This could be the last thing you ever read

T-0: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and – so far – I feel fine.

I am keeping an eye out for any Pale Horses, but so far the world still seems more concerned with scatology than eschatology.

Ha ha – that means “poo, not the Last Things” and they rhyme. If any rappers are reading this, feel free to use that one.

Anyway, it looks like this whole Mayan apocalypse thing has been a big hoax, which just goes to show AGAIN that numberology, ancient prophecies and any ideas of destiny are load of old crap.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

If the world does end, you could do worse than repeat those words over in your mind as it happens.

Assuming it doesn’t, this is likely to be the final ODHSNM of 2012, so I thought I’d wrap up a few loose ends.

My Vasectomy - Epilogue

That I write a blog is one of the first things my wife, Elvira of Castille, tells people who she introduces me to.

Without fail, the next thing she tells them is that I wrote all about having a vasectomy on here – which indeed I did, all through July.

I feel it is incumbent upon me then to close this whole story off and tell you what happened next.

You will remember, I was given instructions – and little jars – to come back after three months (and again a month after that). This is because sperms can apparently survive for a very long time in the cosy environment afforded by the human bollock, and it’s only after said periods of time that you can be sure they’re all dead or trapped like a bunch of Chilean miners. 

I shan't bore or appall you with too many details, but I did receive a small insight into the mind of the psychopath on the two occasions when I set off for work carrying a small container of my own jizz to hand over to a complete and unsuspecting stranger.

And I passed the tests. Or failed them. I’m not sure which you'd say. 

Suffice to say, it worked. I "may now consider myself sterile". RESULT!

Moving House

The Sicilies moved house in September. I know I said I’d write about it, but I unwittingly dragged myself into that whole school appeals can of worms – at which point I lost the will to blog at all as I found myself confronted with a situation which required me to do more than just write the first thing that came into my head.

It seems redundant now. I can’t be bothered to write about it three months later. Sorry. Sometimes interesting things happen to me, but they don’t make it onto here (see the one sorry post I did on jury service in 2011 – that was supposed to be a whole series!).

Hell, if I wrote up everything that happened to me on here people I met in person would find me very boring indeed...

...

Errr...

That’s all folks!

So that’s it. If the world DOES end, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these sticky by-products of my brain over the last two and a half years.

If it doesn’t, ODHSNM will be back in 2013 with MORE MORE MORE of the same old shit. 

What's another year?

T-4: I see that many other media outlets are picking up on the Mayan apocalypse pencilled in for this Friday. Well, here at ODHSNM we have been on it for the whole damn year.

“What’s another year?” quoth Johnny Logan in 1980’s Eurovision winner.

Well, Johnny, a “year” is a bloody awkward rough approximation of the duration of the earth's orbit around the sun. And a proper pain in the arse it is too.

("Another year" refers to the second or subsequent instance in a series of years. And that is what another year is.)

I am attempting to plan my evil capitalist schemes for 2013 (it’s best to be prepared, in case we’re still here) and I am faced with the following absurdities:

• A year, in the Gregorian scheme, is 365 97/400 days (5 hours, 49 minutes) – that is the time between vernal equinoxes. Hence we have leap years every four years unless....eeeurgh it’s too hard, read it yourself.
• Quite independently of years, we have weeks comprised of seven days each – five of which we work and two of which we don’t.
• You do not have a whole number of weeks in year whether it’s a normal 365 day year or a leap 366 day year. Months have between 28 and 31 days, or between 18 and 23 working days depending on where the weekends and bank holidays fall.
• This makes it very hard to project ANYTHING month on month or indeed year on year with any degree of accuracy - because you are hardly ever comparing like and like. 

Now, I realise that calendar reform has got in with a bad crowd – it immediately suggests Year Zero and Pol Pot. And I think it’s fair to say that no one really wants to be associated with that.

I recently read “The World Set Free” by HG Wells.

Now, I know what many of you are thinking.

The Ogilvy Theatre

Most of you are thinking “that’s a conference centre in Woking”.

And, yes, it is – but I am talking about the writer, after whom the conference centre is named.

Some of the rest of you are thinking “hold on... apart from all the Good science fiction stuff, wasn’t all of HG Wells’ political and social thought Bad?”

Well, old Wellsy certainly doesn't make too many bones about how much better his future utopia would be without the poor, the stupid, the uncivilised and the uncultured in it – and he is not in favour of what we in the business world would call “achieving cuts by natural wastage”.

Nevertheless, almost in passing, he suggests that the year should be split in 13 months of four weeks each – with Easter as an annual intercalary day and leap years as specified by Pope Gregory XIII.  

Gregory would have approved. Probably. 

I think this is a tremendous idea and one not necessarily dependent on any kind of genocide or mass slaughter. 

It would make us all marginally younger and it would make the whole maths of time a lot easier. 

Who will join me in my quest for a rational year?

I am Growing as a Person

There’s a great line in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon where he says that for a certain kind of person, any statement of fact by another is an implicit challenge – coming with the unspoken epilogue “...and you didn’t know that”.

I’m afraid I don’t know the precise wording of the line or whereabouts in the book it is – I actually read it, rather than Googling for quotes. Nevertheless, for me it sums up perfectly a very widespread human trait which, until I saw it set down in print, I was aware of but not quite able to put my finger on.

I used to be one of those insecure people who always felt the need to assure interlocutors that I already knew whatever they were telling me, as if I was in some way diminished or belittled by not having known every possible piece of information anyone else might happen to know.

Yesterday, I realised that I had overcome this particular weakness - finally breaking out of the sleep, homeostasis, excretion layer of the Maslow pyramid. 

I was unlocking my bike and getting ready to set off home, when someone shouted across to me that they were surprised to see me riding a scooter and that they had assumed I would be riding something bigger.

Now, this is fair comment to a degree. I do tend to dress like I riot policeman. My defences are:

1. It’s cold and body armour is pretty warm.
2. It’s usually raining and body armour is pretty waterproof (only, of course, if one wears the trousers).
3. If I come off my scooter at 30mph or Valentino Rossi comes off his Ducati at 30mph, we are both going to get pretty badly messed up unless we’re wearing protective clothing.

So anyway, this guy – who also had a scooter – starts talking to me about bikes and matters bike-related. I go along with it because, hey, we bikers have to stick together, right?

Several minutes later, I realise that this person is just regaling me with every single fact about motorbikes he has ever heard.

And many of his assertions are COMPLETELY WRONG.

I can’t remember all of them, but specifically he insisted that it was legal to ride a 250CC bike on a CBT. Which is simply untrue. I should know, because I had to retake my bloody CBT not ten days ago (you have to do it every two years unless you upgrade to a higher category licence).

By this time, I was not only wondering what it is that makes apparently normal people burst forth with incontinent logorrhea to complete strangers who have been fooled into making eye contact with them, but also fighting back an irresistible urge to argue with him.

Had I not been wearing body armour I might have been less willing to engage in conversation – let alone controversy – with an unknown, potentially knife-wielding party. The temptation to say “I don’t think that’s right” was strong...

Reader, I conquered it.

I realised that the quickest route out of the conversation was to say “really?” and go along with it, even though I knew it was incorrect – and even though it gave the impression that I did not know something.

I really am growing as a person. I wished him "the best of luck" four times before I got away, but I did eventually get away. 

Oh I found the quote:

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

I Googled it.

The End is Very Nigh

Give it up for your X Factor finalists

T-11: It’s nearly upon us, apocalypse-watchers. Less than two weeks until the end of the world, according to some dead Mexican astronomers.  

It seems that after a year of nothing very apocalyptic happening, people are finally starting to get their acts together and behave like cattle in a lightning storm.

However, I must admit to you all, that since Christopher Maloney did not win The X Factor last night, my conviction that the world’s doom is imminently upon us has been seriously shaken.

All of a sudden, the arguments put forward by NASA and others against anything out of the ordinary happening next Friday seem fairly convincing.

The Mayans are all dead, and apparently they didn’t know about the extra quarter-day in the solar cycle which makes Leap Years necessary. Taking those into account would mean the world had already ended.