Books to Burn

Now.. I know what you're thinking: "Burning books!? That HAS to be a bad thing!" - To this I would like to reply "OH YEAH!?" I mean; Think about it.... now think some more.. OK.. How come we automatically associate the word 'Ancient' with 'Wise'? -I'll tell you - because almost all the books that remain from that time seem to have some useful or at least interesting content. Consider, also, that up until 100 years (or something) ago, most people lost their teeth at 25 and tortured and killed eachother at the first available opportunity. How come their literary heritage is so venerated!?! I will (again) tell you: It's not that they wrote less (or better) books than we do, it's just that they were more selective and caring about their descendants -bookburning was a natural end to an exhausting week of torturing people of different colors, creed or sex (there used to be a third sex, which is proven by the vague feeling of sexual dissatisfaction that we all suffer from).

We gotta get down to the business of once again burning books at a regular basis (alternative phrasing: Post Editing With Extreme Prejudice), and here are some illustrative example of the 'writers' we have to deal with First, if we don't want our descendants to referr to us as 'The Ancient Poo-Poo-Heads'.

Clive Cussler
A couple of hours ago I stood in my beautiful kitchen, preparing a nice dinner for myself; Tortellini with Parmesan cheese. I was Pretty hungry, I can tell you, but alas the tempting sight of my nicely 'al dente' meal was marred by.. a puny green spot! To make a semi-long story short my meal was full of unwelcome fauna, which caused me to angrily plunge my dish into the muddy dishwater, which crushed a crappy drinking-glass, which in its turn cut my wrists up, leaving my screaming on the floor, spraying my kitchen with blood.

This made me think... "I wish I'd bought the new book by Clive Cussler today!". Why, you might wonder, did such an inappropriate thought cross my mind at that very moment? Well, if I had, I would not now have been crying like a baby, seeing my life passing before my crazed eyes - no no! I would be thinking: "Yes! Why didn't I think of this before?" - Instead of wasting the last minutes of my life in fear and anguish, I would be relaxed in the safe knowledge that I would never have to read such crap again.

His books are an insult to female as well as male readers, and if the third sex hadn't been killed off during the later bronze-age, they would have insulted them too. Reading about the men in his books makes me want to cut off protruding parts on my body. If the villains in his books hadn't been such disgusting, narrowminded cliche's, I would have cheered them on in their inefficient attempts to kill the lobotomized gerbils that constitute 'the heroes'. As it is, the only hope I had during my (dazed) reading of his last argument against literacy was that providence Might prevail, and all the people ineptly described would meet terminally with flesh-eating bacteria.

Philip Kerr
Once upon a time there was (and there inaccountably still IS!) a being that calls itself Philip Kerr. On my refrigerator I have some 'fridge poetry' that I randomly assembled when drunk, just to see what the words looked like together; here's an excerpt from that text: "ly ly do as he than foul". This, incredibly, makes a lot more sense than the intrigue in his famous book "The Grid". In this.. book (although we have to stretch the concept pretty far to make it encompass this abysmal creation) a hyper-modern building controlled by computers becomes possessed by the computer-game "DOOM", and starts killing people. I don't know what to say about this, but it is very worrying that many people have read this book without bringing down righteous wrath upon the writer. Since you are probably using a computer now - or at the very least have come in contact with someone who has recently used a computer, and who has now handed you a printout with this text on it - you probably have a deeper understanding of things computer-related than Mr Kerr.

Maybe I'm not being fair to Mr Kerr, but then again being 'fair' to him would probably send me to prison with blood on my hands.. I could try to just give him a few bitchslaps, but I don't think I would be able to stop myself once I'd started.

I have read that there is usually a special department in every stock-trading company, which does only one special thing; to look at the investments of the worst known traders. Why? Because they are wrong (relatively reliably) in ca. 80% of their investment decisions, and if you can do the opposite of these people, you'd probably make a pretty safe profit. Using the same reasoning, I would like my DNA, and that of Mr Kerr's to be analyzed together, and when science permits this, I would like all the genes that I have in common with Mr Kerr to be changed.