Come to think of it, that’s how the news should be reported. ‘Thirty people were killed today when a massive wanker blew himself up in a busy marketplace’ has quite a ring to it, as does ‘President Wanker’, or ‘Prime Minister Wanker’. In fact, why doesn’t every bloodthirsty cretin prolonging this sorry dispute simply paint the word ‘Wanker’ on their forehead and piss off to a remote island somewhere, where they can fight it out with pans and saws while the rest of us settle our differences using non-violent means? We’ve got the imagination to succeed. What’ve they got? Hairy palms and firearms, and that’s about it.
GPS for life
[8 September 2006]
Like the hapless manchild I am, I can’t drive a car. I have no licence. Most of the time, that doesn’t matter, because I live in London, where it’s easy to get about using public transport and you can find most of life’s essentials—from groceries to crack cocaine—freely on sale within walking distance, wherever you are.
The taxi is my favoured mode of transport: they’re expensive, but overall cheaper than owning and running my own car. As a result, I spend a lot of time sitting in minicabs, an experience that’s undergone a huge shift in recent years, thanks to the advent of GPS for all. Your driver no longer needs to have the faintest idea where he’s going, because the magic smartarse box does it all for him. I recently got in a cab and the driver literally couldn’t speak a word of English; at the start of the journey he passed me the GPS gizmo and expected me to input the destination address myself. The pix-elated arrow did the rest. At first this struck me as pretty shoddy, but the more I thought about it, the more convenient it seemed—it was one step away from having a robot chauffeur. The transport equivalent of an automated vending machine.
And while I sat there it occurred to me that I’d quite like a GPS system of my own. Not for geographical directions, but for simple real-life instructions on what to do next. It’d cover all the basics—telling you to pay your bills and tidy up, helping you locate your house keys, telling you to switch the Xbox off and go to bed, etc—just like an electronic organiser, except it would be plugged directly into your brain; a soothing yet insistent inner voice you can’t switch off.
And once the everyday stuff was taken care of, it could help you tackle more complex goals. Just as a GPS system asks you to type in your destination before calculating the quickest route, the ‘Life GPS’ system would let you input a goal (becoming prime minister, perhaps, or having a hit record, or getting off with someone you’ve taken a shine to), and would then work out the best way to achieve it, in tiny, incremental steps, voiced by someone inherently trustworthy—Kiefer Sutherland in the guise of Jack Bauer, say.
Instead of bleating ‘turn right at the next junction’, Jack would say something like ‘wipe the fridge door’, and you wouldn’t understand why, but you’d have to do it anyway, because he’d worked out that a clean fridge door is somehow hugely important in the grand scheme of things, an essential branch of the flowchart.
And just as a GPS system will recalculate its suggested route on the fly if you take the wrong turn, so the Bauer GPS would revise his instructions whenever life threw a random event your way. If, on an important first date, you were suddenly struck by a violent attack of diarrhoea, Jack would leap straight into damage-limitation mode and guide you through the next few hours with such skilful grace you’d not only maintain your dignity, but appear ten times more attractive than you did before your bowels started churning. He’d be the best friend you ever had.
OK, so you’d be little more than an obedient puppet, wandering through life with no free will—but by God, it’d be simpler. Bauer always knows best.
On Justin Timberlake
[15 September 2006]
Who the hell does Justin Timberlake think he is? I’ve only just heard his recent single (several weeks after every idiot in the world ran out and bought it, it seems), and according to the lyrics, he’s bringing sexy back.
That’s what he says, bold as brass. ‘I’m bringing sexy back,’ he moans, with a meerkat grin on his fizzog, like he’s in charge of the world’s sexy resources, the cheeky bastard.
I mean Jesus Christ, Timberlake: sexy isn’t something you can withdraw from the market then subsequently revive, like Texan bars or Prime Suspect. No. It’s an amorphous concept which means different things to different people. There’s no regulatory body monitoring its supply, Opec-style—and even if there was, no one would put you in charge of it anyway, you snide, self-satisfied, stink-arsed, jigging little stoat.
How dare he? Genuinely—how dare he1. How dare this dot-eyed, crop-haired, fun-sized, guff-tongued, pirouetting waif-boy scamper on to the world’s airwaves and loudly proclaim to be the sole global administrator of all things sexy? You’d think it takes massive balls to do something like that, but given the shrill, squeaking vocals cheeping through his ghastly little gobhole, it’s safe to assume he’s got testes the size of capers. He’s practically a human dog whistle, the shrieking, high-pitched, mosquito-lunged ponce.
And wait, it gets worse. Having declared himself the Lord of All Sexy, the lyric goes on to decry the rest of us mere mortals as being somehow not up to scratch. And he calls us bad names while he’s doing it!
First he says ‘them other fuckers don’t know how to act’—which translates as ‘everyone in the world, with the sole exception of myself, is a clueless fornicator’. Then he threatens us, using language so offensive it pains me to reproduce it here (and while I apologise for any offence it may cause, I think it’s important to quote him in full, if only to bring home the full import of his disgusting slurs). ‘You motherfuckers, watch how I attack,’ he says. Out loud, right there, on the record.
Yeah, that’s right: Justin Timberlake just called everyone listening to his song a motherfucker! It could be you, it could be me, it could be your four-year-old nephew—he treats us all with the same highhanded revulsion. Can you believe the nerve of this jumped-up bitch?
Incredibly, he’s not through with us yet. In the very next line, he clearly states his intention to meddle in the private affairs of others. ‘If that’s your girl you’d better watch your back,’ he tweets. Why, Justin? What are you going to do? Knife me in the spine and rip her dress off in front of me? I wouldn’t put anything past you by now, you hateful, preeping maniac. Sod putting out a single—our mere existence evidently sickens you to the bone, so why not just kick our doors in, burn down our homes, blast us with a shotgun as we crawl pathetically from the flames, and have done with it?
He should be jailed for saying stuff like this. Gagged and manacled and hurled in the deepest, dankest dungeon imaginable. A cell so small they have to snap his skeleton in half to fit him in. And the moment the door slams shut, the whole thing should be soundproofed, sealed and bombed into a million bits.
Justin Timberlake? Justin Piss, more like.
On Banksy
[22 September 2006]
Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.
Banksy first became famous for his stencilled subversions of pop-culture images; one showed John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in a famous pose from Pulp Fiction, with their guns replaced by bananas. What did it mean? Something to do with the glamorisation of violence, yeah? Never mind. It looked cool. Most importantly, it was accompanied by the name ‘BANKSY’ in huge letters, so everyone knew who’d done it. This, of course, is the real message behind all of Banksy’s work, despite any appearances to the contrary.
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I’ll just be on my way to my 9-to-s desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald eithe
r side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America…um…war…er…Disney…and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your world-view changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick V-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one, Banksy! You’ve shown us the truth, yeah?
As if that wasn’t irritating enough, Banksy’s vague, pseudo-subversive preaching is often accompanied by a downright embarrassing hard-nut swagger. His website is full of advice to other would-be graffiti bores, like: ‘Be aware that going on a mission drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells.’ Woah, man—the cells!
He goes on to explain that ‘real villains’ think graffiti is pointless—not because he wants you to agree with them, but because he wants you to know he’s mates with a few tough-guy criminal types. Cos Banksy’s an anarchalist what don’t respect no law, innit?
One of his most imbecilic daubings depicts a monkey wearing a sandwich board with ‘lying to the police is never wrong’ written on it. So presumably lan Huntley was right then, Banksy? You absolute thundering backside.
Recently, our hero’s made headlines by sneaking a dummy dressed in Guantanamo rags into Disneyland (once again fearlessly exposing Mickey Mouse’s disgusting war criminal past), and defacing several hundred copies of Paris Hilton’s new album (I haven’t heard her CD, but I’m willing to bet it’s far superior to Blur’s godawful Think Tank, a useless bumdrizzle of an album, whose artwork was done by Banksy—presumably he spray-painted it on a brick and hurled it through EMI’s window, yeah?).
Right now you can see some of Banksy’s life-altering acts of genius for yourself at his LA exhibition Barely Legal (yeah? Yeah!), including a live elephant painted to blend in with some gaudy wallpaper. This apparently represents ‘the big issues some people choose to ignore’—i.e. pretty much anything from global poverty to Aids. But not, presumably, the fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness of Banksy. We’re all keeping schtum about that one.
—To be fair to Banksy, the ‘murdered phonebox’sculpture he once dumped in Soho Square was genuinely great.
On pissing like beasts
[29 September 2006]
Ours is an increasingly polarised world, with a population separated by one yawning partition after another: racial differences, the generation gap, the rich/poor divide, interfaith squabbling—in fact everyone’s alienated from everyone else in some way. It’s the only thing we’ve all got in common.
Actually, it isn’t. We’ve also got our bodily functions. When Michael Stipe sang ‘Everybody Hurts’, he might as well have sung ‘Everybody Empties Their Bum’ instead—because it’s true (admittedly the song might have felt a bit less poignant with those lyrics, but on the plus side the video would’ve been funnier).
Our bowels are a great leveller. Angelina Jolie is the most beautiful person on earth, but even she’s suffered the odd badstomached scatological interlude, the kind that turns the bathroom into a tropical stink-chamber powerful enough to necrotise your face the instant you open the door. Yeah. She’s done that, too. It’s a comforting thought.
Bodily functions may be universal, but that doesn’t mean they have to be performed in a disgusting fashion. I, for one, am grossly offended by ‘performance farters’, for example—witless bozos who think it’s acceptable to break wind for comic effect. In my book, that’s assault; it’s particles of their excrement wafting up your nose, for heaven’s sake. It should carry a prison sentence of at least five years. I’m not joking.
Annoying though they are, such chuckling gutters are at least comparatively rare compared with the everyday horror of the gents’ toilet—a place where time’s stood still since the Dark Ages. It doesn’t matter where or who you are: even a chortling, dinner-jacketed toff swapping bon mots at a glittering soire’e becomes a grunting dehumanised beast the minute he steps into the gents.
Men’s bogs are disgusting, and our tolerance is baffling. Take urinals. It’s the twenty-first century—why are we still standing in a row, sloshing piss around like animals? It may come as a shock to delicate female readers, but a huge proportion of men, on taking position at a urinal, immediately perform the following ritual: (1) loudly clear phlegm from nose and throat; (2) spit said phlegm directly into urinal; (3) use personal stream to chase phlegm down plughole; (4) vigorously shake self dry while breaking wind, clearing throat and sniffing; (5) leave abruptly without washing hands. (Look, I know it’s disgusting, but it’s true—every man reading this knows it.)
I’m more genteel—i.e. I’m one of the ones who often can’t ‘go’ when someone else is standing there. Not because I’m a wuss, but because I’m a civilised human being who believes it’s the sort of thing you should do behind closed doors. In silence. With no ladies present. Usually.
Surely I’m not alone in this. Gentlemen of Britain, it’s time we held a secret ballot. Let’s vote to make private urinals compulsory by 2008. Oh, and working hot taps would be nice too. Together we can do it. All we need is the guts to say ‘no more’. That and ‘now wash your hands’.
You aren’t what you eat
[ ie October 2006]
On a street near my home there’s a gigantic poster depicting a grisly photograph of a young girl glugging a five-litre bottle of cooking oil. The oil is pouring down her chin and over her shirt. It looks disgusting and is designed to put you off eating crisps. ‘What goes into crisps goes into you/ shrieks the tagline. Do you see?
Beside the fact that it’d be bloody weird if what went into crisps didn’t go into me, but somehow leaped inside the nearest bystander, what’s really annoying about the advert (paid for by the British Heart Foundation) is that it’s a hysterical exaggeration, the equivalent of a shrieking idiot telling you you’ll have someone’s eye out in a minute if you don’t put the cap back on that pen.
What their stupid poster is trying to say is this: if you eat a large bag of crisps every day for a year, you’re effectively ‘drinking’ almost five litres of cooking oil. But so what? Drinking five litres of cooking oil would indeed be awful, but only if you necked it in one go. Sip it in tiny quantities over a full year and it might be quite pleasant. Or you could drizzle it over some crisps. That’d be even nicer.
You could create an equally sickening campaign attacking organic brown rice. Run a cinema ad showing a year’s worth of excrement emerging from someone’s backside in one endless, unbroken go, accompanied by a voice-over saying look, if you eat organic brown rice every day for a year, here’s how much waste you’ll jettison. And then to underline the point you’d show someone vomiting over it. You know: just to argue your case subtly, like the British Heart Foundation does.
It’s not just them. Wizened, infuriating, oatmeal-and-bracken guru Gillian McKeith creates unappetising food mountains in the kitchens of blobsome paupers in an effort to fuel their self-disgust. Look, you hopeless waddling gluttons: look how revolting it is when we take all the cream cakes and sausages you ate in a week and stack them on top of each other! Watch how the tomato sauce from Thursday’s spaghetti hoops congeals with Monday’s chocolate milkshake. Weep! Weep, you fat fools!
St Jamie Oliver pulled the same stunt on his recent Return to School Dinners, mixing chips and cakes and fat into an almighty steaming lump in front of horrified onlookers. As a spectacle, it’s stomach-churning; as dietary advice, it’s meaningless. Churn a ton of pesto, scallops, muesli and yoghurt together and it’ll look just as grim, especially if the camera intermittently pans up to take in St Jamie’s increasingly well-fed face gurning over the top of it.
Still, who cares if the shock tactics make sense—this is about saving lives, right? Well, yeah, maybe—that and snobbery. But where does this demonisation end?
Tip junk food into a trough and you’re effectively saying the people who eat it are pigs: greedy ignorant livestock, who perhaps deserve pity, or perhaps scorn, but clearly don’t deserve freedom of choice. Because left to their ow
n devices, look what they’ll do: they’ll happily drink a five-litre bottle of cooking oil, like the woeful, indolent scum we think they are.
The decoy doomsday
[13 October 2006]
I always wondered what the end of the world would look like. Now I know. Let’s face it—we’re doomed. Each time I pick up a paper or catch a bulletin, the news is 15 per cent worse than before. Seriously, if I switched on the TV and they were showing live footage of an army of fire-breathing pterodactyls machine-gunning people to death on the streets of London right outside my door, I’d be horrified, but not entirely surprised, nor any more scared than I already am. I’d probably just shrug and wait for them to smash the door down.
We’re so screwed, I don’t even know what to worry about first. Terrorist extremists? Yeah, they’re frightening—but what about those North Korean nukes? Or global warming, come to think of it? I need a personal bloody organiser to sort it out—a gizmo that’ll set me a ‘timetable of concern’ just so I can break down my overall sense of creeping dread into manageable, bite-sized flurries of panic. Otherwise, I’m in danger of forgetting to worry about some things—like bird flu, for instance. I haven’t seriously crapped myself about that since, ooh, February? Whenever it was, a top-up’s long overdue.
I’m not the only one. I was reading a George Monbiot piece about climate change on the Guardian website the other day, and it painted such a bleak vision of our potential future, I swear I physically felt my will to live draining through the soles of my feet, as though it were being flushed out of me and replaced with a sort of heavy, porridge-like despair.
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