Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (20 page)

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.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Oil giant Chevron loves its former executive Condi Rice so much, it named an oil tanker after her. How truly awful must you be for the oil industry to like you that much?

When news of this homage caused controversy, the company quietly renamed the ship. The name they chose instead was
Condoleezza Rice? Oil-Loving Secretary of State Who Oversees the Invasion of Middle Eastern Countries to Privatize Their Oil Infrastructure for Use by U.S. Oil Giants? Never Heard of Her! We Did Once Know Somebody Called Condoleezza Rice, But Not That One.

Everyone always goes on about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed “cleverness.” But she herself rates George W. Bush as “someone of tremendous intellect”—so the bar has been set quite low here. Let’s hope she never gets a job as, say, a college professor, because that could blow her mind.

Rice did attend the University of Denver at the age of fifteen—but it was only to study the piano. And that is not, let’s face it, a proper subject. Neither does it prepare you for high office: No one’s going to look to Billy Joel in a crisis, are they? Not unless it somehow involves capturing Captain Jack or drinking loads of wine.