Gary Monro’s blog

Just opened a piece of month-old junk mail. It’s from a casino I’m a member of and it’s inviting me to a Diwali/Eid celebration at their premises. Yes - Eid.

Now I do know some Muslims do gamble in casinos because I’ve seen them - they arrive shortly after the pubs shut. But the majority do not. Further, as it falls over itself in its attempts to be on-message with regards to Britain’s increasingly fragmented society, I wonder if my friendly local casino realises that to suggest a Muslim might celebrate the conclusion of his most holy month with a quick punt on the ol’ roulette wheel could actually result in a hefty deficit in his politically correct account - rather than the credit they were hoping for…..

Fastcompany magazine suggests working long hours is not the same as working hard at all. Working hard has little to do with hours spent in the office.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

Hard work is about facing difficult situations, going beyond your comfort zone, risking rejection. Which, to me, means it’s about personal development as much as about anything else. This requires that one has qualities, of course, but it seems that the qualities required aren’t the ones you’d normally expect.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.

This all makes sense. It’s those that work long hours in frustrating conditions (such as, being responsible to customers for the poor work of others without having any influence over the poor workers) who die earliest. The further up the tree you get the less ‘hard’ work you really do. I’m not sure the top dogs are going home earlier than the rest of us but they certainly aren’t facing the same pressures.

Today is the 4th anniversary of the mass murders of innocent Americans in the Twin Towers and Pentagon building.

Watching, over the last week, some of the coverage of that awful event reminds me just how lucky most of us are to not have personal experience of such horrors.

The death and pain so many went through - and the tales of heroism - remind us of what it is to be human. Suffering, stoicism, determination, duty - are all part of the human condition. It is our response to these that determines what we actually are and gives us our ability to be happy. Despite my misgivings over the Iraq war I believe America shows itself to be tough, dynamic, united and, in the end, very human.

We should be grateful we have the freedoms we do - and be vigilant in their defence, wherever the attack comes from. In the meantime, our thoughts are with our American cousins.

It seems the best tippers in New York are… New Yorkers.

From Village Voice:

New Yorkers are the best tippers on earth. They’ve been aware of the minimum dollar-a-drink rule ever since they got their first fake ID on West 4th Street. Some don’t like it, but most know it. And most do it.

Tipping in the UK is still a voluntary thing, where we tip either because the service was out-standing or because we don’t want to look cheap. In New York tipping forms an essential part of a person’s income - a fact understood by the worker and her boss. (And, I’ll wager, the average New Yorker):

Cocktail waitresses, unlike waitresses and bartenders, usually don’t even get a piddling shift pay. As far as my manager is concerned, there is a direct correlation between my income and my ability to hustle. There are no guarantees, he once told me, but if you really work your ass off you can succeed here. And if you make $37 one night . . . hey, shit happens.

I’ve probably had some of the best service of my life in New York. I’ve definitely had the worst. I felt happy to tip at just over 15% for the former (in England I’ll make it about 10% normally) but for the latter I resented paying the bill let alone paying over the odds. I flat refuse to pay over the asking price for service that deserved a slap round the face rather than a gratuity. Would a New Yorker have tipped regardless?

Foreigners often don’t understand the American way with tipping. The waitress staff have their own way to deal with this problem:

Without the option of auto-gratuity they’d have in tonier restaurants, some servers resort to drastic measures. On one of my first days working at a little tourist hot spot of a jazz club, a bartender I used to work with let me in on a little secret. “Overcharge whenever possible,” she cautioned. “If you hear a weird accent, if you can just tell by the look in their eye, the beer is eight bucks rather than six. You keep the extra two—they’ll never know.”

She’s right. Fumbling drunk people in a strange, crowded setting will almost always fork over whatever money you ask for. “Aida,” one of my former co-workers, overcharged all the time. “That’s $118,” she announced one Friday night, without so much as a stutter, to three toasted, cavorting Floridian lushes she “had a bad feeling about.” The real amount was $98. A silicone-breasted blonde handed over her card, not even asking for a printout. Sure enough, the gratuity line on the charge slip later read $5, but Aida just shrugged. “I took care of the tip,” she said. “Works every time.”

We have been warned, methinks…

From The New Scientist:

A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software “bots” to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.

What’s a ‘bot’?

By performing tasks within a game repetitively or very quickly, bots can easily outplay human-controlled characters, giving unscrupulous players an unfair advantage.

Oh. I didn’t know that. Can anything be done about them?

Many games firms employ countermeasures to detect this bot activity. For example, they can ask the character questions or present them with an unfamiliar situation and monitor their response.

“There’s an ongoing war between people who make bots and games companies,” he told New Scientist. “And making real money out of virtual worlds is getting bigger.”

I’m still stuck on the idea that you can steal something in a computer game and then sell it in the Real World. Isn’t there, you know, a difference between the two?

…the line between virtual and real cash has already disappeared. The game EverQuest, for example, lets players buy and sell virtual items and characters for real money through an authorised online trading site.

Reynolds says the growing number of online game players will only increase the incentive for scammers. “There’s nothing exceptional about the virtual world,” he says. “Wherever there is that sort of money, there’s always crime too.”

So cyberspace seems to offer the same crime opportunities as Real Life. What crime is this man in Japan actually been arrested for?

The article doesn’t tell us. I imagine the police are still trying to work that one out themselves…

I think they’re joking…

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

But it had me worried for a moment…

Apparently Britons have nearly £1 billion lying around their houses.

About £1bn is lost or lying idle in the UK’s 24.7 million households, the study found.

An overwhelming 88% of the 1,500 people surveyed said at least £10 was lost in small change throughout their home.

A further 62% estimated they had at least £56 in jars, pots, pockets and down the back of sofas.

What’s really shocked me is that I thought, on first reading this, it was just another of those unlikely surveys which was probably just made up in somebody’s lunch hour.

But when I think of the cash in my change jar, the ‘rainy day folding stuff’ in my sock drawer and the collection of ten pound notes in an envelope (a friend is paying a debt bit by bit - I’m bad at keeping track so I’m putting it in a seperate place, if you must know) I suddenly realise I might have a couple of hundred quid just dying to be invested, spent or at least counted lying around my home.

PS So if you’re planning on robbing me you know where to look so there’s no excuse for wrecking the place, okay?

PPS Sock drawer is the third one down…

PPPS I’ve never seen that leather posing pouch before in my life.

Most of me thinks this is a prank. Some of me hopes it isn’t.

What do you think?

Seems that Disney is closing down its last remaining hand-drawn cartoon facility and concentrating wholly on computer generated imagery (CGI) instead. Traditional cartoons are now dead.

Of course, future Disney features will not be made by robots but by skilled human animators working with a different kind of tool. But the demise of hand-drawn animation at Disney is a sad and significant cultural watershed that deserves a proper mourning rather than a brief P.R. notice.

For it was at the Disney studio that hand-drawn personality animation–an indigenously American contribution to the international art form of animation–soared to its greatest heights.

I really don’t know how skilful you have to be to use CGI. I write code for a living and maybe my view is therefore tainted but I’m not at all impressed with technical wizardry. But drawing - creating lines, shades, texture, expression, movement and mood all with the nib of a pen or pencil… Ah, now that’s skill as I understand the word.

Somehow you know a person has laboured over a drawing. You realise he or she worked patiently and endlessly on the result that you’re now enjoying and that every single bit of it had to be manually created. I can picture a person working - alone - at his desk, hour after hour, skilfully altering an image tiny bit by tine bit until the combined effect of sheets of paper is life.

I just cannot equate that with someone sitting at a computer as I am now.

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On the eve of my flight to Boston I read this about a chap who tried to board a plane having ‘forgotten’ to remove from his bag a pipe-bomb he’d made for ‘fun’.

Where do we get these people from?

Very interesting point made by ex-nun Karen Armstrong in today’s The Guardian. She suggests that the Bible, Qu’ran, Torah and so on were never actually meant to be read by people in the privacy of their own homes but recited in particular, symbolic circumstances.

These ritualistic recitations - usually carried out by a holy man - put the congregation in a particular state of mind; the option to pick and choose your favourite verse to read did not, in ages of widespread illiteracy (and, of course, no printing technology) exist. She says that the experience of hearing or chanting from the texts was at least as important as the content of the texts itself:

Hitherto the scriptures had always been transmitted orally, in a ritual context that, like a great theatrical production, put them in a special frame of mind. Christians heard extracts of the Bible chanted during the mass; they could not pick and choose their favourite texts. In India, young Hindu men studied the Veda for years with their guru, adopting a self-effacing and non-violent lifestyle that was meant to influence their understanding of the texts. In Judaism, the process of studying Torah and Talmud with a rabbi was itself a transformative experience that was just as important as the content.

She is specific about the Qu’ran. ‘Qu’ran’ actually means ‘recitation’ and is designed to be read out aloud rather than cover to cover on your own. Like poetry, there is a transcendent quality that adds a special layer to the experience:

Much of the meaning is derived from sound patterns that link one passage with another, so that Muslims who hear extracts chanted aloud thousands of times in the course of a lifetime acquire a tacit understanding that one teaching is always qualified and supplemented by other texts, and cannot be seen in isolation. The words that they hear again and again are not “holy war”, but “kindness”, “courtesy”, “peace”, “justice”, and “compassion”.

When the ritual that accompanies the text’s reading is missing the reader can only approach his study on a cerebral level. The emotional and therapeutic effects of reading is lost. This leads to the problem that, if you want to blow up a bus or murder a ’sinner’ you can usually find - and focus on - those passages that appear to give you the authority to do so:

Solitary reading also enables people to read their scriptures too selectively, focusing on isolated texts that they read out of context, and ignoring others that do not chime with their own predilections. Religious militants who read their scriptures in this way often distort the tradition they are trying to defend. Christian fundamentalists concentrate on the aggressive Book of Revelation and pay no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, while Muslim extremists rely on the more belligerent passages of the Qur’an and overlook its oft-repeated instructions to leave vengeance to God and make peace with the enemy.

Unfortunately, Ms Armstrong finishes her illuminating piece with a clumsy defence of Islam (this is The Guardian, remember) and blames the media for concentrating ‘obsessively on the more aggressive verses of the Qur’an, without fully appreciating how these are qualified by the text as a whole’. With all respect to the lady, it’s the perpetrators of Muslim terrorism who have actually focussed on the aggression of the Qu’ran and distorted - I’m sure Ms Armstrong would agree - the peaceful message of the text.

If the thrust of her piece is correct it is actually Muslims - and the adherents of religion in general - who need to relearn the correct way to approach their texts rather than reporters to learn new ways of reporting on the consequences of incorrect practise.

A South Korean man died of a heart attack after playing on-line games for 50 hours.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed.

“We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” a Taegu provincial police official said.

Apparently he’d given up work to play more games. I wonder if it was exhaustion that killed him or the shock he suffered when the internet cafe sent him his bill….

Yep, I’m on holiday. Actually, I’m visiting family who moved up here some years ago.

It’s an odd town, Blackpool. The housing round here is beautiful; heavy red bricks (so heavy they can only be laid three courses at a time - the cement squeezes out otherwise), large, solid structures, big front gardens and some unique features. I particularly love the turrets at the corners of some of the houses that allow the occupants to see down two different streets from one vantage point. There are some very nice open spaces too, not enormous but well tended. The place has an air of class about it.

Now take a trip to the Promenade, the sea-front area that constitutes the tourist area and witness the opposite end of the scale, epitomised both by the people there and the facilities serving them. I am hardly exaggerating when I say the primary features of the majority of the people here are: tattoos, foul language, scruffy, ill-fitting clothes, football shirts or FCUK t-shirts (is this still regarded as funny by these people?), cigarettes drooping from semi-permanent scowls and the occasional loud,vulgar behaviour.

Other notable features are the increased numbers of non-white visitors, particularly Asians - from which I am not sure which conclusion to draw - and the overwhelming uniformity of the ‘food’ on offer in the ‘restaurants’ and cafes. With just a few exceptions, chicken or burger with chips is the staple diet in tourist Blackpool. There are few foreign food restaurants. In a place we stopped for a lack-lustre coffee there were nine main course items on offer. Six of them came with chips and peas (sausage chips and peas, chicken chips and peas, fish chips and peas - you get the idea). The other three offered the chips but, for reasons I can only imagine to be completely arbitrary, no peas.

As with the previous restaurant we’d eaten in we were bounded both sides by families who sat, vacant, unsmiling, their faces taut, their children actually well-behaved - if sullen silence can be regarded as good behaviour.

Perhaps most notable of all was how relatively uncrowded the sea-front area is. When taking into account that this is the middle of the school summer holidays and it is also a Saturday I would expect the place to be bustling. It’s not. It’s busy but there’s room for many more. My sister says the town’s dying on its feet. I am not going to research if this is truly so and, if so, why it’s so, but looking at the sullen faces, the bored kids and experiencing the general lack of anything truly exciting or dynamic (excluding a few half-decent fair-ground rides) I can’t help but feel that, the unemployment problems it will cause notwithstanding, its demise isn’t such a bad thing.

But what strikes me is that the decline - if there is one - is due simply to absolutely nobody in the area I visited actually making the effort to offer something different, something a little better than what is currently the norm. It’s almost as if they cannot conceive of the clientel wanting something different to what’s on offer - and have now found themselves bereft of ideas as the visitor figures slowly slip away. My primary feeling about Blackpool is one of sadness. It resembles a person, well-meaning, inoffensive but stuck in a rut, and, being not particularly bright, unable to get out of it despite a quiet desperation to do so.

Blackpool’s survival may depend on the government’s promotion and legalising of widespread and easily accessible gambling in the UK. Along with the equally socially destructive (but equally lucrative - especially for the government) promotion of 24 hour alcohol consumption it might be that its reincarnation as England’s very own Sin City could be its saving. As a copy of Las Vegas it might even become a classier place . But such a basis for a revival is a fragile one. A socially conservative government ought to cancel this government’s plans to fill its tax short-comings with the tax proceeds from alcohol and gambling. Doing so could ruin the town. It’s a lousy choice to have to make. I hope it can be avoided.

Friday evening my wife and I met up with friends and got to discussing the class issue - as you do.

One of our friends suggested that a simple determinant of a person’s class is how they spend their disposable income. I suggested that this definition was limited in efficiency simply because people who had little disposable income would lack the means to define themselves adequately this way. A person who just scrapes a living makes very different decisions about their spending than a person with 5 or 6 hundred pounds a month left over after all outgoings.

On another point about class I suggested that the various facts that defined one’s class included elements that one cannot alter and that, therefore, whichever class environment one is born into that, more or less, meant that one is forever of that class.

That proved contentious too but I think this was because my friend sees class hierarchially, with the progression from the underclass to the upper classes as being representative of a stepped increase in virtue. And so my view that I, for example, was born working class and would therefore die working class was regarded as my handicapping myself with limitation and stunting my potential to improve my lot due to a surrender to some sort of social inevitability.

But this isn’t so. One’s first 20 or so years on this planet are usually the most formative. Even if I one day became wordly wise, educated, generous and wealthy those first decades are not erased and the influence of my working class family and the conditions in which we lived still exist in some form within me. It may be that I am repelled by those experiences or it could be that I am inspired by them. But they are real and meaningful and they form one of the bases of what I do later in life - even if what I do in later life has all the hallmarks of being middle class.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my class; I am indifferent to it. I am not constrained - or conditioned - by it either but if we are all affected to some extent by our environement then my council house start in life, my father’s entrepreneurial successes from very ordinary beginnings, our family’s lack of education, my grandparent’s financial discipline and ‘old fashioned’ certainties were all there as the tapestry into which my life was woven.

Just as the way we raise our children will be partly informed - negatively, positively or some combination of both - by the way we ourselves were raised so our world view, beliefs, values and principles will, in some way, be flavoured with that which prevailed at home.

The present and the future are all connected to the past. One is built on the other - even if the present is a deliberate rejection of the past. The past is always there and is always a part of you. In class terms my past is working class and working class is what I will forever be - even if my behaviours, aspirations, achievements and principles would otherwise label me as ‘middle’ class.

… to see if you are.

From the Daily Mail (no on-line source available):

A brief IQ test is said to distinguish the brightest candidates for a job within three minutes.

3,500 college students took the test as part of its development; only 17 per cent got them all right. A third got all three wrong. Men made up two-thirds of those who got all three correct while women made up two-thirds who got all three wrong.

Here are the three questions:

1. A bat and a ball costs £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how many minutes would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake there is a patch of lily pads. Every day the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how many days would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

To see the answers - after having given it careful thought yourself, of course - click on (more…)

I rarely read these things but work is quiet at the moment and I’m about to go home and I was curious… That’s my excuse. Anyway, The Times’ ‘Women‘ section has a problems page and I saw this:

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Only speak English? That won’t get you anywhere these days. Here are some definitions before we start:

Chav (see picture, top right)= refers to a subculture negatively stereotyped as being uneducated, uncultured and prone to antisocial or immoral behaviour. The label is typically (although not exclusively) applied to teenagers and young adults of white working class or lower-middle class origin.

Bling (see gnashers, below chav)= refers to expensive jewellery and other flashy accoutrements

Anyway. Forget chavs now that you’ve finally found out what one is. The reaction against ‘bling’ (ditto) is the PRAV. Remember: you read it here first. (Unless you saw The Scotsman today. In which case you read it here second.)

Now personally I couldn’t give a hoot about fashion trends because I am just not that kind of a chap but I found this interesting because it seems to be a little like a counter-culture. The Scotsman newspaper describes the PRAV:

The “PRAVs”, or “Proud Realisers of Added Value”, are a burgeoning group who no longer believe that expensive is better. Snubbing designer labels in favour of cheaper items, they not only want value for money but enjoy gloating about how little they spend.

But get the distinction here: Pravs aren’t buying whatever’s cheap. They’re buying what they want - but cheaply. In a way, they’re bargain hunters. Which means my nan’s a Prav too. Blimey - she will be pleased.

Now you might think that the pursuit of the bargain in favour of designer labels and big name/big price-tag styles means the end of snobbery then. Oh no. Not at all:

So not only is it [bargain hunting] becoming our new favourite pastime, it’s also getting competitive. Around 20 per cent of PRAVs admitted they would tell a friend if they bought the same item as them but at a better price; and 12 per cent said they would feel triumphant.

Crikey. So is poor the new rich? Will I now have to fight my way through eye-gouging Pravs at my local charity shop as I make my way to the second-hand books at the back?

Actually, part of this new trend could be due to other factors also. The small matter of a trillion quid of personal debt coupled with rising interest rates may very well be putting the brakes on spending.

Equally serious, companies like Burberry - whose clothing is synonymous with the chav culture - could well suffer by their association with the lower orders. People are deliberately avoiding their products simply because of the low-class associations they attach to them. Worse, they’re avoiding stores that sell stuff like that and are, instead, favouring the likes of TK Max and Tesco’s own brands.

Ah. Old clothes, second-hand fashions, stores’ own brands… I knew I would become fashionable again if I waited long enough!

NASA yesterday sent a probe crashing into Tempel 1, a 9 mile wide comet, in a bid to better understand the origins of our universe. NASA’s scientists were ecstatic at the successful collision which took place 83 million miles away from earth. The picture on the right here shows the impact of probe and comet.

The probe - Deep Impact - is about the size of a fridge although the flash it created in its collision with the icy comet was, apparently, visible from earth with the naked eye. Of course, you’d need to know where to look and when - and you could do without the thick cloud cover we’ve been ‘enjoying’ in London the last couple of weeks. But anyway. I guess it’s true we could have seen it - in theory.

According to The Scotsman though not everyone is happy with NASA’a successful operation:

A Russian astrologist, Marina Bai, is suing NASA for £170 million, claiming the Deep Impact mission has changed her horoscope.

“It is obvious that elements of the comet’s orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope,” she said.

So how come she didn’t see this coming?

Crime in the newspapers doesn’t seem real. Most of it doesn’t, at least. Muggings. Robberies. Credit card fraud. The odd murder, the occasional rape. Seen it all before. It’s callous to say it maybe but there’s so much of it about that any residue of sympathy we may once have felt for the victims of many of our society’s daily outrages has been long ago blunted by constant exposure, endless repetition. Sure, we get riled by the latest ‘thing’ - feral 14 year olds beating 40 year old family men to a pulp, for example - and then the outrage - and the sense of enraged impotence - feels very real for a while. But - and I’m sure our blessed ‘leaders’ are counting on this - helpless in our fury and, simultaneously, hopeless of ever purging ourselves of it we instead allow ourselves to gradually grow numb to it and, in the end, more or less, stop caring.

It may only be when the crimes that are normally so work-a-day are carried out in one’s own neighbourhood that their influence manages to creep under the guard of acquiescent fatalism so many of us live behind.

Last weekend I needed to fill the car but my nearest petrol station was surrounded by a flimsy - but, psychologically, impenetrable - police cordon. Those lengths of tape - the thin blue (and white) line - hid nothing and, beyond the boundary they created, the men in white jumpsuits, their heads covered, told us everything we needed to know without saying a word. Someone - in our local petrol station - had been murdered.

This week, once again needing petrol, that same garage was now open but only dispensing diesel. As I drove to my next local blue and white tape once again thwarted me as armed police directed traffic past, encouraging us to resist slowing and looking.

Today, succumbing to my curiosity, I went to a newsagent and bought something I would never normally buy. A local newspaper.

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Evil French fascist mayor stirred up ratial-hatred recently after using a shovel to batter to death one of Paris’ huge community of rats - and then bragging about it afterwards.

Jacques Peyrat, the outspoken mayor of Nice, caused added offence to the SPA, the national society for the protection of animals, by congratulating himself on his work in the local paper.

He spotted the well-nourished rat during an official visit to a rubbish collection point in the city’s old quarter close to the seafront.

He told Nice Matin that he grabbed a shovel and used it to “smash” the rat. “I cannot stand those animals,” he explained.

France’s national society for the protection of animals was not at all impressed. They have lodged a criminal complaint which could end with Monsewer Peyrat paying a fine of £2,100.

Serge Belais, national president of the SPA, said: “If it’s accepted that people can mistreat rats today, then tomorrow it will be birds and cats.”

Not everyone is shocked and outraged.

An aide to Mr Peyrat, a former member of the National Front and now a senator for the UMP party, said: “We are not taking this seriously.”

Some woman received nearly £7000 in housing and council tax benefits by claiming she was a single mother with four children.

But when she appeared as a contestant on Channel 4’s Wife Swap programme last November officials were among hundreds of thousands of viewers who saw that she was living with her husband, Michael Litchfield.

Why don’t our officials catch more of these obvious benefit cheats?

(Because they’re sitting at home watching ‘Wife Swap’ on the telly!)

Leesa Morris, of Rainham, east London, admitted falsely claiming benefit when she appeared before magistrates at Havering.

She was told that she could have been jailed but was given a 100-hour community punishment order and ordered to pay £100 costs.

What about repaying the 7 grand she stole?

How come the people who were erroneously given too much tax credit have to repay their money - causing, for some, genuine hardship - while a criminal gets away with a hundred quid fine?

Whoever said that crime doesn’t pay obviously didn’t live in the UK…

It never occured to me that you could study humour but, it seems, you can. And, because you can, someone did. The British Association for the Advancement Of Science to be precise.

Seems they carried out a survey a couple of years ago to find the world’s funniest joke. Here it is:

Famed fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his gruff assistant Doctor Watson pitch their tent while on a camping expedition, but in the middle of the night Holmes nudges Watson awake and questions him.

HOLMES: Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.

WATSON: I see millions of stars, and if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it is quite likely there are some planets like earth, and if there are a few planets like earth out there there might also be life.

HOLMES: Watson, you idiot! Somebody stole our tent.

The BAAS said the joke was the most popular among 10,000 submitted, being chosen as the best by 47% of the 100,000 people from more than 70 countries who took part.

Personally, I think it’s a bit of a children’s joke and not especially amusing. A year later The LaughLab experiment - conducted by psychologist Dr Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire - attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings. Now these jokes are much better:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”

Jokes were also split by their popularity in certain countries:

Top joke in Scotland: I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Top joke in England: Two weasels are sitting on a bar stool. One starts to insult the other one. He screams, “I slept with your mother!” The bar gets quiet as everyone listens to see what the other weasel will do. The first again yells, “I SLEPT WITH YOUR MOTHER!” The other says, “Go home dad you’re drunk.”

Top joke in USA: A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.” The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

Top joke in Belgium: Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks.

Not sure about that Belgian one….

Seems like someone actually bought it!

With thanks to The Liberty Cadre.