Wales - Can it ever be a World beating super power?

Before I start my rant I must warn you that when I say this article is dedicated to M.S. I DO NOT mean Multiple sclerosis as I’d rather dedicated my leg to a chainsaw. M.S. is the initials of a lovely person in my life.

Now Wales is an intriguing country, I say intriguing because I don’t want to offend the Welsh by saying its rubbish and I don’t want to get people’s hopes up by saying it’s awesome. The irony is that I’ve most probably offended many Welsh people by saying the latter...

What strikes me about this nostalgic country, whose ethnic minority largely consists of sheep, is not the phenomenal scenery, its history of being the world’s biggest coal port, the Millennium Stadium, Ryan Giggs or Tom Jones but the mere fact that the Heir apparent to the Throne is actually the Prince of Wales! Why?

It’s a sad truth but the poor old Welsh do get a beating in the media don’t they? After all it was the great Historian from Cambridge, Ali G, who famously claimed; “When you think of Wales, you tend to think of the fish with the biggest penis”. The irony is that Ali G’s father was Welsh. Infact, it’s the media’s portrayal of Wales that lead me to think that the only place on this planet that people won’t oppose being bombed is Wales! The only vertebrate that will object to the Americans’ bombing of Wales will be the sheep population.

I say this with great caution for fear I may upset the sheep. I have a track record of being hated by sheep. Five years have passed since my epic bike ride through the black mountains which, incidentally, aren’t black; they’re green or brown at best and were quite a magnificent backdrop to this most epic yet death-defying journey.
It was while riding through, what appeared to be, the land of the teletubbies that this incident occurred. Up and down mound after mound till suddenly, on the horizon, I could see some rather peculiar looking mole hills. These mole hills were moving and they were white. This didn’t strike me as unusual as I had realised that I was in Wales and well absurdity can, potentially, be normal. A friend of mine the other day proved this Welsh trait by shamelessly admitting that, despite having lived over eighty percent of her life in the United Arab Emirates with her Pakistani parents and having an American accent, she was born in Wales.

Quite hilarious,you may agree, but these mole hills look set to compete in terms of hilarity. As I rode towards these mole hills I noticed that they were becoming more and more fluffy. Now fluffy, white molehills are something of a rarity. So rare that they don’t exist. It turned out that these mole hills were sheep. These sheep were fearless of our bikes and set about chasing us. One sheep head butted my bike and I fell to the ground surrounded by a few hundred sheep. I feared for my testicles, brain, face and I feared what my mother would say when I got home. Strangely, I did not fear for my life partly because death will mean I won’t have to face my mother and partly because I was being attacked by sheep, the fluffiest animals since three toddlers genetically modified their kindergarten’s toy plank to form the world’s first teddy bear! Quite frankly, I’ve met scarier trousers!

Thankfully, I managed to get up and pull my bike out of the rugby scrum the sheep had formed desperately trying to decapitate my bike. I then got away as fast as possible, often reaching speeds of sixty mile per hour.

This, quite frankly, exhibited many new facts. It explained that the teletubbies are from Wales, sheep are fierce animals, the Welsh rugby team’s scrum practice is, most probably, conducted in the Black mountains and I’d rather die than explain to my mother how I ended up on the brink of death in Hospital. Dying before mother sees me is, quite frankly, the safer and relatively painless option. The most worrying fact however is that moles live in sheep and that trousers can be quite scary.

What about the Welsh in general? And the Prince of Wales?! Well, quite frankly, the Welsh are a wonderful bunch of people (albeit colour blind - the Black mountains aren't black!) and the country is one of the most beautiful in the world. The Prince of Wales is aptly named just refer to the previous sentence for further details. It will however always take a hammering in the press and it is probably because, as a nation, it has less power than a triple A battery. Sheep can't destroy a mountain bike let alone a mountain in Wonga Wongistan and so all we can say is that Wales and its army of sheep don't stand a chance in becoming a super power. Barack Obama, Osama Bin Laden and Duracell Bunny, your jobs are safe, for now (Only because I want to look like I believe sheep will eventually rise above all of us and therefore not end up in hospital with several sheep related injuries and then suffer the wrath of my mother).

specialK
(Thanks M.S :)- You're the best)

The True Intelligence of Animals

A few days ago, while sitting by the tranquil part of the Thames near Hampton court, I thought about how depressing life can be. I particularly felt for tube drivers on the Victoria line. Let me explain. The Victoria line is an underground mass transit system which is almost entirely underground this compared to the rest of the London Underground (which is only 40% underground) is quite a significant amount. Drivers who are on 12 hour shifts in the winter don't get to see the light of day at times because they start their shift when it is dark (early in the morning) and finish early afternoon (when it is also dark) this can be very depressing and it got me thinking about other species.

Not a day goes past where we don't see some naturist, peace loving, hippy protestor on television telling us how some bird is at risk from extinction or that the bonga walla walla animal is going to die out because its habitat is ruined. To be honest, a lot of the time I take no notice and flick over to the worst program in the world, Deal or no Deal. This, I tell you with the utmost profanity, is the cheaper, stupider and boring version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I mean, bank robbers and footballers deserve more credit for the way they earn their money compared to those who win on Deal or no Deal.

But, back to the point, the question really must be asked: "do animals really feel emotion? Will they go on the news and embarrass themselves by wearing silly clothes just to tell other animals that humans are dying out and they should all save them?" I for one don't believe they would, considering the way we've treated them over the years. It's like watching a Jew with dead family pleading to the people of the world, on television, that we should spare Hitler and perhaps consider giving him a knighthood. Absurd, but I do wonder if they are capable of emotion. I mean just the other day a wonderful friend of mine told me how her best friend's boyfriend's dog was jealous of his owner's new love and caused havoc by getting in between the couple every time they sat next each other.

We as a species have rather cockily assumed that we are the dominant species on the planet just like we assume science, mathematics or statistics is correct but are they? How do we know for sure? Is there really an atom? And therefore we must ask how much do we really know about animals?

I'm not a strict catholic, in fact, I'm not a catholic at all because my dad isn't a priest but I have yet to see or hear of a duck walking into confession. I'm sure I won't be able land an aero plane in the pacific ocean and ask a dolphin for directions to wonga wonga land and therefore we have no definite way of confirming the information scientists have learnt about animals from just watching them because we can't just ask them, but the evidence seems to suggest they may have emotion and might be smart. This is understandable because while I was sitting by the Thames, I noticed this rather tall looking duck, walking up and down the embankment. It really did look like the duck form of the "pool attendant" or the "coastguard". Probably protecting ducks from straying away from the water onto the road nearby. To the naked eye it seemed pretty smart but ten minutes later I saw a dead duck floating by the side of the water. Now, either the coastguard Duck, who I had, by now, aptly named "Ducky Hasselhoff", didn't do his job right or simply wasn't a coastguard at all and that he was just waltzing about like a gormless idiot.

Being a scientist however, I did not let this phase me and on the basis of my best friend's best friend's boyfriend's dog I decided to experiment. I sat around chewing my pen, hypothesized my experiment and even came up with probable statistical tests that my statistics colleagues would be impressed with. Yes, statisticians are cocks but the statistics made my experiment look more credible. Inspired by the "non marital bliss" dog, I first of all set out to tell some animals a joke. The duck, cow and cat I told the joke to failed to laugh and the hilarity of the joke was clearly summed up by the cow with a resounding and quite bassy "moo". So now that Simon COWell had given its verdict on my joke I felt rather dejected by the whole experiment and decided to ask some bird out on a date. This didn't work out either because birds aren't familiar with the human dating system (...must've been a blonde bird...jokes like this is probably why the cow moo-ed at me). Anyway, joking aside, it was a truly sad finding. The animals had rejected me and I wasn't able to make new friends but surely, these animals must be smarter than us because they get to reproduction age quicker than us, they grow faster, they can walk earlier, they can even die faster (they don't have to face dying old and frail at the tender age of 110). If u ask me they're cleverer than a species who wears its trousers below their arse and confuses it with sports equipment and a blind animal (low BATS) or a species that wears its caps back to front, walks all wonky and makes funny hand signs while wearing jewellery and talking gibberish. Yes, I'm saying that animals are cleverer than humans and quite frankly, our scientists prove it because they look into space for aliens and other species with our intelligence or more when all we have to do is go to London zoo. The only reason we chose to believe that animals aren't smarter than us is because they can't speak to us and prove us wrong. Truth is, Animals are so smart that somewhere along the line they realized this fact and thought that they won't waste their lives talking to such low lives that are so cocky.

As a human, I have one thing to say:

"Men, women and children. Let's face it, life on mars (US) invaded earth ages ago. We must stop acting like invaders and accept we were the only other form of intelligence in space and that the animals on earth are far superior to us. The only reason they act dumb is because they want our money..."

I say this, but we must be getting smarter though. We seem to "grow" quicker with the children now with mobile phones at ten and we seem to reproduce earlier with our thirteen year old parents. Maybe we are learning that if we can't beat them, we can only join them, smart. Hardly. The last two paragraphs, admittedly, are utterly preposterous.

We are humans and thus we aren't very bright. The animals are forced to not to talk to us as part of a labour government conspiracy theory to make Britain's schools, universities and scientists look smarter and the smart ones, who know about this conspiracy, are forced to drive Victoria line trains to remind them of their scary punishment if they reveal the government secret.

 

specialK

(Dedicated to Mani.The Pisshead. Malhi. - thank you for everything)