American Fez

War in the Air

I am thinking of asking NATO to establish a No Fly Zone in my apartment this summer. Surely even that dithering collection of international pantywaists will realize that any winged insect wiping its crap-caked legs on my ham sandwich is a humanitarian crisis that simply cannot be ignored. I won't need much in the way of weaponry: a rolled-up French newspaper; an English can of pest control spray; and a Venus Flytrap courtesy of President Obama - if, of course, Hilary Clinton can persuade him to release a particularly hungry example from the Pentagon's extensive botanical gardens. Alas, negotiations have been slow in the American sphere. I've been told that the Pentagon might provide me with an actual plant, but I have to supply the armor-plated pot and the special potting soil. Neither of these things are in my summer budget; a budget that is already over-taxed with requirements for SPF 9000 suntan oil, broad brimmed hat, waterproof shoes and a daily ice cream (large cone with chocolate sprinkles). Apparently some naysayers in the Department of Defence are demanding to know what my exit strategy is before the Venus Flytrap loan is approved. Since I am unable to identify the actual source of the summer fly infestation, they claim that the plant could become bogged down in my apartment for decades, killing the occasional fly but never getting to grips with the heart of the problem. I've told Hilary and her team that I believe that the heart of the problem is an uneaten beef and falafel sandwich that my plumber left in the basement, but the Department of Defence inspectors remain unconvinced that flies would lay their eggs on that. I don't know. I hope I can count on American support, otherwise I'll be reduced to flicking old elastic bands at the the flies with my thumb, and we all know how badly that tactic turned out for Dick Cheney's thumb. Ouch.

Checkbook Nostalgia

Many years ago, before the days of electronic banking, I balanced my checkbook with several desultory strokes of an inky pen in the printed columns provided for such amateur audits. The sum revealed by these calculations was invariably depressing: yet I always knew, however worthless such knowledge might actually be, exactly how much money was at my disposal - or not, as the case might be. Admittedly, since these were days of enforced, almost ascetic parsimony, there was precious little checkbook activity to be balanced, and so my task was an easy one. Furthermore, there were no ATM usage costs, Identity Theft Protection Plan monthly charges, or other obscure service fees that required additional subtraction. I knew where I stood financially: it may have been shaky ground, but at least I knew how much of it there was.

Back then, the teller at my local bank - Bedrock Trust - was called Miss Copper, a pudgy woman with severe hair who reminded me of the Queen of Clubs in a pack of playing cards, since I only ever experienced her as an expressionless face attached to an immobile upper torso, silently stamping my withdrawal slips with profound disapproval. I would always offer a breezy hello when entering her domain: an optimistic greeting to which she would reply with a faint flicker of her left eye, apparently some sort of nervous twitch indicating that an unedifying and possibly invalid transaction was about to take place. She never spoke. Any specific question asked of her would be answered with either a brief mime or, as was most often the case, a dismissive finger directed at another teller's window. She never even said goodbye when I finally closed my account because I was going off to college.

These days I bank with US Amalgamated Bail Out, which used to be Main Street Consolidated Saving & Loan before it merged with some international bank known by its initials only. The teller is an automated telephone system that talks too much, in both English and Spanish; or a tubby little machine that whirs, buzzes and then spits out an unreadable statement; or a spasmodically loading internet page that demands elaborate passwords and interrogates me with a brief biographical quiz before it delivers any data whatsoever. Since I no longer maintain a checkbook, I rely on these new-fangled devices to furnish my account balance information, which is always different depending on which device I consult, and also what new and unexpected monthly fees and charges have recently been deducted from my account.

Alas, it seems that my accounts are subject to so many assorted fees and puzzling charges that the human mind cannot comprehend their infinite variety, and even those aforementioned computerized systems cannot agree what my total balance is at any given moment. Ah yes. Miss Copper might have been cold and impersonal, just like those machines, but she and I always knew exactly how much money I had left in my account, and she knew that she shouldn't let me have any more than that. In her prim and proper way, Miss Copper was invaluable. How I miss the certainty of Bedrock Trust and my insignificant little checkbook.

Social Networking Not Working

The CEO of Yellowcakes, a provider of artificial coloring solutions for the gelatin-based desserts industry, recently attended a strategies, growth and innovation conference in Las Vegas. Profits were plummeting and he was anxious about the long-term stability of jelly. He needed food for thought, even if most of it would be an indigestible melange of trans-fats and sugar-coating.

Predictably, ninety-percent of the conference seminars were ebullient round-tables about harnessing the power of social media to increase business, each speaker more manically fervent than the last. The other ten percent, run by bi-polar project managers, broached the idea of staging next year's conference - if there was still a gelatin-based food industry to confer about by then -  as an interactive webinar. Everyone was captivated by the notion that the Internet could not only make them money, it could also save them money. All you needed was a Twitter feed and a Facebook page and somehow the money would start flowing in. It was like listening to a cloudy-eyed herbalist extolling the virtues of honeysuckle marshmallow as a cure for terminal cancer.

So, lacking any truly innovative, imaginative or even pragmatic inspiration, the CEO of Yellowcakes returned to his office, determined to ponder whom he should Friend and Follow. He started with both loyal and prospective customers, before expanding his net further afield to companies like his own, and even some fictional characters such as Mr Peanut and the Rice Krispies' elves. It wasn't long before he found himself re-tweeting the profound philosophy of the Pillsbury Doughboy and linking to YouTube videos of chocolate egg eating contests. By the end of the first quarter, over two thousand hipsters had "liked" Yellowcake Artificial Food Colorings on Facebook, mostly for ironic purposes, but the CEO didn't know that. He decided to print a run of vintage Yellowcakes' logo t-shirts to be sold on Cafe Press.

He also contacted me about writing the Yellowcakes' daily Twitter feed and maintaining the various gelatin blog forums that he sponsored. Updating the company's various online profiles was consuming too much of the CEO's valuable time, as you might expect. I explained that I was both slow and expensive, but this didn't seem to bother him. Who isn't? he replied with a shrug. We discussed the ratio of actual product marketing to banal links and pop culture babble; if it was a good idea to follow Martha Stewart or not; and whether it was worth having a booth at Comic-Con called Gelatination.

And so, in the guise of my gelatinous avatar, Monsieur Aspic, I tweet daily about which celebrities prefer gummy worms to jelly babies; my fantasy Jell-O wrestling matches with the real housewives of various cities; how regular gelatin consumption promotes bone health; and occasionally, something very brief about bovine spongiform encephalopathy risk or the new FDA guidelines for infusing animal by-products with chemical color dye. Yet for some inexplicable reason Yellowcakes' sales still keep falling.

Feeling sorry for the CEO, yesterday I advised him to hire a conventional travelling salesman to visit customers in the flesh, since internet social networking services didn't seem to be connecting with his traditional client base. He said that such a drastic solution was too old-fashioned for his forward-thinking company. It's not old-fashioned, I told him, it's just old skool. He brightened at that notion, but mostly he just liked the spelling. What if we post some click-through banner ads on Foursquare,  he suggested, advertising Yellowcakes Old Skool Gelatin Food Coloring? He had such a faraway look in his eye that I don't think he noticed my raised eyebrow.

Financial circumstances forced him to lay off six employees this morning. I haven't tweeted about yet, but they have already de-friended me on Facebook.

The Devil's Friend Wears A Bright Red Cummerbund

You have never truly scraped the shank of Satan's dirty underpants until you've shopped for a tuxedo. The so-called gentleman's outfitter is stocked with every conceivable kind of shiny, satinesque, ill-fitting penguinery. Here you will find suit coats that would look big and boxy on a gorilla, and alpine pleats with trouser legs roughly sewn on to them. It is an approximation of black tie designed for portly clowns attending a formal circus. This is the viscose, wing-collared well from which the illustrators of pulp romance novels drawn their lurid inspiration.

Tuxedos are only sold in two price ranges at these stores: more than you can afford, or drastically reduced for clearance. There really is no acceptable mid-range, unless you plan to spend the evening squatting in a dark corner where no-one can see you, in which case you might consider Ralph Lauren. So you will be forced to plan an excursion to a tailor's shop in the weird, rundown part of town. He will cackle in a sinister and evil manner when you mention your budget, cough uncontrollably while pulling dusty books of irrelevant fabric swatches from a stack behind a broken toilet, and finally whip you with a tape measure while mumbling something about midnight blue, peak lapels and grosgrain facings. You will give him about a thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred depending on your ability to argue with an obviously dying man.

Now you need to purchase a french-cuff shirt, studs and cuff-links, bow-tie, something inconspicuous to go around your waist, suspenders, pocket square and a pair of glossy shoes. People often say that God is in the details, but I agree with Nietzsche's opinion that God must be dead when discussing tuxedo accessories. Most cummerbunds, for example, are clearly machine-made in Hell using the flayed skins of unrepentant pederasts. Consequently, you must always keep your coat fastened when standing so that innocents will not be exposed to the wretched thing. Also, keep your hands in your pockets as much as possible to hide those cheap cuff-links you won on eBay, and it might be a good idea to keep your scarf on so that nobody can see what a mess you made of tying that bow-tie. You can always blame the over-active air-conditioning if someone asks.

I hope you have found this short guide useful.

The Curate's Chicken and Egg

Brewing coffee in the morning is a variety of chicken and egg situation: you should really drink some before you attempt the tricky business of making any, especially if your "gourmet" coffee-making contraption looks like the engine of a custom-built Ferrari with a nuclear reactor stuck on the side, as mine does.

I knew it was probably overkill to buy any coffee maker requiring professional installation, but my brief vacation in the Caffeino region of Italy had convinced me that an automatic drip mechanism was unacceptable, even if I did grind my own beans at dawn and clean-out the filter after every pot. And so I imported the Molto Confuso espresso machine from Famiglia Korea of Milan.

I was forced to rearrange some cabinets, move the oven and buy a smaller fridge so that the Molto Confuso would fit into my kitchen. It was a tight squeeze and eventually I decided to demolish the breakfast island in order to create room for the milk steamer and plastic tubing extensions. The delivery men also told me that I should probably replace the floor tiles with reinforced concrete, otherwise the Molto Confuso might sink into the foundations of the house.

Ultimately, I guess I'm reasonably happy with my coffee-maker, even if its constant chugging and gurgling does trouble my formerly peaceful slumbers, leading to yet another chicken and egg type situation: my bleary-eyed self wouldn't need to drink coffee in the morning if the machine that makes it didn't keep me up all night.

Only Connect

Most creative businesses are using social networking sites to promote their work these days: designers update chic Tumblr blogs with their latest press releases; photographers retweet lavish praise from satisfied customers on Twitter, and painters upload recent portfolio highlights to their Facebook pages;  and now even my crime scene clean-up company is joining in the fun. In fact, we have just posted thirty "before-and-after" pictures from a brutal shotgun double-murder scene our iNumb account. Twelve were artsy shots of blood and brains splattered all over the walls, taken using that neat lomo-photography app on our company smartphone camera that makes everything look green and contrasty, and the other eighteen were just normal shots of the room after Jose and Li Wien had scrubbed all the gross stuff off. At least twelve other iNumb users have liked them already. Potential clients? Only time will tell. Actually, we really want to sign-up for Foursquare's location-based GPS services as well, but the Police have been dragging their feet on that one.

The Music of Your Life

At some especially ignominious point in the nineteen-seventies, a group of tortured children stood on a creaky school stage and sang Jimmy Crack Corn. Their regimented faces formed an eerie pointillistic pattern of skull-like, rictus grins and anxious, unblinking eyes. So fixed were the children's expressions that they could momentarily have been confused with Mardi Gras mannequins, rudimentary animations whose cut-out chins were over-zealously manipulated by means of a very simple yet imprecise pull-tab mechanism; or perhaps with a collection of clockwork dolls in some festive store display, their lower jaws synchronised to clatter up and down to the tune of a manic advertising jingle.

Yet there was one small boy who refused to smile or sing-a-long, who truly did not care about Jimmy and his wretched corn. Instead of mouthing the words while staring at the back wall, his gaze was drawn to the view through an imaginary window behind Principal Himmler's head: it was Constable's great painting "The Hay Wain," except a suspension bridge had been constructed over the Stour, upon which a deceptively benign King Kong was playing pooh sticks. The pooh sticks he was using were Principal Himmler and his repulsively sinewy wife, Mrs Himmler, who taught music education.

You would not probably be surprised to learn that the school where these events occurred was my alma mater, and that the small boy in question was myself. At that time in my life, around the age of five or six, my parents did not own a hi-fi, and so the only music I was aware of was intelligence-insulting juvenilia such as Jimmy Crack Corn, Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam, Puff the Magic Dragon and an extremely tedious ditty about somebody or other being commanded to row his boat ashore. Consequently, I always firmly believed, at least until my late teens, that an interest in music was evidence of serious mental defectiveness. These days I am afraid that my young nephew, currently the same tender age as I was then, might grow up with the same misguided prejudice that I struggled with, which is why I am buying him the complete works of Alban Berg for his birthday.