In Bed with Jocasta (13 page)
Read In Bed with Jocasta Online
Authors: Richard Glover
[email protected]
Here at CyberSisterhood we can’t understand why computer viruses all have female names, when it’s male computer nerds who’ve caused the problem. Talk about typical! Our VirusRenamer searches the Net and gives trouble its correct name — Barry, Steve or Brian.
EmptyCupboard.com
At EmptyCupboard we realise Internet shopping is a lot of overhyped bull: it takes hours, a gormless sixteen-year-old mispacks your order, and — due to a mistaken keystroke — you’ve inevitably ordered nothing but a 75 kilo crate of dried basil. At EmptyCupboard we help the failed Internet shopper with recipes based entirely on all that’s left in your cupboard — a bag of rice and an old tin of Irish Stew. Enjoy!
PeskyKids.com
Perhaps your kids don’t bother you any more because their heads are in the Net. Why not download some PeskyKids! We interrupt your own work on the Net with flashed requests for biscuits, drinks, and company. Both of you might be working on separate computers, in separate rooms, but with PeskyKids you can still imagine what a real family would be like.
And coming soon for kids:
AuthoritarianDad.com
This cyber-father actually supervises your Web use instead of just downloading porn in his own room. Hours of RealFeel Conflict! Adds RebelliousFeel to Web use.
[email protected]
Here at Telstra’s BigPond we’re sick of Regional and Rural customers and their whingeing and whining about how long it takes to download a single Net page over our antiquated phone lines. That’s why we’re going to make some changes. Post us a letter outlining your problem, and we’ll send you a paperback copy of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
— absolutely ready-to-read as you wait. No more wasted download TelstraHours!
ChatWithStyle.com
We’ve spent hours monitoring Yahoo’s teenage chat rooms, and despaired at the poor level of conversation. Sure, young people of all nations are meeting, but what are they saying to each other? Stuff like: ‘Helllllo?’ and ‘Anyone there????’ and ‘Who else likes Britney Spears???’ Download our ConversationFilter, and everything changes. Type in the question ‘Anyone else like Manchester FC?’, and our filter automatically turns it into a knowledgeable inquiry about their last game with Leeds. Mention Dannii Minogue, and our ConversationFilter simply turns it into an inquiry about the more sophisticated Macy Gray. Don’t just lie about your age, gender and occupation; lie about your sense of style as well.
SpeechAtDad’sFuneral.com
In the busy go-ahead world of e-commerce, who’s got time for parents? Especially when they show how very OldWorld they are by actually dying. Log onto our site, add a few details such as your dad’s name and hobby, and our DeepFeelings software will produce a moving elegy. Download us before you Download Dad.
[email protected]
How can you get a groovy name for your web-site? A name like goFish, Excite or Yahoo. Just visit us here at WebbyNettyStuff. Remember how the Web works — it’s full of giant, grey-suited multinationals pretending to be groovy adolescents. Our principle: the bigger your company, the more childish the name. That way no-one will catch on to the truth — that the groovy new economy is exactly the same as the old: lots of money being made by a few multinationals. Don’t tell anyone, now.
EmailCrusader.com
Many companies are now generating so much internal e-mail, that no actual work takes place. At EmailCrusader we’ve discovered the rule: the more boring the department, the more e-mail it generates. In most companies, 95 per cent of all e-mails are generated by the Training Department, the Fire Drill Department, and the computer section itself. EmailCrusader disconnects them every time they try to communicate with the outside world. Voted Web-Site Most Likely To Stop Everyone Going Insane.
HateSmugComputerBastard.com
We’re a flame site for those sick of computer nerds. We maintain that content is more important than the delivery system; that the invention of the Web is less important than the discovery of the yo-yo; and that people with an excessive belief in the transforming power of the Net are all nerds. Voted Least Visited Site twenty years running. Which makes us
very
proud.
T
he Space Cadet and I are lolling by the roadside, just shy of the gutter. We’re seated in two large, stuffed armchairs, feeling like lords. The Space Cadet wriggles deeper into his recliner, noting how the back swivels for extra comfort.
It is then he utters the ominous words: ‘Who’d chuck out this? You’d have to be mad.’
It means he’s afflicted by the gene. The scrounger gene. The scavenger gene. Just like his father, he’ll never be able to pass a garage sale, a council clean-up, or even a straight-out stinking tip, without stopping and having a poke around.
Right now, it’s the mid-year Council Clean-Up, and it’s a dangerous time to drive. The car in front will suddenly swerve toward the gutter, the driver entranced by the sight of an exhausted water heater, lying on its side, bleeding its yellow stuffing.
A clever bloke, they’ll be thinking, could make something out of that.
Why do we do it? Not for any good reason. Oh, but the surge of good feeling as you first take away your find. The feeling that you’ve been able to spot rich possibilities where others couldn’t.
–
You could turn that water heater into a cubby for the kids.–
You could put that three-legged table upside down and use it for quoits.–
You could take the engine out of that lawnmower and make a most attractive planter box.
After some argument, I convince The Space Cadet to leave the torn, rank armchairs behind, and we move down the road. I notice he is skipping with joy. We pause and poke around the next pile. The Space Cadet looks up and says: ‘I love doing this, Dad.’ He’s got it bad.
Someone’s chucked out an old, broken, black and white portable TV. It’s exactly the same as our own black and white TV — the one I’d been contemplating throwing out myself. I have to fight the urge to take it home. Thus the rule: something you’d instantly chuck if found under your own bed, becomes a sparkling jewel when chucked out by another.
A roll of wire, an old pram, a broken cupboard with good handles, a busted ping-pong table: all are taken in, before good sense revolts. Next year, on Clean-Up Day, they’ll go out once again, only to be picked up by another. Just like the busted-up exercise bike I swear’s been circling the suburb for years, providing more exercise through lifting and carrying than it ever has through pedalling.
Yet who can resist the urge? A brass porthole? Walk past it, and the very next week an obscure uncle will die in South Africa, leaving you his steamboat — in perfect condition save for the missing porthole. A roll of lino?
The very next day
the note comes home from school: ‘As the children are practising stencilling, could each child bring a square of lino?’
A bit further down the street and The Space Cadet is suggesting we take home a large pile of still-green tree-prunings because ‘they’d make good wood for the barbecue’. He is also keen on a milk-shake maker with broken glass and English electrical points.
He’s starting to get a bit thin-lipped about the way I keep saying ‘no’ to all his great finds. ‘You know, you’re allowed to take it, Dad. You’re allowed. It’s the law.’
Next house along, he pushes aside a few polystyrene boxes, and spots a cricket bat — scuffed on the bottom, with some silver electrical tape clumped around the handle. By now, I’m in the habit of dissuading him. ‘No, leave it alone, it’s just rubbish.’ But he reaches in, pulls it into the light and takes an experimental swing.
I have to admit, it’s a beauty. An old well-made bat; the sticky and torn electrical tape easily removed. The Space Cadet puts on a mock-pompous voice: ‘I think you better apologise to me for that. It’s not rubbish at all.’
We take the bat home, full of the good times of the Council Clean-Up, talking of how we’ll clean and sand and fix the bat until it’s the best ever.
Yet, turning the corner, I realise that even this is not a time without shadows. Just before we left on our rounds — just an hour ago — I’d placed on the footpath my own pile of chuck-outs. Among them: the rusted metal bit from the wheel of a wheelbarrow long-gone.
It is gone. I stand there stunned. I have come face to face with the most powerful rule of Clean-Up Day: there is no realisation more gnawingly horrible than that someone saw possibility where you could see none.
T
he advertising industry has always been skilled at taking large quantities of its clients’ money in return for slogans so lamebrained they could have been composed by a housebrick. But it’s only in the last few years that the industry has fallen, slathering, onto the ultimate ruse, which is to convince its clients that the really
hip
commercials are the ones that say, ‘Our product is so good, it doesn’t need a slogan.’
This, they have realised, beats the hell out of staying up nights to find something to rhyme with Mcintosh Nasi Goreng.
The clients seem to be falling for it, since half the nation’s products now seem to have a no-slogan slogan. A Reebok campaign, for example, shows a series of not very good slogans, ending with the creative megawork: ‘Reebok — no slogans.’ Or, at least, ‘Reebok — no slogans we could think of before we went to lunch and got stuck into the Tasmanian semillon.’ What used to be the text of the apologetic telegram you’d send to the client — NO SLOGANS STOP WILL TRY AGAIN TOMORROW STOP — is now cheerfully presented as the campaign centrepiece.
Or take the Reschs Real ad, which offered the sheer genius of: ‘With a beer this good, who needs clever advertising.’ Which does rather suggest the rejoinder: ‘With a slogan that bad, who needs an expensive ad agency.’
Advertising is only a lowly part of our modern culture. It’s the small intestine of the body politic; the organ that finally digests developments in the high arts, and then turns them into … well, waste. But the production of waste as toxic as the no-slogan slogan suggests serious problems in the higher organs.
Problems like the cult of irony — that post-modern love of knowingness, of self-consciousness, of the mocking half-parody, of embarrassment at admitting conviction or sincerity.
You shall know it from its offspring. Among them: the self-aware tonight show, full of knowing winks and smug self-parody; the self-aware country band, half-parodying the music it’s playing; the self-aware building, loudly screeching its post-modern borrowings.
And, now, the self-aware advertisement — hiply admitting, for those too stupid to work it out themselves, that, yes, they are watching an advert.
Every age has its soft spot, its area of naivety, and this is ours: this tendency to mistake self-consciousness for honesty. When, instead, we should recognise it as an effort to beguile us further; and to dress up the crummy and the borrowed as things fresh and new.
I never warmed to the cult of irony, even when, a decade back, it was limited to the inner-city few — people who simply didn’t have time, in their busy schedules of parties and put-downs, to develop their own ideas or beliefs. And so merely slipped into the pose of a weary and knowing detachment.
But it’s even more unattractive now it’s become just another mass-market stance — used to flog everything from tonight shows to shoes.
And could any irony be greater than this: that what began as a passionate and necessary debate among French structuralists about cultural relativism and our roles as the bearers of cultural ideas has ended up as a series of dopey country bands, shoe ads and bad tonight shows?
Is there any hope for Western civilisation after irony? We must take hope: surely once an idea is turning up in shoe ads, its time must be up. When irony and self-consciousness turn up in a commercial, it may mean they’ve finally arrived at the very end of the small intestine — and are about to be joyfully expelled into the dunny can of history.
With them gone, we can all fill up again — maybe even on sincerity, on commitment, on the search for values. And hope for a time in which architects, slogan writers, novelists, fashion designers, and tonight show hosts are expected to come up with their own ideas — and believe in them, too.
Wow,
post
-post-modernism. Now that
is
hip.
I
t is now essential for young men, moving out of home for the first time, to be able to fend for themselves. As a one-time Young Male Slob, I am in a position to offer this cut-out-and-keep manual: ‘The Idiot’s Guide to Domestic Life’. Pin it up for the slobby bachelor boy (or slobby bachelor girl) near you.
Clothes Washing
Suggest to a Typical Young Man that he should wear the same underpants two days running, and he’ll be horrified. Instead, he’ll take off his underpants, leave them on the bedroom floor for a week and a half, and then he’ll wear them again.
This is their point: Typical Young Men do not believe clothes need to be washed. They believe they need to be
rested.
They think their undies have just got all hot and sweaty, and all they need to do is calm down, take it easy, maybe just slob around lying on the floor for a week or two, and — fantastic — they’ll be ready for another outing.
And the same goes for work pants, favourite T-shirts and — in older men — dinner suits, which, with proper rest, can go for decades (even, in later years, attending many functions unaccompanied).
Typical Young Men, you understand, have not yet heard about washing. When they lived at home, they just placed their clothes on the floor of the bedroom and then found them, some days later, washed and ironed and hanging up. But, sometime or other, we are going to have to break the bad news: The Clothes Did Not Achieve This Unaided. Somebody helped them do it. And they did it by using The Big White Shaky Machine inside the Room With Tiles.
Washing Up
When moving into his own place, the Typical Young Man may be surprised to find that dirty plates and cups begin to accumulate on the metal thing in the kitchen (‘the sink’).
These need to be washed. For this you need to dress like a cautious surgeon, wearing thick rubber gloves, a protective apron and — sure, if you feel like it — a condom certainly wouldn’t do any harm.
The trick is to immerse the dirty plates in hot water and sort of rub them with the wet thing (‘the sponge’). If that doesn’t work, you can try rubbing them with the scratchy thing (‘the scratchy thing’). Shocking fact, but true: this has to be repeated daily.
The good news is that if you still can’t get something clean you should ‘leave it to soak’. This is Young Guy language for: ‘Janice can do it later’.
Ironing
Typical Young Men always try to take short cuts with ironing. They’ll do the front of a shirt, then skip the back. They figure they’ll be wearing a jacket anyway so who will know? In winter months, they’ve even been known — OK, I’ve even been known — to just iron the collar and a sort of V-shaped area on the front, and count on the sweater to cover the rest.
But ironing a shirt properly is not that hard. Just select the correct temperature, and remember the Idiot’s First Law of Ironing: if the shirt you’re ironing has very, very long sleeves, it may well be a pair of pants.
Cleaning the Floor
Before vacuuming your new place, you’ll have to figure out what sort of floor covering you are dealing with, which can be tough in a house full of Typical Young Men.
Look down at your floor right now, and describe the major floor covering. That’s right — empty pizza boxes and grease-covered motorcycle parts. But now, try looking under the pizza boxes and the bike parts. Yes! You have a floor! And a vermin problem! What a shame that man, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
Cooking
It’s not as hard as it looks. At each meal, just eat something from each major food type:
Food from cupboards;
Food from fridges;
Food you ring up for;
Beer.
The rules of cooking are very easy. Food from cupboards is boiled or heated and food from fridges is grilled or fried. Food from cupboards is technically known as carbohydrate, and includes pasta, rice and potatoes. Food from fridges, on the other hand, is always protein — unless it’s green coloured, in which case it’s usually just some very off meat. Or, in very rare cases, a vegetable.
Either way, the Typical Young Man will refuse to eat it. The need to ‘get plenty of greens’ can be addressed by opening another can of VB.
Cleaning the Bathroom
Many Typical Young Men are shocked to find that cleaning a bathroom doesn’t just mean flushing the loo. And so they sit, staring at the disgraceful mess, hopefully wondering if ‘Putrid Black’ is just another designer colour in the Fowler Ware range.
They should think again — and leave the room locked and barred for at least a week. Like their undies, it may need a thorough resting.
