A buttered gun scenario and the monkey bonking phenomenon

The title of this post is the intro to this week's joke.
It's down below, at the end.
I'm even going to put a headline on it so those who only tune in for the joke can find it easily.
However, I'd like to start with a curious thing I learned recently: human beings are fascinated by monkey sex.

Two weeks ago I did a post entitled, "Do you know your monkey keeps dipping his balls in my beer?"

This post was very popular, and some of the comments I got were along the lines of the title was funny, so I thought I would tune in and have a read.

Considering that was the most popular post of recent times, it seemed to warrant further investigation by me.

So I went over to my fave search engine and typed in "monkey sex".

Well, I don't know what you do in your spare time, but I can tell you now that a lot of you seem to like watching monkey bonking.

As you can see in the grab (above right), within 0.18 seconds 77,400,000 links related to monkey sex came back.

We do like watching our simian cousins doing the nasty, that's for sure.

To compare though, I then typed in "human sex" and the response was: About 1,070,000,000 results (0.27 seconds).

So I guess that's a good thing (psychologically, if not morally) that we do like watching our own species going at it.

NB: No I didn't take the investigative opportunity to peruse websites for porn, though the op was clearly handed to me on a platter.

Anyway, the two searches did seem to fall into two distinct reasons for looking.

The monkey sex is mainly along the lines of being wacky, the first line is entitled "Crazy Monkey Sex", while the human one is, I guess, more to do with porn.

Which reminds me that when I was working in computers in the city, I learned a few stats about the internet that don't say much for us as a species.

Back then, the middle nineties, a 56k modem was considered cutting edge, compared with today where a 3 gigbit modem is already falling behind.

The stats I was told at my computer company were, 90% of the internet is used for email, and 90% of that is spam.

Of the remainder of the internet, websites, 90% of those are porn.

I compared this with today, for email, there are 144 billion emails sent each day, and 70% of that is spam.

How much of the internet is porn?

No one knows.

You simply can't manage the stats, if you go on web searches like mine above then 4% of searchers are after porn.

If you go on websites, then 14% is porn.

If you go on pages on a website, some have more than 70 million porn related pages(!), then the figure goes up again.

The one thing the experts agree on is that there is a lot of it.

So what's my point?
Well it's this.

We have set up a multi-trillion dollar fibre optic network to service the desire of people to look at monkeys bonking and to disburse emails no one wants.

If Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Council comes down to do his appraisal of us as a species to decide if they are going to admit us to the Enlightened Order of Planets, then I think we've got trouble.

Next topic, do you practise conversations in your head?

Do you, time after time, go over and over things you want to say?

And at the same time, things you dearly, cherishingly wish you had said?

I know I do.

I remember at school being told that talking to yourself was the first sign of madness.

This is probably right, since I used to talk to myself a lot, and as anyone who has been watching this space will know, I'm mad.

My father, I might add, also did this, and was minorly famous for being seen at the wheel of his car driving around with his jaws working overtime in some internal dialogue with himself.

He was very stressed.

Back then, the seventies, stress was not a widely known thing.

And even if it was, my father considered anything to do with psychology only for sissies, and so felt, I conjecture, that admitting to being stressed, was a sign of weakness.

This had massively deleterious effects in his health.

He developed heart trouble, and eventually had to be hospitalised for this.

Once he came out he began a pretty pathetic exercise regime, clearly indicating that the doctors told him he had to lose weight.

Now this was true, he did need to lose weight, but what he really needed to do was seek out some therapy for his stress.

So, returning to the beginning of this skein of discourse, is if you are a "repeated-conversation-in-your-head" person, then there is stress going on in your life.

What to do?

Well a good thing to do is to identify the (most commonly) human source of this stress, and talk to them about it.

But over my time I have found that there is an inherent paradox associated with this, which is:

If you can talk to someone, you invariably don't have a problem with them.

If you can't communicate with someone, then they're the people you usually have a problem with.

So you go to talk to them they don't listen, then they turn it back on you and say, "no, you're the one with the problem."

Sound familiar?

Then you come away from the talk more stressed than ever, and with the internal conversation now going ahead at a million miles an hour.

Then you start getting down on yourself, you start saying, 'god, I'm so weak and ineffectual, I can't even get my point across'.

And all the things that you practised so often in the run up to this conversation, suddenly disappear like leaves on the wind when you so frantically need them.

Well, if this is so, try not to be too hard on yourself, many of these conversations are critical to your life, and as such, they are very stressful, and none of us are the characters that Bruce Willis plays in his movies.

Bruce never worries he's left the oven on.

Bruce never attends a meeting with human resources to discuss a bullying problem.

Bruce just pulls out the Kalashnikov and negotiates from behind the sights of that.

We can't do that, sadly, so what's to do?

What do you do if someone at work is stressing you out big time, and you feel unsupported by the boss?

Well if you have a supportive boss, then things are a solar-system-length easier

If not, and this is most common in the private sector, things can be very difficult.

But one thing that I have found that did help, when I have been in a similar situation was Lifeline.

My friend Sandy, who works there was telling me that only ten per cent, or thereabouts, of calls to Lifeline are suicide related.

The bulk, are calls about less fraught matters.

Even then I don't like to describe these calls as "minor" matters, or "less important" matters.

I can't think of a good word, really.

Let's just say calls about matters that aren't suicide related.

Small matters from the outside, but important, world-alteringly important to the caller.

In Britain the equivalent organisation is the Samaritans, in the States there are a host of different services, most issue based, ie sexual assault hotline, child trauma hot line, and they can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_hotline, in Canada you can see the MoodMemos site for services available, http://www.moodmemos.com/seek-help.php

So why are these services so important?

I found that by speaking with someone I didn't know, I could admit things that I would never say to someone I knew.

Often as the conversation went on, I was able to gain a measure of perspective.

I could find out if what I was stressed about was as big an issue as I thought.

Sometimes the issue shrank down in the talking, but other times the phone counsellor and I would come to understand that I did have a large problem and it had to be tackled head on.

How do you know when a problem has to be tackled head on? Not something that can be left?

If you have to see this person regularly,eg at work each day, then you unfortunately have to deal with it and not hope it will go away.

Finally, and you can ask the phone counsellor for this, I was often able to role play my upcoming stressful conversation with the phone counsellor.

I was able to ask them to be the HR manager, or indeed, even the bully, and I was able to practise what I wanted to say.

This process really helped me when the adrenalin was flowing.

So if you are caught talking to yourself, if, like me, you yell at yourself for being such a loser, then call Lifeline and say it to them.

They won't laugh at you, and you may gain some perspective on your problem that you thought could never happen.

And penultimately, another Australia-US confusion story.

In the States they say "I'm going to the bathroom", when we say, "I'm going to the toilet".

I can't remember who told me this, but if you recognise yourself and this story, feel free to contact me and I'll attest it to you.

Anyway, this Australian was in the States and she went into the (genuine bathroom) in the lobby of the hotel she was staying at.

She went to the toilet, then was washing her hands when she noticed a bracelet left on the counter near the sink.

Obviously the owner had taken it off to wash their hands and forgotten it.

So she dried her hands, picked up the bracelet and went back to the reception desk, she handed it to the receptionist and said, "I found this in the toilet".

The receptionist, who had just taken delivery, threw it up in the air like she had been handed a bag of rattlesnakes and jumped back with an expression on her face as if she'd been knifed in the ribs.

Once she returned from the ceiling where she was clinging in disgust, explanations followed and the story teller explained the difference in trans-Pacific usage of the word toilet.

I might add, I prefer the American usage, and often say, "I'm going to the bathroom", it sounds a bit more refined.
Anyway, I was down at Australian Seabird Rescue conducting a tour, and one of the visitors to our centre asked about a turtle we had who had plastic inside her.

I replied, "Yes, we have some hopes, we are really waiting for this turtle to go to the bathroom."

The visitor looked at me in some confusion, and then explained that she thought I meant that the turtles would get out of the tank, flipper their way into the main building and go to the toilet on the bowl.

So enough.

Hope you enjoy the joke.

I've got to go and watch some Monkey sex and then call Lifeline to find out why I like it.

The Joke

A guy goes into a bar in Tombstone, Arizona.

He walks up to the bar and says " whiskey".

The barman pours it and he takes a half slug and then turns around surveys the bar.

He sees a guy playing the piano, and after listening for a moment or two, he decides he doesn't like what he's hearing.

So in a loud voice, he yells across the bar, "Hey you, stop playing that damn piano."

The pianist doesn't hesitate at all, and keeps playing.

So the guy, infuriated, pulls out his six-shooter, fires a round over the head of the piano player, and yells, "I SAID, STOP PLAYING THAT DAMN PIANO, ARE YOU DEAF?"

Again, the piano player, unruffled, goes on playing with every symptom of enjoyment.

So the guy repeats the dose, another shot fired, another assertion that he wishes the piano player to cease and desist.

Again, the piano player goes on.

At this point, the barman sidles gingerly up to the trigger-happy customer and says, "Hey pardner, can I give you some advice?"

The customer turns to the barman and says, "What?"

So the barman says, "If I was you, I'd go into the kitchen, find some butter, and put as much of it on your gun as I could."

The customer says, "Why in tarnation would I do that?"

And the barman says, "'cos when Wyatt Earp finishes playing the piano, he's gonna come over here and shove it up your arse."