Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (19 page)

When Taiwan understandably hesitated, the
China Daily
newspaper painted President Chen as “bellicose” in his opposition to the “peaceful pandas.” The editorial ran: “Stubborn as he is, Chen has to face the reality: he may be able to block the entry of the panda couple but he cannot stop the Taiwanese people’s love for the pandas.”

Frustrated with some of the media’s coverage, Jan Jyh-horng, secretary general of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, argued that “pandas are not communists.” That is true. Pandas tend to fall into one of two camps: They are either instinctively in favor of bringing about greater redistribution of wealth by reform of the capitalist system from within; or they advocate a simple life based on anarchist collectives, which admittedly is communistic, but certainly not in any sense akin to Stalinist-style “communism.” How do we know this? We asked one.

Want to know how it felt? Very soft.

PANINIS

Panini was once simply an Italian sticker company selling packets of cartoon character cards from small boxes situated by the counter in a card store. Then it went into the cheese toastie market and really cleaned up.

It was so successful, in fact, that it overreached itself and ran out of bread, so it started to make its cool, continental snacks out of cardboard instead. It also didn’t have time to print the standard warning on the side of the packet: “Do not under any circumstances heat this fucker to 400°F as that is hot enough to melt the inside of someone’s head.”

In Milan, no one would serve you a Caesar salad panini straight from a lovingly sealed polythene bag that is now practically on fucking fire. Unless, for some reason, they hated your family. Hot leaves? Bubbling hot yellow sauce? This is not the Italian way.

Breakfast paninis with scrambled egg? Balls to them.

PAP PICS OF CELEB KIDS WITH THEIR FACES BLOCKED OUT

Here’s Angelina walking Maddox up to school. But look, we respect their privacy, so we’ve made little Maddy’s face all squarey so he looks like a victim of crime. But he’s holding his thumbs aloft, so he must be all right. Look at the caption: “Thumbs up—shows he’s happy.” See?

But should his thumbs have been pixelated, too? You don’t want his face growing up perfectly well adjusted while his thumbs turn into really weird digits, all warped by the strains of celebrity. Have the boy’s thumbs not the right to privacy?

Or maybe we’re missing something and celebrities just have children with really blurred faces.

PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE IN TWO YEARS

With house prices now being set by absinthe-crazed madmen throwing dice at each other, people are taking out 35-, 40-, even 45-year mortgages. But you can do it in two.

Saving pennies makes dollars, so if you save a lot of pennies, well, there you go, you’ve paid off your mortgage. It’s all about tightening your belt here and there. To the point where your waist measurement is the same as your shoe size.

Money-saving tips in these kinds of books include stopping smoking (they all add up, and are bad for you anyway), not buying coffee (instead, go to places where they give you free coffee), and, if you must buy things, getting them on the Internet (it’s slightly cheaper!). Be careful, though. One top tip warns: “If foraging or looking for food in the wild, make sure you properly identify safe foodstuffs.” So try to avoid toadstools and deadly nightshade if you can. The road to early mortgage repayment is full of victims who, rather than shedding the dark cloak of mortgage, had their stomach pumped after munching the wrong kind of toadstool.

But even this is amateur child’s play to the King of the Saving of the Pennies, financial writer Cliff D’Arcy. If saving pennies were a sparky young lady with excellent conversation, he would be her Mr. D’Arcy, Cliff D’Arcy. He’s the sort of guy who thinks lying down in a darkened room is wasteful.

In July 2006, Mr. D’Arcy announced in a promotional e-mail sent out by popular financial Web site the Motley Fool that he was about to embark on a period of “Extreme Budgeting”: “In January of this year, my discretionary spending came to less than $15, which is a new personal best . . . [Now] I plan to steer clear of alcohol, cigarettes, drinks and snacks, fast food and takeaways, with my only treat being a weekend newspaper or two . . . I appreciate that extreme budgeting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, because it is a tough test of willpower.”

Speaking of tea, Mr. D’Arcy signed off: “I’m off to have a nice cup of tea, which is my only vice during my (financial) detox month!” Presumably reusing the bag for the twentieth time. Possibly a bag that came from the Red Cross.

Putting aside minor worries that money is just a chimerical, abstract way of exchanging goods, services, and human effort, and that this might be an utter waste of miserable time that involves actively hegemonizing yourself with the mores of Mammon, I have created my own “Very Extreme Indeed and Certainly More Extreme Than the Motley Fool’s, Which Isn’t Extreme at All . . . In Fact They Are Just Pussies: I Could Pay Off My Mortgage in Three Months, No Bother—What Do You Think of That? Budget.”

Take all of the measures we have listed here and you could be saving—quite literally—in the region of $200 or even $300
every single year:

1.
Swap credit card and utility companies to get the best deals. Switch companies anything up to four or even five times a day. By really staying alert, you can save well over a whole entire dollar each and every week. Some people might argue that if you expended the same amount of effort working, you would make considerably more, but screw them. They don’t know.

2.
Don’t piss your money up against a wall. I get tired of endlessly telling people that if they keep going to bars, buying beer, and generally enjoying themselves, they will inevitably have less money than they might otherwise have had. Why can’t they just suck on the juicy beer mats provided at the bar? Money’s going in one end and getting pissed out the other. Unless you can find me someone who will pay for piss, I’m not interested. And you won’t. Because that doesn’t happen. A piss merchant, buying and selling piss—it’s a fucking stupid idea. (If you do ever come across somewhere with a piss merchant, let me know.)

3.
You should always—
always
—only use financial products you’ve never heard of. If you’ve heard of an ISA, you need a cash ISA. If you’ve heard of a cash ISA, you need a mini cash ISA. If you’ve heard of a mini cash ISA, you need to call the Bank de Bank, Zurich, and ask for Juan. Say you need “a dirty one.” The code word is “
flaps.
” You’ll also be wanting a PEP, a PAP, the PUP, and a PARP. Don’t forget to claim your allowances for those, either, like some sort of ass-clown.

4.
Boil up some grass to make grassy stew. Eat stuff out of bins.

5.
Sell your toenails on eBay (what are they actually
for,
anyway?).

6
. Never. Ever. Do. Anything. Ever. At all.

7.
Help us.

8.
Kill yourself. There’s no surer way to spend less than being dead. As a bonus, any insurance policies you hold will be paying out like a fruit machine with three triple bars on hold—not that we’d know about that, not risking our precious pennies on such atrocious frivolities. Irony is free—so treat yourself to a highly poignant death by smashing your brains open against the window of your bank. (If you bank online—which we would advise; there are some great deals out there—just go to the nearest branch of the bank of which your online account supplier is a subsidiary.) Now, for insurance reasons, it needs to look like an accident. You’ll need a big run-up to get enough force to kill yourself, so start from the other side of the road while looking down the street and smiling and waving into the distance, as if you have just seen an old friend or acquaintance and have become distracted. Just keep running until you hit the bank and hopefully die. Remember to run very fast or you won’t get enough force to kill yourself. No one wants to come around outside Citibank with blood from their own head smeared down the windows. Also remember, in the days leading up to killing yourself, that you can save money by not eating anything or turning on any lights.

PENIS ENLARGEMENT E-MAILS

Ca:nYo:uLea:veMeAl:one:I’mQu:iteH:ap:pyWit:hMyDi:ck TheWa:yIt:Is:AndEv:enIfIWasn’tD:oYouRea:llyThi:nkI’dWant:It:ToGetC:utOpenBySo:meBa:sta:rdSpamme:rs?

PEOPLE IN BEAR COSTUMES ON MOTORBIKES ADVERTISING STUFF

Happens more than you might imagine.

PICTURES OF CLUBBERS

As in, people gyrating at the camera used to illustrate listings and/or articles about clubs. You’d think that if people were off their faces, they might consider staying away from the camera lens, what with being off your face not usually considered to be a good look for your face. But no.

It’s been a staple now for about twenty years: loads of faces, off their faces. Holding on to their mates, waving a drink about, throwing their hands in the air. Why the fuck would anyone want to see this picture? We weren’t there. We probably don’t wish we had been there. If we are going to see pictures of people fucked out of their minds in a nightclub, please have the decency to make them members of the Bush family. Or high-ranking television personalities.

On the odd occasion that we buy
Dazed & Confused
magazine by accident—which, by the way, claims to be a journal of “ideas”—the photos in the back of some hip schmoozathon or other always,
always
include the same hairy, muttonchopped Japanese man holding a beer bottle. It doesn’t seem to matter where the party is—New York, Paris, wherever. He really gets around.

We don’t know what that’s about.

PLASTIC SURGERY FOR PETS

Joke corner: “My dog’s got no nose.” “Really?” “Yes, I had it chopped off because I didn’t like the way it looked.”

Cutting bits off your pet is all the rage, with some California vets even pointing to potential health benefits. Dogs with floppy ears need them clipped because they are more prone to inflammation from the “buildup of moisture” (oh, and they can’t hear as well—but they don’t know that). Docking a dog’s tail is highly practical because, according to one American Kennel Club judge, “people can’t grab the tail.” No, not if it hasn’t got one.

Dogs can even be debarked by removing two folds of tissue on either side of their larynx. When these folds come together, the standard dog makes that woofing noise we tend to associate with dogs. Whip his folds out and, when he goes to bark, he produces a whisper, like a bark heard far away, when (get this) he’s still right next to you! Obviously no one likes a mental nonstop barking dog, but a spooky whispering one that sounds like he’s down the road doesn’t feel like much of a step up.

POLE-DANCING LESSONS

The Australian Family Association became outraged when children as young as seven began taking “pole fitness classes,” in which they use poles to perform strengthening and flexibility exercises. Said the group’s spokeswoman Angela Conway, “There are plenty of exercise tools out there. Why choose a pole, the classic phallic symbol of the pornographic world?”

Fucking killjoys. Pole dancing’s just a great way of working out—and it’s fun! It’s like Pilates for women who think:
Let’s play at being sex workers!

Top pole-dancing teachers Polestars assure us: “Lessons are for fun, not professional training. All classes are a man-free zone!” This is a grave disappointment to many women who were actually hoping to spend their leisure hours swinging about for the delectation of drunken businessmen jiggling their hands around in their suit-trouser pockets.

Now, Polish dancing lessons—they get you really fit.

POLICEMEN CUTTING UP DEAD PEOPLE ON TELEVISION

Incessant.

POLITICIANS’ “SEXUAL AURA”

When George Bush paraded about the deck of the SS
Abraham Lincoln
in a battle flight suit in May 2003 to pronounce the war in Iraq “over,” many descriptions came to mind. For most of us, “hottie” probably wasn’t one of them—although it was for some maniac from the
Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan said she half expected Bush to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big S on his chest.”
S
for Shitty Shithead Shitforbrains, presumably.

In the 2004 U.S. election, Bush and Kerry tried to target the key undecided constituency of single women voters with their “sex appeal.” Surely they would both have been better served targeting “people with goose fat where their brains should be,” rather than conjuring up terrifying visions of them having a wet-trunks contest.

And really, what’s so bleeding studdish about Bill Clinton? Granted, he doesn’t have buck teeth or a goiter, but that doesn’t mean he’s someone you’d want to see in the buff, aroused.

Something has really gone wrong with your attitudes to sex if you want to whisper sweet nothings to Mike Huckabee or suck off Joe Biden. What next? Pieces eulogizing the blubbery intensity of Dennis Hastert? Ah, but when you meet him . . .

PORN, MISLEADING USE OF THE WORD

Porn gets everywhere these days. Even where it patently is not. (See
Calamity Porn.
)

We are now seduced with “gardening porn” (porn involving hostas), “car porn” (porn involving NASCAR), “gadget porn” (porn with Inspector Gadget), and “gastro porn” (belly porn). Anyone thinking one of these items would feature something of a stimulating bent might have been disappointed to see an older man—probably wearing a sweater—discussing the cons of arborvitae or prosciutto or something. That’s not porn. Or, if it is, only a tiny minority will get their rocks off over it.

It’s surprising they don’t trail the news as “topico-porn.”

And the weather could be called “Hot ’n’ Wet.”

Maybe it could be introduced: “Now here’s Peter with some hot fucking.”

PORSCHE SUVS