Monthly Archives: July 2017

21st Century Misery Solved

 

Currently, 73% of the United Kingdom is currently engaged in filling in paperwork so that your bosses can calculate precisely how much better you are performing now that at the same time last week. We are all being poured into tables and charts to highlight who is the worst – and who is the best at filling in (and telling lies on) forms.

Thanks to annual performance reviews and ridiculously high management targets, we are all working at 13,452% the rate of the average person in 1986. Productivity has never been higher; we are all richer and happier than ever.

Unless you try to catch a train. People who try to catch a train experience delays and strikes, rudeness and tickets that change price by the minute. Oh, and unless you attempt to drive anywhere. People who drive places encounter other people driving on the road. All of these people are impatient, rude and not very good at driving.

The military know this.

For decades, people who like to fight one another sussed out that if you went out in your tank someone else would see it. The next thing you know a little light is flashing, a buzzer is sounding and there’s a missile coming straight for them. Nothing puts a dampener on that Friday afternoon spirit than someone else trying to kill you. Right? We’ve all been there. It’s a real bummer.

So what did the little soldiers do? They went incognito, they embraced the Stealth. They made stuff all black, they put some funky angles on it – but, and this is the most important bit, they called their planes “stealth planes”. Tanks were no longer tanks, they are now “stealth tanks”. Take a flying guess what their little boats are now called go on.

Being stealthy made fighty people much happier and less prone to dwell on how much better stuff used to be. Having a stealthy vape always makes a vaper feel a sense of achievement. It’s clear to us that being stealthy is the future.

We are going to roll out a whole bunch of stuff, beyond vaping, over the rest of 2017. And it all begins with Britain’s second-most popular form of using nicotine: chips. We all love nicotine. We all love chips. We all love the nicotine in chips. But now it’s going to be even better – now they are Stealthchips.

Now we just need to work out how to make fish all angular and a decent way of spraying them a dull machine grey. Once we’ve sussed out how to make Stealthfish there’ll be no stopping us.

Maybe you’re happy with your life? Maybe you’re totally stoked with your vape? It doesn’t matter. If switching to Stealth-life works for people who are all grumpy and misery, just imagine how much more full of beans you’ll feel.

 

Heroes

 

Martin who? Chapman what?

Precisely, the point entirely. If you are unaware, McKee is the chubby lover of all things pies, who believes it is his life mission to save the world from itself (*as long as this doesn’t include pies). Chapman is the same kind of thing but less pie-ridden, more Australian and bitter that he never became the rock god he dreamt of being.

But heroes they are, Melissa Sweet (who?) says so because they “speak the truth to power”. Unfortunately, Ms Sweet doesn’t know how much danger she placed the world in with that one tweet. McKee celebrated with another pie binge and Chapman spent three hours looking at his nude self in a mirror immediately after reading it. Anything could have befallen the plane during that time. Literally anything.

 

Like all heroes, they believe they know better than you and will save you from yourself whether you want it or not (Ref: Marvel’s Civil War). They are going to set you free, they are going to give you liberty. They ride white chargers and have halos and wave mystical swords of righteousness and stuff. Who cares what destruction lies in the wake of this action? Not proper heroes that’s for sure – and it’s that mark of irresponsibility which highlights exactly how heroic MucKy and Chumpman are.

Mucky & Chumpman: making your mind up for you so you don’t have to bother. That’s the film précis right there, Hollywood.

But you, you the pipsqueak in the corner over there. Yes, you. You are like Donald Trump to them. You are the condensed spirit of Hitler, Pol Pot and Simon Cowell. You are the person who told Amy Schumer she could be a comedian. You are the essence of evil because you support a regime that denies their truths. You are with them or you are wrong, for they are academics and always correct and on the side of justice – because they are the heroes.

So, we must be the villains?

 

You know that evil woman in Game of Thrones? The one who made that king bloke kill his own child for no reason? That’s Lorien Jollye, that is. They may as well rename the New Nicotine Alliance, “The League of Nazis Who Leave Milk Out On Work Surfaces”.

Anybody who perpetuates the myth that vaping offers a workable harm reduction approach to combatting smoking-related diseases is clearly one of the bad guys. It’s obvious because we aren’t members of the gang of heroes; a gang that includes Chapman, McKee, Glantz, Mr Burns, Dick Dastardly, Cruella de Vil, and Darth Vader.

So, thank you Martin McKee, and thank you Simon Chapman. Thank you for speaking the truth to power. Thank you for saving us from ourselves.

Oh, and thank you Andrew Laming for actually knowing what “the truth” is and standing up for evidence-based policy.