All Quiet on the Dodo Front

Hello world! It's been quite some time since the last update from As A Dodo Towers but we can assure you that we haven't yet gone the way of all flesh (at least, not the last time we checked) and can still be found roaming the Dodo grounds, brushing dust off Yorick (the fully articulated skeleton in the hallway) and ensuring that the dodo stables and breeding centre are in tip-top condition.

In the meantime, readers might like to know that our erstwhile correspondent Hugo Kent has now had to flee the authorities returned to the role of foreign correspondent in the little-known, yet much-disliked, European land that is Albia. Should you wish to while away the - really rather long - time between Dodo Updates, we would invite you to pop over to A Message from Albia to catch up with events from a country "just like Britain ... but worse".

The World As We Know It c. 4,567,000,000BC - 2008AD

As we at As A Dodo board the speedy interstellar craft we knocked up in the potting shed this morning and prepare to launch ourselves towards a new life on a new planet, we wish to mourn The World As We Know It, which is expected to end at 7.30 GMT this morning, not with a whimper but with a mini-Big Bang, following the official start-up of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN⁽¹⁾)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

The World As We Know It was born when a large rotating cloud of dust, rocks and gas coalesced in the frozen wastes of space⁽²⁾. It was just one of a family of nine planets, though sadly its smallest sibling Pluto, passed away in 2006 after a run in with a gang of astronomers hopped up on research grants and expense accounts.

A precocious child, it was not long before The World As We Know It was outshining its fellow planets, taking only half a billion years or so to develop life⁽³⁾. Soon The World As We Know It was filled with more life than the six-month-old yoghurt in a student's fridge, while its brothers and sisters were either hanging around being gassy, dropping their magnetospheres at the first sight of the solar wind or, in the case of Venus, experimenting with lethal cocktails of sulphuric acid clouds, a greenhouse effect that would melt lead and the kind of crushing pressures normally only felt by teenage boys about to *gulp* go out on their first proper date.

It would be wrong to suggest that The World As We Know It didn't have its own ups and downs. In its youth it was a heavy smoker, indulging in major periods of vulcanism, it had numerous run-ins with gangs of marauding asteroids and, at the age of 3 billion, dabbled for a long time with vast amounts of snow - a practice still enjoyed today by many Groucho club regulars. Yet, despite all this, The World As We Know It managed to struggle on and life struggled along with it. Eventually - after numerous experiments with ediacara, early synapsids, dinosaurs and more bacteria than you could shake an enormously large and pointy stick at - The World As We Know It gave rise to humans.

In the brief span of their existence, humans were to give rise to many wonders. In the past they created the Great Pyramids, the works of Shakespeare and the music of Mozart. In more recent years they created Donald Trump's hair, Deal or No Deal and the Lindsay Lohan upskirt shot.

Yet it was by the hand of man that all these wondrous things, along with The World As We Know It, would be destroyed. As part of mankind⁽⁴⁾'s eternal quest for knowledge, he sought to plumb the darkest secrets of the universe, creating the 27-kilometre long LHC in attempt to validate the Standard Model of particle physics, reveal the nature of Dark Matter and perhaps even recreate a Higgs Boson, the so-called "God particle". Such hubris could not go unpunished.

Despite the warnings of some of the finest scientific minds⁽⁵⁾ that the vast energies involved, as the LHC accelerated protons to near the speed of light and then smashed them together to see what they're made of, would create black holes capable of swallowing up The World As We Know It, the scientists at CERN insisted on pressing on, their only defence of their actions being years of painstaking scientific study, careful calculation and the belief that - in the words of Manchester University's Professor Brian Cox - "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat". Thus it was that they prepared to doom The World As We Know It.

The end of The World As We Know it will be marked by the wailing of the Rapture Ready suddenly conscious that they have not been mysteriously spirited from the face of the Earth but rather that the Earth has suddenly been spirited from under their feet and a gleeful REM celebrating a sudden upsurge in iTunes sales.

⁽¹⁾ Yes, we know the acronym doesn't work but when everyone tried explaining that to the French they just shrugged their shoulders, said "Bouf" and took another puff on their Gitanes.
⁽²⁾ By weird coincidence, if you omit the words "of space" from the previous sentence and add in "fundamentalist Christian beliefs, danger red lipstick and a sassy attitude" to the dust, rocks and gas, you pretty much have the origin of 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
⁽³⁾ which arose either from the so-called "primordial soup" or through "Panspermia", which is the theory that the building blocks of life arrived from outer space and is wholly unrelated to what your elder brother used to do every time Pan's People came on Top of the Pops.
⁽⁴⁾ or at least that part of mankind not wedded to the fatuous notion that all the answers are contained in a 2,000 year old book.
⁽⁵⁾ by which we mean the same Daily Mail correspondents who insist on dividing everything in the universe into either a cause of or cure for cancer.

Magna Carta 1215-2008

The people of Great Britain are today willingly locking themselves up and throwing away the keys as they mark the death of Magna Carta, which passed away this week after being set upon in the Houses of Parliament.

Magna Carta, the eight-hundred-year-old document in which were enshrined some of the fundamental liberties of the people⁽¹⁾, was born in 1215, after the brooding, treacherous and incompetent King John got drunk on power one night and was accosted by a large group of rebellious barons whilst on his way to meddle with the forest law, increase scutage⁽²⁾ and have one of those kebab things the crusaders kept banging on about. It was when the King awoke the following morning in a damp field in Surrey that he discovered that not only had he given birth to one of the earliest examples of constitutional law and sewn the tiny seed from which democracy might one day flower, he had also lost most of his power and inadvertently given Englishmen the right to equality under the law and not to be locked up without trial.

Given the circumstances of its birth, it is unsurprising that Magna Carta proved to be an unloved child. No sooner had it been born than its father attempted to disown it, even getting the Pope to annul large parts of it as "shameful and demeaning" and forced on the King by "violence and fear"⁽³⁾. Yet despite this, Magna Carta refused to go unnoticed. Thanks to its provisions, for the first time a council was set up to represent the people of England (or at least as many of them as happened to be rich and powerful and have a significant body of knights to back them up) rather than merely to serve the King. It was Magna Carta that first granted the right to be tried by one's peers and insisted fines should be proportionate to the offence, as well as decreeing that only competent people should be appointed to ruling posts (a provision which sadly does not extend to the roles of England Football Manager, Heathrow baggage handler or successful candidate on The Apprentice).

As time passed, the popularity of Magna Carta was to grow. By the reign of Elizabeth I it was being hailed as the embodiment of ancient English liberties, by the time of her Stuart successors as an indispensable limitation upon the powers of the Crown and it was under Magna Carta's banner that Parliament was to seize power from Charles I. Indeed, so useful was it in overthrowing the country's leader that, upon becoming that leader himself, Oliver Cromwell immediately started slagging it off to anyone who would listen, memorably describing it as "Magna Farta".

Despite such attacks, Magna Carta fought on, travelling alongside the common law to all parts of the British Empire and influencing the laws of countries from America to Zambia and encouraging our Georgian and Victorian ancestors to proclaim the superiority and nobility of the British system, even as they sold people into slavery, nicked their land and exported assorted criminals to Australia, where their descendants would one day be responsible for giving us Neighbours and Home and Away in return.

Throughout the 20th Century (aside from a brief funny turn in the 1970s when the British Government decided to help the IRA recruitment drive by locking up without trial anyone in Belfast who pronounced "H" as "haitch" on suspicion of being a terrorist) Magna Carta was hailed as a hero. Yet heroes are not always universally popular⁽⁴⁾. By the early Noughties, politicians in such enlightened countries as America, Britain and Zimbabwe found themselves publicly questioning Magna Carta's role. The aged document was said to be looking dowdy and old-fashioned, ill-fitted to a modern world where Presidents and Prime Ministers might need to lock people up in order to defeat terrorism/steal elections and/or look really tough in the pages of the tabloids and the bulletins of Fox News.

In America, Magna Carta found itself hooded, locked up and "questioned" without trial for giving succour to terrorists. In Zimbabwe it was quietly shot for giving succour to people who weren't Robert Mugabe. In the UK it staggered on, forced year by year to turn an ever more scarred cheek as its provisions were slowly whittled away by those whose job it was to defend it.

Just as it was born, so Magna Carta was to die. On 11 June 2008 an incompetent and much-disliked leader was to find himself locked in a room with a group of privileged people of negotiable morality eager to extract any concessions they could. Mere hours later, the body of Magna Carta was found bruised and bleeding its last on the floor of the House of Commons.

Magna Carta will be buried under several promises of knighthoods, the odd multi-million pound bribe, an "Ulster Says No" badge and a populace ever more eager to see their last freedoms destroyed in the name of an unwinnable and illogical "war on terror". It is survived - somewhat surprisingly - by former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis.

⁽¹⁾ as well as not-so fundamental rights relating to the ability of widows to inherit fiefdoms, the duties of towns to build bridges and the like, and a complete ban on any member of the D'Athée family being made a royal official.
⁽²⁾ a medieval tax, relating either to the right of a knight to buy himself out of feudal service or, possibly, to the use of obscure and long-disused words whilst playing Scrabulous on facebook.
⁽³⁾ By strange coincidence, these are the same reasons given by many people for wanting to expunge all memory of their renditions of "Uptown Girl" at "the karaoke last night".
⁽⁴⁾ As anyone who has ever played a licensed computer game tied-in to the release of the latest superhero blockbuster can affirm.

Happy New Year 2008

With the holiday period drawn to a close, it falls to us here at As A Dodo to announce the results of our Christmas Poll. Having asked you, our readers, to pick the obituary you'd most like to see in 2008, the "winners" (if that's the right term) were, in reverse order ...

4th Place
Facebook addiction

3rd Place
The Skinny Jean

2nd Place
Reality TV

1st Place
"News" about Diana, Princess of Wales.

Sadly, we have already (somewhat prematurely as it turned out) buried The Death of Diana, Princess of Wales. We can only hope that this year it is finally allowed to rest in peace.

As to our own New Year, we regret to inform readers that mucking out the Dodo is taking rather longer than anticipated. Owing to that (and other work commitments) we are forced to put As A Dodo on what we hope will be a brief hiatus. In our absence, readers are reminded that As A Dodo: The Obituaries You'd Really Like to See is currently available at Amazon and other good booksellers, and is a frankly bargainous half price in Borders stores.

A happy 2008 to all our readers. We hope to see you again soon.