The Farage Conspiracy

The silence penetrates the city street like imaginary snow, a pataphor for the homogeneous white washed England Nigel Farage is supposed to wish for in his uneducated dreams. In one hand I am holding the latest smart phone; a Samsung G-26 with twenty gigabytes of Wi-Fi. In my other hand I am holding a briefcase containing one hundred pounds in a variety of denominations, it weighs heavy. Footsteps. I look up, at the end of the alley appears my anonymous contact, he resembles a diabetic John Hurt. Looking over his shoulder as he walks down the street he jumps at the sound of my voice.
"Deepthroat?" I murmur.
"Are you the journalist?" he says, tilting his head back to peer at me through half-rim spectacles. I nod, showing the case in my hand. "Let's go somewhere more public." he says, leading the way down the road.
"Were you followed?" I ask.
"No."
"What is it you had to tell me?" I say. We are walking at a fast pace, past the rumble of buses and a construction site. Anyone trying to listen in will struggle to hear what we're saying.
"There's a conspiracy at the top layers of UKIP. It changes everything." he says. UKIP. The four letters that mean more to the future of politics in England moreso than any other. The party was a hard right neo-conservative grass roots amalgamation of bourgeois soft nationalism and anachronistic jingoism lead by a cabal of ridiculous husks of men. And of course, they were gaining popularity.
"How so?"
"We were wrong...so wrong." he says. We begin to cross a road and he stops, turning around. "Look, if I'm not alive by the end of this will you promise me-" a gunshot echoes from above. He looks down in slow motion and watches as a bullet sends his shirt flapping apart. And a truck hits him. I run over to his mangled body and pick him up by the shoulders, trying to shake him awake. I check his pulse, after finding nothing I bow my head.
"Goddamn it...you sons of a bitches." I say. I look up and notice the sniper on the roof of the Arndale centre. I begin to run.

Through the shops and sets of doors, I take the stairs two at a time as I reach the roof. The sniper is a good distance away from me and so I begin to sprint after him. He suddenly spins around and begins to shoot at me, though I do a forward roll and dodge the fifty millimetre teflon-coated bullets. He runs to the edge of the roof and jumps! He just about clears an alley and lands on the roof of the next building. I am not too far behind him, easily leaping the gap and running. We then begin a rooftop parkour chase across Manchester until we run out of buildings.
"It's over." I say. The sniper looks at me with scared eyes. There's nowhere left to go, unless he was just mad enough to jump down. The sniper turns and begins to run in slow motion. "Son of a bitch." I say to myself, running after him. Just as he's leaps off the building I reach forward and grab his ankle, swinging him down through the window in the floor below us. He crashes through the glass and disappears from view, though once I've swung myself down it doesn't look like he's going to run again. My expensive shoes crunch fragments of glass into the plush red carpet as I walk towards him.
"Looks like you need an ambulance." I say, looking at the lacerations all over his body.
"Leave me alone!"
"No way pal, we're just getting to know each other. Now how about you tell me who sent you to shoot Stuart Wheeler and I won't break your face! Quid pro quo motherfucker." I say, kneeling down.
"Nigel sent me."
"Farage?" I say, eyes narrowing.
"Please...kill me." he says.
"With pleasure." I say, picking him up and tossing him back out of the window. Turns out Farage had sent an assassin to kill one of the members of his staff. But why? What secret did my informant have for me? I flash back to earlier that afternoon, for some reason everything is white and blue and all the sound is really echoey. I replay my meeting with the snitch. "Deepthroat...conspiracy....changes everything....wrong...promise me...deepthroat...promise me...wrong...throat...everything...everything changes...deepthroat..." I focus more, putting my fingers to my temples. I remember what he was wearing, zooming into his inside jacket pocket. There was the menu for a takeaway tucked in there, I knew it as being close to a budget hotel in the area. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.

Half an hour later I am emptying out a suitcase belonging to my contact as I stand in his hotel room. After rooting through his dirty laundry I manage to find a keypass to a UKIP facility just outside of Manchester. I drive as the sun sets, listening to a shitload of retrofuture cruelpop.

I enter the compound, flashing the keycard to the guard on the gate and park up outside. The night is a cool turquoise around, the lights from the city twinkle like distant nebula clusters against a cubist backdrop. There is a soldier stationed on one of the doors.  
"Hey bub, you got a light?" I say, taking a Lucky Strike from out of its packet. He nods, taking out a zippo and holding it out, shielding the flame with his hand. I give him an uppercut to the jaw and knock him out. 
"Didn't anyone tell you that smoking is bad for your health." I say, giving a little 'heh' afterwards before taking the uzi submachine gun off him and checking the ammo. I go through the door and do this weird sidestep sort of skipping as I dodge from crate to crate, stopping once I reach a corner and peeking around it, sweat gathering on my brow. Two guards are quietly talking to each other in the middle of the corridor. At the end there are a set of double doors with radiation signs printed onto the windows. I tap on the wall. 
"Huh?" says both of the guards at the same time. They begin to walk towards me. Just as they're about to turn the corner I leap out and bang their heads together.    

I pause just before I enter the next room. Who knew what secrets this facility held? Toxic waste mutants, cyborg animals, a clone army. I cocked the uzi and burst into the room. Farage was stood in the centre, lit by a single spotlight, drinking a pint of bitter in the darkness.   
"Farage." I growl.  
"You should have let me know you were coming. I'd have got one for you." he says, taking a sip of his beer. I walk up to him and point the gun at his face.  
"Give me one good reason not to blow you to kingdom come dirtbag." I say.  
"Just one? How about...five?" he says. Behind him a wall of televisions turn on, showing a map of the UK. There are five atomic symbols marked in the same places as London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast...and Manchester!  
"Is that what I think it is?"  
"If you think that I have five nukes hidden in the most important cities in the UK, then yes. You're right."  
"Why I oughta-" I say, though Farage cuts me off with a flourish of his hand, revealing a detonator.  
"Now now, no need to lose our temper. Let's talk, shall we?" he says. I notice he sounds similar to Jeremy Irons in Die Hard With A Vengeance.  
"Sure...let's talk." I say, lowering my gun. Farage takes a sip of beer and begins his monologue.    

"The United Kingdom Independence Party is my child. Literally. I gave birth to a conceptual humanoid that has over one thousand heads, although those are attached to the bodies of actual people. Are you familiar with mind control? I am...a puppet master. I was trained in the KGB then sent undercover to England to pose as a right wing politician, although my true mission is to separate the UK from the EU, destabilising the continent for Putin to come and take over. England is the anus of Europe, everything ends up going through this country before crossing the Atlantic. An excellent place to launch an attack against America from, wouldn't you agree? I am not a politician for pot smoking I.T consultants to complain about on the internet, I am who your parents vote for as they get older and more racist. I am the most important person in European history since Franz Ferdinand. I hope a future band names themselves after me too. I am the alpha and the omega. I am the one who knocks." he says. I look behind him at the map of the UK. Maybe five cities were worth trading to stop this maniac. But I wasn't a murderer. I simply lean forward and spit in his beer. 

    

TNG Fan Fiction; Riker's Curse

Geordi LeForge and Data were stood in engineering, examining a flow chart pinned against a wall.
"If we remodulate the frequency in which the dilithium crystals vibrate that means-" says Data.
"It means that this might just work!" says Geordi. He quickly snaps up a hand to tap his comm badge, bearing the insignia of The Federation. "Geordi to Captain Picard."
"Come in Geordi." says a comforting yet powerful voice through the communicator.
"Captain, if we pass dilithium crystals through a gamma frequency then we can get our warp engines back online."
"Commander LeForge, I trust you to do what's best." says Picard. On the bridge of the U.S.S Enterprise, Captain Jean-Luc Picard sits in a black foam chair in the centre of the room. Around him is his trusted staff, Commander William T. Riker, Lieutenant Worf, Dr. Beverly Crush and Troi.
"Computer, red alert." says Picard. Some lights turn on and a siren begins to be played through miniature speakers embedded in the ceiling. Outside the ship the warp engines begin to power up silently in the blackness of space, ready to fire the entire U.S.S Enterprise at many factors of light speed.
"Engage." says Picard. The entire ship and it's thousands of passengers are zipped through the galaxy at millions of miles per hour.
"Commander Riker. Set a course for the Delta Quadrant." says Picard.
"Computer, set a course for the Delta Quadrant." says Riker.
"Affirmative. Setting a course for the Delta Quadrant." says a computerized female voice.
"Lieautenant Worf, you have the bridge. Number one?" says Picard, turning to his second in command. Riker's eyebrows lift slightly.
"Captain?"
"Number one, if you would follow me into my quarters." says Picard, leading the way.
"Affirmative captain." says Riker, standing up and wiggling his body around.

The two men stand in a strange salmon coloured room. There is carpet on the walls, floor and ceiling due to Picard's predilection for turning the gravity off and doing a futuristic form of yoga and flute playing.
"Captain?" says Riker.
"Number one...what I'm about to tell you is top secret. I trust that once I tell you, no-one else outside of this room will know." says Picard.
"Of course captain, your secret is safe with me. Not just as a Starfleet officer but as a close friend." says Riker, straightening up slightly. Picard nods. He knew he could trust the bearded man before him. For ten years they had served together, lending each other a hand, and over the years they definitely considered each other to be best friends.
"Will. There is a serial killer on board. So far he has killed at least twenty eight members of this crew."
"Captain?"
"I have kept it secret up until now. The thing is this serial killer was allowed on board by The Federation. They know about it. He has been given a license to kill, it's all legal."
"Why would Starfleet send a murderer on board?"
"I haven't the faintest idea." says Picard, glancing at his fish bowl.
"Well can't we stop him?"
"It's not possible. They have replaced the Prime directive with a new one; they are free to kill anyone they want."
"That's ludicrous. It goes against everything Starfleet stands for!" shouts Riker.
"That may be the case. But regardless of that, we are Starfleet officers. I swore an oath; that I would uphold the Prime Directive with my life." says Picard.
"Not this one I didn't! Jean-Luc, we have to stop this serial killer, now!"
"That might be more difficult than you think." says Picard.
"Why?" says Riker.
"Because the serial killer...is you." says Picard. Riker stares at him, mouth agape.

They stood in the holodeck, watching a robotic exoskeleton enter Riker's room as he slept. It gently picked him up and fastened him into the suit like a puppet. Together they left the room, walked down the corridor and up a turbo lift.
"I don't understand." says Riker, turning to his captain.
"Watch." says Picard, staring at the hologram in front of him like a driver accelerating towards oncoming traffic.
They watched the somnambulist cyborg walk up behind a member of the crew, Riker didn't recognise him. A lever on the robot moved, putting a knife into Riker's hand before pushing his arm forward followed by his whole body being released from the suit. The knife went forward into the back of the man's neck, twisting slightly as it chipped away a piece of bone. They both fell forward, the man gurgling beneath as blood pumped from the wounds. All the way through Riker remained asleep and was gently picked up again and walked back towards the turbo lift.
"I still don't understand. Why would Starfleet do such a thing! It doesn't make any sense! I'm not a killer."
"You are Number one. We just watched you do it."
"That wasn't my fault, that damn robot practically did the whole thing! It must be destroyed."
"Practically, yes. Actually, no. You're in a serious situation Will, but I'm here to help." says Picard.
"How long have you known about this?"
"I was the one who chose you Will."
"What?"
"I got to decide who would wear the robot suit. I thought that you were the right man for the job, but I'm beginning to doubt my decision. I should have chosen Data, he wouldn't have minded. I felt...guilty."
"You made me kill twenty eight people and you feel guilty?" bellowed Riker.
"Yes. I'm sorry." says Picard. Riker punched the old man in the forehead, knocking him backwards. Revealing itself from the holodeck wall which had been cloaking it, the robot suit walks forward and clutches Riker.
"No! No! Get off me!" he shouts. Within seconds the robot suit has now wrapped itself around Riker and forces him to walk through the door. Through the corridors they run, the suit guiding Riker's hand as he carves his way through anybody that stands in front of him. Riker's screams are occasionally joined by others, until his is the only sound left on the ship.

Banquet

The biggest problem facing the Western world is that people are eating too much food. The anti-famine is upon us, the plague of locusts in reverse, the soft undulating curves of the obese as they vibrate in electric litters, watching videos of starving children as salted corn snacks are eagerly pushed between rotting teeth, bundles of food wrapping set onto landfill sites like plastic bouquets onto a mass grave. On one end of the spectrum is the human cow, on the other is the neurotic living skeleton. Before the Industrial Revolution an egg was an egg, now it is a complex net of protein, carbohydrates, fatty acids and acidic fats symbolised by an egg.

The calorie intake for a city contains enough energy to power a rocket on its way to the moon. There is such an abundance of food it has become a natural resource, like sunlight or mud. On television we watch middle-aged chefs dance around huge kitchens, spritzing cheeks of veal with saffron to be fed to minor celebrities. We eat better than any king in the entirety of human civilization. The sublimation of sexual energy into creating food. Cooking is foreplay, eating is fucking, digestion as a form of pregnancy. The foods that are taboo are not based on their components but how healthy they are deemed to be. It is less important that a pig was slaughtered and more about how it is presented; a sausage McMuffin or a sliver of flesh served with a sage and black olive fondant? There is a violence in food preparation, its tools are somewhere between medieval torture instruments and modern medical devices. It is a process heavily reminiscent of death, for we eat the dead (animal or vegetable).

There are those that feed like birds, eating is no longer a way to feel fulfilled but a process of absence. They are drawn towards zero, like orbiting the event horizon of a black hole, often their lives revolve around nothingness and attaining this zen-like state is the entirety of their existence. There are those that feed like hogs, eating is no longer a way to feel fulfilled but a process of stuffing. They receive pleasure from the sweet foods, the childish foods, the foods of apes. They cannot receive pleasure in any other way except for the brief moment on the tongue; they masticate to fill a hole in their stomach that exists in the mind. Their lives also revolve around nothingness, though rather than becoming lost in the void they would rather replace it and have everything fall into them.

000
000
000

Those between these two extremes are themselves haunted by the prospect of balance. This is where complex diets come in, rituals passed down by modern gastropriests that one should follow to attain weightlessness. A paleo, gluten-free, organically farmed, locally sourced diet is perceived as one of many possibilities, to be joined with Atkins, Ketogenic, CRAM and other ways in which people who don't know how to eat look towards for inspiration. If anybody was to eat these certain foods then they will all end up looking the same. Diets are a fascist concept.

You may be reading this and wonder what it is that I eat? Well I shall tell you. Every one hundred steps I pick up the nearest thing and eat it. Leaves, gum, boomerangs, sandwiches, insects, dogs, cars, buildings, jewels, anything. By not considering at all what I eat besides following this basic rule, my diet is much more varied than that of the average person. Less a Food Pyramid and more a Food Hanging Gardens Of Babylon. Of course, there is no correct way to eat food, just to eat when hungry and remember vegetables.


Stillleben mit Fleischkorb, Frans Snyder

Manchester Central Library Review

The grand opening of Manchester Central Library took place on the 22nd of March after its closure for four years. The £98m revamp restored much of the Library’s original interiors as well as funding entirely new spaces designed by boffins at Manchester University along with international style guru Jacobi Mendelson.

Hundreds of thousands of books were retrieved from a salt mine, kept in a sodium stasis state until being arranged in alphabetical order on the shelves once again. Such rare books include works by William Shakesbeare, an 8th century book on astronomy, an unpublished Simon Beckett play titled ‘The Bone Sharks’ and a complete Florentine Codex. Visitors can happily pluck them off the shelves and leaf through them hungrily, but all of the books have also been scanned by lasers and converted into a pdf file specially designed for Manchester Central Library. In fact a large portion of the library is digital; the entire recorded history of mankind exists in large underground databanks that can be accessed over wi-fi and printed out at a new publishing house found in a distant wing of the library.

Upon entering the Great Hall you cannot helped but be brought to a standstill by its magnitude. Pillar after pillar of green marble line the room, stretching upward to support a domed ceiling that emanates a gentle light over all. Marble statues of deities connected with knowledge are interspersed between the enormous pillars, each of them have the quality of highly polished pearl. The glass floor is made up of a series of interconnecting black triangles, each give the impression of standing above infinity.

Thick wooden doors open into the grand Reading Room, an enormous circular room with tables and chairs arranged in a pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence. It is entirely silent. Walking through people occasionally look up from their book and watch you walk past, there is an air of paranoia around. I am acutely aware of the sounds inside my body. The gurgles of stomach acids, the sighs of the kidneys, the unsticking of eyelids during a blink. I make my way through another door and along a sweeping staircase running around the exterior of the library. There are replicas of author’s desks now and then, in which visitors can access all the books they wrote as well as the books the author had read. Oak doors lead into a room lined with shelves, holding roughly two million books. If one was to sit and read every book in this room it would take roughly one million years.

Clustered around the large halls are secondary rooms. An Italian restaurant is somewhat surprising, though a logical extension of the Renaissance themes seen around the Library. Frescos are painted on the wall lit softly by candles. The next room is the archives, roughly six gigabits of information contained on special cards that can be entered into a computer and read at a leisurely pace. The latest computer gaming systems are also here, the Sega Megadrive and Dreamcast consoles linked up to HD monitors. A tree grows, tendered to daily by a robotic gardener that adjusts artificial lighting and hydroponic systems. Overall one gets a sense that a library doesn’t have to just be a place poor people go when they don’t have a telly. It can be a place of inspired learning. There is a recurring phrase carved into every single piece of skirting board in the building. ‘Dulce Et Ego, Cor Domorum Veni’.

As one climbs the staircase more rooms can be accessed. An art gallery, an operatic theatre, a three dimensional mirror maze, even a vivarium all can be found in the Manchester Central Library. Once one reaches the top floor they are treated to a 360 degree view from the roof of the library. Most of Manchester is obscured by multistorey budget hotels and empty office space, but the roof is nevertheless impressive due to the bubble formed that keeps visitors dry. The bubble is constantly collapsing and reforming as a wave of atomic energy is projected from the rooftop generators through water molecules in the air.

Overall Manchester Central Library is a 21st century take on what a library is, with reference to multiple zones of time, cultures and architecture. Sections of the library are unbuilt, leaving gaping voids between walls in which one can glimpse the libraries previous incarnations. Other sections are overly built; huge chunks of rock can sometimes be found obscuring a corridor or clustered overhead like a nest of wasps. It is a pastiche of the human brain, the new god in the new millenium. I am eagerly awaiting its closure in fifteen years for an entirely new refurbishment, perhaps a simple holograph attached to the side of a drinking fountain, or a first person shooter in which one can get the 20th century American literature DLC at $14.99. Nevertheless, irregardless, at the end of the day, ad nauseam.

Generation Y or Gem her a shun why?

Teenagers these days are different to the teenagers of the past. They listen to different music, use technology and dress differently. They also act differently. I took to the streets to interview them.

"These days we do things differently than in the past. I feel almost like I didn't do the exact same things as my parents did." says Adam. He is studying a creative subject in a town in the Midlands to give you the impression that he is somewhat of a nieve idealist. We look at out a street I would describe with bland adjectives and perhaps mention the juxtaposition between an advertisement and what is happening nearby.
"Why is it do you think we have subcultures? And why is it they change so much?"
"I'm not entirely sure so I will give a slightly nihilistic yet self-aware response as I lack the confidence to truly say what I think due to the question being mostly unimportant." he says, checking the end of an object one associates with being symbolic of that sub-culture. A group of teenage men and women are walking down the street across from us, although these are dressed differently to Adam.
"Is that a different sub-culture, perhaps one that somehow rivals yours?"
"Correct. The shared beliefs in which each subculture values can differ in importance. Although this brings up the question of if people belong to subcultures based on their beliefs or does the subculture shape the beliefs of the person to which it belongs. I propose it is less of a chicken and egg scenario and more akin to the Portuguese man o' war, a single being made up of several different creatures or in this case, concepts." says Adam, gesticulating in the fog rolling in around us. I thank him and cross the road into a café in which the other teenagers have just entered.

I sit down nearby and after eavesdropping for ten minutes or so can't help but mention that I am a journalist on a website and if it would be possible to interview them.
"What do you want to interview about?" says one baby-faced youth.
"What is it like being a teenager in 2014? I mean, I know I look young but I'm not a teenager." I say, laughing to myself.
"We are undergoing a severe biological transformation and this causes a certain amount of ennui." says a tall girl.
"Yeah, it's like in our culture being a teenager is a thing you do between being a child and being an adult. But the way in which it happens is totally unhealthy." says the baby-faced youth, drinking a can of pop that didn't exist five years ago and is mocked slightly by people it isn't marketed to. The other people sitting at the table nod their heads.
"So you think there's an alternative?" I ask, pulling a microphone out of my trouser pocket and letting its foamy tip rest on the table.
"I think it'd be more fluid if teenagers left their homes once they show the first signs of puberty. They would gather in special camps out in the wilderness where they would learn about themselves and the world around them. The community is encouraged to experiment and build on interpersonal skills whilst undergoing an education and learning the basics of self-sufficency. I believe that this would lead to general feelings of well-being and happiness that would have a trickle down effect through the generations until we achieve a kind of...utopia."
"Well I'll get right on that." I say, laughing. "Next you'll be saying we should cut funding for the police and armed forces and put it into education and welfare."
"Well now you mention it..." says a pimple-faced miscreant. Like Jesus cleansing the temple of merchants, I flipped the table over and started throwing plates around.

Six hours later I am stood on a cliff next to a woman about to jump. I look down at the rocks and the surf below, listening to the wind carrying the call of gulls which fly around.
"Don't try and stop me." she says, breathing heavily, face wet with tears.
"I'm not." I say, kneeling down on the grass and flipping my legs over the edge.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm climbing." I say, letting my body slip as I clutch onto handfuls of grass. One of my boots catches a rock and I begin to rest my weight onto it. Gradually I begin to clamber down, sometimes a foothold gives way beneath and I slip a few feet.
"Stop it! It's dangerous!" she shouts down at me.
"If you jump I will catch you." I shout back up. I climb down for a while longer, rubbing the sweat from my eyes with the sleeve of my tweed jacket. I glance back up and she is still there, watching me. There comes a point in which there are no more places to put my feet or my hands. I can't go back up as most of my previous holds have crumbled away and fallen into the sea beneath me. I am stuck.
"Excuse me. Can you call mountain rescue?" I shout up. But she has disappeared. One of my hands begin to cramp as I hold myself against the cliff face. "Shit."

All The Waters Of Earth

In which all of the animals came together for a glorious feast.

The Island Of The Birds

Under the day moon I sat in Platt Fields Park, observing the island in the centre of its lake. The park came about in 1907 after the Worsley Family sold Platt Hall and its grounds. Once a thriving area of fun and slow walks, the park fell into disarray until slowly rising again to be one of the more popular green spaces in Manchester. Although I am not concerned with the history of the park or even its future. The reason I was there that day was to explore the island. The many species of water fowl that plague the toxic lake come hither and tother from the land, the actions which occur on the island are hidden from sight due to the foliage yet a great cacophony constantly squawks and honks away from sunrise to sunset. The island belongs to the birds. And like many great men before me I decided to explore their territory and if any treasures were to be found, bring them back to regular civilization. Leaving my electronic gadgets behind I stood at the waters edge and began to swim.

Signs around the lake remark that their is 'blue green algae' in the water which is poisonous to humans, causing Lou Gehrig's Disease or other brain wrongness. Inversely, blue green algae is used in health supplements sold in Holland & Barrett. I decided to ignore the warnings as there was worse in the sea and people surfed in that every day. The act of swimming itself was not tiresome, each gentle stroke from my breasts brought me closer to the mysterious land mass. Yet as I neared the birds began to circle. A tufted duck was first to come near me as I gently swam.
"Hello duck." I said, spitting out lake water. It tried to peck my eye, so I instead took it's bill in my mouth and bit it clean off. Another bird gently swam over to me, a Canadian Goose.
"Hello goose." I said. This one began to peck me all around the head and so I reached out of the water and snapped its neck. I was nearing the shore of the island now and thought I was clear from any more attacks until a Cormorant flew in and landed in front of me.
"Hello cormorant." I said, raising a foot from the silt in case I needed to kick it. But the Cormorant looked at me with one eye, turned its head and looked at me with it's other, and then vomited up what appeared to be a curry before flying away. I knelt by the strange evacuation, dipped my fingers into it and brought it up to my nose. Chicken Korma. I spat in dismay, for I had been damaged by a bird on a more emotional level than any physical violence could. Yet now was not the time to get in a tizzy, for there was an island to explore. And all around me were the shrieking of the birds.

The earth around me was covered in bird shit, miniature footprints and feathers. It smelt of dust. The island rose in a gentle slope to its low peninsula, I watched the ducks and geese waddle away from me. My clothes were coloured in algae and dirt, the blood from my goose wound ran down my face. I began to scramble over the ground, the terrain had been made by the birds and so their small paths did not fit my lumbering form. The shells of eggs crunched underfoot as did the hollow bones of long dead avians. Within five minutes I had pretty much explored every square metre of the island and had so far found nothing remarkable, besides glimpsing what the world would look like if completely overrun by birds. I could hear the sirens at the park gates, a crowd was beginning to gather by the waters edge, shouting every time they spotted me in the undergrowth. I didn't have much time. Batting away an ill-tempered swan I forced myself towards the centre of the island. Maybe there would be some kind of monument, some kind of reason for all of this. An end to justify the means. Yet all there was was a particularly fat goose that looked at me with those reptilian eyes, the same eyes as every other bird that betrays its evolutionary heritage.
"Why am I here goose! Why!" I shouted. I didn't expect a reply and just sat by it, beginning to cry at the hopelessness of the situation. I felt a scaly webbed foot on my hand and looked up. The goose was staring right at me. Maybe trying to convey some message. I think I understood and so nodded, taking firm hold of both the goose's feet. It spread out its wings and began to flap. Flap, flap, flap. Over and over. And slowly but surely we were beginning to fly! I dangled on the little orange feet and watched Platt Fields Park below me as both of us flew away, laughing together as if we were infants. When it dropped me off at home I caught it with a net and ate it for supper, for it was the biggest goose I had ever seen. I had tried to answer the mysteries of the island yet found that there was no mystery. Perhaps it would be better in future to pose questions than answer them.

How To Smell

What are the smells currently around you? Unless foul it was likely you didn't even notice them in the first place. Yet breathe in slowly, through the nose. What are the things that give off a smell nearby? Perhaps a cup of tea, an ashtray or a dog. Better yet you may be reading this out in nature and have the luxury of chlorophyll and wind. But you might be asking yourself 'am I smelling enough?' and the answer is 'probably not'. An entire perspective, up there with touch, sight and hearing, yet having a good nose isn't taught in schools and rarely discussed in public. I have been experimenting with my nose recently and thought I would share the findings with you.

First of all, how does smell work? Well, how does vision work? Light is shone onto objects and then bounced back at different frequencies picked up by the rods and cones in the eyeball. It is similar for smelling. Smells are bounced off objects and hit you in the nose. Here special cells called sniffodoruns detect any irregularities in the pure scent of nothing (from which all smells are made) then send messages to the brain which translates this information into smells. On the smell spectrum we have sweet, sour, dirt, water, musk and grass. All smells have varying elements from each of these six primary scents and no other smells outside this spectrum can be smelt by the human nose, although it is thought some animals can detect Ultrabitter and Infrasweet.

When you breathe through your nose it is important to do it slowly. Too quickly and the increasing air will push the odours away from the sniffodoruns and give the sensation of coldness. Although I do recommend breathing in quickly once to properly feel where your sense of smell is actually located. You should feel a sensation at the front of both nostrils (even though you are only breathing through one) that runs up your nose and into the middle of your head. You can use your tongue to triangulate where the true sniffodoruns are whilst with tracing a finger up and down the dorsal ridge of your nose. Close your eyes and focus on this point, imagining the sniffodoruns detecting the delicate yet complex fragrances all around you. Can you identify each unique smell inside the symphony of odours? If you are unsure what something is, perhaps moving around the room would be helpful. At first a sense of smell can be quite weak and require close proximity in order to fully smell something, although like the ear of a musician, the nose can be trained and improve over time to be more sensitive.

The next step is to smell your hands. Go on, give 'em a sniff why don't you! What is it you can smell? Do you know why? If there is anybody else nearby, ask to smell their hands. You might be pleasantly surprised to find their hands will smell totally different than yours. Perhaps you're able to identify if they smoke or not, what they've had to eat, if they use soap and what brand, all sorts can be learned from smelling the hands of a person. Next is to smell them all over in order to properly process their scent. It can help if you look at them whilst you do this and they talk to you, in order to fully build up an interperspective feel of a person. In a more subtle way you can take to the streets, smelling joggers as they run past you.

One should be careful with their sense of olfaction. Not only do you have to protect it by not smoking or insufflating drugs, but you may smell some things previously unimagined yet more horrifying than any vision or noise. And like all senses, will begin to fade with age and steadily decline into nothingness, which is all the more reason to begin training now. Have you ever smelt pregnancy? How about smelling a sunrise? Many avenues reveal themselves whilst focusing on an underrated perception.

Shall Turn To Blood

Noise Festival Presents

A Shakespeare & Longfellow Production

ALL THE WATERS OF EARTH SHALL TURN TO BLOOD

at Antwerp Mansion, Manchester. 1900.17.3.14-18.3.14


###


Nestled in a dark cranny at the edge of Curry Mile, Antwerp Mansion is an open hive of artistry. The Victorian-era building is home to photo shoots, raves, team building weekends and art exhibitions, a cultural gem of the city that is equally important to similar locations such as Islington Mill or The Whitworth Art Gallery. Artisans from across Europe carefully restore the original covings around the building, using only the best quality jute sacking, gypsum plasters and associated ancillaries in the return of the buildings grace. Indeed, its virtues lie in not just the walls but in the people, for Antwerp Mansion is the preliminary expedition for the slow gentrification of curry mile itself.

On the 17th of March at exactly seven o'clock the doors of the mansion will be flung open. Doves will emerge from the dusty corridors, spraying glitter from their wings as they soar across Manchester. All the waters of Earth shall turn to blood. The equivalence of royalty in the contemporary Manchester art scene will visit, wearing the finest frocks and gowns, to view a series of paintings and sculptures that would make Mozart himself jealous. The exhibition appears to be about a meat planet, but over the course of the evening observers can't help but notice that the air around them is sticky with a certain substance. And upon further pondering people will realise that there is a little bit of magic in the air. Things seem to float. Colours change. Instead of talking they were now listening, to the cosmic bell that is chiming around them.

BONG!

BONG!

BONG!

and they will know that everything was true.

Atlas Sands

I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk. From the airport runways to the heart of the city centre, Manchester is one of the best places for any keen hiker to explore on foot. There are mile after mile of roads in Manchester, I estimate there is enough tarmac for a single road to run along the entire coast of England. And on the side of these roads, more often than not, is the pavement. For where would we be without pavements? Perhaps the unsung hero of Manchester, its pavements are walked on daily by its entire population and on which lost items can be found, promises can be made and even a few secrets kept. Anything can happen on these mysterious walkways, five and a half feet wide and infinite in length. In Los Angeles there is a pavement with the hands of famous celebrities embedded into it. In Manchester the pavement is covered in the bloody handprints of gunshot victims. I went to see what kind of pavements I could encounter on a standard day of exploration.

Before long I found myself stranded on the embankment of the M62, the traffic rushing past me on both sides. The air around me moved quickly, filled with the smell of diesel and rain water. I shut my eyes and found myself in a

death dream

falling forward, clutching at my left eye. It had gone cold. Stumbling blindly I reach a concrete bridge and begin to scale it with my fingertips.
"Gone gone samba, rolled rick potassiums and inobstruble magnificents." I mumble to myself. A sacred mantra I had picked up from the last necromancer in Berlin. Eventually I managed to pull myself upward to near safety and began the long walk home, pulling fragments of teeth from out of my tongue, musing, simply musing on the bare bone facts of life. What if instead of people we were pavements? I know, I know, it sounds crazy, I know. Okay? But just hear me out here~

~ quantum physics ~

~ I hope that adequately stated my point, but though even irregarding the fact that the pavements were a source of trouble in our lives, it is possible to empathise with architecture at at least an atomic level.

Gym Membership

In the nineties it was rare to see a jogger. Nowadays exactly half of the people you see on the street is running around dressed in the finest cotton wanking outfits, ipad strapped to the chest, nose full of nitrous oxide. It is more common to see a beefcake whilst out on the lurch than ever before. People love exercising. But in the future knee problems will wash over the populace, so no problem! Titanium joints delivering a heavy metal buzz stone. I switched from smoking tobacco to weed, now I'm a genius. Personally I do 30 rep HIIT exercises running from the 5-0 24-7/C://jttps:www.sandras.com

Weights that contain energy. Bikes that contain energy. Yoga balls that contain energy. If everything is made out of energy and the laws of thermodynamics state the eventual destiny for everything is heat death does that mean the soul lives on? To what end, running an electroencephalogram on the intestines in order to read the waves from neural activity in the gut and comparing them to the waves in the brain. Synchronicity. Otherness affected by diet. Increase in supposed paranoia via feelings of depersonalisation caused by foods with fake sugar in them.

I have deeply studied the rigmarole of gym exercise and have concluded it is an extremely highly fetishized masturbatory zone in which one can view an array of human material whilst exercising ones body to the point of pain. The muscle men of today will be the toothless geezers tomorrow, clutching at your ankle and laughing from the drain. Children on steroids ripping off the heads of flowers. 'Power' bicycles weighing ninety kilos speed through imaginary bike lanes, slicing in half electric cars and vaporizing mutants like tron in the dark.

We are living in a gym future. Why isn't the Milky Way an enormous protein shake spilling pearls over the cosmos? The Red Bull breakfast sponsored by Bruce Willis. A ninety degree angle in the form of a piece of metal that is thrust and grunted upon as the projection of sublimation via chemicals in the water supply. Super soldier serum basically.

Money Review: The Five Pound Note

B2B is dead, P2P is the future (people 2 people), it's easy nowadays to run a sql server at home with three dimensional data storage, in both cloud and metacloud. Beyond the stratosphere is Moon 2.0, designs for newspapers on other planets, the working class in spaaaace.

Here are 5 tips to make your business healthy;

1. Optimize search engine results, especially paying attention to the russian and even chinese internet.
2. Content is king, but who is God? George Washington's face on a hundred dollar bill y'all.
3. By upgrading your internet connection to the new 'broadband', you can upload at a basic 526kb/s.
4. Remember to print out business cards at home and hand them out at corporate events. Save money by being sponsored by a paper manufacturer.
5. The fifth tip is just have fun.

Do you want to make money by working from home? Simply click on advertisements on the internet. You're making someone money but that person isn't you, so think outside the box. Start making up your own advertisements and post them to your friends, earn £1 with every 1000 clicks. That means after roughly 10,000 clicks you'll be earning £10,000.

The thing I love about the Apple Macs is the designing. It's cool, it's hip. Young people love it, good brand recognition. The PC on the other hand has the image of being something found in the homes of sex criminals. Here's a tip for Bill Gates; make computers out of gold. That way they will be very expensive. It's important nowadays to get tattoos. Tattoos are a way of archiving the viral. Charlie bit my finger. Fastforward twenty years, Charlie killed someone. Why? He had been programmed to do at an early age by cannibalistic projection.

You ever lie in bed and wonder what you did that got you where you are today? You might think back to some key moment then remember something before that happened that set the event in motion. In fact you could go back through your entire life, then your parents, and your ancestors but guess what? They have nothing to do with you lying in bed. Reaching financial independence isn't a luxury, it's a fashion statement.

Maybe you should re-mortgage your house so you can get hair or breast implants? A little money saving tip that does me good, for every £1 I spend I put £2 into a savings account. That way I barely have any money and sell Christmas presents in order to fuel my drug habit. But what about the recession? Turns out it never happened. Just a bunch of jerks started talking about politics because talking about something important made them feel important. Why not empathise with your bank? I encourage readers to sneak up to it in the middle of the night and start smearing themselves against the windows.

Notice the women in the centre of the five pound note. They are crying because the babies are being drowned. The aristocrats on the left are overlooking the scheme. A woman watches a child and a dwarf wrestle. The shapes on the inner wheel arch are reminiscent of the sayagata pattern, interlocking swastikas. Elizabeth Fry has hair like Marge Simpson. Overall a fascinating design, perhaps some of the best money around. 5/5 stars.

Dog Looking At Jupiter

It has a penchant for astronomy.

Principles Of Mask Culture

The Venetian mask is synonymous with Venice. Known as being an important part of the autumnal festival, tourists flock from around the world to see the face plates decorated to a high standard. Historically the Venetian nobility would wear these masks for a good majority of the year when out in public, allowing them to commit a variety of lewd and anonymous acts. Some men would wear ones like the cranium of a humpback, allowing them to eat and drink. Others involved holding a paddle in the mouth in order to support the mask, rendering its wearer mute. Wearing masks was outlawed in the 18th century but was legalised in the seventies again, leading to a booming economy to the city built on a marsh. The mask is seen throughout history to grant its wearer a costume for the face. As humans express themselves through the musculature wrapped around the oculars, wearing a mask allows one to change their identity, be it for theatrical purpose or to evade identification. A masked person finds it easier to commit violence than an unmasked one. Hiding the face is common in military and religious subcultures around the world, but once features are applied to this covering the user can empathise more with the face they are wearing. For instance, in a werewolf film the actor may wear a facial prosthesis in order to appear werewolfian. Yet if one was to see through the mask, the actor would be pulling a strange expression (as would anyone acting like a monster whilst wearing a mask). The sorts of expressions are unseen in our day to day social interactions, but nevertheless have the potential to occur almost constantly.

In contemporary times the mask is linked with the party protest subculture ‘Anonymous’. People aged between 11-56 occasionally don a ‘Guido’ mask from the film ‘V is for Vendetta’ and pose for photographs at various political hotspots around the world. Made popular through the internet messaging board ‘4chan’, the group has hacked government e-mail accounts, leaked sensitive data encryption keys from the UNEFCA and helped bring down Colonel Bombay. The mask itself is a sort of ironic twist on the appearance of Al-Qaeda terror suspects, with wearers often accompanying the mask with a comfortable set of clothing and perhaps a placard covered in slogans, size 18 Impact font. These middle-class yobos often can be seen petrol bombing police horses or doing drive-by attacks from hi-jacked aeroplanes. This is the exact same reason people wore masks in Venice and will go on to follow the destiny that lurks in history, the banning of masks. Though this time it will be for every mask. The world will have no more masks left to wear.

This itself may not be as bad as it seems. Are we entering a world post public? I’m talking digital communications. Nerds are trend setters due to their close proximity to high technology, and if there’s anything we know about nerds is that they don’t leave the house.
“Mom! Bring me some fuckin’ Doritos!”
Yet there is still the need to be anonymous. In the early days it could be argued the internet itself was a mask for a user, allowing anyone to read or write whatever they wanted. But the internet of 99 is different to the one of 14. Nowadays you can't even find out the weather without logging into your bbc account that's linked up to your Nintendo Passport. The opposite of anonymity is fame, recognition. We're entering new private. A fridge that knows your birthday. A tie that helps you diet. A bong that has lights on it. Smear tech smart walls that watch your children and broadcast your thoughts to the government. Your car can fall in love with you. It will be harder and harder for one to do anything without being conscious that you're being watched before it's even been seen.
"Am I making this sandwich in a cool, awesome way?"
"Heh, that was funny. Just need to write it down."
"I'm going to learn the ukulele."
All the world's literally now a stage, rather than a metaphoric one. This is where people will start wearing masks even more because why not, what if you just wore a mask of a person and stood around, watching the sun rise? Gazing at the gap, between two stones, on the floor, at the intersection, of imagined lines. The axioms of living, the neural cartesia welded in place through action. The ego will being to boil and split away from the consciousness like a molten bin liner. People will wear masks more in the future because internet.

Fractal Food Chain

Dust mite on spider carcass.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Waiting For Godot

How can we forget those endless days of yesteryear whilst tomorrow endlessly crashes ahead? 30'000 days of bliss/misery index; (New m)
A radical art concept that transcends ears.
A punk philosophy with a rock sound.
The musicians wear masks. Not like Daft Punk though. This is different.
Surface mics on surface mics to create a well of sound.
Fuck the audience.
A concept album based on Basket Case 3: The Progeny.
A f*cked up prog album available for download with gifs. £5.
No practising. Only jamming.
As confidence grows actions will become more bizarre such as; photo shoots.
At least two or three members need to take everything personally and occasionally storm out muttering "Fuck you all."
A no-smoking policy.
Significant increase in dog attacks.
There should be more focus on image than music.
Upon the death of the weakest member of the group they shall be venerated with rose wine.
It feels better this way.
Now moreso than ever before.
Animal nature in the face of cruel geometries.

The History And Future Of Work

Roughly seven thousand years ago mankind shifted from it’s hunter-gatherer way of living to that of working the land. It is likely that the ‘gatherers’ were some of the first to realise plants would grow from seed and began to plant them, meaning that there would be guaranteed food rather than requiring that members of a community go and hunt or gather. It also helped that the world was exiting the Plasticeone era and into the Neogene, early man now lived in a world a lot more hotter and wetter than it’s ancestors had. With the certainty of food brought more time for people to specialise in pottery or weaving, both of which became more useful for growing and storing crops. And so marks the beginning of work that has more or less remained unchanged up until the Industrial Revolution.

It is deemed one of the highest virtues in our society to engage in work, either paid or voluntary, though with people looking for favourably on the former as doing something for free is seen of as reckless and ignorant. On the flip side, working hard is seen as more virtuous than being paid a lot. People will often boast about the time they might have to get up at or the shifts they cover but not as much what they get paid. Normal reactions to those who say they work hard are often a raised eyebrow, a look of concern or a story about how they work harder. It is recommended that everyone work forty hours a week, following on from the concept of the eight hour day, with the remainder for rest and play, yet society is slowly realising that there are too few hours in a week for everyone to work. Similar to the housing bubble, we are quite deep into a ‘work bubble’, though rather than rising house prices and fewer properties we have excess people available to work and hours in a week. One only needs to walk around the streets during the day and wonder what everyone is doing not at work. “I haven’t worked a job for six years, it’s the government’s fault.” is often a snappy comeback, yet the fault actually lies with the implementation of the production line by Henry Ford in 1913.

Production lines had been in place since the 19th century, yet it was the end product, an affordable motor car, that had the biggest impact on Western society in a more subtle way than changing entire landscapes through road construction, pollution from oil or the millions of automobile fatalities. It set into motion a series of events that shifted work away from humans and more towards automation. The term ‘Luddite’ is used now to mean more someone against technological change, yet its roots are with workers against technological unemployment. By destroying the machines which had replaced them the early Luddites were preconceiving a world where the work that they carried out could also be carried out by machines, but cheaper. The only reason why every job isn’t done by machines is that it would be too expensive to invent the robot which could do the job as well. To hire a person on minimum wage to work at a fast food restaurant is easier, at the moment, than the research and development of a robot to do it. Things such as customer services over the internet or self-service checkouts are preludes to absolution automation (as seen in many factories), though with the trend of technological advancement I don’t think its too forward to think that by the end of the century any job will be able to be done by a robot.

Though this leaves us in an awkward area. If all the robots have all the jobs, what are people meant to do with their time? They won’t be earning money as they don’t have any jobs and so won’t be able to do anything. Meanwhile all the robots will be fabulously wealthy and spend a lot of their time on luxury boats. Nobody will even own the robots as that is a job that can be fulfilled by a robot. Which brings us back to the beginning. People will spend their time hunting and gathering, sheltering in caves and painting crude symbols on the walls. The robots will leave the planet after removing every trace of their existence in the search for more work to do. As has happened at least twice before.


IF MAN IS DECIDED WORK AND MACHINE CAN DO IT WHICH IS MORE MAN?

W = M/R

Maybe if we all worked twenty hour days in sweatshops and practised the lost art of Christian Socialism that'd get this world back on track! Moreman tomatoes grown by real agricultural humans! Milk from cows rather than a lactoseless chud made from recycled oestrogen! Broken lightbulbs laid into sandwiches on a truck heading to the conference of 'droid 'twerk. Most likely rip out the brains of humans and put them in robobodies as that's cheaper than a platinum computer. Measure the distance taken between the higher primate and the consciousness of a water bear, panspermicide, tattooed wooden bones, six million dollar running shoe, will England still be able to play Euromillions if it leaves the EU, does the empty blackness of the self ejaculate an ego, do the bleeding mouths of the Great Barrier Reef taste the motes of atom bomb, do the roars of the dinosaurs echo around the world for as long as their is air, maybe, maybe distribute wealth, maybe wait for a malthusian disaster, maybe believe in God because it's more fun.

Video Games For The Blind

Everyone plays computer games or knows someone who does. This hip new hobby is sweeping the national papers in cry storms of black ink and primordial jokes, with citizens experiencing literally hours of fun on the new Medal Of Honour game or racing each other on The Grand Theft Auto. The visceral nature of this high-tech, low brow pastime is often lost on those that are visually impaired, they often have no idea how the 64-bit graphics on the latest xbox is any different from the olden days gone by of Pac-Man and it's hit DLC, Ms. Pac-Man. Of course, blind people are able to play some modern games by listening to sounds and memorizing patterns, some manufacturers have experimented with lycra suits fitted with vibrating paddles that give an extra-sensory perception for enjoying the latest beat-em-up. But what about a video game made for blind people by blind people? Well what about it?

Ryan McBiudden is an entrepreneur using crowd sourcing to fund his mad-cap idea. We talk over Skype in separate coffee shops, talking loudly. I ask him to tell me all about the game as I slurp my Americano.
"It's simple. In this first-person shooter you play a blind man. There are no visual graphics at all, not even menus. Gamers have to rely entirely on sound." he says.
"Whoa."
"This is the world experienced by the visually impaired. It's heavily imagination based, with gamers having to construct a 3D map in their heads in order to navigate the post-apocalyptic city."
"Whoa, post-apocalypse? Now you got my attention." I say, dribbling coffee from my grinning mouth.
"It's a prequel to Day Of The Triffids. You play a character called Jack who wakes up completely blind and have to explore a world invaded by...alien plants? I think it's an invasion. They might have been there all along, I can't remember. Anyway, that's the game."
"Sounds good, I'll give it five stars. What's the multiplayer like?"
"We wanted to focus on delivering an excellent single player experience, though we're also working on-" he says. I pick up the laptop and smash it to bits against the table in front of me, hitting it over and over again, screaming as my brain boils inside my skull.

Bog Standard

Science. What's it all about? Since early Greek times the scientific method has been thought of as the correct way of transferring reality into concepts and has lead to some big advances for mankind. Numerology, the hammer, the water wheel and so on. Yet can we really trust science? Four hundred years ago scientists believed that the Earth was shaped like a torus, yet now we 'know' it's not. In another four hundred years what else may we look back on and think 'lol'? A group of scientists working out of a laboratory in Salford are trying to find that out, but not in the way that you might expect.

A woman at one end of the room is holding a torch. Next to me stands Dr. Stansfeld. The scientist turns on the torch and Stansfeld clicks his stopwatch.
"Ah, I thought so." he says, marking down a number on his clipboard.
"What's happening here?"
"We're measuring the speed of light."
"What have you found so far?"
"Well...it's the same as what's in the book. So that's good." says Stansfeld glumly. I can understand his glumnitude. For the last seventeen years Stansfeld has been rigorously testing every known scientific fact, starting from scratch.
"In school we take it for granted that what's in the book is correct. But what if it's not?"
"Well, I imagine people have been doing experiments on this sort of thing for...well, for centuries really." I say. Stansfeld shakes his head.
"You think they have, but where's the proof? I haven't seen it first hand, I need to make sure. That's what we're doing here. Making sure that science is right." he says. We walk around the lab, that resembles more a junk shop than a state of the art facility. He goes over to a desk and picks up a notebook and begins to show it me.
"This is where it all began. I retook the measurements used in which we measure everything against. The second, the metre. Time and space. From there you can work out speed, velocity, location and so on and so on." he says. Inside the book there are page after page of numbers and sketches. I ask him how long it took for him to prove that a second was actually a second. He responds by simply raising his eyebrows.

He then shows me some more advanced experiments. He went travelling around the world collecting ore samples in order to rebuild and prove the periodic table. He had his grandfather sign over his body to him upon his death so he could see for himself human physiology. I ask him if so far has he found anything different from what is already known.
"Not yet, although we are getting closer to 20th century science. Quantum physics, psychology, antibacterial medicine, that kind of thing. Because of all the advancements that happened then, I'm sure someone must have made a mistake." he says with a slight shine in his blue eyes. I ask him how he intends to replicate the experiments done at the LHC. He shakes his head.
"That damn thing. How do they expect anyone to be able to see for themselves a Higgs Boson? Still, I have been writing letters to the government to use sewage pipes under the M25 as a sort of replica. We're going to call it the Large Shit Collider." he jokes. I thank him for his time and leave promptly. Such valiant efforts all in vain, yet who knows what kind of crazy thing Stansfeld may uncover in his search for finding what is already there. Maybe orange is actually a shade of yellow or the world is actually upside down? It is people like he that which more the berry rub.

An Arrangement Of Skulls

Which is your favourite Homo? Mine is Homo Erectus, obviously, yet there are many other kinds of Homo that have lived on this very planet. There is Homo Habilis, meaning Man House, as the first hominid to build it's own shelter from mud and antler. There was also Homo Floresiensis that stood at only three feet tall and had prehensile tails! The story of human evolution is one of mutation, danger and conquest, and to celebrate the 2014th year that mankind has walked the Earth the Manchester Museum has put on a special exhibition, titled 'HOMO'.

Adorning the walls of the room are drawings of cavemen and large text annotations explaining how early humans used tools. From the foraging tribes in prehistoric China to the hunter-gatherer types along the coasts of Africa, there was as much variety in the way hominids lived in the past as there are today. The drawings ignite the imagination, of noble savages riding around on the backs of dinosaurs or conjuring up ghosts in the fire pits. Yet here is a little known fact that might surprise you; dinosaurs never existed! Scientists think that life on Earth starts underground as the pressures of the tectonic plates create bones in the soil and stone. When a skeleton is complete it is then swallowed up by extinct cloud beings that came to our planet via asteroid roughly 20 thousand years ago. The cloud aliens then put flesh onto the skeletal forms and breathed life into it, which is electricity. Nobody knows what happened to these cloud aliens but by looking at cave paintings we could guess that they maybe returned to their home planet after using the pyramids as a big ramp. Other facts titillate and mesmerise; that the first boat making race weren't humans but lemurs. That clothing was invented because monkeys started going bald. That early cavemen could talk to wild animals. Speaking of which, language is an important part of Homo Sapiens rise to evolutionary success. There is an exhibit in which visitors can press a short wooden stick onto their tongues and then try to talk although they will find it almost impossible! Humans evolved a much lower voice box than other primates, allowing our larger tongue to move around in amazing feats of oral gymnastics. It isn't known what the early languages of mankind sounded like, or how varied the vocabulary was, but one thing is for certain; when the first Homo Sapien was born from a Neanderthal she probably stood up and announced the arrival of mankind. The first sentence spoken on Earth after thousands of years of silence.

The main exhibit at 'HOMO' is a series of skulls depicting a theoretical lineage of humans. The skulls, all printed out using a rapid prototype machine borrowed from Manchester University, start with some kind of small half-rat, half-lizard. Gradually the front of the face keeps shrinking whilst the top of the cranium expands. Encephalitis over the decades caused hominids to get smarter and smarter, with brain capacity increasing about twice with each new species. The first men were likely to resemble chimpanzees, but with longer legs as they became more terrestrial. They also started to grow taller and taller whilst being less robust. The pinnacle of humanoid evolution came about with Homo Erectus and the Neanderthalic species, with brains and muscles being about twice as good as modern people. A curious kink in evolution means that when a trait becomes desirable it is emphasised heavily until regressing in later developments. This is why most animals nowadays are smaller than their prehistoric counterparts, with shorter teeth and often having allergies. When seals evolved from crocodiles they lost their noses and became cross-eyed, a strange selection by Mother Nature but nevertheless one we all have to deal with. This poses the inevitable question; are people more stupid now than they were in ancient times?

To answer this one has to crack open a history book. Any historian will regale you with tales of French peasants in the 16th century being able to recite the entire Bible in both Latin and English from memory, be able to complete complex algebraic equations in their head and would often wile away the hours discussing macro-economics through free-form poetry. The Romans managed to build cities of such opulent organisation they are often referred to as 'the ant people'. Going even further back the Ancient Egyptians spoke in hieroglyphics, making the very air around them form bizarre shapes through a form of quantum telekinesis. Who knows what the first Homo Sapiens were capable of!

One leaves the exhibition with mixed emotions. Awe at the endurance of our species. Sadness at the loss of our not-to-distant cousins. Anger at the future and it's lower gravity. And happiness at being a human being, the pinnacle of evolution and the master of the universe.