Chapter Two
The Daft Philosophy Game

One evening, Becky and her friends were chatting together when one of them, Amber, suggested they play a game. She said, "I invented some silly philosophy questions. How about I challenge you to answer them?

"Now I might be totally wrong about this, I know; but somehow, I've got the impression that philosophy's just a load of airy-fairy inconsequential pontification, where people can babble on pretentiously for hours without actually saying anything that's of any practical use.

"Actually, thinking about it, I'm not quite sure where that impression came from, which is why I said it could be totally wrong. Just possibly. It's just something I've always thought. Maybe it's something to do with things I've heard about philosophers debating whether we even exist, and old tosh like that.

"But anyway, I made up these daft philosophy questions. How about you try to answer them in a philosophical way, and see which of you can do the most convincing impression of a waffly philosopher who's got their head in the clouds, ... or one who can somehow manage to sound philosophical without waffling?

"You know the kind of thing I mean: I heard a joke about a philosophy exam where there was a chair on the invigilator's desk, and the exam question told them to prove it didn't exist, and one student just wrote, 'What chair?' and got top marks.

"And there's another joke about how there was a philosophy exam where the question was, 'Is this a question?' And most of the students were writing reams and reams of theory about it, but one of them just wrote, 'Is this an answer?' and then got up and walked out, but he got the top marks of everybody there.

"So see if you can come up with philosophical-sounding answers to my stupid philosophy questions."

They decided to give it a go.

The first question Amber asked was, "If you decided to float around in a fish pond for days doing nothing but pondering the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' do you think you'd be likely to be any closer to an answer at the end of it than at the beginning?"

Becky immediately answered, "No you wouldn't, because you'd probably have died of hypothermia by then! Or you'd have got way too hungry to concentrate on the question, and you'd have instead started obsessing over whether raw fish taken straight out of a fish pond would be good and safe to eat; or you'd be busily wondering why on earth you'd decided to do such a silly thing as floating around in a fish pond for days asking yourself a question you could have asked yourself in the warmth of your own home, surrounded by nice food!"

Amber smiled and said, "That's not a philosophical answer! You're not supposed to give practical, common-sense answers; you're supposed to wade around in a mire of waffle for hours, and not get anywhere even after all that!"

The students chuckled, and one joked, "This is going to be a long night if everyone does that! Perhaps going crazy from sleep deprivation will somehow help us come up with more philosophical-sounding nonsense. But then, I think I'd prefer the practical answers."

One of the group said, "Actually, I think some branches of philosophy are more practical than others."

None of the students could think of an answer to Amber's question that sounded in any way philosophical; so she asked them another one, saying,

"What is a hairbrush, in terms of its contribution to the mental well-being of humanity over the centuries? Would societies feel as proud of their achievements if it had never been invented?"

The students laughed, and one said, "What, do you mean would we be able to take such pride in human achievement if we all had to go around with messy hair?"

He said sarcastically, "Yeah, I can just imagine someone being shown the inner workings of a computer someone had just invented, or a bridge that was a spectacular feat of engineering, and saying, 'Well, it's good; but I just can't feel impressed about it, because your hair's a real let-down! How can I admire anything you do when you've got such messy hair!"

One of the others grinned and said, "Actually, I'm sure my mum's said things to me like that!"

One of the friends said, "I suppose part of the implication of the question is that we might all be wandering around feeling so depressed that we had to all have messy hair that we wouldn't feel like taking pride in anything. But how likely is it really that humanity would have been able to come up with solutions to complex problems like how to get tap water into everyone's homes, and yet still never have thought to invent the hairbrush? ... No, don't answer that one; it's not meant to be another philosophy question."

Another student said, "Don't forget that if everyone had to go round with messy hair, it would just be the norm, so no one would think anything of it, probably. It would just be what people had grown up to expect. But don't forget that even if the hairbrush had never been invented, there might still have been combs! And scissors, so anyone who was fed up of their tangly messy hair could always cut it off!"

Amber said with mock seriousness, "I'm sorry, but your answers still aren't philosophical enough. They're not supposed to be realistic and sensible. OK, here's another question for you to try:

"Would the word 'lucky' be likely to exist if no one was ever lucky in their lives?"

Becky said, "Probably not, since there would be no point in having a word that never got used. But the term 'bad luck' and the word 'unlucky' might exist, because bad luck would probably still exist."

No one could think of a better answer than that.

Amber said in mock disapproval, "That sounds like too definite an answer for a philosopher, ... despite all the 'probably's and 'might's in it. You really aren't a very philosophical lot at all, are you! I can see you all need training in this! OK, here's another question for you all to practise on:

"If you flung a feather into the air, would it make a difference to your state of mind for the rest of the day if there was a bird attached to the end of it?"

Becky said, "That's gross! Anyone who was going to be bothered by throwing a bird in the air wouldn't do it in the first place! But if you were a psychopath and didn't care about birds being upset, you wouldn't care about it any more after you'd flung one in the air than you'd cared about it before."

Another student said, "I suppose if you were trying to teach it to fly, for some reason, like if you'd found a baby bird injured under a bush and nursed it back to health, but then you decided you'd better teach it to fly because it had got separated from its parents so they couldn't do it, and you just flung it gently, and that helped it take off, and then it got the hang of flying, you might be pleased for the rest of the day; but you might be upset if you tried to fling it in the air, and just ended up accidentally pulling one of its feathers off and throwing that instead."

Another one of the group said, "I doubt that would happen. Why would anyone pick it up by just one feather? You couldn't just pull a feather off if you picked it up properly. You'd have to be a bit psycho to just pick it up by a feather. But in that case you wouldn't have been interested in nursing it back to health in the first place, unless you were just hoping to give it the chance to grow bigger so you could eat it. But then you wouldn't teach it to fly, in case it escaped. And it would be way easier and more filling to just buy chicken from the supermarket instead of having to raise and kill and prepare a little bird yourself. Unless you were especially fond of killing and gutting little birds, I suppose. I suppose some people who enjoy fishing must like doing that to the fish they catch instead of just going to the supermarket and buying some, for some reason, so who knows. Poor little fishies."

Amber teased, "You might be just beginning to get the hang of this philosophy lark. Not Becky though. So Becky: If you think it would be psychopathic to throw a bird in the air in the first place, does that mean you think anyone who works in the meat industry making meat out of animals must be a psychopath? And what about people like you who eat that stuff? What about all those poor chickens you probably eat bits of?"

Becky said, "Just how philosophically would you like me to answer this? I can give you a practical answer, which is that most people who eat meat probably don't even think about where it comes from. I don't suppose many people think, 'Yum yum! Animal flesh!'

"I don't know whether there's a higher percentage of psychopaths working in slaughterhouses than there are in the general population; but it's not as if people just kill animals for food for fun, is it. There's a difference between doing something out of cruelty and doing it because it's going to provide valuable nutrition to people. I wouldn't want to ever work in a place like that though! I'm looking forward to when they start mass-producing lab-grown meat, so no one ever has to kill animals for it again!"

One of the group said, "I'm not sure it'll work like that. For one thing, farmers who've been raising a lot of animals like pigs and chickens for food and then realise no one wants them any more will probably just kill them. ... Or I suppose it's just possible they might just let them loose to go rampaging across the country scaring everyone and making a nuisance of themselves. Imagine a family waking up to find a flock of chickens in their back garden! Or a flock of sheep!

"Actually, I once heard about a wild boar in Germany that got into a couple's house and jumped into bed with them! It was scared of a little dog and ran away to escape it, accidentally running through a glass patio door. It rushed into an elderly couple's bedroom, jumped on their bed, and tried to burrow under the duvet and sheets. The couple were scared and jumped out of bed. They saw the dog outside. It was barking. They had to chase it away before they could persuade the pig to leave. The husband said he couldn't believe such a massive pig would be scared of such a tiny little dog. He had to bop it on the snout with a newspaper before it would go away.

"But anyway, another reason why lab-grown meat won't stop animals being killed is that farmers will still keep female chickens to raise them so they produce eggs, but kill them when they stop, so they don't have to carry on paying to feed and house them; and they'll keep cows for the milk, but still kill most of the males they give birth to, because they won't be of any use to them."

One student said, "This is getting gruesome! I don't like this game. How much worse could it get, I wonder."

Becky grinned and joked, "Yes, I suppose we could all try to philosophise about just how bad we could make it if we tried."

Amber said, "Allright. here's the next question: If you studied space exploration and gave every black hole you found out about an affectionate pet name, do you think you could end up thinking of them fondly, even though you knew that if you got close to them, they'd suck you in mercilessly till they crushed you to death?"

One of the group grinned and asked, "And this is supposed to be less gruesome?"

Amber smiled and replied, "I suppose it depends on how airy-fairy you can make your answers to it."

Becky said, "Somehow I doubt it would make much difference what you called black holes, since after all, if you called people you didn't like pet names, I don't suppose it would make you like them any better. I dunno; perhaps we could try it: Let's go round calling people we don't like darling from now on and see what happens."

One of the others grinned and said, "I think that might creep them out, ... which I suppose could be fun, thinking about it, at least with people we think are bad enough to deserve it. Or else it would give them the wrong impression and make them think we were in love with them. Then that could creep us out! I think we'd better not do that!"

Becky said, "Allright, how about if we go around calling them things like Squidgychumps and Squankypips?"

They giggled.

But then one said, "It doesn't make a good comparison to compare black holes with people we just don't like though, because there might be a lot of people other people don't like for just trivial reasons, like that they slurp their drinks and talk too much. Hopefully not both at the same time. But a black hole that sucks things in and destroys them would be better compared with a psychopathic murderer. And I don't suppose anyone could get to like those better if they gave them cute-sounding pet names!"

One of the group said, "Hey imagine if black holes were actually called psychopaths instead of black holes, but most people hadn't heard of them. Imagine if there was a documentary about space exploration, and the presenter said, 'There are lots of psychopaths in space. There's a massive one right at the centre of our galaxy.' Maybe lots of people would wonder who they were talking about, and why we'd never heard of these intrepid big fat psychopathic astronauts journeying into space before."

They chuckled.

Then Amber said, "You lot aren't being very philosophical, you know. I don't think anyone's going to win this game.

"OK, here's the next question: Will people who walk around in a dream world experience a real qualitative difference between what they do in their ordinary everyday lives and what they do in their dreams when they're asleep at night?"

One student said, "Probably. After all, when someone accuses another person of going round in a dream world, they don't literally mean it's as if they're behaving the way they would in a dream; they usually mean they're not paying attention, and that kind of thing. But people might pay a lot of attention to things in their dreams. If you really did walk around in a dream world, not paying attention to what you were doing because your thoughts were on other things, you might do things like bump into things and fall down steps, when you might never do that in your real dreams.

"And if you were sitting around in a dream world, you might just be day-dreaming; and since people can control what happens in their day-dreams, they're not like most people's real dreams, where unexpected things can happen."

Amber sighed in mock disappointment and said, "How very unphilosophical of you! Has anyone else got a more ... kind of deep philosophical answer?"

No one had.

So Amber went on to her next question, asking, "If the world is one day run by super-intelligent mice that were created in a laboratory by scientists who didn't realise their creations would take over the world, how likely is it that most people will respect their authority, given they're so much tinier than humans? What could the mice do to ensure the respect and obedience of mankind, and would a mouse kingdom be good for the world?"

One of the group said, "For one thing, they'd have to be intelligent enough to avoid getting stepped on! And they'd have to learn to be house-trained so they didn't pollute the world by doing droppings everywhere, or they wouldn't be respected by anyone! And for another thing, besides making them super-intelligent, the scientists would have to have engineered them to have the ability to talk like humans. Then they'd have to teach them a language like English so people could understand them, and educate them all about what the human world's run like, so they knew the basics, like who they'd have to take over from if they were going to take over the world.

"Then the mice would probably have to fight wars against all the world leaders to get them out of power. I wonder what they'd do, - crawl up their trousers in hordes and nibble on their nuts till they ran away to try to escape, perhaps. But if the mice got a taste for doing that kind of thing, they couldn't expect to get respect!"

Another student said, "Yeah. They'd somehow have to be intelligent enough to be able to persuade pest controllers not to engage in mass-extermination campaigns against them! I don't know how they'd do that. Maybe they'd squeak things like, 'Don't exterminate us. All we want to do is to set up a utopian kingdom where everyone can live in peace and harmony forever, except anyone who wants to take over from us, who will be mercilessly nibbled on!'

"And whether such a kingdom would be good for the world would depend on the character of the mice running it, and whether they were actually good at their jobs. And they'd have to somehow persuade humans to train them to do them."

Becky grinned and asked, "Would you be willing to train a mouse to run a country, just supposing you knew how to do that yourself?"

The student who'd been talking before said, "I think I'd just tell the mice that if they had any bright ideas for how to run the country, they should somehow learn to write to MP's and suggest them. That's if I wasn't too creeped out by talking mice to want to talk to them at all. And I probably wouldn't be the only one! Goodness knows what they could do to get a load of creeped-out people to respect their supposed authority!"

Amber smiled and teased, "Philosophers aren't supposed to say, 'Goodness knows what they could do!' They're supposed to speculate and pontificate for hours on end about all the possibilities they can think of as to what they just might be able to do.

"Oh well, if no one can come up with anything more philosophical than that, here's the next question: If a loving powerful god were to compete in the Olympics, would he want to win all the races to demonstrate his power, or come last in them all to give everyone else a chance because of his love?"

One of the group said, "What if he thought the best way to demonstrate his love would be to show how powerful he was so people would have confidence in him, so he'd want to beat the lot of them in style?"

Another student said, "Ah yes, but if he won, people might think he was cheating, using his superpowers to unfair advantage, so they wouldn't have confidence in him after that, because they'd think he was an egocentric cheat who didn't care about anyone else."

One of the friends grinned and said, "Yeah, he'd end up thinking he just couldn't win, wouldn't he! If he came last to show his love, people might think he was a wimpy god who wasn't worth them putting their faith in; but if he won, they'd think he was mean. A sensible god would stay out of it altogether!"

Amber said, "You might be right there. OK, here's the next question: If you were a teacher and you were standing on a bridge with your laptop computer, and you saw a boy you recognised as a bully from the school where you taught struggling in the water below, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of flinging it in the water in the hope he'd get the idea of using it as a raft, climbing onto it and paddling to safety with his hands and feet, and that he'd manage it successfully?

"Supposing you couldn't swim very well so you didn't want to jump in and rescue him yourself, and you didn't want to leave the laptop on the bridge while you did that anyway for fear it would be stolen and your precious personal data would be perused by nosy thieves, such as the email you wrote but never sent to the headmaster telling him you'd like to see him shipped to the North Pole and made to eat nothing but snow for a year, would jumping in without it and feeling scared still be better than not doing anything or throwing it in instead? For all you know, the boy might grow up to be a thief himself if he was saved - you have no way of knowing, and he is a bully after all, at the moment anyway, although he might grow up to be nice for all you know, and he might change his ways if he's touched by you showing kindness by rescuing him; so would it be better to try to rescue him, or leave him?"

One of the group said, "I'd just run and call for help, and leave it up to someone else to decide what to do! And if it took a while and the boy drowned in the meantime, well, if he was a nasty bully, it might have done the world a favour. He wouldn't be worth wasting a laptop over anyway.

"Anyway, does anyone know if laptops even float? I very much doubt they would if they had the weight of someone's body on them! And I wouldn't want to ruin my laptop finding out, especially when it probably wouldn't do any good! I suppose the bully might be able to just grab hold of it to steady himself instead of actually climbing on it.

"But of course, if the river wasn't very deep, it's possible I could just get off the bridge and wade into it and grab hold of him, without having to put my laptop down at all. Or how about we could grab a big branch from a tree and reach down to him with it so he could grab hold of it, if there was one around, and then we could pull him to shore, without getting either ourselves or our laptops wet at all, or leaving them alone and risking thieves getting them."

Amber said, "I'm not sure it's philosophical to think up alternative ideas instead of answering the questions. ... Or maybe it is. Who knows.

"OK, here's my last question: If you owned a huge cage containing tens of thousands of parrots, and you taught each one a different word of a Shakespeare play, would it be possible to organise it so each of them said their one word in turn and then made no noise for hours so you got an entire clear Shakespeare recital? And if you did, would it likely be aesthetically pleasing To your home community? And would it be a worthwhile life achievement?"

One student said, "If you had that many parrots in a cage, you probably wouldn't be able to keep them quiet enough to teach them anything in the first place! I suppose you could take them out one by one and teach each one somewhere quiet. But you'd probably have died of boredom before you'd finished teaching them all. Forget 'life achievement' - it would probably lead to the end of your life! Your death certificate might say, 'Death by boredom'."

Another one of the group said, "Yeah, it might be possible to teach each one of them a word, and then get them to say them in order by sticking a number on each one so you knew which one to take out when, and then taking them all out in turn again when they'd all learned them, walking somewhere quiet with them and getting them to say their word, and then putting them back and getting another one out, recording the whole thing, and then doing a whole load of editing on it to cut out the bits where the parrots said all kinds of words you didn't want them to say, or where you were trying to get them to say the word you wanted them to, or when you were walking back and forth between the cage and the quiet place. Yeah, you'd die of boredom long before you managed to finish all that! If you had lots of help you could maybe do it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth doing at all!"

Amber said, "Well I don't think any of you would make good philosophers. ... But then, maybe that's for the best."

They grinned, and started chatting about other things again.

Chapter Four
A Long Discussion About the State of the World, Which is Sometimes Humorous

One Student Tells the Others They've Met Up With About a Dream of a Lifetime Turning Bad

The students who'd been talking about such things as unintended consequences of government policies and other people's actions met up when they had a free afternoon not long afterwards. The subject soon came up again, when one of them said,

"You know we were talking about bad unintended consequences of things not long ago? Well just the other day, someone on an Internet forum I post on told us about this horrible thing that happened to someone he works with! He said you just can't tell what's going to happen as a result of your actions, even when you think you're doing something nice, or just having fun! The horrible thing that happened started after he had this chance meeting with someone.

"He said that a couple of years ago, he was out for a walk with his wife and kids by the sea one day, looking for a place to have a picnic. They sat in a shelter they found for a while, and met this man, and got talking to him. It turned out he was this famous author who'd sailed around the world a few times and written books about his adventures. He told them loads of funny and interesting stories. They really enjoyed themselves.

"The next day at work, the man on the forum told the people in his office the funny and interesting stories, and said it was really nice meeting the famous author.

"One woman was especially interested, and she got really enthusiastic about the idea of giving up work and sailing around the world for a year with her husband and little kids.

"Her and her husband read the famous author's sailing books, and got even more keen on the idea. The woman told this man he'd inspired her to read the books and then come up with the idea of sailing around the world. He was pleased about that.

"The woman and her husband bought a boat, and after they'd done some work on it, she did give up work, and they went off round the world. This man thought it was really good that he'd inspired them to go by telling the woman about meeting the author and telling the stories, thinking she'd be bound to enjoy herself.

"The couple were into sailing already, but they'd never done anything like travelling around the world. They bought a new boat that was actually made to their specifications, so it took a year for it to be built and got ready properly. They made a lot of plans. Then they went off.

"The man who told us about this didn't hear from the woman for over a year, and the people in his office sometimes thought of her, thinking she must be having a really nice time, while they were stuck in a boring office doing boring things! Quite a lot of people were envious of her.

"They came back a year later, but he noticed the woman didn't look well. She seemed quite cheerful though. She said she wanted to work there again, but someone else had her old job, so they could only give her temporary work.

"They held a special lunch to welcome her back, and they asked her all about what had happened. She entertained them by telling them about some of the nice things and some of the hardships of sailing round the world, like seeing some really beautiful islands and exotic fish, and the hard work of just two people handling the boat in rough seas, and the risks of travelling through seas that were infested with pirates. She gave the impression that she'd had a great adventure, and it was all worth it despite the difficulties.

"But a few days later, this man met the woman outside, and she asked him how he was. He said he was OK and asked her how she was in return out of politeness, just planning to get the pleasantries over and go on his way. But she started getting tearful.

"She told him her and her husband were getting a divorce, because he was violent and abusive, and a judge had awarded him custody of their sons. She said it would be hard for her to challenge the decision in the courts, because she'd spent most of her life's savings on buying the boat they'd been round the world in, and her decision to go had meant she hadn't been earning money for the whole of the past year, and now she couldn't have her old job back to earn more. She said her husband loves sailing, so there's no way he'd agree to sell the boat so she could get her money back that way.

"She said her husband's planning to move to a country far away with the kids, which he'll easily be able to do because he's got a passport for that country as well as the one she lives in, because he's got dual nationality. So if she can't appeal against him having custody of the children, goodness knows how often she'll see them from now on, if she ever does again!

"This man on the forum said he thought it must have been horrible for this woman spending so much time at sea with an abusive husband, especially because being there, she would have had nowhere to run to, and no one was around to help.

"He said a lot of people might have been envious of her when she was going, thinking she must be really lucky to be going sailing around the world, but the reality might have been nightmarish, trying to look after her little sons on a boat for so long with only an abusive husband for company!

"He said he doesn't see the point in anyone being envious of anyone else, because we never know what other people's lives are really like.

"And the sailing trip all started because he wanted to entertain the people in the office with some funny stories!"

One of the students said, "Blimey! When so many things can go wrong unexpectedly, I don't know why we ever dare go out of our front doors! You never know what's going to happen, do you! It seems you can say something that you think is a nice thing to say, and goodness knows what it might lead to!"

The student who'd told the story said, "True. Mind you, the man on the forum said he thinks the woman's husband was abusive before they even went on the sailing trip, before they even got the boat. He said she came into work with a big black eye one day, and she said she'd got it because something on the boat they'd recently bought had swung out and hit her; but he suspects it was really her husband who'd hit her. Really, she was taking a really massive risk sailing around the world with a violent husband, especially when they knew they would be sailing through seas where there were pirates, and taking the kids with them! You know, it might not have been the most responsible thing to have done; and some of her problems could have been foreseen. Maybe she hoped that if her husband was happy because he was following his dream to sail around the world, he wouldn't be violent any more. Some hope!

"And maybe they would have got divorced anyway, even if they hadn't gone on the trip where they had to spend so much time together, and he would have still got custody of the kids and taken them away to another country far away where she would hardly ever see them, although she might at least have had the money to appeal the judge's decision about custody if she'd still had her money. Still, who knows how things will turn out in the end! It'll be sad if things don't get better though.

"She probably did enjoy bits of the sailing trip though, so at least that probably wasn't entirely a dead loss; her husband might not have been abusive every day. ... Well if he was, it probably means he's an idiot, because what if she'd got too badly injured to help him handle the boat, or couldn't stand it any more and killed herself? If he couldn't handle the boat on his own, he might have drowned, the silly man! It might have made the world a slightly better place if he had, but it would have been a shame about the kids!"

The Students Talk About Accidental Scientific Discoveries That Have Benefited the World

One of the students said, "It's horrible to think of something that was just intended to be a bit of fun leading to something bad like that! Mind you, things can sometimes work the other way around too, with things that seem bad at the time leading to good things. You just never know how things might work out in the end sometimes."

Another one of the group said, "Yes. I've heard about Some unforeseen consequences being good. I read that quite a few scientific discoveries were made after scientists were working on doing one thing, and then something happened that was unexpected, and they realised they'd made a discovery that could be useful in some other way, like when the man who invented penicillin got the idea after he'd been working with bacteria, and went a way for a while, and when he came back, he noticed there was mould growing in the dishes he was growing the bacteria in, and was looking to see which dishes weren't infested with it, when he noticed there were no bacteria around the mould, and realised it must be killing it, so he got the idea that it might be able to do that inside the human body. The thought of taking mould medicine doesn't sound nice; but it must be purified a bit somehow, or just the ingredient in it that kills the bacteria must be given to people. And it's not just ordinary mould; I read it's a rare strain of mould.

"And then other scientists got the idea to develop other medicines that can kill bacteria; so the discovery that had at first seemed to be a nuisance when the mould started growing turned out to be something that must have led to millions of lives being saved!

"And another medicine that's saved lots of lives was discovered after what could be thought of as a chance finding as well. Maybe quite a few have. But I read that insulin for diabetes was discovered after an unexpected thing happened, after a couple of doctors were trying to find out more about how the digestive system works near the end of the 19th century, and they decided it would be a good idea to remove the pancreas from a healthy dog to see what happened. A bit gruesome, but maybe they didn't have more sophisticated methods in those days. Mind you, animal experiments are still done now.

"But anyway, they removed the poor dog's pancreas, according to what I read, and a few days later, they noticed flies swarming around the dog's urine; and when they investigated why, they found out it had sugar in it; so they realised they'd given the dog diabetes, and that the pancreas must somehow counteract unhealthy levels of sugar in the bloodstream or something. They didn't understand how; but later other scientists did experiments and discovered that the pancreas produces insulin, that lowers blood sugar levels. Soon a drug company started making it, so it could be given to people with diabetes as a substitute for the insulin their pancreases weren't making.

"And safety glass was discovered after something that happened that seemed like a nuisance at the time - you know, I mean glass that doesn't shatter into smithereens when it breaks, so the place isn't covered in glass splinters, but just broken bits that are less likely to cause severe cuts for anyone who gets covered in it - say if they're standing in front of a window made of it when someone smashes it, or if the windscreen of their car's made of it and they're not wearing their seatbelt and they have a car accident, so they get thrown through it because of the force of the impact. Other kinds of safety glass were made after the discovery that it was possible to make it.

"I read that the discovery was made when a French scientist accidentally dropped a flask one day at the beginning of the 20th century that contained a kind of liquid plastic. It broke, but the bits of glass stayed together in the shape of the flask, so he realised the liquid plastic must have held them together. So he realised that glass could be coated with it to make it safer.

"And then there's the invention of Velcro, which, apart from being useful, must have made life a bit easier for people with problems that mean they can't use their hands very well, since it can be used instead of buttons or shoelaces, so people don't have to move their fingers around so much when they're doing buttons or shoes up, or undoing them. I read that the idea for it came from a man who went for a walk in a forest, and when he came back, he realised there were bits of plant full of seeds attached to his coat, and when he examined them, he discovered they had tiny things like hooks that they were using to attach to things, and it was quite hard to pull them off. That kind of system was probably helpful to the survival of the plant species, because it would mean they'd get stuck on some things that were passing by, and maybe drop off in other parts of the forest, so new plants would start growing there too. The man realised it would be useful to have a synthetic version of the mechanism for people to use.

"I've read that scientists are taught to think about whether things they at first put down to mistakes could lead to something worthwhile being developed nowadays, and that lots of discoveries have been made after things happened that seemed at first to be things going wrong.

"It's amazing really, the number of inventions and discoveries that have been made in the last hundred years, and the new techniques being made to invent new things. The world's definitely improving a lot, despite the way it can seem when you hear the news, or hear about parts of the world where lots of people are still really poor."

The Students Talk About the Benefits of New Inventions, and Other Things That Have Been Done to Improve the World, Sometimes Humorously

One student said, "Yes. And some things that at first might seem daft turn out to be good ideas too. I heard about a small project in Mexico a while ago that 150 families signed up for, I think, where trucks carrying concrete came to their houses, and then poured a load of concrete into their living rooms! When I heard that, I thought, 'Oh yuck! Why would they do that! And why would anyone put up with it being done to their houses!' And then what I heard said that it actually improved the children's education levels! Education in what not to do, maybe, you'd think! I thought, 'That's daft! How could it do that?'

"But it turns out that it really did. What happened was that the concrete was poured onto dirt floors, and then the people in the houses were taught to mix it up and spread it out flat on the floor. And that was especially good because horrible parasitic worms used to live in the dirt floors, that used to make the children ill, so they missed quite a bit of school. Laying concrete over the top stopped that happening, so they got better educated, and their test scores went up.

"I heard that a hundred million people in the world still live in houses with dirt floors. I don't know how many of those have horrible parasitic worms or other horrible creatures living in them. Hopefully not all that many! But who knows!

"But anyway, I heard some more about concrete. It's more interesting than it sounds. And it seems new kinds are being invented that do some impressive things! I heard that there's a new kind of concrete being developed called self-healing concrete, where bacteria that actually produce limestone are imbedded in it, which can fill in cracks that can develop in it over time, so repair jobs don't have to be done on it as often as they normally would."

One of the students said, "I can't understand how that would work, since what if they produce limestone when it isn't needed? Won't that risk buckling the concrete a bit over time? That could be more like self-smashing concrete! I've heard of people knocking down statues of people who did horrible things but were admired at the time, like people who started and won wars that should never have been started. Imagine going past one of them and watching it smashing itself! You might think, 'Wow, not even the concrete the statue's made of likes that man!' Or you might think, 'Wow, that man must have realised what a horrible person he was in the afterlife, and hates himself so much now he wants his statue smashed!'"

The students laughed. But the one who'd brought up the subject of the concrete said, "No. I read that the bacteria don't work all the time. They can lie dormant for ages, and then just become active when rainwater or moisture in the atmosphere starts seeping into the cracks. Then they work on them till it stops happening, which means the cracks must be repaired ... or else that there's a drought, maybe. Then they go dormant again. But they can apparently repair cracks up to about three quarters of a centimetre wide."

One student grinned and joked, "So if there's a drought, the concrete might actually have to be watered to activate the repairing bacteria. So you might get a lot of homeowners saying, 'I'm just going out to water the concrete. I'm glad they haven't brought in a hosepipe ban yet.' And then you might see them reaching up with a hosepipe and trying to squirt the water up as far as it'll go, or climbing a ladder with a hosepipe in their hand so they can reach the top of their house to spray it. Hopefully they wouldn't have forgotten to close the windows!"

The one who'd brought up the subject of self-healing concrete said, "I don't know if that would be necessary. There might often be enough humidity in the air to activate the bacteria even in a drought, I don't know. But it's being used in canals, and it could possibly be sprayed on the roads in cold weather before deicer's put down, since apparently a lot of that can cause cracks to appear in roads over time."

One of the students grinned and said, "You might see a lot of cars getting stuck in wet concrete then. Somehow I think that would be worse. And how would they make sure the bacteria in the concrete on buildings stayed inside it, so they would only make new concrete if it got cracks in it? If they were on the outside of it too, buildings might start growing every time it rained!"

The student who'd told them about the concrete said, "Well, I don't know how it would really work. But it sounds like a good idea on the face of it. Hopefully it would only be used in ways and places where it wouldn't cause any problems. If it works well, it could save people a lot of repair costs; and it could help reduce carbon emissions too, since a fair amount are caused by transporting new concrete to where it's needed, and new concrete wouldn't be needed so much."

The students thought it sounded as if it could be good.

Then one said, "It does seem that a lot of the things that are being invented, or that we've already got but that most of us probably take for granted, are pretty amazing really. Even things we might think of as just everyday objects. I heard a bit about how the pencil's made. It's amazing to think of all the different processes that need to go into making it, like transporting what's inside it to all the places in the world where pencils are made after it's been mined, and transporting all the wood and then making it the right shape, and mixing it with several other ingredients that all have to be got from different places.

"Really, it's amazing to think of how much talent there must be in the world, knowing that even a common little thing like a pencil needs so much work put into making it, and there are so many different techniques and things that need to be done to make it, and yet we're surrounded by loads of way more complex things, that must have taken a whole lot more ingenuity to create! It seems the world must be full of geniuses without us realising!

"There are loads of little things that we probably take for granted, but it must really take quite a bit of brain power to work out how to make them. Like caps on bottles. I switched on the radio the other day and heard about a machine that makes push-on caps for shampoo bottles, and about how it's more complicated than it might seem, because you've got to make them to fit properly, and so it doesn't take so much effort to push them down that it risks breaking the bottles, and they need to be made so they're not so loose they can come off when you don't want them to, but not so tight it takes a massive effort to pull them up, and things like that; and it must have taken a whole lot of ingenuity to make a machine that can make them, as well as all the other machines they use in factories, and ones we use in our homes and so on.

"If someone said, 'I work making machines that can put caps on bottles', you might think, 'That doesn't sound like much of a job!' But just imagine what the world would be like if no one had ever thought of a way to make bottle lids! Imagine if none of your bottles ever had lids, or if all the bottles in shops never had lids, so people needed to be really careful about not knocking them over!

"Imagine if someone knocked a whole load over at once, or dropped a load of bottles, and they all spilled because they didn't have caps on! Imagine people wading through a supermarket, through loads of shampoo or lemonade or something, because someone had knocked a load of bottles over! Or imagine if you were washing your hair - not in the supermarket, obviously, but in your home, using one of those shampoo bottles that would have a screw-on cap nowadays, but it didn't because no one had ever thought to invent them, and you dropped the bottle, and you ended up sliding around in shampoo! ... Well, I suppose you could still do that nowadays if you dropped one while the lid was off!

"If you dropped it in your family home in the kitchen or something, before you'd got to put it in the bathroom, maybe your family could all go shampoo skating!

"When you think of how much of a difference even little things make, you realise we probably don't realise how lucky we are to have them! Imagine what the world would be like without them! It's easy to start feeling a bit hopeless when you hear about things going wrong in the world; but there's a whole lot going right.

"Imagine if we didn't have nice music. Imagine if no one had ever invented music, or if all the music around was music most people thought was horrible, but the people who liked it insisted on playing it a lot anyway. We're lucky to have music we like!

"And imagine if computers had never been invented, so we didn't have the Internet or anything like that! It must have been a lot harder for people in the old days to write books than it is for people now, since it's so easy to go back and change things now, like if you read over something you've written and realise it should have different punctuation, or there are words spelled wrong, or you'd like to add something or phrase some things differently, and things like that. I'm always doing that kind of thing with emails and essays I write. People must have had far fewer chances to change what they'd written in the days when word processors didn't exist and paper was expensive! I don't know how people managed to write books that aren't a bit of a mess in those days! It seems a pretty impressive achievement to me! No wonder there weren't nearly as many books around then as there are nowadays!

"Well, that might be one reason anyway. Maybe other reasons are things like the price of paper, or the fact that education wasn't made compulsory and free till the 1870s, and most children probably didn't get it before then. I can't imagine what that must have been like! What kind of a parent do you think you'd make if you'd never gone to school, so you couldn't read and write, and didn't develop other kinds of skills that schools teach. ... Well, I can't think of many skills they teach at the moment, but there must be some. It's hard to imagine what it would be like trying to live in the adult world without having learned any of them nowadays! I mean, there's so much information we can find out about because we can read, that we might never find out about if we couldn't, like everything from information on food labels like sell-by dates, to adverts for jobs, to information about which foods are healthy and which ones aren't.

"Imagine if only the richest people ever got any schooling, so most people didn't know how to read or write. Imagine all the ways that would cause problems, from not being able to read cooking instructions, to not being able to have much choice about what career to go into, if most of the good well-paid ones needed people to read and write!

"So you can tell things have got a lot better for a lot of people. I don't know if education was made compulsory in this country because more jobs were being developed that needed more skills like reading and writing and maths than most jobs had before, so the government thought that if this country was going to look as impressive as other ones, people would have to be better educated. I read something like that. I'm glad they provided schooling for everyone though, whatever the reason was that they did it."

One student said, "I'd never want to go back to the dark days before the Internet was invented! Imagine wanting to know stuff, and not being able to easily find it out like we can now!"

One of the others said, "Yeah! And imagine if transport hadn't been invented, so most of us still had to walk everywhere! You'd never be able to go far. You'd definitely never be able to go on holidays in the sun in other countries! ... Well, I suppose there might be a few brave people who'd try swimming the Channel in the hope that it was sunnier on the other side! I'd never dare do that though!

"And it's amazing when you think about the impressive trading networks that have been built up, so we can easily buy food and other things from all around the world! We're so much better off than people used to be, in this country anyway."

One of the students said, "Imagine if telephones had never been invented, so if people went to live in other parts of the country or the world, you might never get to speak to them again! It's amazing really, when you think about it, that we can easily phone someone up and instantly speak to them, even if they live hundreds or even thousands of miles away!

"I agree that we probably don't realise how lucky we are most of the time!

"Or imagine if chocolate had never been invented! Imagine if nice food hadn't been invented, or if hardly anyone could afford it, so we only ever had boring food to eat! Wouldn't that be horrible!"

Another one agreed, and said, "And imagine if scientists had never discovered which food's healthy and low-calorie and which food isn't, so you might eat a mass of cake and chocolate every day for ages and then wonder why you were putting on more weight than you did when you ate mostly fruit and vegetables, or wonder why you started feeling more unhealthy. ... Well, I don't mean you personally; I mean everyone. It wouldn't necessarily be obvious at first that it was the chocolate and cake causing you to feel more unhealthy, since after all, you might wonder if it was unhealthy air seeping into your house from something your new neighbour was doing, or the increase in exercise you'd been doing, or pollution caused by more exposure to fumes since you'd decided to walk outside more in your lunch hour, or who knows what!

"I mean, maybe it's possible that it could be any of those things; but if you didn't know how healthy any food was, it might be easy to miss the most obvious thing. There must have been a time when no one knew about that stuff. Mind you, in those days, people had a lot less choice about what food they could eat, so people had to put up with food they didn't like no matter what. That would be horrible!

"And with some foods making you fatter than others, if you didn't know which ones were fattening, when you got fat, you might just assume it was just something that happened to some people's bodies as they age or something. And you wouldn't be able to scoff massive of bowls full of vegetables knowing they wouldn't make you fat!

"So you can tell the world's improved."

Becky said, "Yeah! Imagine if fridges and freezers hadn't been invented! You wouldn't be able to keep food for anywhere near as long as you can now, and that might mean it was easy to go hungry in the winter or the early spring when a lot of foods started running out. I think that often did used to happen.

"And you might have to spend quite a bit of time most days going to the shops to get new food, so you wouldn't be able to spend the time doing other things.

"And there wouldn't be anywhere near the variety of food around that there is now, because a lot of it wouldn't stay fresh enough to be imported, since I think a lot of it has to travel in ships with massive fridges and freezers to stop it going off.

"We might be healthier, and even more intelligent because of fridges and freezers, because it's easier to get good nutrition from a bigger variety of food than people used to, since we can get some perishable food from abroad, because it lasts longer, and refrigeration ships can bring food with nutrients in it that we might not get so much of in our diets otherwise to this country, which enables us to have a lot of it all year round instead of just in season, like eating strawberries and raspberries in winter, and eating melons and other fruit from tropical countries. I think it was only in the late 1930s that someone invented the technology to enable food to be transported in refrigerated vans across countries so it was at less risk of losing its quality; and it was only at the end of the 19th century that refrigerated ships were invented, so perishable foods like meat and fruit could be transported across the sea to other countries. So most people's diets might have been more boring and less healthy before then.

"We probably take fridges and freezers for granted. But when you think about it, we often ought to be grateful for them really."

One of the other students said with a smile, "Imagine if bottles and jars and tins and packets and bags hadn't been invented, so every time people wanted to buy food or drink, it would just be tipped into their hands - as much as they could carry - or they'd have to bring cups to have it poured into. If they just had to use their hands to carry it, because containers hadn't even been invented, they'd never be able to take much home at once, or more than one thing at once, even, in case the things got mixed up.

"I mean, imagine if you wanted to buy dried vegetable soup and rice pudding. Imagine having one thing poured into one hand and the other poured into the other. Apart from the fact that you wouldn't be able to hold much of either, it would be easy to get them mixed up together, say if you needed to use one of your hands to get your key out of your pocket and unlock your front door or something, so you had to put the food from one hand into the other. Mind you, then you'd get your pocket all dirty too while you were getting your door key out, since your hand would be all covered in food! I suppose you could have put some of the food in your pocket in the first place, but that could be a bit yucky, especially if any moisture in it seeped through onto your skin, or if you'd had dirty tissues in there or something. I suppose food could be wrapped in something like cellophane to stop that happening; but what if no one had ever invented that!

"And imagine if no one had ever been able to invent plates or bowls, so we had to eat all our food off the table, and if there were quite a few people eating at once, our food might get mixed up, like if someone was eating mince and tomatoes, and someone next to them really didn't like that stuff but they were eating a fruit salad, and they got mixed up together!

"And imagine if cups hadn't been invented, and tables were made with little hollows in them, and when someone wanted a drink, they just had to pour it into one of those on the table and slurp it up, or drink it out the bottle."

They giggled, and one said, "Yeah, thinking about it, we're lucky that even basic things that we take for granted got invented."

Then one of the others said, "Imagine if microwaves hadn't been invented. I'm always making cups of coffee and then putting them next to me and drinking a bit of them, and then heating them up again in the microwave when they go cold. Imagine if we couldn't do that, so we'd just have to keep throwing them away and making new ones when they went cold, or putting up with drinking them cold, or having to tip them into saucepans to heat up on the stove or something! Or if your dinner went cold, you'd probably have to just put up with it! And it's nice that microwaves make cooking some things a lot quicker too."

Becky said, "Imagine if towels hadn't been invented, so people just had to shake the drips off themselves after they washed and then get dressed wet.

"And imagine if clothes hadn't even been invented, so if people wanted to keep warm, they just had to wrap blankets or animal skins around themselves or something!"

One of the group said, "Imagine if no one had ever invented soap, so it was a lot more difficult to wash our hands and ourselves properly, so we had to go round with greasy or dirty hands a lot of the time! And then the things we touched would get greasy or yucky! Not to mention unhygienic! Imagine if toilet paper had never been invented! We're really lucky to have that, come to think of it! What would we use if we didn't?"

One of the others smiled and joked, "Pictures of politicians from newspapers, probably, ... only we'd have to buy the newspapers first."

One of them said, "Imagine if toothbrushes hadn't been invented! What would we use? Or imagine if no one had ever invented toothpaste! Maybe all our teeth would have fallen out by now ... unless sugary foods had never been invented! The world would be a more boring place if they hadn't been!"

One of the others said, "Imagine if beds had never been invented, so we all had to sleep on the floor! We're lucky to have nice soft beds!

"And imagine if desks and chairs had never been invented, so we all had to work on our computers and things on the floor!"

Another student said, "Imagine if no one had ever thought to invent shoes and socks, so we all had to go around with bare feet! ... Dirty ones too, if we didn't have soap! ... Not to mention painful ones, when we stepped on things that hurt them!"

One of them said, "Yeah, that would be horrible! There are all kinds of things we can be grateful for when we think about it, like being able to find things to laugh at; having friends; having families that care a bit about us - hopefully everyone here does; having time and the ability to learn interesting things, and to be able to have a good think about things; being able to taste nice food; meeting people who are kind to us; having hair that isn't always falling out in our food ... sorry, I just thought of that because a bit of hair just went in my mouth. But you know what I mean - there are all kinds of things like that that we can be grateful for."

Another one agreed, and said, "Isn't it amazing that brains are so clever we can stand up and walk around, and breathe and things, without having to think through how to do them each time we do. I mean, when you think about it, when you get up in the morning, even going from lying down to standing up's quite a complicated process, with lots of different things needing to be done in the right order; but the brain knows how to just do them when we want them done without us having to think about how to do them each time.

"And it's nice that everyone here's healthy enough to be able to get up and move around without needing help from anyone."

One of the others said, "Imagine if electricity hadn't been invented, so we didn't have computers, or fridges and freezers, or electric heaters, or electric cookers, or electric light, or televisions, or electric kettles, or printers, and a whole load of other stuff!"

one said, "Yeah! And wouldn't it be horrible if we didn't have running water in our homes, so every morning when we woke up, if we hadn't saved any from the day before, we'd have to go out and collect some from somewhere before we could even have a hot drink! Or imagine if we just didn't have hot running water, so we could only ever have cold showers! I think I'd just not wash a lot of the time, all the worse for you lot! We're luckier than we realise! We're lucky to have been born in a part of the world where we just get to have that kind of thing automatically."

Another student said, "Imagine if when people leaned their heads back quickly, they were in danger of falling off! Imagine if loads of people heard a loud noise from the sky or something one day, and they all jumped and quickly looked up to see what it was, and loads of their heads all suddenly fell off and rolled around the place! Imagine if people had to be really careful about how they moved their heads all the time in case they suddenly fell off!"

The students laughed.

Then one said, "Imagine if no one had ever worked out how to make buildings, so we all had to live together outside, so nobody ever had any privacy and peace and quiet, and when it was cold, we just had to bundle up in masses of clothes and blankets; and when it rained, we just had to get wet, or we had to live near enough to caves so we could shelter in those! We're lucky to have homes or rooms to live in!"

One of the group asked, "Do you think if we'd been taught all our lives that rain was invented by scientists, we'd believe it?"

Another one said, "We probably would ... although we might all wonder why the scientists couldn't have made it rain only at night, so we didn't get rained on so often!"

Becky said, "Imagine how good it would be if it rained at exactly the same time each night, so we could all know to avoid it, and not many of us would be around, say if it was between two and five o'clock in the morning every day!"

One of the group said, "Well, that might be nice for most of us, but not so much for some people who work at night, especially outside, like people who mend railway tracks at night when the trains aren't running. Maybe They wouldn't be able to do it, so stretches of railway line would have to be closed more often than they are now so they could do the work during the day."

One of them said, "Aren't trains a fantastic invention! To think we can travel to places in hours that would have taken days to get to before! It's amazing what humans have achieved really!"

One said, "Imagine if the sun only shone for a few days a year! Wouldn't that be depressing! We're lucky to at least have the amount of sunshine we do, even if it would be nice to have more."

Another one said, "Imagine if locks had never been invented, so we couldn't keep our things and ourselves as safe as we can now. Yikes!

"Or imagine if cupboards had never been invented, so we just had to pile up all our stuff on the floor!"

One said, "Imagine if microscopes had never been invented, so no one would ever have been able to find out that germs even existed, let alone that some can cause illness! We still wouldn't know what causes a lot of disease. People used to believe that a lot of diseases were probably caused by bad-smelling air.

"Mind you, some diseases were still eliminated from this country then, because worries over the nasty-smelling air that was caused by all the piles of poo that got left around in the streets in cities in those days, which probably caused disease partly because flies would have been attracted to it and then would have flown into people's houses and spread the germs on it, made some people want to invent sewage systems to take it all away. Mind you, the engineer who came up with the idea had a really hard job persuading the government to pay for sewers to be built, because the job was going to have to be really expensive; and they only agreed to it in the end after the smell in London got so bad one summer that it scared them by reaching the House of Commons!

"When the sewers got built, and flush toilets were invented and became common, cholera and other horrible diseases that had killed thousands of people before disappeared, because they were diseases that were carried in water that was polluted by human waste, like in rivers, that people drank, not realising it was carrying disease!

"I heard that when flush toilets were first invented, it actually made the problem worse, because human waste got flushed right into rivers. Only rich people had them in those days though. But when sewers were invented, that problem was eliminated, because they were all connected to pipes that took the waste them.

"Aren't we lucky we've got our own toilets nowadays! Imagine if no one had any in their homes, and towns had some, but whenever we wanted to go, it would take us about ten minutes to get there, and then we often had to queue for ages! It's nice to be able to just go when you want to, staying in the warm!

"Or imagine if we always had to go outside and find somewhere to go to the loo every time we needed to, like behind a bush, even in the freezing winter! A lot of people must have had to do that in the old days! And apart from being horrible for them, that must have spread germs a lot!

"If germs hadn't been discovered, and toilets and sewers hadn't been invented, there would be a lot more horrible diseases around today.

"There still are quite a lot. I expect that if we read through a medical dictionary, we'd realise there are loads we're lucky not to have, like all kinds of rare genetic ones that make people's health worse and worse over time. I'm grateful I haven't got cancer ... to my knowledge, or something that causes regular pain like arthritis or migraines or back pain. And I'm glad I haven't got a disability, or something like diabetes that would mean I always had to be careful what I ate, and keep a check on my health every day.

"And loads of medical advances have meant people can live longer and stay healthier for longer than a lot of people did before. Maybe quite a lot of us would have died by now if it wasn't for medical advances, like if there were still a lot of horrible diseases around; or a lot of our grandparents might have died by now, if things like blood pressure medications hadn't been invented that reduce the risk of strokes and heart attacks. So we've got a lot to be thankful for, when we think about it.

"I've heard it can improve some people's moods a lot, and even make them more optimistic over time, if they often stop to feel grateful for things, or think of things they can be grateful for every night before they go to bed, and that kind of thing."

The Discussion Becomes More Humorous

One of the group said, "Considering how much hardship and disease and death there was around in the old days, I've been wondering if anyone could ever have been happy enough to make jokes about things and laugh. So I had a look on the Internet to see if I could find any jokes from medieval times or the 19th century. I actually found some. It seems they did find things to laugh about. A lot of the ones I found were pun jokes or unfunny dirty jokes. But I did find one slightly amusing one. It was written in a joke book sometime in the Middle Ages by some accomplished Italian man. It goes:

"'The Abbot of Septimo, a very fat man, on his way to Florence one evening, enquired of a peasant he met, "Do you think I shall be able to enter the gate?" Of course, he meant to ask whether he was likely to reach the city before the closing of the gates at night. But the countryman replied, "To be sure you will; a cartload of hay gets through, so why shouldn't you?"'

"I won't repeat any of the pun jokes I found; I really don't like pun jokes. Actually though, I once put a pun on a forum, which wasn't meant as a joke, and someone replied with a funny made-up story, all about someone being taken to a special treatment centre that was there to cure people of the illness that made them spout puns all the time, before it turned terminal, which would happen if people became so exasperated with the punster they started conspiring to kill them.

"It said one chronic punster was brought by ambulance into the treatment centre with a rag stuffed in his mouth. It said, 'When we removed the gag, he sat up with his finger pointed in the air, and said, "Keep alert! We need all the lerts we can get!" We re-installed the rag and taped it down securely.'

"Then it said one of the workers in the treatment centre was sent out to go to the punster's house, to see what evidence there was of how bad his pun-spouting illness really was. It said there was a lot of evidence of horrible puns in there. Then it says the worker went out, and to his horror, he found more! The story said, 'There was a collision repair shop that asked, "May we have the next dents?" A glass shop just wanted an even break. An upholstery shop - named the Recovery Room - had a notice saying it was in a period of economic recovery. A depleted service station said that I could get all the gas I wanted by eating their fast-food.

"'I couldn't handle any more of this pun-ishment. I stopped off at a hotel I saw along the way, that looked clean and hospitable. I pulled out a credit card and started to register, until I saw the name of the establishment: The Last Resort.'

"'I fled blindly across the road in front of the hotel, and learned, to my horror, that the welfare office was next door - on Easy Street. Desperate, I found a cocktail lounge, and ordered their specialty drink.'

"The story said the bartender's name was Rocky. A bit later it said, 'Rocky left, and his wife, Sandy stopped by and said, "How about a Pile Driver?"

"'"What is that?" I asked, fearing the worst.

"'"Vodka and prune juice."'

"At the end the story said, 'I fled back to the institute and put in for treatment. I mean, would you endure that sort of pun-ishment?'"

The students giggled.

Then one grinned and joked, "Maybe the world would be a better place if there really were treatment centres for punsters, to get rid of their pun-making disease."