Category: Culture

7 Modern Scams (Plus 1)

scamsEver since Achmed the Unwashed tried to sell the Pyramids to a couple of unsuspecting Greek tourists (Herodotus, you idiot!) there have been scam artists bent on separating the terminally naive from their money.  For example, the Brooklyn Bridge has been sold so many times it’s become a cliché.  Likewise, if you were to stack all the bits of the Berlin Wall sold since 1989, they’d probably reach into the stratosphere.  Over the centuries, there has been no shortage of con games and no shortage of victims.  However, it’s only in recent history that the ripoff has become institutionalized.  Here are seven perfectly legal scams (plus one) that are perpetrated on all of us every day.

Diamonds – Diamonds are so expensive because of one unassailable principle: a man will spend an obscene amount of money to avoid looking like a cheap bastard – especially when it comes to a probable wife or potential mistress.

Coffee – Retail coffee out of a paper cup is absolute proof that most people can’t do math.

Water – Here in the affluent West, water is so cheap and plentiful that we pee in it, yet millions of people spend billions of dollars, pounds and euros buying it in bottles.  Folks, bottled water is — water – in a bottle!  It’s no coincidence that Evian™ spelled backwards is naive.

Extended Warranties – This is air.  You just bought a handful of air.

Weddings – Weddings are so expensive because of one unassailable principle: a woman will spend an obscene amount of money to impress her friends.

Funerals – The place where sadness meets ruthless.  Funeral parlours have you by the emotional short hairs — and they know it.  What are you going to do?  Toss Aunt Sarah into a ditch?  Burn her in the back garden?

Skin Products – There is no magical formula that will stop the aging process.  If there were, do you really think you could buy it in a tube for $19.95?

And my personal favourite:

The Apple Logo – The grandfather of all con jobs!  The only difference between Apple™ and ordinary is – uh – nothing!  Apparently, the half-chewed Apple logo is worth somewhere between 200 and 1,000 dollars — depending on how badly you want to get robbed.

Comedy By Remote Control (2018)

I bought a new television the other day and I’m reminded of something I wrote 5 years ago.  Nothing has changed.

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A certain acceptance comes with age.  As you get older, you realize that the world is not going to change that radically between now and the time The Grim Reaper takes your pulse.  Walmart is going to remain the mighty retail monolith it’s always been.   McDonald’s will sell more burgers than Africa has cows — despite the interesting fact that no one you know has ever eaten there.  And Microsoft, Google and Apple are going to continue to rule the world in an unholy triumvirate worthy of Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus.  However, just because you’ve accepted the inevitable doesn’t mean certain things don’t continue to drive you nuts.  Our world is loaded with stuff that simply doesn’t make any sense.  For example, in North America a two-fisted gigantic bottle of Coke™ sells for 99 cents, the smaller (smaller!) bottle costs $1.50 and the bottle of water (that beverage you can get free out of any garden hose.) is $1.89.  Just let that sink in for a moment.  It makes you wonder what Dasani actually means — you just got robbed?

However, the single most ridiculous thing in our world that sends me loopy every time I think about it is the remote control.  This is the point and click device that revolutionized our society.  It changed us from a vigorous, dynamic people into lazy swine with the attention span of a hummingbird without its Ritalin.  It does everything but deliver the potato chips and chew them for us.  I swear, if you knew the correct sequence and pointed it at NASA, you could launch the Mars Rover.  I (the original techno-moron) have recorded Games of Thrones in my living room while lounging through Spaghetti alla Vongolese and a bottle of Amalfi Red (I had to fight to get that combination) on a rooftop in Rome.  It is the most important item, aside from the coffee pot, in any household.  So why, by all that’s holy, is every single one of those little bastards different?

We live in a homogenized world.  If you were magically transported to a shopping mall in darkest Bavaria, when you opened your eyes, aside from The Gotterdammerung music playing in The Food Court, you would have no idea where you were.  You could be anywhere from Indonesia to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  The utter sameness of most of our planet is worthy of Groundhog Day.  Yet, when your television finally hits the wall of planned obsolescence and you have to buy a new one, you’re about to enter the undiscovered country.  You’re reduced to re-inventing the 21stcentury wheel because the brains of the operation, the remote, has changed its shape, its size, its colour and rearranged all of its buttons.  The first time you use it, you think you’ve paused Breaking Bad: the Teenage Years to go for the Orville Redenbacher’s and suddenly you’re recording a 24 hour marathon of Everybody Loves Friends, in HD, on a channel you haven’t even paid for – yet.  So, you start pushing buttons like a Rhesus monkey in a primate behavioural study.  Nineteen clicks later, you’ve selected the adult classic, Boob Chaser III, which Channel 531 casually informs you, has been “shared” with your Facebook friends.  “Thank you for choosing Pay Per View!”

And it’s no use trying to beat the system with one of those Universal control-everything-but-the-toaster jobbers.  That’s just madness.  You need an advanced degree in binary engineering from M.I.T. just to turn one of those babies on.  By the end of the first hour, you’ve screwed up the set-up so badly the instructions are now in Hebrew and the one channel available for your viewing pleasure is The Weather Network from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.  Finally — $19.95 plus tax, poorer — you give up and go back to fighting with the original villain that came in the box.

I know that, in fifteen minutes any twelve-year-old can reconfigure my system so she can run it off the microwave.  It’s not that technology is all that smart; it’s just that it’s smarter than me.  However, I don’t understand why, when all technology is basically the same, every piece of equipment is so utterly different from the last one that you need to hire Thomas Edison to figure it out.  I can’t be the only guy on this planet old enough to remember Ronald Reagan.  What’s wrong with one size fits all?

We have cars that can parallel park themselves, murderous drones that search and destroy across the wilds of Pakistan from a Wii™ system in Wiesbaden; we’re on the verge of creating nanobots that literally eat disease.  Yet, when I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development on Netflix, I still need six (different) little boxes to do it.  If this isn’t Comedy Central, I don’t know what is!

Sylvia Trench: Authentic Feminist

james_bondLast week, Sylvia Trench died.  She was 90 years old.  You’ve probably never heard of her, but she had a massive impact on popular culture that’s still ringing in our ears, today.  You see, before Honey Ryder (played by Ursula Andress) rose out of the surf like Venus in a white bikini, Sylvia Trench (played by Eunice Gayson) was the original Bond Girl in the original Bond movie, Dr. No.

Here in the ‘fraidy-cat days of contemporary feminism, there is a prevailing myth that “Bond Girl” is synonymous with bimbo.  Nope!  Guess again!  Ian Fleming didn’t write ‘em that way.  First of all, Fleming’s Bond Girls weren’t girls — they were women.  And secondly, the majority of his female characters (written between 1953 and 1965) were decidedly not typical women of that era.  Back in those days, the female ideal was June Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver) Margaret Anderson (Father Knows Best) and (let’s face it) the seriously ditzy Lucy Ricardo (I Love Lucy.)  Fleming’s women, on the other hand, were mainly independent, assertive professionals who were sexually active and made no bones about it.  (Ring any bells in 2018?)  Which brings us back to Ms. Trench.

Actually, Sylvia Trench was not in the novel Dr. No, but the movie version is the first time the world got a good look at James Bond, so she’s there to set the tone.   In fact, she appears before Bond does.  In the scene, we see a woman (not a girl) in an off-the-shoulder red dress.  She’s gambling at a high stakes Chemin de fer table.  She’s there by herself, and she’s clearly a regular player. (The house agrees to cover her marker when she loses.)  An off-camera voice says,

“I admire your courage, Miss…?”
She replies, “Trench, Sylvia Trench.  I admire your luck, Mr…?”
Cut to Sean Connery.  Cue the theme music:
“Bond, James Bond.”

And the 007 film franchise begins.

However, this isn’t where Sylvia Trench leaves her mark as the quintessential Bond Woman.  Three scenes later, Bond returns home and there’s Sylvia, out of the red dress and into one of Bond’s shirts, practicing her putt – with Bond’s golf clubs.  Bond (because he’s Bond) bursts into the room with a gun in his hand, but Sylvia doesn’t freak out, shrieking “OMG!  He’s got a gun!” — she flirts.  This is a confident woman.  This is an Ian Fleming Woman.  She’s come to Bond’s apartment (broken in, actually) to sleep with him.  She hasn’t been seduced.  She hasn’t been coerced.  She isn’t a victim of Bond’s raging sexism.  She’s a woman who makes her own decisions — and today she’s decided on James Bond.

So, as feminists from Maine to Malibu theorize and chatter about how many misogynists can dance on the head of a pin — Ms. Trench, I salute you!  You were a woman before it was fashionable and saw no reason to complain about it.