Truly Divine

Having just read Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I’ve added yet another word to my list that should very rarely (if ever) be uttered, typed, or written down: ‘stickler’. Ugh! Just say it aloud a few times. It’s horrible. It’s loaded with derogatory self-acceptance. It’s proud to demean itself. It takes pride in its shame for being what it is. People who are anal should either stop being anal or be proud of being anal and stop referring to themselves in derogatory terms. That’s not the full extent of the crime however. She doesn’t actually believe that being uptight is a bad thing. Lynne is trying to lower herself to our level by using such self-deprecating terms. She thinks her readers are morons who can’t see why she would get upset about punctuation, so she writes in a patronising, self-depreciating tone, dumbing down her writing for you and me. It’s a horrible read and about 100 pages too long. In what seems to be attempts at comedy, she talks about becoming a terrorist and what a unique and eccentric person she is, getting riled up about bad punctuation. I’m impatiently waiting for her follow up work, Hyperbole: The Humourless Person's Best Friend.

In truth, however, I didn’t come here to talk about Lynne Truss. Adding a new word to my list only reminded me of the most heinous word I’ve ever added to my invisible notebook – divine. When talking about divinity it is, of course, perfectly permissible. ‘God is divine.’ may be obvious, but at least it’s correct. ‘This Vienetta is divine.’ is the moron’s way of trying to sound sophisticated and epicurean, and, as we shall see, a poor choice of words. And it’s never ‘divine’ is it? It’s always ‘diviiiiiiiiiine’. I know at this point some of you are getting uncomfortable and maybe even defensive, perhaps reassuring yourself that you don’t say it in an elongated way. In truth, we all have used the word this way, but I decided to wage war against it after an incident a couple of years ago, during my travels through the Orient, when I was on a long bus journey to a lotus festival in South Korea. It was difficult enough trying to sleep in my seat, but it wasn’t made any better by the loud South African men behind me. One of them was trying to charm a lady by offering her some type of confectionery. I didn’t see what it was or hear what she said, but I heard the whole exchange clearly, given the loud and clearly enunciated accent of the South Africans. One of the charmers professed the divinity of the sweet, elongating the second ‘i’ in a way that betrayed all decency. Furthering his profound and poetic insight, master of the charms waited for a natural calm in the chatter before claiming that it was like “a little bit of heaven in your mouth”. Seconds elapsed before chatter resumed, allowing for the magnitude of the thought to sink in. And so, a boring conversation ensued behind me, and I was forbidden from sleeping, their cacophonic voices stabbing me in the ear every time I approached sleepytown. Perhaps I could have enacted revenge upon then – a simple tongue excision would have sufficed – but I’ve heard that they’ve got… (You knew this was coming.) diplomatic immunity.

Let’s go through this then. ‘Divine’ primarily means godlike. Somebody decided one day to broaden its application, by comparing things to the divine. Using it this way makes use of extra vocabulary, and the person who first did this probably felt quite clever, but it doesn’t work. Food and drink (and we’re usually talking about that here) are very unlike the divine. Think of the connotations of the word divine: ethereal, eternal, immaterial, radiant, ineffable, spiritual. “Aha!” say you, “What about pantheists?” Pantheists might object on the ground that God is everywhere and everything, and ergo material. I refuse to register their arguments for two reasons. Firstly, if God is everything, effectively we are saying that God is nature. Why then multiply our entities beyond necessity? Why not just remove God, accept that nature has a unity and laws, and admit atheism? Secondly, I just cannot accept a group of people whose name sounds like a clever term for those who discriminate against transvestites.

The point I was making was that divinity is something abstract, something that we cannot sense. Food is quite the opposite; it’s material, tangible, and sensual. Now, I know what you’re thinking: as they are made from living things, food and drink are close to the divine. “On Aquinas’s Ladder of Being, living beings are a step closer to the divine than minerals etc.” you say. You follow it up by telling me that all organic material, endowed with an immaterial spirit, is divine when compared to dead matter which has absolutely no spirit or aspect of divinity. Lapsing into your smugness, you realise that not only is ‘divine’ accurate, but an insightful comparison between matter living and dead. Thomists and the saint himself would be impressed with your application, your vanity tells you. Well, my child, I’m afraid to tell you that you have merely presented an argument that will be deconstructed and dismissed, in the same fashion as Aquinas’s works. Firstly, the food we eat is generally dead. Perhaps you’re making reference to the bacteria and other micro organisms on the food, but I doubt it. We’re talking about dead matter, something lifeless, and we’re comparing it to the source of all life. Aside from being as inaccurate could possibly be, it’s also somewhat blasphemous. One might even argue that Christ’s body vanished from this world, such was God’s distaste for being a carcass. We could well imagine the God of Abraham being greatly angered at being compared to a dead lump of meat or some caramelised sugar.

Finally, ‘divine’ tells us nothing about the food. Is it salty or sweet? Spicy, creamy, sour, sugary, nutty, crispy, chewy, bitter, tangy, refreshing, luscious, rich, filling, or light? Please add your own adjectives; they don’t even have to be so specific. Try ‘tasty’ or ‘delicious’, ‘yummy’ or ‘amazing’. ‘Sensational’ is pretty much tautological, but it works well, as Richard Nixon knew, when he was lamenting the high standard of presidential food he had the privilege of eating. The man may have been a crook, but he had standards. I do, too. I can only think of one circumstance where ‘divine’ is permissible when describing food: when one is foregoing the use of ‘good’ (e.g., The chicken’s really gooooooood.). Don’t get me started on that one.

Refusing to concede the word ‘divine’ as an appropriate description for food and beverages, Saint Thomas Aquinas consumed many a bounty of delightful goods, in the search for tasty adjectives. When asked about the dubious canonisation of Aquinas, Pope John Paul II answered, in his infinite wisdom, that he was made a saint for the miracle of being morbidly obese yet sincere in his renunciation of gluttony.

10 Reasons John Lennon Was Killed

I have always had ambivalent feelings towards John Lennon. Lennon never seemed to be ambivalent towards anything, and it seems to me that that is what his fanboys love the most about him. I find such rancorous certitude unpalatable, as I believe the world to be too vast and plural to be stratified into two simple moral categories. Funny how Lennon (like most moralising people) always found himself to be on the right side of his moral view of the world.

So, as we approach the 30^th anniversary of his death, I present multiple reasons why he was killed:

10. Stephen King was in a really bad humour that day.

09. “Number 9. Number 9. Number 9.”

08. McCartney developed ‘yellow fever’.

07. ‘They’ thought he was ‘too radical.’

06. Yoko found out he was shagging his Chinese secretary.

05. Jesus is pettier than you would think.

04. He isn’t bullet-proof.

03. The 1980s weren’t his scene.

02. Mark Chapman preferred the much tamer cynicism of Catcher in the Rye.

01. He had it coming.

More Power to You.

So, I was out shovelling the snow on the path outside my garden, when a bottle-blonde quinquagenarian* comes shivering by in the cold. Now, my pro-active, He-Man-like shovelling had kept me warm for the past hour, and the feeling of victory that come from facing the elements was flowing through my veins. (When I eventually get around to founding my own warrior society, we’ll have a specific word for that feeling.) I was prepared for possible condescending comments from passers-by, as doing something good voluntarily is so despicable and demeaning. I was especially concerned by the oncoming X-Factor watching, auld-biddy-before-her-time. Shuffling onward, she made the special effort to utter her thoughts into the frosty air: “A polar bear wouldn’t come out in this feckin’ weather.” I saw her point immediately – it’s not as cold as people are making it out to be. A polar bear would find 0 degrees too balmy. Onward I shovelled into the ice, with the fiery courage of a warrior rekindled in my heart. Who the woman was I do not know, but I’m sure if you spend time on a knife’s edge – where danger meets destiny – you’ll find her soon enough.

* I’ll save you a trip through your dictionary – a ‘quinquagenarian’ is a word that is one hundred times more difficult to pronounce than it is to spell.

FT-TBML (Feck That – That Being My Life)

I received an email today from a recruitment agency, asking me to teach in Bahrin (I was informed immediately that this is a country in the Middle East – as if I wouldn’t know). My long lover affair with the country has left me a familiarity that often deludes me into thinking I have visited there before. I often gaze affectionately at pictures of the ‘Kingdom of the Two Seas’ and drift into a fantasy about a land where I truly belong. The country and I seem like the two colours on the national flag respectively, jaggedly matching each other.

So, as you can imagine, I proceeded to read the rest of the very excitedly. Unfortunately, the excitement was short-lived. The following passage dissuaded my excitement from furthering its jittery course:

“It's perfectly safe to work in Bahrain, as long as you use the smallest amount of common sense. Use the same rules as you would in any city, with some allowances for Islamic morals, don't stumble around in the dark on your own, don't wear mini skirts and plunging necklines in public malls, and show respect to the local population.”

What a ridiculous error and thoughtless assumption! Don’t these savages know what a semi-colon is? They talk about ‘morals’, yet they don’t have the decency to put a semi-colon after the word. Feck that; I don’t associate with such reckless joy riders!

I Suppose You Had to Be There...

I’m preparing a speech for the not too distant future, when destiny finally grants me my wish for revenge. What I’ve penned so far:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I plead guilty to the cold-blooded murder of Mark McCabe. I dismembered him, flayed him, and removed his still-beating heart. He died in agony at my hands. I squeezed his liver into pate, though the gaps of my fingers. However, ladies and gentlemen, I stand here with a clear conscience and with no regret in my heart. McCabe committed a heinous crime against humanity. Such was the gravity and monstrousness of his crime that I could no longer allow him to reside among the peoples of the Earth. He should have known better; he should have held back and done nothing. I refer, of course, to his abominable creation, Manic 2000. When the crime took place, I was too young and weak to take action. The mobs that followed him and bought his accursed CD seemed too strong and overwhelming. It was a parochial affair, really, and it (fortunately) didn’t escape the confines of this island. If I was older, I could have fled to another country and forgotten about it. How wonderful it would have been to known that the majority of the world didn’t suffer as I suffered. And I did suffer.”

Too much, you say? Oh, ye of short memory! Try watching the video without flinching. You may well have participated in the crime, but you cannot justify saving this man’s life.

I mean, look at him; he’s a so goofy looking and he’s spouting tired phrases from Ye Auld Book o’ Rayver Incantations in what appears to be a pseudo English accent. Even the most parochial DJs of school hall discos would cringe at such painful lines as “put your hands in the air… like you just don’t care” or “Oggy, oggy, oggy! Oi, oi, oi!”. This stuff was dire ten years ago, never mind now, and despite being a teenager, I knew well of how pathetic it was. It was all-invasive though. Emigration wasn’t a real option for me at the time, and I just had to suffer the tune of what now sounds like a circa 2005 ringtone.

What the hell was up with that accent anyway? I don’t understand how someone expects to be considered cool by impersonating the accent of another country. It makes him look like a small-timer, someone easily dazzled by cosmopolitanism. Anyone who has ever listened to a 2FM DJ (which McCabe once was) understands what I mean. They’re all like an overly pally uncle who thinks he needs to relate to your generation, and throws out a few Americanisms to show he’s still hip. This mystifies further – who has ever been impressed by someone pretending to be American? I doubt Americans do; they often ridicule such people in their films and TV shows. But this is something these DJs aspire to, as if they want to look like someone who was bowled over by an episode of Friends.

Anyway, the best explanation for Maniac 2000 is that McCabe wanted to make a song that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but rave, hoping he would be immortalised in the curriculum of every sound engineering course, as a typical example of the genre. I’m pretty sure I could reproduce the song on an unsophisticated piece of software now, and I bet virtually all the lyrics would be available to me to place along the bars of the archaic rave sounds. Except that truly bizarre declaration in the middle of the ‘song’: “Life: it has no meaning!” He seems so sure and happy about it. I wonder if he’ll still be so happy and sure, when I slip my knife into his gullet and repeat the words back to him.

So, after four minutes of painfully cringeworthy lyrics, which are below the talents of a 12 year old (That’s only referring to the lyrics I understand – the song proceeds mostly like drug-induced blabbering.), we get “come with me to the place to be.” The song ends. The place to be is a post-Maniac 2000 world, where McCabe is a one-hit wonder who is largely forgotten. If destiny doesn’t grant me the opportunity to take revenge, I can always console myself in the knowledge that McCabe’s greatest hour was with a song he has largely disowned. What was cool (even though it never really was) has now passed into what is dated and pathetic. McCabe tells us he’s embarrassed by the ‘song’, as he is still trying to chase a reputation of being hip and contemporary. Some people never learn.

Folk Song Reviews: Dublin in the Rare Old Times

"You cannot step twice into the same river." – Heraclitus

As with the above quote, Dublin in the Rare Old Times is concerned with change. Both Heraclitus and the song’s narrator step into the same river only once; the pre-Socratic philosopher steps into the river of the universe, where change is the only constant, the narrator steps into the Liffey to rid himself of his worldly sorrows (or at least we can imagine him doing so). Despite the cryptic character of Heraclius’s philosophy, it seems evident that change was not regrettable or tragic to him. The narrator, on the contrary, mourns virtually every change that occurs since he was young enough to sing Ring a Ring o' Rosie.

Dublin in the Rare Old Times was written by Pete St John during the 1970s. St John’s other notable composition is the Fields of Athenry, a song about English occupation, now sung by Liverpool FC fans (you can also experience a dance version in the world’s shittest discos). St John is the worst kind of person known to mankind: the ex pat who returns home to criticise everything. In The Rare Old Times, he is critical of the economic progress that took place in 1960s Ireland. These economic changes happened under the stewardship of Seán Lemass, an actual Irish patriot who put his balls on the line by fighting against the British in the war of independence. So satisfactory was Lemass’s service as Taoiseach that he’s largely forgotten in the Irish psyche (because we only seem to remember the bad ones). You could almost be forgiven for thinking he derived his fame from being the lovechild of Clark Gable and Phil Lynott, and not for being one of our Taoisigh. One wonders what he, a true Dubliner of an even rarer and older time, would think of the negative sentiments expressed in Rare Old Times.

St John bemoaned the economic progress made in the 60s, as it deprived him of his romanticised view of an idyllic 1950s Ireland, and so he composed Rare Old Times to give expression to his totalitarian will to keep a culture stagnant for the sake of his childhood memories.

Let’s wade through the misery-infested lyrics to get a better understanding of the level of sanctimony, melancholy, and self-pitying that warbles drunkenly from the song. Keep in mind that we are supposed to sympathise with the narrator of the song.

(The song, for those who haven't heard it.)

Raised on songs and stories, heroes of renown,

Ah, the passing tales and glories that once was Dublin town

Nothing objectionable so far. Detached from the melody and rest of the lyrics, one might suspect this was the beginning of an epic ballad, one where the hero leads a depressed people to glory. Only the word ‘passing’ clues us in to the misery ahead.

The hallowed halls and houses, the haunting children's rhymes,

That once was part of Dublin in the rare old times.

For those of you who don’t know, Dublin was a tenement dump, where children had to play on the street. While it may not have been a bad life, the ‘heroes of renown’ fought to change these conditions. Lemass wanted economic progress to change these conditions. The old codger who narrates the song wants to hold on to these days so badly that he almost equates further industrialisation with the apocalypse in the chorus:

Ring-a-ring-a-rosie as the light declines,

I remember Dublin city in the rare old times.

Ring a Ring ‘o Roses (or Rosie), a nursery rhyme, is synonymous (albeit incorrectly) with the Great Plague of London, and the declining light could represent some after-effect of nuclear war as much as it represents the mind of the narrator. The whole premise seems to be that the new Dublin no longer holds the charms of the rare old times. That’s quite a message to be passing on via a folk song. The concrete changes in the city cannot be undone by one man, but perhaps he could give us a glimmer of hope. After all, some of us have to live here. Selfishness, as we’ll soon discover, is the least of his vices.

My name it is Séan Dempsey, as Dublin as can be,

Born hard and late in Pimlico, in a house that ceased to be

As Dublin as can be, Dempsey? I would have thought that being born raised in Dublin was enough to be considered as Dublin as can be. No doubt the ‘heroes of renown’ would appreciate such useful social stratification.

By trade I was a cooper, lost out to redundancy,

During an economic boom? It seems so unlikely. The vital clues to this puzzle come later in the song.

I courted Peggy Diegnan, as pretty as you please,

Oh, the rogue and a child of Mary from the rebel Liberty;

I lost her to a student lad, with skin as black as coal,

When he took her off to Birmingham, she took away my soul.

Whenever I hear these lines in the company of a foreigner, I cannot help but cringe. I used to try comfort myself with the excuse that the composer needed something to rhyme with ‘soul’, but no excuse can save the song from sounding racist. Why the superfluous detail? To make it sound like an authentic story, perhaps? One could well imagine a contemporary version of this song, where a backing singer interjects soulfully with “Nothing wrong with that” to soften the blow of the abrasive line.

In any case, it’s abundantly obvious why Peggy left for Birmingham. Who would you prefer; a travelled, intelligent man who offers you the prospect of a more prosperous city, or a whiney, drunken layabout?

Ah, the years have made me bitter, the drink has dimmed my brain,

For Dublin keeps on changing, oh, nothing seems the same

As we all know, years make people bitter and alcohol forces itself upon you. Neither of these activities require the agency of a person. Where does Dempsey get the cash for drinking anyway? I thought he was made redundant. Let’s examine the evidence:

1. He was a cooper, so he made barrels and the like, probably for transporting beer.
2. He lost out to redundancy, or so he tells us. His account may not be accurate, given…
3. The gargle dims his brain.

This leads me to believe that he was sampling the product while working, became alcoholic, and got fired for being no longer able to do an adequate day’s work.

The Metropole and Pillar are gone, the Royal long since pulled down,

Here we find a lie by omission: the Pillar (or Nelson’s Pillar) was blown up by the IRA in 1966, not swept away by economic progress.

Farewell, Anna Liffey, I can no longer stay,

A hint that he’s going to drown himself in Liffey. I’d call him selfish if he wasn’t so burdensome on everyone else’s lives.

And watch the new glass cages that rise up along the quay

Your prison cell is your self-imposed captivity in the past, not the new buildings in Dublin.

My mind's too full of memories, too old to hear new chimes,

I'm a part of what was Dublin, in the rare old times.

What a lousy excuse for not living your life. I bet that Dempsey’s no older than 46 and would run to his old age if he thought it would bring it any faster.

The worst part of all is, if you enjoyed or sympathised with this song, you’re an enabler of nostalgic alcoholic. Either that or you’re singing it in Temple Bar, in a nice clear accent for the tourists, or even worse, you work in Temple Bar and have to listen to this song everyday. Someone should write a folk song for those poor bastards.

Book Review: His Father Spelled It 'Cant'

I have recently been dabbling once again in the ingestion of philosophical classics. Lugging my gargantuan intellect through the labyrinthine works of the German giant, Immanuel Kant, has brought me to this conclusion: I wish he was still alive so I could tell him to get over himself. What audacious disrespect Kant showed for those who had philosophised before him, by disregarding the established terms of metaphysics and creating his own, intractable terminology. Did he never pause to consider his predecessors? Did he think that the Greeks, early Medieval thinkers, and Scholastics slogged through dense philosophical problems and laboured during drastically less stable times just to have their terminology disregarded by some snotty-nosed, university-residing, dilettante (Kant hardly ever left his home town of Königsberg, yet thought himself eligible to teach geography), who no doubt took the printing press and more relaxed censorship for granted?

Kant must have been one of those terrible people who never listen to other interlocutors in a conversation. We can imagine him apathetically sifting through philosophical classics, muttering the incantations of an uninterested listener. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure.” he says nonchalantly to Aristotle’s Metaphysics; “Hmm. Yeah, Very good.” he assures Descartes’s Meditations with a bored voice, paying attention only to the sentences forming in his mind.

Hume provoked him enough to write his Critique of Pure Reason, a provocation Kant refers to as being awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers”. If Kant was honest, however, he would have told us that the Scotsman awoke him from his mid-conversational slumbers. Hume, Leibniz, and other empiricists and rationalists may have formed the backdrop to Kant’s philosophy, but, while he may have stooped to reference them, he wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying. He slipped into dialogue with his predecessors, with the philosophical equivalent of a disingenuous ‘As you were saying…’ and then proceeded on a merry tangent of his own fashioning.

Events took a turn for the worse with the completion of his second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. With the spectacular success of his first Critique, Kant created another monstrosity, a sequel, as though philosophical works were Hollywood movies. By this time, he had fallen madly in love with the sound of his own voice. Having rejected any arguments for the existence of God in his first Critique, Kant then presents us with a dire argument for believing in God in his second. Over the course of the two books, Kant dismisses that God can be inferred by the need for a first cause in the chain of events in our universe, rejects the notion of God as the supporting structure of existence itself, and argues against the suggestion that God can be inferred from the seemly ordered design of the universe. What does he replace these ideas with? In short: God exists because I, as a good person, deserve him to exist, so he can reward me. What incredibly mediocre nonsense! It’s obvious that Kant wasn’t listening to the complex arguments being posited, assuming them to be inferior to his own, allowing him to gargle out something so simplistic and lame that it boarders on the level of New Age philosophy. If Kant was able to give credence or credit to anyone but himself, he would have quickly realised that the game had moved on to a more advanced level.

Kant’s third Critique pertains to aesthetics. I will spare both myself and my readers any suffering, by avoiding details in explaining this work. By now you have surmised, as I have long since surmised, that Herr Kant was a dilettantish, opinionated lowlife. Having suffered his careless ramblings on epistemology and ethics, nobody wants to know his thoughts on what is beautiful and artistic. One can imagine that even a naked John Lennon would cringe at such drivel.

I would usually encourage you to read a primary source to verify my interpretation, but in this instance I warn you to keep a safe distance away. A mere glance the table of contents of The Critique of Pure Reason is enough to make your brain drip out your ears. It’s a dense briar patch of esoteric terms, aligned in to sentences that mangle any attempt at comprehension (e.g. The Principal of Synthetic Unity of Apperception is the Highest Principal of All Employment of the Understanding).

I sincerely doubt that anyone has actually read any of Kant’s three Critiques, especially the first one. No doubt, through tedious conversations with and excruciating lectures from the author himself, students apprehended a gist of the philosophical mammoths, and this has survived to inform our modern interpretation. The Critiques remain unread, and academics, trapped in web of fear and deceit, pretend to have conquered them. In the silent, self-regulating conspiracy, they suspect they are not alone in their lies, but fear bringing the problem into the open. And how could they anyway? Nobody is qualified to give an exegesis. Translator have undoubtedly translated word by word and (where Kant was merciful) sentence by sentence. One suspects that if you ran passages of Kant’s work through the context-free Google Translate, you would get virtually the same text that we find in our translated editions of his books.

In 1804, Kant passed away. Alas, I cannot even visit his tomb in Königsberg, to tell him in a gentle, whispering voice to get over himself, as his remains were stolen in 1950. It hardly seems a worthwhile theft. Kant’s dense skull must have weighed a ton (as evidenced by the portraits of his bowing head). The only things of less value have decayed from existence; his interconnected ears and his sentence mangling brain.

Shit Got Real

Whatever became of Captain Planet and the Planeteers? They were active during a time when environmentalism was fringe and politically impotent. Now, surely, is their time, as green politics has become mainstream. After some research, The Fair Observations has traced the fate of the green revolutionaries and their opponents. Sadly, they ran out of formulaic and happy resolutions, and their neat, little adventures became messy misadventures in later life.

Our Heroes

Ma Ti, the youngest of our activists and heart of the group, was kidnapped and tortured to death by the CIA in 1996, while the Planeteers were trying to prevent water being privatised in Bolivia. The trauma of his death disturbed the groups so much that they went their separate ways.

Kwame, as an independent activist, tried to take on the militias and poverty in African states, and used his power of earth to help farmers grow crops. He inexplicably contracted AIDS (some of his supporters claim it was caused by Chemtrails), and now lives a life away from the public eye.

China sent Gi on a citizen exchange programme to Ireland. With her expertise in environmental science and oceanography, she expected to enjoy life in an island country, but she was disappointed to find that no institute would employ her and that people made fun of her name. She has been working in menial jobs ever since and the crushing weight of her long shifts has left her bereft of any goals, let alone one as ambitious as changing the world.

Linka made a fortune, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, by starting up renewable energy industries. She immigrated to the UK, where she tried to encourage the development of wind farms, largely by pointing her ring at wind turbines and shouting “wind”. She was criticised by fellow environmentalists, who saw her excessive use of her ring as yet another human activity affecting climate change. Many claimed that she had failed to keep herself fully informed with environmental science and had ceased to care after she had made her wealth. In later years, she tried to use her corporate power to coerce the Russian government to turn eco-friendly. She was poisoned in 2005. The British government are hesitant to release details of her death, but many suspect it was the handiwork of the Putin government.

Wheeler's body was found in the mess left by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Nobody knows how he ended up there. Some critics say he got his comeuppance for his reckless lifestyle of chasing tail.

With the Planeteers separated, Captain Planet could no longer distribute himself into the rings. He grew bitter as the years passed, having to spend all his time in a cynical, greedy world. His political views grew more and more radical and militant. He now leads a small band of violent revolutionaries in Latin America, who want to bring about an eco-communist South America, by whatever means necessary. Rumour has it that he once killed a subordinate for ridiculing his green mullet.

Gaia still lives off the fat of the land. With no Planeteers to guide, she spends her time writing sentimental novels and making appearances on Oprah. She is a regular on FHM’s annual Sexy Older Lady list.

The Rogues Gallery

Hoggish Greedly married the woman of his dreams and turned his back on his reckless consumption of natural resources. He slimmed down to healthier size, started a family, and published his memoirs, where he defended his old colleagues’ activities. His assessment of Captain Planet was long and brutal, memorably describing him as “a radical propagandist for the deadliest leftwing agandas” and “the personification of all that wants to deny the family and freedom in society.” Planet wrote a counter statement, in his own blood and pinned it to an effigy of Greedly’s wife, soaked in the blood of his former henchman, Rigger. Greedly now lives under a witness protection programme.

Dr Blight died after years of fighting ovarian cancer, which she almost certainly developed from a dalliance with Captain Pollution (Captain Planet’s toxic arch-enemy, who is summoned from five deadly rings). Her last year was spent under house arrest for the murder of Sly Sludge.

Sly Sludge was stabbed in the neck by Dr Blight after making an ill-advised quip about her facial mutilation coming from the same source as her cancer. He died before the ambulance reached the nearest hospital. 

Duke Nukem mutated into a hideous deformed mess and was permanently confined to hospital. He was barely able to breathe and he lost his capacity to speak. His spinal chord became entangled in the gooey, radioactive mess made up most of his body. This caused him much agony, but he was unable to communicate it, and as measuring his stress levels became meaningless in his new state, nobody noticed for months. Eventually, a perceptive doctor suspected that he was in pain. He taught Nukem Morse Code, enabling him to spell out “Kill me”. The doctor informed the hospital authorities, but later changed his story. Insiders tell us that Captain Planet skinned the doctor’s dog and told him to revise his story or his family would be next. Nukem now lives in yet another mutated state beyond all classification. Nobody is sure if he’s living or dead or some third inconceivable category.

With his gargantuan financial power, Looten Plunder backed George W. Bush in the 2000 US presidential election. When Bush became president, he made Plunder his chief advisor on the environment. Plunder’s policies favoured his insatiable greed, and his companies made record profits under the Bush administration. He now lives in gigantic fortress-cum-zoo, which collects rare species which Plunder hunts for sport. It is believed by leading economists and political watchdogs that Plunder could topple almost any government in the world, such is the might of his corporate empire.

Verminous Skumm continued a life of crime, his activities becoming progressively worse. When the Planeteers disbanded, his behaviour became more reckless and vicious. Authorities that normally turned an apathetic eye to his environmental violations began to consider him a problem. At the end of an epic duel in 1999, Captain Planet, now radicalised to a ruthless level, took Skumm to a hideout to execute him. After enduring the entirety of Planet’s hour long diatribe, Skumm broke down in tears and pleaded for death, urging Planet to do it. Captain Planet, spared his life, realising that keeping him alive was a greater punishment than killing him, and he made trophies out of Skumm’s hands. After years of plummeting into anonymity and poverty, the rat-like mutant was blessed with the convalescent care of a sympathetic cleric. He was soon selling his story to the media of how he had been saved by Jesus, and how he was the victim of circumstance and a wicked, environmentalist super-lunatic.

"Blood makes the best fertiliser."