The Friday Thing 22nd July 2005 - The Laughing In The Face Of Terror Issue
TERRIBLY UNIMPRESSIVE EVENTS=
In what seemed to be a desperate cry for help, four seemingly non-suicide bombers failed either to bomb or to suicide in London yesterday. Armed police chased one man, seeking merely to console him, but he ran off sobbing into a ruined rucksack. Several fundamentalist groups posted messages on their websites claiming no responsibility for the attack whatsoever. 'These men are an embarrassment to our cause', said one, 'and we wish to point out we have never been affiliated with any of them. Except the one who at least broke the bus window. He's alright.'
Thankfully, and on a more serious note, no-one was seriously hurt, and two people were arrested, which is a definite improvement on last time. The fact that the shambolic - if successfully co-ordinated- effort was a mirror of the previous operation shook people up, but was also oddly reassuring: there was no imagination in it, nor commitment, nor expertise, and it suggested perhaps that the 7th really was the best they could muster. Sad-sack terrorists. We suggest that to maintain their deadliest weapon of surprise (surprise and fear, fear and surprise - two main weapons), any future cod-terrorist chancers should think a little smarter, perhaps taking note of TFT's terror tips.
1) Rucksacks are far too obvious, and give the Daily Star the opportunity to use the side-splitting headline 'RUCKSACK OF DOOM', which isn't really very terrifying. Use a large lady's handbag instead. In order to avoid suspicion, dress in women's clothing to match (there's a specialist place for it on Eversholt Street, you can get the big shoes and everything). London is a tolerant place and no one should look twice at you.
2) That 'bomb dogs' idea that was in that BBC 2 thing a few years ago . . . hey, don't dismiss it outright.
3) The detonators caused no casualties, but did create panic and a large-scale shut-down of the tube. Try the less-is-more approach to create maximum effect with minimum resources - eat popping candy on crowded buses, inflate bags of crisps and pop them against your hand, walk up behind people and shout 'boo'.
4) The tube system is riddled with mice. Mice carry some nasty germs. Surreptitiously scatter cheese about the platforms.
5) Remember, aim for total unpredictability. Instead of committing your simultaneous suicide bombing attack on the tube in rush hour or at lunchtime, commit suicide quietly in your own home in the middle of the night by taking dodgy acid in a room full of sharp things. They'll never expect that.
shockandbore@thefridayproject.co.uk
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YOU'RE A LOSER, BABY
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Advertisers seem to be taking the hint from Dove's daring and only slightly dubious 'Campaign for Real Beauty' angle and starting to tow the fatty line. Women are openly sobbing in the streets with gratitude that their natural, unsculpted shapes are now Officially OK according to a bunch of loud-mouthed bleeders in suits. Still, much as it's all driven by market forces and economic targets and oh-so-icky things of that ilk, it's a step towards that mythic Truth in Advertising and the day we can all eat a pie without wanting to turn ourselves in. Nothing to get your Dworkins in a twist over.
However, the new Special K ad leaves a bit of a dry, cardboardy, tasteless taste in the mouth, by virtue of its massive daftness. It's not unfamiliar territory - deliciously vague 'scientific research' suggests that you can lose weight by having Special K for breakfast, replacing 'indulgent snacks' with sickly-sweet Kellogg bars and er . . . well, no mention of lunch or dinner. It's the kind of nutritional non-advice that queen of all quacks 'Dr' Gillian McKeith would blow incredulous chunks over (if the spindly crone has actually got any chunks to blow). Familiar too is the fresh-faced woman who falls somewhere within the parameters of 'normal' - the most amorphous of classifications, whose meaning with regard to the bigness of women has been dithering about like an amnesiac shopping trolley for years. She's wearing an ill-fitting Butlins-esque red coat, suggesting that while we should applaud her fight against the flab, we don't really need to see too clearly the casualties of battle.
So Normal 12-14 Woman eats her breakfast beside her adoring little 6-year-old imp-child, who is drawing her picture. Then it starts to get distinctly disquieting. 'Mummy,' the creature grins, 'you're such a loser.' Mummy smiles. Then she goes to get her nails done. 'Dahling', sneers the manicurist through her nose, 'you're such a loser.' And so on until N12-14W passes a not-too-threatening manual worker type, who admiringly yet chastely leers 'loo-hoo-zerrrr!' as she strolls by. Of course no one who's within shouting distance of their right mind expects advertising to show realistic situations, but this is like David Lynch Does Diet. 'Loser' is rather a borrowed insult, more common in the US than the UK, so it's not quite so emotive as, say,'ugly stunted minger-beast'. But it's still, y'know, Not Very Nice, not positive, not the best way to march your target demographic down the aisle of Tesco. Then there's that clever new meaning - losing weight is good, therefore being a 'loser' is actually a Good Thing. See? 'You could lose up to an inch,' babbles the voiceover, 'from bust, waist and hips'. Yes! But er, an inch of what? Fat? Skin? Muscle? Sanity? What if you've only got three-quarters of an inch of stuff on your bust, waist and hips to start with? Can you carry over the rest to your thighs? Exchange it for Nectar points? What? No matter. It's another dodgy attempt to cash in on the desperation of people who will risk their health to be thinner. All you have to accept is that it's good to be a loser, and it's good to disregard such half-arsed advice and go and eat some fucking fruit instead.
Such a bizarre campaign makes some sense when you discover Kellogg's roots in grinding negative grit into the nourishing wholegrain of meaning, and of poking unwelcome fingers into the crevices of people's private lives, happiness and health. The inventor of the healthy, boring cereal was Dr John Harvey Kellogg, and when he wasn't preaching the undeniable benefits of good food, he was raging against the sins of masturbation, which he considered a 'disease'. He also put his money where his tight-lipped mouth was and performed circumcisions (starting a late 19th century trend which continues to this day), foreskin-wiring operations and cliterodectomies, the latter being the last resort to 'allay abnormal excitement'. That would only be after he'd advised the application of mild, soothing carbolic acid. A gentle, compassionate soul, then. His brother Will took over the corn-flake-making, bunged sugar on the horrid things and made the company a great success, to the extent that the mad doctor never spoke to him again. Although that may have been because Will was saying hi to his monster on a daily basis, just to piss him off.
The dippy, results-fixated advertisers behind the 'Loser' campaign doubtless have little awareness of their place in the line of cereal-related sanctioners of human misery and negaters of sexy sugary Fun. But some other enterprising agency is bound to notice that a long-skewed balance needs redressing, and start making risque ads giggling that 'research has proven' that ten minutes of vigorous masturbation after breakfast burns more calories than an hour of guilt-ridden flesh-pinching. With the slogan, blaring from buses and billboards, 'Kellogg's - the only cereal with cock.'
bowloffuck@thefridayproject.co.uk
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REPUTATION, REPUTATION
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Roman Polanski is one of film's more, as some smirking sources would euphemistically put it, 'colourful characters'. He was married to Charles Manson's famous victim Sharon Tate. He is famous for directing Rosemary's Baby (giving a cameo to fine upstanding Satanist Anton LaVey), thereby making thousands of women wonder if their partners had been craftily shagging them in their sleep. But he is possibly even more famous for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Hey, it was the 70s.
Polanski and the girl partook of champagne, Quaaludes and hot-tub hanky-panky at Jack Nicholson's house. (Jack was elsewhere wondering if his sister was actually his mother.) The director was later arrested and charged with rape of a minor, rape by use of a drug, and four other counts of young-druggy-sex badness. Then he nipped off to Europe before the sentencing hearing, and hasn't been back to the USA since. These things are not in dispute. What is in dispute, hotly and in a court of law, is that a grieving Polanski did on the night of his wife's funeral in 1969 touch the thigh of a Scandinavian woman in a restaurant. Such was the terrible allegation of a 2002 article in Vanity Fair. The TFT team are united in condemnation of the smearing of such a morally unimpeachable figure in this disgusting, prurient, thigh-touchy way. We hope that Polanski's unintentionally hilarious, um, brave effort to clear his name and unmucky his reputation will set an example to other wronged and distressed individuals.
1) Osama bin Laden sues all international television networks for showing him in 'an unflattering light' when broadcasting his videos. 'My beard was airbrushed, and my eyes made to look cold and psychotic,' he is reported to complain. 'You will all die like dogs.'
2) Robert Downey Jr sues E!Online for suggesting that he once took some Night Nurse when he was feeling a bit crock.
3) The families of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sue USA Today over allegations that the boys used to pick their noses and eat it.
4) Family of Jeffrey Dahmer outraged at same paper's suggestion that the predatory cannibal used neither a fork nor a napkin.
5) A distraught Paris Hilton tells court: 'I did not show my ankle.'
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FEAR OF FAILING: AN ENGLISH TEACHER WRITES
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Retired primary school teacher Liz Beattie has suggested that the word 'fail' should be removed from schools, like so much contaminated fish pie. 'If children at an early age decide, "I can't do school, I can't learn to read or do this maths stuff", they are losing an enormous part of their lives,' said Beattie. 'Some children who have a problem are being turned off the whole education process almost before they have embarked on it simply because failure is a thing they see quite a lot of.' The motion itself, the wording of which Beattie has said she doesn't necessarily agree with, booms: 'Conference believes it is time to delete the word 'fail' from the educational vocabulary to be replaced with the concept of "deferred success".' Cue seismic outbreak of giggling at the back, and some of those fake farty-noises you make with your armpit.
Beattie does have a good point about the power of words, how quickly and permanently labels can stick, and how important it is not to plonk figurative dunce caps on our future hopes. Self-esteem is anyone's most valuable resource, because most of the others you can acquire are useless without it. You suck up most of your ration before you're ten, and start to really need it at twelve when your body starts to turn on you. Being dismissed as a failure too early or too often can create miserable little sods who grow up into bigger sods who make other people miserable. But failure, as a word and a concept, has been tossed around less and less lightly in recent years - there are all kinds of ways to sugar that particular bitter pill. N for Near-miss, U forUnclassified - in fact, one student I know was tickled pink that an erratic two years yielded A-Level results spelling 'BUN'.
Of course you should discuss when someone hasn't made the grade, come up to scratch, achieved the minimum standard. You can - and should - point out that failure doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't make you useless or worthless or hopeless. But failure is not an indication that success will follow, that you'll catch your break next time - failure means you messed up now, though that doesn't preclude you being successful in the future. Blurring the distinction between those two is as dodgy and potentially calamitous as that unidentified leak coming from the boys' toilets.
The worst of it is that it opens the door for a bit of favourable grade-massage, giving those who persistently flunk a little more slack, and a little more, just to help them on their way. But coddling the foot-draggers at the bottom of the class can be to the detriment of the bright, well-behaved, eager students bouncing up and down going 'mememememe' whenever some horrid difficult question is asked. In theory there's enough success to go round, but it doesn't quite work like that. Start lowering the bar for everyone to step over, and somewhere at the top the brains start to sense their value - to the world and themselves -start to plummet. The idea is that they'll take care of themselves, being so bright and all. But if more attention is paid to the sad-sack underachievers and pen-cap-pingers, the smarties start to feel a bit like it's not really worth being clever and good if you're more or less ignored. And what's the use of working hard for your achievements if, relatively, the deferredly-successful get more props for being less good? Then they start to think 'fuck it', get a bit disillusioned, end up at third-rate ex-polytechnics, take dreary unfulfilling jobs, and die unloved in comfortable yet soulless semis with only their canaries to mourn them. I exaggerate, but the point remains. While I'm about it, those ex-polytechnics - rebranded as universities, so that people attending them could feel less like failures. Students still look down at almost everyone, so it's not such a big deal, but it does indicate that the idea of 'deferred success', if not the phrase, isn't much newer than that creaky library computer.
All else aside, it may be vital to put a big red pen grimace next to the concept of deferred success, because once assimilated into the language and the culture, it could spread like wildfire. Imagine: producers and commissioners being able to justify their crappy ratings by saying 'it's deferred success, wait until the spectacular season finale, folks'; councils letting rubbish pile up in the streets but not, technically speaking, 'failing' to remove it; and politicians being able to declare with impunity that the missed targets weren't really missed at all, and the figures will add up the next time we calculate them, and the occupation isn't actually a disaster, it's just never going to be declared a failure.
Oh wait.
muchfailingandgnashingofteeth@thefridayproject.co.uk
posted by lethalbuzzle @ 10:17 AM
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