The Price of Progress…

The future is unwritten:

But I’d wager the following scenario is prime candidate to be a waypoint in our destiny. I’ll stick my finger in the air and pluck out a time….let’s say 12000 years from now. Despite all human trials; the conflicts, the disasters and disease we’ve managed to swell our population exponentially. Another finger in the air and another pluck and I arrive at a trillion inhabitants. All very very different in appearance to us relics of today. Those lucky to have their consciousness selected become man/machine hybrids for a rationed time. They colonise the solar system and many manufactured planets beyond. Within each being, only a few threads of humanity remain; every creation physically and mentally superior to anyone alive now. The random drift of evolution has been captured and reined for our… own self-preservation and world conservation. At least that’s how it’s portrayed to the populace. The truth is; it’s the execution of curious whims, meddling for meddling’s sake by men of weird science. Labelling themselves as Intelligent designers from our time they engender a progeny that’s a caricature of themselves…who in turn deliver their own new breed into a further future.

Many times over this repeats until we reach the aforesaid waypoint. That generation sit there.. and gaze upon US for their education, for their history, for their entertainment. Several ultra-historians I’d posit for every man, woman and child alive today and a myriad more curious enquirers. Because of the traces we’re leaving in our everyday lives, we’re easy fodder. Our physical movements, business, social, intimate and financial interactions; they’re all recorded and saved in data warehouses and archived unchanged for history henceforth…ready for recall at the flick of an impulse from a far removed descendant.

The upshot – we WILL be judged. We’ll all have our Judgement Day. Not by a mystical God of our imagination’s making. But by godlike beings of the cheap and plentiful kind–of our own engineering.

The future is written.

Would you Moonwalk for a Mate?

The funniest animal…

It has to be the ‘Red-Capped Manakin’. This little bird dwells in the tropics and has evolved over time to master the moonwalk as its mating signature. The male is jet-black in body, crimson crowned and no longer than an index finger. To see it perched atop a branch dancing its little twiglets off is a hilarious yet beguiling sight. No wonder the females swoon and fall into their seducer’s open wings afterwards. I’m the same sex and of a different species – all the same I was charmed enough to mate with it. I jest (the size issue would soon break the relationship).

Word has it that many moons..let me be more precise 684 moons ago at time of press (give or take a moon) a guy called Bill Bailey (an African-American tap dancer (not the British Comedian who is coincidentally almost as funny as the bird I speak of)) was the originator of the moonwalk, well I figure he’d made a trip out into the wilds of wherever, caught sight of this feathered enigma and mocked the bird when he returned. He’s known to be the first ever ‘moonwalker’ and rumoured to have inspired Michael Jackson no less.

A video can be found on youtube – go on, cheer yourself up.

Billie Jean