To Boldly Drink Where No Man Has Drunk Before

I can't help but think it was no coincidence that around the same time as scientists say we may have found the first truly habitable planet in the universe, humankind has also developed the first beer that can be drunk in space.


This may seem like a frivolous invention, but when you think about it it's fairly monumental. I mean for one, it's beer. In space. But secondly, the habitable planet in question is roughly 20 light years away from earth. Which means that even if we could travel the entire journey at half light speed, a cosy cruising speed of 149,896,229 m/s, the journey would take 40 years. If we ever send colonists over there, they are going to need a good supply of beer, as you can't expect a large group of people to sit in a tin can for 40 years without having any fun. If people give up the larger portion of their life to travelling to a new world to set up a new society, they deserve the chance to actually relax. Hell, if we didn't let them they'd probably come out the other end of the journey having all killed each other.


At first reading the article announcing the beer worried me. The beer is made by Australians, which instantly gives rise to concern that they were producing some form of Space-Fosters. Lager is bad enough on earth, never mind taking it to space. Thankfully, having read further it seems that one of the main problems with trying to drink normal beer in space is its high carbonation, which causes it to have the lovely property in space of potentially floating back out of your stomach and into the air any time you burp. On the plus side, this pretty much makes lager a no-go for space (sign me up for NASA!). The other issue they have is that, much like in high altitude plane flights, the human taste buds are affected, causing flavour to generally be dampened. As such they had to brew a specifically low-carbonated and highly flavoured beer, meaning they decided to go for a variety of stout.

Space Stout, for Space Men

So not only have they made a space beer, but they've also made it one of the best kinds of beer they could have gone for. Everyone knows that real men drink stout or porter. The only downside to this that I can see is that, being the quite heavy beer stout is, once we get to the habitable planet Gliese 581d (or "New Yorkshire" as I'm provisionally calling it) it'll be quite hard to drink, as the double earth gravity the planet boasts will make it settle in the stomach like a bag of rocks. On the plus side, when your space-wife is moaning at you to stop watching the damn space-tv and get off the space-sofa to take her out to a space-restaurant, you really won't be lying when you say it's hard to pull yourself up from the sofa.

Welcome to New Yorkshire: No lager, wine bars or Justin Bieber allowed

Overall the planet seems perfectly suited for the average Yorkshireman. It only receives 30% of the intensity of sunlight of earth, which is pretty much the same as the average cloudy day in Yorkshire and it is kept heated to a liveable degree by the large amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so no need to worry about bloody environmentalists banging on about reducing emissions.


All this seems a fair way off into the future, but with the invention of beer for space we can rest easy that once the day comes, we won't be without a pint or twelve for the journey. And remember: in space, nobody can hear you belch.

A Second City, and why it won't be in Yorkshire

I recently saw an article over at The Independent about Manchester looking to overtake Birmingham as the second city. As a Yorkshireman my first instinct was to scoff and say "but what about Leeds?" until after thinking for a moment, quickly deciding that Leeds was a terrible and sordid scumhole, and should never be declared the second city. I should know, I was born there.

This got me thinking, Yorkshire is a big place, but pretty much all of it's cities are....a bit shit, to put it bluntly. Out of our top two contenders for the second city, we have Leeds, which is 90% financial district and has very little personality or cultural output, and York, which has the historical advantage of being the old first city but which is essentially just a quite pretty city with nothing going on and a tendency to flood everywhere. Sheffield, Hull and Bradford, you could never really imagine having the kind of cultural and global impact that Manchester has had, with the one exception of his lordship Sean Bean, for whom all of Yorkshire is eternally grateful.

So why are Yorkshire cities a bit naff, and does this mean Lancashire is better? No, of course not. Don't be stupid. Lancashire is a terrible and awful place, and Birmingham is even worse, bloody southerners. But even more need for there to be a reason for this. As Yorkshire, God's own county, is so undeniably better than Lancashire or The South, why are its cities so terrible?

Yorkshire: Better than you

Part of the reason has to be that it's harder to hate each other when you all live in the same place. People from Yorkshire love to have a go at people in the next town over, and it's much easier to hate more people if very few people live where you do. When two people from Yorkshire first meet, their first task is to work out why they don't like the other person. This is much easier to achieve on a town level, as within a city you have to resort to districts and streets. As such, Yorkshire people much prefer living in towns and villages, as you save 30 seconds which could be much better spent drinking or grumbling about things not being as good as they used to.

Probably a larger reason is that the Yorkshire temperament means that we don't brag about our achievements half as much as Mancunians or Brummies. Ask a Manc what makes his city great and I bet within two sentences the words "oasis" or "the stone roses" will have been spoken. I mean yeah, they're good bands, but are they really that good that they form a cornerstone of your region? Ask a Yorkshireman what's great about their city and the answer will either be "It's not, it's shit" or you'll get things about the area and the people. When we talk about what is great about Yorkshire we talk about the moors, the hils, the spirit of the people. To me that's far more important than some band who whines about what they've smoked and drunk.

It isn't like Yorkshire cities don't have their output of famous people and bands, we just don't go on about it as what makes us great. So Sheffield has produced The Arctic Monkeys, The Human League and Pulp, which is great. But you don't hear them banging on about it.

Made in Yorkshire

All in all it's probably part of the Yorkshire spirit. We're proud as hell to be from Yorkshire, but trained from birth to be slightly ashamed of everything that makes Yorkshire what it is. The mining and industry of our past has been mocked so much, both from outside and within, that we hold a slight embarrassment about our history. But it is an incredibly rare occasion to meet a person from Yorkshire who is ashamed of being from there, or who doesn't claim Yorkshire is pretty much better than anywhere else. And rightly so. We don't need to prance around shouting about how awesome we are at producing bands or culture, or how our sporting achievements are better than our neighbours. We already know we're better than the rest of you, intrinsically and eternally. If we started harping on about everything we're great at, not only would it take all day every day, but we'd stop being that good. Only Southerners have to care about other people thinking they're any good.

What a set of plankers

You can always trust the Aussies to do something dumb, and the recent reports I've seen of a new "irl meme" of "planking" only goes to show this. Essentially it is the art of lying face down in public places and taking a picture of it, generally in weird or famous places. It actually started in good old blighty, but has really become popular over in Aus, presumably because they're the only people stupid enough to think it's actually funny.

To be honest, the only remotely cool planks are those done on things which look impossible to lie down on or done using something totally weird. Ones like the following:

But it's pushing planking to make it actually funny or cool that ended up with the death of a 20-year old guy in Brisbane, when he tried to plank on a seventh floor balcony and winded up plummeting to his death. It must suck for the guys friends and family, but the media and government coverage of the incident has just become stupid.

For example, police have been reported as stating that they won't tolerate these "dangerous stunts" and that they will be punished with fines or even jail sentences in serious cases. Let's put this in context. One person has died in an accident, so now anybody who is lying down on something the police deem as dangerous will get fined. That to me seems like a massive over-reaction. People die from stupid causes every year, including common things like using a toaster and putting on your trousers. This doesn't mean we ban trousers, or arrest people using their toaster irresponsibly. We may put a caution on for people to avoid doing common stupid acts, like using a fork to fetch their jammed toast out, but when people do it anyway it is their responsibility and their fault. I'm fairly sure the guy knew it was fairly stupid and dangerous when he went to plank on the balcony, but he chose to do it anyway. Do we need to protect against this? Why should we? The number one rule of life is that we die at the end of it. Do we really need to protect against people doing stupid things and them going wrong? To me the answer is no, unless it is putting other people's lives in danger, people should have full right to potentially screw up their own life.

We don't stop people from playing rugby, even though it is a sport which in essence is just an excuse to hit each other. We don't stop people from snowboarding, even though it is strapping a plank of wood to your feet and throwing yourself down a mountain. And we don't stop people from skydiving, even though if something went wrong you'd quickly become a pancake on the pavement. Doing stupid stuff is fun, and the danger that goes with it adds to that. If we start taking away the danger and the stupidity from the world, we're left with a very boring place. If someone dies doing it, so what? There's 6 billion odd more of us in the world. I don't think anyone other than the friends and family of the person who died really have a right to care so much about this death that laws need changing or police need to be alerted.

Let people do stupid stuff, it's the only element of natural selection we still have left in the world.