What I Did Last Night

Last night was a Friday and, as I have next to no life, I was indoors and bored. I could have been out doing normal teenager-y things, but it was raining and I prefer being comfortable to being sociable. Therefore, I spent my Friday night listening to The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing and cleaning out the drawers in my bedroom, which have spent the past four years or so accumulating miscellaneous junk. Except the bottom one. The bottom one is broken and doesn't open, so remains unmolested.

Here is The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing.

Here is a list of things I found in my drawers, in no particular order because I cannot be bothered to alphabetise (for once) and I forget the order in which the things were found:

• 4 pairs of ordinary 3D glasses
• 1 pair of Harry Potter 3D glasses
• 1 pair of Shrek 3D glasses
• My retainer
• A tasselly waistcoat - I still haven't decided whether or not I think it's hideous...
• All the plans for the James Bond parody series Monty Bond I wrote with Elliot in Year 9
• The Geography assignment that got me a level 7 in Year 9
• Thousands of keyrings, including many in the shape of sperm
• The original drawings of Wild Whizz, Wild Ted and Wild Tizzwed
• The guitar tab for 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'
• A tangled mass of Scooby Strings (if you don't know what these are, then you had no childhood)
• My Blue Peter badge
• Numerous other badges, many Pirates Of The Caribbean
• 5 watches that have stopped working
• 1 watch that still works
• The first three acts of a musical I started but never finished writing when I was about 13 entitled The Adventures of Captain Retard, complete with lyrics for three songs and the guitar riff for one. I kept this. It was hilarious. Terrible, but hilarious.
• A pristine edition of Top Gear Magazine from at least 3 years ago
• A list of supremely shit Things To Do Before I Die, which have since been heavily revised
• A number of Poundland bags-for-life
• A rusty bracelet I found on the beach about six years ago
• The provisional drivers' licence I had to have replaced because I couldn't find it in time for my theory test. Oops.
• A brass engraving of Charles Dickens
• Many notebooks filled with shit drawings and random facts
• A 'Bloke Bingo' scorecard
• Some nail varnish that was so old that it had dust on the inside
• Smudgy photographs of me and Beca from the photo booth in the Namco Station at the Galaxy

Draw whatever conclusions you will from this information. Personally, I am struggling to understand how I made it out of childhood so normal... Still, got a good list out of it. And who doesn't love lists?

The Most Amazing Person You've Never Heard Of: Norman Borlaug

79 years and 3 days before I was born, a brilliant man was born in America. In his lifetime, he won many awards for his achievements and saved so many lives that people lost count long ago. Yet, very few people know his name or why it is important.

Norman Ernest Borlaug received in PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942 and then moved to Mexico, where he researched wheat. The research he conducted in the team of plant pathologist George Harrar led him to develop various genetically engineered strains of wheat which was high-yield and disease resistant. His work there spanned sixteen years, during which time he bred many successful crops. Altogether his work meant that a lot more wheat could be harvested from any given crop and his work in Mexico alone saved at least a million people from starvation.

After that, his career took him through numerous starving communities including places in India, China and various countries in Africa. In each one, he studied and improved the crops so that more could be gathered and more people fed. In the mid-1960s, he started to spread his powerful crops in war-torn India, which saved millions more from acute famine. He took his crops to Pakistan where wheat yields nearly double and, in the space of three years, the country became self-sufficient and no longer depended on foreign aid in order to stave off starvation.

In 1970, Borlaug was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the world food supply. At that time, it was estimated that he had already saved over a billion lives.

When he retired from travelling through starving countries, he continued to teach and research to continue his legacy. His died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in December 2009. His achievements saved the lives of more people than you will ever know. He dedicated his life to easing the suffering of others and ending hunger in the world and no one can say that he did not achieve just that many times over. Throughout the course of his life, he was honoured with numerous awards and prizes for his work in helping others – and rightly so.

The sad thing is that so many people will never hear his name. He is no celebrity and he is not taught in schools, except to speciality students focussing on plant genetics. The amount of people he has saved from starvation increases every day as more and more people in developing countries survive on the crop strains that he developed and introduced to their ecosystems.

But the worst thing about people not knowing about Norman Borlaug and his amazing work is that it breeds so much ignorance among people who think they know about genetically engineered food. People campaigning against GM crops claim that it is harmful to people and that it will mutate them, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is that people make ignorant comments about it and stupid people listen; then stupid people get into power and they take the crops away from all the people who are benefiting from them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t something that was necessary to save lives. People are already starving even with GM crops – without them, the world would not be able to feed two thirds of its population.

It’s only thanks to people like Norman Borlaug that mankind is becoming truly self-sufficient. Maybe people should stop complaining and thank him.