The BK Bacon ’n’ Bacon Bacon. Take a slice of fried bacon. Nestle it between two slices of fried bacon. Gently wrap these three slices of bacon in a slice of bacon. Serve with a side of bacon.
KFC Bucket Surprise. It’s the same bucket of fried chicken you know and devour, but now it’s also filled with a mysterious liquid. Is your chicken soaking in sour cream? Sour milk? As if you care, fatty.
The DQ Snow Dog. A beef wiener stuffed inside a beef sausage, smothered with beef gravy and blended into a Blizzard. Beefreshing!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Because I’m a super-busy guy and we live in a hectic, fast-paced world, I was standing by the toaster the other day, reading the plastic wrapper around my loaf of bread. This is a normal thing that non-crazy people do, so shut up. Anyway, near the bottom of the package, there was a little graphic of a warm loaf being removed from a stone oven on a wooden paddle. Above, there were two words: “Artisan Inspired.”
Let that sink in for a moment: Artisan Inspired.
To sum up, my bread was not actually artisanal, as we understand the word. It was produced, packaged and distributed in abundant quantities by a national food processor. However, artisanal bread is popular and delicious. It therefore follows that this superior product would “inspire” the people who work at a national bread company, in this case, to put the word artisan on their wrapper.
I, for one, can see this catching on. We’re at most a few months away from being able to enjoy a cold glass of “artisan-inspired” milk, produced in large batches by high-efficiency milking machines that are programmed to think they’re old-time dairy farmers.
But let’s not pigeonhole our corporations into being inspired only by artisans. Food products can also benefit from other highly dubious connections. Just a few examples:
Heirloom-inspired gummy bears. Finally, a snack worthy of being served to a fancy lady wearing a monocle. Hands off, kid: these gummies are for when company comes over.
Democracy-inspired Spam. Because freedom’s just another word for a canned, precooked meat product.
Mandela-inspired M&Ms. Let the packaging tell the story: “Chocolate, peanuts, pretzels, almonds … While brainstorming what next to cram inside our iconic candy shell, one member of our creative team thought briefly of Nelson Mandela’s heroic struggle. We’re pretty sure it was Dave—he watches the news. At trivia, Dave was the only one who knew that Syria is a country and not that lady in our iPhones. Anyway, the point is, maybe twenty minutes after thinking about the late South African leader’s unimaginable ordeal, Dave was outside having a smoke and he was like: ‘Boom, marshmallow.’ Enjoy these Mandela-inspired Marshmallow M&Ms.”
Aside: If ever I won political office, my first order of business—after the mass detention of my enemies—would be to introduce legislation governing use of the word improved on food packaging. (In two terms, Obama, you failed to get it done.)
Food companies seeking to describe their products as “improved” would be obliged to:
Apologize for feeding us something that needed to be improved in the first place. (At minimum, the law would require a photo of the company’s CEO shrugging sheepishly.)
State what its product used to taste like, on a scale ranging from “sawdust” to “ass.”
Itemize and promote in large print the recipe changes that resulted in the improved taste. (Bob’s Cupcakes: now with 172 percent more hydrogenated cottonseed!)
This last one is important. At the place where I shop, I recently came across a bag of unsalted natural almonds that featured a big red starburst and the word “Improved!” I’m calling that bluff: How did you improve almonds? Was it the way you didn’t do anything to them?
Anyway, where was I? Right, artisan. It’s a great marketing word, but we don’t want to overuse it. So let’s create a few more and spread it out a little:
Future Vintage. Some people will pay a hefty premium for vintage products. Why make them wait? Everything produced today will eventually qualify as vintage, so I say overcharge them now. Warning: Hipsters will shorten “future vintage” to “fintage,” because that’s just like them. Dude, check out my fintage horn-rims!
“All natural.” The quotes mean “not really.”
Organish. Over the past several years, grocery stores have started stocking more organic foodstuffs, which is great because (a) they’re really expensive, and (b) they remind us that everything else we eat is coated in enough chemical residue to alter the very composition of our genome. Luckily, there’s a middle ground for budget-conscious consumers. Our new line of “organish” food still has all the harmful pesticides—the difference is, we feel bad about selling it to you.
Tough Question: What does the future hold for the human body?
A British geneticist claims to have made a startling discovery: humanity has stopped evolving. He apparently arrived at this conclusion after studying new data, analyzing behavioural patterns and watching John Travolta eat a side of ribs.
Professor Steve Jones of University College London cites a number of reasons but says the leading cause of our stagnation as a species is that fewer older men are fathering children. Turns out a man in his fifties is more likely than a man in his thirties to pass on genetic “mutations,” the fuel of evolution. (By total coincidence, Professor Jones is in his sixties—an older man—making his theory either the summation of a life’s work in science or the worst pickup line ever. Hey baby, how’d ya like to help encourage a few cellular deviations?)
Many are taking issue with Jones’s conclusions—but what if he’s right? What if there will be no sixth finger or third arm for humankind? What if we really are done evolving?
Then the monkeys win, people.
Already they are gaining on us, continuing to evolve and improve themselves. Researchers recently found that some Nigerian monkeys may even be starting to speak in “sentences” by combining specific noises into a sequence. According to scientists who monitor the Nigerian monkeys, when the adult male delivers a “sentence” of sounds consisting of three pyows and four hacks, it is understood by the female monkeys to mean “let’s get going” or “time to move on.” Whereas four pyows and three hacks clearly means “I’m going bowling with Steve.” (It’s a loose translation.) Hurling one’s feces at another monkey, meanwhile, is still generally understood by scholars to translate as “I’m preparing for my Adam Sandler audition.”
Bottom line: they’re getting more intelligent and we’re not. This much can be said with certainty—we are not helping our own cause in a potential war against the monkey menace. Not long ago, scientists at the University of Washington used an electrical circuit to give paralyzed monkeys the ability to move their arms. On one hand, this could lead to neuroprosthetics for humans with spinal cord injuries. But on the other hand … monkey cyborgs! Coming down from the hills! Monkeyborgs! Ruuuuuuun!
For humans, a lifetime of servitude as a monkey concubine may serve as an evolutionary settling of scores. A recent study found that our early human ancestors may actually have interbred with the forerunners of chimpanzees long after the two species branched out from their shared family tree.
These findings have shocked the scientific community—not to mention many chimpanzee parents, who suspected their daughters were up to something but, wow, not anything this freaky. The researchers claim that human/chimp DNA didn’t finally diverge until 5.4 million years ago—to translate for creationists: last Wednesday—which is hundreds of thousands of very awkward years after the two lines split. (Typical morning-after conversation: “Gee. Last night at the cave—I coulda sworn you were a biped.”)
What’s inescapable is that we are, as a species, the product of our distant ancestors’ hot urges for chimps. An eternity later, payback may be coming our way: monkey see, monkey kill.
And don’t even get me started on t
he hell we’re going to catch from dolphins.
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It
Reason No. 6: The Constants of Life
Let’s take a break from pondering the many ways in which the future will inflict upon us horrible, horrible change. And instead let’s look at some of the things that won’t change, but will nevertheless still also be horrible.
These are the constants of life today. They will endure as the constants of life tomorrow. Which, in most cases, kind of sucks.
The Despair of Winter I: A Poem Dedicated to Our Earth
In the annals of what prompts despair
Ranked just above losing one’s hair
(But below wedding a Kardashian)
Is the sun going down at 4 PM.
The roads with headlights are festooned
Though the clock says it’s still afternoon.
Our skin so pale, our moods defective
Disorders seasonally affective.
The early dusk makes tempers short
Our smiles the dark will surely thwart.
Reduced we are to glares and glowers
When our star is keeping banker’s hours.
And in our homes as many yawns
As shirtless scenes in Breaking Dawn.
PJs, slippers, vim diminished
And Jeopardy’s not even finished.
Up north the dark’s a constant pest
The sun no more than fleeting guest.
It peeks out briefly just to tease
Like a thong above a woman’s jeans.
December’s global truth behold!
Some must be hot, some others cold.
A tilt of 23 degrees
Makes Earth one big McDLT.
(Was that last reference too obscure?
I know that’s not the meal du jour.
But I thought it surely would be glib
To compare our Earth to a McRib.)
Each year it takes us by surprise
The early gloaming, late sunrise
The street lights coming on at four
And your grumpy eight-year-old just swore.
Come summer we’ll stand in ovation
To praise the ways of your rotation.
But a curse, a hex, a thousand pox
Upon autumnal equinox.
And winter solstice, even worse,
The hour of dusk just plain perverse.
It’s a cruel and truly heartless ruse
To make a day short as Tom Cruise.
Across our cranky hemisphere
There comes a unifying cheer:
Hey Earth—get off your lazy axis!
Autumn’s no time to relaxis.
We hear you’re suffering climate change
Hot flashes have you feeling strange.
And word is that we are the cause
Of your planetary menopause.
Perhaps a deal we can beget
(Though technically it’s more a threat):
Spare us from the winter bummers
Or we’re all buying H2 Hummers.
It’s not as though we’re asking much
Just angle your round self a touch
So your top half leans toward the sun
And the next four months don’t make us glum.
For some there’ll be a cost, we’ll vouch
The briefer daylight hours will ouch
Much like a kick in the genitalia
Thanks for your sacrifice, Australia.
Clamshell Packaging
Upon presenting a child with a new toy, today’s savvy parent will instinctively reach for a pair of scissors to cut through the hard-plastic clamshell and twist-tie wires in which the item is packaged. Should the scissors fail to get the job done, out comes the knife. Then the pliers, a blowtorch and the jaws of life. By now, today’s savvy parent is sweating profusely and possibly mortally wounded. You win this round, Fisher-Price.
And it’s not just toys. These days, you don’t so much open a product as you emancipate it. You spring a cordless phone from captivity. You free a foursome of AA batteries. You release Barbie from her wire bonds (unless, you know, your Ken happens to go in for the kinky stuff). When our son was four, he received for his birthday a set of army soldiers. He wanted to play with them right away. I cut, pulled, jabbed, tore, twisted, yanked and, resorting to a razor blade, sliced. Finally I hoisted the soldiers high in the air and, triumphant, looked over at my son—at which point I realized he was now a grown man and wanted the car keys. Enjoy the prom! Hang on, gimme just a minute before you go—I need to get this new digital camera out of its plastic case.
A study estimates that sixty thousand people each year in Britain alone are injured trying to gain access to new consumer products. That means about thirty thousand people in Canada meet the same fate, and I’m three of them: first, I scraped my thumb opening an X-Men action figure; second, I bruised my thigh when I jabbed it with a screwdriver that slipped while prying a low-energy light bulb from its plastic prison; and third, there’s what’s come to be known as The Epson Incident.
It began when I came home with some replacement ink cartridges for our printer. There were four cartridges in all, and they came in one “convenient” plastic package. The package was so “convenient” that I couldn’t open it, so I grabbed a pair of scissors. With equal parts effort and profanity, I managed to breach the clamshell coating, which gave me a sense of tremendous accomplishment and, when the side of my hand slid up against the cut plastic, a laceration.
Eventually I got through the outer plastic package. I was inside the perimeter! Moving swiftly, I ripped open the inner cardboard package. Then I cut through the cardboard package inside the cardboard package. Then I broke for lunch and a nap. Refreshed, I set about strategizing as to how best to confront the thinner plastic inside the cardboard inside the other cardboard that was inside the thicker plastic. It was roughly at this point that I turned things over to the exorcist.
Wrap rage has become such an epidemic that Consumer Reports recently presented “awards” to the products that come in the most impenetrable packaging. The Uniden digital cordless phone, tied to cardboard in close to twenty places for some reason, took more than nine minutes to liberate. Meanwhile, American Idol Barbie remained captive for fifteen minutes and ten seconds; her release reportedly involved “untwisting wires, snapping rubber bands, stripping tape, slicing thick plastic manacles off her arms and torso, cutting off a tab embedded in her head and carefully ripping a series of stitches securing her tresses to a plastic strip on the back of the box.” (To be fair, that’s exactly how they prepare real-life American Idol contestants.)
Why corporations package things this way is a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an impenetrable plastic that’s covered in my blood and tears. Consumer Reports says it’s a reflection of the fact that plastic is now cheaper than cardboard. Others suggest it’s because factory workers are increasingly rejecting socialism in favour of sadism.
Personally, I think it has everything to do with global domination. After all, most toys and consumer products are made in China. China is a new power bent on surpassing the United States as the world’s largest economy. And what better way to do that than to sabotage North American productivity while simultaneously sapping from its citizens the will to live?
The time has come to fight back. You want our minerals, China? You want our lumber? Here, enjoy this high-quality two-by-four of genuine Canadian cedar! You can use it to help build a nice house—as soon as you figure out how to remove it from its durable, hard-plastic clamshell packaging. You may just want to go ahead and plant some saplings instead. It’ll be quicker.
Summer Camp
What follows in italics is an actual letter home that our son James sent from Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontari
o, when he was twelve. It is presented with its original spelling and grammatical errors. Commentary and analysis are provided for your edification. It begins:
One of the many things I am looking forward once I get home is a tolet that doesn’t get clogged so easily and when it gets clogged people don’t keep pooing in it until there is poo two inches over the water level.
That is the opening line of his letter. There’s no “Dear Mom and Dad.” There’s no “Camp is awesome!” He just cuts straight to the fecal matter. It’s like having a Jim Carrey movie for a son.
In his defence, our boy does have a history of getting to the point. During his first summer at camp, James mailed home a note that consisted of a single sentence: “I was riding a horse and I got thrown off and now my broken arm is in a cast.” One panicked phone call later, we learned that by “broken arm” he meant “sprained shoulder,” and by “cast” he meant “sling.” When he got home and we called him a “dummy” for making us worry like that, we meant “idiot.”
The wake up bell goes at 7:15 so it’s a big cut off from 9:30.
During July, James got into the habit of sleeping in, sometimes until 10 AM. We think he’s apprenticing to become a teenager or a Van Winkle. Still, what’s important here is that the letter has a second sentence—and a second complaint. Will he be able to maintain this impressive ratio? Let’s find out!
It has only rained 1 time so far. I think we are going on trip in like 5 days.
Here James unleashes a burst of clipped prose reminiscent of any number of campers too lazy to think of an actual anecdote. Instead: random facts! “Trip,” by the way, is a four-day canoe excursion that’s mandatory at his camp. Unsurprisingly, last year’s correspondence focused heavily on where the campers poo while on trip.
The thing I am looking forward to most about coming home, besides juice that actually tastes like something, is hockey.
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It Page 11