Wonderful news. It now emerges that I needn’t have plugged Maths in matric after all.
All I had to do to improve on the 16 per cent I scraped together after spending two hours playing noughts-and-crosses on my Maths paper was to get my Dad to rig up a battery-powered electrical current and fit a couple of electrodes to my bonce.
Then, when the adjudicator, in a voice not dissimilar to the bloke who does the punts for movies and says “Coming to a cinema near you… The Revenge Of The Malevolent Mathematical Under-Achievers..”, sounding like a mongrelly cross-breed of Tom Waits and Benito Mussolini, pronounced “Pupils, you may now pick up your pens and commence”, I would have simply switched on and come over all Einstein in an instant. Instead of staring at him blankly and musing over whether Miss van Straaten, my dead-sexy Afrikaans teacher, was wearing a mini that day.
Nooit, man! What do you mean e doesn't equal ac/dc squared?!
No formula or equation would have been beyond me. Trigonometry would have proved a piece of piss. I would have nailed Pythagoras’s poncy theorem quicker than you can say “Hatman’s a genius” – even if you hired one of those chicks who reveal the specials on Vim over the PA system in supermarkets to make the announcement.
But, no, they’ve typically left me to wallow in decades of guilt before announcing that running a slight current of electricity from one side of your brain to the other is a cure for something termed “dyscalculia” which, like my Attention Deficit Disorder, neanderthalitis, hypertrichosis (excessive growth of hairs in ears) and dofclobberitis (the inability to look anywhere remotely near fashionable), has only been dropped on me in an advanced stage of my life.
Nice. A classic piece of scientific discovery. The boffins emerge from sterile-white labs and wave around a piece of paper which makes absolute sense of something disastrous that happened to you about 54 years ago. Helpful.
But I mustn’t be so self-indulgent. If fitting a pantechnicon battery into a South African child’s “Ek hart Wayne Rooney” rucksack and releasing a few thousand volts through the cerebral deserts where grey matter is as rare as a Bafana victory helps to send our Matric pass rate soaring, I’m all for it.
So, fire up your synapses the best you can and zoom over to the BBC\’s health news site to be further stimulated. And, please, don’t buy into all that politically correct “don’t try this at home” codswallop. You want to pass Maths, right? Right.
Well, just get the old man to rehabilitate an old battery and attach to the parietal lobe around the back of your head somewhere. I suggest you have a word with your Biology teacher about this first. You don’t want to stick the electrodes on the wrong lobe and sardenly fand yu karnt spel.
I am sure that science is a subject close to your hearts, Hatpeople. So I make no apologies for putting you through this arduous test. For starters, may I trouble you to closely scrutinise the following photograph? OK. First, close your eyes. And no peeping. Are your eyes shut? Right. Now open them!
Does this picture taken of my neighbour staring at me lying next to my swimming pool suggest that the boffins have got it horribly wrong?
No, I didn’t think so. Good. We’re all on track. Oh, a big ta to SASI (that’s South African Sports Illustrated, not the South African Science Institute) for the pic they took of Genevieve Morton who, by the way, has been allowed to swim in my pool. On special occasions.
You will be ready by now for a scientific explanation of how honeys such as Genevieve have got to be so off-the-hook hot. I’ll do my best. Fred-Hot News has in its possession a scientific study which concludes that women, through the process of evolution, are becoming more beautiful. Why on earth would they want to do this? Well, to ensure the survival of the female gender, apparently.
Don’t worry. I was also, at first, a tad confused. But I have an excuse. I’m a man. So, for the other men out there, here’s the scenic route: beautiful women are more likely to find male partners and better-looking parents are more likely to produce daughters. Those daughters – are we beginning to detect the emergence of a pattern at this point? – will themselves, by dint of having aesthetically pleasing parents, become right little crackers. And so it goes on. Angels beget even more gorgeous angels. Check? The boffins’ research also threw up that men, on the hairier hand, have “remained as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors”. It’s all falling into place, isn’t it?
Before (ungratuitously) furnishing you with further proof of the burgeoning beauty (pardon my gratuitous alliteration) of womankind, I’ll allow the London Times to take up the the story.
There. Now you’ve got the picture. And do please allow me to give you another one…
Further proof... that the beach in front of my house in Umdloti is the place to be
Good. We’re done. Thank you for staying the course, Hatpeople, and helping to prove that the resident beauty boffin at the University of Helsinki is on to something. Only wish I had listened to my parents and taken Science at varsity. Instead of just drugs. Just porking you. My love goes out to all of you beautiful Hatpeople, Fred.
