Apathy Sketchpad

Yesterday, The Times reported that the Labour party had taken donations which had come to them via. a proxy to conceal the donor’s true identity. Aside from containing this fantastic sentence:

Donations made via third parties are illegal unless the person behind the donation is also declared or there is a “reasonable excuse”.

…it also explained this email I received in March but had always assumed was a scam:

DEAR BELOVED URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL

I am DAVID ABRAHAMS, an impotant businessman here in LAGOS, NIGERIA and I have sum of $600,00 USD  (SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLAR) which I want to donate to THE LABOUR PARTY. I would like a trust worthy partner to act as a donor. The money will be transfered into your account and then into THE LABOUR PARTY. The fund will be split as follows: 15% for your expenses, 10% for contingency/emergency and 75% for THE LABOUR PARTY.

Yours in Christ,

David Abrahams

LAGOS NIGERIA

No, really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Also I read that Santa has lost the disks on which he stored the lists of 25 million naughty and nice children. So, er, let’s hope that doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

At the front of the line was a man in a sharp suit. When he got to the gate, the guard, an angel, agreed that he had lived a good life, but asked him why he had not followed some of God’s laws. The man shuffled, embarrassed, before finally admitting that he’d been an atheist. He felt a bit stupid.
“Oh,” said the angel, “fair enough, then,” and opened the great gate before him. The atheist was surprised to be entering Heaven. The line advanced by one, and another man reached the front.
All in all, he was beginning to feel pretty confident. He’d lived a good life, and believed, and he’d followed all of God’s rules. He was a shoe-in.
“Ah,” the guard said, reading his name from the list and recognising it immediately, “Blaise Pascal. Yes, we’ve been looking forward to this.”
“As have I,” Pascal said, proudly.
The angel’s face twisted into the expression a mother might use to quiz a boy who thought she’d be pleased that he’d painted the sofa. “Really?” Pascal paused, confused, and the guard continued, “Only it says here that God thinks you’re trying to pull a fast one on him.”
“What?”
“This ‘wager’ of yours. God isn’t a mind-reader, you know. Free will and all that. He doesn’t know if you believe or not, not really, and your little numbers game is really just an argument to say you believe. You’re trying to con God into letting you in.”
“I’m not! I really, truly believe!”
“How do I know you’re not just saying that to get in, that you haven’t been saying that all along. That’s what you’re little wager would advise, isn’t it, if you didn’t really believe?”
“I never said anything about pretending to believe. I said you should believe!”
“To believe as a choice, disregarding evidence?”
“Yes!” Pascal said, relieved that the angel understood.
“Yes,” said the guard, “we thought you might say something like that. So we’ve prepared a little test…”

“Atheists?” said the demon, “there certainly aren’t any atheists in Hell.”
“But,” he started, starting to question his beliefs now, on his first day in Hell, when one might reasonably argue it was a tad on the late side, “all they had to do was believe! How hard is that?”
The demon made a noise somewhere between “oh?” and “hmm,” in the patient manner of one who’d been going over this for centuries and didn’t imagine having to stop soon. “But they didn’t believe in Hell either. It would seem a bit harsh to expect them to follow rules set out by someone they thought was fiction, with a punishment they thought didn’t exist.”
“So what you’re saying is,” he said, watching with trepidation as the demon selected a pointy looking object from a leather roll-up pack and held it over the flames, “that all we had to do to get carte blanche to sin as much as we pleased was to stop believing?”
“That’s right,” the demon said, as it walked behind the lost soul and plunged the instrument into his back (not that he really had such a bodypart any more, of course). “But you’re in luck. God’s laid down a special rule, just for you. To test your little wager. You can go to heaven, if you want to.”
“How?” Pascal shouted, above the pain. Right then and there there was nothing he wouldn’t do to escape the pain.
“Simple,” the demon replied, moving the instrument savagely, “just believe I don’t exist.”
And for a thousand years he tried.
After that he rather gave up. By that stage his tortured soul didn’t seem worth saving anyway.

BUSH ANNOUNCES SUCCESS OF NEW “HIGH-RESOLUTION” DOLLAR

President Bush hit back against critics of his economic policies in a press conference last night. He claimed that he had made good progress towards his goal of “a higher-resolution dollar”. Under previous administrations, he said, rounding errors crept into all business done with overseas partners. By reducing the size of the unit of currency, Bush explained, he had enabled it to be far more precise. “Imagine,” he said, “if the dollar was worth so much that you could by five beefburgers for a cent. How would you buy one beefburger? You’d have to buy five and throw four of them away. It’s like that. Now we can buy one beefburger and avoid having to give four of them back to other countries.”

THOUSANDS QUEUE UP IN OWN LIVING ROOMS TO BE FIRST TO RECEIVE LATEST XBOX LIVE ARCADE RELEASE

On Wednesday, gamers got their first look at Alien Hominid on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service, which allows users to download games directly to their Xbox 360 for a small fee. In anticipation of the release, many gamers had queued up beside their Xbox since Monday evening. One such person said “in our house you can never be sure when people will be using the TV. This was really the only way to be certain of getting the game as soon as I could.” He added that he had previously queued up for both the Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii console. “This is better than that,” he said, “because my Mum brings me food here.” Other gamers queued up in this way because they were worried about Microsoft “running out” of stocks of the game.

AMERICAN SOLDIERS ISSUED WITH SPECIAL “HARRYCARD”

The US military has issued all its troops with a credit card-sized photograph of Prince Harry, to make sure he is not harmed in any “friendly fire” incidents. The card carries a photograph of Harry in full battle uniform, which was chosen over a competing photograph of Harry at his passing out ceremony on the grounds that soldiers might be “unlikely to recognise the Prince in uniform based on a ceremonial photograph”. Some British soldiers have commented that it is unfair for Harry to get such special treatment, but most American troops have welcomed the move. One soldier told us, on condition of anonymity, “I think this is a good idea. Normally if we accidentally kill the odd British soldier we’re alright; the army protects us. But if we killed a Prince then the s**t would really hit the fan. We might even get demoted for that.” Producing and distributing the card has cost the US military over $5.4 billion.

Yes, I did NaNoWriMo this year.

Yes, I won.

No, you can’t read it.

But here is an extract anyway. It’s one of my favourite passages that doesn’t involve Nigel and that doesn’t so much as hint at the plot, setting, or genre:

Hannah had been allowed in to see Alex for a while, since the doctors didn’t have any particular reason to be in there. As far as they were concerned, he was the healthiest person they’d seen in years, apart from being in a coma, and he’d only been in a coma for a couple of hours. He could just be a heavy sleeper. She wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to feel. She was relieved that he didn’t seem to be hurt at all, but terrified because he wouldn’t wake up. She couldn’t shake either feeling, despite the fact that until then she’d considered them mutually exclusive. It was like feeling dizzy, or using menthol shampoo in a warm shower. She stayed with him for five minutes before both feelings quietly subsided to boredom. They ebbed away so subtly it wasn’t until she got to ‘more beer for Alex’ that she realised she’d been sat there doing her shopping list while her boyfriend lay there not moving. Then she felt guilty, and angry, and resolved to stop having contradictory emotions about things, a resolution she utterly failed to keep when a doctor came in and told her she had to leave now, making her feel bad about leaving Alex on his own and glad that she didn’t have to stay there feeling conflicting emotions about everything. She could go and feel them in the privacy of her own home.

At half past midnight she decided that if she couldn’t feel an internally consistent gamut of emotions, then she must logically have gone insane. A moment later she decided that that was probably perfectly normal in her situation, and therefore nothing to worry about. Then she realised that that made her both insane and normal simultaneously. That neatly explained the conflicting emotions she’d been feeling all evening, and now that that was cleared up she was finally able to get some sleep.

Thankyou for choosing BT OpenWorld Broadband. Before you place your order, you must enter your postcode and telephone number, so that we can check that your local telephone exchange can accomodate ADSL connections, but fail entirely to check that it isn’t completely full. Once this step is complete, you may proceed to enter your Preferred Activation Date. This should be the date two days after you would like to be informed of the delay, and one month prior to the activation of your broadband line.

In the meantime, you may feel free to entertain yourself by installing your delightfully expensive new modem. This is the strange green fish-looking thing with the lights on the front. This must be plugged into your computer’s USB socket, which will provide it with almost enough power to operate, causing it to stop working arbitrarily, and requiring your computer to be rebooted several times a day or, if you are unlucky, resetting your computer almost at random. But don’t worry — until your account is activated all it does is flash lights at you anyway. You must also install the Splitter Boxes wherever you feel they look best.

For more information about why we have made no apparent attempt to activate your account in the weeks since your “Confirmed Activation Date”, please phone our customer care line, on 0845 555-4663 if you are a home customer, or 0845 555-2874 if you are a business customer. Both of these numbers will apparently get through to the same computer controlled response center, which will ask you to press numbers on your phone, and then inform you that your account will be activated on your “Confirmed Activation Date”, now up to four weeks in the past. If this does not give you the information required, please phone again. This time, we reccomend you press different buttons, and if you are lucky you will be allowed to speak to our highly trained staff, who will be more than happy to take your details and put you on hold for forty minutes. If you manage not to hang up after forty minutes of The Four Seasons, then we will transfer you back to our staff, who will inform you that we are very busy and ask you if you would like to be called when we had somebody available to help you. You then have the option of hanging up and not ever getting help, or going back on hold.

Several days later we will randomly activate your account, and send you an email to confirm this. If you want to use the connection on two computers at once, it is easy to find software on the internet which can act as a Proxy server, meaning it will allow other computers to acces the internet via the computer it is running on, often for up to a day before it arbitrarily stops working for no discernable reason. This will not allow you to use MSN Messenger, because it was programmed by the evil Microsoft Corporation.

We hope you enjoy using your new connection, and continue to pay for it.

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