Microwave Man Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Robot Boy Mr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life. They were a normal, happy husband and wife. One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad. Mrs. Smith would would be a mom which would make him the dad! But something was wrong with their bundle of joy. It wasn't human at all, it was a robot boy! He wasn't warm and cuddly and he didn't have skin. Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin. There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head. He just lay there and stared, not living or dead. The only time he seemed alive at all was with a long extension cord plugged into the wall. Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, "What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, "What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender." The Smith's lives were now filled with misery and strife. Mrs. Smith hated her husband, and he hated his wife. He never forgave her unholy alliance: a sexual encounter with a kitchen appliance. And Robot Boy grew to be a young man. Though he was often mistaken for a garbage can.

As long as it’s BYOB, I’m cool,” Tuck answers. “And if Danny is coming then you better lock up the liquor cabinet.” “We can move the hooch to G’s room,” Logan says with a snort. “God knows he won’t drink a drop of it.” Tuck glances over at me with a grin. “Poor baby. When are you gonna learn to handle your liquor like a man?” “Hey, I handle the drinking part just fine. It’s the morning after that does me in.” I smirk at my teammates. “Besides, I’m your captain. Somebody has to stay sober to keep your crazy asses in line.” “Thanks, Mom.” Logan pauses, then shakes his head. “Actually, no, you’re the mom,” he tells Tucker, grinning at Tuck’s apron before turning back at me. “Guess that makes you the dad. You two are positively domestic.” We both flip him the finger. “Aw, are Mommy and Daddy mad at me?” He gives a mock gasp. “Are you guys gonna get a divorce?” “Fuck off,” Tuck says, but he’s laughing. The microwave beeps, and Tucker pulls out the defrosted chicken, then proceeds to cook our dinner while I do my homework at the counter. And damned if the whole thing isn’t domestic as hell.

Summarizing is when you take a story that is complicated and interesting, then stick it in a microwave until it shrivels up into a tiny piece of black crunchy tarlike stuff. A wise man once said, "Any story, no matter how good, will sound really, really dumb when you shorten it to a few sentences.

During wartime, experimental drugs were often tried on men. If a drug failed, the man died. But if a drug succeeded, it was used to save both women and men, but without women dying to develop it. Men were similarly used as guinea pigs in the development of emergency procedures, microwave ovens (a man was inadvertently “cooked” during the testing process7), and other advances that served both sexes. Later it was labeled sexism that physicians studied men more than women. No one labeled it sexism because men were used as guinea pigs more than women.

There isn’t a name for my situation. Firstly because I decided to kill myself. And then because of this idea: I don’t have to do it immediately. Whoosh, through a little door. It’s a limbo. I need never answer the phone again or pay a bill. My credit score no longer matters. Fears and compulsions don’t matter. Socks don’t matter. Because I’ll be dead. And who am I to die? A microwave chef. A writer of pamphlets. A product of our time. A failed student. A faulty man. A bad poet. An activist in two minds. A drinker of chocolate milk, and when there’s no chocolate, of strawberry and sometimes banana.

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, zip lock, franchised, on-line, microwavable.

The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, zip lock, franchised, on-line, microwavable. Where there are no deadlines, cell phones, or committee meetings. Where there is room for the soul.

she waves her fists in front of him as if trying to swat two flies the size of microwave ovens.

if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.

For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each. After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while he's wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.

Twenty pairs of shoes but they never know where the shoehorn is; houses filled with microwave ovens and flat-screen televisions, yet they couldn’t tell you which anchor bolt to use for a concrete wall if you threatened them with a box cutter.

Listen, I'll share some of the wisdom I learned over the years. When you near the end of your life... when you're a lonely old man... you start realizing what your accomplishments are really worth. The most brilliant clue I ever deciphered, the millions I earned -- even the microwavable burrito itself -- sometimes I think I'd be willing to trade all of it for a single hug of someone who truly loves me.

Styrofoam tombstones around the stage and angles the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus so the audience can read its epitaph: Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1

Make sure to marry a man who puts his pizza rolls into the oven, not the microwave," Laura told her, smiling at Will. "He knows good things take a little more time.

Full of screws and nails and spanner sets and that sort of thing. People don’t have useful things any more. People just have shit. Twenty pairs of shoes but they never know where the shoe-horn is; houses filled with microwave ovens and flat-screen televisions, yet they couldn’t tell you which plug to use for a concrete wall if you threatened them with a box-cutter.

A tall, leggy French girl on her way to work was looking at her phone and almost walked into me as I crossed the street. I dodged her just in time and she glanced back to give me a dirty look. How dare I not realize the importance of her early morning text message. I wondered how humanity managed to work and accomplish things before our time in history; the invention of electricity, the radio and the light bulb; creating the combustion engine and then building roads for people to travel on; creating aircraft so mankind could travel faster between great cities they planned and built; the industrial revolution; NASA landing a man on the moon; the invention of the microwave so single guys could make TV dinners and not starve. How had mankind managed it all without texting each other every five minutes? Or had they been able to accomplish all these things because they didn’t have this frivolous distraction disconnecting them from dreaming and inventing, and human interaction?

He's probably somewhere right now eating a Big-N-Tasty. The man has a coffee pot, a microwave, AND a mini refrigerator in his classrooom. If you plan on having a conversation with him, I suggest you do it over the phone. Otherwise, you'll need a motorcycle helmet just to avoid the Snickers shrapnel flying from his mouth!

It’s easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry’s vision of the techscape of the future was. By today’s standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of “touchtone” dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different.

She went downstairs, following her nose to the coffee pot. Frowning, she noticed that there was no coffee. The pot looked like it had already been washed and put back, but she could smell coffee. Growling, she opened the pantry door and stepped back. What the hell is this? Quinoa, chia seeds, lentils, bran flakes, super green powder, whole oats. She slammed the door and opened it again. Yup, same stuff was there. She went to the fridge. When she opened the door and looked inside, she felt her mouth drop. One dozen eggs, whole milk, cottage cheese, bottled water, a drawer of green leaves, another drawer of vegetables, and yogurt. The man didn't even have a microwave. "I'm gonna fuckin' die.

Say you live five miles from the grocery store. When you need food, you hop in your car, and fifteen minutes later you’re buying groceries. One day on your way to the grocery store you get stopped by a train. You’re delayed five additional minutes. The whole time you’re waiting for the train to pass, you’re irritated by the delay. You forget the fact that before cars were invented, a five-mile trip to the store could take a whole day. “Or how about the student who’s working on a research paper for a class assignment. Because of a slow internet connection, it takes him thirty more minutes to look up and download the necessary information for his paper. He’s peeved by the delay. He’s forgotten that before the Internet, he would’ve had to motor over to the library, look up books in an archaic card file system, find the books in the library stacks, then search through the books for his information. A process that could take hours. “But the quintessential example of this phenomenon is the microwave. Whereas in the past it might take twenty to thirty minutes to cook or heat food in a conventional oven, the same outcome can be derived with a microwave oven in less than two minutes. Yet we stand at the microwave tapping our toe impatiently waiting for those two minutes to conclude, frustrated by how long it’s taking. “Which is why I say today’s world suffers from a serious case of the Microwave Syndrome.

But there was more than dullness in the confessional; it was not that by itself that had sickened him or propelled him toward that always widening club, Associated Catholic Priests of the Bottle and Knights of the Cutty Sark. It was the steady, dead, onrushing engine of the church, bearing down all petty sins on its endless shuttle to heaven. It was the ritualistic acknowledgment of evil by a church now more concerned with social evils; atonement told in beads for elderly ladies whose parents had spoken European tongues. It was the actual presence of evil in the confessional, as real as the smell of old velvet. But it was a mindless, moronic evil from which there was no mercy or reprieve. The fist crashing into the baby’s face, the tire cut open with a jackknife, the barroom brawl, the insertion of razor blades into Halloween apples, the constant, vapid qualifiers which the human mind, in all its labyrinthine twists and turns, is able to spew forth. Gentlemen, better prisons will cure this. Better cops. Better social services agencies. Better birth control. Better sterilization techniques. Better abortions. Gentlemen, if we rip this fetus from the womb in a bloody tangle of unformed arms and legs, it will never grow up to beat an old lady to death with a hammer. Ladies, if we strap this man into a specially wired chair and fry him like a pork chop in a microwave oven, he will never have an opportunity to torture any more boys to death. Countrymen, if this eugenics bill is passed, I can guarantee you that never again— Shit

10. How does a tiny man say goodbye? With a microwave!

After seeing Dylan with the redhead, I sunk deeper into a depression. Even working at Lark’s house did nothing to distract me. I simply went through the motions. Fortunately, Lark was especially tired and slept most of the day, so she never noticed my bad mood. Harlow wasn’t as oblivious as we washed dishes after dinner. “What’s up, stinky pup?” I rolled my eyes at her nickname for me. “Nothing.” “She doesn’t want to deal with the leaves,” Jace said from behind us. Our ten year old brother crossed his arms like Dad often did when suspicious. “See, she got spooked last night and bailed on raking the leaves. They ended up blowing around the yard and now she’s trying to get out of raking them again.” “That’s not it.” “Sure, it is,” he said, his dark hair covering his narrowed eyes. “What else could it be?” Grumpy, I decided to punish him. “It’s about a sexy guy.” Jace’s face twisted into horror. “Eww!” he cried, running out of the room. Harlow and I laughed at the sound of him telling on me to Mom. “In a few years, girls will be all he thinks about,” I said, returning to the dishes. Harlow leaned her head against my shoulder. “Sexy guy, huh?” “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your fight?” Harlow glanced at the clock. “Yeah. When I get back, I want to hear about the sexy guy making you sigh so much.” As my sister dressed to go, I finished the dishes and struggled to stop sighing. I was still grumpy when Dad got home. In this living room, he told Harlow to be careful. She said something and laughed. When Harlow started fighting at the Thunderdome, she called herself Joy and hid it from our parents. She didn’t think they’d approve and she was right. Harlow and I were naïve to assume they wouldn’t find out long before she told them the truth though. Dad might be a pastor, but he learned about the Lord in prison. As a member of the Reapers, Dad had eyes and ears all over Ellsberg. He likely knew Harlow was fighting before she threw her first punch. Entering the kitchen, Dad smiled at me. “Stop talking about cute boys around your brother. He has a sensitive gag reflex.” I laughed as he got himself a beer and joined me at the sink. “Mom said we have leftovers. Mind warming them up for me?” Shaking my head, I filled a plate and set it in the microwave. “Are you okay?” Dad asked, frowning at me. “You look worn down.” “I had a long day.” “You sure that’s it?” We watched each other and I remembered the first time he asked if I was okay. Five years earlier when I was brought to this house and met my new family. I didn’t remember a lot from that day besides thinking these people were too good to be true. I figured they’d wait until Kirk was gone then hurt me. I couldn’t remember when I knew Dad was a good man who loved me. Not like my real dad loved me. Tad felt the kind of love a person died to protect. I saw the love in his eyes as he waited for his food to finish warming. “I wish I was stronger.” “So do I,” he said softly. “Everyone does. They just don’t admit it. That’s what makes you so brave. You can admit your fears.” Even thinking he was full of shit, I smiled. “Thanks, Dad.” Taking his plate out of the microwave, he inhaled. “Mom makes the best meatloaf.” “I made it.” Grinning, Dad nudged me with his hip. “If you make this meatloaf for the boy you’re hung up on, you’ll own him.” “I’ll remember that.

After they left, Emma returned to her Jasper-burger consumption with gusto. She’d asked Lisa once to find out the recipe for their seasoning mix, but Kevin wouldn’t give it up. Plus, as Lisa had pointed out, it wouldn’t do Emma any good to have it since she couldn’t cook worth a damn, anyway. “So about what I said before,” Sean said after he’d wolfed down his food, “about not wanting them to know we’ve had sex. It’s not that I’m trying to hide it, I just…” “Don’t want them to know.” “Yeah.” “That makes sense.” His face brightened. “Really?” “No.” “Damn.” He’d finished his beer, so he took a swig off the glass of water she’d requested with her meal. “Under normal circumstances, I’d want everybody to know we’re sleeping together. Trust me. I’d put a sign on my front lawn.” “But these aren’t normal circumstances.” “Not even in the ballpark. I have this bet with my brothers I’d last the whole month and I don’t want to listen to them gloat.” Of course he’d have a bet with his brothers. Such a guy thing to do. “But it’s more about the women.” “The women?” “In my family, I mean. Aunt Mary, especially. They might start thinking it’s more than it is. Getting ideas about us, if you know what I mean.” Emma ate her last French fry and pushed her plate away. “So we have to pretend we’re madly in love and engaged…while pretending we’re not having sex.” “Told you it complicates things.” “I’m going to need a color-coded chart to keep track of who thinks what.” He grinned and pulled his Sharpie out of his pocket. “I could make Sticky notes.” The man loved sticky notes. He stuck them on everything. A note on the front of the microwave complaining about the disappearance of the last bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. (Emma had discovered during a particularly rough self-pity party that any chips will do, even if they burn your tongue.) A note on the back of the toilet lid telling her she used girlie toilet paper, whatever that meant. He liked leaving them on the bathroom mirror, too. Stop cleaning my sneakers. I’m trying to break them in. Her personal favorite was If you buy that cheap beer because it’s on sale again, I’ll piss in your mulch pile. But sometimes they were sweet. Thank you for doing my laundry. And…You make really good grilled cheese sandwiches. That one had almost made her cry.

Before she sat, she grabbed the spiral-bound journal she’d been jotting down notes in since she’d first joked about her plan to Lisa, and set it on the table. “I wrote down a few things. You know, about myself? If you skim through it, it’ll help you pretend you’ve known me longer than two days.” Instead of waiting until they were done, he sat down his slice, picked up the notebook and opened it to a random page. “You’re not afraid of spiders, but you hate slugs? That’s relevant?” “It’s something you would know about me.” “You graduated from the University of New Hampshire. Your feet aren’t ticklish.” He chuckled and shook his head. “You actually come with an owner’s manual?” “You could call it that. And if you could write something up for me to look over, that would be great.” He shrugged and flipped through a few more pages of the journal. “I’m a guy. I like guy stuff. Steak. Football. Beer. Women.” “One woman, singular. At least for the next month, and then you can go back to your wild pluralizing ways.” She took a sip of her beer. “You think that’s all I need to know about you?” “That’s the important stuff. I could write it on a sticky note, if you want, along with my favorite sexual position. Which isn’t missionary, by the way.” It was right there on the tip of her tongue--then what is your favorite sexual position?--but she bit it back. The last thing she needed to know about a man she was going to share a bedroom with for a month was how he liked his sex. “I hardly think that’ll come up in conversation.” “It’s more relevant than slugs.” “Since you’ll be doing more gardening than having sex, not really.” “Wait a minute.” He stabbed a finger at one of the notes in the journal. “You can’t cook?” “Not well. Microwave directions help.” “I’d never marry a woman who can’t cook.” “I’d never marry the kind of man who’d never marry a woman who can’t cook, so it’s a good thing we’re just pretending.

You really need to trade in that End Days psychology, Stephanie, for some silver-lining thinking,” Jim said airily. “Not every second of every day is a friggin’ crisis. Besides, be careful what you wish for.” He paused to hand her a book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. “Says here, the more psychic energy you invest in gloom and doom, the more likely you are to make it happen. The universe is very sensitive to these things, picks up on all those thought impressions, and the next thing you know, whack!” He smacked the back of his right hand against his left palm for emphasis. They rounded the hall, and the next thing Stephanie knew her head was being stuffed in a microwave. Microwave Man, one of the robots, provided the service. “Five seconds to a side, makes for an evenly cooked meal,” Microwave Man said. He waited five seconds, then turned Stephanie’s head. “Get me out of here! I feel my brains boiling!” Stephanie screamed frantically. But Jim, as strong as he was, was no match for Microwave Man. “He’s got ahold of your hair. I’ll run and get some scissors.” “I’ll be dead by then, you fool!” “What did I say about looking on the bright side, Stephanie?

In real life, sexually-speaking, women are slow cookers and men are microwaves. But in pornography, all a man does is touch a woman and she’s howling in delight. Today, pornography is so widely used by young men, they learn these falsehoods. There’s good evidence that the more porn men watch, the less satisfied they are with their partner’s looks and sexual performance.

Anger spikes in my chest, and slowly, I turn to glower at her. The microwave beeps loudly, and the old man turns to grab the cups, unaware of how close I am to wrapping my hands around her throat.

Well, I have had some luck. I cross-referenced some of the other articles in the issue and got a few hits, one of which led me to a man’s personal website. I sent him an email.” I stare at Henri. “Don’t worry,” he says. “They can’t track emails. At least not the way I send them.” “How do you send them?” “I reroute them through various servers in cities across the world, so that the original location is lost along the way.” “Impressive.” Bernie Kosar scratches at the door and I let him in. The clock on the microwave reads 5:59. I have two hours before I have to be at school. “Do you really think we want to go digging around in all this?” I ask. “I mean, what if it’s all a trap? What if they are simply trying to root us out of hiding?” Henri nods. “You know, if the article had mentioned anything about us, that might have given me pause. But it didn’t. It was about their invading Earth, much the same way they did Lorien. There is so much about it that we don’t understand. You were right a few weeks ago when you said we were defeated so easily. We were. It doesn’t make sense. The entire situation with the disappearance of the Elders also doesn’t make sense. Even getting you and the other children off of Lorien, which I have never questioned, seems odd. And

Chris was told he had been assigned to work in a communications vault that was the nerve center for this system of international espionage—a code room linking the TRW plant with CIA Headquarters and Rhyolite’s major ground stations in Australia. The continuing disclosures about the secret world fascinated Chris, and he was especially intrigued by what he saw as a bizarre contrast between the mechanical spies he had been told about and the location of the ground stations. The Rhyolite earth stations had been planted in a world that was about as close as man could find now to the Stone Age; they were situated near Alice Springs in the harsh Outback of Australia, an oasis in a desert where aborigines still lived much as Stone Age men did thousands of years ago. Under an Executive Agreement between the United States and Australia, Chris was told, all intelligence information collected by the satellites and relayed to the network of dish-shaped microwave antennas at Alice Springs was to be shared with the Australian intelligence service. However, Rogers told Chris, the United States, by design, was not living up to the agreement: certain information was not being passed to Australia. He explained that TRW was designing a new, larger satellite with a new array of sensors; the Australians, Rogers emphasized, were never to be told about it; anytime Chris sent messages that would reach Australia, he must delete any reference to the new satellite. Its name was Argus, or AR—for Advanced Rhyolite. Whoever in the CIA had selected the cryptonym must have enjoyed his choice, because it was appropriate. In Greek mythology, Argus was a giant with one hundred eyes … a vigilant guardian.

Well now look. The human being, and the human male in particular, is programmed to take risks. Had our ancestors spent their days sitting around in caves, not daring to go outside, we’d still be there now. Sure, we’re more civilised these days, what with our microwave ovens and our jet liners, but we’re still cavemen at heart. We still crave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of a dopamine hit. And the only way we can unlock this medicine chest is by taking a risk. Telling us that speed kills and asking us to slow down is a bit like asking us to ignore gravity. We don’t drive fast because we’re in a hurry; we drive fast because it pushes the arousal buttons, makes us feel alive, makes us feel human. Dr Peter Marsh, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, says the recent rise in popularity of bungee jumping, parachuting and other extreme sports is simply man’s reaction to the safer, cotton-woolly society that’s being created.

It had been four years since he’d seen the government agent, but he looked like he’d aged twice that. A bad patch. That’s the way it happened. A body could hold the line for a decade, one Christmas photo just like the ten previous, then bam, the years zoomed up and flattened you like a Mack truck. The last of the man’s football-hero good looks had been swallowed by age and carbohydrates. Now he was a blocky head on a big rectangular body, like a microwave atop a refrigerator.

The man-made electromagnetic environment is overloaded and has been so for decades.

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, zip lock, franchised, on-line, microwavable. Where there are no deadlines, cell phones, or committee meetings. Where there is room for the soul. Where, finally, the geography around us corresponds to the geography of our heart.