Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

by Steve Lowe

  It’s a testing situation. One that has intriguing ramifications for the nation’s psyche. Critics of this education system point out that this cram-based learning fails to instill in children any “reading stamina” for whole books. Reading a book from cover to cover? No chance. Not even a short one. (They were fine with turning over the paper, but . . .)

  TICKETING HOTLINES

  “The bill for your $25.50 ticket comes to $46.99.” “Great.”

  TOAST, OVERPRICED

  There’s a lot of overpriced toast out there. Watch out.

  TOY CARS

  Are aspirational these days. They’re all big Mercedes and Audi TTs. Visit any toy shop looking to gift up a little person and you’ll find all the household names in the die-cast mini motor universe—Matchbox, Siku, Hot Wheels—wholly obsessed with premium automobiles.

  There’s seemingly a ban on ordinary cars—the sort most people drive, the sort most children might ever see. No Civics or Yarises or Focuses or Kias—or even any Saabs or Lexi (that’s the plural of Lexus, by the way). Toyota Prius? Not on your happy ass. The message: “Hey, I know you think he’s good, but sorry, kid, your dad’s a loser.”

  You’ll be falling over huge delivery trucks branded with DHL or UPS logos, but searching high and low for an ambulance. You can still get fire engines—except they have to be either 40 feet long with 18 retractable ladders and called Flame Tamer, or have TURBO written down the side.

  What next? Conservatories for dollhouses? Marbles made out of actual marble? My Little Gated Community? Doctors and Nurses could become Senior HMO Manager and Drug Company Rep. Simon Says: “Swarovski Rocks!”

  TRAILERS FOR PROGRAMS THAT ARE ON TV NOW

  An ad for a program advertising the fact that said program is on “next” or even “now”—that is, as soon as this trailer and the announcer announcing that the program is starting get out of the way, the program will start.

  Surely trailers should trail programs that will be on in the future, rather than those that are on in the present. We don’t think of that as a complicated point.

  TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN

  Interiors magazines tell you that September is the month to:

  •Decorate the walls with bird motifs.

  •Discover the beauty of stained glass.

  •Use summer’s harvest produce to make jellies and chutneys.

  No, it’s not. It’s the month to go to work/school/college, eat toast, drink too much, forget to do stuff, and watch some TV. Rather like October. And November.

  What do you mean you haven’t repainted the whole house yet this week? Didn’t you know that “warm, vibrant, and lively, orange is set to become next season’s hottest color”? Meaning that having a stylish house actually means having an orange house.

  Until, that is, six months down the line when—with your house barely free of the smell of orange paint—the same homes mag wags its shitty little finger at you and says, “Sophisticated, mellow, and organic, sage green is set to become next season’s hottest color.”

  What shall I do with my orange carpet? Burn the bastard in the street as punishment for it not being sage? My house looks like a fucking Tang commercial.

  “New looks for table linen”? Shove them up your ass.

  DONALD TRUMP

  The Apprentice supremo Donald Trump—and this is true—claims he grows those amazing trademark eyebrows on purpose. They are alpha-male stag antlers designed to intimidate opponents in negotiations. Okay, but what about the stupid hair?

  Big Don has a holiday Web site called—and this is equally true—www.gotrump.com. He also has a property Web site called www.pumptrump.org. Okay, he hasn’t. But GoTrump is real. In fact, we’d highly recommend listening to Trump’s welcome speech on the home page, where he shouts at you like an evangelical car salesman pumped up on sales after a sales seminar at a power-selling away-day: “There’s nobody better—there’s nobody even close.”

  Advanced megalomania—that definitely puts us in the holiday mood. Although we would be even more enthusiastic if they had animated the eyebrows.

  T-SHIRTS, INSANELY EXPENSIVE

  The turnover for T-shirts in the U.S. economy is now greater than for all other commodities combined—including food and oil. This is due to the strategy of charging fuckloads of money for them, even though, at the end of the day, they’re only T-shirts that cost approximately jack squat to produce.

  Not long ago, one could reasonably be expected to be an outcast from society for wearing a JOURNEY T-shirt. Not anymore, though—not now that they cost $70. What about a fake-aged AC/DC T-shirt—a brand-new T-shirt that looks like a faded 1980s tour T-shirt? A mere $69. Or maybe a fake-aged THE FINAL COUNTDOWN BY EUROPE T-shirt—a tad more expensive at $75 (because it’s about 8.7% more ironic).

  Some of these desirable items are produced by a company called, ahem, Buddhist Punk. An iron law of insanely expensive T-shirt making states that your company must have a silly name—a bit, you know, funky. (See Funky, the Word, as Applied to Anything Except a Musical Genre.) Top marks here must go to the company Maharishi. Christ, if you’re chump enough to give them seventy bucks, you can’t say they weren’t advertising the fact they could see you coming. You couldn’t give a much bigger clue short of calling your company Faker. Or Snake-Oil. Or Skank.

  Oh, but they’ve probably been also “customized” (someone has added a bad print of Hong Kong Phooey or Al Pacino as Scarface). Or even “deconstructed”—that is, with seams on the outside, or bits of material added to, you know, consider the workings of your T-shirt and unpack its very, erm, T-shirtness. “Deconstructed” T-shirts are the very apex of T-shirt design and are always—always—the work of major designers. M-A-J-O-R. People who don’t just design T-shirts but also do, you know, trousers, maybe even coats.

  Please understand that these T-shirts are very expensive—anywhere up to $200—because it takes a major talent to do this and only a major talent. Or a monkey. For fuck’s sake.

  TV BULLIES

  Television is only entertaining when we’re watching someone else’s lifestyle being torn to shreds with the brutal, yet oddly humane, efficiency of Orwell’s chief interrogator O’Brien.

  The main draw of TV’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watching judge Simon Cowell tear the contestants a new asshole when their Bryan Adams cover doesn’t live up to Cowell’s high standards. Sounding like a less friendly version of Waldorf or Statler from the Muppets, every week he drops cruel bon mots like, “If you would be singing like this two thousand years ago, people would have stoned you.” And all of that is still nicer than his weekly gay bashing of possibly-not-gay Ryan Seacrest.

  On America’s Next Top Model, not only must contestants conquer, er, top modeling challenges (Like walking while wearing clothes? Doing coke? Dating Rod Stewart?), but they must also survive the verbal assaults of lunatic Tyra Banks. She once brought a challenger who disappointed her to tears by screaming, “Be quiet, Tiffany! Be quiet! Stop it! I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this.” Yes, this is reality TV, but must that reality sound so much like an abusive marriage?

  Supernanny Jo Frost has got so carried away with the Nietzschean implications of her calling that she dresses up like a Nazi dominatrix. It’s a potent sight, but what kind of message does it send out to the kiddies? Maybe FX should show Supernanny Plus in which she administers some light, after-hours whipping to a daddy who can’t control his offspring.

  What we need now is a single program combining all the elements of ritual humiliation called How Do You Like Having Your Psyche Rearranged, You Fuck? An English headmaster could visit the homes of ordinary citizens and shout: “Your hair is crap. Your house is puke. Your clothes are trash. Your kids are shit. You smell appalling. And I’m afraid, my dear, that you don’t seem to know the first thing about making love. Here’s a loaded pistol. Do the decent thing, there’s a good soldier.”

  U

 
ÜBER, THE PREFIX

  As in übertrendy, über-cool, über-stylish, and, of course, übergruppenführer. The question we must always ask ourselves before embarking on any leisure activity is: Will this put me in a higher social position than my contemporaries? Otherwise, what’s the point? After all, it’s not a game.

  These days, you can read an überhip novel surrounded by übercool kids in an überflash drinking environment. You can mix it on the high-end ski slopes with the überstylish powder hounds. Or dine at New York’s übertrendy Tenjune restaurant, spending a hundred bucks a head (which is in no way überpriced). Or you can leave cattle class and use private hospitals to become an überconsumer.

  Surprisingly often, cutting an überdash means flashing some übercash. And, logically, if one is not an über then one is, dismally, an unter. You never pay a hundred bucks a head for your dinner? That’s sad. It’s probably not your fault, but you really do deserve to be enslaved. Are there any railways that still need building?

  Stratifying humans into unders and overs seems a satisfyingly simple way of dividing society. And don’t we all like simple überideas?

  UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS

  Everyone thinks we should “understand business.” We have no business not understanding business. We should very much make it our business. To understand business. Personally, we make it our business scrupulously to avoid business. But that’s our business.

  One man out to make you—YES YOU!!!—understand business is Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money. Well, we think he wants to help us make money. He opens every episode by shouting “Let’s try to make some money!” But as we wrote, he does SHOUT THIS VERY LOUDLY, which is also how he communicates EVERY OTHER THOUGHT HE HAS!!! So he could also be trying to make us deaf. BOOO YAAA!!!

  Cramer made between $50 and $100 million as a hedge-fund manager in the 1990s, so in theory he should understand business. (See Hedge-Fund Boys.) And yet, according to many other Wall Street wizards, he’s a crock. Alan Abelson of Barron’s slammed Cramer in a 2004 column, showcasing how one batch of the Mad Money man’s stock picks tanked by an average of 90%.

  There was also a Web site run by Cramer critics called CramerWatch.org, where not only did they track the failure of many of Mr. Cramer’s stock picks, but they also offered up their own picks by Leonard the Wonder Monkey. Who was a simian. And often just as accurate at picking stocks to invest in.

  One thing we have learned about business came from watching The Apprentice, and that is that even people who are really into business don’t understand it. Most of the contestants haven’t got a fucking clue. About anything. Set them a simple task like “go and buy these items for the cheapest price” and they will flap around like an elderly person suddenly commanded to drive Formula One. Unless we’re missing something and one key business skill involves being fairly average but shouting loudly that you are, in fact, not average. “Average? Me?! Get out of here! I’m the best. I know I’m fucking everything up and no one likes me, but I’m the kind of guy who gets things done and can get on with anybody. Buy stuff, people! Buy stuff!”

  UNITED NATIONS, THE

  See Vox, Bono.

  UNNECESSARY DIGITIZATION

  In Europe, Virgin’s new Pendolino trains have special tiny screens set into the carriage walls just above the windows, telling you whether seats 045 and 046, say, are AVAILABLE or, conversely, NOT AVAILABLE.

  The screens are tiny. The carriage lights are set into the wall just above them—and thus shine directly over the faint LED lettering, which sits on/merges into a light gray-green background. Even with 20/20 vision, you have to squint to read them, leaning in right over the top of the double seat.

  So maybe a more efficient, faster, easier method of discerning whether a seat is AVAILABLE or NOT AVAILABLE would be to look at the seat and decide whether there is someone sitting in it. (Or, conversely, NOT SITTING IN IT.) Old-fashioned, perhaps, but less likely to require the utilization of binoculars.

  Digital scales, meanwhile: The only people who need those are drug dealers.

  UNNECESSARY GREETING CARDS

  “For my wife . . . On Mother’s Day.” Such messages are presumably intended to carry the subtext: “For my wife on Mother’s Day, because, as you know, I tend to think of you as my mother.” Or maybe: “Because I love you in much the same way as I love my mother.” In either case, don’t expect a nice dinner.

  We didn’t realize Mother’s Day meant giving cards to every woman in our acquaintance. How about: “For my childless female friend, the one without kids, on Mother’s Day, because you have the potential to be a mother—which is a great and beautiful thing. (Even though you do, as we think we have discussed before, get a bit irritating when you’ve had too much to drink.)”

  “Congratulations on your divorce.” Presumably comes with the message: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / You didn’t get the house / But you did get the canoe . . .”

  Not forgetting:

  “Congratulations on your teeth whitening.”

  “Happy Prom, princess.”

  And, of course: “Commiserations on the death of the life partner you stole from me. Rot in hell, you fuck.”

  UNOFFICIAL “SPONSORS” OF SPORTING EVENTS

  For shame! Apparently there are companies out there that want the honor of sponsoring the Super Bowl or World Series without the glory of paying nearly $3 million per spot. So marketers for these products roll out campaigns aimed to capitalize on these sporting events . . . without specifically mentioning the event.

  Since Coors and Anheuser-Busch already had the exclusive NFL contracts, Miller created its own Super Bowl tie-in in 2007 by running a contest offering a visit from NFL Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson to the winner’s house for the “Feb. 5 game.” Why, let me check my calendar and see who’s playing on the fifth . . . oh, look, it’s Super Bowl Sunday! What a coincidence!

  ConAgra Foods, Inc.—home to B-level food brands like Hunt’s Ketchup, Swiss Miss hot chocolate, and Jiffy Pop popcorn—took a B-level approach to NFL’s big game also, by hiring former pro/current commentator Boomer Esiason to hawk its food in ads that happen to run—wait for it again—during the “Feb. 5th game.” Integrated marketing manager Corey Saenz bragged about the scam to USA Today, saying, “What’s nice about Boomer is that he gives us NFL credibility without tying into the NFL per se.”

  Fair or unfair, at least second-rate beer and hot dogs deserve to be sold to football fans. They are the target demo. But toilet paper? Yes, says Scott bath tissue, which hired former Bears coach Mike Ditka to urge consumers to cut the danger of clogs during the “Big Game’s” halftime bathroom rush by using its easily dissolvable toilet paper. Well played, shit paper. Well played.

  The key to these unofficial sponsors’ success: euphemisms. None of them said the words Super and Bowl in the same thirty seconds. That was the fatal flaw in Bowl-O-Rama’s decision to promote its new Super Bumper Lanes during the “Big Game.” Those bowling lanes now belong to the NFL’s lawyers.

  U.S. VERSIONS OF UK REALITY SHOWS

  Dancing on Ice becomes Skating with Celebrities, what with the original being too hard to understand.

  V

  “VARIOUS THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE” LISTS

  Whole series of listy travel books convey the message: “Don’t die before seeing Borneo. For then, you will not have lived.”

  Or even the Finger Lakes! Look, we’ve seen the Finger Lakes, and we can honestly say we could have easily lived without seeing them. They were okay but, well, we haven’t been back—which kind of says it all.

  “Unforgettable Things to Do Before You Die”? Although there is not much point doing something “unforgettable” just “before you die” because you won’t actually have too much opportunity to forget it. Maybe a subtitle should point out that: “You Might Want to Do Them Awhile Before You Die, Otherwise Their Unforgettable Nature Might Be Somewhat Wasted on You.”

  Of course,
another way of saying “Things to Do Before You Die” is “Things to Do While You’re Still Alive,” which rather goes without saying, unless we are to assume that there are loads more boxes to tick off of “Things to Do After We Have Stopped Living.” The primary thing about these kinds of lists is . . . look, it’s not going to happen. And if it did happen, you would quite clearly, and quite tragically, have set about methodically experiencing life with the spontaneous zeal of a solicitor’s desk clerk catching up on invoices, which rather defeats the life-seizing object you are seeking to convey.

  I don’t want to die.

  VILLAGE PEOPLE, THE, NOT BEING GAY

  In 2005, the Village People’s lawyer protested that the whole gay thing surrounding the group was a travesty of the truth. The lawyer had decided the members needed a more “mainstream” image and barred inclusion of their songs in an upcoming gay rights documentary.

  This is a bit rich, seeing as their hits included “YMCA,” which said: “Get some man-love at the YMCA.” And “In the Navy,” which exhorted listeners to: “Get some man-love in the navy.”

  A little-known fact is that, after their first flush of success, the boyz tried to update their sound. The 1981 album Renaissance (and this is 100% true) saw them morph into a hideous electro-pop outfit, styled as New Romantics. We hesitate to suggest you look up the pictures on the Internet, so just try to imagine, instead of the Cop, the Indian, or the Construction Worker, a black Steve Strange with a mustache-goatee combo standing with his legs apart, crotch thrust forward, like . . . well, like a member of the Village People.

  And is this lawyer also maintaining that the New Romantic Village People weren’t gay?

  VOLUME OF TV ADS

  Too loud.

  VOX, BONO

  In the run-up to Live 8, Bono explained to the Evening Standard the full burden of his responsibilities: “I represent a lot of people [in Africa] who have no voice at all . . . They haven’t asked me to represent them. It’s cheeky but I hope they’re glad I do.”

  Cheeky? Not a bit of it!