Vittachi

Your name is your fortune

Be sure to write your name in The Book of Morons

By Nury Vittachi

*

Strangers were giving me curious glances. Were they attracted by my Adonis-like good looks? Bizarrely not. They were smiling, but in a sneering sort of way. I smiled back at them, but they became sneerier, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.

An hour later, I discovered why. I’d been to a breakfast symposium and had been wearing my name badge for the following two meetings, one bus ride, one nap and two coffee breaks.

One colleague told me she’d once gone to a morning briefing and forgotten to remove her name badge for three meetings, a formal dinner and a one-night stand. In the end, it was the hotel breakfast room waiter who finally said, “Do you know you are still wearing a big ugly name tag from some meeting?” All the people with whom she had interacted, some acrobatically, had not mentioned it.

But the record must go to the cousin of a friend of mine who went to a half-day symposium and then wore her name badge for the next SEVEN MONTHS.

This is how it happened. She’d accidentally had it on for about five hours when a particularly noxious co-worker gloatingly pointed out that she had forgotten to take it off.

“I’m keeping it on on purpose,” she lied. “I prefer to.”

After that, she HAD to keep it on. She soon discovered that having everyone know her name changed her life. She made dozens of friends from people who tried to help her. “People who take the trouble to try to save a stranger from embarrassment are usually nice,” she said.  

It soon became the case that at every shop and café she frequented, staff greeted her by name and passers-by assumed she was a celebrity. In fact, she WAS more or less a celebrity, and is well-placed to run for President of the World one of these days.

               This woman had stumbled open a fact known already by religious types, such as a friend of mine who believes in a holy book called, unbelievably, The Book of Morons. He believes wearing a name badge is a great conversation starter—although I haven’t yet worked out why all members of his sect are spotty young boys called “Elder Johnson”.

                Anyway, businesses spend fortunes making sure their names are widely circulated, so why shouldn’t individuals do the same? But of course it depends what your name is. Adolf L. Hitler Marak, a politician from Maghalaya in India, is possibly an exception.

                I once knew a Hong Kong pastor named Rob who always got a warm welcome when he visited prisons. He later discovered that new prisoners had their crime pinned on their shirts and everyone saw his name badge, and assumed he was “one of the lads” in for robbery.

               Which leads us to the clergyman Jaime Sin in the Philippines who used to go to conferences with a name badge saying “Cardinal Sin”. He took all the teasing about his devilish name with good humour, and would welcome people with the words, “Welcome to the House of Sin.” His church was always packed.

                So let’s all be a bit more friendly and open and put on name badges at every opportunity.

                That doesn’t include you, Adolf.

Facebook changes the way people relate

Poke me and I will friend you, he said

By Nury Vittachi

*

Millions of computer-users around the planet are now communicating with each other through Facebook, which is a sort of on-screen school year book with a page for every person on earth.

That’s fine. But what is not fine is that its bizarre language and conventions are starting to creep into real life. “I poked you. Will you friend me?” someone said to me the other day.

                This is worrying. Here’s how relationships in the future will develop as Facebook becomes increasingly influential.

                Boy meets girl. Boy pokes girl.“Ow! What did you do that for?” she complains.

                “It is how relationships start according to Facebook,” says the boy, whose name is Peter Lee. “Now you have to poke me back.”

                “What if I don’t want to?” says the girl, whose name is Meena Das.

                “If you do, you are allowed to look at my profile,” he replies.

                Curious, she stabs her finger into his shoulder. He immediately turns to stand at a right angle to her so she can see the side of his face. “You can now look at my profile.”

                “You’re weird.”

                “No. Poking is the first stage of a relationship. Studying a person’s profile is the second.”

                “And the third?”

                He pulls out two large pieces of blank white card from an art portfolio bag. “Stage three is to write on each other’s walls.”

                “Do we write poetry? Or do some sort of art?”

                Peter shakes his head. “Nah. We just write inane phrases or we forward ancient jokes.”

She watches to see if he writes anything clever or witty, but he just writes words she doesn’t understand: “Whassup? LOL.” 

               Then he walks purposefully across the road. She follows. They enter the offices of an outdoor advertising company. He leases electronic billboards on top of a building for them both.

“What are we doing this for?”

                “Stage four. Facebook requires us to have a public answer at all times for a question which is asked automatically: ‘What are you doing right now?’ The answer must be in the third person.” He types sentences which appear on the billboard above them: “Peter Lee is typing this sentence. Peter Lee feels the need to go to the toilet. Peter Lee is in the toilet.”

He goes to the toilet.

Two minutes later, he emerges to find that the girl is adjusting her make-up. He starts tapping on the keyboard that operates her electronic billboard. “Meena Das has updated her profile,” he writes.

Meena is impatient. “Can’t we do normal boy-girl stuff, like go on dates and stuff? You give me your phone number and I’ll give you mine.”

Peter shakes his head. “No. Guidelines recommend we don’t exchange personal details. It is not good to get too close to other users you meet through the Facebook friend system. Goodbye.”

She notices that he is walking away with his finger in front of him. “What are you doing?”

               “I am going to go and poke all your friends.”

                She’s outraged. “You can’t do that. They’re my friends.”

“Yes, I can. Now I’m in your network, your friends are my friends too.”

Meena stamps her foot. “Loads of shallow acquaintanceships and inane games, but no real relationships or commitment. This Facebook thing was started by boys, wasn’t it?” she says.

“Yes,” says Peter. “How did you guess?”

Judges need their beauty sleep

Kindly prove to the court you are alive, your honour

By Nury Vittachi

*

A dramatic controversy is raging in the corridors of international justice. We all know judge and jury have to be present at trials. But do they have to be paying attention? Do they have to be awake? And—here’s the cruncher—do they have to be alive?

These are important issues, particularly since many judges are, to use the recognized medical term, “drooling old codgers”.

                I was alerted to this topic by reader Harsha Wikramasinghe, who told me about a trial which has just been cancelled in Australia.  When the hearing started, court officials were delighted that jury members were taking copious notes. But then they noticed they were writing vertically. It turned out they’d lost interest in the case and had been doing Sudoku. The trial was abandoned.

                However, in a similar case in the same country, a different conclusion was reached. A Judge named Dodd fell asleep during the arguments, but woke up in time to sentence the men in the dock to prison sentences. The case continued, but the men afterwards complained that it was not their fault that their fates bored the judge.

                Senior judges considered the issues and concluded that the law required judges to be physically present—but they didn’t have to be mentally there. Legal expert Robert Moles summed up the finding as good news for judges: “They are entitled to some quality sleep time.”

                Some lawyers sneakily interrupt judges’ beauty sleep. In Ontario, Canada, Judge Ayres Cuoto fell asleep during a 2001 trial. Lawyer Kim Schofield found a copy of The Criminal Code, a 2,136-page hardback, and dropped it onto the desk. “His honour was visibly stirred from his slumber,” she said afterwards.

                In Asia, courts are sleepy places with occasionally bursts of drama for which we wake each other.  For example, there’s one case in my diaries which really should appear in any listing of the world’s most important criminal cases. A furious man stormed into a Sri Lanka court room holding a bag of excrement. He flung it at the judge. But he aimed too high. The substance hit the ceiling fan. You can imagine the mess. This defendant illustrated the truth in a widely used adage (“the s*** hit the fan”) that had surely never before been scientifically tested.

               But what about death? Having been a court reporter, I can testify many judges sit with their eyes closed, unbreathing, for hours on end. It is impossible to tell whether they are awake, asleep or deceased. I remember shaking hands with one judge and I’m sure I could feel rigor mortis in his arm.

               Although the Australian finding says judges are only required to be physically present, consider the incident that took place in the US city of Denver in July last year. Judge Frank G. Henderson died right there on his bench in the middle of a hearing. The case was halted. (I wonder how people left the room, since no one is allowed to stand up and leave before the judge does? Is everyone still there?)

                If they had followed the findings in the Australian case, lawyers could have just pointed out that Judge Henderson was still physically present, and carried on regardless. They would probably have enjoyed having fewer interruptions from the bench.

And the jury, of course, could have finished their Sudokus.

The Discovery of America

How settlers met the Redneck tribes

By Nury Vittachi

*

Today, boys and girls, we are going to study an important part of world history: the discovery of America.

                The first settlers from the civilized world, by which I mean Asia, of course, travelled to the Americas by ship, discovering it more than 150 years ago. They landed initially in what is now called North America in the mid-1800s. Here’s a poem to help you remember this: “In eighteen hundred and forty-two, Third Uncle sailed the ocean blue.”

                  Now when the Asian settlers landed, they discovered there were already people living there—a group of people known as the Rednecks.

                Although the Rednecks were simple, primitive people, they had spread over many parts of the country. They had curious habits. Female Rednecks had white faces on which they put face paint made for them by a man named Max Factor. Richer ones wore animal skins as a sign of wealth.

Males Rednecks had no face paint but gathered every night for the ritual drinking of a foul-tasting firewater called Budweiser that send them into ecstatic states during which they saw visions and fell over.

                It was observed that Rednecks greeted each other by raising their right hands and saying: “Whassup?” They had a deep spiritual connection with the land, which they referred to as “Real Estate”. They divided it into small sections which they sold them to each other for empty promises known as “mortgages”.

               The Asian settlers were intrigued by the fact that the land had great potential which was unlikely ever to be realized, since the inhabitants’ main hobby was collecting firearms and shooting each other. Occasionally, one of the Rednecks would suggest abandoning this practice, but the others would simply blast him full of holes.

                Furthermore, Rednecks spent millions building university libraries but never entered them, preferring to spend their study hours bowling.

               Not wanting to upset the natives, the Asian settlers started off in the railroad and mining businesses and then crept up the social ladder. The settlers’ children enrolled in Redneck universities, took over the libraries, and rose to dominate math, science, computing, medicine and so on. They became surgeons, financial controllers, systems analysts and programmers.

                Since many Asian settlers were math geeks, it was easy for them to go to Redneck casinos and wipe out the locals at blackjack and other card games.

Non-academic settlers discovered that the primitive peoples in North America had been subsisting since time immemorial only on inedible British-style food-like substances, such as “baked shoe leather” and “hot water bottle au gratin”.

So they introduced them to food which actually tasted of something. Rednecks were of course immediately enchanted with the stuff, and hundreds of thousands of outlets selling everything from curries to char siu opened up all over the New World.

These days, the Asians who discovered America live in peace with the remaining indigenous peoples there. Asians run the place, of course, but are wise enough to let the other tribes think that they are in charge.

The locals have not yet noticed that Asians have the best jobs earning the highest salaries in the key sectors, and label them as “inscrutable”, meaning “smarter than us”.

But today, it is considered politically incorrect for Asians in America to refer to the indigenous people of the country as Rednecks. They are now known as “staff”.

Car park nazis I have known

Motorists are at war, you know
By Nury Vittachi

*

My wife got a parking fine the other day. Yet she had parked within the white lines, heaped money into the meter, and returned well before expiry time. What was the deal?

It turned out that parking spaces on that street had been designated as “vans and trucks only” and those on the next street “cars only”. However, the owners of the parking spaces had made sure there was no visible information about this.

For years there have been running battles between people with cars and people with parking spaces. I stopped at one parking garage recently which displayed a big sign at the entrance: “ONLY $6.” I nipped in and stayed just a few minutes. On the way out, officials demanded $24.

“But the sign said six dollars,” I complained.

“Six dollars for 15 minutes,” the official said. “Minimum stay one hour.”

A week later, officials put up a large disclaimer on the car park wall: “The owners of this car park take no liability whatsoever for any theft or damage or any other occurrence concerning your car, whether caused by directly or indirectly by us.”

If you think about it, this disclaimer actually gives car park staff full permission to break into your car, steal your stereo, and leave notes sneering at your taste in music. Knowing the officials who work there, it’s probably only a matter of time before they do. (I just hope they take my wife’s Carly Simon CDs.)

I saw one disclaimer that was even worse. In the car park at Mughal Gardens, Srinigar, India, there’s an extra line: “No Responsibility for Explosions.” So they can blow up your car if they feel like.

The following week, officials at my local car park added three new layers of control. A computer records the time you enter. An automatic camera takes a time-stamped picture of your car on the way in. And a little man in a uniform writes down your number plate and arrival time in a log book.

After lunch one day, I went to pick up my car and discovered, to my horror, that I had lost my entry ticket.

The car park official was thrilled. “You lost ticket, you pay 24 hours’ parking fee,” he grinned.

I explained that I had only been there an hour.

“You got no proof,” he said.

“True,” I said. “But you do. You have a computer record. AND you have a photo record. AND you have a Logbook Kept by a Little Man in a Uniform record.”

He looked horrified. It was true. There was now a mountain of evidence protecting the driver.

He went into a huddle with other officials. They eventually decided that instead of asking for the cost of 24 hours’ parking, they would demand the same money but call it a “Lost Ticket Handling Charge”.

So I had to pay it. But it was almost worth it just to have tormented them for a few minutes.

I heard of a case in London recently in which a driver returned to his parked car to find that officials had painted a white “Disabled Parking Only” box on the ground around the vehicle, and then attached a parking fine to his windscreen.

Which is why I now carry grey paint in the boot of my car.

This is war, you know. 

Bureaucratic nightmares round-up

Airport officials recapture the red tape top spot
By Nury Vittachi

*

Here at the records office of the Ministry of Unreasonable Officials we are happy to announce that employees in the airport sector have once again grabbed the coveted top spot.   

This follows a period when civil servants threatened to take over as dumbest breed of red tape dispensers, thanks to officials from India and Malaysia who declared living people dead and refused to revise their paperwork despite having the “corpses” standing in from of them asking politely for their status as deceased persons to be reviewed.

The airline sector’s winning team earlier this month prevented a man from boarding a plane at Heathrow airport in London because he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a man with a gun. Brad Jayakody’s garment had an image from the action film Transformers. Well done, Heathrow officials: that was an impressive entry.

In runner-up position came an Indian airport official. He confiscated a mango from a passenger “for security reasons” before allowing him to board a domestic flight in that country. The passenger told me: “Maybe they thought I would hijack the plane by threatening to squish it on the pilot’s nice uniform?”

Numerous people shared stories of airport security officials swooping on women for the crime of wearing underwired bras. Just a little note to guards: if a woman needs tempered steel to reinforce the underside of her brassiere, there is unlikely to be much room in the garment for extraneous objects.

And in the United States, airport officials prevented a person boarding an aircraft with a MacBook Air, the new super-thin computer from Apple. They didn’t believe such a slim object could be a real computer. 

                An emailer who signs himself “Frequent Traveler” asked a question: “Many airports now have No Joking signs at security areas, and there have been several cases of quick-witted wags who have been arrested and even jailed for telling jokes. How do they square this with their constitutions, which guarantee free speech? And why haven’t you been arrested?”

The only answer to your first question, Frequent Traveller, is a hollow laugh.

As for the second, I pretend to be deaf and dumb.

As well as the No Joking Zones at airports, there are secret No Joking Zones at newspapers and other media offices all over Asia. Think about it. While this newspaper fearlessly prints these attempts at humour, do its rivals regularly print anything remotely funny? No? There you go.

Now I wouldn’t want airport officials to think that I am calling them dense, humourless ill-informed automatons, just because I am.

No. I fully accept the fact that airline passengers can be even dumber.

The Asian press reported last week that a record number of female pilots are well on their way to taking the controls of aircraft at major airlines in the region.

This is great news, but I know Asian businessmen will be at least as sexist as their western counterparts. I will never forget a story I head of a European pilot named Helga who overheard a male passenger commenting as she entered the cockpit.

“Is that a woman I see going in there?” he asked.

The flight attendant nodded.

The man added: “Well, I suppose it’s all right, as long as they don’t let her touch anything.”

Worst Chinese songs ever

The sad song of the single eyelid girl
By Nury Vittachi

*

The search is over. The world can take a deep breath. Readers have spoken, and the mission to find the most, er, memorable East Asian pop song lyric ever has come up with a winner. 

                Let’s go in reverse order. In third place comes Hong Kong’s Aaron Kwok with this baffling line: “A crowded car is like the noise of bees who is specially recalling my face with nostalgia.” Thanks, Aaron; keep taking the tablets.

In second place is Taiwan’s Richie Jen with this great passage:  “Lonely boy’s flyswatter: Swat-swat left, swat-swat right. How come I have no one to love me? No one shows interest. How boring.” You said it, my man.
                But the first place winner in this category has to be—big round of applause—Single-Eyelid Girl by the China Dolls, a group from Thailand.

                This unforgettable song is about a girl who falls in love with a boy, but then discovers that he only likes double-eyelid girls, while she is a single-eyelid girl: “The boy at the table opposite us is here again today; look at his eyes, what amazing confidence. But I've heard that he only likes double-eyelid girls! With my single eyelid, I have no choice.”

                For some reason, the song conjures up a vision of a Cyclops-like girl sitting in a restaurant with one huge eye in the middle of her forehead. I’ve never actually seen the lead singer of the China Dolls, so perhaps that is what she looks like.

                Meanwhile, listeners of the Phil Whelan show on Hong Kong’s Radio Three wanted to add the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps to our list of bad lyrics. George Harrison, desperately looking for a rhyme for “sleeping”, sings: “I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping”.

An even more embarrassingly desperate rhyme was spotted by reader Dave MacDonald in Led Zeppelin's Dancing Days: “I told your mamma I'd get you home/ but I didn't tell her I had no car/ I saw a lion, he was standing alone with a tadpole in a jar.”

Raiya Kishwar Ashraf from Bangladesh added a song from her country which clearly has lyrics designed to shock listeners: “My shirt button is open: Oh brother. My shirt button is open!” Which just goes to show that different things shock different people.

Reader Ricardo Cabeza scolded us for missing Neil Diamond's Play Me, for the line: “Songs you sang to me, sounds you brang to me.”

We earlier mentioned an Indian song which went, “Light your ciggie from my liver, oh lover”. Reader Claudia Cucker says it may not be as absurd as it sounds: “The liver is the organ in your body that gives off the most heat.” Thanks, Claudia. Next time I want to flambé my dessert, you can come round and ignite it with your internal organs.

                Several readers wanted to give a Most Baffling Love Song award to Manfred Man for his song about a guy who meets a girl who says: “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo.” He replies with the same phrase, and they decide to get married so they can spend every day chanting “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo”. The only possible response to this lyric is: What were they on when they wrote this, and where can I get some?

Males and females not the same, boffins discover

It’s curtains for men, as scientists map the female DNA

By Nury Vittachi

*

Scientists in Holland last week announced that they had for the first time mapped the complete DNA of a woman. The DNA of the human male was mapped in 2001, and boffins have also done a number of lesser beasts, such as the dog, the bear, the E. Coli bacterium, the fruit fly, the mouse, and finally, last and definitely least, the human female.

Humanity will at last be able to conclusively identify genetic differences between men and women, a spokesman said.

                As usual, scientists have taken years to discover what the rest of us already know.

               For example, I know from personal experience that men are genetically programmed to have no opinions whatsoever about the colour of curtains. I have spent years strenuously attempting to have an opinion on the subject, but it is simply not possible.

Unfortunately, women are genetically programmed to not notice that men have no opinion on this topic, and will ask their partners for one repeatedly throughout their lifetimes.

When I am on my deathbed, my wife will ask: “So: what colour curtains do you want at the crematorium?”

And my last words will be, “Er. Ah. Um. I don’t know. Uh, white?”

“White? Are you crazy? What about all the soot?”

Here’s another example of gender-specific programming. If a man puts something down and then cannot find it, he is genetically programmed not to look for it but to ask the nearest woman where it is. She will then find that it is exactly where he left it and she will hand it to him. It’s a kind of comforting ritual.

There are genetic differences in shopping, reader Sara Wan said. Men buy things according to how many unnecessary functions they have, which is why the world now has Internet-connected refrigerators and Bluetooth-enabled rice-cookers. “If we could calculate just how much money is wasted by men buying gadgets with functions they never use, we’d probably have enough to solve all the world’s problems,” she said.  Good idea, Sara. I’ll see if I can find a gadget with that function for you.

                A reader who did not want her name used said: “I am a married woman. My husband has several functions he does not use.”

Moving right along, a gentleman named Dan said he had seen statistics which said that married men live longer than single men.  This could be true. Or maybe it just feels like it.

Men and women also have very different body-clocks. This can easily be proved by observation of The Midnight Conversation, which I’m sure all couples have.

Him: Zzzz.

Her: Do you think we have enough quality time, I mean, as a couple?

Him: Zzzz.

Her: I mean, when was the last time we really talked?

Him: Zzzz.

Her: We don’t talk enough.

Him: You do.

Her: What did you say?

Him: Nothing. Zzzz.

Anyway, I guess these scientists in Holland may come up with some useful information that guys can use. You know what they say. There are two periods when men don’t understand women: before marriage and after marriage.

I shall leave the last word to a female reader. “Imagine a world with no men. No crime and lots of fat, happy women.”

Readers' answers to the swimsuit problem

The naked truth about those original Olympic athletes

By Nury Vittachi

*

Japanese swimmers are secretly wearing Speedos to beat their best times by almost a second, the Asia business correspondent for The Times of London reported.

                Athletes fear that swimming costumes made by Asian firms such as Mizuni and Asics slow them down. This follows reports that swimmers wearing UK-made Speedos have an unfair advantage. Asian swimmers are hoping for technological breakthroughs by top Japanese swimwear firms such as Descente (which strikes me as a terrible name for a company which makes garments which wearers desperately hope will stay up).

               Don’t worry, lads. Readers of this column have come to your rescue. Vince A, writing from the Philippines, said: “Those of us in technologically backward countries have no chance to compete. I vote that all swimming henceforth be sans any swimwear to even things out.”

               Other readers supported this idea, and pointed out that it would boost television viewership and be more true to the original Olympics games, at which participants were naked.

Vince: your idea is perfect in every way, except for the fact that it just won’t work. Most television channels would simply refuse to show the Olympics if athletes appeared as nature intended.

It’s a strange thing. The human being is the only creature to think its own body is weird and disgusting. It is the only animal which will arrest itself for seeing itself naked. This is somehow taken as a sign of our sophistication as a species. Whoever it was among our forefathers who decided that what humans look like naked was some kind of secret clearly did not realize that anyone could blow it by simply undressing. As far as I know, seeing yourself naked in the privacy of your home is not yet illegal anywhere, except perhaps in more conservative parts of Singapore.

                On the subject of nudity, reader John Wilson received a letter while preparing for a stay at the Hong Kong Eye Hospital. “You may consider to bring your own clothes,” the letter advised. Perhaps patients, expecting the hospital to supply everything, have been turning up naked. “I’ll follow the advice,” he said.

                 I also heard from a historian who said that the Olympics were not originally naked, as widely believed. What actually happened was this. A runner called Orsippus of Megara, sprinting along at the Olympics in 720 B.C., lost his shorts in the middle of his race. This must have been horribly embarrassing for his clothing sponsor, which was probably some early Greek sportswear firm with a name such as Reebokos, Nikos, Pumos or Adidos.

                Orsippus stepped out of his shorts, kept on running—and won the race. From then on, everyone followed his example of competing naked.

              It’s also not true that women were not allowed to watch the original Olympics. The rules said that any married women found in the audience would be thrown off a cliff, but single girls were allowed to watch. Perhaps the organizers thought young women would find it educational.

                Anyway, this little history lessons leads us to a clear answer to the swimwear conundrum.

Swimmers who don’t have Speedos and have to wear slow, draggy swimming costumes, can take inspiration from Orsippus of Megara and “accidentally” lose their trunks after starting the race.

And since Japanese swimwear already has the word “Descente” printed on them, it will all seem rather apt.

*

The dangers of new technology... such as books

Conservatives object to everything, including reading and writing

By Nury Vittachi

*

Sometimes I hit a raw nerve. Several readers complained about my criticism of Grand Theft Auto IV. This is a youth-oriented computer game in which players get points by committing extremely anti-social acts such as armed robbery, substance abuse and making poor clothing choices.

Hey—what I really meant was that I don’t need this game because I get quite enough of this sort of thing at home already.

                Most of the letters of protest can be summarized as follows: “Dear Idiotbrain, there is no scientific evidence that violent video games make people violent, and if you continue to make such ridiculous allegations I will have no option but to shoot you, chop the corpse into tiny pieces and blow up your building. Love from Jin-Jin, aged 10.”

                Well, to all the Jin-Jins out there, I have absolutely no objection to boys turning themselves into mindless killing machines, providing you all take your guns and go and live on some isolated continent miles away from me. (Oh, you have done? You’re in America?) 

The most interesting response came from a philosophical reader who said people have been scared of new technology since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Actually, he makes a fair point, and his timing is good. Today, June 2, is the anniversary of the day Guglielmo Marconi (known to his friends as “the nerd with the unpronounceable first name”) filed his patent on radio transmissions in 1896. Marconi’s invention triggered howls of protest from people who said radio was dangerous new technology which would stop people reading and writing.

                Similiarly, in the 1950s, there was a campaign against typewriters because they would “depersonalize communications between businessmen”. This is an obvious fallacy: whoever heard of a businessman with a personality?

In the Victorian era, there was a campaign against erasers because they would stop students thinking deeply before they wrote. Now, come on: has anyone ever seen a student thinking deeply?

                Two millenniums ago, Socrates campaigned against reading and writing. In those days, wisdom was delivered exclusively through something called “oral tradition”, which basically meant Men With Beards Talking.

Socrates warned: (a) If people started reading and writing, their memories would wither from underuse; (b) they would read out the words of Men With Beards and look cleverer than they really were, and (c) the world would become democratic, upsetting the elite.

Socrates was right, but he could not foresee that East Asian leaders would have the ability to keep their faces straight while telling people who have waited 2,400 years for democracy that they are “too impatient”.

               But anyway, Socrates’ criticisms were ignored, and so were the criticisms of people who wanted to ban radio, erasers and typewriters. Has society been dumbed down?

                Actually, I think it has. Consider this. When Marconi died in 1937, the world wanted to do something to commemorate his work. You know what humanity decided to do? They took every audio broadcaster off the air for two minutes. To celebrate the invention of radio. Ouch.

When I think of that, I can’t help but hope that humanity dies off soon, so that the world can be re-colonized by a more intelligent species, such as mushrooms. But if Jin-Jin is still around, he will probably shoot them.