PART II: The Origin Of Everything From N To Z.This is an exhaustive encyclopedia that explains the Origin of Everything the BTSB-way. Nausea/nirvana - When Iggy Pop took his shirt off during a Stooges gig back in the 70s, the audience was overcome by a feeling of sickness only comparable to that of being punched in the stomach after devouring thirty rotting eggs while plummeting down the Niagara Falls in a barrel. When Iggy Pop finally put his shirt back on, the feeling of nausea was replaced by nirvana, a state of well-being, carelessness and relief soon adopted into Buddhist beliefs and the Seattle grunge scene.
Originality - When a German scholar calculated in the year 1768 that every single original idea in the world had been used up a decade earlier (yes, even his calculations had already been done by a chipmunk living in the Barcelona region. Sadly his data was never examined by anyone, because chipmunks, fluent in dog and squirrel, can't speak human languages), he committed suicide and destroyed all his notes in order to keep art alive. Sadly, his efforts were in vain, for when Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, he ruined art for us all.
Periods - When God deemed that women got off easily compared to men because they didn't have to work, bother with higher wages or go through the pains of ejaculating sperm, He created menstruation to bother them all.
Québec - When a word beginning with Q was needed for A-Z lists, a city in Canada was named Québec. Unfortunately, being Canadian, it soon became wildly unpopular and thus A-Z lists were satisfied with listing Q as "the 17th letter of the alphabet".
Religion – When the charlatan priest Me’chtualapapanup could guess what card the audience had chosen from a shuffled deck. He claimed his powers came from God, but now we know he was actually using the flesh of his pinky as a placeholder in the deck.
Sarcasm - When Thomas Jefferson wrote the lines "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence.
Teenage angst - When misbehaving-children-deserve-pain-mentality and corporal punishment fell out of fashion in the mid-20th century, teenagers tried to compensate the lack of upbringing by cutting themselves, listening to horrible music and wearing mascara, determined to make everyone around them just as miserable as they are. Luckily for us, it's rumoured that the old-fashioned methods of Hit Them In The Armpits So It Doesn't Show and Feed Them Well - Go Straight To Hell, Give No Food - They'll Be Good are coming back.
Ulysses - When James Joyce wrote this groundbreaking doorstopper, he had no idea what repercussions his work will have on future generations of English students forced to plough through the pages of this epitome of tediousness. Voted by many to be the most boring book of the 20th century (second only to Finnegan's Wake by the same author) and considered to be one of the reasons for high suicide rates among English literature students. Publishing the book was, according to the publisher Sylvia Beach, "a grave mistake, for which I am truly sorry about".
Violent spouses - When interviewed, around 80 per cent of all Swedish people would like to be beaten up by their girl- or boyfriends every now and then. Domestic violence has become the norm in households ever since a Swedish study described the positive correlation between getting beat up by your spouse and your financial success. Another study appeared a week later, claiming that domestic violence causes cancer, and this attributes for the 20 per cent living in denial.
Worried parents – When popular child labour employers, such as the coal mines of Kuala Lumpur and the girls' dirty underwear factories of Sapporo were forced to shut down due to alleged human rights violations, parents of former child employees became worried that their children would fall to sloth, gluttony and many other western vices. To prevent children from falling into such culture traps, the worried parents sent them to Africa and the Middle-East to work as minefield testers and cannon fodder.
Xanadu – When a word beginning with X was needed for A-Z lists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem Xanadu. The poem’s popularity flared for a while, but died out very soon when people noticed how utterly crap it actually was. After this disastrous defiling of art, for which Coleridge should have been executed right on the spot, the lists used the adult-oriented “XXX” as the entry for the letter X. Thus true art, so far removed from Coleridge’s pathetic attempt, endured.
Yngwie Malmsteen – When the guitar industry was facing an all-time low in the 80s due to the rising popularity of the electric synth, the good people at a very large record company signed Yngwie on in order to assure that even ugly people can play the guitar damn well.
Zebra crossing – When the German schoolboy Günther Zebra grew tired of the crazy traffic in his hometown of Düsseldorf, he walked to the middle of the main street in after-work traffic, sat down cross-legged in front of a line of cars and refused to budge. He was soon run over by a Volkswagen with poor breaks. A white line of paint was used to cover the spots his body parts flew to. Later, when a group of French landscape architects happened to see the white lines on the asphalt, they had one of those “EUREKA!” moments, and so the zebra crossing became used in all places with traffic to commemorate Günther Zebra’s death.
Link to Part I of The Origin Of Everything [tags]origin, everything, nirvana, ulysses, religion[/tags]
