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Tuesday
August 24, 2004

'You Smell of Goat': A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf by Peter Cresswell

When wildebeest and wild beasts roamed the plains thousands of years ago, early man roamed with them ... and often provided them with a good meal. A successful hunt was all such poor creatures had to celebrate: the high point in mens' bleak existence was (very occasionally) roasting a wild beast over an open fire. Then, for just a few brief moments in their short and brutal lives, when their bellies were full and their bodies warm, their thoughts could (at last!) roam to higher things. With the kill they had bought themselves time to think.

And what was it they thought about? What great realisations did they come to? After much skull-sweat they concluded that , in the immortal words of Tom Waits, 'twere better to be a good liver than to have one. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (41 messages)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 1:42am

Ekfellent, Mifter Crefwell. I enjoyed profefing thif fo much I put it at the head of the queue & fanctioned it fraight away.

Linf

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 2:40am

Is it just my computer, or are other folk here unable to access this article as well? :-(

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 2:45am

I fixed it once before, but someone went back and unfixed it. Try it again.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 2:45am

I can't read the article either!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 3:02am

Thanks Joe. It is now fixed :-)

Brilliant article Peter. A few points though.

"On such nights, and over the course of those thousands of year of struggle, there was one thought, one goal, that drove these men forwards: the idea of beer!"

Have can you have the idea for Beer, before you've had one. Wasn't it more likely an accident. Someone stored some mouldy wet grain in a barrel or something?

"To make matters worse, the main non-alcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD."

Actually, Ergot was responsible for many deaths. It caused hallucinations and fits. It was not a nice thing to get. It is also thought to be the cause of trials of Witches as a form of scapegoat for something they couldn't understand - as it only grew on the grain in certain climate conditions from time to time.

P.S. Ergot caused what is known as the "St Vitus’ Dance". Apparently, Andy Warhol had a bout of it when he was a child. That explains a lot :-)

(Edited by Marcus Bachler on 8/24, 4:21am)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 3:03am

Thanks Joe - it's viewable now. And thank you, Peter, for this sublimely funny "hiftory"!!!

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 4:18am

Hilarious!

If only modern-day Muslims would lighten up and drink an occasional beer the world might not be so messed up.

And Marcus, I'm not sure how beer was invented, but the secret of putting bubbles into beer was discovered by a young Tasmanian called Albert Einstein (aka Yahoo Serious):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6301589106/002-9295098-7492040?v=glance

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 9:11am

First of all, I don't think there is anything wrong with anyone's computers. I just think you're all snockered.
Second, I offer, in humble tribute, a poem I wrote in 1954, when I was 10 years. Our assignment was to write about Valentine's Day. My artistic muse doesn't like to be summoned, so I came forth with the following:

Valentine's Day
by Jimmy Kilbourne

Valentine's Day is such a happy time
When you see big red hearts
It reminds me of my dear Clementine
Who I threw in the water in parts

It was such a bloody sight
To see her float away
The water was kind of a reddish white
It's still that way today

I saw her arm come bobbing up
And kept it for a souvenir
It made such a lovely tasty snack
As I dunked it in my beer.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 9:37am

What a delightfully macabre sense of humour you had (have?), young Jimmy! :-)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 11:12am

Thank you, Derek. I am still being treated for it, but it is quite comfortable here at the home, accept for this damn jacket that ties in the back...

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 9:13am

to begin with, your notion of early humanity is all wrong... thinking came first from the women, not the men, as did the first civilizations - and, for that matter, fermented drinks... get off the discredited 'tarzan' notion, read elayne morgan's works, as well as jane jacobs' the economy of cities... biology is the passing of the children, without which there'd be no men... which made the women equally important...for without the women, no children would have survived...

as for the rest, the praising of the fermented - is indeed a quaffled article, and very enjoyable...

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 9:15am

slight correction - it is the child who first thought, or exercised the brain in that direction, buttressed by the women... the men, tho, still came in last...

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 1:08pm

Robert M:

lay off the feminist archaeology. Riane Eisler and all of her clones have one simple agenda: to do as much selective interpreting as necessary to give females credit for everything good, and males credit for everything bad. women invented civilization. women invented agriculture. women invented this. women invented that. we used to live in a female ruled utopia until men ruined it all with their natural masculine depravity.

yeah fucking right.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 2:44pm

Robert said: "...to begin with, your notion of early humanity is all wrong... thinking came first from the women, not the men, as did the first civilizations - and, for that matter, fermented drinks."

Absolutely wrong, Robert. As that seminal twentieth-century anthropologist Hoagy Carmichael pointed out:

Talking is a women,
Listening is the man. [Italics mine.]

Clearly, you can't think while incessantly chattering! Obviously what Hoagy meant here was that, as listeners qua listener, men are contemplative and thoughtful and have always been so.

Now some of those thoughts, Marcus, must have been about beer (at least in the abstract), for even long before anybody had ever sunk a cold one they would surely have been thinking something like this:

a) those fermented berries we stumbled across yesterday were really, really nice; and
b) Oh, my head!; and
c) perhaps if we plant some of this grain we might get more of it next year, and avoid having to wander around all the time; and
d) I bet if we had lots of grain and worked out a way for that to ferment we'd really be on to something; and
e) I wish that woman would shut up her chattering!

Now, it took a while to give a single word to all this ruminating but, eventually, when those clay pots of stored grain begin to turn damp, and then starchy, and then yeasty, and then tasty ... one word could be used to sum it all up: Beer!

And so beer was invented, and man saw that it was good. And lo! the woman did stoppeth her chattering -- or if she didn't, verily the man did not give a shit, for he was falling down and giving thanks ... or at least that's what he said he was up to last to night.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 5:17pm

Ancient woman may have been wiser than you think. Here is an interesting passage from "Six Thousand Years of Bread" by H.E. Jacob:

"...the woman became mightier than the man, because she knew the qualities of various herbs...There were those that induced sleep and those that brought merriment...the woman possessed a way to lull the man's fear, for she had observed how beetles and butterflies clung to fermented sugar that the heat of the sun had made ooze from the barks of trees. Thus the woman learned to brew intoxicating drinks. And the men arose after they had slept off their intoxication and returned joyfully to their flocks."

Heh heh... ;)

Jennifer

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 5:31pm

(Edited by Peter Cresswell on 8/24, 5:33pm)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 5:32pm

The wise and thoughtful Jennifer said: "Heh heh..."

And I reply: "Aha!"

As Hoagy Carmichael went on to say:

Talking is a woman,
Speechless is a man.

:-)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 10:00pm

She must have been wearing glossy red lipstick. ;)

Ba-dum-tsh.

J

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - 10:37pm

Guys: If you like the well-brewed males so much form a club and have 'intoxication' till you drop - just don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses ;-) ...
drunken bragging called nourishment (of belly and mind) will not change the many facts that indeed the women were first, were better and will remain last (we even live longer!) ... for details check 'Walker, Barbara G.: The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper and Row, New York, 1983' and 'Stone, Merlin:. (1979) Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: Our Goddess and Heroine Heritage 2 vol.' ... just calling it feminist guilt-trapping will not make it so!
Face facts boys: the y-chromosome is just a damaged x that cannot even stand on one foot ... certainly not when it's drunk :-)
As for that wonderful brew of your's: keep it! If it is your greatest claim to civilisation bear in mind that even monkeys could get drunk and hung-over ... I don't think anybody ever checked the dinos :-]
VSD

Wednesday, August 25, 2004 - 12:41am

Peter, like all great new ideas, yours seems ridiculously simple and obvious when finally stated. You are one of the foremost liberators of mankind.

Barbara