Strivers and Skivers: 4
SKIVERS
HACKNEY CITY FARM: Claims to be a working inner city farm, but is just six children standing round a pig. Their rooster has been observed pecking at a packet of Lambert and Butler, and at night you can hear the sheep bleating “fahhhk offf, fahhk offf”. For being marvellously incongrous, we salute it.
LUKE HOWARD: Patron saint of the Idler, as he was the gentleman that invented clouds: that is, he first came up with the idea of observing the clouds for so long that he was able to classify them, and it is to him we owe Cirrus and Cumulus and Stratus.
NORTHERNERS DOWN SOUTH: Manchester and Newcastle have lost a third of their populations since 1961, and Liverpool is a ghost town. This exodus to London is overwhelming the infrastructure of the city, making life a hell for true born Southerners. Some consider it fitting revenge for all the shit heaped on the North during the eighties. In the meantime, we await the day Northerners get their own pubs in Earls Court, just like the Aussies.
TECHNOLOGY: Promised to do all the work for us. Didn’t.
OFFICEPLOTATION MOVIES: Surely the next wave of cinema. The Idler seeks funding for a trilogy of films that combine the sex n’ gore shlock of B-movies with the familiar mise en sc?�ne of modern office life. Proposals include Attack of the Fifty-Foot Manhunting Maudlin Receptionists (Tagline: Where Gin leads to Sin!) and The Brainstorm Bonker (Tagline: Put me on the back burner, baby!). Also look out for Cannibal Couriers, in which a troupe of bicycle couriers have to wait in reception for so long, they start eating one another’s flesh.
DOGS: The irrational baragain between man and dog continues. Dogs, to be blunt, are a fucking liablity: in 1996, dog aggression (directed primarily at children) cost US insurance companies $250 million in claims. Americans also spend $5 billion a year on dog food and $7 billion on vet’s bills! Dogs are our kept whores, giving us their so called “love” while they slip their paws into our pockets and run off with out jewllery. Scroungers!
STRIVERS
PANIC ATTACKS: Simply everywhere this year. In a panic attack you lose all perspective, suffering irrational fears and anxieties when in fact nothing is wrong. As soon as you manage to distract yourself, the symptoms vansish - you go from imminent heart attack to mild anxiety - and within a few hours, you begin to forget all about it. The pattern is repeated in the daily apocalypse of our culture, one manufactured crisis after the next is served up, consumed, and then the empty platter is pushed aside for tomorrow’s helping of anxiety. We have internalised the pace of the news agenda and it is making us ill.
WANGST: New term for self-pitying display of introspection indulged in by men in their twenties. Often caused by Russian novels and an inch of extra girth.
COCKALORUMS: A cockalorum is an eighteenth century word used to describe “a self important little man.” Not since the Napoleonic Years has an age suffered so grievously under the cosh of the cockalorum as our own. In the economic boom, the intermediary layers of our society thickened, the middle management so blessedly culled during the last recession has returned to ensure all decision-making is now interminable and cowardly. The position of the mediator is ideal for the cockulorum, the little man who siphons off powerand wealth by insinuating himself as the broker between two greater forces, whether he is agent, or an executive with bigger executives to answer to, the cockalorum (literally cock of all cocks) will always be all mouth and little trousers.
PASSREMARKABLE PEOPLE: Northern word for someone who holds forth at length on the faults of others - generally physical ones - thereby betraying the speakers lack of humanity. As in, “she is too passremarkable, it makes me uncomfortable.” The surly people who write for newspapers and magazines can be awfully passremarkable. Don’t they realise how ill mannered it is to comment on another’s physicality?
THE BOTTOM OF THESE COLUMNS: No matter what we do, they still will not line up neatly.
SKIVERS
HACKNEY CITY FARM: Claims to be a working inner city farm, but is just six children standing round a pig. Their rooster has been observed pecking at a packet of Lambert and Butler, and at night you can hear the sheep bleating “fahhhk offf, fahhk offf”. For being marvellously incongrous, we salute it.
LUKE HOWARD: Patron saint of the Idler, as he was the gentleman that invented clouds: that is, he first came up with the idea of observing the clouds for so long that he was able to classify them, and it is to him we owe Cirrus and Cumulus and Stratus.
NORTHERNERS DOWN SOUTH: Manchester and Newcastle have lost a third of their populations since 1961, and Liverpool is a ghost town. This exodus to London is overwhelming the infrastructure of the city, making life a hell for true born Southerners. Some consider it fitting revenge for all the shit heaped on the North during the eighties. In the meantime, we await the day Northerners get their own pubs in Earls Court, just like the Aussies.
TECHNOLOGY: Promised to do all the work for us. Didn’t.
OFFICEPLOTATION MOVIES: Surely the next wave of cinema. The Idler seeks funding for a trilogy of films that combine the sex n’ gore shlock of B-movies with the familiar mise en sc?�ne of modern office life. Proposals include Attack of the Fifty-Foot Manhunting Maudlin Receptionists (Tagline: Where Gin leads to Sin!) and The Brainstorm Bonker (Tagline: Put me on the back burner, baby!). Also look out for Cannibal Couriers, in which a troupe of bicycle couriers have to wait in reception for so long, they start eating one another’s flesh.
DOGS: The irrational baragain between man and dog continues. Dogs, to be blunt, are a fucking liablity: in 1996, dog aggression (directed primarily at children) cost US insurance companies $250 million in claims. Americans also spend $5 billion a year on dog food and $7 billion on vet’s bills! Dogs are our kept whores, giving us their so called “love” while they slip their paws into our pockets and run off with out jewllery. Scroungers!
STRIVERS
PANIC ATTACKS: Simply everywhere this year. In a panic attack you lose all perspective, suffering irrational fears and anxieties when in fact nothing is wrong. As soon as you manage to distract yourself, the symptoms vansish - you go from imminent heart attack to mild anxiety - and within a few hours, you begin to forget all about it. The pattern is repeated in the daily apocalypse of our culture, one manufactured crisis after the next is served up, consumed, and then the empty platter is pushed aside for tomorrow’s helping of anxiety. We have internalised the pace of the news agenda and it is making us ill.
WANGST: New term for self-pitying display of introspection indulged in by men in their twenties. Often caused by Russian novels and an inch of extra girth.
COCKALORUMS: A cockalorum is an eighteenth century word used to describe “a self important little man.” Not since the Napoleonic Years has an age suffered so grievously under the cosh of the cockalorum as our own. In the economic boom, the intermediary layers of our society thickened, the middle management so blessedly culled during the last recession has returned to ensure all decision-making is now interminable and cowardly. The position of the mediator is ideal for the cockulorum, the little man who siphons off powerand wealth by insinuating himself as the broker between two greater forces, whether he is agent, or an executive with bigger executives to answer to, the cockalorum (literally cock of all cocks) will always be all mouth and little trousers.
PASSREMARKABLE PEOPLE: Northern word for someone who holds forth at length on the faults of others - generally physical ones - thereby betraying the speakers lack of humanity. As in, “she is too passremarkable, it makes me uncomfortable.” The surly people who write for newspapers and magazines can be awfully passremarkable. Don’t they realise how ill mannered it is to comment on another’s physicality?
THE BOTTOM OF THESE COLUMNS: No matter what we do, they still will not line up neatly.
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."