To: Barackobama@thewhitehouse.com
From: Georgewbush@hotmail.com
RE: Libya
Dear Barack,
LMAO!
Yours,
George
To: Barackobama@thewhitehouse.com
From: Georgewbush@hotmail.com
RE: Libya
Dear Barack,
LMAO!
Yours,
George
No matter how prepared you think you are for witnessing the terrifying miracle of childbirth, you aren’t. Here are a few pointers for birth partners you won’t find in the medical texts:
1. Gas & Air is not as good as poppers
Don’t get me wrong, it passes the time and if you stick at it for a good few minutes, you will get high. It’s just a sort of early-nineties-speed-and-hash high, rather than your 21st century coke-and-plant-food high. Just don’t expect any euphoric moments of clarity.
2. Your wife will look like a crackhead
If she – and I highly recommend she does – decides to go for an epidural (a spinal injection of anaesthetics), she’ll be hooked up to a drip. She’ll also probably have a heart rate monitor for the baby and various other bleeping, clicking and whirring medical machines protruding from every accessible vein. Couple this incapacitating reliance on hospital gadgetry with crippling fatigue and violent mood swings and you’ll soon start to believe that the midwives have swapped your loved one for a pre-priory Amy Winehouse. See Tom Hanks towards the end of Philadelphia for reference.
3. You’ll look down the business end. You just will.
Perhaps the scariest element of preparing for a birth is the thought of seeing your partner’s minky stretched wide enough to allow passage of a living, breathing human. But no matter how terrifying a sight it may be, there is a part of you that will simply not be able to resist having a peep. It’s the same part of you that wanted to watch those Ken Bigley videos back in 2004.
4. You’ll get bored
Miracles of childbirth aside, 27 hours of standing by a hospital bed can get really fucking tedious. The midwives will occasionally chip in with some chat but it won’t stop you secretly willing the mother of your child-to-be to jack it all in and demand a c-section on the spot.
5. You’ll smell of meat
Uterus, vagina, placenta, umbilical cord. None of it is pretty. And it’s only when you finally make it home that you realise your clothes and hair now smell like a mouldy butcher’s apron complete with flecks of stale fanny curd and coagulated menstrual blood. Miracle indeed.
I recently stumbled across a post by Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist and various other spiritual-journey-slash-coming-of-age novels.
The post was an analogy that attempts to deal with the ancient atheist argument of “if there’s a god, how come so much bad shit happens all the time?”
In this story, a man is having his haircut in a barber’s shop. He suggests that if you don’t believe in god because the world’s in such a state then perhaps you shouldn’t believe in barber shops either. After all, there are lots of men in the world with long hair and shaggy beards. If barbers exist, why all the scruffiness?
The answer is simple. Of course barbers exist, it’s just that not everybody chooses to go to them. And of course God exists, but because some people don’t pay him a weekly visit, the world’s gone tits up.
What a horrible indictment of god. Is he really so insecure that he needs everybody on earth to constantly bow their heads in prayer in order to function properly? Must we constantly blow smoke up his arse before he pulls his finger out and decides to end world poverty? Would he decide to eradicate AIDS if only more people would sing him his favourite song on a Sunday morning?
Of all the arguments and counter arguments I’ve heard for the existence of god, this is perhaps the weakest. Not only does it rely on a ludicrous comparison between an all powerful being and a hairdresser – Jesus could probably have done with a trim before he was nailed to the cross, by the way – but even if it did make a convincing case for God, it makes him sound like a total prick.
I know I’m late to the party on this one but I just love it. Listen to any website at codeorgan.com
Like a lot of people I know, David Cameron’s smug face makes me feel sick.
Torymergency is a site I built with a programmer friend. It was designed to stop Cameron getting into number 10, and told voters what the best anti-tory vote in their constituency was – based on the party that needed the smallest swing to beat the conservatives. Sadly it didn’t work.