Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It’s the parody, if it can be called such a thing, Eats, Shites and Leaves.

The more astute of you will have noticed already that is not really a pun in the same way that a brick is not really a building and a car is not really a traffic jam. The word ’shites’ has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It has simply been shoe-horned in there in the mistaken belief that swear words are intrinsically funny. Anyway, I shouldn’t linger too long on the title of the book because then I wouldn’t have space left to deride the contents.

The stated author of this book is called ‘A. Parody’. I suspect this to be a poorly chosen pseudonym, poorly-chosen because the book is not a parody of Eats, Shoots and Leaves in the same way that a rematch is not the same thing as an action replay and a mole is not the same thing as an apprentice. I know this because I have read Eats, Shoots and Leaves and it is a book of prose. Eats, Shites and Leaves is, on the other hand, a book of lists. A book of lists of jokes. A book of lists of old jokes. They’re arranged in no logical order and often split up arbitrarily. There is no contents page and only a rather poor index, so using the book is something a nightmare. I say ‘using’ because the book purports to be a guide to “crap English and how to use it”.

I know a few things and one of them is that a list of common mistakes is not the same thing as a guide in the same way that “ROAD CLOSED” is not the same thing as “DIVERSION” and a speeding fine is not the same thing as a driving theory test certificate.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves did amazingly well precisely because it was in every way the opposite of this book. It was readable, amusing, original, and easy to understand. It wasn’t pretentious and it wasn’t insulting. The alleged parody is that thing which I hate the most: some moron with no apparent right to claim he has an expert opinion other than his being the first person to think of writing it down in that particular way, waxing lyrical about something very authoritatively and very wrongly and making fun of people smarter than him in the process. (See also, creationism, jumptheshark.com.)