THE BLINOVITCH SAGA

Episode one

Once upon a time (let's start classically shall we?) there lived a young woman of 89 years old, who bore a son on the thirty second day of the thirteenth month in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and fifty five. This date co-incided with the death of Albert Einstein and some say the lord himself replaced one genius with another. This is the tale of how Wallace Hector Picklebarrow came to derive his six great but totally irrelevant formulas of life in the universe. (All based, of course, on the postulate that the universe IS NOT a space time event but just some Sunday afternoon hobby of this bloke we call God.)

Wallace's first notion of his genius came at the tender age of six when he decoded and completed the mystery that is Leicester University maths unit six (Differential Equations two for you purists out there.) This was closely followed by him completing every book in the junior red scheme reading list (something I myself still aspire to.)

As with all famous personalities, Wallace's life was dogged by an unfortunate home life and at the age of eight his father eloped with an Austin Allegro to New Zealand, where he bred the entire All Blacks rugby team with one Miss Tyrone (terror of the sheep).

At the age of eight Wallace found a new challange. He calculated the probability (with errors - thank you Dr. Fraser) of finding a teaspoon in the washing up bowl after completing the washing up.
To quote Wallace: "The result of my analysis says that until you have measured the bowl, the spoon is in a superposition of states and after you have measured it you have a superposition of anger that is directly proportion to the amount of washing up already completed, but is inversly proportional to this if it is Friday."
He completed the statement here as it was time for bed as his mother always kept a strict routine in the household.

At nine years old the toughest time of Wallace's live came about (if you discount that awful incident of the affair with the butchers girl and the sausage grinder). It came to pass that his father returned from New Zealand with the demand that Wallace return to New Zealand to become a sheep sha... no, sorry, farmer. His mother and father fought for days; to quote his mother, "We will fight him in the kitchen, we will fight him in Asda, fight him on the buses, we will never surrender."
Two days later his mother surrendered unconditionally on the condition that Wallace give up Physics because she was sick of hearing (in response to the question are you in bed yet) "I don't know, have you measured me yet?"

Fortunately on the plane to New Zealand Wallace dropped through the plane due to the finite probability of all his atoms passing through the atoms of the plane at the same time; then as luck would have it a parachute also materialised in the same space-time frame and saved his life. He spent three years on a un-inhabited island with only the inhabitants to talk to, who fortunately had the largest collection of Newtonian physics in the entire world.

After three years he was rescued by a passing ship called the USS Enterprise where he spent one year studying the quantum theory of solids. Much to his dismay, one document made reference to a book in the British Library called "The complete quantum theory by Leonardo Da Vinci", followed by a book called "Shrödinger's pets: the early years". These books would one day prove fateful to a suicidal Wallace after he gained only a first from Oxford University after six weeks instead of five.

He returned to Stoke-on-Trent and this is where I first had the pleasure of meeting him.

Tune in next week for episode two. (I feel as though a funky theme tune should set in here but as these terminals are crap there is no such facility.)

Episode two

• POSTULATE 1: An Australian soap shall always be in the interval of 4-6 months behind British time so that Christmas conveniently ties in with the Summer holidays over here.
• POSTULATE 2: Any entity (i.e. actor) that is seen to have any ability, skill, charm, or talent is immediately eliminated from the show. (In the original text this is called the actor-anti actor catastrophe.)
• POSTULATE 3: Anything that resembles a coherent script and plot will be equally destroyed on the grounds that we write this drivel for people who can't remember long words such as script and plot.

The paper ends here with Wallace's own doubts on the theory. "I am not sure that, just because Australian soaps are so dire, nobody watches them because, let's face it, when 'A'-level revision is in progress, any distraction is a valid one. And hence we must bow down to these fine Australian literary works."

He left this paper unattended for some years and we shall return to it later, and anyway by now he had reached the age of fifteen and all of a sudden he had a new interest in life --- GIRLS.
Instead of playing with his Toys 'R' us `My first Tunneling Electron Microscope' he found a new study - the measurement of the Young's Modulus of the average bra strap. He indeed secretly worked on this throughout his troubled teenage years and from the final paper we can see his state of mind at the time. Quotes such as the following were included in his paper:

• "Bras and what they contain!"
• "Let's take a look at those two MAJOR POINTS again"
  and finally
  
• "A hands on study of the properties of Bras."

It was due to this that Wallace spent three weeks in hospital. In order to carry out this research, he needed to steal the girls' underclothing from the changing rooms during netball practice, but on one unfortunate day, Wallace tried to steal Esmeralda Higgin's bra and he was caught. They don't call her Esmeralda "The nutcracker feet" for nothing you know and I'll leave the rest for you to work out.

When he returned after this incident three boys cornered him about the incident and everyone branded him a pervert (oh dear - the sacrifices for >modern science). The three boys were just about to beat him up when (not for the first time in his life) Quantum effects took a distinct liking to him. As he leant back against the wall all his atoms simultaneously passed through to have a look at the other side, and then decided that they liked it so much that they would stay on the other side of the wall. Although the atoms of his clothing distinctly liked the original position and Wallace had to endure a particularly cold and embarrassing walk home.

It was a low time in his life; all his friends had outcast him, news of his father's death came through (apparently whilst out drunk one night, his father had taken a sexual liking to a hay-baler and they found him all wrapped up with nowhere to go, the next morning).

All Wallace could do now was throw himself into science and hope for the best, and after three months he had gained membership to the illustrious "Mathematical Genius club (mascot Sarah the Sigma sign - sad but true).

The professor in charge was Zecial Angstrom "Fly with pi" BLINOVITCH: destiny had arrived...

Tune in next week for episode three (if you can be bothered to read it and if you've got this far WELL DONE, I'm off to see my psychiatrist now.)
Don't forget the imaginary theme tune and credits at this point.

Episode three

The flight out to New Zealand for the funeral was a strange affair, due to Wallace's insistence that they all travel on the new QUANTUM airways. They boarded the plane and waited and waited for the plane to materialise in New Zealand; after a few false starts where the plane ended up in Russia they arrived at their desired destination.

On the plane Wallace felt sick, they were playing a disaster movie on the in-flight T.V, "The UltraViolet Catastrophe - THE RETURN". After all this nausea the plane landed safely and Wallace departed to the funeral. His father was a strange character and as the coffin was lowered into the ground (in a nice squat hay-bale shape), his new wife and all the other sheep made sacrifical gestures, i.e., they listened to Kylie Minogue C.D.s for over an hour.

This short break in New Zealand proved worthwhile for Wallace; he came up with the next set of postulates that would lead him to his Grand Unified Theory of life.
This time the scientific paper was on "WHY ARE DEGREE STUDENTS SO LAZY."

• POSTULATE 1: When waking up in the morning the first consious thought is "oh just another ten minutes," this is independent of what time you wake up, even if this is when you are already late. Also the getting up time is quantised: you may only get up in five minute intervals; i.e., if the clock says 8.31 then you may only get up at 8.35 since the 8.30 rise has been missed.
• POSTULATE 2: The theory of time fuzziness. When an assignment is set, the average student will feel that he has years to do it in, i.e., the future is fuzzy. The fuzziness clears when and only when the assignment is due in within the next twenty four hours. His future colleague James P. Nut would earn a Nobel prize for work in this field, although he himself only finished his theory the night before it was due to be handed in.
• POSTULATE 3: The coefficient of guilt. This states that if you get up late and don't hand in work you have a guilt feeling that you try to remove by staying up late that night on the promise that "I'll do loads of work, honest". This coefficient is calculated by multiplying the number of minutes late you were by the days late on your assignment squared. The higher this value (in minutes day²), the more your stress coefficient raises... but that tale is for another day.

Wallace produced this paper with great hopes but he only won the St.Dominic's Primary junior science bronze medal (gold was won by a boy who had measured the viscosity of an average snot sample). It was like a slap in the face with a rancid copy of the Daily Mail.

He returned home to England to shake up modern science and by now was sixteen years old. He first had to take his G.C.S.E English exam and on the way into the exam he tripped, fell and scrawled a big line across his exam paper as he tried to steady himself, pen in hand. He was concussed and had to miss the exam but as luck would have it the scrawled line earnt him a B grade in G.C.S.E. English.

Wallace was alarmed at the news that French workers were striking in order to force the E.C. to change the laws governing the velocity of light in a vacuum. "It's just not logical!" Wallace screamed and rushed to Europe to sort it out. He saw the Channel as a large potential barrier so he decided to use EuroTunnel to get to France. When he arrived the French workers tried to beat him and make him farm illegitimate children, but, as luck would have it, his mother volunteered for that job and single-handedly put paid to the French strike force that year (at the expense of betraying Wallace; he would not see his mother again, though it was rumoured that she appeared as a topless weather girl on French TV, as La Weathergirl a la Slapper.

Wallace went on to Brussels where he had a nice discussion on particle physics with a team of cyclotron workers. They offered to show him the inside of the cyclotron; they opened the hatch and let him in, but then they turned out to be French sheep farmers in disguise (wanting revenge for Wallace's interruption of their plans to change the velocity of light in France and hence allow them to have more mass without even having to attach a sheep to their groinal area. They locked him in and sent the fast neutrons like bullets through Wallace's body.

Is this the end? Is this the fate of our dare devil hero? Do you care?! Tune in next week to find out.
NOT NEARLY THE END-unfortunately?

Episode four

Wallace panicked: is this the end? Could his career be over? Would he never again see a beuatiful sunset, eat a well prepared meal (I'm rambling again aren't I?)? He suddenly realised what to do and he pulled out his PANTS.
Yes, his Practical Alteration of Neutron Trajectories Set, and deflected those nasty little particles away. He escaped from the accelerator and, as luck would have it, the French farmers were away preparing to burn some English sheep. They saw him dashing out of the door (slightly diffracting as he went).

The chase was on. Wallace must escape back to England. To help him, a kindly old gentleman pointed him in the direction of the Army, Navy & Quantum Mechanics surplus store. He went into the shop and began to browse around. Heisenberg grenades twenty a box, possibly. The shop steward came towards him. "Oh yes, sir, our Heisenberg grenades are a good buy: you just through them and hope." Quantum body armour, guaranteed to stop anything, but this shop does not accept responsibility for the effects of Quantum tunneling.
So, having got stocked up, Wallace set off on his journey back to England. Walking down a dark alley Wallace was grabbed by a mysterious man in a long coat.
"It's all right, I'm a friend. The name's BOND, COVALENT BOND. Look, there are friends in Europe but watch the evil Chemist, Dr Van de Waals. He aims to stop your progress in Modern Physics. (Yes, I am setting up your stereotypical villain to extend the plot, O.K.) With that, the man was gone and Wallace continued his journey to the border. Just as he was about to go and collect his false passports he was taken by a band of desperate criminals to a dark, lonely, sad looking building. In the building a man stood surrounded by his minions, a man in a white coat: yes, it was Dr Van de Waals.

"Welcome child," the evil one spoke.
"What is this hell hole?" said Wallace.
"This, child, is a CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT, we have been setting them up for millions of years, taking away vital funding from the Physics departments, making up wild stories of cold fusion. Yes, we are the bane of your life. We are now ready to take over the world, alter all known physical constants; but first you must suffer the pain of chemistry theory."
Wallace had to speak. "What are these burnt out shells of people that serve you, what have you done to them you evil fiend?" (Great dialogue isn't it?)
"These are chemistry students, they all hope to graduate and serve me as the ultimate tool, a postgrad chemist, a totally demented and tortured sole. Enough of this prattle take him to the lab..."

Is it the end (again)? Will Wallace escape, will there be another episode next week? (Course there will, you're not that lucky.) Will the first year lab ever end? For answers to these and many other questions tune in next week for THE BLINOVITCH SAGA. (I've been watching too much Doctor Who lately.)
The End. (It is not the begining of the end but it is the end of the begining.)

Episode five

"Take him to the lab," bellowed the sinister little man. They took Wallace into the Chemistry lab, a dark, hellish, burning place.
"Destroy him, destroy him at once," screamed Van de Waals (cor blimey I'm giving myself nightmares). At that moment however, one of the minion chemists tipped some blue water into some red water and it fizzed and went purple (oh, what a good thing G.C.S.E Chemistry is) and like the good chemists they were, they could not resist the temptation to stare at the reaction and recant the ancient words, "Oh wow, groovy reaction, let's write down an equation."
This gave Wallace the oppurtunity to escape, he flew from the building (purely in a descriptive way, no drugs or quantum mechanics involved) out into the street, across the planes of Holland, down through the scenic parts of France, back past the gorgeous countryside of... Let's just forget it, eh. So he was out, if only he could contact the secret Physics agent, Covalent Bond, he may be able to get the names of other agents that could help him to escape. Whilst he thought what to do next he sat in a little French café, and a woman with a black cape, orange hair, smoking a three foot pipe sat down at his table.

"Hello I'm sorry I'm dressed like this but I'm trying to be incognito, anyway my name's Take."
"Oh," said Wallace, "what's your first name?"
"Never mind, you can just call me Miss Take." (Oh dear, it's all becoming a little sad isn't it?) "I've a message from agent Bond, he says that a boat called the Cornish Clipper leaves from Dunkirk to England in the morning; it's your only chance to get back."
Wallace departed. So little time, how would he reach the French coast in time? But as ever the author has not neglected his option to use Quantum effects and, as Wallace walked down the main street, his atoms spontaneously appeared on the French coast. The chance for escape was here, could he now escape? As he looked at the boat in the harbour, a sinister figure with a test tube slid into position behind Wallace.

Escape? Death? Will I get over this damn bout of Christmas time flu? For answers to these and more questions be sure to tune in for next week's bumper Christmas cliffhanger episode (well Eastenders has one) to find out.
THE END (of the prelude to the beginning of the end of the 1996 issues of Blinovitch.)
(Cough,Cough!)

Episode six

(Now to celebrate the new Star Trek film the rest of this episode is done in Star Trek speak.)

Van de Waals spoke to his minions. "Stop him, but don't kill him; we must make the victory honourable, but with a slight moral message."
"Yes captain, prepare the photon streamer device."
"Are you sure? It does mean wasting the battery in the torch."
"Come on man, Wallace is coming about; prepare the shields."
In Wallace's mind Star Trek had also invaded. "I must engage warp factor 0.0000000000000000000000000002 or they may catch me, isn't that right Data?" Suddenly Wallace was aware of a very poor actor with a white face standing next to him.
"010001001111101111101100010010110010110011010," said Data
"Oh Christ," thought Wallace "binary. This hallucination is worse than I thought."
"Quick use the teleport," Wallace said.
"0101111110101010110110101010110101010110101010101101001010 and 101"
"You're right, Data, the Blinovitch budget does not run to that wonderful special effect. Tell you what, let's leg it instead."
"45A5Fe4bc434," mused Data in a slightly amusing to Star Trek fans way.
"Hell," Wallace thought, "he's changed to Hexadecimal now; this Star Trek continuity is getting worse."

So the intrepid adventurers boldly went where thousands of tourists had been before and they found themselves approaching the ship just in time. The whole Klingon empire was behind them (well, Chemists actually) ready to pounce; one slip or stall and they would be dead.
"1010 1010 1110 0011 1010," screamed Data in binary-coded decimal.
"NO!" shouted Wallace, as, on the ship, the little men moving about raised the French flag from the deck and burnt some ceremonial sheep; they had discovered the plot.

With enemies everywhere, this is surely the end for Wallace... and this time I mean it.

Episode seven

The blinding white light flashed and Wallace found that he was sitting in a small white room that had a mushroom shaped console in the centre of it.
"Ah- Wallace my dear chap," said the Doctor, "Welcome to the Tardis."
"What now?" thought Wallace, as he was used to these frequent strange goings on in his life.
"You see," said the Doctor, "this machine you are standing in is called the Tardis and the Timelords are afraid that, with your extensive knowledege of quantum theory, you could invent a machine like this centuries before it is supposed to be."
The Tardis gave a sudden lurch (or at least the camera angle did)
"Oops, that's the temporal cross field up Dalek creek without a sonic screwdriver," said the Doctor.
"So, Doctor, what is to happen to me?"
"Well I have instructions to take you to the barren desolate world at the begining of time, but Blackpool is out of season at the moment."
"Well Doctor I have an idea on a invention I like to call the warp drive, perhaps I could swap my life for that?"
"No, Wallace that's invented by some Star Trekker in the future, even though the initial design was featured on Galactic television's `HOW DO THEY DO THAT'"
The Tardis made one more unpleasant lurch.
"Oh blast the co-ordinate sub-system, the Tardis is impatient and we've arrived at Blackpool anyway."
"That's it then, Doctor, to save my life I must spend the rest of it running a bed and breakfast in some run-down town?"
"Afraid so, my friend; if it's any consolation the evil Van de Waals will never find you. Goodbye Wallace."
The Tardis doors opened and, as Wallace left, he shouted to the Doctor.
"Goodbye Blinovitch, maybe I'll see you again one day?"
But the Tardis was gone.

THE END. No, really, it is THE END.