This Week...Let's Just Look At Ducks.

Commentary

"I don't see the difference between fox hunting and say, polar explorers clubbing seals. It's just good fun." – Andrea Leadsom

"When I first came to this job one of my two questions was: 'Is climate change real?' and the other was 'Is hydraulic fracturing safe?" – Andrea Leadsom

"I do want to be very clear: I see our nuclear deterrent as absolutely core insurance for our national security." – Andrea Leadsom

There is officially too much news and the world is eating itself. We’re in a different time now, a time where a woman putting a cat in a wheelie bin isn’t considered front page news anymore, instead cast aside to page 13 in a local paper. The Britain I want back is a Britain that would be outraged by the discovery of horse meat in a 59p Tesco lasagne, as if when you buy a 59p lasagne you would expect anything less. We live in a post-apocalyptic tabloid Mad Max where Eastenders stars are free to roam the lands away from the lenses of The Sun and where nobody in the world knows what Callum Best is doing.

Fortunately, away from all the stories of this week that will genuinely change our country forever, those stories thankfully still exist to take our minds off the shit storm that surrounds us. Here they are…

POKEMON GO CHANGES SOCIETY

Nostalgia is big in 2016. That’s why you see grown adults eating popcorn, riding scooters to work as if it is a completely acceptable thing to do and getting smashed in an east London multi-story car park you may as well be 14 years old chinning White Ace in your older mate’s Punto. As adults another thing that pulls on our heartstrings is Pokemon, the game that allowed me to hold on to my virginity for at least 3 years (Guitar Hero sustained that for another 2 at a guess).

Pokemon Go is an immersive augmented reality game for your phone that allows you to catch Pokemon ‘in real life’, or as real as you can get while you’re staring at your phone in Stratford bus terminal trying not to get your phone nicked. In the week since its release people have found dead bodies while playing the game, we’ve seen armed robberies and injuries but before you scream ‘I CANNOT TAKE ANYMORE HORRIBLE NEWS’ some good has come with the game. The infamous Westboro Baptist Church is named as a Pokemon gym in the game and its gym leader, @meakoopa on Twitter, has planted a pink Clefairy there with the name ‘LOVEISLOVE’ which forced the church to call the fictional creation a ‘sodomite’.

Seriously though I think this game is a genuine progression for our species in that we’ve simply stuck two fingers up two Darwinism and screamed ‘DID ANYONE EVER ASK US IF WE WANT TO DEVOLVE AS A RACE?’. We’re not taking this ‘progression as a human race’ thing lying down, and if we want to play a game that reminds us that nothing will ever be as good as when you were 14 instead of say, eradicating world hunger or colonising Mars, then I’m all for it.

SOMETHING THAT ISN’T TERRIBLE

Oh yeah this is the stuff alright, the sweet release from the great depression that is 2016. Seeing this story today is what I imagine heroin is like, a sweet release that while it may not last is only comparable to pure ecstasy. The University of Oxford this week have discovered that newly-hatched ducklings are capable of abstract thought, being able to understand the concept of ‘same’ and ‘different’ which allows them to quickly learn who their mothers are. That’s all this story is, it’s a story about how smart ducklings are with no undertones of racism or political treachery in sight. Look there’s even a video that comes with it, look at the video and whisper to yourself that everything is going to be alright over and over again until you actually believe it. I mean, it’s like closing your eyes in a fire and pretending it’s not there but still, where’s the harm in that?