Out-and-Out Liars; 10.000 Monkey Typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 4)

Is ten thousand hours the general rule of success by lying? Scratch a liar, find a thief. Do we always find the same amount of bare-faced fabrication we found in the Midwichian's cunning self-centredness or in the Homo-counties gay soccer team? How to sort out the practicing opportunists?

Lets put it to the test shall we, by taking two samples of simpletons, let’s make them as familiar to us all as possible, the Betas-; hamburger-eating, beer-swilling, fag-smoking, speed-shopping, quiz-and-reality-TV- watching masses.  Transforming the  face of  Britain, this phenomenon first invaded ours shores, from the United States in February 1964, it led to people-who would otherwise have entertained each other with popular songs-burning pianos and other stringed instruments en masse.

The primary fascinating fact about The Betas (Named after Beta Blockers) as regards our significant study, is how much of a head-start those in the United States had, lounging about sofas, too obese to reach the TV set to change the channel. Nobody was playing out-doors, family board games or any kind of live instruments in America after 1957, that is exactly seven years before the rot literally castaway on a ship and landed in the UK from the United States. (Incidentally, the time lapse between the first American Beta man coughing himself to death in E,R, and the first English Beta Man sneezing himself to death in ER is actually...seven years. It always is. This grew to become a phenomena known as Beta Man E.R. And if you look close at these long years of separation, you might find if you linked totally intangential facts, that in the company of Floy, Junior Gay soccer, and World-Wide computer programmers ,that that which may sound awful, is actually quite familiar.

"Hamburgers were first sold to a background of rock-and-roll; sales quickly out-stripped the Club Sandwich", says Desmond Morris, the social anthropologist, who wrote the unofficial biography of The Betas called Snouts. " Bruno, inventor of the Hamburger, had the inventor of the Club Sandwich murdered, his body parts , indistinguishable from the gaudily painted parts of a fairground attraction, were found by a gypsy showman when he started his ride much to the horror of the blood and gore-bespattered crowd. The idea of separating the Club Sandwich from rock-and-roll was not going to be an easy one; they had a plan. Hour after hour people would stagger out of rock-and –roll joints throw up and there, miraculously, would be a hamburger bar. Immigrants, new to the country, would sell them at traffic lights to passing drivers under pain of deportation, and the red-light districts of major cities shut shop due to the lust for the Hamburger out-stripping and easing out the need for sex".

“As already mentioned, it was seven years before the first hamburger reached Liverpool”, continued Desmond, "It was an accident. A crate of copies of Beale Street  Blues records was to have been delivered to London via Liverpool, but instead, at the last minute, relatives of the inventor of the Club sandwiched reeked revenge by bumping off Bruno; the culinary inventor choked to death after being force-fed eighteen of his own patented Hamburgers; his corpse, still in the throws of digestion, replaced the blues records bound for merry old England.

A Liverpudlian record entrepreneur supplier to shops in Soho discovered the rotting corpse where Mississippi Delta Blues recordings should have been. At the autopsy a connection between hamburgers and cause of death was immediately established and samples retrieved from Bruno’s intestinal tract appeared in the popular press of the day. The Hamburger, in Britain did not quite replace the need for alcohol and it was too cold to practise a lot of sex anyway.

What is so special about the hamburger you may ask? It was never made well. It still isn’t. It is not as though it cost fanatics, it didn’t. It wasn’t as if they were better than the saveloy. The saveloy wasn’t anywhere around then. It was the sheer amount one could consume before the days of the gastric band.

Here is Desmond Morris talking to a member of The Betas who had recently been fitted with a gastric band after hamburgers had removed his intestinal lining.

Everybody just got better and better at eating burgers, we didn’t see it as lacking in confidence. We couldn’t help it; we ate them all night long at first. It was the first thing we had that was foreign. We had to try to eat more than anyone else to get one over on them. In Liverpool, we started with one hour sessions, until we upped our numbers to a personal best. I became like my friends. They ate Hamburgers for eight hours a day. This was serious; we weren’t playing.

Eight hours?

Who, at the time, for Pete’s sake, drummed this into the Betas. Once news got out that they had broken the eight hour record, others started packing them in. They had to increase to seven nights a week. At first they ate hamburgers till twelve thirty, when the hamburger places sold out and closed, but they knew of a place that had a twenty-four hour lock-in and stayed until five o’clock most mornings.

Seven days a week?

The obesity rate increased five-fold among the Betas by nineteen-sixty-eight and then ninety-fold by nineteen-seventy-five along with the death rate: 106 in 1968 to 9002. in 1975.  By the nineteen–eighties this had increase to 970.000.000. Along with their hearts, by the end of the nineties Betas’ stomachs were literally bursting. How incredible is that? Most gastric bands let only a tenth of a hamburger pass into the stomach; the constant stench of burped up hamburger is today what keeps the Betas apart from the rest of us.

“When we look back we cannot say that this stage in human development was a very good one,” Desmond Morris droned on.  “Only an enormous amount of stamina on the part of a small number of learned individuals, relics of the jazz age, could resist the various copies and counterfeit versions of the Hamburger that have sprung up since the demise of rock-and-roll. We only need remember Elvis Presley unable to waddle on stage, on his back in his bathroom dying of an excess of hamburger, while in the background came the sound of his mother making them with a feverish discipline like no one else”.