Secret Society

The time has come to confess to my long standing membership in a very, very old secret society, fear not, this society is not the kind to dump me in the East River for spilling the beans on my membership. In fact, we glory in being known it helps us to identify and recruit new members, and we are ALWAYS (for reasons that will become painfully clear) in need of fresh meat... err new members. First, I suppose I should reveal the name of the society of which I am such a proud member, it is a very simple name we are called The Ministry of Bad Ideas or The Ministry for short. No, we are not some sect of religious morons, the Ministry here is more like a cabinet minister not a fire and brimstone kind of minister. We have a sister/brother organization that people may have heard of it is called the Ministry of Silly Walks. However, we are the older organization, and are still thriving to this day. We are an international, multi-cultural group. We take all sorts if you have an idea run it past our Central Committee (the ones that have survived that is), and if it is deemed worthy of our attention, and you survive a demonstration of your idea, voila!!! you are a member. We scour the globe for acolytes to bring into the Ministry. Our budget is small, our equipment might be outdated, but by god(s) our imaginations are boundless. Secondly, I suppose a brief history of the Ministry is in order. We started a LONG time ago, no one is quite sure of the name of our founder or the exact date which we were founded. We are not the most adept at record keeping (fire, which we LOVE to play with, has a tendency to destroy records). We do know that the Pharaoh that had all those problems with Moses, he was one of ours. That whole "let my people free" crap would not have been possible without us, and Charlton Heston owes us a bit of thanks. The long standing, but now defunct, medical idea that health was based on the four humours i.e. black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, that was one of ours. You have to admit it did have some sticking power, and we were able to get a decent chap (for a Greek) like Hippocrates to expound it for us. One of the quirks of our society is not all members know they are members, and not all members are totally incompetent. We have had a number of "successes" over the years most of them without trying. A surprising lot of our members have been doctors, we are not quiet sure why this is so, but as long as they pay their dues we do not ask too many searching questions. William Harvey was one of ours until he had to ruin it by solving that whole blood circulation thing, then we had to read him out of the Ministry. He was a nice chap for an Englishman. Most of the guys who tried to copy Da Vinci's flying machine were ours. In fact, that footage you see from time to time on TV with all those spectacularly complex machines crashing miserably, comes from our archives. Ockham's Razor is not a favourite theory of ours. That bastard has caused us a great deal of grief. We thrive on the absurdly complex, simple is for the weak minded, and the morally bankrupt. Alfred North Whitehead who came up with a theory of relativity more complex than Einstein's, one of us. Polytheism was mostly our idea, why have just one all encompassing god when you can have hundreds of them for all sorts of stuff. It helps you shift the blame, and who knows one or two of them may smile upon you as you leap off that bridge with papier mache wings, complete with real live duck feathers glued on for safety, strapped to your arms. Asking any number of gods, fates, pixies, fairies, idols, or really cool looking stones, for luck is one of our major tenets. Being an extremely eclectic organization, we sometimes expand our membership to include non-humans. Mrs O'Leary's (nice lady for an Irishwoman) cow was one of ours (I told you we like messing about with fire). The cat and mouse that recently caused a seven day electrical failure in Albania, they were ours. In fact, our history is so long and colourful (and taking into account the length of this post and my readers attentions spans) I would be doing the Ministry an injustice to attempt to squeeze it into one post. Stay tuned.