The end of the world - part 1

The end of the world - part 1

Some birthdays are better than others. He had just bought his wife a brand new Japanese dishwasher so this was going to be one of her best.

            Professor Peter Papadopoulos Niccolo Machiavelli, Dave to his friends, was a pretty simple and straight forward sort of guy so he was shocked when he discovered the extent and deviousness of the Japanese plot.

            He had gone through the usual academic mill, BSc in Chemical Engineering followed by a Masters in applied creative writing, then he took a three year PhD. His thesis was, ‘ Events that could either cause the end of the world or annoy a couple of people for a few days,’ He had come up with some better titles – ‘It was the best of times and it was the worst of times’ but apparently this had already been used by some sociology student. His second choice was ‘It was the start of times’ but this had been claimed by Adam’s ghost-writer at Eden Publishing . ‘The end of Times’ had been challenged by a daily paper so he was left with the title above which he thought really flowed off the tongue and had a majestic note of authority.

            His next task was to list all the possible threats and dangers that could mean the end of the world – not the end of the world as we know it but the end of the world, full stop. These potential hazards included;-

·         Half of an island falling into the Atlantic and causing a huge tsunami that would destroy most of the Eastern seaboard of the Americas.

·         A massive meteorite strike a big as the one that destroyed the dinosaurs; and a few cockroaches but no one ever worries about them.

·         Human destruction of the Earth’s biosphere, making the Earth unable to support human life

·         Global warming which destroys the crop growing capacity of the Earth

·         A full stop

and

• Dishwashers

Yes, I know you probably think this is ridiculous; how could an island break in half and then fall into the sea? Much more likely is the dishwasher theory.

It goes something like this.

            You will know that the Japanese people tend to be somewhat vertically challenged. ( Please never call a Japanese man an oriental dwarf as ‘OD’ translates into Japanese as slimy tapeworm – which is hardly complimentary, you must agree. )

This has never been liked much by the Japanese people who look up to the Northern Europeans – they don’t have much choice really do they? – except of course when they are bowing or drinking tea on the floor.

Dr Arigato Origami was commissioned by the Japanese government to research into the cause of this height disparity and what could be done about it. After eleven years work at the University of Hari San ( Now, come on, I wouldn’t be that obvious would I? )  in Northern Honshoe  he came up with an explanation.

            Did you know that Japanese always rinse their dishes after washing them up while Europeans never do? Ari had discovered that it was the daily ingestion of tiny amounts of detergent that made the Europeans grow taller. It is too technical to go into it in much depth here but it has to do with the electro-gravitic tension between cells. This had to be stopped! He suggested that the Government in Tokyo should issue daily detergent pills but this was seen as unlikely to succeed – would you take a daily Daz tablet if the government asked you to? Exactly. Ari had to come up with a different solution so he invented dishwashers and started selling them to the gullible Europeans. ( Did you know that there was no such word as ‘gullible’ in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1873? ). The genius of this plan was that, not only did the Japanese make a lot of money selling the machines, but the dishes were rinsed by the machines so stopping the Europeans taking their daily dose of detergent. The machines could not be sold in Japan, for obvious reasons.

            There was a problem – it was the law of unintended consequences. This says that; Any well intentioned action will come back and bite you on the ankle – or something like that anyway.

            The sequence goes something like this; Europeans stop eating detergent, no detergent going down the drain to the sewage plant, no detergent going into the rivers, no detergent sprayed onto farmland via irrigation. No detergent going into the sea. If the European people stopped growing, what do you think happened to fish, crops, farm animals? Exactly, no food! Well there would always be sushi but who can live on that? This was not discovered until it was too late to start manufacturing detergent again, all the plants had been converted to dishwasher production.

            That famous phrase by Ted Eliot from his poem The Hollow Men sums it up really, ‘The end of the world came not with a bang but with a pre wash, hot soapy wash, rinse and dry.’