From UK-Dance...
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> Sorry to tell you mate, but your life was pre-destined to
> be one of shopping trolley rides through dingy vomit-splattered
> underpasses because you had a TI calculator.
>
> As for Hewlett Packard, well, you can take your Reverse
> Polish Notation, and your business maths analysis, and you
> can stuff it right up your arc.sin!
It's all making sense now. And yes, I did spend
my fledgling years grappling with Reverse Polish
Notation. Oh, what a waste! I should have been
out in the sunlight snorting birds and shagging
coke but, no, I was locked indoors typing
" 4 ent 2 + = 8 " under threat of fatherly violence.
I still have a red LED Novus 4510, made by
National Semiconductor. It says "The electronic
slide rule" on the box, which should have rung
alarm bells and said "get the fuck away from me,
I'm NOT NORMAL, I'm the Aphex Twin of the fucking
calculator world!" But oh no, we were sucked in,
like Luke Skywalker's laser gun up the marauding
nozzle of mothers 1100 Watt Henry Industrial-spec
vacuum cleaner. That was that, your whole life
mapped out, much of it spent typing "55378008",
turning the display upside down and laughing like
spotty adolescent hormone explosions, stuck in
a night time limbo world of Jet Set Willy, and
the same Star Trek repeats over and over endlessly
on telly. No matter when you tuned in, no matter
which episode you watched, it featured a bare
chested William Shatner rolling about with a
monster in a dusty quarry with an alien, Kirk's
paunch nicely oiled for the cameras, Turkish
wrestler style, perhaps catering for the
homoerotic subconscious needs of it's viewers. In
the same way, in which time becomes a loop, no
matter what episode of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn you watched, it was always the
one where he had to whitewash the fence. It was
later revealed that his paintbrush was merely a
phallic symbol. As for the whitewash, I'll let
your enquiring minds work that one out.
So, my dear chickens, the moral is that maths
in all its forms, pure, applied, is a load of toss.
Throw that adding machine out the window, put
on a yellow leatherette posing pouch with "You
KNOW you want it" written on the front in diamond
studs and go strut your stuff down the local
shopping centre like a big funky sex machine.
You'll have the old biddies literally making
puddles onto the floor at the delicatessen counter,
and that's when you'll strike - give it to them
hard and fast, over the stack of 7p a tin loss leader
baked beans. Their curlers will fall out, their
hearing aids will go into feedback and they'll
exclaim that they've "never had it like this since
1941 when my Alf got a bit randy down the
Anderson shelter." Sorted. You've down your
bit for the pensioners like a good citizen,
entertained the punters in Kwik Save, and will
never have to worry about shit like imaginary
numbers ever again.
Roger Penrose - eat your nob off.
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