The first rule of Man Flu is DON'T PANIC. Man Flu can smell fear. Man Flu will normally initially present itself as a bit of a sniffle, dull aching all over or just 'not feeling right'. It's important to let as many people know exactly how you feel, particularly other men. This will give them the opportunity for early preparation should then begin to fall ill.

At this stage you may find women become sarcastic, cold or unsympathetic towards you. This is simply a primitive defence mechanism ensuring that you keep your distance from them and therefore lessen the likelihood of them carrying the virus home to their husband or boyfriend."

[The rest of the site can be found at http://www.manflu.info/index.html]

Come on, men: we can all get through this crippling affliction if we all stick together. Firsly, I propose to have this pandemic listed on the UN list of diseases so that work can then begin on finding the much-needed antidote. As for testimonies, could any afflicted men out there share their own horrible experience of man 'flu so that we all might be that bit wiser?

Gaz out.

I was reading Greek mythology last night and came across the story of how the Alphabet was created in Greece (or, rather, brought by the Gods and added to by man). Then, in the supplementary notes that follow, the editor compared the process by which language developed to that of the Celts of Ireland, and suggested that they underwent similar instances of development - even to the point that at one time their languages consisted of the same basic sounds and in the same basic order. Whilst poppycock, I did pontificate some over the development of the alphabet itself.

The Hebrew and Greek alphabets are incredibly similar in what the call their letters. Regards:

Hebrew: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Dalet...

Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta...

Alright, so if you look into the letters afterwards some of them get a little bit farfetched, but that's irrelevant to this particular study. What I wish to draw upon is the fact that, even though the symbol α is called 'alpha', it is pronounced 'ah'. The reasoning behind this disparity (according to Jared Diamond, anyway) is twofold: if the Greek alphabet is descended from the Hebrew alphabet by way of Phoenician then it follows a similar pattern in what it calls its letters. Second, in order to present the letters in a memorable order, the sounds were given words with which to associate them (aleph means 'ox', for example) - Greek would have simply kept this word order.

You may well be wondering what this has to do with the price of fish, mind, and you'd be perfectly justified in doing so. Think of our own alphabet - better yet, say it to yourself, (quietly, mind, lest you attract undue attention at work or in a computer cluster). What do you notice? What you ought to have noticed is that the sound one associates with the letter is not (or rarely) how we pronounce the letter itself. Now think of the baby alphabet you will have learnt in primary school - pronouncing the letters as they are actually said. To me, this seems much more logical.

Allow me to expand further: take the letter W ("Dubbul-you"). Can you imagine how cumbersome words would be if you have to pronounce every single W in every word as 'dubbulyou'? Wikipedia would be dubbulyoueyekayeyepeeeedeyeeeah, whilst 'whilst' would be dubbulyouhaycheyeelesstee. (And yet www. is dubbulyoudubbulyoudubbulyouDOT.) Thus, whilst I'm not advocating that we start pronouncing the letters as we name them, perhaps we shouldn't dub the phonetic alphabet a 'baby alphabet' but rather a 'rational alphabet' and ours the 'irrational'. If we needed the same system that the Hebrews needed to remember a cogent system of words then surely we should have an alphabet that names each letter after something beginning with that letter. (Apple, Ball, Cake, etc.) It may seem infantile at first, but remember that the Greeks - acclaimed as the developers of western thought - used a system not a million miles distant.

Gaz out.

Something hit me last night: I'm twenty. Avoiding for the moment any sort of etymological description of the terminology, I feel in a more philosophical mood and as such want to muse on what it actually means now that I'm twenty.

I guess the first thing to admit is that I still regard myself as a teenager. Asked in an impromptu fashion how old I am, my mind will automatically leap for 'nineteen' before I stop to ponder that I am, in fact, older. Perhaps it was because the end of my teenage years came sat around in an [admittedly very nice] hotel room in the middle of nowhere in Canada or because I always seem to be a year behind with how old I am - it seems to take me a year to catch up and learn how old I am and by which time I near to start learning another number. Perhaps I should just start thinking I'm twenty one now and save a bit of time in the process. Regardless, I consider myself a teenager still.

But what does that mean? I mean, 'teenager' is perhaps synonymous with 'adolescent' and conjures up images of spotty-faced, hormone-driven youths wandering about the place in fashions that no other generation understands and listening to avant garde bands which to anyone else just sound like white noise only less tuneful. However, I fear that a teleological approach here shall be my undoing and so must look at it more objectively - how one is at thirteen is very different from how one is on the eve of their twentieth birthday (one might hope). Consider how much you've learnt [been taught and otherwise] in those seven years, how many things you've experiences and all the people you've met. I'm nothing like I was when I was thirteen at present and a good thing too - I've matured, y'see. Is it better, then, to split teenagers into two groups - pre- and post-sixteen; chosen as a year by which a young person gets basic rights and privileges and selon moi can be regarded a de facto adult -  or even further to regard being a teenager as a sliding scale alone which we all move at different speeds and to different ultimate degrees.

So, when I say that I still regard myself as a teenager I mean someone at the older end of the scale (I toyed with 'higher' but then found that a little condescending). However, I guess I still do the sorts of things that teenagers do - partying, learning et al. Would being a teenager then be better seen as a state of mind? I know of people that, whilst nineteen regard themselves as adults in direct contrast to my ideas. I realise to say that I'm young at heart would be the same, though does what I'm saying put me into the category of those desperately clinging to the past? I propose not.

A teenager (that is, adolescent not someone in their teens per se) should stop being a teenager once they gain basic rights - their rite of passage. Whether this be at sixteen [sex, leave home], seventeen [drive] or eighteen [drink, vote] is debatable but it should apply to one of them at least. However, the fact that it also applies to the nineteen year olds perhaps suggests that one can be mature with rights and privileges intact and still be a teenager. Thus, it's not a societally imposed when someone stops being teenager, but it is an adolescent. My point therefore is that although I fall outside the official boundaries by which I can be a teenager, I was already outside of the implicit boundaries the year (or up to three years) before that as I was, technically speaking, an adult. I had adolesced. Ergo, there ought (incidentally; one of my favourite verbs) to be a separate definition for a teenager past the watershed of adolescence that 'young adult' doesn't quite cover. One who is old, but still doesn't feel it. One who sees more in common with someone a year younger than with someone a year older. Without wishing to complicate this with clumsy taxonomy and with my extensive knowledge of lay Greek (though still wishing to show off a bit) I'd like to term this person a προενηλίκος [proenelikos - "pre-adult"].

Adulthood, then, according to me is self-defined though coming of age isn't. Everyone who reaches a certain age will become of age at that moment according to society. However, one chooses when one wants to regard themselves as an adult. There is a difference between being called 'sir' in a shop and seeing oneself as an adult just as far as the fact the bank sent me a letter addressed to Mr G. Morris when aged fifteen didn't make me an adult. To conclude with an idiom that I cling to rather fiercely - "Growing old is inevitable; Growing up is optional." I just don't think I'm ready yet.

Gaz out.

How can some people struggle to grasp even the most simple and clearly-defined of all facts? I mean, sure, I'm not expecting every average Joe Bloggs on the street to be able to give me a concise summary of Newton's laws of motion, nor for them to be able to bang out the clarinet part to Beethoven's 9th on demand, though I think some things shouldn't be above what one might expect someone of average intelligence that you stop on the street to be able to do. First and foremost amongst these, in my books, is proper use of the English language.

I was shown today an example of atrocious grammar and spelling, whose transgression I shall not reveal for obvious reasons. (Not that they'd even know who they were, so they won't even know this is being directed towards them - thus, I implore anyone who has ever misspelled anything ever to pay heed for I may well be talking about you.) However, I felt, in light of this magnanimous display of ineptitude to redefine a few immensely simple concepts that I've had mastery of since well before I even knew the Internet existed.

Your, You're

These two always manage to rile me up when people mistake them - mainly because they're so immensely different. Your defines the possession by a singular or multiple third party in direct address. For example: This is your mistake. You're, however is short for 'you are' and does not have any possessive qualities in itself whatsoever. For example: You're a cretin. Yore is another matter altogether, and 'ur' does not even constitute a word, though is a proper noun if used in reference to the ancient Mesopotamian city. Chances are, however, if you use the word 'ur' that you won't have the foggiest where or what Mesopotamia is.

For note, the same applies with 'theirs' and 'there's', also 'whose' and 'who's' which can be substituted mutatis mutandis into the first few sentences of the above paragraph.

They're, There, Their

As with above, they're implies omission of letters, shortening 'they are' into a single word by use of the magical device we with IQs larger than that of the average German Shepherd folk call an apostrophe. There is a demonstrative pronoun to stand in for any proper noun or direction, whilst also having the additional function of being an imprecise location over yonder. Their, however, implies ownership again. The three are not related other than being homophones, and ought not to be confused.

"I couldn't of...[sic]"

It's mildly amusing (on the same level that one might experience should they realise that an elderly relative has just told an embarrassing story from their childhood) that I put [sic] after the quote, as that's precisely how it makes me feel to write such a crude perversion of English. The sentence above, if you haven't realised already, should read 'I couldn't have'. I mean, how is it possible to mix the words 'of' and 'have' up? Do I go into a chemist and ask for "a box have that"? No, I don't. Why don't I? Because I have an ounce of sense about my person.

Linguistically, conditional sentences demand an auxiliary verb which, in any Indo-European language, will most likely take the form of 'to have' or 'to be'. Last I checked, 'of' was not an auxiliary verb, nor a conjugation of one and so I think I'll go ahead and use the proper conjunction if it's all the same with you. Even if it's not I still will.

(Oh yes: I'm back.)

Gaz out.

One of my favourite songs of all time has to be Joan Osbourne's 'One of Us' (Alternatively - and wrongly entitled - 'What if God was one of us?'). I'm not even sure why I like it so much, but I've always liked it; from the first time I ever heard it right up until the last time I listened to it (it's playing as I write this, incidentally). It prompted myself and Mr Mann to write the skit version of 'What if God was a platypus?', dealing with the problems of a monotreme deity and the possible exclusion he must feel as a result - a venture that I'm sure we'll try and record for you good people at some point or another.

Anyway, why am I telling you this? Well, I was looking for a nice piano arrangement of the piece to learn and play (which I found, incidentally) and I stumbled across several versions on youtube which I'd like to share with you now;

Proper version

Live Version

Piano Version (My favourite, possibly)

Skit Version (What if God smoked cannabis?)

I think that's enough for now. I just thought I'd share these little links with you as I have nothing better to do, in fairness.

Gaz out.

So said Rafiki, anyway.

Yes, yes, I realised (and have been pulled up on the fact no less than three times in the past 24 hours) that I haven't blogged in a long while. Thus, this is to appease those out there that were afraid that I might've stopped blogging for good: nil desperandum, mes amis. If you have to know why I haven't been blogging for the past week and a half, allow me to explain briefly for you;

Easter Monday - Wednesday: I was in Nottingham as the guest of Mitch and Emily. It was nice to be down there and, what with all the relaxing and enjoying myself I was doing, I found little time to blog.

Thursday: Recovering from Nottingham and working all day with the Tories.

Friday - Sunday: Went away with Youth Fellowship to Tarn which is, quite precisely, in the middle of nowhere as well as being at the back of beyond. (From this, one might formulate that the two are somehow related and, whilst I'm tempted to draw a diagram to explain this little thesis of mine, I shall refrain for the good of us all.) I had minimal access to modern technology whilst up there, being without the Internet, a computer and signal most of the time. I'd thus like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone I didn't text back on account of my not receiving the text due to my being in the middle of a field.

Monday - Today (Wednesday): It was Mitch's turn to come and see me in jolly old Bolton. What possessed him to do so is beyond me, though I'm awfully glad he did - it was good fun to spend time with him (not that it normally isn't, nor that it was anymore fun that it would be with anyone else, I just felt like a bit of unprecedented flattery). Together, we managed to devour half a pig and cow respectively grace a the strawberry duck, spend far too long looking at toys than grown men should and top my previous personal best in the pub quiz combined with the brains of Bolton.

I feel I must also apologise to everyone for not putting up an April Fool's gag. In truth, I couldn't think of one that I hadn't done in previous years, and so shall have to think long and hard about what to do for next year. Actually, I didn't really manage to fool that many people compared to what I normally manage, though I'm going to attribute this in part to being in bed until 10 more than anything else.

Anyway, until next time;

Gaz out.

I was sat here pontificating over the subject of the next blog and it struck me what day it was: Good Friday. (Well, I'd known about if for some considerable time beforehand if we're honest, though that detracts from the magical element I'm trying to imbue within my blog.) So I began to think about the term 'Good Friday' and tried to fathom it's etymology though to no avail: I can't see what was so good about the day itself. Alright, so if you believe the story then Good Friday is the precursor to the salvation of all mankind, though surely we should called Sunday 'Good Sunday' in which case? Anyway, I had another little ponder and then realised that I didn't know where the word 'Easter' came from.

I decided to compare it to the languages that I'm reasonable adept in: in French the celebrate Paques, In Germany Ostern and in Holland Paas. German, then, is the only one that's reasonably close and thus I assume that the two terms are in some way related, though I then wondered why Dutch was so similar to the French word. Downtrodden and defeated by my own lack of etymological insight, I turned to wikipedia in an effort to enlighten me.

It turns out that all romance languages use a derivative of the Latin form of the Hebrew word 'Paschen' (Passover). Fine, thought I, that's France and the Netherlands sorted out - now what about us and Germany? Turns out that Easter is descended from the German month of Eostur which had some link to the original celebration of the Passover celebration in the western church. The venerable Bede, who I detest for an unconnected and The Peoples of Early Medieval Europe related reason, wrote in the 8th Century about "Eostur" and this, I gather, is the earliest recollection of such that we have.

I would now like to draw everyone's attention to a little gripe of mine that has managed to plague me throughout this blog so far. I keep misspelling the word 'the' and instead writing 'teh'. An honest mistake, one might think, and you'd be right in assuming as such. So, when I go back and right click the underlining of the word I get a lovely list of words, though the word 'the' is not amongst them. Instead, I could change it to some of the following gems:

tech; techno, tether; Tehran, tae, thy, tie, toe, 1st, THC

Not one of them is the word I want. I'm sorry, windows: you have failed.

Gaz out.

I figure, with Easter Saturday looming just around the corner, I should crack on with some of the requested topics before I run out of time. One of the more interesting ones still outstanding is that of the Fermi paradox, as suggested by Duncan.

The Fermi paradox was proposed in the 1950s by the physicist Enrico Fermi. Actually, I'm lying already; he summised what would later become the paradox when he asked that, assuming life on earth was standard, and given the high amount of star systems, then "Where the fudge is everyone?". (He didn't actually say that, though his question was probably along similar lines and with comparable emphasis and frustration.) It's a fair question: if the chances of life existing elsewhere than on earth are so vast given the correct conditions (like those recently found on Io) then why haven't we been able to see, or at least detect, alien civilizations?

There's a couple of reasons selon me, the first of which being that there is nothing to see. This encapsulates a few theories in one: firstly that there is nothing out there and that intelligent life is so rare as to only exist in a selected few pockets spread across the universe. (Sod's law would then dictate that these would be at the furthest point from us, and would travel everywhere we weren't.) Further, what if this intelligent life had not managed to develop space travel, had managed to destroy itself in a series of wars and clashes, or that - even if they hadn't yet managed to get into space - they hadn't been able, nor possessed the wish to, broadcast things over a wide enough area for us to pick up.

Secondly, and slightly in the realms of the conspiracy nut this time, they can travel, do know about us but don't make themselves seen for various reasons. Perhaps there are problems with the visibility of such visitors - they are too small or too large for comprehension, have superior technology that would allow them to cloak themselves, exist on a different plane of reality or simply like to observe us and treat earth as something of a giant zoo. Of course, this is all assuming they're interested in us: perhaps they stay away because we're of no real concern or value to these visitors and so no one bothers coming here anymore.

All viable reasons, I reckon, though the first block form a little more logical sense compared to the begging-to-be-sectioned influence present in the latter block. Anyway, I shall leave it for you to decide; Personally, I'm not overly sure I'd like to know if someone is out there or not. Part of the wonder and mystery of it all is in not knowing and speculating instead and I'm not sure I want to give that part up.

Gaz out.

It was requested by Mike that I have a little chat about facial hair and, though reasoning escapes me for the moment, I’m more than happy to oblige, as it gives me the uncanny ability to stretch my lunch break out for another twenty minutes or so.

Now, those of you that know me will know that I’m not the most baby-faced of all people. In fact, where some people might develop a five o’clock shadow, I seem to grow a lunchtime umbra. In fact, I figure I really must grow for a Turkish shave sometime soon and experience what it must feel like to be perfectly clean shaven for the whole five minutes that it might last. Some of you out there may envy my ability to grow facial hair, and to you I say that you’re welcome to have my facial hair any day of the week so long as you leave my eyebrows pretty much where they are.

Yet I still don’t grow a beard. Why not? It could be conditioning that my Grandma told me never to grow a beard from a very young age and so I never have – it could be minimised exposure to beards as no one in my family seems to have had anything of a notable beard for any distinct length of time or it could be the fact that I don’t want to have a beard. Again; why not? Well, for one, I don’t think I suit them. I may seem to fit well with a bit of ‘designer stubble’ (a trendy way of saying that I forgot to shave this morning) though, in truth, it makes me feel – well – dirty. My history teacher once told me that I should never trust a man with facial hair and I think, historically speaking in the last two hundred years or so, she may be right: Marx, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Rasputin, Queen Victoria. Never a more despicable band of rogues and villains have I seen. Maybe.

It’s not really helped by the etymology of the terms used. At its most literal, moustache means ‘mouth stain’ in French. Call me a little peculiar if you must, though, to me, I don’t want to be proudly sporting something that even the French – a people, nay, species, that consider snails, duck liver jam and oysters the height of culinary mastery - consider to be disgusting. I wouldn’t be able to look at myself anymore which, incidentally, might make shaving it off a touch more difficult and certainly a touch more haphazard.

Regardless, I do admire people that manage to grow really quite spectacular facial hair. Look at the 19th Century mutton chops or the turn-of-the-last-century French villain moustache and you’ll see why. As such, when I stumbled across this site rather than doing the French I was meant to be doing, you can no doubt understand my simultaneous amazement and fascination.

Gaz out.

So; Hulme Hall stopped serving us food yesterday 'until further notice'- nothing bad there, one might think, and you'd be perfectly justified in thinking as such. Maybe this way we might actually get something vaguely edible or that looks like what it's purported to be. (I'm reminded of the anecdote of myself asking for the lighter coloured slop. When asked if I meant the curry, I replied "If that's what you want to call it, aye.") The official reason was a 'maintenance fault', though it was only a matter of minutes before all manner of rumours began to fly about, getting progressively absurd as time went on: closed down by health auditors, floods, asbestos, staff strike, dropping all the crockery, etc.

As such, we of Hulme Hall were treated to breakfast this morning chez St Gabriel's across the road. I wasn't aware that it was an all-girls hall until after I had sat down with my food, though I appreciate that I might've been a touch more willing to go in the first place had I known. It's funny, though, how breakfast over there made me feel like I was in the lap of luxury - drinking nothing but finest ambrosia (in a Greek mythological sense rather than the corporate one) and eating what can be called divinity on a plate. In fairness, it wasn't that much different in terms of substance, but it was the little differences that made us more and more envious of these girlies. Hell, I was considering a sex change - perhaps the social ostracism would be balanced out by the unlimited juice?

Unlimited juice wasn't the only frivolity, mind: each table had its own bottle of actual Heinz ketchup, a choice of skimmed and semi-skimmed milks, as many croissants as a man (or, indeed and perhaps more accurately, a woman) could gorge himself upon, a fruit and fibre dispenser - and an all-bran one (I don't even like it, but the choice was staggering) all with the added stuck-up nose turn of having a big tub of butter rather than stupid fiddly packets of the stuff. There were probably more, though I don't want to dwell too much on how much it was fantastic as the reality of having to go back to Hulme Hall catering possibly at the beginning of next week only fills me with something of dread.

Gaz out.