7 Reasons

Tag: planets

  • Pearls of Wisdom

    Pearls of Wisdom

    It’s Sunday.  This is Marc.  I was thinking last week (as I occasionally do) and something occurred to me.  I love writing 7 Reasons.  I also love dictionaries of quotation.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if I combined the two?  The answer was emphatically yes.

     

    I decided to fire up the Randomator (it’s up there at the top of the page where it says “Randomator!”) and harvest a few 7 Reasons quotes on various aspects of life and living.  Here – in the order that I found them – are some 7 Reasons pearls of wisdom on an array of topics.

     

    On sharks:  “In my 27 years, I believe I have sleep-walked only once. And even then it wasn’t a very exciting sleep-walk, I just went looking for the bathroom in the lounge. I couldn’t imagine doing that every night though. Which is what a shark has to do. Apart from it swims instead of walking. And it rarely ends up in my lounge.”

     

    On St Peter: “It is generally accepted that 156,000 people die everyday. That’s about one every 1.8 seconds. I don’t believe that Saint Peter has the stamina to sit there all day every day shouting out names. When does he sleep?”

     

    On Viagra:  “When a man takes one Viagra pill, his penis assumes the shape of the number 1 for a considerable time. Therefore, if a man takes seven Viagra pills, his penis must assume the shape of the number 7 for a considerable time. I’m not sure why anyone would want a 7 shaped penis – unless they wanted to make love to someone round a corner – so it’s probably the wrong number of pills to take.”

     

    On the Dutch: “Dutch people are fantastic.  They’re tall, which is more space-efficient than being fat, and they speak many languages…”

     

    On supermarkets:  “A supermarket is not a place for mankinis and it is certainly not a place for jogging in them. No one wants to see that while deciding what to have for dinner. Apologise. Immediately. And then cover yourself up with a parsnip.”

     

    On measuring time: “I have no idea exactly how long I was in the kitchen, but I do know that I had a ginger beard when I emerged from it.  I had one when I went in too, but I was definitely in there for a very long time.”

     

    On supporting England:  “My heart has sunk so many times I am amazed it’s not lodged somewhere around my groinal area.”

     

    On the pole vault: “…it’s a sport which involves physically exerting yourself until you’re panting and thrusting a long, rigid shaft into a box before you briefly soar heavenward and eventually end up lying sweaty and exhausted on a mattress with a horizontal pole.”

     

    On popemobiles:  “A popemobile is visible from quite a distance.  Even when there isn’t a pope in it.”

     

    On new planets:  “I want a planet that is 100% water. Not ice, water. I want a planet that looks like a sausage. Or, even better, a planet that morphs into a sausage from its 100% water state.”

     

    On Christmas: “When the children burst into our bedroom at six o’clock this morning and jumped up and down on the bed screaming “It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas!” we were very moved. We don’t know whose children they were, or how they got into our house, but we were moved.”

     

    On polar bears:  “If you do insist on dating a polar bear, then you have to understand one thing. You will never be able to use your bath again.”

     

    On flamingo farming:  “With the new flamingo farms, it will be possible to stumble across fields full of pink clusters of gangly birds – all year round.  This will brighten up the landscape no end, especially at sunset.  Countryside campsites will become countryside camp sites where you’ll be able to enjoy the countryside camp sight of intense pink colours in tents (pink coloured).”

     

    On the Sinclair C5:  “Always a bit annoying having to get out of your vehicle and push it up a hill isn’t it? Which is why the Sinclair C5 should have come with a tow rope. Or a map that just showed hills that went down.”

     

    On Annie Lennox:  “Annie Lennox has got a problem. If her heart keeps going boom whenever she walks into an empty room – and it has been at least 25 years since it started – she needs to do one of two things. Go to the doctors or avoid empty rooms.”

     

    On philosophy:  “If a butterfly beats its wings in a forest in China does a tree fall on a deaf person on the other side of the world?”

     

    On the French:  “The French have dainty little feet. It’s a well known fact, in my mind, that they spend 56% of their time in the bathroom moisturising their toes.”

     

    On Foursquare:  “foursquare iPhone App Would Like To Add Your Current Location. Jonathan Lee doesn’t. He is very happy doing some work at home without the whole of foursquare’s Jehovah Witness community knowing where he is.”

     

    On rhymes:  “They say that nothing rhymes with orange, but this doesn’t seem quite right to me:  Nothing rhymes better with puffin.”

     

    On candles:  “There are always candles on the table at dinner parties but no one knows why.  I don’t want to singe my arm hair every time I pour some wine or pass the salt.  Why would you want to put a fire on the table?”

     

    On Nelson:  “Fancy losing a battle to a bloke with one arm and one eye. Do you know how difficult it is steer a ship with one arm and one eye? That’s pretty lame France.”

     

    On parenthood: “There are toys everywhere.  And if you have children, you have to get rid of your toys and replace them with stuffed animals and pushchairs.”

     

    On Turkish barbers: “…a middle-aged man – shaking and hyperactive from far too much strong coffee – holding a cut-throat razor to your jugular and gesticulating wildly, millimetres from your face, while he asks you where you’re going on holiday this year?  Then he sets your ears on fire.”

     

    On ironing:  “There are only so many movements you can make with an iron – assuming you are doing the job properly anyway. Right to left or left to right seem to be the only options. I would love to do top to bottom, but whoever invented bras made it impossible.”

     

     

     

     

  • 7 Reasons We Shouldn’t Try To Contact Aliens

    7 Reasons We Shouldn’t Try To Contact Aliens

    This year is the fiftieth anniversary of SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).  For half a century mankind has been broadcasting into space, trying to contact extraterrestrial life forms.  Is it really a good idea to get in touch with aliens though?  Here are seven reasons that we shouldn’t.

    1.  Size.  Jimi Hendrix once said that he believed that aliens could be enormous, and that we would be like ants to them.  As he put it, “You wouldn’t go miles out of your way to step on an ant-hill”.  What if our communications are annoying them though?  You wouldn’t go miles to tread on ants, but you might cross the living room to swat a buzzing fly.

    2.  Evolution.  What if the aliens have evolved differently to us?  What if they’ve evolved from insects or snakes?  What if they have feelers on top of their bulbous heads?  What if they’re descended from ear-wax?  We’d find them repellent, that’s what.  What if they came to visit us and they turned out to be 15 feet high spiders?  Half of the world’s population would scream “Kill it!  Kill it!” and the other half would take one look at them and think “Not bloody likely”.  Do we even have a giant shoe?

    3.  Disease.  Aliens are…well, alien.  Humans would have no immunity to any diseases or infections that they would bring, and they would have none to ours.  We won’t be able to cope with Venusian Flu of the eye and they won’t be able to cope with Herpes of the tentacle.  Meeting aliens would be a bad idea for all concerned.

    4.  Dullness.  What if the aliens are uncharismatic?  Really boring?  Catatonically, mind-numbingly, vapidly, monotonously Daily Mail dull?  Do we really want to have an unimaginative dialogue with dreary spacemen?  What if they’re like Vogons?

    5.  Defeat.  What if the aliens are more powerful and more advanced than us?   We can’t know that they’re not war-like and intent on universal domination.  By trying to contact the aliens we could be guaranteeing ourselves a new world order.  We could only hope that our new alien masters would be benevolent.  Perhaps they’d be a bit subtler than going for out-and-out enslavement, preferring to conquer and rule us – they might even settle for a puppet-government.  To head this, they would need to find someone innocuous and popular, with a good grasp of modern communication, whose covetousness and vanity would leave him open to their manipulation.  Our new alien-overlords would probably install Richard Bacon as Earth’s puppet-leader.  No one wants that – even him.

    6.  Beggars.  Why would aliens want anything to do with us anyway?  If they’re in any way more advanced than us we’d drive them round the bend.  Whether It’s pestering them for technology to save our ailing planet, pestering them for accommodation when we realise that we can’t or pestering them to take David Gest back, we’ll be, at best, a nuisance, and at worst, a burden.  We’re like the annoying neighbour that you try to avoid by pretending to be out.  The aliens – if they have any sense – are hiding from us.

    7.  Madness.  What if there are no aliens?  Then the whole SETI programme will have been in vain.  If there are no aliens out there then essentially we’re talking to ourselves.  I’ve seen people that do that out on the street.  They look a bit foolish and they say the silliest things – often about spacemen, ironically.

    ********************UPDATE********************

    Since we wrote this article, Stephen Hawking has come out and stated his opinion on this subject.  He agrees with us.  We don’t know if he read this piece first or eventually – after considering these issues for a good while longer than we did – came to a similar conclusion by himself.  We like to think that it’s the former.