Warming Up

Saturday 15th April 2006

I have tricked my brain into working by deciding not to do any work. Relieved of the pressure to think of comedy ideas by my enforced strike due to illness, my stupid brain started having funny ideas in the early hours of this morning. My brain is like an obstinate child (hence my puerile life's work) which can only be made to do the right thing by the use of reverse psychology. So all the last few months where the rest of me has been trying to make my brain write some jokes, my brain has dug in its heels (it literally has heels incidentally) and refused to play along. But now I have said to my brain "Actually thinking about it I don't want to do any comedy any more, take some time off" my brain has thought "Why not? I am great at coming up with comedy things. It was me that thought up that idea about the false Rod Hull having a false arm over his real arm for example. I will prove it to you by coming up with some ideas for your rapidly approaching appearance on Radio 4's Political Animal."
But my brain, being the attention seeking organ that it is (I have one more attention seeking organ, though that doesn't need any encouragement - my pancreas is always working) decides to do that work while the rest of me is trying to sleep at about 1am. Still better that it do it then than when I am actually asleep, because the jokes it comes up with in my dreams are really rubbish. The last one had the punchline "an extinct Pterodactyl," which is a promising tag but just not with whatever the feedline was(and it was something loosely based on the riddle of the Sphinx joke that I do and didn't make sense). Although the audience in my dream found it hilarious, once I was awake I realised it probably wouldn't even work with the most pliant real crowd.
Having said all this the stuff I was thinking about was only broad strokes about the effects of global warming, but it was nice that my brain was beginning to join in again after so much time thinking of new ways to cause itself to stultify.
I am going to have a go at using my brain now to flesh out the stuff I was thinking about. It probably isn't all that funny, but my brain is only just warming up again after many:

So the latest report on global warming says that the temperature of the earth is set to rise by 3 degrees in the next century and that we’re not doing anything like enough to prevent it and let’s face it – we’re not going to. We can’t blame the government for this. It’s down to us. And we’re not going to do a thing. 400 million people are going to be flooded out, millions will die. Our grandchildren’s lives will be hard and unpleasant and you know what none of us care. The prognosis doesn’t get any worse than this, but still we won’t do a thing. Are you going to stop driving your car? Cos I’m not. Are you going to turn off your central heating? Not a chance. Are you going to cut down on your trips by plane? No. I’m going to fly more. I’m going to fly to places I don’t even want to go to and go the wrong way round the world to get there. I’m not going to change anything, because you know no-one else will. It’s OK. I’m nearly 40 now. I’ll be around for 30 more years top. This isn’t going to affect me. So I don’t give a fig. You might think I’m callous, but I’m not that bad. I mean I don’t have any kids. I doubt I’ll have any, so none of my progeny will be affected by this, but lots of the people who aren’t changing a thing have kids and grand kids and yet still they have no intention of altering their lifestyle one bit. That’s cold don’t you think? Pretending they love their kids, even arguing they need an SUV to keep the little ones safe and all the time they’re laughing up their sleeves. You’re screwed kiddie-winks. I’m not going to be around to reap this whirlwind, but you and your kids better start building an ark – you won’t need a very big one. Luckily there won’t be too many animals left. You know I love you, but not enough to give up all this great stuff.
I think maybe in two generations time they’ll look back and think that we didn’t really know what the consequences of our actions were. I mean that would be the only way to explain the fact that we allowed our own descendants to be born into such a fate, so I think we should make it clear that that isn’t the case. This I Radio 4, this programme will be archived and repeated endlessly on BBC7 so let’s tell our kids and our kids’ kids just how it was. We owe them that. So let’s all shout this out together “We knew all the statistics and we still did eff all!” And again, but with a kind of evil laugh after it. That’s it. They’ll love that. Way to go great grandma. Love that crazy sense of humour you’ve got there. I’d laugh outwardly, but you know I’d be using up oxygen.
But it’s true. We’re not going to do anything. Not even when it’s too late. Cos it’s already too late. And look at us. There’s a bloke in the audience who is actually sitting in his car and has the engine running and the air conditioning on. And he’s right to behave this way. We’ve got to enjoy the world while it’s still good enough to enjoy. So let’s just treat the world like an old car that we’ve stolen, drive it into the ground until all the petrol runs out and then when it can’t take any more, set it on fire and run away laughing.
But joking apart, I think the least we can do is come up with a few plans as to how the people of the future might cope with the world that we’re forcing them to inherit. We wouldn’t want them cursing our very existences every second of the day.
So here’s some ideas: how to counteract the rising water level of the oceans. There’s one simple way to get rid of all that excess water. They can just drink it. There will be 10 billion people in the world in 50 years time. All of them just have to drink an extra litre of water a day and the sea level will be kept down by an impressive 10 billion litres. Obviously everyone will have to hold the extra fluid in, but that seems a small price to pay for living on the land. If things get really desperate they can wee in the bath and keep the plug in.
In fact if things get really bad then everyone can store the excess water in buckets and saucepans which they keep on top of their houses.
Alternatively water boils at 100 degrees centigrade and disappears off into the sky as a gas. In the next fifty years surely science can build a kettle filament big enough to go in the ocean. Every time the sea level is getting too hot then turn on the sea kettle and hey presto the water will float harmlessly off into the air, in all probability to fall on the deserts as rain killing two birds with one stone. The kettle would of course melt the polar ice caps, but you could counteract this with big fridge elements at the north and south poles. The kettle and fridge technology would probably cause huge amounts of pollution in the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer… so the scientists who invented them would have to come up with some kind of solution for that too. Simple.

And so on. I might work.