Posts Tagged ‘exploitation’

I bought my shiny, shiny teeth with the money of fools.

Imagine putting “self help guru” when you have to enter your job title on a form. How embarrassing would that be?

Self help gurus are widely lampooned in the mass media, often depicted as deranged, criminal, sad, pathetic, or all of the above. Some of my personal favourites are:

• Greg Kinnear as Richard Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, a desperate, clutching man whose pathetic quotes fail to inspire his small, yawning audience.
• Patrick Swayze as Jim Cunningham in Donnie Darko, a seedy and despicable man.
• Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia, see above.

It’s only if you’re Tony Robbins that the job actually rocks…

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Three morose individuals mourn the loss of their hamster

To our loyal 5 fans: we’re sorry. We’ve been busy. But now we are back. With November starting, we shall start with our Mini NaNoWriMo updates. Thank you for still loving us. We love you too.

Except you in the corner.

Crackhead Dentist: we hate you. We all hate you.

Better for me if I could close my eyes
And dream of imps perched tight on your shoulder,
Cackling loud as you excavate my mouth
And pull and rip and grate and burn my gums.

Instead, my eyes are open wide with pain
As you simper and calm with platitudes,
Bright and breezy in your sterile domain
That plays muzak that kills the man in me.

Tell me: what do you expect me to say,
You fuck, when I’m drooling all on your floor?
How can you sleep, you fuck, so sound at night
Hearing my screams and with your bloody hands?

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The IWDTFM team during office hours

It will come as a shock to absolutely no one to find out that, every once in a while, when the moon is full and the leylines are aligned, I complain about my job.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. We spend a third of every day at work. Eight hours out of twenty-four. Apparently, the UK workforce is one of the hardest working populations in the world, putting in an average of £5,129-worth of overtime every year. I don’t really put in much extra time, although to my credit I’ve been known to stay late if something needs finishing. Most days, however, I’m out the office sometime between five-thirty and six o’clock with a spring in my step and my evening ahead of me.

So what do I complain about? The usual, really. Being tired, being busy, being bored, being hungry, wanting to go and play outside, wanting to stay and play inside. Wanting to be anywhere but cooped up in an office working for a living.

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Karl Lagerfeld: the definition of ego

We on the IWDTFM team are often asked, “Why don’t you all become models?”. It’s a valid question, given how good looking we all are. But I have a secret: I don’t understand the fashion industry. What it is, what it does, and why the hell anyone would want to be a part of it.

I’m writing this because I read Kate’s article about the New Zealand fashion week, and – like Kate – I was impressed that a country that has yet to pave its streets even has a fashion week. Wales doesn’t, although this could be due to the fact that large numbers of the Welsh population have yet to be introduced to clothes.

Not that the fashion industry is particularly concerned with clothes. They don’t produce things that you can wear. They produce monstrosities of design, much like a five-year-old with access to a large supply of Play-Doh might.

What really confuses me about the fashion industry is that so many people seem to want to break into it. Models, fashion designers, stylists, hairdressers… never mind that the industry seems to be a mix of sweat shops and the Third Reich, it’s honestly an industry that people marry footballers to get into. On your average thirteen-year-old girl’s list of “Things I Want To Be When I Grow Up”, the desirability of jobs in the fashion industry is probably only second to whatever the hell it is Tara Parker-Tomkinson did to get famous.

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As everyone knows my favourite genre of music is blond female vocalist. I just can’t get enough! Growing up my mother would always listen to Debbie Harry and the odd breathy rendition by Marilyn Monroe.

In my formative years Christina, Britney and Shakira owned the charts. This all contributed to my fervent hankering for the recent onslaught of pseudo-modest soulsters.

But in the last year I’ve become so overwhelmed with mid-20’s female breakthrough artists with blond hair that I can’t tell them apart! Can you help me sort Pixie Boots from Lady Duffy? What sets Duffy apart from Hilary Duff, apart from the former being a diminutive of the latter?

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A French bulldog puppy typically vends for around £2000 according to our on-hand puppy-buying expert. This is a hell of a lot of money to pay to watch a creature writhe around on laminate flooring. Turtles are like, only a fiver.

This French bulldog is doing an impression of a turtle. His owners take pleasure in making him look stupid, whereas actually they are extremely intelligent, and in this case this gorgeous specimen is merely feigning an interest in sitting upright to appease his masters.

There is something strangely opaque about his fathomless eyes though. Remember when you used to play with marbles, the “misty” ones? I am reminded of them when I look into this dog’s eyes when he stops writhing for a rest and a breather.

Forget the negligence of the owner, one of his parents is slumped on the floor in the background. Totally. Not. Helping.

I want to go to a gig, but I can’t because TicketMaster is intent on keeping me at arm’s length from any ticket at all times.

Browse to Ticketmaster.co.uk and try to book something. It needn’t be anything particularly popular. Try getting the unreserved standing tickets. Proceed through loads of pointless questions that could definitely wait until I’ve committed to a couple of tickets. Decipher the faux-typewriter Captcha words and reproduce them in the text field provided. Find out that the tickets aren’t available. Repeat.

Despite that I choose the “just find me a fucking seat, I don’t care where” option, infuriatingly it states that my anally stringent gig-attending criteria are preventing it from finding any tickets to sell me, so I have to go back and try looking for tickets to see the same band in Dusseldorf or Montreal.

Guys, look – I’m a big boy, if the damn thing is sold out, just tell me – I can take it!

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I submitted this to Threadless.com and got knocked back.

A friend of mine – who is about my age – asked me recently what ‘tweeting’ is. I gave him the stock, Twitter-approved answer that every tweet is an answer to the question, “What are you doing right now?”. My friend then asked me what blogging is, then wondered how such a big internet could fit down those really thin phone lines.*

I’m going to go out on a limb here and tell you now that I like Twitter. I like being able to see what my friends are doing, and tell them in return what inane shite I find interesting right this second. Considering mobile phones and text messages didn’t become commonplace until well after I left university, my acceptance of this culture of being socially visible has been nothing short of startling.

I disagree with Daniel, who states that Twitter began as a “medium of communication for lazy bloggers and self-important narcissists three years ago”. I also disagree that dead bloggers are a bad thing. I find it genuinely impressive that the deceased find the time and energy to tweet regularly. However, I do agree that Twitter has since been hijacked by the lazy bloggers and narcissists, although I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. What infuriates me is how, as Daniel points out, Twitter has become just another marketing tool.

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Get your Guevara novelty licence from the King of Swords amd pretend you're a tyrannical despot! HAHA! Cool! Do these kids think he's some kind of classic old cartoon character worthy of praise? Christ.

The image of massive fascist Ernesto Ché Guevara is absolutely fucking everywhere. A million t-shirts depicting him are sold in Camden every second, typically to the kind of grungy kid who stands around smoking and looking moody. I posit that they know little to nothing of this man’s life and works. These kids are probably alienated by their peers for being honest, tolerant and non-judgmental.

Now it’s 2009, and his visage is a global insignia, representing counter-culture and rebellion and is reproduced in many, if not all media.

But what about all the other shit he got up to, like stringing up gays?

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