Guess what?

Two-thirds the way out on the spiral arm of an insignificant galaxy is an equally uninteresting yellow sun, where an
inconsequential blue and green planet orbits, which is called by the two-legged inhabitants after the detritus and excreta
underfoot left behind by long dead creatures that provides anchorage to all the green stuff and is actually not green or
blue, but brown.

Despite naming the planet after the brown stuff, the inhabitants do their best to not only remove all the green stuff,
which provide them with something to breathe, they also cover it over with hard surfaces to smooth the way for
wheeled vehicles that not only consume what they need to breathe, but also exhale gases that eventually will cause their
destruction. It is all rather reminiscent of some smaller organisms who consume sweet stuff and produce an intoxicating
liquid, thereby sealing their doom, and the colony dies in its own waste. Strangely enough, the bipeds find this waste
product extremely good for "getting out of it" and hence encourage the foolish micro-organisms to produce rather a lot
of it, so it is only poetic justice that the bipeds are equally as foolish.

However, the bipeds do do one remarkable thing that no other civilization in the known universe has: In the middle of
an insignificantly protruding landmass of the planet the inhabitants celebrate the intoxicating liquid, by drinking a lot of
it, at a place named after lots of green stuff that is abundantly present on the brown stuff as a rule, but where it is
covered by the same grey, hard surface stuff that they call concrete and that they usually provide for the wheeled
vehicles. The entire planet and its inhabitants present one paradox upon another and were recently short-listed for a
galactic prize entitled "the most illogical and stupid species in the galaxy award."

After the celebration (which lasts for 21 rotations of the planet), the inhabitants are so intoxicated that some have to
sleep it off under the table, while others dance on the table and sing rather unintelligible songs about the processes of
reproduction, accompanied by extremely fat and red-faced musicians who blow into metal instruments that make a
sound reminiscent of excess wind in the digestive system escaping. Why they all put themselves through such
discomfort remains a mystery to the rest of the galaxy.

The watchful eyes of the galactic anthropologists, who can perceive a much wider range of the electromagnetic
spectrum than the inhabitants of this deluded species, have noted another extraordinary fact about them: Every one of
them imagines he or she is at the center of the universe. This is a most remarkable delusion, because it is obvious that
the center of the universe is exactly where the big bang went bang and the only place where everything in the universe
is getting further and further distant. The main and most easily understood attribute of the center of the universe is that
it is the emptiest spot ever known. For that reason, to imagine you are there, or even want to be there, defies all
common sense. The galactic anthropologists reckon it will take this species a million or so orbits of the planet before
any semblance of sense emerges among them and it is unlikely the species will survive anywhere near that long.
Meanwhile, the award has been given to a yet more stupid species, namely the organisms who produce the intoxicating
stuff.

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Text: Alan Frostick, Hamburg