Beware the frozen virus of doom!

It has been revealed this week that scientists have successfully defrosted a 30,000 year old virus.

Should we be worried? Hell, yes!

“March the...? Dammit! I don’t even know the day any more..! 2024. It’s over, people. The end of mankind is upon us. Germageddon!

It all seemed so innocent back in 2014. Some scientists found a 30,000 year old virus in the Siberian permafrost, popped it in the microwave for a bit, and before you could say ‘re-animated harbingers of death are upon us’, it had woken up, yawned, and popped off to kill some passing amoebas, just like in the very, very, old days.

As climate change melted more and more of the planet’s ice, other long-buried carriers of disease were soon enjoying a spot of much needed warmth and sunshine, before toddling off to wreak liberal helpings of death on unsuspecting wildlife who had foolishly begun thinking they were safe.

And then they started on us. Our microscopic chilled old-school enemies started off with a few things we thought long gone (Smallpox), then delivered some we didn’t even know existed (Wibblychinitus) before getting bored for a bit.

We thought we’d won. That science had beaten the viralpocalypse. We were wrong. They were just re-grouping.

They were more intelligent that we could ever have reasonably expected. They ignored us, and went for our technology instead.

Anything with a circuit board, microchip or battery (and that was pretty much everything) was suddenly under attack, being melted away into puddles of metal and plastic slush.

True, the ‘Zombie Massacre’ of 2019 wasn’t our finest moment. Who would have guessed that the millions of people shuffling along the streets, with vacant expressions, moaning eerily and oblivious to the world, were all just iPhone users trying to figure out why their screens had gone blank?

With the iPhone generation wiped out, we were suddenly a planet without Marketing Professionals, hipsters, brand-obsessed teenagers and people called Nevs. Which was nice for a while.

But it got steadily worse. Cars wouldn’t work, TVs became blank, pointless, wastes-of-space in the living room (much like Big Brother participants), the transport system collapsed, and then the unthinkable happened. Wifi stopped working.

Those who still had working devices could no longer connect to the internet, meaning we instantly had no idea what to do any more. There was no point in asking someone else – they would have just Googled it anyway. We weren’t even able to take arty photos of our food and post them on Instagram.

With artisan food outlets and coffee franchises shut down, there was panic and anarchy ensued. Soon there were riots as people battled their neighbours for the last packet of HobNobs. As the chilled white wine reserves ran dry, the last vestiges of civilisation trickled away with them.

I’m writing this on paper with a twig, as a warning from history.

Oh God – I think I can hear them at the door...”

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 7th of March 2014. You can view the edited version used by the paper on their website here 27 words went missing in the edit, but nothing too substantial. You've got the whole, original, version I subbed above.

It would appear that, occasionally, my brain coughs up one of these odd, swirly-wirly-timey-wimey things, as a method of making a faintly disturbing or ludicrous story into a ridiculous paranoid vision of the future. I always worry when I do these if the paper will decide it's just too weird for what is, officially, an opinion column. I'm grateful that they haven't pulled the plug on me. Yet...

(Still on the home-made compilations. This one is from Feb 2005, and features mash-ups by Manriki, Janmix and The Geez. Groovy!)

The Schaf Shuffle

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Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

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