Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (24 page)

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!

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.