Making Human

Well, I’ve reached the end of week 2 of my pregnancy. Being a man, I am experiencing a strange and unpleasant clash of hormones. For instance yesterday afternoon, I was getting quite irate with a work laptop because it wouldn’t eject a disc and was about to kick it. But then from nowhere I burst into tears. This would have been bearable if I’d been alone but it happened during one of the largest lectures I’ve given this year to a hall full of some 200 undergraduates. I had to excuse myself and ran out sobbing.

My cravings this week have included watermelon, saffron, garibaldi biscuits, pine (nordic), cillit bang, banana (skins) and tongue sandwiches – not all at once thankfully! Oh and yesterday I was unusually ravenous and was about to order some pizzas but ended up being satisfied by consuming the menu itself, which saved £70. But sadly I was then sick everywhere and had to get a Chinese banquet delivered in the end.

The growing human in my lower abdomen area has already grown considerably and starting to make itself known to me – I confess to feeling the butterfly type movements that so many women go on about when ‘up the duff’. But after one week? Something seems a bit odd. It’s all going a bit fast and because I don’t recall the conception, I have no way of ascertaining the precise factors that could have affected the gestation process. I’ve been leaving messages on Hawkings and Dawkins phones to quiz them further and get to the bottom of it all but they’ve yet to return my phonecalls and just keep texting me laughing faces and “:-D” symbols. One of them must remember something! Bastards!!

Sorry, there go my emotions again…

Bye for now,

love PCH

xx

CONGRATULATIONS – You’re our 3,000th Reader!!!!

I may be getting a bit ahead of myself here – but I thought a pre-emptive post may be the best course of action. This is not to say that  then this will be hopelessly out dated in a matter of weeks, but perhaps you can take small pleasure in the thought that you reading this now – are indeed the 3,000th visitor to this blog. Here you may find my various musings on all things science related – and occasionally not (although don’t call me a ’social’ scientist) I do however consider myself an authority on many aspects of the Human condition, and I am almost 42.3% certain – that should you have a question relating to virtually any subject matter – you may just find the answers here.

I have been asked though, to stipulate that, The Human Institute, in no way whatsoever – is affiliated to either this site, or the opinions and ideas contained here within.

Indeed, I myself, cannot be held responsible for any of my experiments, theories and formulas.

And  before anyone goes poking their nose around asking – that whole mess last year with the rabid donkey and the centrifugal compressor has already been explained at length to the police – and various animal rights authorities. We just don’t know how it got in…

Code RED.

I don’t know how this could have happened, but it seems that I, Professor Charles Human – professor, doctor, scientist, MAN – am pregnant.

Well, actually I DO roughly know how it happened. It was the end product of a series of stupid, purile, drunken experiments, conducted and goaded on by my peers. The evening started off quite amicably. I remember we were discussing the scientific probability that one day it would be possible for a man to become pregnant (a real man, not some ex-woman, post-op with a goatie). Then I vaguely remember me suggesting why not make that day today! Idiot. After being kicked out of our club at closing time (or possibly for shouting), raiding the nearby off-licence for their last case of Scotch, I recall we headed back to my institute feeling the night was still young. The rest is hazy. There was lots of alcohol. Then ethanol. I remember Dawkins trying to a call for a stripper (at 3am!) – as if that was going to help. Every time we go out, he tries to order a bloody stripper. He even did it once when we all went to theatre. The man is tit mad. Anyway, as I say I can’t remember much beyond that. There were tubes….vaseline…scalpels, and I think Hawkings raided the cryogenic store for something as I saw the poor janitor having to clear up broken glass nearby this morning. I don’t remember any pain. In fact I do recall a great deal of laughter and possibly cigars. But the evidence is there on my lower abdomen – surprisingly neat stitches. And what could be a cigar burn. When I saw my body in the mirror this morning, I suspected another practical joke from the boys – I knew Hawkings wanted to get his own back on me for pushing him down the steps at Waterloo station. So I thought maybe they’d stitched a clock or my wallet inside me again. But this was far more serious.

Buggeration. This has all kinds of implications for me. The main one being I’m going to have a baby. It’s definitely happening. I’ve just discarded the 27th ‘YOU ARE PREGNANT’ pregnancy test. At least I don’t have to worry about telling the father. As that’s me too. Just got the conclusive DNA test back from the lab, covered in smiley, laughing faces of course.

On the positive side, this adventure will provide a unique insight into the male side of pregnancy. I’ll still post my regular blogs on all things human and science, but I will occasionally also post dedicated blogs on this new point in my life. There’s lots to talk about obviously. A great deal for me to think about. I’m going to keep it, there’s no question of that. In the critical interests of science, human nature, historical significance and also because my ex-wife always wanted one and when she finds out, she’ll be livid. Ha! Plus you get £190 from the government – simply for getting up the duff.

I will of course deliver the baby myself. I just don’t trust anyone else. I’ll perform a Caesarean section under a local anaesthetic – whereas I am usually against such artificial means of bringing a child into the world, I am equally fond of my penis and fear that, following the evacuation of an infant through it, the old boy will closer resemble a recently vacated sleeping bag.

The really odd thing is, after less than 24 hours my stomach seems to already be slightly larger. Admittedly this could be down to the whole chicken I consumed for breakfast – strange craving I had at 7am, I simply couldn’t deny my body it and was almost breaking down the door to Sainsburys. Gave the fella on the rotisserie counter quite a shock as I gorged on the roast poultry in front of him. I also bought some spares in case I am overcome by a similar urge tomorrow.

Anyway, I had to blog my initial reaction to this news but now I must dash – feeling queasy and need the loo again! (eleventh time in the last hour)

Volunteers wanted for [FREE]!

It’s getting as though a scientist can’t even perform a simple genetic experiment nowadays! I remember when people would readily give up their time – sometimes even their lives, all for the good of science.

And before that, there was always the good old days when we could use animals. I recall with great fondness, the first frog I dissected. The first cat I electrocuted. The first panda I gassed. These were heady, carefree times – when it wasn’t unknown for the lab to occasionally descend into the odd ‘animal organ’ fight! But of course, someone always has to come along and spoil all the fun. Before we knew it we couldn’t even swat a fly, let alone open up an elephant, without the RSPCA or so similarly cretinous group coming down on us.

So with drugs to test, experiments that still needed to be carried out, it was that we turned to our fellow man. Something I had coincidentally been at the forefront of, using as I was humans to test my ultimately unsuccessful range in pet cosmetics.

Still there proved to be a plentiful number of volunteers who were only too happy to help their friendly neighbourhood scientist. They weren’t paid though. We aren’t made of money. What little funds and grants we have are always ploughed straight back into our work, and the occasional field trip to Thorpe Park.

So it was this week that I put a perfectly innocent advert up in the free paper, ADVANCED SCIENCE and POTTERY, asking for a large group of volunteers to assist us here at the Human Institute. I require some 200 people for an experiment I wish to conduct, and was most pleased to find an immediate and enthusiastic response to the advert from willing, jobless layabouts. However, since then I have been contacted by a interfering local MP who demand I at least pay something called minimum wage. Now I wasn’t about to pay these volunteers (or at least the survivors) nothing. Indeed I had considered a last meal and a token payment for, I don’t know, a pound perhaps, to at least cover their bus fare home more than generous. Apparently not.

So once again, as I finish writing this, I am forced to head out  and round up some of the homeless and lost. Where did I put my hammer?

The Last Picture Show

As well you might by now know, I am a man who deals in cold hard fact. And thus fiction in it’s many myriad forms has never held any interest for me. This was revealed to me at an early age, when it was that as a small child and put to bed – on occasion my grandfather would read to me a story. He delighted in turning to the pages of Hans Christen Anderson and The Brothers Grimm to entertain me, as had they entertained him as a small boy.

I would of course, however, regularly take him to task for the obvious inconsistencies and impossibilities that such tales would throw up. Rapunzel – to grow hair to sufficient length with which to fashion as a rope for passing suitors, would have had to be growing it for at least seventy to eighty years – depending on length (again my grandfather and I would often argue as to how tall this actual ‘tower’ was). So far from being the beautiful princess waiting at the window for her rescue, she would have invariably been quite the wizened old crone. And one who constantly bled from the follicles, such would be the force exerted on her scalp by someone attempting to climb her hair. Quite frankly such a task would kill her.

Similar a house made of sweets, the like of which Hansel and Gretel happened upon in the woods, is quite impractical in either wet and hot climates, and would have suffered equally badly in both.  And the name Rumpletilskin is preposterous- who’d ever guess that!

So it is I grew up to be the man of science I am today. But I am not so uncultured as to be completely unaware of the current topics of conversation that filter through the laboratories and classrooms here at the Institute. The latest talk being about a motion picture causing quite the stir called ‘Avatar’. Now I have not seen this picture. Nor have I any interest or intention to rectify this matter. To date I have only ever sat through one film in my lifetime. And even then I stumbled upon it quite by accident, as I was trying to set the timer on my then BETAMAX video cassette machine to record the latest episode of Tomorrow’s World. Tthe one where they previewed the ‘fold up car’ – idiots!

Instead I found I had recorded a film entitled ‘Beneath The Planet of the Apes’. Now this film, despite it’s promising title, of which I imagined might in some way, relate perhaps to Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, was instead some incomprehensible rubbish about spacemen, mutants with nuclear bombs, and monkey’s riding around on horseback. So perplexed and then angry I was by what I watched, I promptly destroyed my television and have never owned one since.

If this makes me some social leper – then so be it, but quite frankly if it also means I don’t have to suffer seeing that hack Winston’s stupid big face spewing out whatever asinine scientific theory he’s currently trading in then all the better. You can keep your blue people!

On this I am RESOLUTE…

To you I say New Year. I am unable to prefix this with the verb ‘Happy’ though, due to the excess of gross consumption that has inevitably accompanied the festive season.

Like many of you I am sure – I too have taken it upon myself to cut back and detox over the next few weeks. Unlike many of you, however – I am being stricter in my self discipline, and so as of five days into 2010, I have ingested no food nor liquid. I have also taken to jogging for up to 13 hours a day.

Despite currently lacking the energy to press much more than the keys on my laptop, I take solace in the fact that I am unable to succumb to the temptations of the fridge as if I get up too quickly from my chair, I tend to pass out. No fool of course, as extra precaution I also set fire to my fridge at the weekend.

Christmas Fallout & The Year in Review – How was 2009?

Well all I can say is I’m glad that’s over! So once more another Christmas passes us by. Not only can I barely stomach the idea of celebrating the birth of a fat man in a red suit who delivers ‘presents’ around the world, the general over consumption I detailed in my last blog entry has little abated over this past week. And to make matters worse invariably we are forced to spend this time with family.

My father doesn’t believe in Christmas (fine you might think – there being something we do have in common) however over the years my father has also stopped believing in the metric system, tomatoes and black people. My mother’s idea of a festive dinner tends to consist of a power shake and back into the garage for the afternoon to continue pumping iron, it makes me shudder to think how strong that woman is, even at her advanced years.

So Christmas was once more spent with my idiot half brother, someone I may have neglected to mention in blog’s of the past – and well for good reason. The product of a messy fling that bears little thinking between my father and our gardener, Graham and I have never seen eye to eye – partly because he is only six years old and I stand some feet taller than him. However his tantrums and constant demands to be the centre of attention I find particularly grating. I find it almost impossible to comprehend how someone as stupid as he, with his limited scientific knowledge (I think he may have ‘heard’ of Newton) can possibly be sourced from one half of the same gene pool as me. Well let me assure you, round the family dinner table I can be just as loud as he can, if not louder!

Still I digress, happy to find myself back in the comforts of the Human Institute and sitting here typing the final blog entry on the keys of my newly acquired Macbook. (Are you reading this Bill Gates? Your ‘updates’ are a thing of the past – I AM FREE!)

So with drink in hand I sit here and contemplate the past year. What have been my main achievements? What have I learnt? what have I taught you my dear reader? Well, I have fulfilled my vow to post one blog per week here on the site, and in the process boost the awareness and circulation of this humble little site. In this new information age where the criticism could be levelled that any idiot now can get their voice heard and read on one of millions of personal websites, as a Professor of Science and Humans – I am glad to be the one sensible head craning itself above the moronic horde.

Why this year alone I have experimented in sleep deprivation, final results still pending once I can actually find what I did with them over that week.

(http://professorcharleshuman.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-science-of-sleep-day-1/)

I have championed Sir Martin Marion Hilary, the oft forgotten inventor of time.

(http://professorcharleshuman.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/old-father-time/)

And finally given up on this whole cloning business – far much more trouble than it’s worth.

(http://professorcharleshuman.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/the-face-looks-familiar/)

And while we’re at it time travel too.

(http://professorcharleshuman.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/a-dire-but-ultimately-pointless-warning-from-the-present-ie-the-future/)

So what does the New Year hold in store? Well I am looking forward to taking part in my first space flight, and finally finishing my matter transporter (I did give it a test run earlier this year when I tried to transport a common house fly but failed to notice a human being had accidentally climb aboard too – I shan’t go into what came out the other end).  It’s about time too I took a visit to the Large Hadron Collider in Cern to see what all the hold up’s are about. And as ever here at the institute it will undoubtedly be the usual mix of lecture, experiments and occasional discos.

So I bid you farewell people of the year 2009 – and hello to you people of the year 2010 – hold on tight here comes Charles!

Too much of a GOOD thing…

In this festive period where we all pretend to celebrate the birth of the magician Jesus Christ, invariably our time is called upon by various parties, friends, colleagues and occasionally strangers to indulge in a few Christmas drinks. Indeed in the past week or so I have been constantly at one end of a glass or three. Whilst the human body can show remarkable resilience I fear I am now at a point where I can no longer continue having a good time.

I extend this latest blog entry out there to all the people I have yet to catch up with, and are making demands of my time to say – the fun must stop, the good times, the drinks, the partying, the constant state of merriment. I can take no more – I am officially going to ground for the remainder of the holidays – I shall resurface just once more to offer my inaugural annual review of the year. Until then…

Who called it the Noughties anyway?

As we reach the years end - I notice a trend for many publications to not only be looking back on events of the last twelve months – but the past decade as a whole. What has it meant for you? What has it meant for me? And who in all seriousness ever referred to it as the Noughties? As we enter the next decade, must we refer to it as the ‘Teens’? Comparatively speaking are we likening the next ten years to that of a sullen, hormonal young hooligan who would stab you sooner than look at you from under his ‘hoodie’ were he able to actually extricate himself from his home entertainment games console for more than 7 minutes at a time. I thought not.

 I am however – whilst always resolutely individual, also not adverse to jumping on the occasional passing band wagon, particularly if it boosts the old stats before the year is out. So what might be the defining historical moments that have shaped the world in the last ten years. In the world of science we have seen the rise of the celebrity, although it is frankly embarrassing how the likes of Winston and Dawkins have prostituted themselves for the media and adulation of millions, passing off their trite theories and preposterous notions of science – hacks who leave us real scientists to mop up the detritus of their awful waffling here on minority read blog pages hidden away in the furthest corners of the internet.

I may have my censors, I may have enemies, I may be a figment of some others imagination, but if anything these last ten years have taught me – despite my brief flirtation with possible fame and fortune back in 2005 when I met an agent – only to be told that there were already ‘other’ scientists, is that it is time for me to get more vocal – to take the next decade by the stethoscope and drag it into the 21st century. Science has a name – its name is Professor Charles Human. You have been warned. (If you were already aware then take this more as a gentle caution).

Customer Unservice

I don’t ask for much in this life. I’m rarely happier than when left with a pint of gin of tonic, the electronic musical mathematics of Kraftwerk and a small mammal to dissect. I do though, share the frustration of many of you when having to deal with automated phone lines and the extraneous waiting times of a company’s customer services. Only this very week I have been having yet more issues with my broadband internet connection, and had to resort to conversing with an employee of the service provider. I should in the interests of partisanship not disclose the name of said company – but suffice to say it was 02. I had just been in the middle of downloading a rather large amount of free science papers and music when I found my connection entirely uncooperative. Of course, it would be usual in these circumstances for me to try to resolve said problem myself before having to resort to consulting some inferior intellectual oaf over a phone line.  Someone, no doubt, who would have trouble breaking down and explaining Pythagoras’s theorem, or naming the key chemical components of their own DNA strand. What could such a person possibly have to tell me about computers.

But like the rest of you, and despite my best efforts to create my very own internet (or the world wide Human as I favoured calling it), I am subject to the big business chains and corporations too. I won’t pretend that you know anything about how the internet actually works, it is essentially a network of computers all connected to a giant supercomputer the size of a small town secretly located in the American Nevada desert. So it was that I was forced into calling my provider to resolve my connection problem. Firstly I was presented with a voice recognition system that asked what service I required. Well I am never going to be at the beck and call of a machine’s whim, and often take these opportunities to engage the machine in some manner of scientific debate (I have in the past caused a number of automated lines to question their purpose and self destruct) and sure enough after much confusion from the computer I was successfully put through to someone with a more human (although barely) physiology.

I don’t expect to be lectured or told what to do when speaking to customer services on the phone – I do the instructing and tell them exactly how they can help me and what it is they should do. In this particular case it was no different, even as I had to listen to the idiotic blithering of the person on the other end of the line who insisted on wanting to know what my landline number was and name. I like to keep things concise and to the point when dealing with people on the phone, and when I am done and said what I had to say, will immediately hang up. Unsurprisingly the fool on the other end, despite my very precise instructions has failed to rectify my broadband issues, and I still find myself with a frustratingly intermittent signal. I shall be writing to my provider, and demanding a complete apology from them, in the meantime I am taking my laptop with me direct to the source and shall be spending the remainder of the week combing the Nevada desert for the internet itself.