Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

by Steve Lowe

  PEOPLE IN BEAR COSTUMES ON MOTORBIKES ADVERTISING STUFF

  Happens more than you might imagine.

  PICTURES OF CLUBBERS

  As in, people gyrating at the camera used to illustrate listings and/or articles about clubs. You’d think that if people were off their faces, they might consider staying away from the camera lens, what with being off your face not usually considered to be a good look for your face. But no.

  It’s been a staple now for about twenty years: loads of faces, off their faces. Holding on to their mates, waving a drink about, throwing their hands in the air. Why the fuck would anyone want to see this picture? We weren’t there. We probably don’t wish we had been there. If we are going to see pictures of people fucked out of their minds in a nightclub, please have the decency to make them members of the Bush family. Or high-ranking television personalities.

  On the odd occasion that we buy Dazed & Confused magazine by accident—which, by the way, claims to be a journal of “ideas”—the photos in the back of some hip schmoozathon or other always, always include the same hairy, muttonchopped Japanese man holding a beer bottle. It doesn’t seem to matter where the party is—New York, Paris, wherever. He really gets around.

  We don’t know what that’s about.

  PLASTIC SURGERY FOR PETS

  Joke corner: “My dog’s got no nose.” “Really?” “Yes, I had it chopped off because I didn’t like the way it looked.”

  Cutting bits off your pet is all the rage, with some California vets even pointing to potential health benefits. Dogs with floppy ears need them clipped because they are more prone to inflammation from the “buildup of moisture” (oh, and they can’t hear as well—but they don’t know that). Docking a dog’s tail is highly practical because, according to one American Kennel Club judge, “people can’t grab the tail.” No, not if it hasn’t got one.

  Dogs can even be debarked by removing two folds of tissue on either side of their larynx. When these folds come together, the standard dog makes that woofing noise we tend to associate with dogs. Whip his folds out and, when he goes to bark, he produces a whisper, like a bark heard far away, when (get this) he’s still right next to you! Obviously no one likes a mental nonstop barking dog, but a spooky whispering one that sounds like he’s down the road doesn’t feel like much of a step up.

  POLE-DANCING LESSONS

  The Australian Family Association became outraged when children as young as seven began taking “pole fitness classes,” in which they use poles to perform strengthening and flexibility exercises. Said the group’s spokeswoman Angela Conway, “There are plenty of exercise tools out there. Why choose a pole, the classic phallic symbol of the pornographic world?”

  Fucking killjoys. Pole dancing’s just a great way of working out—and it’s fun! It’s like Pilates for women who think: Let’s play at being sex workers!

  Top pole-dancing teachers Polestars assure us: “Lessons are for fun, not professional training. All classes are a man-free zone!” This is a grave disappointment to many women who were actually hoping to spend their leisure hours swinging about for the delectation of drunken businessmen jiggling their hands around in their suit-trouser pockets.

  Now, Polish dancing lessons—they get you really fit.

  POLICEMEN CUTTING UP DEAD PEOPLE ON TELEVISION

  Incessant.

  POLITICIANS’ “SEXUAL AURA”

  When George Bush paraded about the deck of the SS Abraham Lincoln in a battle flight suit in May 2003 to pronounce the war in Iraq “over,” many descriptions came to mind. For most of us, “hottie” probably wasn’t one of them—although it was for some maniac from the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan said she half expected Bush to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big S on his chest.” S for Shitty Shithead Shitforbrains, presumably.

  In the 2004 U.S. election, Bush and Kerry tried to target the key undecided constituency of single women voters with their “sex appeal.” Surely they would both have been better served targeting “people with goose fat where their brains should be,” rather than conjuring up terrifying visions of them having a wet-trunks contest.

  And really, what’s so bleeding studdish about Bill Clinton? Granted, he doesn’t have buck teeth or a goiter, but that doesn’t mean he’s someone you’d want to see in the buff, aroused.

  Something has really gone wrong with your attitudes to sex if you want to whisper sweet nothings to Mike Huckabee or suck off Joe Biden. What next? Pieces eulogizing the blubbery intensity of Dennis Hastert? Ah, but when you meet him . . .

  PORN, MISLEADING USE OF THE WORD

  Porn gets everywhere these days. Even where it patently is not. (See Calamity Porn.)

  We are now seduced with “gardening porn” (porn involving hostas), “car porn” (porn involving NASCAR), “gadget porn” (porn with Inspector Gadget), and “gastro porn” (belly porn). Anyone thinking one of these items would feature something of a stimulating bent might have been disappointed to see an older man—probably wearing a sweater—discussing the cons of arborvitae or prosciutto or something. That’s not porn. Or, if it is, only a tiny minority will get their rocks off over it.

  It’s surprising they don’t trail the news as “topico-porn.”

  And the weather could be called “Hot ’n’ Wet.”

  Maybe it could be introduced: “Now here’s Peter with some hot fucking.”

  PORSCHE SUVS

  Want an SUV so you can loom over other road users like the U.S. Army? But also want something sporty to accelerate ludicrously away from the lights before suddenly braking at the next roundabout?

  Then the Porsche Cayenne is the car for you: two utterly pointless vehicles in one. No one likes you.

  POWER LISTS

  Every magazine now has a “Power 100,” from Forbes to Accountancy Age to the Frog Hollow PTA Newsletter. It’s so devalued the ranking of “#1 Most Grand Poobah” that Entertainment Weekly—annually home to its own Hollywood-centric Power List—instead created a “Smart List” in 2007, recognizing the fifty most intelligent people in the industry, because, quote, “It’s not about power anymore—meet the brains who are taking the film biz forward.”

  Please, like brains ever have power. You’ll never top Vanity Fair’s “Power List of Power Lists” with that attitude.

  POWERPOINT

  The Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like fuckheads.

  PRICE PROMISES

  Now, surely, if you were going to hike around town/the Net checking whether somewhere else sells this item cheaper, you’d do it before coming in here to buy it and not afterward like some sort of twat.

  PRINCE ANDREW

  In 2003, the fourth in line to the throne decided to travel from London to a lunch engagement in Oxford by chartered helicopter at a cost to the taxpayer of almost $6,000. When faced with complaints about squandering the public purse, a palace spokeswoman explained that reliability was paramount as the Oxford date was a state banquet in honor of Vladimir Putin. Sadly, “setting out earlier” was, she continued, simply not possible as there was “something he’d forgotten to do” and also “something on the telly.”

  Prince Andrew loves helicopters so much that, when no helicopter can be found for him, he scampers up and down the palace corridors shouting: “Mummy! Copter! Mummy! Copter!”

  PRODUCT, THE WORD

  “What products do you use?”

  “Oh, you know . . . pens, ball bearings, all sorts.”

  “No, I mean beauty products.”

  “Oh, sorry. You needed to be more specific. And less of a fucking prick.”

  PROPERTY LADDER

  A marvelous system that separates society into two camps: the smug and the damned.

  PUBLIC BATHROOMS, LACK OF

  Thank God for McDonald’s. As a pleasing bonus, when you relieve yourself in McDonald’s without purchasing one of their special patties of death, you
are quite literally taking the piss out of them. Actually, no—you’re quite literally giving piss to them. Anyway, they don’t like it.

  Starbucks are also very handy for a wiz-and-run. And bars. Except the one I popped into in Brooklyn in 2001 where the burly landlord made me buy a shot on reappearance from the can on pain of a punch in the face. The fat bastard.

  PUBLIC PHONE BOOTHS, STATE OF

  Will no one think of the junkies?

  Q

  “QUALITY” HOLLYWOOD MOVIES

  People often stereotype Hollywood as a machine always preying on our basest needs for violence, sex, and glamour. It’s not, though, sadly. It tries being deep, too, which, when it comes to making films, is something that is best left to the Europeans. Except the British.

  These films can generally be spotted by any sign of the following: Sam Mendes; Jude Law doing an American accent; Kevin “I love the theater best” Spacey; Spielberg and Hanks! Together again!; a “normal” middle-American suburb where everything is not as it seems; Gwyneth Paltrow playing a famous poet; Nicole Kidman playing a famous author (with a big nose); lives being changed forever by a car accident; Paul Haggis; and Sam Mendes and Paul Haggis! Together again!

  QUESTIONING WHETHER GEORGE CLOONEY IS REAL

  “He acts, he directs, he’s gorgeous, he’s intelligent, he’s politically committed: can he be real?!”

  It will no doubt relieve the redoubtable Mr. Clooney that we have an answer to that question.

  And the answer is “Yes.” Isn’t it obvious? Look at him!

  QUICK RECIPES

  By strange coincidence, the craze for cooking fancy food has coincidentally coincided with the craze for working into the evening and then feeling the need to pass out from drink. This has led to a craze for quick recipes.

  So all food magazines advertise the “Quick and Easy” aspect of their “Tried & Tested Recipes.” (What, you’ve actually tried out the recipes? With this trying and testing, you are really spoiling us.)

  In his book Jamie’s Dinners, British chef Jamie Oliver claims that, in the past fifteen years, the average time spent making a meal for the family has slipped from an hour to thirteen minutes. He then describes some extremely quick “Five Minute Wonders,” a section that should more accurately be called: “Five Minutes, My Giddy Sweet Back Bottom.” He even adds a challenge: “Each recipe has the time it took for me to make it—you never know, you might be able to beat me on some of them!”

  Well, you try making beef with pak choi, mushrooms, and noodles, for instance—which can apparently be done and dusted with coriander in five minutes twelve seconds, including slicing the red onion, slicing the ginger, finely slicing the chile, brushing and tearing up the mushrooms, and quartering the pak choi—without slicing the tops of your fingers clean off and leaving the kitchen a blood-spurting mess. Particularly when you’ve been drinking.

  Really, your partner might as well have the car running for that mercy dash to the ER. Is this what he wants? Emergency wards full of wannabe quick chefs! Is this part of his bold vision for public-sector renewal? And your partner’s in no fit state to drive a car—they’ve been drinking. Look at the fucking state of them!

  Honestly, he comes across as such a saint. But really he’s still a bastard.

  R

  R&B BALLADS

  That is not an album. That is somewhere in the region of one decent fast song followed by thirty tons of Disney-does-gospel-with-satin-sheets-in-hell mush with no discernible words except “Woh-oh-oh-oh-aaaaaahhh! Ooooooh! Oooaoaoaoaoaoaoa! Aaargh! Aaargh! Aargh! Yooo-hooo!”

  And those aren’t even real words. Bullshit, really.

  RAZOR BLADES THAT CAN SHAVE EVEN CLOSER THAN THE HITHERTO CLOSEST-SHAVING BLADE, WHICH WAS ALREADY REALLY QUITE CLOSE

  Shaving has certainly come on in leaps and bounds since men dragged flinty bits of flint down their hirsute faces, pulling out clumps of hair matted with animal fat and their own fetid blood. “Aaaarrrgggghhhhh!” they would say. “For fucking fuck’s sake. That really hurt and now it’s all stingy and raw and throbbing and raw.”

  Then there were the so-called cutthroat razors, but these took a dive in popularity after barbers started cutting people up and putting them in pies. That’s when the safety razor was invented by King Camp Gillette, in 1895. (Hur hur, King Camp. He’s called King Camp.)

  And bang! The race was on—to make the safety razor bigger, better, closer, and, crucially, more expensive. Along came lubricant strips and “spring loading,” “open cartridge architecture,” and handles with “knurled elastomeric crescents.” First there was one blade, then there were two. Then there were three, then—you can see where this is going. Now there are five—yes, five. Count ’em. And weep.

  The new Gillette innovation has five razor blades in it. Five. Not four—like the Wilkinson Sword Quattro—but five. Five. Can’t you count? We said five. It’s very exciting.

  Now, some people might suggest it’s probably impossible to get closer than existing razors in a way perceptible to the naked eye. They might say it’s a colossal waste of a billion dollars and the full-time efforts of a hundred people to go around developing new five-blade razors like the old ones were going out of fashion, which they are. Perhaps these people would agree with Roger Hamby, of the Cutlery & Allied Trades Research Association, who said: “The Holy Grail of closeness was reached thirty years ago with the first twin-blade razors.” But what do “some people” know?

  The names of these babies alone should be enough to reassure us of their scientific veracity and general goodness. Sensor—you know what it’s all about. Mach 3—the blade so manly, it has a name vaguely reminiscent of strafing Afghan villages. Mach 3 Turbo—it vibrates! Mach 3 Turbo G-force! (Don’t know what that one does.) The five-blader, which has seventy-five patents on it and is made in a Class 5000 clean room in Berlin, an environment purer than an operating theater, is called Fusion. Yes, it has capacities so mind boggling it can only be described by conjuring up the spirit of jazz rock. Dark magus!

  READY MEALS

  Should you stray off the modern food-Nazi holy-eating track for a sneaky fix of bubbling additive paste, you might need to develop the appetite of a particularly picky three-year-old. Because these things really ought to be called ready-for-another-meal-in-an-incredibly-short-space-of-time meals. Or “snacks,” as we believe such meager portions were termed in the olden days.

  For this reason, “Where’s the rest of my fucking ready meal, you chiseling shysters!?” is a phrase that should be heard shouted by disgruntled customers at supermarkets throughout the land as they stomp down the aisles, pushing over stacks of promotional Pringles and turning off the fridges.

  “Serves 2”! Serves two what, exactly? Cockatiels?

  I HAVE GIVEN YOU FOUR BUCKS AND NINETY-NINE CENTS—AND I DEMAND SUSTENANCE!

  RECRUITMENT VIDEOS

  In the War on Terror, the recruitment videos of the opposition have the considerable advantage of a medieval fundamentalist ideology to fall back on. A tack that sadly isn’t available to the U.S. Army.

  The recruiters’ job has traditionally involved making joining up seem like a “fun” and “exciting” thing for go-getting youngsters to do. Admirably, they don’t attempt to hoodwink youngsters into thinking that war is just a large-scale computer game. Oh no, that’s wrong: Visit www.americasarmy.com to play the only online, multiplayer video game “Based on the Experience of Real U.S. Army Soldiers” and sponsored by the U.S. Army.

  Unfortunately for the recruiters, though, the “fun” side of being a soldier is still difficult to convey. The new ads focus on the less war-like aspects of joining the army (“It’s not all gun-related mayhem; sometimes it’s preparing breakfast, too”). But sadly, in times of war, one inescapable fact of army life is—yes, that’s right—war. It just keeps cropping up.

  RESTAURANT SERVICE CHARGES

  Different from a tip in several key ways: It’s not voluntary and
it doesn’t often get to the staff. Many establishments either split the service charge with the staff or just keep it all for themselves. So it’s not even a “service” charge, a charge in appreciation of the staff, who might reasonably expect to get paid properly anyway. It’s just a charge: someone asking you for extra money for no reason whatsoever, which they will then simply keep. You can see why they don’t call it that on the menu.

  RESTAURANT SERVICE CHARGES THAT ONLY APPLY TO PARTIES OF MORE THAN TEN PEOPLE

  More service, certainly, but only because there is more stuff being served. You thieving shits.

  RESTAURANTS THAT REFILL HEINZ BOTTLES WITH CHEAPER KETCHUP

  You’re not fooling anyone.

  RESTAURANTS WITH UNFEASIBLY SMALL TOILETS

  As you squeeze between the door and sink into a cubicle that was last cleaned—that is, given a cursory wipe with a damp toilet roll—sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century, note how the extra table space in this Indian/greasy spoon/Chinese restaurant created by making the unfeasibly small toilet into which you are now trying to pry yourself so unfeasibly small is never occupied by a diner. It will always be either empty or occupied by restaurant staff smoking cigarettes.

  Sometimes these restaurants exude an air of genuine tragedy and thwarted ambition. This expresses itself in the need to walk a very long way to reach the unfeasibly small toilet. You must travel either upstairs or downstairs, through the never-used overflow room, full of piled-up tables once upon a time destined for office holiday parties that never came. These rooms often manage simultaneously to smell musty but also smell of paint, even though nothing that could rationally be described as “decorating” has ever taken place there.

  And there you are, in the semi-darkness, a bit drunk, tripping balls on MSG, wading through this shrine to the Unknown Diner, this culinary purgatory, Godot’s own bistro—just to piss in a cupboard.

  RESTUARANTS WITHOUT TOILETS

  Basically, what they’re saying is: “We’ve had your money, but we’ve not got a pot for you to piss in—now buzz off. And once you have buzzed off, go and fuck yourself.”