This looks like Stephen Hawking, the world’s most brilliant man, giving a lecture. Or possibly floating in space among the stars, but that would be cruel, even if rather appropriate. But its not. Its a hologram in Hong Kong. Whilst the Prof was at home in Cambridge. And seeing as hopping on Easyjet is a bit of a problem for the ageing physicist, and they don’t fly that far anyway, holograms are the way forward. Though they cost a bit more than an Easyjet flight.

What’s amazing though is that Stephen Hawking is still alive at all. I know a guy with Motor Neurone Disease. I saw him a couple of years ago and he just looked a little ‘stiff’ when moving. Then a few weeks ago he came into work and he has become a Stephen Hawking impersonator. It was terrible. Chin down, speech impossible to understand, distorted completely. Just 2 years. Stephen Hawking was given 5 years to live in nineteen sixty-whatever (go watch the film again if you want precise details) and is still miraculously ‘here’. A brilliant mind, possibly the most brilliant since Einstein, trapped in a totally useless body. And winner of the prize for ‘the most disabled person ever to cheat on his wife’. For which he must be praised to the stars.

Meanwhile, back on the building site, all is not looking good for bricklayers. Our favourite construction worker, the ‘brickie’ is counting his days (ok, or ‘her days’ but really…) as they’ve invented a robot brick-laying thingy. Wot lays all the bricks you want, all perfectly, all with the correct amount of mortar, all perfectly… bricklike in ever way.

Furthermore it just lays bricks. It doesn’t request that passing women bare their breasts for it (though the technology is there), nor stop for 6 pints over a 3 hour lunch (only when on daily pay, not hourly, obviously). It doesn’t ‘piss like an elephant’, nor request tea with 9 sugars every 40 minutes.

The bricks have to be loaded, presumably by a humanoid of some description, probably wearing a hard-hat, and I assume that the parameters are input first, otherwise it would just keep building a wall forever. Fine for Donald Trump, not so good for your new garage, the wall of which goes on for 600 yards windowlessly and breaks 736 planning regulations.

They’re comin’. The robots, holograms, techno-peoploids, just you wait.

Happy Monday

A xxxx