“Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland”

by David Rose

  70 ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’—written by Johnny Marr and Morrissey. Performed by The Smiths and taken from their album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987, Rough Trade Records). It reached number thirteen in the UK singles chart and became the inspiration for the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name (1998, HarperCollins Canada).

  71 In Genet’s novel, Querelle is a thief, a prostitute, an opium smuggler and a serial killer. Ostensibly he kills for money, but his real motive for murder is pleasure. Peristerophobia—a fear of pigeons. Lochinver (or Loch an Inbhir in Gaelic) is a village on the coast of Sutherland, Scotland. Green M&M candies have often been attributed with aphrodisiac qualities. Rumours of an aphrodisiac association with the green candies began in the 1970s when students reportedly collected them from packets to feed to their loved ones during sex. Mars eventually exploited the myth from 1997, when it first introduced the green character candy into advertising campaigns. By 2001, the campaigns were much more suggestive. The green M&M character became a clearly sexualised version of the other characters, with fuller lips, heavy-lidded eyes and long eyelashes. The campaign carried the tag-line ‘Is it true what they say about the green ones?’

  72 Waitrose—chain supermarket. The Caversham branch is located at 51 Church Street.

  73 ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’—written by Noel Gallagher and performed by British band Oasis. The song appeared on their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995, Creation/Big Brother). It reached number one in the UK singles chart.

  74 Teen drama that originally aired on the Fox network in the US for four seasons between 2003 and 2007.

  75 A for Andromeda (1961)—BBC TV science fiction drama written by cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It provided Julie Christie with her first major role. She was replaced by Susan Hampshire in the follow-up series, The Andromeda Breakthrough. Space: 1999 (1975–77), UK science fiction series produced by Jerry and Sylvia Anderson, starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. I Will Go Slightly Out Of My Way To Step On That Crunchy Looking Leaf—member group on the social networking website Facebook.

  76 No Frills—cheap, generic own-brand goods sold by the now defunct Kwik Save chain of supermarkets in the UK. The supermarket went into administration in 2007.

  77 Univocalic—consisting of only one vowel.

  78 (See p. 55, n. 47.)

  79 Theory proposed by Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski in a paper published in 1924 that a ball can be decomposed into a finite number of point sets and reassembled into two balls identical to the original. Thus, the theory suggests that the points inside a pea can be sorted into pieces, and these pieces can then be rotated and reassembled to cover all the points of the sun.

  80 Richard de Fournival or Richart de Fornival (circa 1201–60) was a medieval philosopher and trouvère perhaps best known for the Bestiaire d’Amour (Bestiary of Love). De vetula is de Fournival’s Latin poem, offering a systematic study of the number of ways you can obtain any given total from a throw of three dice.

  81 Edith Wharton (1862–1937)—American novelist, short story writer and essayist on architectural design. Frogger and Donkey Kong—arcade games that both made their debuts in 1981. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)—French playwright, poet, actor and director.

  82 Taken from the song ‘My Humps’, written by will.i.am and D. Payton. Performed by Black Eyed Peas and taken from their album Monkey Business (2005, A&M/Interscope). The song reached number three in both US and UK charts. It was the subject of intense music press criticism upon its release. John Bush, writing in All Music Guide, described it as ‘one of the most embarrassing rap performances of the new millennium’, and Bill Lamb, writing for About.com, called it ‘the musical equivalent of a bad Farrelly Brothers movie’. Hua Hsu of Slate.com said, ‘It’s not Awesomely Bad; it’s Horrifically Bad.... There are bad songs that offend our sensibilities but can still be enjoyed, and then there are the songs that are just really bad—transcendentally bad, objectively bad.’ A poll conducted by Rolling Stone ranked the song first in the list of 20 most annoying songs.

  83 Family Fortunes—UK television game show based on the US show Family Feud. The show ran in the UK from 1979 to 2002, revived again in 2006. Les Dennis (b. 1954) was the show’s host in the UK between 1987 and 2002.

  84 Symmedian—one of three geometrical lines intersecting in a single point (the symmedian) on a triangle.

  85 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)—German polymath and the discoverer of the binary numeral system in which numeric values are represented by two digits (commonly 0 and 1).

  86 Necker cube—an optical illusion first published in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. A wire-frame drawing of a cube in isometric perspective, the Necker cube can be interpreted in two different (although both seemingly correct) ways, alternating which side can be interpreted as the front/reverse of the cube. The illusion helps form an understanding of the human visual system and of the human brain being a neural network with two distinct and interchangeable stable states.

  87 Hustler—monthly pornographic magazine first published in 1974.

  88 The reference here may be to the 1996 song ‘The Crossroads’ by Cleveland hip-hop group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which originally contained the line ‘And, Wally, even though you’re gone, you’ve still got love from bone’ although it’s much more likely that the advertiser is citing the British television soap opera Crossroads, set in a motel near Birmingham, England. It was originally broadcast on the ITV network between 1964 and 1988 before being revised briefly in 2003. Wally Sopper was a peripheral character in the soap, fond of concocting abstruse money-making schemes. He appeared in the series during the early to mid-eighties.

  89 Thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger around 1935. In it, Schrödinger attempted to illustrate what he saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics when it is applied beyond atomic or subatomic systems. The experiment proposes that a live cat be placed in a hermetically sealed steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. Also in the chamber is a small amount of a radioactive substance. If an atom of the substance decays, a relay mechanism trips the hammer, breaking the vial and killing the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not any decay of the substance has occurred, and therefore cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the acid released, and the cat killed. Thus, according to quantum law, the cat is both alive and dead in a superposition of states. Only upon opening the box does the observer learn the condition of the cat. However, in doing so, the superposition is lost and the cat becomes either alive or dead. The observation or measurement itself affects an outcome and the outcome does not exist unless the observation is made. This is sometimes referred to as ‘quantum indeterminacy’.

  90 C&A—international chain store selling budget clothing. Founded in the Netherlands in 1861 as a textile company by brothers Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer. The store ceased trading in the UK in 2001 but continues to trade elsewhere in the world.

  91 Pangram—a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The advertiser here has constructed two pangrams.

  92 Hooke’s Law—named after the 17th-century British physicist Robert Hooke and first stated in 1676 as a Latin anagram. Hooke published the solution in 1678 ‘Ut tensio, sic vis’, meaning ‘As the extension, so the force.’ In other words, the amount by which a material body is deformed is linearly related to the force causing the deformation.

  93 Flesh-eating bacteria.

  94 (See p. 88, n. 85.) The binary in this advert translates as ‘32-year old computing geek seeks open-minded blonde twin sisters with very large breasts. Own mansion with pool an advantage’.

  95 Cytogenetics is the study of the structure and function of the cell, particularly chromosomes. Banding is a technique used to produce a visible karyotype by staining condensed chromosomes. Quinacrine banding (Q-banding) was the first staining method of banding used in cytogenetics and is done usi
ng the antiprotozoal drug quinacrine. Mitotic inhibitors are used during slide preparation to stop cell division and thereby increase the number of mitotic cells available for analysis.

  96 Perry Anderson (b. 1938)—historian, essayist and author. Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949)—cultural critic. Both are regular contributors to the London Review of Books.

  97 Weltanschauung—German philosophical concept of a world view, or wide world perception.

  98 Latka Gravas—fictional character from the ABC television sitcom Taxi (1978–82) portrayed by Andy Kaufman. Latka was based on a character Kaufman created known as ‘Foreign Man’. A. J. P. Taylor—Alan John Percivale Taylor (1906–90), influential English historian born in Birkdale, Merseyside.

  99 Auscultatory—of or pertaining to auscultation, or listening to the sounds of the body. Bouzouki—a stringed Greek and Balkan folk instrument. Assuming no triple word scores, or double letter scores, ‘auscultatory’ would score 17 in a game of Scrabble, whereas ‘bouzouki’ would score 23. ‘Sorry’ would score 8.

  100 Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli (also known as the Fonz or simply Fonzie)—a fictional character played by Henry Winkler in the US sitcom Happy Days (see p. 22, n. 11).

  101 Marks & Spencer—UK chain department store.

  102 See appendix.

  103 10236 Charing Cross Rd., Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California, 90024. The original Playboy Mansion was at 1340 N. State Parkway, Chicago, Illinois, 60610. As such, the current Playboy Mansion is often known as Playboy Mansion West.

  104 ‘Jenny from the Block’—written by Andre ‘mrDEYO’ Deyo, Jennifer Lopez, Jean Claude ‘Poke’ Olivier, Samuel Barnes, Lawrence Parker, Simon Sterlin, and Jose Fernando Arbex Miro. Performed by Jennifer Lopez and taken from her album This Is Me... Then (2002, Epic). Reached number three in the Billboard Hot 100. The song is one of a growing number where the theme juxtaposes the performer’s upbringing to their celebrity status. In Lopez’s case, her childhood in the Bronx, New York, is juxtaposed with her paparazzi-haunted life as a successful performer and girlfriend of Hollywood movie actor Ben Affleck. The chorus includes the lines ‘Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block’. Other songs following a similar theme are Faith Hill’s ‘Mississippi Girl’ (2005), Gwen Stefani’s ‘Orange County Girl’ (2007) and Fergie’s ‘Glamorous’ (2007).

  105 John Holmes (1944–88)—pornographic actor, also known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd. One of the most recognisable male adult film stars of all time, Holmes appeared in approximately 2,500 pornographic features (movies, adult loops and stag films) in the 1970s and 1980s, including at least one gay feature film and a small number of gay loops. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was marketed as being the largest in the porn industry (its exact dimensions are unknown, although both his first wife, Sharon Gebenini, and his last wife, Laurie ‘Misty Dawn’ Rose, both stated that Holmes himself claimed his penis was ten inches long, although Holmes’ incessant self-promotion often led him to claim it was as large as fourteen inches. Porn actress Annette Haven, however, has stated that Holmes never achieved a full erection, ‘It was like doing it with a big, soft kind of luffa’). Holmes also attracted notoriety for his involvement in the brutal Wonderland Murders in 1981, when four people were killed in a drug-related plot allegedly masterminded by businessman and drug dealer Eddie Nash. Holmes died from an AIDS-related illness in 1988 and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies, Boogie Nights (1997, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) and Wonderland (2003, dir. James Cox). Mu’umu’u—loose, traditionally Hawaiian dress popular as maternity gowns.

  106 Adam Phillips (b. 1954)—British psychotherapist, essayist and author.

  107 Acronym meaning ‘Big Beautiful Woman’. The phrase and its acronym were coined by Carole Shaw in 1979, when she launched BBW Magazine, a fashion and lifestyle magazine for plus-size women. ‘BBW’ is often used in personal ads and fetish websites.

  108 ‘You’re So Vain’—written and performed by Carly Simon. Taken from her album No Secrets (1972, Elektra Records). It reached number one in the Billboard Hot 100. Since its release, the song has been the subject of intense speculation as to who the subject is. In 2003, the head of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol, paid $50,000 at a charity auction to learn of the identity of the song’s subject. The condition of winning the auction was that he wasn’t allowed to reveal the identity to anyone else, save for one letter, ‘E’. Simon herself later added the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ as clues, which made Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty and James Taylor the main candidates (Simon had relationships with all three). Although she was married to Taylor shortly before the song was written, she has stated that the song isn’t about him. Mick Jagger sang uncredited backing vocals on the song. In April 2007, Warren Beatty gave an interview to a US journalist in which he said, ‘Let’s be honest. That song was about me.’

  109 Logan’s Run (1976, dir. Michael Anderson)—film based on the dystopian novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, in which the population is controlled by killing people as they reach the age of thirty (‘the time of renewal’).

  110 Mekon—ruler of the Treens and arch-enemy of Dan Dare.

  111 ‘Superheroes of BMX’—written and performed by Mogwai. Taken from their album 4 Satin (1997, Chemikal Underground, Jetset). Cannock Crocodile—in June 2003, the Staffordshire town of Cannock (population: 92,500) was put on alert after numerous sightings of a crocodile loose in the local Roman View Pond. An investigation by the RSPCA led to the capture of a snapper turtle (later nicknamed ‘lucky’) although the cryptozoologist group CFZ (Centre for Fortean Zoology, based in Bideford, North Devon), concluded in a field study report shortly after the RSPCA investigation that the size of the beast in the sightings (estimated at between three and five feet in length) was far too large to be a snapper turtle.

  112 Abercrombie & Fitch—US lifestyle clothing brand specialising in casual luxury apparel for the early-twenties market. The model referred to in the advert could be Matt Ratliff, who is 6’1” and was chosen to represent the archetype of the A&F blonde-haired, sporty, youthful male consumer in many campaigns following his arrival to the A&F brand as the main face of their Christmas 2005 campaign.

  113 FriendsReunited.co.uk—online service aimed at reuniting old school friends, family members, work colleagues, etc. Dean Friedman, see p. 25, n. 17.

  114 Thundercats—US animated television series running between 1985 and 1990, following the adventures of a group of cat-like humanoids from the dead planet Thundera. Cheetara was the only adult female of the group until the appearance of Pumyra after several seasons.

  115 All Bar One—UK-based chain bar and restaurant.

  116 ‘I do believe, induced by potent circumstances, that thou art mine enemy’—from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, II, iv.

  117 Lee Hazlewood often sang with Nancy Sinatra. Elvis Presley began a brief, much gossiped-about affair with Ann-Margret in 1964. Kris Kristofferson was married to Rita Coolidge from 1973 to 1980. Jackie Chan is a martial arts actor. The final line of the advert is taken from Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ (written and performed by Kris Kristofferson), from his album Kristofferson (1970, Monument).

  118 Presumed to be taken from the Beach Boys’ song ‘California Girls’, written by Mike Love and Brian Wilson. Performed by The Beach Boys and taken from the album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965, Capitol). Reached number three in Billboard Hot 100 charts. Written immediately after he had taken LSD for the first time, Wilson claimed that the same LSD experience also created a permanent threatening voice in his head that would eventually lead to his mental illness later in life.

  119 Tizer—carbonated soft drink. Quavers—reconstituted potato snack.

  120 Baileys—brand of Irish whisky and cream-based liqueur.

  121 King Gustav II Adolf (1594–1632)—in Swedish, Gustav Adolf den Store. Founder of the Swedish Empire, he lead the Swedish armies as kin
g from the age of seventeen until his death on the battlefield in 1632 during the Thirty Years’ War.