If you’re anything like me, then you’ve noticed the pump at the petrol station that boasts ‘Super Unleaded’ and thought, what’s so super? Is it a regular unleaded by day, but by night….? Surely it’s either unleaded or not, in what possible way does ‘super’ fit into the equation? “Well it’s more unleaded, isn’t it?” If that’s the case, then where will it end? Why not create a range of products, going from Pretty Unleaded to Really Unleaded to More Than The First Two Unleaded. Surely this could continue until they finally arrived with Definitely Unleaded.
When I try to find out the actual benefits received from paying 10p more a litre, I mostly get vague answers like, “It’s nicer to your car…treats it better…cleaner.” I suppose it’s the motor equivalent of toilet paper. All the different toilet papers do exactly the same thing, but there’s a huge range in price and quality. On the upper end of the spectrum, you get ‘quilted’ sheets, presumably to make your bum feel like it’s going to bed. Indeed, the experience of wiping your arse can become so luxurious that you’ll be taking four shits a day just to feel like your anus is being kissed by money. And of course if you’ve got cash to burn, and want to truly feel decadent in your post-defecation process, why not just use a satin handkerchief or pashmina scarf. Perhaps you are driven by a need to express a socio-political statement, so use a gold bar or some traveller’s cheques.
As students, our house tends to opt for the cheapest excuse for bog-roll available. It’s not usually pretty; I once had to resort to using the label from a baked bean can. I speak from experience when I say don’t use anything laminated. For the smallest amount of money, the range tends to offer something that is either atom thin or sand paper. When going for the former category, you need to buy in vast quantities, as you’ll be using a roll at a time to avoid staining your hand.
It’s always good to be green, but I draw the line at recycled toilet paper. First of all, I’m naturally suspicious of processes I don’t understand, and the act of transforming a desk chair into Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is as mysterious as alchemy. I’d feel more at ease if they just called it ‘Magic’ and that we had normal bins and Magic bins. I’m uncertain as to what extent recycling can be used. Can you turn a teddy bear into a machine gun? I want to know what this toilet paper was before. Perhaps it was a children’s pushbike, the wing of an aeroplane, or a carrot.
What worries me most of all, is that things are recycled from the same ‘family’. So recycled toilet paper, was toilet paper once before. How many generations of sphincters had these humble sheets hugged? And how quickly does the recycling process take? Does the sewage system filter straight into a recycling plant, that works overnight to have those same sheets dry-cleaned for next day delivery, so the very same sheets could be getting familiar with you once again come Tuesday?
On the first way round, how soon do you think they know what trees will be used for what? They probably label them: Timber, firewood, Ikea, Harry Potter, toilet paper. It must be incredibly humiliating for these trees, with all their friends going to Sweden to live the good life, whilst knowing that their only purpose is to be stained by human refuse and rot in a septic tank. I wonder if they bow their trunks in shame, unable to ever look another tree in the bark again. :(
Friday 27 March 2009
Saturday 14 March 2009
Facial Foliage
I’m currently growing a beard. It’s official. I’ve made a conscious decision to grow hair on my face. It’s not as if I have any say in the matter, sure I can shave, but the hair grows regardless of any mental effort to stop. So I’ve decided to stop arguing with my face. You win this time, Beard. It’s been a constant battle since I was about 16. I even like to think of my razor as a tiny sword.
Admittedly, when I was 16, my face was putting up a bit of a pathetic fight. A fight that I wanted to lose. Because every boy at 16 just wants some fur for his top lip. He wants to look more mature, but you can’t really grow anything worth boasting about. If you try to sidle down to the breakfast table, pluck up your collar and ask the family, “Notice anything different about me?” They’ll probably think you forgot to wash your face.
I remember when going to college though, I found out that this wasn’t entirely true. There were exceptions. Boys with all the maturation of a thirty year old, sporting full tramp beards. I used to look at these boys in wonder. They weren’t really boys at all, but Manly idols. How did this happen?
Perhaps young Jimmy was walking to school when he noticed a tear in a hedge. A hedge that had always seemed so ordinary and unnoticeable. But then he remembered what Old Man Jenkins had whispered to him after Jimmy had finished mowing his lawn in exchange for lemonade, “Take the uncertain path…look out for hedges,” and for some reason “crazy golf.” But at this same time, he remembered what his parents had told him on the first day of school, “Stick to the roads…stay away from the hedges,” and when he had asked why, they had looked at each other with a deep sense of knowing, and his father said, “Just because…damnit.”
Now once that something had been forbidden, there was no turning back for young Jimmy, and so through the hedge he went and fell head first into a vat of testosterone. There really is no other explanation.
Admittedly, when I was 16, my face was putting up a bit of a pathetic fight. A fight that I wanted to lose. Because every boy at 16 just wants some fur for his top lip. He wants to look more mature, but you can’t really grow anything worth boasting about. If you try to sidle down to the breakfast table, pluck up your collar and ask the family, “Notice anything different about me?” They’ll probably think you forgot to wash your face.
I remember when going to college though, I found out that this wasn’t entirely true. There were exceptions. Boys with all the maturation of a thirty year old, sporting full tramp beards. I used to look at these boys in wonder. They weren’t really boys at all, but Manly idols. How did this happen?
Perhaps young Jimmy was walking to school when he noticed a tear in a hedge. A hedge that had always seemed so ordinary and unnoticeable. But then he remembered what Old Man Jenkins had whispered to him after Jimmy had finished mowing his lawn in exchange for lemonade, “Take the uncertain path…look out for hedges,” and for some reason “crazy golf.” But at this same time, he remembered what his parents had told him on the first day of school, “Stick to the roads…stay away from the hedges,” and when he had asked why, they had looked at each other with a deep sense of knowing, and his father said, “Just because…damnit.”
Now once that something had been forbidden, there was no turning back for young Jimmy, and so through the hedge he went and fell head first into a vat of testosterone. There really is no other explanation.
Saturday 7 March 2009
I didn't mean that
For me, predictive text is the way to go. It’s come a long way since it was first introduced, and has a respectable dictionary. However, it has one glaring oversight. Something myself and my housemate Sarah Jane Chambers noticed whilst sipping on scones. It doesn’t have ‘fuck’. Or any other expletive, for that matter. It is totally innocent, apparently.
If I want to write ‘fuck’, it suggests ‘dual or duck’. Name me one person who doesn’t live in the country that will use either of those words more than ‘fuck’. It can’t be done. Fact. Now stop thinking.
As much as it does miss out a vital part of my vocabulary, it does also make sense. It protects the more easily offended from being asked, “Did you mean, ‘fistfucker’?” You may be intending to send a perfectly honourable text to one of your family members, but instead of saying “Hey aunt!”, accidentally say “Hey cunt!”
So you have to go back to typing in the letters yourself, for those crucial curses. The only problem is, I often forget to turn the predictive text back on, and carry on unwittingly, sending out texts like ‘Gdw gmw wmt dmgmg?’ for the rest of the day.
Check out Bill Bailey's song about the problems with texting.
Another problem with using predictive text is that you don’t always use the punctuation you had intended. This can have a big impact on the meaning, and dangerous if you’re in the early part of a relationship and are asked a direct question. I was once asked by text “do you miss me?” Now this is the first time she had asked this question. It’s one of those more vulnerable moments when you open your heart to someone, and say, kiss or cut me. I wanted to end my response with a love affirming, “miss you!” I text back immediately to reassure her, but went wrong. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but I instead ended with the challenge, “miss you?”
This was less love affirming than it was relationship ending.
I’ve become more of a fan of the exclamation mark of late. It suggests positivity and energy. However, I do draw the line at using them to ‘enhance’ a joke. I believe it does not have this quality. However, this is not a unanimous view. One not shared by an older generation. You see it worst when your parents join facebook to share comments! Make unfunny, parent jokes! Like, you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!
They seem to think the exclamation mark has some inherent comedy value, which will transform their shitty little aside to comedy gold. Every time I see that exclamation mark, I think of their face, a prize of glee, their eyes wide with farcical madness, barely able to contain their own laughter as they add the punctuation, and now as they see it for themselves, well they’ve never seen anything so funny. And then for a wild second it occurs to them, how could they make this funnier? No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly. But already their right hand is holding down the big shift key, and their left is edging guiltily towards the ‘1’. It hasn’t even been entered, but already the suspense is too much. Their face begins to crack as sharp and shallow breaths are taken, and then the finger comes slamming down, crashing through the keyboard, lodging the ‘1’ into a permanent state of ‘pressed’. The !!s file one after another, replicating like chromosomes in mitosis. An endless stream, a parade of mirth in symbols. The laughter is coming thick and fast now and the parent is struggling to find breath. He has never laughed this much in his life. It is unbearable. He has to leave, but his eyes hold fast, as if in a trance; there is no looking away. The joyous hiccups have turned to uncontrollable wheezing to epileptic fit. The eyes are bulging and the tongue drying up. He clamps his jaw in order to stop himself, but succeeds only in smashing his teeth like dishes, the shards of which he breathes in, slicing his lungs into wet pillowcases. He dies a bloody and unfunny death.
May this be a warning.
If I want to write ‘fuck’, it suggests ‘dual or duck’. Name me one person who doesn’t live in the country that will use either of those words more than ‘fuck’. It can’t be done. Fact. Now stop thinking.
As much as it does miss out a vital part of my vocabulary, it does also make sense. It protects the more easily offended from being asked, “Did you mean, ‘fistfucker’?” You may be intending to send a perfectly honourable text to one of your family members, but instead of saying “Hey aunt!”, accidentally say “Hey cunt!”
So you have to go back to typing in the letters yourself, for those crucial curses. The only problem is, I often forget to turn the predictive text back on, and carry on unwittingly, sending out texts like ‘Gdw gmw wmt dmgmg?’ for the rest of the day.
Check out Bill Bailey's song about the problems with texting.
Another problem with using predictive text is that you don’t always use the punctuation you had intended. This can have a big impact on the meaning, and dangerous if you’re in the early part of a relationship and are asked a direct question. I was once asked by text “do you miss me?” Now this is the first time she had asked this question. It’s one of those more vulnerable moments when you open your heart to someone, and say, kiss or cut me. I wanted to end my response with a love affirming, “miss you!” I text back immediately to reassure her, but went wrong. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but I instead ended with the challenge, “miss you?”
This was less love affirming than it was relationship ending.
I’ve become more of a fan of the exclamation mark of late. It suggests positivity and energy. However, I do draw the line at using them to ‘enhance’ a joke. I believe it does not have this quality. However, this is not a unanimous view. One not shared by an older generation. You see it worst when your parents join facebook to share comments! Make unfunny, parent jokes! Like, you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!
They seem to think the exclamation mark has some inherent comedy value, which will transform their shitty little aside to comedy gold. Every time I see that exclamation mark, I think of their face, a prize of glee, their eyes wide with farcical madness, barely able to contain their own laughter as they add the punctuation, and now as they see it for themselves, well they’ve never seen anything so funny. And then for a wild second it occurs to them, how could they make this funnier? No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly. But already their right hand is holding down the big shift key, and their left is edging guiltily towards the ‘1’. It hasn’t even been entered, but already the suspense is too much. Their face begins to crack as sharp and shallow breaths are taken, and then the finger comes slamming down, crashing through the keyboard, lodging the ‘1’ into a permanent state of ‘pressed’. The !!s file one after another, replicating like chromosomes in mitosis. An endless stream, a parade of mirth in symbols. The laughter is coming thick and fast now and the parent is struggling to find breath. He has never laughed this much in his life. It is unbearable. He has to leave, but his eyes hold fast, as if in a trance; there is no looking away. The joyous hiccups have turned to uncontrollable wheezing to epileptic fit. The eyes are bulging and the tongue drying up. He clamps his jaw in order to stop himself, but succeeds only in smashing his teeth like dishes, the shards of which he breathes in, slicing his lungs into wet pillowcases. He dies a bloody and unfunny death.
May this be a warning.
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