Friday 29 August 2008

How Not to Be Judged By Karl Marx – Or Socialist Sex and How to Do It.

There is a portrait of Karl Marx. On the wall of the Man’s bedroom. There is a certain sense that Karl is overseeing proceedings.

Of course we all have something on our bedroom walls. Some appealing art or peeling paint that looks down upon goings-on in the bed. I have a painting of what is probably the sea, for obvious metaphorical reasons. I also have a drawing of a naked man (known as Dangly-Bollocks Man), for obvious metaphysical reasons. He has is face politely averted.

Karl, however, in his best Mona Lisa style is looking very directly. Judging. What goes on. Quite a lot has been going on.

Now I am worried that my sexual activities with The Man (henceforth to be known as the Unknowable Man for obvious reasons which we will never know) may not be of a sufficiently socialist nature. That possibly Karl might disapprove.

The question is – am I the bourgeois of the sex world? Should I be instigating revolution and the fair distribution of orgasms? Is it fair that the few should have so many and yet the many have so few?

As Karl himself said ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ So perhaps on this premise we can be reassured. The Unknowable Man has the abilities and I have the needs. And Karl has the beard.

Tuesday 26 August 2008

Mamma Mia! Or How Life Really Could be a Musical

I’ve been to the cinema. The film went like this:

A young beautiful blond 20 year-old was about to get married.
She sang a song.
Her 40 –something-year-old mother did DIY.
She sang a song.
Some men were involved who also sang.
There was dancing.
And in the end it wasn’t the beautiful blond 20 year-old that got married but the 40-something-year-old mother. She lived happily ever after. With Pierce Brosnan.

Mamma Mia!

This, I feel should be a parable for life. Aside from the Pierce Brosnan bit.

So why, we ask ourselves, isn’t life more like a musical? When was the last time that a group of people were, at one moment discussing something quite mundane, like money, or oranges, or perforations and then spontaneously broke into a song and dance routine? Where are the hidden orchestras playing overly-arranged tunes? The young tight-buttocked men grinning inanely whilst flinging their limbs into the air? These, surely, are the elements in life that lead to long-lasting happiness.

And so I feel it is my mission to rectify the aforementioned shortcomings. I have the technology. I have just purchased the costumes.

This is how it will go:
A not-so-young woman wants a man.
She sings a song, the orchestra plays from her iPod (we won’t worry that no one else can hear it for it is only the main protagonist that we are interested in).
The young tight-buttocked chorus dances and flings limbs about (this will be in miniature using the woman’s daughter’s ex-collection of Ken dolls but some cunning camera work will cover this lack of scale).
The woman dances wearing her new costume that she bought for her forthcoming holiday but will double up for the purpose (a purple tankini and a pair of red houndstooth daps).
A man sees her (through the kitchen window) (for this is a kitchen-sink musical) and falls in love with her.
He sings a song (or possibly it is groaning, but we are not sure, nor do we actually care).
The man is not Pierce Brosnan because his singing is crap.
In the end the woman of a certain age marries the peeping Tom accompanied by a dancing chorus of Kens and Barbies and much merriment and music that only she can hear.

There are no young beautiful blond 20 year-olds involved because she died of embarrassment in the very first scene.

I believe it will be a hit and run on Broadway for many years until purple tankinis and red houndstooth daps fall out of fashion and women of a certain age are no longer wanting men.

Saturday 23 August 2008

Don’t Panic – Or Dark Matter and How to Find It

It’s ok. We can all stop panicking. They’ve found Dark Matter, or at least found something dark that may lead to them finding something that shows something dark. That may matter. Or not.

Dark Matter, for all you non-physicists out there, (or for all you physicists out there who think physics is something to do with science), is invisible, very very difficult to find, constitutes a great deal of the universe, is difficult to pinpoint, put your finger on, touch, smell, hear, understand and essentially makes the world go round. Does this remind you of anything?

There have been a number of methods for trying to find Dark Matter:

Look in the sort of places where Dark Matter likes to hide (these include space, dimly lit bars which resemble black holes, the internet and under the bed (that’s if you’ve merely mislaid the D.Matter rather than having lost it or never found it in the first place)).
Use a Dark Matter Detector (these include the darker reaches of the soul, the sleeve, and something that looks like an internal organ or possibly is an internal organ).
Pretend you aren’t looking for it and hope you happen across it.
Look for something that resembles Dark Matter and simply pretend it’s the real thing (a very popular alternative).

Never confuse Dark Matter with the Dark Ages although as the Dark Ages approach those who have mislaid, lost or never found Dark Matter tend to get even more confused than they already are.

I’ve been fumbling about in the dark with someone who matters and am just as confused as ever. But at least I’ve stopped panicking. Because I now know that it is possible to find Dark Matter. In theory. Or something that resembles it.

Monday 18 August 2008

How To Tell If a Man Will Continue to Fancy You Using Statistics

I just read that 31% of people aged 45-54 who married in the last year in the USA had met on the internet. This is heartening news. Of course statistics have a tendency to belie the realities of life in the same way that life tends to inflate vital statistics.

A famous statistician once said ‘we are not concerned with the matter that is uncertain.’ But that’s what’s the matter. Uncertainty.

Having established that The Man probably does fancy you (note the use of the second person as if we aren’t really talking about me at all), how does one discover whether he will continue to fancy you or if it was just a passing fancy? And if passing is fancy why is it comparatively popular?

Statistics may prove to have some insight into the problem. So:

How to tell if a man will continue to fancy you using statistics –

1. Gather your sample (no, not that, that’s how to use biological techniques) (we may come to that another day).
2. Observe the experimental setting (bed, sofa, hillside, kitchen or bicycle).
3. Take extensive and exhaustive notes on extensive exhaustion (try not to get your pen confused with anything else) (oh and try and be subtle or the Man may wonder why you have to write everything down and take this as a sign of early-relationship-memory-loss, evidence gathering or belief in astrology).
4. Use numbers.
5. Analyse the numbers using statistical analysing sort of things.

Statistical analysing sort of things can be either
a) Descriptive – where you make a nice graph (usually shaped like a breast), a tasty pie chart (shaped like a pie that some bastard hasn’t divided up fairly at all), or a bar chart (shaped like New York). You can also use numerical descriptors about deviation. In my case I will stick to just the usual deviation.
b) Inferential – this is said to account for randomness (that’s handy) and draws inferences (don’t we all?).

I set about the task. This is what happened:

From my sample I inferred that due to the randomness of life, the exhaustion occurring from experimentation and my inability to understand the setting of my bicylce, I came to the analytical and statistical conclusion that the answer to ‘Whether the Man Would Continue to Fancy Me’ was:
14
with a mean of 78
and an average of 28,892,892.
Or, in a more descriptive manner:
a graph that was shaped like an aardvark pole-vaulting,
a pie chart that was pencil and onion flavoured
a bar chart that strangely resembled Einstein’s hair-do in 1953, or possibly the Outer Hebrides.

The problem with statistics is that, like men, even when one has them, they are more or less impossible to interpret.

Thursday 14 August 2008

How I Did Meet my Guardian Soulmate or How to Be as Educated as Einstein or 101 Classic Books

This may be the most ridiculous and desperate thing I’ve been asked to do. Matt, in his wisdom, has sent me this task:

Equipped with only a very very long list of ‘classic’ books I’m supposed to
Look at the list and:
1) Bold those I've read.
2) Italicise those I intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books I love.
4) Pass it on to a few others so's they can inevitably defeat me.

Why? I ask myself. And shouldn’t he have also sent tea, cake, a bivouac and one of those shiny silver blankets to see me through this?

They say that education is not about knowledge or information. Like sex, and all good things in life, it is about technique. Einstien, when asked what the speed of sound was, said that he didn’t know, he didn’t need to know, because he knew how to find out. There are some simple methods of finding out:
Ask someone who knows
Read a book
Look on the internet
Experiment.

The infamous questions that are commonly asked of my blog are:
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot
And
Guardian Soulmates (although technically that’s not a question we know what they mean).

I still don’t have any knowledge of or information about:
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot
And
Guardian Soulmates

But I know a man who does. A man slept with me. I am therefore highly educated. I can now ask this man who knows
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot (and many other places worth visiting)
And
Guardian Soulmates
and has probably read all these books and many trillions more, looked on the internet, found me on Guardian Soulmates and if I am as lucky as I’d like to be will proceed with further experimentation.

And re the ridiculous task - Matt did this because Gary asked him and Gary’s a dreamboat. I don’t know Gary. But since Matt is also a dreamboat I guess that (by inductive logic) is why I should do it:

1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – erg
3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling or some of them
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible or more than I’d have liked to
7 [Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte]
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare or some of it
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – also erg

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - although it's in the pile
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 [[[The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger]]]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy or some of it
25 [[[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]]]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – but the Man has read it 1000 times
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 [Emma - Jane Austen]
35 [Persuasion - Jane Austen]
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 [[Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne]]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 The Magus - John Fowles
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 [Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen]

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding !! I haven’t read that!!
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath – oh dear
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (but the Lawyer said it was rubbish)
83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 [Charlotte’s Web - EB White]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom otherwise
know as ‘I hope books in heaven are a shit-load better than this
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 [[[The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery]]]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I really need to add
101 [[[[Mostly everything by P.G. Wodehouse]]]
and all this generally goes to prove that I’m a girl and was once a child. I don’t know who to pass this on to so if any of you would care to play this rather insipid game feel free. Or spend your time reading a good book. Or on the internet finding knowledgeable people.

Wednesday 6 August 2008

How to Tell if a Person Fancies You Using the Laws of Chemistry

They say it’s all about chemistry. Or at least it’s a ‘valued quality’ for an ideal match on Soulmates. They don’t have physics. Which leaves me wondering if there’s really a place in the world for Relationship Physicists. I think I may have to convert to being the Relationships Chemist.

So – How to tell if a man fancies you using the laws of chemistry:

First let us examine the science of Chemical Kinetics. This seems relevant as movement and collision are involved.

Rate of reaction –
Factors that affect the rate of reaction:

Physical state:
If your target person is in a poor physical state (wobbly, purple, limbs arranged in a Picasso-esque manner or a bit Dali around the edges) this will have a detrimental effect on his/her ability to react. Reaction times will be slowed. Therefore they may fancy you but you will have to wait a year or so to find out.

Concentration:
‘Concentration plays an important role in reactions’ (this is a direct quote) (that’s why I’ve used the quotation marks) (not just for effect). From this we infer that if your target soul is not concentrating he/she may simply forget to fancy you and fancy something else that passes by their field of vision, like a chair, a pint or a small woodlouse. This may make you feel like a small woodlouse. Or a chair. Or liquid.

Temperature:
Folk of a higher temperature have more thermal energy. More thermal energy may lead them to remove some outer layers. Or some inner layers. Do not confuse this with attraction. It’s them that’s hot. Not you.

Catalysts:
Whilst the catalyst remains unchanged during the reaction the elements involved undergo a transformation of some sort or another. Catalysts can range from ‘beer goggles’ to ‘wine piz-nez’ to ‘cocaine blindfolds’ to ‘crowd spectacles’ (this time I used the quotation marks for erroneous effect). I heartily recommend them all. It may be your only hope.

Equilibrium:
Doesn’t come into it.

Interestingly Beer’s Law may give some clue as to how to actually get a person to fancy you. It states that there is a dependency between the transmission of light through a substance (this obviously includes attire) and the coefficient of intensity. I’ve always liked Beer.

Saturday 2 August 2008

How Not to Email a Guardian Soulmate

They say that money can’t buy happiness but where’s the empirical evidence for this? Strangely, then when I Googled ‘money can’t buy happiness’ it turns out that there are a number of scientific studies that appear to demonstrate just that. However, never one to be put off by evidence, fact, science or the truth I have decided that money will buy me happiness and have done it again. Subscribed to Guardian Soulmates.

But this time it’s going to be different. This time I’m not going to sit there and hope that my well-worded (or wordy anyway) profile and glamorous picture will bring the Soulmates flooding in. Or trickling in. Or thank you the person who emailed me last time. Nor am I going to believe that simply ticking ‘Any’ for all the boxes in ‘my ideal mate’ will attract Mr Right. Or that adding all the cute guys who are way out of my league to My Favourites will mysteriously make them in my league. This time I’m being proactive. I’m taking control. I’m actually emailing people.

I have a technique. This is what I do:

I find a man I fancy. Or a man.
I carefully read what he’s written.

I then craft a cunningly worded sentence or two to say how interesting and sexy they sound. Examples include:
‘You sound interesting.’
‘You look nice.’
‘I read your profile.’
And
‘I fancy you.’

I then craft a cunningly worded sentence or two that lets them know just how interesting and sexy I am. Examples include:
‘I have written a load of bollocks on my profile.’
‘I can catch a ping-pong ball on my nose.’
‘I know how to read.’
And
‘My shoulders match.’

Then, finally, and this is the important part, I craft a cunningly worded question so they can answer my email without the awkwardness of not knowing what to say. Examples include:
‘How do you come to be living in Iceland/London/The World?’
‘Why have you put up that appalling photograph?’
‘Can you direct me to the Caves of Redemption?’
And
‘How?’

So far three people have replied. One of them didn’t have a subscription yet, one of them had let their subscription lapse and the other was the man who emailed me last time. And they say money can’t buy happiness. Pah!