Which, of course, isn’t in itself a bad thing. But while cultural commentators worked themselves up into a lather over this pseudo-feminism that seemed to be promoting gender equality in the young, the Spice Girls were shifting millions of records, bought by a newly mobilized demographic previously more interested in male pop stars. As a result, the legacy of Girl Power was a tidy pay packet for those who’d been involved in creating it, and a slew of unsuccessful copycat acts. In the meantime, the real battle of equality is still being fought – by people far less glamorous and wealthy.
Getting Celtic or Japanese Symbols Tattooed on your Back
Getting tattooed isn’t a pain-free experience, and for many years tattoos were badges of honour amongst slightly scary men who hung out in slightly scary pubs, recounting brutal anecdotes of fist- fights that would invariably end “and you should have seen the other guy.” They would have their girlfriends’ names permanently emblazoned on their forearms, unaware that this show of loyalty was unlikely to keep her in the relationship if he ended up serving an eight-year stretch for grievous bodily harm. But largely driven by high-profile celebrities such as Johnny Depp and David Beckham who made it cool to have dye injected into the dermis, the masses followed suit with millions of ill-advised tattoos which continue to embarrass their owners to this day.
While men frequently made the simple error of believing that they would love Linkin Park or the Manic Street Preachers in perpetuity, women were keener to adopt words such as “Strength” or “Peace”, but using Celtic symbols, or Japanese or Sanskrit characters, to make these statements seem more exotic and profound. Of course, the translations were rarely checked over with qualified language experts, and as a result thousands of women are walking around with “Engine Oil” or “Bilberry” emblazoned on their lower back by mistake. The rapidity with which lower-back tats became unfashionable as everyone rushed to get them done (nearly forty percent of under-40s in the US have a tattoo) saw them become known as “tramp stamps”. And worse still, you couldn’t remove your tramp stamp without further pain and additional expense.
Wearing Fashionable Shoes that didn’t Ruin your Feet
When we’ve already mentioned such crimes against chiropody as stilettos and platforms (see Teetering Around on a Pair of Chopines, the Renaissance Platform Shoe) it seems a shame not to mention footwear that was good for your feet and provided more than adequate ankle-support. But the utilitarian aesthetic of Doc Marten boots seemed unlikely to ever make them fashionable; in the decade following their invention in 1947, eighty percent of sales were to German women over the age of forty. Even their adoption by post- punk counterculture in the UK and USA wasn’t enough to give them mass-market appeal.
But the 1990s saw them become so popular that the people who had worn them to appear different suddenly had to jettison them, as hordes of pre- teenage girls snapped up new ranges of cutesy multicoloured DMs. This trend was mirrored by the newly found popularity of guitar music that had previously been bought only by a handful of floppy-fringed boys with emotional issues; suddenly everyone was listening to Nirvana, and traipsing around town in footwear whose soles were heat resistant to 80°C and provided superb protection against dangerous acids. (Not usually a problem in shopping centres.) A dedicated Doc Martens store opened in London’s Covent Garden at the height of the boot’s popularity, but in 2003 all production ceased in the UK as boys switched to ludicrously overpriced trainers, and girls abandoned comfortable if hefty shoes for daintier footwear that seemed designed to cut painfully into their heels.
Imagining that a Jar of Pesto will Transform your Culinary Abilities
Boiling up some pasta and covering it in a heated-up jar of ready-made tomato sauce to create a ridiculously quick meal was a lifeline for hard-working folk in the 1980s who a) were continually pushed for time, and b) couldn’t cook to save their lives. But the introduction of pesto onto the supermarket shelves was a further revelation, as pasta with pesto actually requires less work than pasta with sauce (because the pesto doesn’t require heating up). And for a few short years, the meal managed to combine ridiculous simplicity with an incredibly thin veneer of sophistication.
Citizens of Genoa would probably shrink back in horror at a jar of mass-produced pesto sauce, but we truly believed that we were eating authentic Italian food, and that chucking a tablespoon of the stuff on top of some overcooked rigatoni actually marked us out as talented cooks. Student boys attempted to impress student girls by serving up pasta with pesto, perhaps with a bit of extra grated parmesan cheese, as their pièce de résistance. But it didn’t take long for the pesto flourish to fail in its attempt at seduction. Your guest quickly realized that the cooking process was less involved than preparing a ham sandwich, and in many ways not nearly as appetizing. Pesto would henceforth remain in the cupboard for emergencies only – and if you wanted to impress, you’d definitely have to get more than one pan out of the cupboard.
Sudoku Puzzling and Viagra Guzzling: The 2000s
We’re barely emerging from the first decade of the twenty-first century, so it’s hard to be objective about our recent behaviour. We’re still wild about Harry Potter, but it’s hard to know whether future generations will look back and wonder why we fussed over a fictional boy-wizard. The Ugg boot – a piece of footwear that women would have spurned in the mid-1980s – may well have returned to being a fashion faux pas by the time this book is published, but it’s hard to know for sure. But other new traits are probably with us for good – say, a couple having their mobile phones sitting next to their plates while eating in a restaurant, what with the telecommunications boom showing no signs of slowing, and humans showing an inexhaustible need to stay in contact with everyone they know at all times.
More serious issues were also occupying our minds, and with good reason: the events of September 11, 2001 left us all wondering whether our lives would be similarly cut short by terrorist martyrs seeking eternal pleasure in the company of 72 virgins, while the melting of the polar ice caps and increasing frequency of freak weather events finally woke us up to the idea that global warming might not be such a far-fetched notion after all. But that didn’t stop us attaching a singing fish to our wall. Speaking of which…
Attaching a Singing Fish to your Wall
An entertainer who only has one string to his bow – say, a tap dancer who only knows the moves to “Putting On The Ritz”, or a magician who can only make digital watches disappear – will quickly find their limited skills adversely affecting their careers. An act that might initially seem impressive and diverting will quickly become monotonous, repetitive and irritating – which is exactly the experience suffered by anyone who owned a Big Mouth Billy Bass. If there was ever something comical about a mechanical, rubbery fish singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, said humour had a brutally short lifespan and has long since been forgotten by those who experienced it. But the fish couldn’t be taken back to the shop because, despite being profoundly annoying, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
It made its first appearance in niche sports stores in the USA in April 2000, and was soon selling in huge quantities to people who had never previously considered attaching a fish to their wall, let alone one whose vocal repertoire extended to one Bobby McFerrin number. But this was not a gift that kept on giving, and by the end of the year some were changing hands on eBay for under a dollar, while others failed to change hands at all. Dr Robert Thompson, professor of media and pop culture at Syracuse University, described Billy as “off the scale in terms of taste”. If only we’d consulted such a doctor before making the mistake of buying one.
Boosting One’s Sexual Potency with Drugs Acquired on the Internet
There’s a reason that all drugs can’t be bought off the supermarket shelf and that a doctor’s permission is needed to get hold of them. It’s not because the doctor is a killjoy; it’s just that untrammelled drug free-for-alls aren’t a particularly good idea – not least because stupid people migh
t decide that the more medicine they take, the more beneficial the effect, and start gulping them as if they were breath fresheners.
But the Internet started to make prescriptions passé. Following the marketing of Viagra in the mid 1990s and its approval for use to treat erectile dysfunction in 1998, men were faced with the problem of having to admit that they had erectile dysfunction in order to benefit from the new treatment. And being proud, slightly vain characters, they didn’t want to confess this to anyone other than a stranger operating a dodgy drug-selling website on the other side of the world. This had two effects: thousands of under-the-counter drugs winging their way across the globe in plain brown packets, and a massive proliferation of junk email. Of the millions of such emails, it only required a tiny percentage to yield orders – and even now, scarcely a day goes by without someone calling themselves something like Hamstring C Semifinalist sending us a note urging us to extend our manhood. Whether we have a manhood or not.
Attempting to Rid the Body of “Toxins”
Here’s some health advice included with this book at no extra cost: don’t drink quite as much alcohol; cut back on processed food; eat more fruit and vegetables; don’t spend all your free time slobbing on a sofa and working your way through successive boxes of chocolates. This is basic common sense, of course – but these rules, tarted up with jargon and repackaged in a white coat, thick-rimmed spectacles and a clipboard, were suddenly flying off the shelves in the early 2000s in the form of a range of so-called “detox” books that promised to help you “expel toxins”. With svelte celebrities lending their wholehearted support, a huge industry quickly grew up around detox diet plans, despite the absence of scientific evidence that they detoxified you in any way.
It might seem churlish to complain about any movement that promotes healthy living, even if that advice essentially boiled down to “be more healthy”, but there were extensions of the detox movement that weren’t quite so benign; such as the dangerous suggestion that “water fasting” was beneficial. Ranges of detox products such as teas were widely sold, and at the height of the craze, credulous health-freaks would have bought microwavable sausages if they had the word “Detox” emblazoned on them. Soon, scientists were speaking up and pointing out that the body detoxifies itself perfectly well already, thank you, and reaffirming what we all knew, deep down: there’s no magic solution to becoming healthier. You’ve just got to cut back on the burgers and booze.
Passing the Time with a Sudoku Puzzle
For some people, puzzles are a fearsome test of the human mind that is to be relished. Others aren’t so keen on the mental battle, but enjoy the familiarity and gentle routine of an easy puzzle in the same way that they might enjoy mowing the lawn. The brilliant simplicity of Sudoku ticked both those boxes; when they first appeared in newspapers in 2004, hardcore cryptic crossword fans were as attracted to the form as those who preferred Spot The Difference. The idea of Sudoku is to fit the numbers 1 to 9 into a grid of 81 squares, without the numbers repeating in rows, columns, or clusters of nine (see puzzle) – but crucially there was no maths involved, a fact trumpeted by newspaper editors who’d print “no maths involved!” next to the grid in the hope that people would have a go. And have a go they did.
The chap who is thought to have invented the puzzle back in 1979, Howard Garns, died long before the craze took hold, and he would have been surprised at the way the twenty-first-century media exploited Sudoku for all it was worth. Within a couple of years it had spawned TV shows, dozens of books and magazines, songs, electronic versions, a world championship and a three-dimension Rubik-a-like (see Becoming Obsessed with a Three-dimensional Hand-held Puzzle). But what the puzzle didn’t have going for it was variety, and despite attempts to inject new life into the old format (Super Sudoku, Hyper Sudoku, Killer Sudoku) it failed to stop people suffering from Sudoku overload, Sudoku boredom and, ultimately, Sudoku intolerance.
Trying to Find a Casual Acquaintance on Friendster.com
It’s not many years since “social networking” was a phrase that might be used solely by marketing executives wearing brightly coloured spectacles and standing in front of a flipchart full of similarly irritating buzzwords. But it has come to mean something beyond a mere Internet fad; its basic premise of “keeping you in touch with your friends” underlies almost every successful online venture, and the vast majority of unsuccessful ones, too. We’ve never been more in touch with our friends – indeed, it’s scarcely possible to be out of touch with them. But for the Western world, the website that first put the idea into practice – Friendster.com – is now a virtual ghost town, a space where friends could certainly keep in touch with each other had they not departed en masse to the place where the real party is (supposedly) happening.
An investor in Friendster.com revealed in 2006 that the site’s founder, Jonathan Abrams, created it as a “way to surf through friends’ address books for good-looking girls” – and it initially succeeded magnificently: in 2003 people flocked to look at flattering pictures of friends of their friends, and Google soon offered Abrams thirty million dollars for the site. Abrams declined, figuring that the site would go from strength to strength. But while it continues to be popular in Asia, people in Europe and America have lost interest; there wasn’t much intrinsically wrong with the website (after all, it ended up being superseded by MySpace, a far uglier offering) but, like a cool nightclub that suddenly and inexplicably falls out of favour, no one went there anymore. After connecting with your friends, there was nothing to do except go and connect with your friends somewhere else.
Going to Work on a Small, Foot-powered Aluminium Scooter
The scooter takes its place alongside the tricycle as the first personal transportation devices for children, allowing them to propel themselves across playgrounds towards other children who then squeal and run out of the way. But for a two-year period, the foot-propelled scooter, in a miniature, fold-up form, would be used by grown adults to whizz around the City of London, Manhattan, and any number of regional airports – transforming these areas into playgrounds full of people in suits who were old enough to know better.
The micro-scooter was invented by a former Swiss banker named Wim Ouboter, whose life-long interest in scooters was borne out of the fact that his sister had one leg 25cm shorter than the other. At the peak of its popularity it was being described as a “travel essential”, and picked up celebrity endorsements from the likes of Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams. But the fad wasn’t without its problems; during one boom period in the USA in May 2001, hospitals treated more than four thousand accidents in a month-long period, and in the UK the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents described the micro-scooter as being more dangerous than inline skating (see Rollerblading Rapidly through City Centres). It may have looked sufficiently like a toy for helmet-wearing to seem pointless, but it could nip along at 25mph and was perfectly capable of propelling you over the handlebars. Today, the micro-scooter has transformed from being “a great idea” to being “slightly embarrassing”.
Sporting an Unpleasant-looking Plastic Leisure Shoe
The popularity of the platform shoe showed that we can feel affection for unpleasant-looking footwear under certain precise cultural conditions, but no one would have placed any bets on love ever being shown towards a brightly coloured plastic clog. But during 2006 people suddenly began to sport Crocs, which had been aimed originally at boating enthusiasts and were made out of rubbery material known as “croslite”. They were quickly branded as a fashion disaster, but the company behind Crocs hit back – not by denying it, but by running advertising campaigns with the strapline “ugly is beautiful”. And by making a virtue out of the fact that they looked pretty unpleasant, they started to cultivate a motley crew of admirers, including Al Pacino, George W Bush, and a whole heap of roadies who suddenly didn’t have to take any socks on tour.
So they survived being criticized as hideous – but then they were attacked for a quite unexpect
ed reason: health and safety. Despite having been certified by the US Ergonomics Council and described by more than one happy customer as “comfortable”, they were suddenly accused of all manner of evils, from causing a build-up of static electricity to dragging children into escalator mechanisms. Regardless of whether the accusations had any sound basis, sales began to slump during 2008 – and the lack of activity today on both ihatecrocs.com and crocfans.com would indicate that the majority of people no longer care one way or the other about them.
Dipping a Marshmallow into a Chocolate Fountain
As if we hadn’t learned our lesson from the rapid rise and fall of the fondue set, we briefly dug in our pockets in the middle of the decade to hire chocolate fountains for parties: a waterfall of smooth, melted chocolate into which you could stick strawberries, pineapple chunks, biscuits, cakes, in fact anything that tasted good when covered in melted chocolate – which, let’s face it, is pretty much everything. “It turns every adult into a child,” said one enthusiastic entrepreneur, failing to add that it turns every adult into a 200 lb child with rotten teeth. Because if there’s one thing that doesn’t help you keep tabs on your calorie intake, it’s free-for-all dipping into a virtually inexhaustible supply of chocolate.
As with the fondue, there was also the potential of the “double-dip” transforming the beautiful chocolate fountain into a cascading pillar of germs and disease, which meant that eagle-eyed fountain police had to be on standby. There was also the issue of waste – not just the fact that you were powering up a device to pointlessly pump liquid chocolate around a circuit for four hours, but that when you were finished, some 10lb of semi-melted chocolate would remain adhering to the interior of the machine. Which was probably more than everyone at the party managed to consume over the course of the entire evening.
The Next Big Thing Page 16
