by Steve Lowe
Previously, during the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the United Nations, he explained exactly why the institution was so important: “[I] live off some of the statistics provided by [the UN]—it gives [me] the facts so that when I rant I have something to go on. Without Kofi Annan saying, ‘You have an open door at any time, Bono,’ I wouldn’t have the same intelligence. You need to know what’s happening on the ground.”
People often wonder what the UN is for. It is, we now discover, essentially a fact-finding service for Bono, the world’s most important man, who has come here to save us, each and every one of us.
Bono is all around. Tonight: Thank God it’s him, instead of you.
W
WAITS ON EVEREST
Have you seen the lines? Fucking atrocious. Don’t know why they don’t hire more staff.
The fact that Mount Everest is “really high” need no longer be a barrier to having a fun day out for all the family. Like Legoland, but with less oxygen.
Everyone’s been up there, including the first double amputee and the first Playboy cover model. The ascent is now littered with abandoned oxygen bottles, soft-drink cans, and shredded tents. There are piles of human excrement; toilet paper is referred to locally as “white man’s prayer flags.”
Oh, and corpses. One in twenty people who go up don’t come back. That’s not because they like it so much that they decide to stay. At the time of this writing, 203 people have been killed on Everest since records began in 1922—11 of them in April and May 2006 alone.
Strangely, the waiting lines for Everest do not appear to make it completely safe. In fact, they might help foster the illusion that climbing the world’s highest mountain is a breeze. One experienced mountaineer recently told Radio 4’s You and Yours: “I was on the North Camp with people who had not worn crampons before.” Some people thought Sherpas were a type of van.
Others might be deluded that someone will help them to safety if something goes wrong. This is not necessarily true. When David Sharp had to stop after he became ill on his way down from the summit in May 2006, it has been estimated that as many as forty climbers passed by on their way up the mountain. A few gave Sharp oxygen or supplies, but none attempted to rescue him. He died.
In 1996, two Japanese climbers came upon a frostbitten but still conscious Indian climber slumped in the snow. Although the Japanese were carrying food and oxygen, they ignored him. Higher up, they passed two more stricken Indian climbers, one conscious and kneeling in the snow. Again, they passed by. One explained: “Above 26,000 feet is not a place where people can afford morality.”
How’s that, then? You’re just on your holidays. You’re not the first ones to do it. Although the late Edmund Hillary said: “On my expedition, there was no way you’d have left a man under a rock to die.”
When Hillary died in early 2008, much was made in obituaries of his noble refusal to admit that he had actually beaten his Sherpa companion Tenzing to the summit—until, that is, after Tenzing had died. Nobody admitted the possibility that maybe he wasn’t the first after all, but just waited until his old mate had croaked to claim he was. We’re not saying that this happened, only that it could have. The sly old mountain goat.
WASHED AND READY-TO-EAT VEGETABLES
A fantastic way for supermarkets to turn a bag of carrots at 79 cents per pound into a bag of scrubbed carrot batons at $3 per pound.
Batons? Don’t make us laugh. You couldn’t run a relay race using anything of that size. You’d be almost certain to drop it during the changeover.
WATER
If you are still drinking ordinary water, you must be some kind of freaking loser. We wouldn’t drink ordinary water—bottled or tap—if you paid us, which, apart from anything else, would be quite a weird thing to do on your part. We only drink “ultrapurified,” “restructured” Penta—“the Choice of Champions.” Too fucking right it is. This shit is scientific. Consider this blurb from the side of the bottle: “Top athletes use Penta for ultimate performance.” Drinking this stuff makes you run faster: fact.
“Busy mums and high-flyers use Penta to rise above the daily grind.” Anything endorsed by both athletes and moms—well, that’s got to be some serious shit. Which it is. Highfliers are usually total shitheads but, hey, they need water, too. And it’s reassuring to know that when some fucknuts on Wall Street are bankrupting Guatemala, they’re very, very hydrated and are therefore much more likely to piss their pants.
So what’s in it? Water! Yes, just freaking water—but more water than in old-fashioned water. That’s right, there’s more water per centiliter of our water than your Earthling water, you shit-water drinking fool. If you had 500 milliliters of your shitty water, and we had 500 milliliters of Penta, we’d have more water than you. Having trouble getting your brain around that? Try getting “Bio-hydrated”: It makes you alert, more intelligent, and (oh yes!) more likely to bang and be banged by fit people.
Not only is Penta “easy to drink” (how difficult can water get—unless it’s just been boiled in a kettle? But still, cool), it’s also “fast acting.” Because old water, while perfectly adequate for the Steam Age, is now just so frigging slow. If you’ve got broadband but still use taps, you’re clearly some kind of chumpy monkey. So get with it, monkey chump.
In fact, the next time your local water authority comes knocking, demanding to know why you haven’t paid the bill, tell them to shove their water up their ass, it’s shit.
WEATHERPEOPLE’S BABY TALK
The audience for most weather reports consists of particularly wee three-year-olds. This is why, if it’s “chilly out and about,” the audience needs instructing to “wrap up nice and warm.” If the sun’s coming out to play, we should all be careful because its rays can be very strong. And if there’s rain coming, the forecaster adopts a special pained expression: “Naughty, naughty meteorological system!”
Okay, there might be a case for wincing slightly when relaying how another record has just been broken; that, thanks to the wonders of climate change, we have just witnessed the hottest February ever and Vermont is aflame with burning bushes. But no, they get quite jolly over that sort of thing.
“Spits and spots of rain”? Fuck that.
WEB 2.0
Haven’t finished reading the first one yet.
WEB PORTALS
Judging by the home pages of AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN, the Internet is just one fucking massive, world-spanning copy of the New York Post.
Chirpy presentation; perhaps a bit of news, although not much; asinine lifestyle tips, consumer articles that aren’t really; sex tips; astrology (obviously); pictures of what’s hot and what’s not on the red carpet. Where are the conspiracy theories? The swirly graphics trying to sell you stuff? The good old-fashioned fully nude humping? Now that’s the Internet. At least you can read the Post in the bath.
WEB SITES, SUPERFLUOUS
Surely the correct response to an ad for a new chocolate ice cream is either “That looks quite nice—I might buy some” or “Nope, not for me” or total indifference. Not: “Thank God they’ve set up a Web site about this ice cream, so I can find out more information before committing myself to such a significant purchase.”
At the movies, on TV, and in magazines, ads for, say, new sneakers direct you to a Web site solely dedicated to moving pictures of those selfsame new sneakers—presumably in case you haven’t quite grasped the ramifications of the whole “there are some new sneakers on sale” message and need to research the issue further in the comfort of your own home.
Visit any of these sites and your screen will (assuming you’ve got the right plug-in) explode into a thousand swirling colors. For a brief moment, you’ll be dazzled at how your crappy PC can contain such visions of kaleidoscopic wonder. Then you think: Why? Someone spent ages making that happen. Why?
WORK EXPERIENCE
Employment arrangement that enables companies to shift their training costs on to
middle-class parents.
“WORK HARD/PLAY HARD”
“We need our weekends to get over our weeks and need our weeks to get over our weekends.”
So says the modern office worker, whose lifestyle is closely resembling that of Mötley Crüe in their mid-1980s Sunset Strip prime. Rather than, say, a stupendously unquestioning twentysomething couple who frequent a few after-hours bar-clubs following a week spent so far up their boss’s ass they could clean the inside of his hat.
The general public is working longer hours, drinking more booze, and drugging more drugs than ever before. We work stupid hours and then relieve the stress by hammering our bodies with toxins, and—unlike, say, a Victorian chimney sweep whacked up on gin—we think this equates to radical high living rather than just alternating between the twin modes of droney worker and droney consumer.
Soon, we will all be obliged to work and play so hard that the two will need to be combined. Young professionals will be standing around in All Bar One of an evening typing up reports on their Palm Pilots while chugging back bottles of absinthe and eating Marlboro Lights. Young workers will conduct presentations from the middle of the dance floor in Area, showing flow charts on a projector normally employed for “psychedelic visuals.” Staff appraisals will be carried out in the ladies’ toilets while racking out a line on the top of a filthy hand dryer.
The offices, meanwhile, will have bars and cigarette machines and people from the head office hanging around the leather-sofaed chill-out area whispering “powder?” Everyone will be living like Steve Rubell at the height of his pre-bust Studio 54 24-hour fuck-and-coke-athon.
This means that, before long, everyone will eventually crash out, go into rehab, come out, and be played by Mike Myers in the biopic. Which is a worry.
WORLD LEADERS, MESSIANIC
You might have thought that, given the choice between a messianic leader and a nonmessianic leader, most people would realize that the latter was safer by far. Sadly, though, some populations can’t resist the lure of leaders with delusionally apocalyptic ideas of saving the world by getting their God on, who think there is a big man up there telling them to bring about a clash of civilizations. Which is a shame.
The buildup of tension between America and Iran has been particularly intriguing in this regard, being a clear stand-off between one person who believes in the coming messiah and another who believes in the coming messiah—albeit, problematically, a different messiah.
The Iranian uranium enrichment program has focused attention like little else on the messianic thoughts of elected president, and world-renowned Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Just before announcing that Iran had gate-crashed “the nuclear club,” he disappeared for several hours to hold a mystic meeting with the Hidden Imam, an arcane figure who has apparently been hiding in “grand occultation” since the tenth century and whom Ahmadinejad believes will soon return to earth to embark upon a climactic face-off with all enemies. The subsequent all-singing, all-dancing show put on by way of celebration was great, a bit like High School Musical but with added uranium.
Luckily for everyone, nobody in the “infidel” West would ever dream of getting caught up in anything so dangerous and irrational as a clash of civilizations. Excepting, perhaps, the Bush White House. The born-again President W. has, after all, said that he invaded Muslim countries because his Christian God told him to. How do we know this? Because he carefully explained this to a gathering of Muslim leaders. According to Nabil Shaath, Palestinian foreign minister at the time, at a meeting in 2005: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did. And then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.” And I did.’ ” I would like to have seen their faces after that.
Bush actively considered destroying Iran’s capabilities with a nuclear bomb—the first used in anger since 1945. According to Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, senior military officials tried to remove the nuclear option, as such an insanely inflammatory act might not play well with the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. The White House insisted the option must be retained. Using information from his Pentagon sources, Hersh said of Bush: “It is his mission, his messianic mission if you will, to rid the world of this menace . . . He thinks he’s the only one now who will have the courage to do it.”
“Courage”: Yes, that’s definitely what he’s got. Responding to this, BBC Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen pondered that maybe the situation was not totally as dire as it seemed to be: “Are they telling [Hersh] the truth or is this some kind of disinformation operation?” he wondered. “It could suit the Bush administration for people to believe they are not rational when in fact they are.”
It’s sort of comforting to know that actions which appear irrational could, in fact, actually hide a deeper rationality. That’s much better. And, certainly, these guys are not usually in the habit of taking fairly hairy risks about that kind of thing. Except, perhaps, for the time when the CIA handed instructions to the Iranians about how to build an atomic bomb.
According to New York Times reporter James Risen’s book State of War, in 2000 the CIA began the really quite flaky Operation Merlin, an intriguing experiment aimed at throwing Iran off the scent that involved passing on nuclear secrets—Russian blueprints for a crucial component known as the TBA-480 high-voltage block—but first making them slightly wrong. It had worked with other weapons designs and so, the thinking went, it could also work for nuclear bombs—sending Iranian scientists down a dead end for years. It’s like a fun trick, but a fun trick that sort of passes nuclear secrets to Iran.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, what reportedly went wrong was that the CIA’s Russian scientist, a defector who lived in the United States, spotted the CIA’s intentional flaw and, rather misunderstanding the nature of his mission, added a helpful note tipping the Iranians off to the problem. It was, one could definitely assert, a mistake. But an honest mistake. We’ve all made them. Although ours don’t usually involve passing nuclear secrets to Iran.
WRAPS
A chicken wrap? With a lower half that’s basically one massive reef knot of pita dough? That actually admits on the packaging to containing just 20% chicken to 40% wrap? And that’s 20% by weight, meaning that—given the way chicken weighs more than wrap—the chicken peeking out of the top is essentially all the chicken anyone is getting in this chicken pita wrap? That is not, in any real sense, a wrap—in the sense of something being wrapped up in wrapping. That’s just wrapping with some incidental stuff nearby, as if by coincidence rather than intent.
Healthy Option pita wraps even make big claims to “have less stuff in.” Don’t fucking boast about it! Why not put a big sticker on saying: NOW CONTAINS NO FUCKING STUFF WHATSOEVER!
X
X, THE LETTER, AT THE START OF WORDS WHERE IT ISN’T
I see you, products incorporating Xtra or Xpress. If you think you’re saving letters by dropping the e, you’re actually using loads more than you need to because it’s all a bunch of nonsense. Remember this rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t get points for it in Scrabble, it will look retarded as the name of your store.
X&Y
The creation of Coldplay’s epochal third album was riven with pain and strife. One version of the album was scrapped completely as the band decided to start again from scratch. During the tortured process, around fifty songs were junked to make way for the final selection.
So, what . . . there were fifty songs not as good as the ones on the final album? Really? What, worse than that first one?
XANAX ADDICTS
What’s wrong with Hollywood people these days? Getting addicted to Xanax, Vicodin, Ambien, or other assorted mother’s little helps: It’s not very James Caan, is it? OxyContin sounds like a zit cream.
Certainly, on one level, an addiction to prescription painkillers does have logic o
n its side. If taking drugs is a way of killing the pain, then clearly the ultimate painkilling drug would be the painkiller. It’s kind of the mother lode. But the outlaw chic that drug use supposedly confers on the user is somewhat diluted by the “prescription” element.
Did Francis Ford Coppola and crew film Apocalypse Now on drugs that made your legs wobbly and your speech slow and slurred? They did not. They used high-octane cocaine. These were very much the go-getters of the age. Would they ever have made it up the river pumped up on Xanax? No, they would just have wobbled about in the hotel room for a while. Then they’d have had a bite to eat.
XENU
The Church of Scientology’s theory of Xenu, its highest level of wisdom, must be imparted only to those who have ascended to the zenith of human development (that is, people like Tom Cruise). This is because lesser people trying to process the revelations may die; that is actually the stated reason. But we will now reveal to you what OT (Operating Thetan) level Scientologists pay probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and devote many years of effort to learn. Be brave. Gird thyself, or turn away, damn you . . .
Basically, humans are made of clusters of spirits (or “thetans”) who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by an evil galactic warlord named Xenu. Suspecting rebellion due to overpopulation, Xenu—ruler of a galactic confederacy that consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets (including the earth, which was then known as Teegeeack)—duped citizens into attending “income tax inspections,” where he drugged them and shipped them off to Teegeeack. They wore clothes “which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute” (wrote L. Ron Hubbard), and were shipped in planes that were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, “except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t.”
Through the Scientology process of “auditing,” the thetan—who has lived through many past lives and will continue to live beyond the death of the body—can free itself of “engrams” and “implants” (the accumulated crud of ages) and thus recover its native spiritual abilities—gaining control over matter, energy, space, time, thoughts, form, and life. This freed state is called Operating Thetan.
