History and fiction - and dinosaurs

When I was pre-teen, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I would have been content curating a museum, because long excavations without access to proper showers wearing clothes chosen because they showed the dirt the least and brushing dirt away from a metatarsal would have tested my love even for custard croissants. Then a teacher - as they do - crushed my hopes by pointing out I wasn't very good at, like, school. Jokes on her because I then vaulted the scholarly alphabet, but sans my dreams.

What they fail to tell you in school - among many things - is that a job title hides many variations of task. Even though I lacked fundamental logical skills, as it turns out, I could have risen through the corporate landscape, perhaps in funding, by bemoaning the inadequacies of the previous job-holder and then revising everything because Steve Jobs did it (in a competitive and innovative technological environment that is completely different to most companies).

I especially love dinosaurs. Now, I understand that this discipline is a bit of a joke because it requires ignoring the amazing range of animals we have now. But, they are giant reptile-like creatures, people. And this is also a treasure hunt. We don't even really know what they look like or sound like, just where they died, really. We don't have complete skeletons, people. We're throwing a party if we find an intact femur. And like with Pluto, we're notching creatures off roll call all the time.

When I was still living in the clouds like scarecrow looking for my brain, I had collections of magazines, trading cards and posters of my favorite dinos. I drew a cartoon of a dinosaur family that I realise now was improbable because different species can't breed, and I'm pretty sure a T-Rex and brontosaurus do not a stegosaurus make. Most kids grow out of this and into, I dunno, cars and making dinner like adults.

Did you know there is actually an internet discussion about who would win: T-Rex or Allosaurus? Your answer? It's a trick question. They lived in different eras. But should time and space collapse, my money's on the Allosaurus. The T-Rex is bulky and wins mostly by rushing at its prey, and Allosauris is lithe and fights like a boxer. Another anticipated show-down is Allosaurus versus Stegosaurus. I leave that to your imagination.

A stegosaurus staring down an Allosaurus.

There is a type of dinosaur that would beat them both. A saurupod (four-legged herbivore) so big nothing could kill an adult, except maybe worms, gangrene and flu. Oh, and humans. First they were known as gigantosaurs (yes, I know, I would have called it Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus) and then titanosaurs (I call it Fiveminutesoffame-saurus). A single femur is about one and a half times the height of a person.

A herbivore at the centre of the food chain.

According to reputable sources, a velociraptor was captured last year alive in Congo. There are some people who take this seriously because some fossils of extinct dinosaurs that were not wiped out in the mass extinction have been found in the area. Unfortunately space and time has not collapsed, and a few million years is a long time for anything to hibernate. Also, if they were real, I would be there reenacting the scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are hiding in the kitchen.

Some of my favourites have always been (until they check it off roll call) a species of duck-billed dinosaurs, which is a description not a nickname. They grazed in the same way as cattle, with their lips. Do I need to state the obvious? That their lips looked like bills. Well now I have. They ate on four legs but ran away on two, smart buggers.

Bird beak rather than bill, maybe.

This was not where My Point was meant to be (this never happens. Never). I was actually going to write about a popular science book I am reading that I am sceptical about. (The author claims he wrote a paper that founded string theory. Which is interesting given that the theory predates his birth.) But, you know, then dinosaurs. Perhaps I like history because if it were going to affect us, it already has. Like a  novel, you can close the book or skip the chapter on mass sacrifice or how that fossil came to be dead in the first place. You squint at your mortality, shift your head so that it looks like immortality and leave to get lunch.

I would be good at curating a museum. Far away from other people. With only the past and fiction for company. (I meant or: past or fiction. Definitely.) Can someone translate Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus into Latin?

PS. I realise a person who hunts dinosaurs is a paleontologist. But I was 12.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Part 2 of 2

What is the attention span of a gnat? I am figuring that we find out its life span and divide that into something objective, like the attention span of a fly, or by the amount of time they can spend on a single task. Then we could wander through a few academic halls and land up considering the consciousness of tiny flying animals or fall through the moldy hall that is when a baby becomes a person. As you may have surmised (and as intended) you may have noticed I have a short attention span, which I would compare with that of a gnat's - no, I will compare it and tell you it is two minutes and 3.2 seconds, because I can and I did.

I have also realised that I have said 'would have' a few times today. There are three 'have's in that sentence alone. What the heck is the point of that word? (And before you get snarky, you, I am well aware there is a linguistic answer, but my point still holds because this is my blog and if I say a gnat can only focus on a single task (as defined by me) for two minutes, that is valid.)

So, I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by sheer force of will. My opinion hasn't changed. Although the structure is interesting, the symbols are heavy-handed. I could not empathise with a single character until the last 2% of the book, but by then I could also not subjugate my lack of suspension of disbelief. (I am really trying here. Whenever I want to point out how illogical something is and that it is a result of laziness not plot, I hear the 'eh' of Dwight from The Office every time he wants to point out something illogical - usually to do with bears. It builds up at the back of the throat and pops from the nasal cavity like a buzzer in a game show.)

This isn't a spoiler, unless you are inclined to belief: the book is set over centuries upon centuries, where humans build up their technology over and over to a point when they can create nuclear bombs. How? How could this happen?

Geologists tell us (although this may be a fringe group of rogue scientists who do not believe in pollution) that the poles are overdue for a shift, whereupon north becomes south, confusing swallows, polar bears and brown bears, as well as pirates and hopefully radar linked to bombs. It may or may not kill us (dust storms, rampaging polar bears and swallows, bombs). Also, (and FYI) a certain degree of climate change is normal, judging by the ice age and the fact that Europe was a desert. (Interesting point: the size of dinosaurs was only possible because the density of the air was lower than it is now.)

Given this was written in the 60s, this would take us way into the 5000s, when (hopefully for the planet) we are extinct, because, entropy. More than a few of the surviving populations would have some kind of mutation (not the X-men kind, but if I could choose, something that gives me the ability to sprint and climb like a mountain goat, because, zombies) from the recurring nuclear bombs, which they would need anyway for the fittest, which no offence, cannot be almost exclusive to monks!

Here's another meaty one for the academics: technological determinism. This book assumes a single pinnacle of human discovery and creation. Bombs, intercoms, phones, planes etc. But a) I can imagine oh so many alternatives, like, what if we discovered the more eco-friendly (and therefore smarter) solutions to electricity, fuel and, errr, general human habitation, first? And b) does this 'pinnacle' really make society 'better'?

This a controversial topic and my gnat brain has moved on. Name of the Rose depicted a monk and a monastery in Italy that captivated my imagination. In this book I met three monks I did not like or only learnt to like in the very last pages of their chapter. It is one thing to kill off characters like a gnat flaps its wings and another thing to just move me to another monastery and then tell me they died of old age while I wasn't looking. It, in fact, makes me care less about your very stupid because they are very human characters. I have compared my brain to a gnat more than once today, therefore your argument is invalid.

Initially my foray in the world of insects was intended to justify A List. First, I did not want to talk about that book of invalidities as it shall be known from now on. Second, I am already bored, so I figured that bullet points would be more my speed. Since this argument is so very compelling, I shall add A List now, in the same blogpost, because I do not feel like writing out more than one tweet.

In the spirit of the above review (don't groan, you) I am going to pick five of the least dis-believable books I have read. I will however use short phrases instead of full, therefore very boring sentences.

1. A Canticle to Liebowitz
2. A Stranger in a Strange Land: life on Mars, general 60s-like (and spirited) shenanigans, a human taking on the physical abilities of another species as if sprinting like a cheetah were a combination of will and absence of will
3. Heart of Darkness and Atomised: more a lack of liking and an abundance of hatred than of disbelief
4. Zoo City: animal familiars that appear when you commit a crime, the final scene
5. Her Fearful Symmetry: ghosts, the characters' complete absence of character, other characters, plot - all of it, narrator (and all this from the writer who made me believe in time travel!)

While we're at it, let's add Gulliver's Travels

I always feel the need to point out that magic is meant to be compatible with physical laws, like gravity and the conservation of mass. Even zombies have an (albeit loose) explanation! So if something that didn't exist before is magicked into existence and it is made of atoms, where were those atoms before? Because so many other tricks rely on the existence of atoms - and I do not mean an interpretation of quantum laws, because *insert game-show sound effect*. Oh, I'm overthinking? Well - ok, the gnat has flown off.

In other words, if an animal familiar appears, was it lurking around waiting for you to do something awful? Is it missing from a zoo somewhere? Is it a manifestation of some communal judgement? Someone, somewhere, must have a clue - must have noticed a trend of disappearing animals - even if it isn't yet verified. And what trend is there regarding the type of crime considered worthy of a (really awesome - and if you're handing them out I'll take one) animal? Legal, societal, religious? Just one real clue, please. (I also want the awesome inseparable animal. Imagine walking down the street with a tiger, a polar bear, a tortoise, a wolf - do they come in extinct too and if so, hello, black rhino.)

Impressive - my attention is holding more like a fly battering itself against a window. (As I typed that, my bunny sat on my stomach, so maybe I am sorted. Still, a polar bear? I adore polar bears.)

What a meandering post. I think the most meandering I have ever written. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it gives me more wiggle room in future. To sum up: every book mentioned in this post, except for the Umberto Eco, is ridiculous. According to the woman with her gnat in her skull. The unconscious doesn't restrict itself to dreams. Do you see it? I asked for a polar bear when I had already been given a gnat. Does the extent of the crime affect the size of the animal? Could an insect be a familiar? That seems a bit of an anticlimax. Like this conclusion. (I walked right into that one.)

V & 1Q84

They have more in common than isolated consonants from the second half of the alphabet (that would be V and Q for those to lazy to glance at the heading and work it out). This is not beginning well. Which is another thing these books have in common. More accurately, they (the beginnings of these two books - and even this post) are awkward.

I felt the introduction should end awkwardly, too. Yes, I did that on purpose. Not because I had no idea where to go from there.

We will get back to the awkwardness shortly, don't worry. I want to tell you about something else they have in common, which is the real reason for this post of paragraphs that end like cliffs. Me.

As you should know (you religious reader of this irreverent blog), I am reading 1Q84, but in tiny portions like baby quiches and cucumber fingers stolen from trays carried by waiters around the room. After more weeks than I have limbs, I have only just reached page 209. Of 1 300 and something. And three parts. In between I have been reading 'sorbet' reads: frivolous, with happy(ish) endings and only light intellectualism.

So why then I should read V by Thomas Pynchon is a mystery. You know those competitions where marketers ask us to test the new flavour of chips or yoghurt or fizzy drink, and name it - which is so dubious because, if they can't figure it out, there has to be an experimental and perhaps accidental mouthful of preservatives and flavourants in there? This is that kind of mystery.

Let's retrace our steps back to the awkward introduction (not because we've lost our way. No. Definitely not).

Ulysses. Yet another thing these books have in common. If Terry Pratchett is prince of light reads, Murakami is prince of opaque Literature. James Joyce is king. The plot of a Murakami novel cannot be summarised without sounding like a Philip K Dick plot (which is really the snail trail of his brainwaves on acid).

You don't believe me? The first protagonist is a gym trainer slash assassin, who murders wife-beating politicians with a tiny ice pick. The second protagonist is a language tutor who discards his ethics to rewrite a short story so that the author can win a prize. She is a dyslexic, potentially emotionally disturbed young woman, who cannot use punctuation in speech. She also believes in 'Little People'.

Oh and there is some kind of space-time warp where events impose themselves in hindsight like a waiter with a tray of baby quiches into your conversation.

V is a colleague of said waiter, except he apologises and then explains what is on the tray under your nose. In other words, the characters and even the narrator steer you toward a premeditated snail trail of thought. The narrator outlines the potential paths you can follow and the exits you can choose, should you choose to follow and exit.

Despite the comparative doggedness of V's themes, the language of the first limbs-worth of chapters reminded me of Joyce. Sentences end abruptly, words leapfrog each other and dialogue is sometimes invisible.

The book begins by following a drifter who is AWOL from the navy. His name is Profane. He drifts for a while, building roads, until drifting back to his former cabinmates, all of whom are um choice characters. The moral epitome of the sort of person who doesn't read. Including the women. The language and even the characters quickly become your calendar - the setting for the memory of these days and weeks.

Despite this, I was irritated by how little of the chapters I understood. Until the chapter in which Profane signed up to hunt and cull alligators in the sewers. Here I finally understood Profane - divorced from most of the cabinmates I judge so pretentiously.

Confession (don't get excited; this is only a mushroom of a confession): My Kindle copy of V is not exactly legal. By which I mean it is entirely illegal. I rarely read free books unless they are loaded on my library card (if you happen to find it) or loaned from a friend. And by rarely, I mean never. I am setting a precedent for when I am an author and need income to pay for food.

As you don't know, because you never do such things, pirated copies are often of bad quality. This may explain the missing articles, prepositions and conunctions. And the misspellings of 'it' and 'and'. The BA student will loftily proclaim that this is a practical metaphor for the death of the author. But no. My guess is that either this is an edited but unproofread manuscript or an OCRed version of the Kindle version.

Perhaps the alligators never waddle through the original version.

Now, this is awkward.

Another confession (a toddler of a mushroom): The two books have less in common than I have suggested. Not only because my copy of 1Q84 is legal. V plays with language and ideas, but you can still read it for hours on end without remembering you haven't had a cup of coffee yet.

1Q84 is why you need coffee.

From these last two posts, you might think I do not like 1Q84. I do. (Confession: I am not sure whether I do or don't.) But, true to form, it is opaque, even opaquely opaque.

PS. This conclusion is intentionally awkward.

[Insert your name here] is a...

"Camilla is a hag." (For those of you with limited memory, that is my name - or my assumed name. Psych.) Followed by "Camilla is a commoner". The self-inflicted cruelty of asking Google who I am was sparked by Facebook. If Facebook says to do something, you do it. Or don't it, depending on your stance towards social media. In which case this cruelty is news to you. I didn't do it, not for any political reason, but because who has never Googled their name before? Apart from that new village of pygmies that discovered us recently. Or more accurately, discovered a race of helicopters.

Which makes me wonder about the helicopter maker. Upon discovering the helicopter hovering above them like she was going to lay ginormous eggs, did the men defiantly waving spears at her guess the object is human-made? Or would they have to take a closer look to pull apart wires and empty fuel tanks? Or would they assume the forest (being the source of all and named Djengi) created this really big dragonfly, like the Khoisan men in The Gods Must be Crazy who only showed up everyone's lack of sophistication.

They may have Googled their names having discovered us, because no doubt they are now clothed in Hawaiian shirts and begging poverty, while the forest is being cut down at a rate of one football field a day (I assume this is big, being (still awaiting its status as a standard unit) untranslated into soccer fields).

The Camilla referred to is Parker-Bowles. Even as a child, people used to tease me with that and think they were the first ones. To adults, I laughed and made a face. To people I didn't have to be respectful to, I asked if they thought I looked like a horse. So if I were Googling her name, that would be my contribution. How terrible, I know, but I don't know her and I was scarred by the whole Charles-love-letter thing as a child so I feel justified.

It's a silly game meant to point out the silly things people ask Google, as if Google were Djeni, the creator of the helicopter. I hope. But also we're saying who we're not and (in those cases where the result is blush-worthy) who we are, in our lifelong search to chisel out our identities. (No, I'm not saying you're Michelangelo. Or a sculpture.) Just to clarify, I am not a hag. Yet. I may be a commoner, but I think Marx and Engels had a point, before they wandered down the illogically violent path of Robespierre.

Most people know what their name means, even if it is so old we no longer use the name to mean what it means in normal (or in my case any) conversation. I am neither Russian nor more than one half (going back three generations, so ok, some fraction on either side) British. My name means 'attendant at a sacrifice', suggesting it's really old, because we don't sacrifice anything except our integrities these days. I could have done worse - I'm just there holding the sacrifice down and mopping up the blood.

Although, two things occur to me: I am more disturbed by the thought of sacrificing a sheep or something, and as with Robespierre, attending these things usually puts you on list to be sacrificed. When the winds change, they don't only bring the stench of the things you have done.

At this point I must remind myself (and you, you) that I have never participated in or sanctioned blood sacrifice (except of integrity). This chisel is faulty.

My name is not a common one (score). So there is only one other cultural reference to my name, but it is (mostly) worthy of one's pride in the character of someone who isn't you. Chisel-stuff.

This Camilla is a warrior princess favoured by the gods. One of them at least. She only takes up a few lines in Virgil's Aeneid, but she is almost totally who I wish I were. Kind of. If I could stay me and be those bits of her. Without any sacrifices. Because, as I think about it, there is at least one in this part of the epic poem. To clarify, deity of the helicopter, before you award me what I wish for and whisper be careful underneath your breath, I would like to still be me, as I am now, with additional qualities from the warrior-princess, as enumerated below, in a context-appropriate way (I don't own a bow or a horse), without sacrifices, except ones of integrity, but only if sacrifices are part of the deal, which I don't want them to be.

"Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile - Penn Provenance Project" by kladcat - Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile

She is a tot in swaddling blankets when the commoners run her father, a king, out of town for being a tyrant. He runs like a bat out of hell with his daughter until he comes to a river that he can't cross with the little one in his arms. Instead of looking for a more rational mode of transport, he appeals to the goddess Diana, promising her his daughter if she arrives safely on the other side. Well, lands safely, because (yip) he throws her across, tied to a spear, and then follows doing doggy paddle.

She lives. (Don't try that at home; this is mythology.)

Diana was one of those multi-tasking goddesses: she liked to hunt and could talk to animals, as well as being obsessed with the moon. Camilla grew up wild and hunted a lot, so she looked impressive when she rolled into the town of Ardea to fight the Trojans: "her hair/Bound in a coronal of clasping gold/Her Lycian quiver, and her pastoral spear... and her, the maid, how fair!"

Camilla and her band of merry hunters ride into battle without fear (a healthy emotion) and she proves why: she lays half a horde of men low with bow and arrow, and then ducks back when she sees the other half are intent on revenge. She is so effective in battle that the narrator asks: "Whom first, dread maiden, did thy javelin quell?/Whom last? how many in the dust lay low?" Then he enumerates them and their bloody deaths. Let's skip the sacrifices.

Then she forgets herself. She sees a man who looks like one of the Clegan brothers from Game of Thrones and gets greedy. She spears him and taunts him as he dies. "Yet take this glory to the grave, and say/Twas I, the great Camilla, made thee die." The blood-lust has her and the taunt becomes a battlecry. Instead of striking and then retreating, she chases her prey, yelling: "Fie! shall a woman scatter you in flight?/O, slack! O, never to be stung to shame!" Granted, the horde of dead men is piling up.

One of the Trojans who escaped her spear, stalks her and stakes her. These guys were more talented than modern mafia henchmen and zombie killers, because every soldier dies on first hit. She dies and Diana despairs. Because a goddess is involved, the story doesn't end (the epic is an epic for a reason, but this sub-plot too). Diana dispatches one of her nymphs to revenge the man who killed her (for all intents and purposes) daughter. Complaining about the waste of an arrow on such a cretin, the nymph kills him. He dies quickly, because we're distracted bemoaning Camilla's fate.

This goes on for a while, so I'm making an executive decision to end the story here.

Camilla is all the things a warrior should be, with all the merits of a princess. I'll take that thanks: speed, determination, bravery, strategic skills, beauty, poise, with the patronage of a goddess. But in the midst of battle, she becomes greedy and cocky. She yells taunts that are beneath her - what does she need to prove? And why?

There's something I haven't told you yet. Why are they fighting if Camilla's father lost their kingdom yonks ago? Who are they fighting for? Camilla and her soldiers needn't have marched into battle. Ostensibly, the king of the Rutuli is a good friend of hers (platonic, if you know anything about Diana), so they are marching to his aid. He has a kazillion soldiers of his own with those of other kingdoms - she and her crew are not a host, even if you squint, even if Camilla is pretty terrifying.

She goes to battle partly because she wants to prove something but also because she has fallen in love with the bloody end of the hunt. She wants to experience the power of taking the life of a man equipped to take your own. She imagines that, as a woman, she is underestimated and proving each man otherwise is part of the thrill. And remember that she survived being thrown over a river on the back of a spear. Who wouldn't feel immortal?

Trust me, I know this all because I share her name. I signed the contract assuming her identity (but I didn't check the clause about the sacrifice). Really, I did some reading, and some of it is just me and my chisel hacking away. The line between the two is made of salt and it just started raining. I don't feel guilty for misinforming you, because isn't that what reading is about? Making something out of clues? Carving yourself out of marble? Or making a helicopter?

For years, I disliked my name, because I thought it was out-modish and staid. Learning the meaning of my name cast it in a different light: a bit mystical - for ages, I struggled to understand what 'attendant' meant: someone who simply attended, was part of the crowd, or someone who participated but was not the ringleader or the actual sacrifice. I still don't know, really. That in itself is revealing, right? But would you rather be the one watching or the one doing something? There may be a strain of Camilla in me yet - be careful what you wish for.

PS. The Aeneid is an Epic Poem, in the sense that it is part of a genre and in the sense that it is Very Long. It ranks up there in the ratio between efforts and results with Chaucer. Or Franzen's The Corrections. Choose wisely.

The immortality of dinosaurs

Saturday, late afternoon. That time of week when I write and post a new blog entry, which according to my tags will be a mixture of a review and musing. I like to think of each post as a Socratic dialogue using books as a vehicle. (‘Think’ being as far from reality as ‘hope’ and ‘belief’ – see here’s a bit of epistemology! And a homespun epigram: Hope is not a strategy. Take that to the bank, you.) This is when you open your RSS feed or a plain old browser in anticipation of said dialogue. Or will do, now that you know when I post.

All of this is an attempt to distract you while I figure out what I am going to write about. See, most of what I have read this week is techie news and a little of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (about which I have still to develop an opinion). Then I thought, I can dust off one of the oldies, like Anthem by Ayn Rand, even that scene in A Passage to India by Henry James, where the protagonist undergoes an existential crisis in the dark of a cave.

Really what I want to talk about is the new Transformers movie (which looks epic, and fyi, is a discussion of good and evil, and to what extent violence is acceptable for a good cause. Ok, really it is a developed-world justification for violence as a necessary good where the moral values are patriotism and democracy (sarcasm hand)) and dinosaurs. Dinosaurs also often carry the weight of humanity’s sense of impending doom, which has a parallel in the fear of our own mortality when a character suffers, transferred to the security of your immortality when said character dies (and you don’t) onscreen or in a book.

I won’t, though, because I realise that the market of functioning adults for whom the event of the year is a movie based on a children’s series, is niche. (Although, seriously folks, they are AI robots that can transform into fast cars, mid-air, and Optimus Prime’s voice could convince me to buy ostrich steak for the good of the world (I am a vegetarian, but when I ate such things, ostrich meat was my least favourite).

Dinosaurs, though, are a different kind of steak. When I was young (most of primary school and the beginning of high school), I wanted to become an archaeologist (now, even spelling the word was a feat for a young’n so jest not). This was after my dreams of becoming a ballerina (I stopped dancing at about the time I was moving into point shoes), marine biologist (I am terrified large bodies of water), writer (no money) and teacher (no money) became unrealistic. (I was getting to the age when reality foisted itself on me – I later banished it.)

I used to draw cartoons of a dinosaur family, comprising improbably of a T-Rex and a Brontosaurus (that fairy of the dinosaur world) in primary and secondary colours. I say cartoons but they were not funny, even though my parents laughed hollowly at the last frames. I had playing cards, magazines, posters (alongside point shoes, Roxette and exercises meant to alleviate my short-sightedness) and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton that you could take apart and piece back together (I have one now too, but it doesn’t glow).

Funnily enough, Chrome shows a dinosaur when it can’t find an internet connection to open a website, as it is doing now.

So I was going to become an archaeologist, a less unrealistic goal - except that I have always hated Geography. And didn't have an affinity for Maths and Science. Which a teacher felt obliged to tell me as parent evening loomed. As I do, I acted as though this was old news (as if I simply didn't want to peel the tape from the walls when I peeled off the dinosaur posters). Although I can agree with one relevant point: I can imagine crawling around in the dirt with a tiny paintbrush searching for fossils for about the length of a workday. Then I would want a hot shower with extra hot asap followed by a bed with a fluffy duvet. Ok, I could scrap the bed and consider a tent, but I still want hot water. And in the morning I want to go home.

I later toyed with become a graphic designer (I lasted one year at advertising school, which is a real thing - I suspect the last year involves seminars in capitalism and the ills of empathy) (no money, except in advertising) and journalist (no money).

Book publisher! This way I could make close to no money with integrity. Assuming a loud voice and looking around: No, not really haha (whispering: but kinda). And then I specialised in Maths. Because I have no affinity with it (sarcasm hand).

This tortuous walk through careers loved and lost has become My Point, although my initial point was that dinosaurs (and transforming robots) are a) epic and b) that functioning adults who love one or both can come out of the closet now because nerds are taking over the earth.

In a last-ditch attempt to convince you that dinosaurs deserve your respect and adoration, consider the latest obsession with dragons in the wake of Game of Thrones. (FYI, in my youth I also taped up pictures of dragons, and drew pictures of dragons, but not funny ones, because you don’t make fun of dragons or dinosaurs (except in that T-Rex-making-the-bed meme, but we could count that as an awareness campaign for dinosaurs whose terrifyingness, fundamental to their survival, is undermined by their short and weak arms)).

Focusing. You like dragons, right? (Everyone likes dragons, duh.) Dragons are like dinosaurs except that:

• they breath fire
• they can fly (even if this is scientifically improbable - birds the size of emus and ostriches are too heavy to fly)
• they are fictional, and
• they can be tamed.

Tame creatures lack the fearsomeness of wild creatures, even the herbivores (ever gotten up close to a river buck?). Mostly, because, well, they’re tame. But even if I were in a theme park devoted to dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park I would not so much as scratch a belly, even if it were a stegosaurus.

The crack in this discussion (yes, this is a serious discussion, you) is that, well, dinosaurs are extinct, so we can’t know if we'd be able to break them like mustangs (probably) and the view in the rear mirror concentrates history so that we can tame its population in adjectives and metaphors. Dinosaurs ‘ruled’ the earth (they didn't give it up because they were weak – I’d put our chances against an asteroid at very low, even if we did maroon someone on it with a bomb) before we did.

So we give them names and even personalities - but we don’t tame them. (We don't tame robots either and I suspect the Transformers are humouring us. Fictionally, I mean. Obviously.) Buffered by time, they come to represent strength that is both familiar (lizards and things) but unfamiliar in sheer size (literally, because the composition of the air was different there and allowed for animals with a bulk that would crush them like a can today). They represent consistency, adaptation and diversity, and the fear that humanity could be wiped out remorselessly and without warning.

Also, dinosaurs didn’t embark on a consistent campaign of destroying the natural habitat and enslaving each other in the name of survival of the fittest. They just killed and ate each other in the name of survival of the fittest. And they couldn't use language so they didn't really conceptualise this either. Luckily for them, they didn't have to fight us for survival, though. I’d take my chances with the asteroid. The End