Hipster disruptor? Never trust a well-groomed caveman with your clams The Dawn of Man. Picture a pastoral scene of prehistoric arcadian bliss as our troglodyte ancestors sit about calmly picking fleas off each other's backs. One eats a banana. Another slowly munches the scraps from a mammoth bone. The rest seem happy munching the fleas. Mmm, fleas. Young Trog is wallowing in a nearby rock pool …
"MARKETING GIRL:
When you have been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed, it has to be properly researched. I mean yes, yes we’ve got to find out what people want from fire, I mean how do they relate to it, the image -
FORD:
Oh, stick it up your nose.
MARKETING GIRL:
Yes which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know, I mean do people want fire that can be fitted nasally. "
He'd have seen the inverse relationship between thickness of banana slice, and value associated with and launched the 'bananot' - a banana cut into strips so thin, you wouldn't believe they exist other than the fact they come in a gold plated (warning, not real gold, just some yellow paint) presentation box. Only $1000!
Also available is the 'bananot' which comes in the larger box, and so has more room with it, only $2500!
Excellent column! Although the "strong" ones would not have moped off, they would have either been given new Slabtops and Mobile Bones to be "product influencers" or have taken them and banned anyone else from using them with the aforementioned strength/religious power...
“One day old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had declared that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't looking. 'Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, 'or burn!'
They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.”
-Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy
"Old Thrashbarg said that it was the ineffable will of Bob, and when they asked him what "ineffable" meant, he said look it up.
This was a problem because Old Thrashbarg had the only dictionary and he wouldn't let them borrow it. They asked him why not and he said that it was not for them to know the will of Almighty Bob, and when they asked him why not again, he said because he said so."
(isn't it from Mostly Harmless ("the fifth book in the increasingly mistitled HHGTTG trilogy"))
Of course all had boybeards in those days, given average life expectancy of 18 yrs.
Not so. As you say, that may have been *average" life expectancy, but infant and child mortality - right up until recently - was hideously high. Survive your childhood, and you had a good chance of living to a ripe old age.
The Bible also mentions people living hundreds of years - like Methuselah at 956 years.
New testamant, written mainly in Latin and Greek: 3 score + 10 or if you're lucky 4 score.
Old testamant, written in ancient Hebrew: 956 for Methusala etc. Almost certainly mistranslation/misunderstanding by translaters whose knowledge of Latin and Greek was better than Hebrew.
"956 might well have been a mistranslation of "ninety-five or -six"."
No, because Hebrew numbers don't work like that. They are not positional.
But there are other religions such as that of the Jains which believe that in the past people lived much longer and were much bigger. I've said it before, will say it again, the original purpose of the Bible was not to be a science textbook of any description.
"Methuselah at 956 years"
Societies at that time and place used both a solar and a lunar calendar. 956/12 = 79.67. Quite believable that if it was common for people to live until 70, that one particular individual could make it to nearly 80, and that he would be regarded as exceptionally, indeed legendarily, long-lived.
Why, exactly, do we think of the wheel as a great invention? When you think about it for a second or two, a wheel is pretty bloody useless on it's own.
The really great invention was actually the axle. Sorry, Thor.
That said, never forget CLAMS GOT LEGS!
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My favourite (can't find it online or I'd link it) is the explanation of golf:
B is playing golf, A stops by to chat
A: Whatcha doin'?
B: Playing golf.
A: What's the object of the game?
B: I'm trying to get this little ball into that cup over there
A: [picks up ball, walks over and drops it in cup] Silly game. [walks away]
oh, and it's spelled, "COVFEFE" :-)
Must have been a nifty bit of climate change going on there.
Bananas need warm climate to grow.
Mammoths were known to prefer a more nip hardening climate - a chilly environment was their thing.
So banana and mammoth together quite unlikley (unless we have sceanrios such as mammoth stuck on an ice berg drifting to somewhere warm, iceberg melts and mammoth washed ashore to food bonanza delight of banana munching trogs)
So my suspension o0f disbelief was sadly lost before we got to the silly stuff
"One eats a banana. Another slowly munches the scraps from a mammoth bone"
Where does Mr Dabbs write "woolly mammoth"? Woolly mammoths lived in the chilly north, yes, but their hairless cousins lived throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.
You know, where bananas grow.
Hey, you're the wordsmith, not me.
When you were plotting this article in your head, did you really mean to close it out the way you did, or did you run out of steam (or bump up against a deadline)? It was crowd-pleasing, to be sure, but your stuff is usually far better than trafficking in Pavlovian politics.
Lovely bit, but I like this version better from the twisted mind of Mel Brooks.
My fave is the Terry Gilliam take on 2001 in which the cavemen tosses the bone high, it turns into a spaceship which sweeps through space until the music falters, when it falls back to earth and hits the caveman on the head, cold-cocking him.
I'd link it but have had no luck finding it.
You carry it with you at all times so that, if you want to speak to another troglodyte on the next hill, you raise the mobile bone to your ear and yell as loudly as you can in his direction.
Just yesterday, while hiking in the forest, following the Baden Powell trail above West Vancouver, followed by not one, but two insufferable idiot having shouted conversations into the speaker phones in their hands.
followed by not one, but two insufferable idiot having shouted conversations into the speaker phones in their hands.
Hate that, esp when they complain about you listening in.
You could always start one of your own, talking about finding a perfect place for the bodies and hoping those nearby can't hear you, otherwise you'd have to take care of witnesses (very risk trick for US based people!)
Slightly longer and better clip at Southpark Studios, but with a lot more 3rd party JS :
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/2hlbyd/take-that-shit-off-speakerphone
...by yours truly.
Being out in the hinterlands with gin, dry vermouth, and, uh a hem, cough, cough, cubed ice and being repulsed by the idea of fricking ?ICE CUBES? in a Martini, the caveman instinct kicks in.
Grab that towel there and that large somewhat hollowed out stone over there and this nifty fist sized rock nearby, wrap the ice effing cubes in the towel, place it in the large stone's hollow, and pound it with the fist sized stone. TAA DAA! Crushed ice in The Caveman Martini.
Add a small sliver of Habanero pepper, lay back, and howl with the coyotes.
The perfect Martini (for IT persons).
(Cued video link in really bad quality. If cue doesn't work, FF to 48:30.)
you can do it all for real soon in ancient cities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVMMRJeSOw8
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