The Fly Is Undeterred

I watched the world final snooker championship last night, until nearly 1am. Good job to John Higgins for hoisting the trophy a second time, and also to Mark Selby, who made the match one worth watching.

I enjoy watching snooker, and will say that Ronnie O’Sullivan is my favourite player, altho he can be maddingly frustrating to watch at times. He is a genus, but I fear his time may have passed him by. Same for Stephen Hendry, altho he can’t seem to take the hint. Anyway, I like snooker, but it’s not the kind of thing you can really think about too much, or it stops making sense. Snooker, like nearly all sports, consists mainly of people paid a lot of money to do very simple tasks (yes, I know it takes a lot of skill, but the point is, the idea is very simple). In this particular example, I just spent 18 days watching people on television hitting balls into holes with sticks. What kind of statement is that to base your life around?

“Hi; what do you do for a living?”

“I hit balls into holes with a stick”

“Ah, yes… pay well?

“Well, when I’m successful at it, yes”

Snooker players practice four to five hours a day or more to be the best at hitting balls into holes with sticks. Instead of living their lives with loved ones or friends, they’re usually down at some dingy club under a fluorescent light, hitting balls into holes with a stick. While doctors and firemen are saving lives and making differences in the world around them, other people are using up their alloted days, hitting balls into holes with a stick. It’s a funny world.

And other sports are just as odd; tossing balls through a hoop, fighting to move a ball over a goal line, hitting a ball back and forth over a net, running faster, jumping higher, picking up the heaviest thing, etc. You get the point. Not that any of us are doing much better, but you have to wonder at the possible conversations that could occur in the afterlife:

“Welcome to Heaven; What did you do with your life?”

“I hit balls into holes with a stick.”

“What? Your whole life?”

“No, I also… well, maybe I did!”

Snooker players don’t go to Hell tho, since it’s probably full of the rest of us who just watched instead.

If nothing else, a blog is a handy way to empty your mind of stuff that’s been pasted to the inside of your brain for some time. This is something that’s rattled around in my skull for years. A good example of what I get up to when I’m not doing anything else.

Imagine for the sake of argument that everyone has a built-in digital display over their heads. Assume it’s a part of nature that we evolved with, just like five fingers and two ears. The display measures the difference between physical time and the time in our heads. You know how you get impatient when you sit at a red light that seems to take forever to change? When it turns green, what do you do? Usually you then try to rush to catch up to where you think you should have been, had the light changed sooner. It’s this difference between where you are vs. where you think you should be that the display measures.

For most people the display would nearly always be lagging behind to some degree. It seems we’re always in a hurry, or always behind where we should be. As we run late, the display would provide proof of this. Some people, like obsessive-compulsives, would be manic to make sure their display was as close to ‘proper’ time as possible. A few would even be ahead of where they should be. Lucky bastards. Remember, I’m asking you to assume that this is a normal part of human physiology; it wouldn’t even bear much comment, unless someone was seriously ahead or behind.

Got that? If so, then the thought experiment itself is much simpler to describe:

What (if anything) would Frankenstein’s display read?

A senior scientist with the Ministry of Thought revealed today that the world as we know it does not exist, as prophesied by John Lennon forty years ago. Dr. Ian Lize announced that “Basically John Lennon was correct, as the lyric of the Beatles’ song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ said: Nothing is real.”

Dr. Lize outlined the results of a five-year research project by the Ministry, which discovered that everything we see, hear, experience or otherwise believe to be external stimuli is in fact, illusionary. “Imagine our surprise when we found that despite all human experience to the contrary, it’s all unreal. We’ve double-checked our research and there can be no doubt – it’s all a sham!”

“The implications are tremendous. Religion, love, weather, our daily lives, the whole of existence is basically not there at all. We’re still working on what, if anything, really is there instead, but so far we’ve got many more questions than answers.”

At the press conference, Dr. Lize was asked if this also extended to such mundane things as breakfast, stubbed toes, and the conference itself. “Yes; as far as we can tell, you did not have breakfast, you have never stubbed your toe, if you even have toes, and even this press conference does not exist.”

An official at Downing Street said that the Prime Minister is saddened to find that there is no reality. The cabinet is expected to send an envoy to the United Nations next month to discuss what this may mean to ongoing concerns world-wide. International leaders from around the globe expressed everything from shock to disbelief when they were briefed earlier in the week, ahead of today’s general announcement.

The Ministry is expected to release a website later in the week where the whole of the research results will be available. In keeping with the amazing findings of the group, the website will also not exist.