People do say the stupidest things sometimes. I should know.

"I wish someone would take him away" Muttered one self important lady as I minded my own business with a library book. Her friend obligingly tittered at the supposedly witty request. Carry me away? Sorry dear. Health and safety. Wouldn't want anyone to hurt their back.

As it happens her attempt to socially exclude me sort of failed. It's called not giving a hoot, lady, although normally I use a stronger rude word. Quite why I'd want to be her friend perplexes me. Why would I want to titter obligingly every time she made a wish? Go away you silly woman... Oh dear... I think I might have inadvertantly excluded her socially... Oh well. At least this book is interesting.

That's not the only example. One of neighbours has the strange habit of shouting "Learn to play first!" each and every time I start playing a guitar. Each and every time. What is she, an android? Programmed to heckle me to simulate live performance? Can you imagine what having sex with her is like? Might need a foot pump.

Talking about women you wouldn't want sex with, another neighbour last night attempted to sing Silent Night in polish. I blame Simon Cowell. Now everybody thinks they can sing.

Green Men

For some reason my last blog post vanished into outer space. Unlike NASA, I didn't spend millions of dollars on it, so I'll just have to repeat the exercise, safe in the knowledge that it won't affect my dole payments or finances.

Over the weekend a new mission to Mars has blasted literally a ton of expensive scientific equipment toward our neighbouring planet on a quest to discover if life ever happened there at all. Since humanity appears to measure the existence of life by the extent of nighclubs and other social venues that open late, it looks as if the empty red deserts of Mars rather rule out that possibility.

It's been asked on television why we're so obsessed with Mars, and even worse, finding anything alive on it. Ever since Schiparelli thought he could see canals on the martian surface, we've been inventing inhabitants that basicially conform to one or other of two ideas. Firstly, that the martians are living on a dying world and must expand to ours, an enterprise usually confounded by square jawed hollywood heroes, a few screams from their female love interests, and the occaisional assistance of the common cold. Seconfdly, that the martians are dead and gone, leaving behind mysterious machines and ruins to present our heroes with puzzles and terrors. It seems deserts resonate in the human psyche with ideas of failure, abandonment, sterility, and psychological emptiness. Or more likely, that deserts are really boring places to spend an evening.

So I guess our obsession is borne from a desire to find somewhere new to dance the night away. But why are martians always depicted as little green men? I mean, if no-ones actually met a martian UFO driver, how would we know? Funnily enough, the same problem also occurs with those supernatural folk that frightened our medieval ancestors witless. Those little folk were often green too.

By now the conspiracy theorists are no doubt claiming that aliens have been visiting Earth at least since the middle ages based on what I've just said, but why the heck would an intelligent interplanetary civilisation want to visit the middle ages for anyway? There wasn't a decent nightclub at all back then.