 |
Tuesday, April 25, 2006The Tuesday Twat(s)No. 60. Orange women.OK, what gives? Every where I go, there are bright orange women clinging to their summer tan tighter than Paul McCartney to his Scouse accent. Surely, as science marches forward the chemicals that they use are supposed to get better, not worse? Yet this year's latest shade seems more fake than ever before. Perhaps there is a new budget brand that you can buy from the Pound shop? Or perhaps they are all being sponsored by a certain well-known Mobile phone company? In these skin-cancer concious times the bright pink of T-Mobile or the dangerous red of Vodafone is out obviously. Not quite sure where that leaves the blue of O2 though. Maybe skin colouration is subject to the whims of fashion "This season, Judith Chalmers is the new David Dickinson". Living in a multi-cultural city as I do, I have met people with pretty much every skin shade evolution has come up with, yet this peculiar shade of orange still seems wierd. Now I know how remote tribes must have felt centuries ago, upon seeing the first white Missionaries as they came ashore bringing their gifts of christian fundamentalism, sexual repression and measles. Labels: The Tuesday Twat(s) |
Tuesday, April 18, 2006The Tuesday Twat(s)Apologies for last week's absence. Normal service shall be resumed.No. 59. "Veteran" soap actors. Last week, I'm told, a long-standing character in the soap drama Coronation Street died. Johnny Briggs played some character or other for thirty years before being bumped off (no doubt through some convoluted plot-line) . This momentous event, which I am reliably informed was "all over the news", somehow didn't make it on to Newsnight. Nevertheless the subsequent tributes to the actor's "genius" from all and sundry triggered a memory from a few years back. Another (still alive, I believe) actor in the same show, William Roache, passed the forty year mark back in 2000. Again, he was feted as a genius by the sort of masturbatory documentary that only self-indulgent telly-types are shameless enough to appear in. This got me thinking, "Are long-standing soap stars worthy of the title actor?" and even more dubiously, "great actors?" I humbly submit that they are, at best, rather shit actors. A perusal of the careers of both men on Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (which also lists TV work), reveals two one-trick ponies. Bill Roache has basically done nothing since 1960 except Corrie. Similarly, whilst Briggs was a jobbing actor for a few years before he joined the street in 1976, he too has done two-thirds of bugger all else. Surely, if they were half as good as their mates would have you believe, they would have done some more, you know, acting? Why has nobody else offered them a meaty role? Look at the CVs of many of the other similarly aged actors who have appeared (briefly) in Corrie and you might see a hundred roles in dozens of different shows. Surely, that's what acting is about? At what stage does acting a part move from acting to just doing the day job? Pretty much everybody is an actor at work. We all put on personas in the workplace to a greater or lesser extent, particularly in the service sector. I've spent the last few months acting like I give two-shits when the local Chav community are unhappy about the level of service in the sport centre. I don't, but for the most part I appear to have been successful. Occassionally I even get thanked for my concern after sorting a (normally) self-inflicted problem. I play the role of a professional service provider - Briggs plays the role of a middle-aged man. Sure, his role involves him pretending to cry or get angry, but I pretend to care when the manifestly perfectly healthy complain about how they've been threatened with the loss of their "Disability" benefits if they don't get a job. The woman in question (who walks a mile each way every day to bring her daughter to badminton) is so fooled by my Lawrence Olivier-like acting that she whinges at me daily. I've even fooled her into thinking, by means of an occassional "Uh huh" and "Oh, dear", that I am not reading the Metro newspaper and actually listening to her. So to all of those long-standing soap actors - get over yourselves. You have spent a career doing a low-level, essential job, and have brought many people a certain amount of pleasure. That is to be applauded. But then so has Stelios the owner of the chippie near my parents. Please accept one more award, "The Tuesday Twat Award" - put it in front of the others, you've actually earned this one. Labels: The Tuesday Twat(s) |
Tuesday, April 04, 2006The Tuesday Twat(s)No. 58. IKEAI first visited IKEA 5 years ago. I vowed it would never happen again. Unfortunately, little Sis has just bought her first house and big brother was drafted into helping fetch furniture from the local IKEA. "But they have a website, and they deliver" I whined. I even offered to sit in her house and wait for it whilst she went to work (one advantage of working nights). To no avail. So off we trek. On a Saturday afternoon. Several things struck me immediately. 1) It was busy. The first clue came from the fact that it took us 15 minutes (I'm not exagerating I swear) to park. The second clue was that just going up the escalator into the store required us to stand so close together that we just might have broken a few rules about familial proximity. 2) It was hot. Despite it being 2 degrees below outside, the 14 year old sale assistants in their yellow and blue shirts had damp patches, and their hair had gone limp. 3) It was like a maternity ward. Seriously, there were more bumps than a traffic calming zone outside a primary school for disabled kids. Is the nesting instinct in pregnant women so strong that they are compelled to go to IKEA on a saturday? I was worried that if they started playing whale music over the speakers, there wouldn't be enough towels in the linen dept to go around. 4) People will buy any old shite if it has IKEA stamped on it and a vaguely rude sounding Swedish name. Shoehorns? WTF? Who the hell buys shoehorns? And who the hell names a dining chair "Roger". A chair that could be bullied at school! (BTW - with the aid of an electric screwdriver, I can build a "Roger" in 17 minutes). 5)It is really easy to get separated from your loved ones (or failing that, the fuckers that dragged you to IKEA). As described above, people will buy anything if it has IKEA stamped on it. One moment little Sis is yammering on about matching door handles, the next I am distracted by someone actually paying money for a bag of coloured sand. When I turn around I find I am alone (or at least as much as anyone can be in IKEA on a saturday). Once upon a time, I would have burst into tears and caused a scene. Now I am older and wiser and my first thought is great, I can have a sit down on that comfy looking futon and play Solitaire on my phone until they call me. Just how did IKEA shoppers survive before the days of mobile telephony? 6) The signs lie. Barefaced, whopping great lies on a par with the Tooth Fairy and Intelligent Design. Take the one marked exit for example. Load of bollocks. When I was finally phoned and told to get my lazy arse downstairs to do some lifting, I dutifully followed the signs marked "Exit - you will miss Kids IKEA". Good. I don't want Kids IKEA, I might catch something nasty off them. I want to go straight out and into the self-service area. Now lets be honest, despite the funny names - most IKEA stuff looks identical, so it wasn't until I saw the same sign again that I started to suspect that I had gone around in a circle. I followed it again looking for another sign that would break me out of the loop. 5 minutes later - the same bloody sign! Naturally, there were no sales assistants to ask for advice, and everyone else looked as pissed off as me, so I ignored the sign and headed into Kids IKEA. I realised my error immediately. Instead of sitting on a futon playing solitaire, I should have come straight here - they had an XBox with the Simpsons! Unfortunately, I was expected downstairs and the sooner I got there, the sooner I could leave. By simply going in the opposite direction indicated on every exit sign, I soon made my way downstairs. 7) No wonder Mr Ikea is so rich - his customers do all of his work for him. No overheads. First of all how many "assistants" are there on the floor in IKEA? I saw none that weren't at a till point or selling store cards. Second - warehouses that require a lot of heavy lifting have a high turnover of staff and pay a lot of sick pay and compensation to workers who injure themselves. No such problem in IKEA. Your customers can do all of that shite, whilst your workers are all under 21 and cost you minimum wage. Bonus! So in summary. I hate fucking IKEA. Next time, we do it on line. Labels: The Tuesday Twat(s) |
FOR YOUR PERUSALBBC News NewScientist Online The Onion InkyCircus ARCHIVESFebruary 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 June 2007
|
