Holiday brochure with a difference...

March 22nd – As an outsider, I think the human race has done some clever things and some dumb things. I mean, we invented the Internet then filled it with adverts and porn – we created music then gave it to Justin Bieber and Mister Blobby for safekeeping – we created the wheel then put it on the car – we deciphered the code for our DNA and thought  insurance companies were a good idea – we created rocket propulsion then put a bomb on it – we created a whole host of gourmet food programmes where chefs create fancy menus for rich, overindulged people to test before cooking them again for other rich, overindulged people to scoff then we watch as half a nation starves for want of a crust of stale bread… Ooppsss, sorry, got political there; apologies…well, you get my drift. 

It just seems that no matter the advancement of our society and how astounding our discoveries and understanding become, we seem hell bent on taking a perfectly sound, rational and helpful set of circumstances and fucking it over. It’s as though the human race is set on a course of self-destruction with sensibility taking a back seat to the driving force of cynical manipulation. Take the space programme, those rockets we put bombs on I mentioned earlier?

OK, they haven’t all been lined up for destruction purposes, some of them have been used for research and some been sent on voyages of discovery, to travel to other planets and seek out new life; to boldly go… The Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, all these have either had a rocket from their neighbours visit them or have suffered a fly-by in recent years. This work is, ostensibly, to discover;

1) Which planets held life and/or;

2) If there is life still present.

And I guess Mars was the one that held out the most prospect of finding one or the other.

This planet captured the imagination to such an extent that, when the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast H.G. Wells’ story, ‘War of the Worlds’ in 1939, folk ran out of their homes and abandoned their cars mid-highway, yelling and screaming in fright, believing that an alien invasion was imminent…mind you this was in the U.S. If it’d happened in the UK, in Wolverhampton to be more precise, people would also have run out onto the streets but they’d be armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight…but that’s the Black Country mentality for you.

To try and prevent us being caught on the hop by an unannounced calling card from deep-space nine, the checking of the airwaves for sounds of extraterrestrial life soak up hours…weeks…years of people’s time and the sightings of spaceships year-on-year gives a constant supply of nut-case headlines for the newspapers. And yet…

We seem convinced that we are not alone and all of our intelligence (I mean, what other civilisation could have invented Pepperami) is geared up to finding other life, if not close at hand (?) then on an as yet undiscovered planet in an as yet undiscovered galaxy. So given we have invested billions and, through our own illogical logic, believe we have the shared suggestions of a bank of highly intelligent people in order for us to make the right introduction to any visiting blob from another planet, you’d think we’d have a strategy mapped out. One that would give any alien cause to be impressed by the level of intelligence they were about to encounter but also have a little trepidation as to what to expect at that first contact with us, wouldn't you? It should surprise you not at all then to find that, regardless of all the high-minded fancy talk by politicians, professors and phonetic experts, I had a LOL moment in the car yesterday when I heard that ‘Voyager 1’ had, supposedly left our solar system.

There’s some dispute about this but that’s not what I found funny. What I did find unfathomable was that as a first taster of what these aliens could expect when they visited, to tempt them into giving us a try if you will, the ship had been loaded with various examples of our high advancement and creativity. Sensible, you’d think, except ‘Voyager 1’ was carrying, amongst other things, music by Chuck Berry.

Now, I don’t know about you but if I were a visiting alien looking to take a well deserved holiday that’d be like expecting Bermuda but finding Blackpool. Bad enough they should have to endure ‘Extreme Grooming’ let alone, ‘My Ding-a-Ling’.

As if that weren’t enough, the result of a 2004 poll on this day voted Ozzy Osborne as the best person to welcome aliens to Earth. With that coupling you have all the essential ingredients in place for ‘War of the Worlds II – The End of the Unintelligible by the Incoherent’.