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Stolen from Phil Plait - The Stupid, It Burns

I once had a news editor (Hi Dave! Come see us!) who said he liked me because, when I walked down the road, I looked around; up at the roofs, the second storeys, the signs, the people around me, what’s going on.

I once had a Geography teacher (Hello Mr Cant! Man, can you imagine being a teacher with the official surname ‘Cant’?) who said the secret to urban geomorphology (pronounced with a heavy Northern accent – he was a filthy northerner, we were posh public schoolboys) was Looking Up – up above the WH Smiths and Sock Shop shop fronts to see what sort of buildings were hiding behind them, when they were built, what they were about.

And this, well you can Google it for yourself; someone said, not that long ago or perhaps ages ago, who knows, “That’s not even wrong enough to be wrong”.

And I’ve said for a long time to everyone who can’t get away quickly enough that there are some people who look up and some people who look down. Throughout their whole lives. Some who lift their heads and some who just look down. Some who are interested in the wider world and some who have blinkers on all their lives and know only their own lives. People who, when you say, ‘Hey did you see those photos of that asteroid hitting Jupiter?’ don’t say, either, ‘Yeah, wow!’ or ‘No, where can I see them’, just say, ‘Duh?’ People who know why they should be buying a new LCD 119 cm television instead of a 108 cm plasma model but who have no clue that buying a four kilo bag of Haribo’s finest for their two-year-old niece is, perhaps, déconseillé by middle-class know-alls like me. And doctors.

So this article in the New York Times really spoke to me. Yeah, people who are so stupid, they don’t know they’re stupid. People who talk on their mobile phones, sip their lattés, brush their hair, do their make-up, don’t fix their kids’ or their own seatbelts, people who are stupid but don’t know it. People who, when I speak to them to tell them that their kids are running around in the back seat of their cars and who will, when they have an accident, hit the back of their heads with the force of a baby elephant falling off a cliff * reply to me either ‘Eh?’ or ‘Fuck off’. Darwin at work, but it’s a tragic fact that 49% of the population are below average. 49.9, in fact.

So. Do you look up?

(*non-statistical fact made up for emphasis)