Instead of seeing this as thievery, let’s just see this as my homage to the classic “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.
(GEORGE, JAMES, STEVEN, and TIM stand around holding beers.)
GEORGE
Great that we have these monthly meetings.
JAMES
Terrific.
STEVEN
Who would have thought, after all these years us skeptics could finally come together and drink in a bar?
TIM
Been a good ten years I’ve been waiting for it to happen.
GEORGE
You’ve been a skeptic ten years?
TIM
At least.
GEORGE
Huh… I barely remember not being a skeptic.
JAMES
Memory’s faulty. I’ve got videotapes of myself, five years old questioning the existence of God.
STEVEN
That’s nothing. On the video of my birth, the doctor shouts, “it’s a boy!” slaps my bottom, asks “why isn’t he crying?” and I turn to him and say “I doubt that all babies do that!”
TIM
Well… I say it’s been ten years. But that’s only since I’ve known the word! Certainly, I never believed in anything as silly as Santa Claus or God.
GEORGE
Never believed in Santa? Is that all? When I was in pre-school, no more than three years old, I explained, in detail, why it was impossible for the old elf to have ever existed and instantly revealed that my classmates had been given gifts by their parents!
JAMES
That’s nothing. At the start of my schooling, I drove the teacher insane by forcing her to give mathematical proof, in detail of just why one plus one happened to be two.
STEVEN
Well we all go through that stage. I suppose the first person I drove insane was my mother when I requested her to show me the sex tape leading to my conception, just to prove who my father truly was.
TIM
Well of course, a sex tape is good and all, but the evidence is so easy to fake! I insisted upon a full scale DNA test that bankrupted my parents for the first ten years of my life.
GEORGE
DNA testing! And you let your parents just give the samples to the scientist doing the testing! Ridiculous! I insisted upon being trained in genetic analysis, taking the samples myself, taping open my eyelids so I could make sure nothing was out of my site until the testing was complete!
JAMES
But of course, it was always important for me that the evidence was properly vetted. I remember the first peer review panel I negotiated in order to deduce the proper way to get from one side of the street to the other.
STEVEN
That reminds me of when I was four years old and created a viable model of the big bang and physical laws that resulted on a compound super-computer and sped the process up through the age of the universe in order to really make sure that the sky actually was blue, and that that wasn’t just what folks around me were saying.
(Tim has no idea what to say. He pauses.)
TIM
I just carbon dated the tracking device I assembled and installed on my mother to make sure she was actually on her way home when I was a week old and verified to the minute when it was that I built it.
GEORGE
And you look at these skeptical kids today, they just don’t know how to question anything anymore.
(The other three nod in agreement and go back to drinking.)
