The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap (Chapter 3, Part 3)

                                                                              3.

On December 6, 2006 The Stuck-up Artists reached new fits of apoplectic peak at Tate Britain’s £705.000 purchase of the glitter and dung Turner Prize winning Nigerian/British artist Chris Ofili’s thirteen paintings of a Macaque-crested monkey, named Floy. Entitled ‘The Upper Room’- due to the fact that an exact replica of Floy’s room on the upper-most floor of Silly Home Valley for the Insane had to be copied and rebuilt in an upper wing of the Tate before Floy would consent to pose as his recent alter-ego, Lord Raven, (a defunct English aristocrat complete with faded grandiose surroundings, hanging by an old Etonian tie above a camp bed littered with Y-fronts, cheap gin and genealogies) - the collection would be the gallery’s proud new acquisition.

The Stuck-ups, who had had to get buses to the demo, were incensed. They donned monkey masks and threw dung at anyone entering; this had the curious effect of turning the staunchly anti-conceptual-art protestors into...well, conceptual art. We might try to fathom the mystery as to what it was exactly in the thirteen portraits of the real-life Lord Raven that so offended the Stuck-up artists.

A: The portrayal of Lord Raven, an establishment figure in sad alcoholic demise, by a monkey.

B: The elevation of Chris Ofili to giddier heights of fame through the Tate’s £705-000 purchase of a work of art the Stuck-ups deemed lacking in artistic merit.

C: The fact that The Upper Room also happened to be a reconstruction of the interior of The Chelsea Arts Club down to the very beam from which Lord Raven aka Floy swung.

D: The raw truth that since the closing-down sale that was the British Empire Raven’s end was the likely end for those trained to administrate colonies that no longer existed.

E:  Unalloyed envy.

F: The original and brilliant use of elephant dung the Stuck-up artists wish they had thought of first (See option E).

G: Floy’s refusal to relinquish the Eton tie on loan to the gallery.

H: All of the above.

The fact that the right reply is B, I am forced to admit to not having a clue why. I figure you haven’t a clue what I am talking about either. Chris Ofili does not have a clue either; neither does he need to, endowed as he is with such rare artistic brilliance. Being such a humble, kind man he would be puzzled as to why anyone would be mean enough to harbor grudges that fell into any of the above categories.

In the ensuing years Stuck-up founders Tabitha Galsworthy and Anthony Christ-Jones have put a great deal of effort into undermining both Ofili’s and Floy’s involvement in The Upper Room, discrediting them both as originators of the work through the same small-minded logic that still seeks to discredit both Shakespeare his works because he lacked a university education and Barack Obama his autobiographies because...? They sought to prove the deceased real-life Lord Raven as the only possible fit for a Success Ideation Quotient the Stuck-ups could handle. As Lord Raven lacked the advantage of being able to defend himself this – in the eyes of the Stuck-ups- gave them an advantage elevating his Ideation Quotient in the eyes of the public to Above Reasonable Doubt. Basically the more dead you are the easier it is to make up lies about you-whether you like it or not-and raise your name on the shoulders of other people’s giant dung heaps to everlasting fame.

There is indeed a huge gulf between God-like Ideation Quotient one can aspire to  while still on earth and that which can be attained when dead; the Dictator Ideation Quotient is actually an opaque glass ceiling of limitation that is only shattered once you have been hunted down and executed; the Rarity Ideation Quotient,-your transformation into actual ether- surreally, increases your real-world value.

Indeed there is no point in being a catch when you are dead. The chasm between real success and imagined success depends indeed on your Ideation Quotient. As the late and great queen Quentin Crisp pronounced, “ If you imagine you are a victim, then victim will be your style! If you imagine you are undeserving of success when you get there then ingratiating sycophant, my dears, will also be your style! “.

“There is no point in climbing on the shoulders of the unsuccessful or moderately successful to accelerate your rise”. The  psychopathically ambitious British financial rogue-trader Nick Leeson said in evidence at his hearing “Blue-Sky-thinking is all well and good but Blue-sky can be experienced very close to the ground and one is in fear of rubbing shoulders with the ‘Gormless,’ or those ‘Without-Sky, your Honour. I sought out friendships and connections with Jet-Stream-Thinkers to raise my profile and help my plan mature to its ultimate aim of reaching those who breathe the rarefied air of Outer-Orbit-Thinking”.

“Those who attain giddy heights tend to become a little light headed”, said the Judge as he sentenced Leeson and a whole raft of bankers to twenty years of solitary confinement to limit their contact with any sky whatsoever, metaphorical or real.

Science: Giants tend to imagine themselves to be well over six foot, if they are not do they have a realistic chance of entering the professions ?We don’t suppose so. The requirement of being a giant is six times six feet, thirty-six feet to be a serious player, though those giants who are, say, fifty or sixty feet tall have the best views of all. Those below a particular height should really and truely stop muttering incessantly in the back of New York cabs and anywhere else for that matter. “I could’ve been a contender”. This disgruntled world-view has become automatic in those who seek to promote intelligence over height.

That the Stuck-up artist Anthony Christ-Jones had a higher opinion of himself on the day of the Tate’s purchase of The Upper Room by Chris Ofili, is clear.  Christ-Jones took bitter umbrage that as a trustee of the Tate, Ofili should benefit from in-house financial advantages while the Stuck-ups were at pains to sell a painting at Portobello Road market at a 30% discount let alone get the whole cannon of work  accepted by the Tate for free; The idea that Ofili could be 30.000%  richer than Christ-Jones was ridiculous.  All that can be said is that, like the hardening process of the elephant dung with the use of a hairdryer, but in reverse; as we shall see, the winds of a thousand solar flairs would not be enough to soften a constipated Anthony-Christ-Jones.

I am of the opinion that an individuals’ Ideation Quotient towards an institution can be brought to a tipping point. I once again challenge you to deny that the Turner prize winners, one and all attain a decent score on the Imagination Ideation Quotient, and the Turner accolade proved the fact that, perfect examination results at art college, corporate sponsorship and interstellar fame notwithstanding, there was no pooper-scooper large enough to eradicate them from Christ-Jones tormented inner landscape.

Let’s peruse the list here-below of the first fifteen Turner Prize winners since 1984 and meditate on the mendacious demise of the underachievers omitted.

Malcolm Merling

Howard Hodgkin

Gilbert and George

Richard Deacon

Tony Cragg

Richard Long

Anish Kapoor

Grenville  Davey

Rachel Whitbread

Antony Gormley

Damien Hirst

Douglas Gordon

Gillian Waring

Chris Ofili

Steve MacQueen

The last name on the list, Steve MacQueen an artist of African decent and consecutive 1999 Turner Prize winner after Ofili, was another brutal kick to an already agitated hornets nest and the Stuck-ups proverbial wings beat like the fans a thousand Southern belles on the verandas of a thousand plantations at the news of emancipation. That same year, one coup de grace of many coups de grace  was the emergence and pre-eminence of Christ-Jones ex-girlfriend into the public eye with her installation My Fucked-Up Head.

Here are the rest of the Turner Prize winners which includes the cross-dressing artist from Pottersbarn, Graceful Perrier for his site-specific installations of National Heritage Blue Plagues sign-posting the residences of all nineteen former Turner Prize winners; a curiously innovative, if annihilating concept, as the plaques are traditionally awarded twenty years after death.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Martin Creed

Keith Tyson

Graceful Perrier

Jeremy Deller

Simon Starling

Tomma Abts

Mark Wallinger

Mark Leckey

Richard Wright

Susan Philipsz

Martin Boyce

Apparently, to win the Turner Prize a sense of entitlement is not enough, and those smarting at the entrance of the Tate Britain year on and year out worshiping Our Lady of Universal Ill-will, know this all too well.

The idea of creating a repeating triptych of thirteen differently coloured simians around the unressurrectible central patriarch Lord Raven was influenced by an admixture of the biography of the real-life Lord Raven written by his social worker, the lugubrious poem The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and the various shady intentions of family members in the famous Last Supper film Festen. These three works, a biography, a poem and a film were the only entertainments allowed Floy in the upper room of Silly Home Valley for the Creatively Unhinged.

For years The Raven, the complete antithesis to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, promised Floy the curiously comforting prospect of a unending void of nothingness after death, the biography the means to get there, and Festen allowed him respite from the grim past time of contemplating...well, nothingness. He re-enacted each of the thirteen characters with the use of variously coloured light bulbs strangely allowed by his carers.

His psychiatrist Abel Blumental condoned the practise as a form of Gestalt; the identification with thirteen different personas with the use of a lottery of ambient lighting was seen as a welcome distraction from Floy’s previous obsession. As long as he was prevented from re-enacting the final moment of the adventurous Lord Raven’s  grandiose demise, the therapy might work. Somewhere in the midst of his research began Floy writing and re-writing the sentence, “Your paintings are stuck up, You are stuck up - Stuck up, Stuck up, Stuck up”, on the walls of his room with coloured crayon.

The Midwychians, those midheaven albino extra-terrestrials who taught Floy binary code were, it appears, once again in contact; they had traced him after scouring America’s loftiest educational institutions recruiting a few more socially anorectic types along the way. Their presence in Floy’s addled brain first manifested itself as background white-noise until he, once again was able to receive every TV and Radio station and Broadband within a phenomenally wide radius; He had joined the sociopathic hive mind, and the voices of those races accidently abducted from loving family backgrounds who lived together, if somewhat noisily, could be heard distinctly crying for home above those malevolent races who shove their children into private schools at seven and their old into homes, who droned, “There are only so many hours in a day,” incessantly. Through this din Anthony Christ-Jones’ ex girlfriend’s now legendary rant “Your paintings are stuck up…” traced an enervating leitmotiv through Floy’s days and nights; no space was left uncrayoned. Somewhere a deluded mixed-race statistician was insidiously promoting the pernicious doctrine of Popular Eugenics and Gilded Spawn while a Nigerian/British artist and a Macaque Crested Monkey were beating a path to each other’s door.

Out-and-Out Liars;The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 2)

                                                                   2.

Way before the Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and The Mug Factor!, as a young man, Lenny Mulch who had already embraced the uselessness of adopting a high-minded attitude, made his first tentative step towards heights of universal mediocrity when he met an equally unremarkable lad called Sly Green. Green had been brought up surrounded by wonderfully creative hippies; he hated them. His progressive parents taught him from home. On a daily basis he daydreamed of becoming a mercenary and having them herded into one room and slaughtered. Green’s mother enrolled on an Open University course studying from home so that she might eventually make her own money.  Green cleverly fabricated an elaborate system whereby her laptop lid, spring-loaded, slammed shut when she hit the ‘save’ icon, breaking his mother’s beautifully tapered fingers and stopping her earning power, (and later that of others who might wish to work for a wage), forever.

Back in his village in Devon, Mulch was irritated by anyone he saw as intelligent which, thankfully wasn’t often.  His Ideation Quotient (IQ, a measure of which social and cultural group you aspire to belong to), compared with millions of people tested all over the planet in the last half decade, was non-existent. He did not see intelligence as a must. His Ideation Quotient level was no higher or lower than getting teenagers together and enrolling them in work placements, internships and other bogus apprenticeship schemes which ensured they would be no better than indentured slaves. Mulch would one day make us all sit fascinated and bewildered for hours and hours, mezmerised at his expertise for producing a show graduate unemployed contestants paid to appear in with the anti-climatic fanfare finale of life-long work experience as a road sweeper as the main prize.

In 2012 Mulch made a decision to shut himself away and make a life-long study of himself, which he thought, would be a gift to the world. Like middle-class Fringe theatres around the UK, he applied for grants by using photos of and pledges to include local ethnic minorities and when the money arrived, reverted to ‘jobs-for-the –boys-thinking’; in the case of the theatres i.e. those with a high Entitlement Ideation Quotient, and in Mulch’s case, himself.

The eminent social-anthropologist Professor Nohair sums up the phenomena he calls National Sleepwalking Ideation Quotient “The Ideation Quotient test among the English middle-classes is invariably not only off the scale class-wise but, increasingly, in the wrong time. When interviewed, ten percent revealed themselves to be urban-cyclist-with-wicker-baskets who not only went about London in a perpetual daze and fixed grin but had the amazing faculty to be able to edit out those they did not wish to see in particular and the city landscape in general and emerge, in their imagination, on an Edwardian country lane. A group of Nigerians re-imagined as a gaggle of geese, a drunk as a stray pony, a riot as swirling autumn leaves and the bloody of traces of that morning’s mugging could become a spilt punnet of strawberries if one’s Ideation Quotient was English Pastoral enough. By the end of testing the real Ideation Quotient of England and the English, it was  found that what lay beneath was an escapism on xenophobic proportions  ; 25 million people in England could only cope with its multicultural reality if their Ideation Quotient dial was tuned permanently to Downton Abbey. Another 30 million’s Ideation Quotient saw them submerged in the comforting world of the contemporary crime series Midsommer Murders; they were able to ignore the weekly genocide placed before them and focus lovingly on the thatched cottages, cricket lawns and privet hedges of a fictional racially-cleansed post bi-millennial village they yearned to believe was still here.”

"That this Halcyon England Ideation Quotient", Profressor Nohair observed, " initially a marketing tool to sell reruns of Agatha Christie’s England abroad, has backfired horribly and is now selling itself back to itself is still ignored, and remains clear only to those whose Ideation Quotient includes the anti-monarchist call ‘We’re-fed-up-living-in-a-fucking-museum!’ ".

At a low-impact environmentally friendly Levellers community’ in Totnes, Devon, at a Yard Sale advertised to raise travel money to send a daughter to New Zealand, a middle-aged, middle-class woman with an extremely high Above-Stairs Downton Abbey Ideation Quotient concealed by an Environmental Earth Mother  Ideation Quotient looked over her hand-crafted gypsy clothes pegs like a mother hen.; it was never realized how much the Ideation Quotient, or utter collective self-delusion was at play here. Yet not only had the community at the top of the hill bought into it with the fervour of ragged sleepwalkers in hand-crafted natural fibres, but so did the self-deluded town below. The fact is the yard sale was pure Greenwash; each member of the community had bought out-right their converted stable houses surrounding a grander house and like children were now playing poor on the lawn. The comment shouted out by a passerby regarding the money raised’ That’ll be enough for a few Cappuchinos at the airport!”, was ignored.

“There is nothing more telling about the morale of a nation than its Ideation Quotient”.  Continued Professor Nohair,“ Political correctness is a natural enemy of how one chooses to see oneself and National Displacement Ideation Quotient, where a whole nation side-steps this issue by identification with somewhere else, (like New Zealand’s appropriation of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth) allows long-haul flights of national fancy without offending anyone in the real world. That it is a major symptom of malaise is obvious; sub-titled Scandinavian crime dramas allows the English to escape into a racially pristine landscape without incurring the wrath of the Political Correct and from their sofas, quaff deeply at the well of an Aryan  idyll. It’s damage limitation really”.

Ideation Quotient is central to success, without the unseemly stampede of those who have been given the notion that they are elite, gift-aid for top private schools would be impossible to acquire, hence the IQ Test (Ideation Quotient test). High in the Texas Hills companies are using this test to sort the wheat from the chaff scrupulously measuring a perspective employee’s self-belief by asking. “How certain are you to reach the top?” The surprise second part to this question could make or break an applicant. “...of a giant dung heap?”

It would be a major miracle if any one could raise one’s Ideation Quotient above the rest of humanity. You would say that is impossible-divine right notwithstanding? You would be right by assuming that to get to the top we need to scramble up on the shoulders of giants; and when we hear about Chris Ofili our gut instinct is the same as Lenny Mulch's and Sly Green's; is he worth using to further my ascent? Out-and-out liars are indeed those whose no-holds-barred attitude to climbing up the backs and onto the shoulders of giants to succeed is nothing more than ingenuous.

Summarizing Out-and-Out Liars we have seen that an outstanding amount can be done without talent by opportunists. In this section, we will be sending a whole battalion of diggers out to solve the cases of what happened to those who slipped through the crust of their own private dung heap and disappeared into failure in its purest and concentrated form- social compost. How we have been tricked into running to our sofas cued by mass recession Shadenfreude into gawping at the They-Shoot-Horses-Don’t-They despair that is Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and the Mug Factor!, Mulch and Green may never rise to a level of intelligence to tell us. Had Lenny Mulch met the sixteen year old Chris Ofili it would be him, not Ofili cashing in, but he would have been cashing in on the same misunderstanding; Mulch does not understand what a true out-and-out liar is and that is a misunderstanding he will carry with him to the gargantuan mulch that will be his grave.

Out-and-Outliars;The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 1)

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap, Part 1

         

                             “YOUR PAINTINGS ARE STUCK UP,

                 YOU ARE STUCK UP – STUCK UP,

                              STUCK UP, STUCK UP”  former girlfriend of stuck up Anthony Christ-Jones.

In 2010 Tate Britain exhibited the works of the Nigerian/British artist and 1998 Turner Prize winner, an affable man named Chris Ofili.

The Tate Britain show featured, among the artist’s many phenomenally successful works, a piece called The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars. Created in 1998 The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars is an 293.x 400cm paper collage incorporating oil paint, glitter, polyester resin and elephant dung on linen, featuring the faces of over a dozen negro stars encased in...well black stars. These avatars of ebonic success surround a gigantic black shamanic figure, presumably the artist himself. Like all his other works in the Tate Britain exhibition its frame rises up from the gallery floor mounted on the shoulders of a giant dung heap. Elephant dung to be precise, two dried dollops of it to be exact. Of the many visitors among the artistic crowd  who snorted and sniffed their way around the exhibit, suffering in silent scorn the adverse fact that an ex-colonial subject could be uppity enough to pass them, two self-entitled artists who themselves had preternatural expectations on who should pass examination entries into the best art schools in the land and who should not, declared that according to their artistic standards, Chris Ofili’s work on display before them was ‘superbly under-qualified to call itself art’.

One  night in 1999, a mere few weeks after Chris Ofili was announced as the first ever black winner of the Turner Prize a fierce opposition of Stuck-up Artists formed a mob outside the gallery. “We are inheritors of the English Old School of Painters, Mr Ofili isn’t!” The smarted crowd shouted as the camera zeroed in from a panorama of the disgruntled and Stuck Up Artists assembled to a huge poster of a fresh-faced dark-skinned physically robust man in his twenties. ‘The average Englishman will not accept this person’s artistic kudos in a hundred years’, a representative of the Stuck-Up Artists announced. In 2010, it was two founders of this same group, Tabitha Galsworthy and Anthony Christ-Jones, who stood before The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars.

Anthony Christ-Jones stepped forward from the mob, “ The intelligentsia, who have not felt the need to leave the hallowed confines of the Chelsea Art’s Club since the death of Gainsborough,  will not think highly or well of The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars.” The Turner organizer Sir Nicholas Serota looked at Christ-Jones as if Christ-Jones were shit and he, Serota were cleaning fluid.

“Indeed, I think it could herald culture’s demise”. Christ-Jones went on with genuine disgust. Having a high Ideation Quotient (IQ, having an ingrained and specifically  high-minded idea of oneself as a member of a cultural elite). “There’s tradition, and now these people... “ He stepped back into the mob, the jealousy in his countenance visibly evident. “ We, the cultured elite can not continue to accept this ridicule...This definitely has to be stopped!”

Since the late nineteen-nineties Chris Ofili, hugely famous where the Stuck-ups are hugely not, has come to represent everything that is genuinely adored in Britain about out-and-out liars. He alone, and not the Stuck-ups, is feted in the media. Again, a documentary about his work won international prizes where a self-made film of the Stuck-ups vanished into obscurity; the critic who precipitated its swift demise described the point of the film and the Stuck-ups as ‘a morose error’.

You don’t need to be a telepath to know that, when tested, the results of Ofili’s Ideation Quotient is within the boundaries of humble whereas  those of the Stuck-ups are quite frankly stuck right up there...too high up, indeed, to be measured, actually.

The Ideation Quotient test (IQ:: People who see themselves especially and uniquely too smart for...well, other people) asks some pretty strange questions. “Were you  speaking elaborate sentences at the age of six weeks? Were you able to discern the cultural inferiority of Radio 3 over Radio 4 when you were three years old? At four years of age did you ask your grandparents, and parents why they failed to treat you like a deity? Do you remember the utter disappointment at being totally misunderstood?

The Old School thought that if this foreigner, ‘who’s father couldn’t even speak our language properly’, can walk in with his scant knowledge, after they had studied all there is to know about art, and instruct us on the subject with work one would find in a child’s exercise book then they all might as well be plebs. “Where would Bertrand Russell be if he has been super-ceded intellectually by that mulatto javeler Fatima Whitbread ? We’d have the Principia Tapioca! They bellowed“. Chris Offili took this all in his stride; their rants were the perfect opportunity for him to take a nap.

“He could nap for hours” A ‘brother’ remarked. “through long lectures at art school  He napped through the French painters, then the Russian art movement he napped through the lesson of some pretty wise teachers who nevertheless became his friend; he first learned to nap in church”.

A second ‘bro’ called Steve said “See it, when Christopher was a young teenager, he would smear photographs in excrement and call it art. What began as a joke he made a career out of that could compare to Andy Warhol’s in both attitude and success. Bam, a man who had napped his way through school, dosed fitfully through exams was famous in half the time it takes through tireless hard work from semester to semester. To him it was hilarious. Nobody realized and when they did there was nothing they could do about it.

Now on the stage of Tate Britain on the evening of The Turner Prize. Chris Ofili, positively narcoleptic, approached the microphone his eyes drooping with the desire to take yet another nap, his voice barely audible, the room of cut glass chandeliers and equally cut-glass accents,  spun like a whirly-gig, an exotic topiary, or like a gallery of ancient and modern portraits seeking to arrange itself in some begrudged new hierarchy shuffling forward and doubling back and colliding all set in motion by the arrival of this black conductor above them about  to be crowned king.

“Um, ah”, The crowd, having decided that a colonial slave trader attitude was the only one they found they possessed in their  armoury, studied their gilded invitation cards incredulously. Sir Nicohlas Serota, who resisted the urge to hug himself in Semitic glee at some private and mischievious secret, still running with the slave block theme, held the turner prize winning money £12-000, aloft. “ We all know the integrity of art and that art has no price.” Serota annouced. Offili seemed to be momentarily weighing up the Serotas sagacious comment but, actually he was merely steadying himself as deep wave of fatigue was causing him to sway dramatically. The three-tiered chandeliers and the prisms emanating from the gigantic diamond earrings on loan began to whorl around the room as though the party below had been instinctively and simultaneously stirred into motion by an ancient rumour that would they feel less culturally at odds among the Henry Moore’s next door and were leaving through conflicting exits en masse...which in fact they actually were.  Allowing Sir Serota to raise his hand in the air like a prize boxer and just before entering the REM stage of his nap Chris Ofili shouted out at the top of his voice and to a now totally empty hall. “Money! Money! Where’s my money?!”.

Out-and-Out Liars; 10.000 Monkey Typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 6)

                                                                        

6.

If we put the Gay Premier League Players, the Betas, Floy and Bill Gates off our shores altogether which one is the swimmer who could complete a path back successfully? Floy and Bill Gates, I dare anyone to deny, are not talented in that department. Lenin and MaCarthy had a sort of messianic gift that thankfully won’t disturb most of us in our life-time, and Floy, had a mind so left-field that he could probably get home by turning a flea into bait prized from his paw using himself as fly. Or are you all utterly oblivious to the obviousness of that fact.

But what unruly person hitches his dingy to others’ extra-curricular universality.  The Betas, for reasons I cannot to explain, got linked to the hamburger. Without the hamburger, the Betas might still be well and not have been, individually, torn apart. “I was immensely unlucky” Bill Gates said " Mr Badwill, once again, had me cornered. 'Please, please believe me, I am not an iota as brilliant or entrepreneurially out-standing as your obsessive fixation on me would have you believe!' I shouted. I understand now that I lacked, unfortunately, the requisite meanness to have him drowned in the Piranha pool in 1968 ”.

Out-and-out liars viewed from afar are unusually tiny because they have decided to kind of opt out of being strained through the colander of scrutiny and benefiting from analysis. The Gay Premier League teams no longer return Mr Badwill's calls, so to suit his statistics he began to desire to be close to, and started following, a list of individuals he had already drawn up during the first year, nay months after his birth; seventy of the richest people in history since he began recording wealthy human beings. In an old Wal-mart exercise book he calculated, before he reached ten, what each person was worth using currents as 50.000 US dollar bills. he began with Egyptian Pharaohs then moved on to European royalty including kings and queens, not letting a cent pass, then gazillions of dollars later, American billionaires.

(List stolen prior to publication by Oscar Charles Denton, aka, OCD, who because of his love of lists and kleptomaniacal tendencies, is himself now on a list of wanted criminals. He is of dual West-Indian and English Caucasian heritage, sporting an undefined mal-combed ‘fro. He dresses a way lot younger than his age. He is to be seen around the properties of statisticians and historians or anyone compiling data on anything whatsoever, anywhere.)

Do you know what would have been interesting about the list had it not been stolen? That Mr Badwill has spent an astonishing fourteen years in America and elsewhere hunting for the seventy-five richest people on the planet only to slowly realize that all of them were no longer...well, on the planet. Think about it if you care. No historian he spoke to, beginning with those professed experts in the extraordinary history of human wealth, even hinted that less than 20 percent of the Cleopatras and Pharoahs of Mammon on his rich-list were dust, and that there was not a single one who was willing to let him approach them to ask how he would go about generating wealth from their legacy and become the single richest person in this country and in every corner of the world!

1. John D Rockerfeller
2. Andrew Carnegie
3. Frederick Weyerhaeuser
4. Jay Gould
5. Marshal Field
6. George F Baker
7. Hetty Green
8. James G Fair
9. HenryH Rogers
10. J P Morgan
11. Oliver H Payne
12. George Pullman
13. Peter Arrell Brown Widner
14. Philip Danforth Armour

What are the facts? It’s a no-brainer. In the 1800s the systematic use of slaves changed the American economy dramatically. It has recently emerged since 9/11 that the broken bodies of hundreds of thousands of Negro slaves lay in mass graves deep below New York’s Streets, buildings and railroads; this transported free labor  all for the illustrious fellows listed above, built Wall Street. (Serious NB: Thankfully, these remains RIP, have now been repatriated to Africa.).The harnessing of a human work-force for manufacturing on an industrial scale had begun by these earnest men. It was when the rules of traditional morality mal-functioned that labor could be broken and replaced. What this list says is that, like arms dealers and oil barrens today, it really matters how cold you are prepared to be to transform yourself into something really happening.

Should you have the misfortune to have come into the world late you would have been too young to take absolute advantage of the abundant free labor to hand. Should you have come into the world around 1820 you were too old and your mind had set into a state of paranoia and was shaped by internal civil war.The narrow nine to ten-year window of your mid-life crisis offered a clear view of  the complete lack of possibilities the future held. Of all the fourteen on the stolen list above none could see a life worth living in which true visionary talent had a place. Like the Gay Premiers Soccer League, born in the Homo-Counties, they were beneficiaries of hampering advantages.

Now let’s see how Floy and Bill Gates fared under analysis.

Inmates at Silly Home Valley will still tell you that they consider themselves, each and every one, the most important person since Copernicus computed his theory of heliocentricity; each inmate saw, not the sun, but himself at the center of the universe. That was the time the magazine Popular Eugenics announced that the Sterility 8800 had been invented. The Sterility 8800 cost $39; a DIY device which enabled you to sterilize anyone at home.  The front page read, “PROJECT RUNWAY! First Unrivalled Commercial Kit to Turn World into Models.”

For the less-than-physically-and-racially perfect subscribers to Popular Eugenics, this early soft-peddling headline was the dawning of the ideas behind Lebensraum, and it was a revelation of horrific Biblical proportions. Hitherto, culling had been a simple matter of mass murder which was an expensive way of sorting out supremacists from every one else. Hacking ones’ guts up into a small electronic device was an inexpensive way of culling the useless and ordinary and one could now dream of a time and a day when enough would be culled that, in a few years, one would find oneself completely alone.

Thankfully, for Mal-Combed Badwill that day can still be looked forward to.

January 1975 would see Badwill's fledgling personal appearance, then at a phenomenally young age, to lecture on the advantages of culling. The principal players of the age gathered, on consecutive days, to hear him at The Rockerfeller Center and at Carnegie Hall.

“As a person in early mid-life in 1975, you would have already been expected to have out-lived your usefulness of that life; there would have been no place for you in my vision of a hard new world”. Said Melina Mercouri, top executioner at Project Runway and head of Greeces' neo-eugenics program Gilded Spawn. “There we were a companionship of aspiring multi-billionaires in the main-frame of youth and Caucasian-hood, and as part of this fellowship, you kept thinking, ‘Why let old codgers, mulattoes, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims and gays screw things up, this is our revolution?’ Old people, mulattoes, blacks and Hispanics, Jews and gays were subsequently blinded; they were allowed to go on living but their opportunity of becoming zillionaires and be of any importance in the world was eliminated.”

It may appear to be a pie-in-the-sky paranoia to say if you were not white and a college graduate you did not belong; but you didn’t. If you did you could take any ones house, wife and baby, because in the hard new world, you had no time between your position as a door-to-door salesman of the $39 Sterility 8800, and preventing everyone who was made to buy it reaching pension age.

By the same token there was a trough of fear towards the young too. You wanted your feet on the ground and had to constantly check for high school graduates lurking under your shoes. Those born earlier than 1958 had already been eliminated, in other words literally blinded by the revolution; the ideal specimen was twenty or twenty-one, which signifies two birth years of the blooming of human excellence, 1954 or 1955.

Entrapping Bill Gates to help Badwill test this theory Gates said, “I wish I had never been born”.

Bill Gates; October 28, 1955

No egg-timer on earth could stop at such a supremely sublime date! Gates is the Gay soccer player born in the Homo Counties. Along with his second best friend, (I, of course am his very best friend),he  hung about in the billiard room at Life=Eminently Square waiting for me with pool cues along with other members of Incremental Scams Limited. Again, the great man’s birth date?

Bill Gates; October 1955

The third most powerful man, next to Jesus Christ and God has been clocking up 2000 hours on a daily basis as the most revered salesman turning the world soft selling his wares. Who is this man?

Bill Gates; October 28, 1955

Lest you forget for one second the God-like man that is Gates, let’s forget Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. Disliking Gates for Jobs, who is not even from a rich family and not a Midwichian, is as impossible as disliking Floy. Investigations have brought to realization bits of Hamburger brought up from the bottom of the Mounting Yew Swimming Pool, California, in a neighborhood now down-at-heel with ingénues working for a pack of harlots, built on the crack of San Francisco, which is, not absurdly enough, the address of Silly Home Valley for the Episodically Insane. This neighborhood  full of ingénues in the pay of a pack of harlots, (the most heinous bunch deserving electrocution to be found anywhere in the world.)  a flea-ridden Jobs prowled around Mounting Yew Swimming Pool looking for teenagers, along with other amateur executioners, dangling dangerous electrical devices into the pool he had made from tinkering around with some old spare parts. It was the business and job of watching who came up for air and who did not that came to dominate his every breath.

In one of  many biographies, His Rise in My Fall, Jobs admits that he is merely an ‘incidental milliner’ and this insight into his childhood obsession with hats tells us that Jobs' formative years were absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He

      attended evening classes with the pack of harlots and while hat making listened to them talk about the mysterious bout of electrocutions at the local swimming pool. Furthermore Jobs, while steaming yet more felt in his trademark fashion, would also hang out with their ingénues in order to hear yet more of the latest gossip on the drownings. Once, he openly accused one of the pack of harlots after he planted spare parts at her workshop station. Having built a reputation, through wild accusation and fear, as top ingénue he was able to get the whole assembly line of the pack of harlots to become fascinated with, and then design his own hats.

Another light bulb moment! What became of the harlot found with the spare parts? The prison gates closed behind her and she was forced to not only buy time-shares in the penitentiary in which she was incarcerated (sound familiar) but also, along with her fellow prisoners, make clothes for the fashion maestro Giorgio Armani, or, she was told, she would never see her thirteen year old child again. And when was Gates born?

Bill Gates; October 28, 1955

Another pusher of wares that is turning everyone soft was Messer Schmidt who organized Love-Ins at Silly Home Valley for the Grandiosely Insane; two thousand  of them; 'Google' was the collective sound emitted from the  participants of that fateful orgy. Gates’ D.O.B?

Bill Gates; October 28. 1955

It would be mean of me to put forward the idea that every phenomenally rich person, who sells wares that turn every body soft, will end up at Silly Home Valley for the Titanically Insane should they find themselves born outside the chrono-digital figure for greatness, 28,10,1955... but I am. It would be pretentious to say that my success was based on merit; as an individual there is nothing in my background, however far back or hard one scrutinizes, to suggest that I am able to grasp even the most rudimentary elements of talent. The above are tall stories about people seized, and worked hard by opportunists, and who happened to come of age at a time when scouts were out seizing that particular age-group and could get a reward from the rest of society. Your success is not your own, as are none of the products in the world in which you grew up in.

Hey, we almost overlooked Floy! If he had been a tiny bit older and a tad mangier he would not have been stolen from murdered parents in the jungle to live a life of  enslavement in the 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool. Floy, the socially anorexic computer messiah could still be out there in the jungle playing with others, and being part of nature’s wonderful biodiversity. Had his arrival been timed wrongly then you would not be staring at a tiny window wondering, friendless and bewildered, exactly how fate conspired to turn the internet into your only life-support system.  Once again. Floy, the socially anorexic computer messiah could still be out there in the jungle playing with others, being part of nature’s incredibly dwindling biodiversity.

When was Floy born?

Floy: Hard to tell; monkeys don’t bother to keep records in the wild; they’re to busy having fun.

Let’s go on about Floy, if only to say that after he went berserk he went on to invent the perfect Sun Screen for his old skin condition and this became his most important companion at Silly Home Valley for the Accidentally Insane. Time, location and whether you manage to get born in either does not matter, for whenever or wherever you were born three out of four people will be using powerful Sun Screen.

Bill Gates; October 28.1955

Bill Gates; October 28. 1955

Bill Gates. October 28. 1955

Out-and-Out Liars; 10.000 Monkey typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 5)

Now let’s turn to the history of when I first started stalking Bill Gates. My story is almost as familiar a trajectory into despair as that of the Betas. One moment, I could see my future clearly; I was on a direct path to life on social security, the next moment, I was a sociopath. I was stalking Harvard and my hair was dropping out. Little did I know that stalking the future founder of Microsoft would eventually leave me friendless; but I was, and am today, totally mesmerized by his sheer brilliance and his gargantuan ambition that I distinctively knew in my guts that I had to make him my best and only friend. With the help of a marker pen and an empty wall in my parents’ unused cellar I began to plan a broad outline of how I would gradually move closer to the object of my adoration; and dig a hole for myself a little deeper everyday.

Gates’ father was a rich lawyer in Seattle and his mother the daughter of a well-to-do banker. I started sending Bill’s ( From a young age I was already on first name terms even though I had precious chance of meeting him stuck in Hampshire in a morbid strop watching the flies buzzing around the cabin that was my parents motor-way café.)-So, I started sending Bill’s parents death threats if they didn’t introduce me to their son; They took him out of public school, at the beginning of seventh grade and sent him to a private school surrounded by a piranha  lake and an elite SAS squad trained to guard presidential off-spring. Half way through Gate’s second year, I sold my parents café while they were on holiday, went to the US, swam the piranha lake and attempted to join the computer club.

“One of the club members recognized him from a ransom photo on the bulletin board, established by The Rich Mothers’ Club and along with a few other boys, after interrogating him thoroughly, we hauled him off, against his will to claim the money that was our reward” Said Gates remembering this halcyon entrepreneurial moment with pride,“ We split the reward money and some used it to pay their way out of going to summer camp by sending others; using their names in their place and some used it to pay inner city girls to come into the campus for sex. Of course some of the reward money went to the teachers. I didn’t know nor cared what happened to the undesirable nuisance but part of the bounty, at least three thousand dollars of it, a mere fifth, went into a computer terminal they put in this funny little room with padded wall-paper down the end of gated disused corridor. We had no control of when they would let us out; the lengths they went to protect us from the likes of Mal-combed Badwill was amazing really”.

It was ‘amazing’ no really, because in 1968 most colleges hadn’t yet installed turnstiles, metal detectors and X-ray conveyor belts, but my venture across the lake that day seem to initiate and instigate all these changes, almost immediately. As a result of being locked in the computer room for weeks and months on end to keep others out,   (who only wanted to champion the very air he breathes), those sequestered students learning programming had nothing else to do but laboriously develop ever more complicated ways of programming. Notwithstanding, without my unstinting adoration, braving the lake perimeter and everything, the ASR-33 Teletype, a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to Seattle Police Department would never have been installed. “The whole notion of enthusiasts of computer enthusiasts doing time was only implement in 1965”, recalled a grateful Gates. ”Someone, thankfully, had the right idea”. Extraordinarily, Floy got me some time on a stalking charge in 1971, so my name was already on the system. That is how Bill Gates got to be Bill Gates, programming, while I was doing real time as an eight grader in 1968.

From then on I intensified my campaign of fanatical adoration; Gates now lived in the computer room. He and a number of the others learned the art of self-defence and acquired a strange new device called Tear Gas- after a while, due to the high cost of round the clock protection, it wasn’t long before the mothers once again clubbed together and came to the unanimous decision they were bankrupt. They did a sponsored Cup Cake Bakerthon, but the students ate the cup cakes before it could actually be verified they had been made.  A group of programmers in Washington, who liked locking themselves  in perfectly symmetrically square white rooms, called No Life Outside of the Centre or (Life=Eminently Square), asked Gates to join them. As fate would have it one of the parents of a boy in the same college and programming team. Manic Rona, sole patron of Life=Eminently Square, put up the money to develop software that could spy on her allegedly cheating husband, asked Gates if he would like a safe haven from his ever-growing army of psychophants for free programming time. Much of, if not all of Gates’ after school time was spent inside a white-washed windowless cube.

Life=Eminently Square went bankrupt when Manic Rona discovered the calming effects of Camomile Tea. Gates and his friends, forced to think outside of the cube, started hanging about listlessly outside of the computer centre. Before long one of their number staged a fit until an outfit called ISI, Incremental Scams Incorporated allowed them access to free use of a computer in exchange for them working on a piece of software which would incrementally reduce their companys’ payroll. In one seven month period, Gates and his band of plaid-clad pirates stole 1,575 cents which averages out at eight cents a day from the main employees of Incremental Scams Incorporated. They did this eight hours a day, seven days a week!

“It was an obsession” said Gates regarding my unstinting adoration of the God-like man. “I flicked through an atlas for potential places to hide. It wasn’t only in the day time but at night too. That’s when I started programming at the weekends; it would be a rare week that I did not glimpse Mr Badwill lurking a mere twenty or thirty yards away. There was the time he even stole a load of passwords and broke in and crashed the systems so he could lure me into the open.  I couldn’t use the security of a computer room for a whole semester, and I was only fifteen and sixteen, how could I hope to gain the requisite ten thousand hours!? Then Mr Badwill informed me he had access to a free computer in the Psychiatric and medical wing of the sanatorium at which he is now an out-patient. So, I got myself sectioned, and during this big black period, between electric shock therapy, paper cutting, origami, and Mr Badwills’ obsequious presence, I was able to program between three and six in the morning.” Gates let outs a hideous laugh. “I would sneak out of my bed at night, amid the nightmarish groans of the dreaming inmates, I could even see the lights of my family home and university through the bars on the windows. That is why, today, I am so generous to the sanatorium because, sanitary conditions notwithstanding, they allowed me an invaluable, if brief, daily respite from insanity”. (Gates mother confided, ‘Years later he still gets up at three and wanders around aimlessly until six in the morning).

One of the founding members of the FBI, Bud Dude, got an encrypted, encoded and  technologically complicated message to decipher from the CIA, which meant to convey  the whereabouts of the set- up of a computer system in Washington state but, misinterpreted, found Mr Gates dispatched to a disused power station in the Nevada desert. Those running the power station were more than grateful for the blunder because, as it just so happened, they needed a computer programmer to run….well, a power station. In these fledgling days before complete revulsion, programmers were a hard species to find and one with experience even harder. By the time Dude had located Gates in the Nevada desert he had shared top secret FBI data with his former chums at Harvard. Indeed Gates was to spend his senior years sending the nations’ top secrets to former chums and ex-girlfriends disguised as an independent college assignment. He began talking in code, watched over by a young Chuck Norris, who Gates later says taught him nothing about acting whatsoever.

I pursued Bill Gates, from the eighth grade to the end of high school and the Nevada desert. I was Bill Gate’s 10,000 Hamburgers, and by my measured and determined campaign, and, some would say, ‘quixotic’, elevation of the man to Dulcineaic-like status and his unbelievable attempts at escape offered him extraordinary geographical and mental opportunities for confinement only hitherto enjoyed by Floy.

The first part I played in his genius was death threats to his family which got him sent to a school surrounded by a piranha lake.. The second part was because I swam the piranha lake to be closer to ‘The Great Man/Boy’ The Rich Mothers' Club raised money to have him sequestered with a computer as companion. Due to a neurotic state of marital paranoia Gates was recruited by Manic Rona to develope Life= Eminently Square.  (I can’t take credit for that one, though Manic Rona still sends me batches of Camamile tea). Number four was that he was taken on board by ISI Incremental Scams Incorporated who incorporated a system to reduce payroll, well, incrementally. The fifth part of my hand in Bill Gates meteoric destiny was him having himself sectioned to a place from which he could see his home and university through the barred windows and in whose impossibly chaotic diurnal and nightmarish nocturnal timetable offered a slim respite between three and six in the morning. Number seven was Bud Dudes’ blundered  communiqué between the FBI and the CIA. Number eight was that at the Nevada Power Station Gate’s had access to State secrets he rendered into code. And number nine was that, because of a generations of adoring fans like myself, the lake has been restocked with sharks.

What is the common thread that runs between all these opportunities? Me, of course. I gave Bill Gates time to practice. By the time Gates could no longer rely on state protection for his safety he started his own software company; because of me he had been forced to program nonstop for seven years running. He had lapped everybody else including himself at least ten times on life’s race track. He was one million hours ahead! How many human beings young or old do you know who have had to be forced into such an experience through another’s determination. Maybe there are fifty throughout History. J F K, Greta Garbo, The Marquis De Sade, Michael Jackson and siblings, Agnetha of ABBA, Shirley Temple  to name but a few. I had the best exposure to this young computer software genius than anyone, anywhere in the world ever, and all because I am lucky to call him my one and only friend.

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”.

Out-and-Out Liars; 10.000 Monkey Typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 3)

Back in 1971, at Paington zoo, it was felt that Floy, the gangly six year old simian, had too much unstructured time. It was also felt that by turning him into a monkey who could not only create computer programming language but who could, in turn, teach it to others, he would attract other simians with too much unstructured time on their hands, who, realizing career potential, would abandon a life of idyllic play in the wild and volunteer themselves up for captivity by the thousands. "When we came upon Floy in the Javanese jungle he would throw everything at us that he could throw”, ‘Said Samuel, the man who shot Floy’s father.  “We lured him down from the trees with a cam-recording of a banana. We got funding for Floy to be privately tutored by an Ivy League professor and by the time he was eleven years old Floy created ten perfectly equal portions of banana; he was also suffering from Sleep Depravation Disorder“. The program was ruthless, he was woken up every hour and made to execute and check the banana portion test twice.

He defecated by the truckload. But the signs were ignored. They always are. One low- key side effect of his development is that he stumbled around his enclosure humming Beal Street Blues.

In the early 1970s, when Floys wasn’t even a pixel in the reflection of the screen, computers were for seismically disturbed loons. If you were one, (you had the potency and social significance in the 70s as the Marcel Wave has now). Computers consumed millions of hours of developmental playtime-and that’s just in the 70s. If a school had one, it was hard to figure out why anyone would apply for access to it; if you gained access to it you disappeared off the social radar completely.

Furthermore, if you had the misfortune to meet a programmer, it immediately dawned on you how monumentally boring they were. They were as much fun as a card board cut-out spewing out of its cut-out mouth line after line of incomprehensible computer jargon that made you want to punch them. They were as much joy as stacking, hundreds, nay thousands of chairs. Once in awhile someone would walk over to the schools electricity cupboard and switch everything off at the mains. Since programmers only had this in their lives, their disappointment was palpable, and the dependency was not sated until the electricity lines crackled into life again after a few hours. These prank power cuts, at worst, lead to high school shootings, at best, when the computer came back on, everything had to begin again from scratch.

It is only a set of extremely adverse congenital conditions that pre-disposes anyone becoming as programmed as a computer. That the ‘condition’ still goes unnoticed by the experts in men and women well into early twenties is all but incredible. When you are forced out to play, and possibly enjoy yourself, how can you hope to be programmed for ten thousand hours? He, Paddling pools, Hide-and-Seek, British Bulldog, forty-forty, making camps, playing army, Action men or Barbie , Racing Go-Carts, Kerplunk, Ludo, Monopoly. Scrumping, gathering chestnuts, blackberry picking, bicycle racing, acorn wars have nothing to do with the solitary and intensely autistic world of those tragically pre-destined and in diligent training for a life of grinding loneliness.

It wasn’t until the sixties that Joseph Asperger diagnosed and identified the archetypal computer programmer (who would one day propel us into an autistic society). It was by noticing certain children who refused to join in, or engage in playtime activities or even make eye contact. These children were painfully anti-social with an internal default setting that incessantly sought isolation in order to repair and perfect itself. (Like a proof-reader on speed let loose in the British Library). It was only years later that it was realised that these children were the Midwich Cuckoos of the beginning of the computer age and that if this caught on, we were all ultimately doomed.

The chronic fear of other people could be the karmic collective and cumulative effect of the historical fact that human beings haven’t been particularly nice when it comes to ‘sharing’.

                        Revolution after revolution doesn’t allow us to forget what is operating here. The Titanic taught us that it was only those individuals, on deck, playing an intense game of Patience who retained any shred of dignity. Sharing was the last thing on humanity’s mind, after banging into an iceberg in the middle of a freezing ocean on a sinking ship. It was reactive, a programmed response; rather than wait to be tipped in to the icy water by a fellow passenger, or be among those who shoved, bit and shot their way to the life boats, those card players who ignored real-life and refused to acknowledge the far from altruistic results of human panic so flagrantly on show, are on the same spectrum as the quartet who segued seamlessly from sonata to sonata totally detached from the general unbridled enmeshment of base instincts above and below deck.

This is where the Midwichians came in, because the Midwichians  first came to our world from another universe to get us to switch over to the idea of sharing. The first purveyors of this novel system arrived in 1957 in a space ship which sent everyone running. By 1960 the Midwichians had enough telepathic power that one of them could watch Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men and a hundred others would simultaneously see it too. “In the late fifties and early sixties, I am sure, though slightly vague, as to whether there were any others exactly like the Midwichians”, Declared a bewildered Princess Michael, founder of  Human’s Against Midwichians (and Everyone Else for That Matter). “Maybe nips or maybe melon-eating coloureds, darky-mouths…I don’t think I can think of any more ethnic minorities to insult” she continued.

This was the opportunist that greeted Floy when he arrived at Plymouth Harbour on his way to Paignton Zoo in the autumn of 1971. Floy had been chosen by the Midwichians before he had even seen a computer; they were in cloaked ships high above, telepathically schooling him and, mathematically engineering a bug that could allow him, through the unhappiest of circumstances, to start the programming revolution from one of the few places in the world a seventeen year old simian could learn programming whether he wanted to or not…the 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool.

Bet you don’t know what the difference is between Forbes Magazine ( magazine about the super rich and The Big issue (magazine about the super homeless) , Floy once posited through an interpreter, ‘ one is read by ass-holes and one makes ass-holes red’. Programmed social climbing had become a thoroughly frustrating exercise. It was no longer fun.

“I was so bored in the typing pool I used to throw camp voices from the north end of the hall to the south end. North voice; ‘How much time do you spend here, dear?’ South Voice: ‘Oh a phenomenal amount of time, dear’. North Voice:’ I am open twenty four hours, Dear’. South Voice: ‘I would love to stay here all night with you, Dear’. North Voice; ‘I can walk you home in the morning’. South voice; ‘Sorry, dear, I haven’t averaged my 10.000 hours at the computer this week’. North voice; ‘not that old chestnut, dear, all of us down here at the north end have this recurring nightmare’, Both North and South voice: ‘that we suddenly realize we are the bi-polar ramblings of someone who isn’t even enrolled or entitled to show up for this project, dear’ ”.

“The challenge, of course, was to hear your thrown voice replying above the general din and cacophony of the other simians throwing camp voices. North voice; ‘You signing on when you get out?’ East voice; ‘you would put it in’. east voice; ‘how long do you want it in for?’, West Voice 2^nd ; ‘time equals….. ‘ East voice;’ wouldn’t charge you.’ South-east voice:’ they’ve put K in our tea !’ North-west voice:’ there are literally faecal bugs in the software.’ Southeast voice: ‘I am sitting here forever until I find out who put K in my tea.’ North Voice: ‘Signing on? No dear’.

I invite you all to look at the jet-stream of opportunists that came floys way. Because he was being schooled by the Midwichians, who remained far out of sight in the Universe, they were able to share systems with him each time he punched a card in, via the bug they had surreptitiously implanted. His brain also became an unwitting TV aerial as a result he could pick up as many programmes as he wanted even if he didn’t want to, which meant that his brain was open 24 hours, which meant he was up all night, which also meant that by the time he came upon 0. 1 binary system in the 10.000 hours monkey typing-pool, he was under the delusion that he was brilliant; it would be years before he would learn the big part of the picture; that he was being used expertly extra-terrestrial opportunists.

“The Midwichians probably programmed me for eight to ten hours a day” Floy later wrote in his unofficial autobiography. “ By the time I went berserk they were doing it day and night. I was terminally out to lunch. I would stand in the middle of my hallway for two to three hours wondering what I had got up from watching a movie (in my head) to go and get. In fact it was only when I passed out and my head fell on the keyboard and the keys repeated to the end, momentarily waking me at each beep, that it was generally decided that I had cracked it. It seemed I was at my optimum competence the more berserk I was. That was when I wrote my first brilliant programme 0 and 1 and it is still being used today, thirty, forty, fifty years later”. Interviewed in his Silly Home Valley-issue dressing gown Floy redid the math in his addled head- which now took as long as it did to program a computer in the 1970s; programming had serious turned Floy soft. How many summers, days and nights were required until he finally went berserk. “Oh” Floy finally concluded triumphantly, “Ten thousand hours! That can’t be right, can it?”