Tag: up

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Grow The Hell Up

So you’re a teenage boy. I was one once, and got over it. You can too, if you TAKE HEED of these important points.

1. You are not special. You are not the first person ever to feel this way. You are not the first person ever to fall in love, or get stoned, or drunk, or listen to music that wasn’t in the charts. You are, in a word, unoriginal. Hurry to adulthood where such tedious conformity goes unremarked.

2. You look like an animated French Bread Pizza. This is not a good look. Get busy with the acne treatment, and you might find the teenage girls you pine after, bother to look at you. I mean, it’s still doubtful, given you only speak in mumbles or grunts and have the personal hygiene of algae, but hey, it’s a start, no?

3. You are composed entirely of knees, elbows and Adam’s Apples. While teen girls are so sylphlike they get their A-Level results photos on the front page of the Telegraph, teen boys lurch about like they were made that morning and the glue didn’t take. You’re fitter than you’re ever likely to be again – stop walking around like you’ve a freakishly heavy head.

4. You need ‘fake ID’. Now that’s just plain embarrassing. To have to proffer some weedy doctored piece of card every time you want to do something normal, like buy Tippex or 12 cans of extra-strength Fusilier Lager from your local shop is demeaning to all concerned. Get old, so you can demand such essentials in a booming, confident voice.

5. You’re all over the scale. Speaking of voices, what’s up with yours? One minute you’re frightening bats, the next minute you sound like Sauron spotting Frodo. Stop mucking about, boy!

6. Why so unwashed? Acne treatment is all well and good, but it needs to be accompanied by actual washing. A spray of Right Guard under the arms every morning is insufficient. You’ve achieved success when strangers can enter your room without being knocked unconscious.

7. You didn’t ask to be born. Sorry, what’s that? You didn’t ask? OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T! Nobody did! It’s not how the system works, for crying out loud! I’m sure this was covered in Biology. To become a man, you need to internalise this existential sense of injustice and only let it out, say, during major sporting tournaments.

September 5, 2012
7 Reasons That the IKEA Plastis is the Ultimate Washing-Up Brush

The IKEA Plastis is amazing. It’s truly a thing of wonder. Here are seven reasons that it’s the ultimate washing-up brush.

1. It Creates Envy. The IKEA Plastis washing-up brush is capable of provoking great envy. I first saw one in a friend’s kitchen four years ago and, ignoring all of the more expensive and conventionally desirable objects that surrounded it (almost the entire Le Creuset range of pots and pans, a very swanky digital radio, a fully-tiled kitchen floor), I made a beeline straight for it. “This is amazing!”, I exclaimed, as I picked it up, wide-eyed, to examine it. “It’s a washing-up brush”, my friend replied, helpfully. “Yes, I can see that”, I said, “but it’s got a sucker on the bottom. It’s ingenious*.” And that was it. I had fallen in love with the simplicity and brilliance of the design. I wanted that washing-up brush more than I want a cat that can talk or the ability to levitate (which I would use mostly to surprise people in first-floor rooms). I had to have one.

2. It Creates Anticipation. “It’s from IKEA”, my friend said. “What! NNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” was my rational and measured response during which I adopted a posture worthy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but in a well-appointed Bolton kitchen. This may seem like an overreaction to the prospect of purchasing something from IKEA, but it really isn’t. Had the Plastis been available solely from the moon it would have been easier to get hold of. I live in the centre of a city. Because of this I choose not to own a car. This is because I live in the bit that most people drive to and I have no desire to visit the suburbs/industrial estates/retail parks/Frankie and Benny’s so I don’t need one. Public transport is also not a practical option when it comes to visiting our local IKEA and the Plastis isn’t available to order online (I checked. Weekly), so I had to wait four years until we required a sufficient quantity of shelving, lampshades, sideboards and other stuff in order to justify renting a car to get the Plastis. During that time I tried not to think of the brush every day**, but I thought about it a lot. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and, in the years that the brush was absent from my life, I grew very fond of it indeed. Perhaps too fond.

I stopped short of getting a tattoo of the Plastis.

3. It Makes Grown Men Jump For Joy. “There it is! There it is!” I exclaimed breathlessly to my wife while pointing to a display on the other side of a very large room in IKEA, before abandoning her and hurrying toward the stand of brushes. And there it was. Or, more excitingly, they were. There were loads of them, in several colours, standing upright in serried ranks on their suckers. There was an army of them. This is what it must be like to be The Queen during the trooping of the colour, I thought. After four, long years, I was finally about to get hold of a Plastis!. Obviously, I studied them all very carefully before selecting one and, while my wife was away playing with wardrobes, tape measures and shelving, I made my important decision. Though it wasn’t a very difficult one because…

4. The Plastis Comes In Red. This is important. As one of the rules of our kitchen (immediately after the rule that every time I paint the ceiling, something else will spring a leak and ruin it again) is that nothing goes in there unless it’s red. We have red pots, red pans, red blenders, red mug-stands, red radios, red everything. Josef Stalin and Ken Livingstone would get into our kitchen: Winston Churchill and Joseph McCarthy would not. Unless they’re any good at laying floor tiles (red), in which case, they’d be very welcome.

5. It’s Great Value. The IKEA Plastis is fantastic value priced, as it is, at £1.11. Not only does this mean that you can buy joy and fulfilment for less than the price of a cup of coffee, but – with its preponderance of 1s – should you wish to print this page out, it will be cheaper to do so as the number 1 uses less ink than any other number. Also, should you be near a superstitious type at this moment, the three ones will be causing them to say “Nelson!” and dance around, meaning that you get free entertainment too. Obviously, in our case, the fantastic value was slightly offset by having to buy a sideboard and rent a car to get one, but it’s still better value than paying council tax, which costs many times more and doesn’t make anyone happy.

6. It’s Even Better Value For Dishwasher-Owners. Because, as the people at IKEA will tell you, the Plastis is dishwasher-safe. Which means that you can wash your washing-up brush inside the dishwasher, which is great, because otherwise, if we didn’t have a dishwasher, we’d have to buy another washing-up brush to wash our washing-up brush with. So for dishwasher-owners, the cost of washing-up brush ownership is halved.***

7. It’s Got A Sucker. Obviously the best bit about the Plastis is the sucker, and since we got ours home I’ve been experimenting with it. I’ve stood it up on the draining board, I’ve stuck it to the wall, I’ve affixed it to the (red) biscuit tin and, best of all, I’ve stuck it to my forehead and chased the cat around the house pretending to be an alien (consequently, for the past two days I’ve had a large purple circle in the centre of my forehead which doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon). There is literally nothing that can’t be improved by sticking a Plastis to it. Even people. The Plastis is awesome and one day, who knows, I might even use it to wash something up.

*I promise you, our conversations are usually far more interesting than this.

**Because that would be weird.

***Yes, I did use this argument in IKEA to justify purchasing the Plastis to my wife, who responded by using a technique that she has developed during our marriage called Smile & Nod.

January 27, 2011
7 Reasons That Jessi Slaughter’s Father Probably Should Have Kept Quiet

I’m sure that most of you reading this are, by now, aware of the Jessi Slaughter (not her real name) phenomenon. If you’re not, to summarise, she’s an eleven year old girl who did what any other eleven year old does, she was silly and she made some mistakes. She wound some people up in internet chat rooms and then made several threats to the people that disliked her including, “I’ll pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy”. They took exception to this, and there was an astonishing internet hate campaign conducted against her. To be honest, the whole thing was rather tawdry and not worthy of our attention. Then her dad waded in:

Understanding of the Internet FAIL
Uploaded by failblog. – Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

Now, at 7 Reasons we occasionally like to think of ourselves as a self-help guide. And to this end, I feel compelled to address my remarks directly to Mr Slaughter, as it is surely he who needs my help the most.

1. You’re Not Very Good At Addressing The Camera. I dislike doing pieces to camera, mostly because I’m not very good at them. I tend to get a bit flustered and mangle my words, and it’s because I’m so bad at them that I try to avoid doing them at all costs. But I know this much, Mr Slaughter. When addressing the camera, you should never, ever get down on one knee at the start of every point that you want to make, only to spring up again afterwards, because it’s an undignified position for any gentleman – especially one who’s maturing in years – and it does tend to make you look like a bit of a fruitcake. Oh, and always try to wear trousers. Trousers are very important.

2. “…you’ve been reported to the cyber police…” Oh my god! Run for your lives! It’s THE CYBER POLICE!!! They sound futuristic and terrifying and now I’m cowering fearfully in the corner of my…hang on…the cyber police? There are no cyber police. You just made them up to intimidate the people you’re ranting at. Now, I’m no expert in making up shadowy organisations to intimidate internet users, but I can’t help thinking that the sort of people that spend their time trolling others via the internet might conceivably have some knowledge of its workings and be able to see through your deceit. If I were you Sir, I’d have used a real and scary organisation to threaten them with. But I sense that you realised this too, Mr Slaughter. Somewhere, in the midst of your furious rant, you seem to have grasped that the cyber police weren’t going to fool anyone and you did what any sensible person would have done in your situation; you added a secondary organisation.

3. “…and the state police…”. Yeah, that’s telling them. Tell them that the FBI are going to hunt them down, tell them that the CIA are hot on their trail, tell them that…wait…the state police? Mr Slaughter, Mr Slaughter, the state police? Seriously? These people?

4. Moustache. While watching your epic, and rather unhinged rant, Mr Slaughter, I fancied that I could hear another sound in the background. The sound of moustachioed men’s heads being placed in their hands as they collectively murmured all around the world, “Oh god. This’ll set us back years”. You see, Mr Slaughter, the moustache has been enjoying something of a renaissance of late, and is no longer the object of ridicule that it once was. That is until now. You have shamed the moustached community with your exploits, Sir. I firmly expect sales of safety razors to soar as a result of your buffoonery.

5. “…Consequences…will…never…be the same.” No, Mr Slaughter. And nor will my monitor, covered as it now is with most of the cup of camomile tea that I was attempting to consume while watching your video. Nor will my wife be, as she will surely remain traumatised by the sight of her husband spitting a beverage at his own computer before helplessly convulsing and writhing around on the floor for several minutes wholly unable to form words and barely able to breathe. My cat, you may be pleased to learn, seems unaffected by the spectacle. Oh, and before I forget, what the hell does consequences will never be the same mean?

6. Embarrassing Dads. Your daughter did a silly thing. She’s young, and we all make mistakes. No one wants to watch a red-faced eleven year old girl cry and this episode would have been a fleeting, yet soon forgotten, embarrassment for her if you hadn’t pitched in. Then, Mr Slaughter, and only then, did this video truly go viral. As you so insightfully and eloquently bellow toward the end of your rant, you are “HER FATHER” and you will probably go down as the most embarrassing dad in history. And George W. Bush has children.

7. Parenting. While I’m on the subject, when you state that you are “HER FATHER”, you are surely only referring to the biological aspect of parenthood. After all, what sort of parent allows his eleven year old daughter to go online with a webcam and threaten to shoot people or express the wish that they “get AIDS and die”? If you don’t want her to be vilified on the internet or upset by the reaction she gets from it, take it away from her, rather than mindlessly and somewhat comedically railing against the other people that use it, however childishly they may have behaved. The only part of this whole episode that’s funny is your rant, Mr Slaughter. The rest is horrifying.

July 19, 2010