Museum tickets. Letters. T-shirts. Minute pictures. Shells. A Mickey Mouse cigarette lighter. Some dusty SMS, stored in the phone’s memory. Compiled CDs. Little things. A pipe. Memories. A yellow sticky note, stealthly attached to an
agenda.

Relics

If you have something like this, or any other relic, I wellcome you at my new pawnshop. Instant cash payment. I also buy packed remainings (pay per pound).
For children (as children may someties relics of a couple), please contact our slave trade department.

Photo by sludgegulper.

Explanation

We always imagine future people as being superior to us. (This means we have properly acquired the myth of the progress.) If future people are superior, they must necessarily be smarter than us. Constrained by the myth of the progress, which we’re going to inoculate in their heads, they will feel the urge to be more intelligent than we are. So they’ll give up on the TV. (I pittifylly look at the science-fiction shows presenting the future households turning, just like ours, around TV sets – wide and flat plasma screens). But, anyway, one shouln’t dramatize the future people’s situation, they’ll have a much more exciting Internet then ours.

Additional predictions

Telephones (fixed or mobiles), walkmans, computers (desktop, notebook or handheld) will also disappear. The people of the future will have, embeded in their brains, some very dense chips (imagine a powerful computer compressed to a 1 cubic millimeter size, taking advantage of the neural sensory circuits, imagine an Internet that was addressed to all your senses), and these chips will satisfy all their communication and instruction needs.

On the other hand, this scenario is rather a consequence of the myth of the progress (which we never question). In reality, the future will be similar to the riots in French suburbs in 2005. They’ll live a perpetual urban war. They’ll live in police states. And they’ll be cured of the myth of the progress.

A household of the future

PS Let’s go back, for a moment, to the TV of the future. If it will exist, the current sets will undoubtly disappear; the future television won’t address to senses any more, but to people’s brains; when you can stimulate the sensory centers, it is not worth the trouble to stimulate the senses. The people of the future will necessarily be insensitive.

The levitation’s secret consists in laziness. When you want to levitate, you should be really idle. You lay down and pretend getting asleep. The body is tupid (in any case, it’s more stupid then the brain), so it will be convinced that you’re going to fall asleep; so it will relax its muscles.

When the muscles are totally relaxed, the job is done; you’ll acually be able to fly.

A guru preparing to levitate

PS It takes a lot of practice to become this lazy.

“The discovery is the fruit of a six weeks research, carried by a complex team, consisting of engineers, physicists, amateurs, physicians, philosophers, electronics specialists, volunteers and ols wisemen.” said Mirinda Panta, the Institute’s director, who was recently reconfirmed by a tripartite agreement signed by gavagai and the Maoist government.

Initially, the invention was adressed to the  notebook users who get to spend long periods of time in areas with extreme weather conditions (Sherpas, Bedouins, Inuits) or who live in disadvantaged regions, where the access to power is a problem (Somali Plateau, Bronx, Amazon rain forest). But its unisputed utility recommends it to a general usage”continued Mirinda Panta.

“The principle”, said Sardri Batan, amateur physicist, “is very simple. Basically we’ve created a battery made of radioactive alluminium and attached it to the motherboard of a notebook or of a desktop computer. There’s no difference between this radioactive pill and the system’s regular battery”.

Radioactive motherboard

“The alluminium radioactivity, unknown two months ago, doesn’t affect human’s psychical or physical state in any way. The alluminium 17 years half-time, as well as the minimal recharge costs will undoubtly be a relief for the econimc balance of millions of households”, said the Minister of the Family Affairs and of Domestic Economy.

“Our country proves once again, to the whole world, that we are a real source of inspiration and wisdom”, said somebody interviewed on the street.

Asked whether the atomic divice irradiates or not, gavagai answered:
- Of course it does.

The loan is not yet available, but I’m looking forword to sign the contract. A few days ago I thought I needed to borrow this amount (100 for an acquisition and 1 for personal expenses. I called my accountant and asked what he was thinking about. He started laughing. My question was probably his belly laugh of the day.
- What do you need so much money for? he asked. Do you have a new mistress?
- I’d like to buy Google.
- Yeah, right…
- Just find me the money.

When he’l find it, I’ll tell you how would I get it.

PS I have no idea if there actually are vintige children. I only saw some artificially created, in ads and movies.

Vintage children

Photo by freeparking.

After some complex medical tests, it was concluded that I have some deficiencies with things anybody else can easily do. My incapacities are nothing but stunning, and this is the source of my perpetual grief.

And, like this wasn’t enough, I’m also having memory issues. One can give me a piece of advice for a thousand times, I still won’t remember it and still repeat the stupid things I was doing before being given advice.

Long story short, my honorable donors, the fortune of my normality is in your hands. I mean your heads.

The little piece of brain I need is the one that makes somebody think that someone is normal.

Thank you.

With gratitude, gavagai

PS Photo by brain blogger.

It was very difficult to me to extract this idea from their heads; it was nested there by a bunch of stupid teachers who justify their educational failures by the means of empty concepts like “hereditary stupidity” or “native intelligence.”

[Parenthesis. Over the last 5 centuries, there were, in the history of Western Civilization, two fundamental changes. First, religion was replaced by science in the production of the epistemic authority. Secondly, the power wanted to leave us the impression that there was a reconfiguration in the criteria and the means of access to the upper part of the social hierarchy (the so-called "meritocracy", which we were  learned to rely upon and because of which we can say, at any time, what are the forms of a latin feminine noun of the 3rd declination at the oblique cases). The two mutations have generated the concept of "native intelligence", which is very similar to the divine right monarchy. This is how the theory of Francis Galton, the creator of the science of heredity, has appeared. I close the parenthesis.]

In the spirit of Franz and Nicholas, before coming to me, occurred the following reasoning:

If the spontaneity is not spontaneous, and if there are spontaneous people, then spontaneity is acquired. If it is acquired, then it can be learned.

When the two shyly entered my office, I was writing a review of a book whose author (Kronski) proposed a theory saying that, in the possible field of a particle at a time T, there is at least an impossible spot, where it happens that the particle simply isn’t, this being the result of the adoption of a probabilistic theoretic framework that quantifies the chance (which is the case for the new quantum mechanics) ; from this it actually can be inferred the incompleteness of the theory of quantum mechanics in its classical formulation. One can easily imagine that at that moment where I wasn’t quite sure about the consistency of the surrounding world. And I was unable to understand the nature of the request of Franz and Nicholas.

- But why do you want to be spontaneous? I asked.
- Because, said Franz, since we’re not spontaneous, people believe that we are not intelligent either. And in the world we live in, there is nothing worse than not being intelligent.
- Yeah, you right, I said. But what is the relationship between intelligence and spontaneity? If someone tells you that you are not intelligent (because you are not spontaneous), you can reply that he or she commits a serious syllogism error.
- A serious syllogism error? Nicholas asked with a dazy expression.
(All the amazement og this creation, as well as some other inhabited solar systems’, was on their faces; the pressure made them look exophthalmous and distorted their mouths, generating a grimace of misunderstanding.)
- Yes, I clarified. Those who believe that you are not smart do not take the premise that all spontaneous people are intelligent, but – wrongly and on the contrary – that all the intelligent people are spontaneous. They confuse the inclusion with the identity.

They were very happy to hear that. Admittedly, I had to explain what a syllogism, an error or a modus ponen / modus tollens are (I’m not sure they understood) and what was the relationship between spontaneity and intelligence, but it was worth it. I was quite happy to have helped, I was already rubbing my hands preparing me to resume the writing of my
review, when Nicholas made a surprising remark:
- But nobody tells us that we’re not intelligent. People only believe so. We can’t tell them they make a mistake, it would be pittyful and not at all intelligent.
- Yeah, you right, you too, I said. I hadn’t thought about it. It is impossible to extract from people’s minds the idea that spontaneity is a necessary condition of intelligence.
- We must be spontaneous! Franz said.
- Can you help us? asked Nicholas.

I was asked a lot of things during my life. Unknouwn people asked  me what time it was, the beggars asked me for money, the next-door ladies asked me for mustard, the students – for my phone number, some women even asked me to make them a child (they belonged to my entourage, where it is believed that I’m very smart), some lady asked me for pegs, string and a whip … but I was never asked for something so strange. I started thinking. I had never thought about spontaneity, but given the opportunity, I decided to take advantage.

- My dear Franz and Nicholas, I said, spontaneity cannot be learned.
- So you can’t help us, Franz said dryly. (And to Nicholas) I told you so.
- But this doesn’t mean that I can’t help you, I hastened to add.
(I bet two wigs and a test tube against anything that if they were dogs, they would begun to wag their tails.) I have first explained why spontaneity could not be learned.
- … Because the spontaneity, the way it is generally understood, presupposes the notion of causality. Almost a mechanistic causality. There’s not so much difference between this causal reflex and the automatic leg benting when the doctor hits it with his little hammer. The two hadn’t understood a single. They had even begun to look at me a little suspiciously. I tried to reassure them.
- I will explain to you the theory of spontaneity, I’ve just built it. Be S a stimulus, IR an immediate reaction and TR a tardive reaction; be t1 the time between S and IR; be t2 the time between S and TR. We call spontaneity the relationship S-IR, where t1 istending indefinitely to 0. We call stupidity the S-TR relationship, where t2 indefinitely tends to infinity. The imaginary boundary between t1 and t2, and hence between S-IR ans S-TR is a variable oscillating around the value 1′ on a time scale T. The index of spontaneity (IS) is the product of the difficulty coefficient of the assertion (its quality, measured in number of associations of ideas and symbolized by Q) by 1 / t1, i.e. IS = Q / t1 idead associations  per second. The formula is interesting because it also gives us the stupidity index (IS).

Photo by wburris.
- We don’t understand. Continue this way and we’ll never be spontaneous, said Franz.

[Parenthesis. The publisher of this blog told me the same thing. She believed that the general audience will be bored to death while reading this article. But I think that any educated person should be glad to have learned the equation of spontaneity, or, as called our publisher, "the equation of the general stupidity." I close the parenthesis.]

- Is there any other way you can help us? asked Nicholas.
- OK, I’ll try. Spontaneity cannot be learned because it presupposes a rapid series of associations between different words or language games. What we name, in the natural language, “associations of ideas” can be translated,  in a physicalist description,  by” neuronal synapses,  electro-chemical processes by which neurons are connected to each other. To get a number of synapses in a short span of time it takes a long and torturing training. If you are willing to try, in 5 years you will be spontaneous.
- 5 years? …
- Anyway, spontaneity is a mistake, I tried to comfort them. By assuming the causality, it tacitly acknowledges all itsfaults. Newtonian time, for instance, which …
- Thanks for nothing, said Franz.
- We wish you a good day and a wonderful life, said Nicholas.
- Stop it, I haven’t finished yet.
- We don’t wanna hear a single word. You made us dizzy enough. And we couldn’t say that you saved our time, either.

I noticed that people receive the good intentions of their peers in the most thankless way. If there is something written into the human nature, it must be the ingratitude. This truth troubles me. And, at the moments I’m writing about, I was saddened. Not so much because I wanted to help my friends (whos IS didn’t had a value greater than 1), but because they would have had the impression that I had been unable to help them. So I decided to show them the easy way of obtaining the recognition of their intelligence.

- And what if I promise you immediate results?
They stoped. Were silent, but – obviously – I had won their attention.
- It’s obvious that I can’t teach you how to be really spontaneous. But I can teach you how to simulate being so. Everything you need to do is saying random sentences. They should fall like a dog in a bowling game.
- But, if we do this, people will think that we are completeidiots.

- No, they won’t. It depends on the confidence in your voices. This confidence will make people believe that you had something in mind when you say your stupid line. If they are smart, they’ll look a link between the stimulus and the response and they’ll be surprised by the number and speed of the associations you supposedly made. If they’re not intelligent, they would wonder what you meant, so you can actually create an ad hoc series of associations between the two ends of the stimulus – response continuum; under the pretext of explaining every link, you have all the time in the world to really make those associations. In any event, everybody will admire your intelligence. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I tell you ‘cigarette’ and you answer something like “bastard”. Being a very intelligent person, I’ll make the following associations: ‘cigarette – lighter – fire – fire in the house – firefighter – male strip-tease -
bachelorette’s party – sleeping with the stripper – birth of the bastard “. Realizing that you have an 8 associations of ideas per second IS, I’ll be convinced that you are very intelligent and I’ll admire you.
- And we can say practically anything? asked Nicholas withdistrust.
- Yes. Anything goes.

Hippo’s life is unspeakable. As its name suggests, it is a water horse, but field observations have shown that it rather behaves like a pig.

Early in the morning, the hippo wide opens its gab and starts roaring. It keeps its eyes shut and doesn’t notice the few little birds that got into his mouth. If it had noticed (actually if it had been aware that somebody was watching it and was realizing that it had noticed them), it would felt forced to eat them alive, just to keep its status of ferocious beast, which makes it very proud. But it pretends not seeing the birds, because its mom told it to brush its fangs both in the morning and evening; and the little birds are its toothbrush.

After taking its shower (rolling in the mud), the hippo goes hunting; it particularly looks for garbage floating on the Nile. Its stomach would soon get stuffed (for the Nile is very polluted). It spends the rest of the day laying on its back, with the belly gently caressed by the sun (it helps digestion), and happily grunting.

Digesting, it’s getting dark. (This is by far the most idiotic sentence you’d ever read.) When the digestion is finished, the hippo goes (defecate); it does it by the means of its short tail, which it handles like a little shove. Then, relieved, it brushes its fangs and goes to sleep in the mud.

Hippo’s enemies are the croc and the children. It hates crocs because they steal its garbage, and children by instinct. When it gets lucky and finds a clild, it instantly eat him. (Hippos, just like pigs and humans, are omnivoracious),

In nature, these animals can be found mainly in zoos.

Photo by Stig Nygaard

And ladies loved him very much; this is why he used to come back home very late from those parties. Sometimes he even came back home the next day. And when he was coming back home, he was founding his black tomcat waiting for him (for single writers often own a black cat).

And the tomcat was hungry. And Lewis used to give him some milk, and the tomcat was drinking it with a satisfied expression in his eyes. And then he was thinking that his master was very vicious. But Sinclair Lewis wasn’t very vicious.