A tin full of people

 

A tin full of people

  

     Image courtesy of 'Wikimedia Commons'

A baby sardine

Saw her first submarine:

She was scared and watched through a peephole.

 

‘Oh, come, come, come,’

Said the sardine’s mum,

‘It’s only a tin full of people.’

Spike Milligan (1918-2002)

I was reminded of this verse while watching a cruise ship departing Southampton. Very few liners have elegant lines these days and look more like container ships, which I suppose is what they are. The very largest look like floating blocks of flats.

In the small hours of the night they are sparsely lit, the passengers mostly asleep, and the crew members the only folk awake. When darkness falls and before the cabin calls, the liners blaze like a department store at Christmas and there is endless associated noise, much like a passing car on the road with its music playing at full volume.

The thrumming of the engines and the cacophony of the passengers do nothing to enhance the peace of the sea. Noise pollution can affect the hearing of marine animals, causing stress and changes in behaviour. Such changes may lead to population decline because of decreased reproduction rates.

Cruise ships are one of the major sources of air pollution worldwide, affecting the air quality of coastal cities and ports. A luxury cruise ship emits as much particulate as 1 billion cars.

You can read more about the effects of cruise liners here, here and here.

I know people enjoy their cruises - some go on two or three a year - but perhaps the cruise liner companies could find some way of assisting the unseen world they are so carelessly destroying. There must be a way to moderate unnecessary travel, leisure travel, if you will - make them more expensive to undertake, set a limit on how many cruises one person can make in a year? (That would open up a Black Market in ticket sales, I'm sure.) 

Something must be done before we destroy life in the oceans as efficiently as we are annihilating  life on terra firma. Sadly, many of the measures to save our environment are ill thought-out and amount to virtue-signalling and back tracking on promises. The only remedy is for humanity to  change its ways. There's little hope of that until probably far too late.

 Our beautiful blue planet is fast becoming a dirty brown dead planet, spinning endlessly in space. Space is the next great frontier and the next we will undoubtedly fight over and despoil, if we survive that long.

Humans are essentially self-centred. In the past we had to be, to survive. Now, we take and take without thought for the consequences and of how our descendants - our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and their children - will manage to live in a depleted world.

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ 

What’s the time, Mr Wolf?

Perhaps you enjoyed this playground game when you were six or seven years old? It was a safe way to experience a frisson of danger and panic and an outlet for the demons that sometimes haunted childhood dreams. It maligned wolves but the knowledge of a wolf's true nature would come later in life, when innocent games would be replaced with more earnest pursuits. One child would volunteer or be chosen to be Mr Wolf. He would walk a little way off and turn his back on the rest of the group. Then the game could begin. The children would begin the sing-song chant.

'What's the time, Mr Wolf?'

After each question Mr Wolf would turn to answer them and the children would take a number of steps according to the time called out. Some children would take tiny steps, pretending fear, while others would show their 'courage' with huge strides.

'One o'clock.'

'What's the time, Mr Wolf?'

'Two o'clock.'

'What's the time, Mr Wolf?'

'Five o'clock.'

'What's the time, Mr Wolf?'

'DINNER TIME!'

At this point the children would scatter, screaming, but Mr Wolf usually managed to capture the nearest who then took his place and the ritual would start again.

Maybe the correct answer to the question is, 'It depends where you are in the Universe' for time is not constant. If you travel, for example on an aircraft, and then return you will have aged less than someone who hasn't travelled. This was proved by scientists who synchronised two atomic clocks, placing one in an aircraft and one in a stationary position. When returned the clock in the aircraft showed an earlier time than the stationary clock. (Atomic clocks are so accurate that they will lose only one second in tens of millions of years.)

So speed affects time. Gravity also has an effect. If a person could live at the top of Mount Everest the ageing process would be faster than for someone at sea level. There are some places in the universe that have incredibly high gravity. If it were possible to get inside a black hole, where gravity is so dense that nothing absorbed can ever escape, time would effectively stop. Furthermore, if one were able to inhabit a spinning black hole one would be able to view the end of the universe.

To stay forever young may be your dream while all around crumble into ruins but to do so you would have to travel phenomenally fast and the energy required would be enormous. It is not possible . . . but any space travel was unimaginable not so very long ago!

Exit from Celebrity Culture

I cannot believe that the lead story on Sky News today was the funeral of Michael Jackson, a black man who tried hard to turn himself into a white man, judging by his increasingly bizarre appearance. I was not a fan. His singing voice did not impress me though his dancing did.

Yesterday the news of a fresh agreement between USA and Russia over nuclear weapons was overshadowed by excited speculation over who might be attending the funeral of this celebrity and who might win a lottery to the following Memorial Service in the Staples Centre. Indeed, since the poor benighted man died last week the media has been filled with repeated reports and videos of his rather sad life. It was interesting to note that Elizabeth Taylor, a friend of the deceased, declined an invitation to attend what she referred to as a 'hoop-la' event.

Meanwhile, there is serious unrest in China, Burmese dissidents are still being repressed, soldiers are being blown up in Afghanistan, there are further clues to the origins of whales, talk of hominids that died out thousands of years ago, new discoveries in space . . . there are so many fascinating and interesting things happening in the world but they are eclipsed by 'celebrity'. I think celebrity news is a gift to lazy journalism – the researchers do the work of tracking down appropriate stills and video clips while the presenters regurgitate tired facts. However, they have to report what they're told to so perhaps it's management that needs to wake up, shape up or ship out.

Is it surprising that when children are asked what they want to do when they grow up many of them reply that they want to be pop singers or simply famous? Is it not time that 'reality shows'- an invitation to the voyeuristic – were replaced with real entertainment?

Michael Jackson – Requiescat in pace – if you're allowed to.