First things first: I don’t think London Transit is being very fair when they have so many buses with 3 in their digits coming to the same stop. I got on the 33 when I thought it was the 13. That was pretty dumb. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were wearing the skirt with a slit in the back, but I wasn’t so I had to waddle back like a duck. And then there was a detour, and the 4 didn’t come, so I got on a 15, which was just fine. But it took forever and a day to get home.

Okay, so here’s my revelation: I think I do understand SQL. I mean, I’m just reading chapter one in my book, SQL: Clearly Explained, but I discovered something interesting. SQL is an object oriented language.

This isn’t going to make sense to anyone in the normal way, so I’ll be very metaphorical about it, because object oriented languages are metaphorical away. With an object oriented language, you pretend you are actually producing objects. It’s make-believe. You say, I will make this thing, and this thing will have kids, and those kids will have the same qualities as the parent. And then I will take those kids and modify them, and then make them parents, and their kids will have the qualities of two sets of objects, the original object and its own parent. And so forth. And then they all get modified and have kids and those get modified in different ways, and they all branch off, like evolution. Some things go off to become certain kinds of dedicated objects, and others become totally other things. But you can trace them all back to a parent object. Like the missing link.

Reading the installation instructions is like a flashback: in the beginning there was nothing, and we called it #0. And then we created #1, the object that would be the parent of all objects, the object that really doesn’t do anything except bind the rest of the functional world together. #1 is the creator and the created, the beginning of all things and the end of the path of parenthood for everything that will be created from here on in. #1 is God.

And then you type into your little terminal window and get God to create users, and objects, and things. And It was good.

See? It’s not really so complicated. SQL is created by a bunch of nerds who miss ye olde telnet days, that’s all. I too remember the telnet days, and I know an if statement when I see one.

World? Yeah, I can conquer you. You sit back and relax. I’ll be right over.