I was assurred years ago that physics was a good employable degree. Don’t worry, I was told, you don’t have to get a job related to your degree. It shows you can put the work in and get a result. It shows commitment. It shows that you can learn something and pick up skills. Blah blah blah.

Today I discover this is a lie.

If I want to apply for the job of website designer, what do I need? Why, that would be a website design degree. If I want to write software I’m expected to have a degree in that, and if I want to design kitchens I need a kitchen design degree. I don’t know why I would want to design kitchens; I have no intrest at all in them, but it’s a good example of a job demanding a degree that nobody in the world will have.

This is, of course, the problem with these degrees. I know a man with a degree in greenkeeping. That opens up approximately four only incrementally different jobs to him, but it closes them off somewhat from everyone with a proper degree, because why would you hire someone with a degree in chemistry when there’s someone with a degree in precisely the job you have advertised?

What am I supposed to do? Be a physicist? Alright, so I’m clearly qualified for it, but it would mean working with physicists, and four years of being at university with them was quite enough for me. It’s rather disspiriting applying for a job you know you don’t meet the stated requirements for, but it’s the only way to get any job at all, especially when it was the computer science A-level that put me off the idea in the first place. That was mostly outdated, idealised nonsense that had nothing to do with any computer I’ve ever seen. You learnt it, and then were examined on it, and then tried very hard to forget it before you accidentally mentioned it to someone who actually knows about computers and looked like an idiot.

Taking the web design as an example: clearly I can design websites. I have two. Some people don’t have that many ears! But how am I supposed to convince someone of this in an interview? I’m terrified that the degree courses will teach you words I don’t know for things I do:
“So, do you mind if we ask you a few questions to assess your knowledge of HTML?”
“Go ahead.”
“What is the Carnegie Principle in the context of Front And Back Extrusion?”
“Come again?”
Then I go home and Google it and it turns out to mean “make sure you use the American spelling of ‘centre’ in align tags” or something else equally obvious and I’ve just told the interviewer I didn’t know it.

So now I’m stuck with a degree nobody wants, skills nobody will ever know about, and no job. Great.

I have never seen the Twilight Zone. But Wikipedia’s random page (which is our homepage) showed me an episode, which in turn linked to all the others. Here are some actual episode titles from the Twilight Zone:

“Mr. Denton on Doomsday” (1/3)
“The Purple Testament” (1/19)
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1/22)
“A Passage for Trumpet” (1/32)
“The Mighty Casey” (1/35)
“King Nine Will Not Return” (2/1)
“Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” (2/3)
“A Thing About Machines” (2/4)
“The Trouble With Templeton” (2/9)
“A Most Unusual Camera” (2/10)
“Night of the Meek” (2/11)
“Mr. Dingle, the Strong” (2/19)
“The Rip Van Winkle Caper” (2/24)
“Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” (2/28)
“Deaths-Head Revisited” (3/9)
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (3/14)
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” (3/23)
“Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” (3/30)
“Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” (4/14)
“The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms” (5/10)
“The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross” (5/16)
“Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” (5/17)
“I Am the Night – Color Me Black” (5/26)
“The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (5/33)

After that there were a couple of revivals, one runnung a few years, and the other about one. And apart from maybe “Azoth the Avenger is a Friend of Mine” (episode 10 of the 2002/03 revival) they never really mastered the art of episode titles again. (Although it is nice to note that in episode 32 of this series the monsters finally arrived at Maple Street.)

According to The Times, a fifteen-year-old has sued the police — successfully — claiming that a curfew law is in violation of his human right to hang around shopping centres of an evening.

And I say well done to him. That is excellent. I’ve long been of the opinion that this “I’ll Keep The Whole Class Back After School Until One Of You Owns Up” mentality is wrong on almost every level. The moral implications are obvious — you’re restricting the rights of wholly innocent children because someone else who looks similar comitted a crime — but quite aside from that it patently doesn’t work. The more you do the the whole class, the less likely anyone is to confess. Before long they’re not only confessing to taking Katie’s pencil, but also to keeping the class back two hours (again, illegally), and ruining playtime for everyone.

People have long been of the opinion that you can do this kind of thing to children and it’s okay. It’s not. There’s just a kind of understanding that you don’t actually have to listen to children because they’re young and naïve and nobody listened to you when you were fifteen so why should you listen to them? Heck, why aren’t they down’t pit where they should be? Damn whippersnappers. (The answer, of course, being that there are no pits any more and therefore children only go down there on school trips.)

So, a few kids commit crimes. Arrest them, then. That’s what prisons are for. You put criminals there so they won’t commit crimes any more. It’s a good system, and it works. You’ll notice that this kind of rule against any other group is called Discrimination. Men are still allowed in pubs. Footballers are still allowd in Majestyk. There’s no Muslim curfew on public transport that stops Islam belivers using the Tube in rush hour, and rightly so. And religion is something you can change — the only way to not be a child any more is to wait a few years until the government arbitrarily deems you old enough that your opinion matters.

On the last episode of Anne Widdecombe To The Rescue, in which she dispences quick-fix solutions to pepole’s problems, she was faced with some children who were lazy. They’d eat their parents’ food. “They don’t see it as theft,” their parents explained.
“Do they ask permission?” Anne queried.
“No.”
“Well, then it is theft,” Her solution? “Tell them if they don’t get jobs, you’ll sell their television.” Bear in mind that the television set in question had been given to them by their grandmother. You’ll notice here that a prominent conservative MP has just denounced stealing a Kit Kat from your parents, and then less than a minute later advocated stealing a television from your own son and selling it. And these ‘children’ were about twenty. They’re old enough to vote, drive cars, buy alcohol, but apparently not old enough to keep their own property.

Mind you, religion is a tricksy one. It gets you coming and going— you’re not allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religion, but neither are you allowed to question the beliefs. If, say, I choose to voice the opinion that religion is frankly pretty dangerous and should probably be banned, that is massively politically incorrect. (I don’t actually hold so strong an opinion, but it’s a damn good example.) It’s frowned upon even to suggest that perhaps a god capable of creating the entire world is unlikely to resemble a chimera of various animals from Earth or care if you cut your hair, eat the wrong meat, work weekends or wear the wrong boxers. But the fact is it religion can be very dangerous. Observe:

Religion is an excuse. People use it as an excuse to fight long wars, but also as an excuse to help each other out. It’s very strange but that’s what happens. People generally want to be nice but feel they need an excuse. But you can use the same techniques to more-or-less brainwash them, and you can’t stop them because that’s Discrimination.

The Pope says contraception is wrong and there’s overpopulation and an AIDS epidemic in Africa. These events aren’t unrelated. Tell me that’s sane. There’s nothing in the Bible about contraception. There can’t be; it hadn’t been invented when the Bible was written. They’re contributing to one of the biggest killers in human history and you won’t convince them to stop because they’re Entitled To Their Beliefs, whatever exactly that means.

Religion is also used as a very powerful argumentative tool. You’d never convince a school board to ban evolution because you thought perhaps it wasn’t true but didn’t have any evidence. You’d cartainly never persuade someone to blow themselves up simply as a favour. But the trouble is, there is no comeback to the religion argument. You aren’t allowed to suggest that their beliefs are, perhaps, total balderdash, even when those beliefs are corrupting the education of a generation of children, albeit American children.

There was a piece in the news a few days ago saying that some Muslim women were offended that people looked at them suspiciously on the train. And do you know what they were wearing when they said this? They were covered from head to foot in black fabric save for a thin strip to see out of. Now, call me paranoid if you like, but were I a terrorist, that’s what I’d wear. Nobody would recognise me and if I was questioned about why I was so clearly hiding my identity from security staff I’d simply play the religion card and they’d run away scared. If possible I would design a religion that requires me to carry a ticking rucksack. Hoodies. Hoodies are banned in a lot of places. The official reason? “They obscure people’s faces from CCTV cameras.” And what happened when they were banned? Crime fell by half overnight and profits rose by a quarter. So why allow people to wear something that covers their entire body simply because they have a book that advocates it? Criminals are bound to catch on sooner or later. Maybe they already have and we haven’t caught them yet.

To be honest even without that I think those outfits are hardly a healthy message to give to young women. Not exactly Girl Power, is it?

At university they had a policy of photographing everyone. There’s a photo on the wall to this day of what is essentially a black shape with glasses one. What’s the point in that? If ID cards were introduced (which frankly I think people are far too worked up about) would that be an acceptable image on them? Could be anyone, that. That’s the picture they use in videogame manuals from the early nineties to depict the big boss. What if your religion banned fingerprints and biometrics? Would you have a card that just said “N/A”?

Don’t get me wrong. You’re free to believe whatever you want— well, no, that isn’t true at all. It’s actually rather a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been told a million times I should believe in a lot of things, but I simply can’t. I can’t believe, for example, that God created the world 6000 years ago any more than I can believe the sky is green, because I’ve seen it and it isn’t. You won’t make me believe something against all known evidence simply by repeating it or threatening me with eternal damnation in another place I don’t believe in if I don’t.

The worst example, though, to my mind is people who change their religion to marry someone. The logic there goes as follows: “I love this man, therefore Jesus is Lord”. It’s physically not possible to believe something simply by wanting to. You need convincing. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions, and that’s just wasting everyone’s time.

You’re free, I should say, to believe whatever you believe, but if you have no actual reason to believe it beyond “it says so in this book” and “my parents told me”, then I’d rather you didn’t try to claim that your arbitrary prejudice is as valid a stance as my well-reasoned and thought out opinion. And if you’ve thought about it and don’t know, it’s alright simply to say “I don’t know”. That’s why God gave us the word ‘Agnostic’. Or didn’t. Whatever.

Congratulations to DFS for pointing out in their adverts that “nobody does champagne like the French”.

Well, no. No they don’t.

8th May 1998

Film Deep Impact is released. It has Morgan Freeman in it and is therefore excellent.

18th June 2004

I publish this comic posing the question, can we alter our lives be changing the positions of bodies involved in our horoscopes?

I reach the (implied) conclusion, “no. Horoscopes are bullshit”.

12th January 2005

NASA launch Deep Impact, a $279,000,000 probe, to try and blow a hole in a comet, in order to study it.

7th May 2005

Newspapers start reporting that a crazy lady in Russia (named Marina Bai) decides that this will disrupt her horoscopes and otherwise mess up the universe and sues NASA. She decides a suitable target for this action would be an injunction to stop them blowing up any comets (naturally), and punitive damages to the tune of $311,000,000. Compare these two figures. They are at worst terrifying and at best the wrong way around.

The courts point out that NASA is in America and therefore does not fall under Russian jurisdiction, America not being a part of Russia. Her lawyer, Alexander Molokhov, a man who I have absolutely no worries about saying is either very stupid or a total bastard, manages to get the case reinstated for a while on the grounds that NASA has an office in the Moscow embassy. Let’s forgoe the fact that US embassies are generally considered US soil and therefore obey US law (since I’m not sure of the legality of any of the above anyway) and skip straight to the nub of the problem:

My client believes that the NASA project infringes upon her spiritual and life values as well as the natural life of the cosmos and would disrupt the natural balance of forces in the universe

I would have so much respect for NASA if they put out a press release that simply said:

Yes, but your client believes that rocks in space control her life.

4th July 2005

NASA blow the comet up anyway. To my knowledge no court date has been set.