Being Mr. Kenny

Today I discovered that it is quite taxing, mentally, to chew and cut up a pizza at the same time. I found this out when I had to gobble down my free pizza from work so I could start my shift on time. Maybe it’s the male thing, not being able to do to things at the same time, or maybe it’s the fact that chewing actually does take up quite a lot of attention, who knows. Maybe we will never get the answers.

Mark Kenny is 22 and holds an Honours degree in Biology.

Hey folks, just wanted to blog to let you know that I might not be around for much longer. I just finished a whole 250g round of Camembert in half an hour, so a heart attack could be creeping up on me any second.

I used maths to work out the volume of cheese consumed, and it turned out to be 866 cubic centimetres. That’s probably not a lot, but putting things in cubic centimetres always does wonders for showing off how much of something there is.

Apparently that’s 1,129,000 Joules of energy I just ate right there. I did some more maths and found out that that’s 627 Watts. I just ate three and a third lightbulbs worth of energy! (Ok, I just consumed energy at the same rate as a 100W lightbulb shining for about 3.3 seconds gives off. Or something.)

Let’s put this into perspective. Apparently the human brain consumes 20-40 Watts. This means I just ate enough to keep it up and running for just 15 seconds or nearly 8 hours, depending on whichever of the two bits of maths I did was correct.

I’m pretty sure it’s 8 hours though. Let’s have a massive round of applause for the human metabolism. Also, could someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to really basic calculations work out some stuff for me and see if my conclusions are correct? Just don’t tell Gillian McKeith, now, will you. She’d make me look at my poo and then tell me how crappy a diet I have.

I just sent this via the customer comments form:

Dear Cadbury. I think you are all geniuses. I don’t care what the person’s position is in the company, the whole bloody lot of you are all geniuses. Let’s face it, you make chocolate and then supply it to the general public. If I were you, I would probably make all that chocolate and then just try and eat it all myself.

But really, you people are actual geniuses, Gods among men. I think it is the height of generosity that you let this chocolate out of your factories. I really think you ought to be in charge of the country.

Thank you very much,

Mark Kenny

Update: Nearly two hours after originally posting this, I stand by everything I have said.

I was on the tram the other day and I spotted a man running as fast as he could towards the tram stop as we neared it. We were about 50 metres away and he looked very determined, so I naturally assumed he was trying to catch the tram.

Not so, ladies and gentlemen! Not so! He stopped abruptly in front of a car that was just pulling out and, turning around, with the same look of unyielding resolution on his face, he bent over and exposed his buttocks to the unfortunate occupants of the car.

Sadly, I wasn’t there long enough to see the reaction, but the incident stayed with me all that day. I have no idea who this man, or the victims of his attack, were, and I can only guess at his motives. All I know is that he performed this action with the utmost sincerity. He wasn’t smiling or laughing in any way; throughout the entire episode his face was the very picture of solemnity. Forsooth, his was no friendly moon!

What struck me most was his choice of attack. Throwing eggs at someone’s house, I can understand, but getting your arse out in public lacks a certain amount of grace and composure. I’ve always thought that you should try to maintain your dignity if you’re going to get involved in retaliation. There’s a certain amount of pride involved in these things, as Wikipedia attests. Public nudity doesn’t really cut the mustard in my book.

Anyway, it kept me amused, if a little disgusted, and it caused a bit of a stir amongst the passers-by from what I recall. Funnily enough I don’t think anyone else on the tram noticed it, or at least if they did they didn’t bat an eyelid. It’s strange what gets a reaction and what doesn’t.

Maybe the reason old people have deja vu all the time is because they’re always saying the same thing over and over and it’s tricked their brains into thinking that everything in life repeats itself anyway, so you might as well make like you recognise someone/a situation/whatever because you probably do.

At least, that’s the theory I just invented to start this post off. I have reached the ripe old age of 22, and I’m already doing that “Oh gosh was that five years ago it seems like only yesterday my goodness doesn’t time go past quickly I can’t believe how much you’ve grown you were only knee-high to a grasshopper last time I saw you, haha” thing that adults are so fond of doing.

The most recent event which made me think that was last night when my housemate was telling me about this sixteen-year-old guy he knows from work. More specifically, a conversation he had with this guy about some football thing that happened in 1994. I have no idea what the competition was, I loathe football almost as much as I loathe Michael Winner. My housemate’s point was that 1994 was twelve years ago and his friend couldn’t remember this football competition, whatever it was, because he was only four years old at the time.

Four years old! In 1994, I had just got to be 10. The big one-oh, double digits, no more single digits for me, no sir. My housemate’s friend had reached the big four … and then no more digits! The numbers just stop there!

It’s almost like when I remember that the six year olds in my Mum’s class were born in 2000. The year 2000 — when I was taking my GCSEs, when the world was feeling embarrassed for having been terrified that their computers/VCRs/toasters were going to malfunction and turn against us at the stroke of midnight, Januray 1st. That same year, people whose lives thus far had consisted of floating about in a warm, dark uterus were being cruelly brought into the world and slapped on the bottoms by doctors before being prodded, weighed, and having their fingers counted by midwives.

So anyway. Now that I am firmly, finally, fankfully* out of puberty, having “oh gosh is that the date” moments looks set to become a recurrent feature of my life.

* As in “Thank Heavens puberty is over” but I needed to use the voiceless labiodental fricative, not the voiceless dental fricative. But isn’t that always the case!

There is something wonderful and mysterious about Google translate, especially when translating from Italian:

You take the clam:
and it cuts it to you in two parts.
You take the shells:
they washes to you in order and dries to you well them.

I was going over some old folders from my days as an errant and inattentive student, and I found this in my notes from a lecture:

It’s a character I invented called Gablabby Roslyn. She was offering me some important advice during my lecture, which was ironic for if I had not been drawing pictures of her, she would not have been able to give me that advice.

It’s like when you put two mirrors facing each other, or feedback when you hold a microphone up to a speaker. THESE ARE THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE.