THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY
Men love history. You’ve only got to look at the hordes of strange men who hang around the Military History section at Waterstones to realise this. Not too many around the Homes and Interiors section or Wellbeing, but history? We love history. In most Sopranos episodes, big Tony Soprano was enjoying whatever was on the History Channel. By now most areas and subjects of history have been covered. You could say some have been over covered. I mean, how many more books about Nazi Germany can be written? I liked Stalingrad as much as the next man but when they start bringing out books like What Hitler Had for His Tea: Volume III: Wednesday or An MTV Cribs Special at Adolf ’s Bunker we know the market is saturated.
This chapter is a fresh look at the great moments in man history. All told from the point of view of a man whose brain is slightly addled from overdosing on butterscotch Angel Delight as a kid. My filter will focus on man history’s greatest hits. Sure, everybody knows who Albert Einstein is. He invented the theory of relativity. He also had great inventor hair. What the hell does it mean, though? It teaches us nothing about ourselves as men. There is a statue of Albert Einstein standing outside the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. It should be the man who invented the remote control. Or a statue of Percy Spencer. You don’t know who Percy Spencer is, do you? This is exactly what I’m talking about.
Well, he is in my opinion a greater scientist than Einstein. This is because Percy Spencer was the inventor of the microwave oven. His story is the epitome of what men’s history should be about. Yes, other scientists may have worked out ways to provide clean water for millions of people and that’s great, but every man should have a special place in their heart for Professor Spencer. He has provided millions of men with an amazing gift. The ability to be able to make an inedible meal within 30 seconds. Plus he accidentally discovered the technology while he was trying to blow stuff up.
As a former employee of the US Navy, Spencer was trying to refine and produce very powerful microwaves for use by American fighter planes – I presume so the pilots could heat food in their cockpits and enjoy a nice ham and cheese toastie while warmongering.
One day he accidentally strayed into the path of these rays and noticed that the peanut chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He realised that these rays could cook things. But the brilliance of Spencer was that he didn’t decide to go down the route of trying to turn his discovery into a horrible death ray. Oh no. He decided to use it for male emancipation.
With the advent of the microwave we no longer had to make a hash of trying to cook a meal with proper ingredients and four hours’ cooking time. We no longer had to suffer in silence eating beans on soggy toast, because now we had a machine that could nuke a meal in 30 seconds and we wouldn’t have to miss any of the football on the television.
OUT OF THE SEA
If we’re going to do this thing properly we should take our starting point as the moment we crawled out of the sea. This one’s a no-brainer. We all know men hate the sea. Sure, we’ll swim in it, we’ll hang around on the beach and look at it, but live in it? No way.
You’ve only got to look at any man on holiday whining about all the dried saltwater on his back and the fact that his soggy shorts are making his arse itchy to realise, men + sea isn’t going to be a long-term deal. Our genitals don’t like it either. Shrinkage happens, as Jerry Seinfeld told us.
So at some point around 315 million years ago we decided we’d had enough. That and one of us spotted a prehistoric babe in swimwear and someone selling cheap counterfeit watches and to the beach it was, baby!
For the next 314 million years or so we ambled about on the earth splitting into hundreds and thousands of species. This makes sense. Men aren’t the best at staying together; we like to drift off as something catches our eye. You often see women frantically looking for their boyfriends and husbands in shopping centres only to find them safe and well staring at the widescreen TVs or fondling gadgets. I’m always losing my wife at the supermarket. Maybe they need a desk for Lost Men to go to.
This is a store announcement. Has anyone lost the following men: Steve, Bob and Gary? If these men are yours please come and collect them from the Lost Man Desk…
Without wishing to sound dismissive of this period, not much really happened. What man couldn’t enjoy wasting 314 million years doing fuck all? Man heaven.
Obviously I’m not counting the dinosaurs – they were very exciting – but this book isn’t called The Dinosaur Commandments (that’s the next one). In fact, the most exciting thing that happened to mankind during this long era was that around 100 million years ago, we reached a crossroads in our evolution.
MOUSE OR MONKEY?
We had the choice to become monkeys or mice. That’s right, it was a simple case of would we rather be mice or monkeys? And who doesn’t love a monkey? Think of how much as kids we loved the PG Tips adverts with the piano-moving chimps. Arguably the greatest advertising campaign ever. Chimp removal men. Genius.
We rightly chose the path of monkey and modern man avoided the prospect of a tail and buck teeth (apart from the inhabitants of certain parts of Norfolk).
Then after a couple of 100,000 years (men don’t like to rush anything, it’s all in the preparation) we worked out it would be easier to walk on our hind legs and use sticks to smash things up. This was made possible by another huge evolutional leap: the opposable thumb. Evolutionary scientists will tell you that this development was important because it enabled us to pick up wood, make tools and hold things. This is all true, but thumbs were a much more important development in man history. Now for the first time since the universe began, we could give each other the thumbs-up.
No talking, no elaborate rituals, just a simple thumbs-up. The thumbs-up sign of course reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of Happy Days and the invention of the Fonzie double thumbs-up. The thumbs aloft was then ruined for ever by Radio One DJs and Sir Paul McCartney.
CIVILISATION
The primitive cave paintings of Trois-Frères in southern France contain some of the finest preserved examples of prehistoric art. Roughly 311 million years after crawling out of the primordial ooze, man decided to chronicle his achievements by taking some animal blood and tree sap and painting on the walls of his cave. If they hadn’t there would have been no Tony Hart, Rolf’s Cartoon Club or Neil Buchanan’s Art Attack. It’s not even worth thinking about. Though Morph was ruined when they brought in that plasticine wanker Chas.
What did these brave Neanderthals depict in the early paintings? Their battle against rival tribes? The taming of fire? A list of all the woolly mammoths they had hunted and killed? Nope. They simply drew a massive penis. Really. It says a lot about the psyche of man that you can travel back to the cradle of humanity and the first tentative steps towards civilisation and literally find a willy scrawled across it. You can imagine one caveman spending hours painting a hunting scene, then going for a wee and coming back to find a big cock and balls scrawled across his hard work and his mates in the corner sniggering. It’s reassuring to know that almost 15,000 years later we’ve come full circle from drawing penises in French caves to drawing the very same penises on bakers’ heads in French language textbooks at school.
MAN’S FIRST LOVE
It was around about this time that man started the most significant relationship of the millennia. Fire.
We can never truly know how man was introduced to fire but we know that it was definitely love at first sight. However, it’s strange that almost 10,000 years later we still can’t