The Hell of It All (49 page)

Clearly I couldn’t go to the moon. Others had got there before me. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place; specifically between now and the deadline. What to do? In days of yore, I’d have been forced to use my imagination. Now I can simply crowd-source. In case you don’t know what CROWDSOURCING is, it’s a stomach-churning new media term obviously invented by a bastard made of piss. In this case, it means going online and asking passersby to suggest subjects for me to write a smattering of short pieces about, in order to fill up this page and send you away happy.

So that’s precisely what I’ve just done: it’s like pulling random
subjects from a hat, but with even less preparation. The following ‘search terms’ came from people on Twitter. I limited them to three words and no more. I’ve done my best to answer their ‘queries’, stream-of-consciousness style. I’ve done something similar on this page before, and make absolutely no apology for doing so again. Splutter all you want. Splutter till your lungs pop and run down your T-shirt. It’s my page and I’ll do what I like with it. Off we go.

Who invented meringue?
Someone bloody lucky because they got to eat the first one and come up with the name. In fact, it sounds as if they initially uttered the name during the first mouthful.

Which would make a good blanket law: all new food inventions must be named immediately by the inventor while they’re experiencing the inaugural gobful, to give a more accurate impression of what it actually tastes and feels like. After all, ‘biscuit’ doesn’t really describe the sensation of a biscuit. In any properly run universe, a biscuit would be called an ‘umch’.

Sky+ killed adverts:
No, it changed them. Many ads now contain bold captions that you can see even on fast forward. It’s DIY subliminal blipvertising, basically. Probably causes brain haemorrhages. It’ll all come out in the wash in a few years’ time, when we’re striding about like Cybermen, reciting the URL for confused. com like a flat mantra while blood dribbles out of our ears.

Greggs’ sausage rolls:
I once mentioned them in print and the next day their PR company sent a van containing stacks of freshly baked sausage rolls to my office as a surprise gift. The following week I prominently name-dropped Blaupunkt stereos and Sony televisions. Not a sausage. HA HA. NOT A SAUSAGE HA HA. Oh sod off, you’re probably reading this column for free anyway.

Smurf sexual reproduction:
The mating rituals of Smurfs were never fully explored in any of the novelty records or cartoon serials in which they featured, because the reality of Smurf sexual activity is too sudden and ugly to lend itself easily to either amusing high-pitched songs or light-hearted animation. Their playful characteristic twinkle in the eye is quickly replaced by the dull shine of brute instinct. They go at it like foxes, jack-hammering and shrieking
behind the bins for around 45 seconds, before mopping themselves clean with their distinctive hats and going their separate ways.

God/no God?:
No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!

Bastard mouth ulcers:
Yes, they are. The worst thing about mouth ulcers is that when you’ve got a nasty one it’s simultaneously too trivial to complain about and too annoying not to complain about. That’s why each time you open your mouth to complain about it, it hurts a little bit more, just to teach you a lesson. The CIA forced Guantánamo detainees with mouth ulcers to eat salt and vinegar crisps in order to get them to talk.

All they could say was ‘ow’. As in ‘Ow-Qaida’, presumably. Christ, I’m spewing some gibberish today. Someone punch me in the kidneys.

Unwise column request:
Yes, OK, agreed. Maybe it was. Crowdsourcing overrated. But it was this or a continuous low hum for 850 words. Normal service resumes next week.

It’s all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can’t move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press … all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.

And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly
exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was. What’s that? Phone-in TV quizzes might a bit of con? The economic boom is an unsustainable fantasy? Riot police can be a little ‘handy’? MPs are greedy? The
News of the World
might have used underhand tactics to get a story? What next? Oxygen is flavourless? Cows stink at water polo? Children are overrated? We knew all this stuff. We just didn’t have the details.

After all their histrionic shrieking about standards in television, it was only a matter of time before the tabloids got it in the neck. Last Monday even the Press Complaints Commission, which is generally about as much use as a Disprin canoe, finally puffed up its chest and criticised the
Scottish Sunday Express
for its part in the Dunblane survivors’ story scandal. You remember that, don’t you? Back in March? When the
Scottish Sunday Express
ran a story about survivors of the Dunblane massacre who’d just turned 18? It fearlessly investigated their Facebook profiles and discovered that some of them enjoyed going to pubs and getting off with other teenagers, then ran these startling revelations on its front page, with the headline ANNIVERSARY SHAME OF DUNBLANE SURVIVORS.

‘The
Sunday Express
can reveal how, on their social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights,’ crowed the paper. ‘For instance, [one of them] – who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died – makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.’

Nice, yeah?

As I’m sure you recall, there was an immediate outcry, which was covered at length in all the papers. You remember their outraged front pages, right? All their cries of SICK and FOUL and VILE in huge black text? Remember that? No? Of course you don’t. Because the papers largely kept mum about the whole thing. Instead, the outrage blew up online. Bloggers kicked up a stink; 11,000 people signed a petition and delivered it to the PCC. The paper printed a mealy-mouthed apology that apologised for the general tenor of the article, while whining that they hadn’t printed anything that
wasn’t publicly accessible online. All it had done was gather it up and disseminate it in the most humiliating and revolting way possible. Last Monday’s PCC ruling got next to zero coverage. Maybe if it had happened after the
News of the World phone
-hacking story broke it would have gathered more. Or maybe not. Either way, the spotlight of truth is, for now, pointing at the press.

But this is just one small part of the ongoing, almighty detox of everything. There’s been such an immense purge, such an exhaustive ethical audit, no one’s come out clean. There’s muck round every arse. But if the media’s rotten and the government’s rotten and the police are rotten and the city’s rotten and the church is rotten – if life as we know it really is fundamentally rotten – what the hell is there left to believe in? Alton Towers? Greggs the bakers? The WI?

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we’ll probably discover Google’s sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There’s surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it’s suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we’re all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It’ll be set in Basingstoke and called, ‘Cuh, Typical’.

What about each other? Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We’re probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary
The Matrix
. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your coworkers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven’t even got shoes, for Christ’s sake.

As the very fabric of life breaks down around us, even language itself seems unreliable. These words don’t make sense. The vowels and consonants you’re hearing in your mind’s ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or screen. Pointless hieroglyphics. Shapes. You’re staring at shapes and hearing them in
your head. When you see the word ‘trust’, can you even trust that? Why? It’s just shapes!

Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there’s nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn’t matter what they’re made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects.

It’s summer, so the cinemas are cluttered with films unfit for human consumption. CGI has ruined everything. Don’t get me wrong: I love computer graphics. I thought
Wall-E
was brilliant. I’m even excited by the prospect of next year’s
Tron
sequel. CGI is great when it has earned the right to be there. Kneejerk CGI action, however, is the single most tiresome development of the 21st century.

In 2007 I saw
Die Hard 4.0
on the big screen. It was the 3,000foot computer-generated straw that broke the 3D camel’s back. Towards the end of the film there’s a lengthy sequence in which antediluvian tough guy Bruce Willis (played by Touché Turtle) hurtles along in an articulated lorry while a fighter jet tries to stop him by machine-gunning the entire world to pieces. The scene grows steadily more outlandish: huge sections of highway buckle and collapse; the truck swerves and tumbles and is literally shredded by bullets; Bruce leaps on to the back of the jet and leaps off just as it explodes in a massive fireball.

And it’s boring. Unbelievably boring. At any given moment, only 17% of what you’re watching is real, and you know it. You’re not immersed in the slightest. At best you’re impressed by the rendering of the smoke plumes. It would genuinely have been more exciting to replace the entire chase with a scene in which the bad guy made Bruce stand at one end of a bar and threatened to shoot him unless he successfully tossed a dried pea into a novelty Charlie Brown eggcup down by the toilet door before the alarm went off on his iPhone.

The second
Transformers
movie came out this year. I didn’t fight
for a ticket. I’d caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool.

CGI isn’t the only villain. On Friday, a remake of
The Taking of
Pelham One Two Three
opened in British cinemas. The 1974 original is a brilliant, grubby little thriller; the perfect heist movie. The remake is directed by Tony Scott and stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta. Merely reading that sentence should be enough to give even the most blasé film buff cancer of the enthusiasm. Obviously, these are desperate times. With that in mind, here are three deceptively great movie ideas for Hollywood to pinch at its leisure:

Title:
Come Alive!

Synopsis: God decides to grant evangelical preacher Will Ferrell the power to heal the sick with his fingertips. But the almighty’s lightning bolt misses its target, hitting Will’s penis instead. Now Will is cursed with the miraculous ability to cure any disease or fix any injury – but only if he has full sexual intercourse with the patient. Since Will is also a 45-year-old unmarried virgin with strong views on sex outside marriage, it won’t be an easy ride! Review: What starts as a regulation gross-out comedy soon takes an unsettling turn as Will faces an agonising decision at his father’s deathbed, before building to a frankly unbelievable conclusion in which a terrorist cell releases the Ebola virus in a nearby donkey sanctuary … and only one man can save the day.

Title:
Hollywood Mosquito 3D

Synopsis: Seizing on the current vogue for 3D Imax releases,
Hollywood
Mosquito 3D
is a cinematic spectacle shot entirely from the point of view of a hungry mosquito flying around Los Angeles during a heatwave. Filmed with microscopic high-definition cameras, the action consists of eye-popping and shockingly frank sequences in which the naked, breathing bodies of your favourite Hollywood
stars are transformed into immense, surreal landscapes: living canyons of flesh for you to fly over, around … even inside. Review: No blemish is left secret, no crevice goes unexplored, and absolutely no blushes are spared in this bluntly explicit thrill ride starring Harvey Keitel, Megan Fox, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Zac Efron.

Title:
Nic Cage: My Life as John Lennon the Cow

Synopsis: In this groundbreaking experimental documentary and extreme ‘method acting’ challenge Nicolas Cage spends an entire year living life as a cow – standing in fields, eating grass, crapping on all fours, with no human contact whatsoever. Having spent 365 days becoming fully immersed in the cow mindset, he is unceremoniously whisked to New York’s Dakota building where he must simulate the last eight weeks of John Lennon’s life while retaining his bovine perspective and continuing to wear his prosthetic hooves.