The below is an excerpt from ‘Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena’ by Philomena Cunk.
Facebook is a sort of pub in your computer, where your mates and you can all meet and fall out with each other without having to pay for a drink or some nuts or put up with a fucking pub quiz taking place.
People tell Facebook everything, but there’s one thing it can never know, and that’s how someone smells. There isn’t a button for having a bath or blowing off. So the people on Facebook you don’t really know—you can imagine they smell like something nice, like almonds, or Glade Plug-Ins. Which’ll make you like them more. But with people you’ve met in real life, you already know how they smell: all human and ordinary. Which makes them less mysterious.
When Facebook figures out how to do smell, everyone will be as disappointing as they really are. And maybe that’ll be better.
Fake News
Fake news is a way of persuading people of things even though there’s no evidence. Lying to you that the world is dangerous, or corrupt, or round.
Fake news used to only happen on April the first when the papers would pretend something unfunny had happened, and the presenters would read it on BBC Breakfast and pretend to laugh. But now it’s not just one day, it’s all the time. It’s a worse mission creep than Christmas.
Fake news originally started on the internet. On the internet, you can lie, and there’s no consequences, but if a newspaper lies on its front page, they have to print a little tiny box that says “sorry” inside a different paper weeks or sometimes years later, so that acts as a big deterrent.
Donald Trump says the mainstream media is fake news, because it says what he is doing. It’s quite persuasive because most of it does sound made up, probably for a film where a bear gets to be president.
Actually, fake news is all right, really, because real news is quite boring. So nobody reads it. But fake news is better, because it’s stuff you already think, so you don’t have to read it. Just the headlines. So you have time to read more of it. Which you don’t.
Fullosophy
A great fullosopher once wrote, “Naughty, naughty; very naughty.” And he knew what he was talking about because, like all good fullosophers, he spent all his time thinking—but think- ing about thinking.
Human beings are the only animals who ask questions, apart from owls, who always want to know who’s there. Questions like, “Is there a meaning to life?” “What am I here for?” “How did those shoes get in my fridge?” And, most weird of all, “How am I thinking these things?”
When you think about it, thinking about thinking is the hardest sort of thinking there is, which makes you think. It’s probably even harder than poems or remembering the names of all the Smurfs. Luckily some people in black-and-white photo- graph times spent their whole lives doing exactly that sort of thinking thinking, and their brains became so full that they became known as fullosophers. The minds of fullosophers are stronger than ours because they do thinking all the time, like when you get a man to help you move a fridge. But using only thought.
The first fullosophers were ancient and Greek, and had names like Heraclitus, Petepaphides and Pythagoras. His big idea was that everything in the world could be done with numbers, like in Argos. Though, ironically, the Greek version of Argos only stocked noughts, an idea invented by some bloke called Jason. Pythagoras is best known these days as the inventor of the trian- gle, but a world without his ideas would be unthinkable. Because there’d be no Dairylea. And you couldn’t start snooker.
Pythagoras died in 495BBC and, by then, fullosophy was all the rage. Like One Direction but with better beards: Socrates; Aristotle; Plato. They all kept their brains warm with a beard round their chin. If that’s where brains is.
Plato invented Platonic relationships. Before him, men and women couldn’t be just friends, they had to have sexual inter- course with each other. Which is, of course what people in platonic relationships want to do really anyway, whatever they tell you. Maybe Plato invented pretending not to want sex so he could get more of it. That’d be just like him. The devious bastard.
All that pretending not to want sex must have knackered everyone’s brains, because there was no good fullosophy until Rene De Scarts was born in the sixteen hundredth century. De Scarts is famous for saying “Cogito ergo sum,” which is Latin for “I think therefore I am.” It’s lucky he said it in Latin, or everyone might have thought he was just Popeye. And ignored him.
What De Scarts was trying to say was: if everything is in our brains, how do we know we exist? And the answer, of course, is footprints. But how do we know our footprints are really there? What if they’re somebody else’s footprints? Or drawings of footprints, like at the airport? And how do we know airports is real? Most flying is in dreams, so you never know.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a German fullosopher, even tried to explain reality using the idea of Superman, which is stupid because humans can’t do laser eyes or pick up skyscrapers with their bare hands. Or can they?
Trying to explain reality is so complicated that even the brainiest fullosophers can’t do it in a way a normal person doesn’t find really boring. Perhaps that’s because thinking about thinking is a bit like singing a song about singing, or watching a TV program about a TV program, like Extras. In other words, not as good as the one he did first about paper.
Perhaps fullosophers should think about exciting stuff instead, like being burgled or Fireworks Night. But thinking about Fireworks Night doesn’t help us understand reality. It just helps us understand fireworks. Perhaps De Scarts was right, and we think because we are. Because, if you think about it, we probably are. And if we aren’t, then maybe it doesn’t matter.
Excerpted from ‘CUNK ON EVERYTHING: The Encyclopedia Philomena’ by Philomena Cunk. Copyright © 2018 by House of Tomorrow Ltd., Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris. Additional material by Charlie Brooker and Ben Caudell. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
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