This picture landed in my inbox compliments of a friend with an equally dubious sense of humour.

In the beginning, there was Chaos. Darkness covered the earth. After Chaos, five divinities came into being. The divinities were: Gaia (mother Earth), Tartarus (Underworld), Erebus (Darkness that covers underworld), Night (Darkness that covers Earth), and Eros (Love). Erebus and Night had same spare time on their hands, and some hanky panky resulted in offspring (I do not think that birth control was invented then). These were Hemera (Day), Phôs (Light), and (a bouncing set of quintuplets) Doom, Death, Misery, Deceit, and Discord, or as we call it today, Government. Discord later had children of her own, and these were Murder, Slaughter, Battle and Crime. To keep things interesting, she left the father’s name off the birth certificates, as you do.

Gaia and Uranus (Yes, I know all the jokes. No more, please. And I don’t know how he got into this story anyway.) had a bunch of kids. The first three were real monsters with 100 hands and 50 heads each. Not your usual baby beauty pageant contenders, so loved by the US. The next four were almost as bad, giants with one eye in the middle of their forehead (Cyclopes) Jeremias (“Power”, usually resulting in destroyed tyres and or engine), Brontes (Thunderer), Steropes (Lightning flash) and Arges (Shining Guy; if you don’t believe me, look it up). Zeus employed Brontes, Steropes and Arges full time in his forge making thunderbolts. Jeremias had a part time job hosting Top Gear and would join his brothers when things needed blowing up.

As this was the time before television with very little else to do, along came the third generation of gods: the Olympians, as they made their home on Mount Olympus. After, Cronos castrated his father Uranus, and set himself up as the King of Heaven. He then married his sister, the Titan Rhea and had a bunch of kids. Unfortunately Cronos kept eating them. And we thought we were the first ones with fad diets. When Rhea was expecting her sixth child, she grew tired with her husband’s weird dietary choices and smuggled the baby to the island of Crete. To satisfy Cronus’s need to devour his own children, Rhea gave him a baby-sized rock wrapped in a blanket instead. Cronos promptly ate the rock and never gave it another thought. The sixth baby was Aurelius Stiggitus Apexus.  Stig, as he became later known, grew up safely on Crete. The Nymphs gave him milk from magical goat named Amalthea and this is why he is all white.

Gaia’s baby, the monster Jeremias, having destroyed all the tyres and engines available on the Top Gear Track, started to create havoc and stole all the thunder and lightning from Zeus’s forge. But Aurelius Stiggitus Apexus had taken control of thunder and lightning, and shot down Jeremias with his thunderbolt. Jeremias’s hopes of terrorizing the universe were ended, but he still needed a job, so he moved to Sicily, where he supplied the volcanic magma for Mount Etna and became a part-time consultant to the BBC.

And this is how we ended up with the picture above. Either that, or somebody had fun with Photoshop.