Ah! That’s more like it: I knew you would not neglect your intellectual pursuits. A Jesus biography, though? What kind of things could be discussed in there, other than whether or not Jesus existed? I’d have thought that the Bible remained the most accurate (read: highly inaccurate but copious, at least) account of Jesus’ life, and that the best any hack-biographer could do was to offer a highly speculative and sensationalized portrayal, seen before only in the likes of the notoriously hostile Nazareth Chronicle. Jesus, I’m sure, was a very good man at heart, who doesn’t deserve to have his visits to brothels, his attendance of wedding feasts and surfeit on alcohol, and his act of auto-cannibalism at the Last Supper splashed all over the front pages. If I were Jesus, I’d sue from the grave. Or not the grave, but rather wherever Jesus hangs out these days.

Funnily enough, I read the Sex and the City thread you mentioned just last week. It was very interesting if not incredibly protracted and verbose, and I’m not sure I can even remember the gist of the arguments now. But you and I had the genesis of the same discussion brewing in Glitterbot’s suckiest artists threads a few months ago, where you renounced heartless plastic commercialism; but I think I confused you because my tastes are more eclectic than yours. Well, eclectic enough not to have a wardrobe full of Iggy T-shirts anyway.

Actually, I’ve just noticed that that picture of Xylex bears more than a passing resemblance to your Iggy avatar. I’m sure you could airbrush Iggy in the place of Xylex’s head and people wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I like the idea of Bulletproofface’s Snoopy tattoo, also.

Okay, I’ve moved as seamlessly as I possibly could through the various topics, but we need to back peddle to my brief career as an astronaut. I wish I could say that I volunteered myself to be sent into space, but it was actually part of my parents’ wishes. I had a fairly happy though impoverished childhood, and it was only because my dad had connections with high up places – a brother’s auntie’s dog’s friend’s cousin’s owner, in fact – who promised to send me into space and keep my best interests at heart. My mother jumped at the chance and arranged for me to be posted to NASA straightaway, yet I still have the remaining impression that I was being used as a human guinea pig of some sort. . .

As you may have gathered by now, it was a fairly routine mission, as space mission go; just a test flight in a new shuttle which had an unprecedented use of a uranium power source, the kind of thing which sadly doesn’t make international news. The guy who was in charge of coordinating the mission – the brother’s auntie’s dog’s guy – really only wanted a child on-board as something flashy that he could write on his CV. I think he used me as a means of claiming that he had sent the first child into space; a development which, as you can imagine, he tipped as heralding a new era of the space age where children could become self-sufficient in space and presumably seek out inhabitable planets and repopulate them of their own accord. I was given a fairly minimal training programme, even though most of the controls on the shuttle were operated from a terrestrial base, but I kinda twigged what was going on with the coordinator’s selfish motives to exploit my position, and resolved to be difficult and obstinate once I was finally blasted into space.

Of course, I was young and fearless, so being sent into space was no big deal, just something that beat the shit out of a daytrip to the zoo. As soon as lift-off was successful, I immediately carried out my revenge on ground control by smearing excrement over the CCTV cameras (something for which I was severely reprimanded on my return to Earth), but once the main objectives of the mission were completed I was given a free rein for a brief spell. So I completed a few 360 degree spins and looped-the-loop. I was only six years old, after all.

Fifteen jugglers, Fifteen jugglers
Five believers, Five believers
All dressed like men