History According to Bruno Tim

In The Beginning:

In the beginning there was nothing, which blew up. Some time between fifteen minutes and several billion years later, the Earth was formed. Populating the Earth with flora and fauna was a process of evolution that took hundreds of millions of years and at the same time was accomplished in one week, with a day off to groove on the rubble. The dinosaurs lived, and then became extinct. Scholars are divided as to what caused T. Rex and his buddies to kick the paleontological bucket. This is my theory: The dinosaurs starved to death when a massive Ice Comet smashed into the earth, but they were already on the way out due to too many fatty foods, ennui, and getting chased by Jane Fonda and her tribe. (She just wanted to show them a neat workout so they could work off those extra tons, but they didn't know that.) The Ice Comet propogated the first (and last) Dinosaur Wars, which ended in a vast conflagration of nuclear detonations around the globe, thus finishing the task of sweeping the Earth clean for the next group of gormless fools to come along... Homo Sapiens. Basically, it comes down to this: Their brains were small, and they died.

The emergence of humankind.

The current model of homo sapiens has gone through a long and arduous process of refinement through evolution and natural selection and at the same time was created by God/Gods/Goddess/Goddesses from clay, a rib, or maybe just an old pizza box. Theologians and scientists dicker about this all the time. I personally believe in the pizza-box theory, since so many people can be classified as 'saucy', 'meaty', 'a vegetable' or just plain 'cheesy'. Sounds like pizza to me. Time passed and humans started picking up a bunch of bad habits: fire, the wheel, religion, animal husbandry (and later the keeping of animals), war, and civilization. If it wasn't for the invention of beer, though, there's no telling where we would be today. Probably setting fire to our wheels and having religious wars over whose burnt the brightest. Humans are like that.

The great religions are born:

With the increased prosperity and free time created by agriculture and civilization, humans began to ask the really deep questions about the nature of life, death, and reality. In such an environment it was inevtable that prophets, seers, holy men, messiahs and suchlike would descend upon the people of the Earth to teach these three holy writs (which seem to be the backbone of most major religions): 1: God is love. 2: Treat everyone with kindness, honesty, and a loving spirit. 3: Kill anyone who disagrees. The development of organized religions has had a deep and lasting impact on our civilization in too many ways to ennumerate, but the upshot of it all is this: Humans have come to believe that they know what's good for people they've never met, and are willing to pass laws and wage wars to prove it. God is love... tough love.

Cities, great nations, and empires rise and fall, etc.

With the emergence of agricutural and pastoral plenty, cities began to spring up like a rash of boils. The early city-states played a game called "decimate your enemy," an enemy being anyone who didn't live where you did, and half the people who did. I probably have the order messed up, but as far as I can recall, everything from the founding of Ur to the end of Rome cam pretty much be summed up thus: The Persians kicked Ur's butts, The Hittites kicked the Persian's butts, The Etruscans kicked the Hittite's butts, who in turn had their butt kicked by the Carthaginians. The Greeks were content with kicking each other's butts until the Romans came in and kicked everyone's butt -- paying special attention to Carthage, killing every single Carthaginian and sowing salt on their lands to make sure they didn't get any ideas about coming back. After a while, Rome got her butt kicked by Huns, Goths, Visigoths... there was a general 'let's go kick Rome's butt' sort of fashion going on. An odd sport. I much prefer ice hockey. It's mellower.

The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages are referred to as such because hardly anybody can remember how to spell 'medieval,' the sun was extinguished for a long time (or at least the burner was turned down real low,) and/or it was a period of ignorance, superstitious terror and horrible plagues. Take your pick. If you want an idea of how bad it really was, consider this: it was the Irish who actually kept the embers of civilization and learning alive. Wow. There's not much more to say after that, is there? Yes, yes, I know... the Catholic Church engaged in unspeakable acts of depravity and psychotic torture, diseased fleas took a sizable chunk of the population of europe on a tour of the river Styx, and every third person you met was either on a pilgrimmage to find the holy toe bone of saint Buddy or trying to sell it to ignorant yokels. Yeah? So? Why'd you think they called it the Dark Ages?

The Renaissance

The Renaissance was one of the last really good parties, sociologically speaking... at least, it was if you forget about the Inquisition, war, and mirkins. Like any good party, it came with an attendant hangover: syphilis. Oh well: if you gotta play, you gotta pay. The Renaisssance is noted for it's many contributions: Art, dance, music, literature... these all have their place in history. Many people overlook the fact that the Renaissance also saw the perfection of the fart joke. Historians hardly ever mention this, but it seems like just about everything that happened during the English Renaissance happened in the Merry Month of May-O. And it seems to have been accompanied by many a whack-fol-a-diddle, too. Strange.

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