The opposite

As the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell wrote,

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Which is not exactly cheerful, but old Andy did have a point: with the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe, it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what you might conceivably do in the few years left to you. After all, wouldn’t you like to leave some mark on the world before you pop your clogs? When you’re finally pushing up the daisies, wouldn’t you like someone to say “Well [your name here] was a total waste of space as a human being but he/she did invent [your choice of invention here].

Of course, finding something really worthwhile to do with your remaining time is no easy matter, so to make the choice a bit easier for you, I’ve come up with ten suggestions of things to do before you die. I’ll admit that ten is a fairly arbitrary number – it could just as well have been a hundred or even a thousand – but you can always look at it as a starting point. So here goes.

1. CLIMB MOUNT EVEREST. Yes, I know it’s a classic but it’s still worth doing anyway. Apparently climbing the highest mountain in the world is now so popular that there’s a waiting list and traffic jams at base camp so all the more reason to get cracking before they install a lift. Naturally, it helps enormously if you have some sort of physical defect or are prepared to do it backwards, barefoot or waving an inflatable banana.

Mount Everest - vastly overrated.

2. FIND OUT WHO INVENTED MAYONNAISE. The Majorcans say it was them, the French, as always, claim that they did it. The Germans have been quiet on the subject, which is unusual, while the Italians couldn’t care less as long as it’s made with extra virgin olive oil. Find out who did it, acquire the copyright and sue Heinz for millions.

3. LIVE. All right! I know! It sounds easy but there are very few people who have mastered the art. What it really boils down to is that whatever you choose to do before you die should actually have been done much earlier.

4. DISCOVER A CURE FOR SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter what – there are plenty of useful diseases out there so you can more or less take your pick. It doesn’t even have to be an effective cure as long as it will fool people for a few hundred years (the placebo effect is a great ally in this). Personally I’d play safe and go for something that is not life-threatening, such as athlete’s foot, for example.

Python Foot - also worth a try.

5. INVENT A NON-ESSENTIAL GADGET. Let’s be honest – most of the essential things have already been invented so that only leaves the non-essential ones. As they’re non-essential, the field is fairly open here. But whatever you choose to invent, be sure that when it comes to naming it you stick an ‘i’ in front, as in the iAutomaticHamsterBacksideWasher. You’ll probably get sued by Apple but that can be another claim to fame and will use up all the dosh you made after copyrighting mayonnaise (that will teach you).

6. BECOME AN OLYMPIC ATHLETE. Tricky at first glance but it’s really dead easy. All you have to do is choose a sport that your country is useless at and register yourself as the only competitor. Examples that spring to mind are the Ethiopian cross-country skiing team or the Vatican City marathon team. After all, who’s the Winter Olympics athlete that everyone remembers? Yep, Eddy “The Eagle” Edwards!

But the Vatican synchronised luge team is not to be messed with.

7. WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE. Now some might argue that you actually have to be good at something to do this but nothing could be further from the truth. Finding out who discovered mayonnaise might help but the smart money is on the Peace Prize. If Jimmy Carter and Al Gore can win it, you must be in with a chance. Failing that, you could do worse than the Nobel Prize for Literature. Just write something incomprehensible and mention ‘peace’ a few times and you’ve got it.

8. WRITE A MILLION-SELLING ALBUM. Easy-peasy! If Alanis Morrissette (who’s as wet a Canadian as ever drank a litre of Perrier) can do it, so can you! 33 million copies of Jagged little pill? You must be joking! It takes 33 million jagged little pills to listen to it! So buy a guitar and learn a few chords. And you can use the earnings to discover who invented mayonnaise and then give all the profits to Apple.

Alanis Morrissette disguised as a rubbish bin (extreme right).

9. SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF WORLD POVERTY. This is not quite as easy as it sounds as it calls for a bit of investment. Namely in plane tickets and a gun. Make a list of all the offshore tax havens, go to each one and go into each bank. Hold the gun to the head of the manager (don’t worry, he’s used to this – he gets it all the time from his customers) and ask him to empty out all the safe deposit boxes, etc. and send the proceeds to the Third World. The only catch is that it will probably end up back in the offshore tax haven. But the Third World is not a perfect world.

10. HAVE THE LAST WORD. Ever been frustrated because that snappy comeback occurred to you 3 hours after the confrontation with the rude sales assistant? This is for you. It is perhaps your greatest challenge and one that cannot be left to chance. Clearly the whole thing will have to be carefully engineered and stage-managed. Invite a select group of friends around to your place, work to a script and make sure that no one opens his or her mouth after you have spoken. And make sure you have that snappy, off-the-cuff comeback prepared days in advance. Canned laughter is a nice touch.

The history of Hollywood – and a few other places – is strewn with forgotten heroes, but none have been quite as thoroughly strewn, or forgotten, as Igor.

This is strange indeed because if you so much as mention the name Igor to most people, they will immediately think of a goggle-eyed hunchback who opens large, iron-bound doors with an ominous creak and says something like “The master was expecting you” in a vaguely East European accent. Yes, everyone seems to remember Igor the character, yet few remember Igor the actor.

What makes this truly sad is that, in the course of a career that started way back in the 1920s, Igor portrayed a huge variety of leading and supporting actors ranging from an anonymous bit-part player in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Bela Lugosi, to Marty Feldman and even, in a spectacular bit of type-casting, to Charles Bronson. And that is to name but the obvious few.

Charles Bronson

In fact, Igor has played a huge variety of roles including Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Sylvester Stallone and, more recently, Keira Knightly and Hugh Grant. And yet no one even knows his last name.

I think you’ll agree that to play so many very different parts, calls for acting ability of the highest calibre. But who, in fact, was Igor? Who was this master of accent, idiom and - let’s be frank – disguise? Who was this man who was never honoured in his own right by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or even the National Transylvanian Academy of Retired Igor Players?

Igor was born in obscurity to a family of low-paid goggle-eyed hunchbacks in the town of Weissenberg in 1907. His parents, Mr and Mrs Igor, worked as mouse-stuffers for the local taxidermist. It was hard, grinding work – particularly the legs – and there was rarely meat on the Igor’s table. Well, no meat that wasn’t ground mouse anyway. To relieve the burden on the family, little Igor ran away to join a company of travelling insurance brokers.

Summer in Transylvania

It was while selling third-party, fire and theft car insurance in the villages of Transylvania that Igor discovered a talent for acting. Light comedy appealed to him in particular and he joined a succession of local drama groups. It was while playing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (he played the fan) that he was spotted by the roving impresario and theatrical agent Leonid Brezhnev.

Broadway was soon to follow. Igor shone as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town but finally got his big break playing a piano in The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. In a review of the production, the New York Times said: “Ruby Keeler was a stand-out as the third chorus girl from the left but the true star of the production was Igor the piano. I particularly loved the moustache”.

Igor as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town

The lure of Hollywood proved irresistible but playing a door-stop and a piano on Broadway was no immediate guarantee of success. Igor joined the thousands of wannabes queuing at Central Casting and kept hunch to back by checking that the users of public lavatory cubicles were still alive. Finally, in 1925, he got his first big break in a Mack Sennett comedy called Sneezing Beezers in which he played a goggle-eyed hunchback. After years of playing inanimate objects, this was a true breakthrough. Unfortunately these were still the years of silent movies so Igor’s one line, “The master was expecting you”, appeared in text with a scroll border and a few major chords from the pianist.

Small though his part was, Igor had caught the eye of directors and producers. Sneezing Beezers was followed by a number of Mack Sennett one-reelers. Soon his popularity was such that audiences would virtually ignore stars like Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan, waiting in anticipation for the goggle-eyed hunchback.

It was time for a makeover

By 1928, the days of the silent movies were over. Talkies became all the rage. Not that Igor noticed very much of this as he never went to the cinema. This was not because he feared the adulation of the public but more that he could never get into a position that allowed him to see the screen.

1931 saw the first real high-spot of his film career: Frankenstein. Unfortunately, these were definitely the days of type-casting and Igor was cast as a mad hunchback called Fritz. Determined to show the studios what he could do, he subsequently made Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, in which he expanded his repertoire by playing Bela Lugosi.

This gave Igor an idea. He set to work reinventing himself. While many stars of the 1930s were indulging in wild parties fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, Igor could usually be found working out at the local gym and hammering his hunch with a wooden mallet. He solved the problem of his goggle eyes by simply sucking his cheeks in, which was so successful that he landed the part of Katherine Hepburn in Morning Glory, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Katherine Hepburn

We can fast-forward over the years that follow. Suffice to say that many of our favourite actors were, in fact, Igor. His versatility was astounding. Here are just a few examples: Humphrey Bogart and a reprise of Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, R2D2 in Star Wars, Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean…

Sadly, Igor passed away on September 17th 1840. In spite of winning an enormous number of awards for his work, his oeuvre has never been appreciated in its own right. It is time to redress this balance.

Mind you, a lot of actors will be out of work.

Igor and his mother relaxing in the sauna

There will be many of you who are unfamiliar with the word “unboxing” and to tell you the truth I was too until recently.

You must admit, it’s a slightly unusual word.

You might conceivably be forgiven for thinking that it refers to one of the many burgeoning alternative sports. You know, the sort of thing that gets relegated to late at night on the Xtreme Sports Channel. This time involving a man wearing shorts and gloves who gets up from the canvas following a countdown from 10 to 1 and then hits another guy in the fist with his chin. A bit like untennis and the untriplejump. But then with blood.

And that's a straight belly to the fist from McManus!

You would be wrong.

It could also refer to the practice of going shopping and refusing to get things wrapped. “No I’ll take it unboxed please. And while you’re about it, I’ll have some unboxed pastrami and a couple of unboxed bagels.”

Wrong again.

Unboxing is the increasingly popular practice of taking things out of boxes. Notably on YouTube. Naturally, the objects that are unboxed do not include pastrami or bagels but are usually some piece of soon-to-be-obsolescent hardware that the unboxer can’t wait to get his hands on. Although he can certainly wait long enough to set up a high-definition video camera and film the whole business.

To leave you in no doubt about what I mean, here’s an example:

I’m sure you didn’t watch that until the bitter end, and that’s unfortunate as it gets really exciting in the last 5 minutes. But don’t think that this video is in any way unique. The only thing that’s unusual about this one is its length – a full 25 minutes of monotone commentary on something very few people could care less about.

Which brings us to the point of why anyone in his or her right mind would want to make a video about taking something out of a box and then post said video on YouTube. After all, although I’ve seen much worse footage on YouTube, in terms of sheer boredom value the unboxing video positively streaks ahead of the opposition. But why do it? I’ve thought long and hard about it and the only conclusion that I can come to is that this is the last resort of people who desperately want to post something on YouTube but have no idea what.

Nothing ever happens in their lives. There are no hilarious and possibly fatal accidents involving children or pets. No UFOs hovering over the back yard. No idiot riding a shopping trolley into a canal. Not even a gang of international terrorists kidnapping their grandmothers. At least none when the video camera is handy.

Nothing not happening nohow.

It’s not even that many of the unboxers seem particularly enthusiastic about unboxing. Some of them even claim to not know what is in the box in the first place, which is fairly difficult to believe when you consider that they bought it, and paid the transport costs. No, they stumble along in their boring monotones, sometimes exclaiming “well, will you look at that” with all the excitement of an archbishop commentating on a chess marathon.

I’ve also noticed that many of the presenters of unboxing videos tend to be a bit disrespectful to the contents of the box. Accessories are tossed casually aside one by one with words like “And we have a hard drive and a standard USB cable” as if they don’t really matter at all. And in fact they don’t. The product is nothing; the unboxing experience is everything.

Mind you, in terms of production costs, unboxing videos tend to be very cheap entertainment indeed. Props usually consist of a table and a knife, although scissors have been used on occasions. Script writing too tends to take a low priority. There’s a lot of ad-libbing in the style of “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much foam padding” or, more prosaically, “So let’s see what we have in the box” or, more bizarrely, “Let’s do the smell test”.

Unboxing smell-testing equipment (here seen on dog).

More worrying to people with an ounce of sanity is that some unboxing videos have pretty high production standards. There’s a snappy intro with upbeat music. A presenter – typically a voice only – who achieves a certain degree of rapid-fire articulacy. There’s quite clearly a flourishing market out there for people who want to see objects removed from boxes.

And even more worrying is the fact that in today’s consumer society, the box is gaining in importance over its contents. Manufacturers wised up to this a long time ago - Apple, in particular, has become well-known for its elegant, stylish packaging. In fact, if you buy high-tech goods online, you’ll often see a photograph of the box along with one of the product. Does the box tell you any more about the product than what you’ve already read about it? No. But the box is still important. After all, when you’re actually using your tiny mobile phone, can anyone really see what brand it is? Of course not. The defining moment of ownership of a high-end device begins and ends with the box.

Fortunately I foresee a rosy future for the unboxing video. Splice them all together and play them back-to-back on the TV in your bedroom. A guaranteed cure for insomnia.

We all live in societies that are governed by rules. And, believe me, few societies are governed by quite so many rules as the one I live in. You see, Norwegians have wonderful laws – handmade, finely crafted, honed to perfection. People come from other countries to admire them and some of them even copy these laws when they get home. The Norwegian book of laws, cunningly disguised as a sex manual entitled Norges Lover, is a weighty yet erotically red-bound tome that is great for pressing flowers and using as a door-stop. And in fact that’s what most Norwegians seem to use it for as few of the laws that it contains seem to be observed on any regular or meaningful basis.

The Norwegian Karma Sutra.

But then, of course, that’s precisely what rules are for. They are there to be broken. If nobody ever broke the rules, there would be no point in having any. What is more, hundreds of thousands of lawyers across the world would be instantly out of business. And, believe me, there’s no one more likely to break the law than an out-of-work lawyer.

One should also bear in mind that lawyers are only the very visible tip of an immense legal iceberg that includes judges, justices of the peace, recorders, solicitors, actuaries, notaries, clerks of the court, ushers and, of course, policepersons. Ergo no laws equals mass unemployment. The Norwegians, being a sensible, well-adjusted people recognise this fact and make it their business to break every law in the sex manual.

Not that breaking the law is exactly difficult to do. Our modern society is now cluttered up with so many of them that breaking a few is no longer a question of existential choice – it’s an absolute inevitability.

Moses delivers the first traffic regulations.

Even the sweet, grey-haired, lovable granny so beloved of Disney films can hardly set her Zimmer frame over the threshold without immediately breaking a few rules. In fact, she’s probably more likely to do so than younger people, because she simply doesn’t know that the rules exist in the first place. However, as any out-of-work lawyer will tell you, ignorance of the law is not a defence.

You see, it’s all about social control. The thinking behind this, if there is any thinking, seems to be that the more we are controlled the easier society will function. There will be fewer disputes because there are rules in place to resolve these disputes. However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the more rules there are, the more disputes there are likely to be.

Take a local by-law – which I’ve made up – against washing your car on a Sunday. You might well feel irritated if your neighbour washes his car every Sunday but you’re unlikely to do anything about it. After all, it’s a free country and if he wants to wash his car, there’s nothing to stop him. But pass a law forbidding people to wash their cars on Sundays and you’ve immediately got grounds for making a complaint. And not just any complain either but an official one that could lead to a sanction for the offending washer. And which will certainly lead to a bad relationship with your neighbour thereafter.

So the law has created a dispute instead of resolving one.

Young police cadets unwashing a car.

A lot of the rules and regulations that govern our behaviour seem to aim at ridding our lives of minor annoyances. Typical of this is the “Do not walk on the grass” sign. The annoyance in this case is presumably the one experienced by the parks department who have to keep the grass looking nice. But why do they have to keep it looking nice? Since when was grass there to be looked at? Of all the vegetation that has been put to the service of parks and gardens, grass is certainly the most practical. It’s there to be walked on. Or played on. It’s not designed to be stared at.

It’s when it comes to traffic regulations that the rules get truly barmy. And then for really bad craziness, we have to look further afield than Norway. In San Francisco, elephants are allowed to walk down the street, provided they are on a leash, however it is forbidden to wipe your car with used underwear. In Denver, Colorado, it is prohibited to drive a black car on Sundays. But if you think it’s always the blacks that get a raw deal, in Minneapolis it’s forbidden to drive a red car down Lake Street. Tennessee very rightly forbids driving while asleep.

No leash, eh? Sorry but you're nicked, sunshine!

And just in case you thought that the United States has the monopoly on mad traffic laws, in Greece you can have your licence revoked for being unwashed or badly dressed. The Russians are a little more sensible: you can be as unwashed as you like but it’s illegal to drive a dirty car. In China, drivers who stop at pedestrian crossings risk a fine while the Turks take a rather opposite view of road safety that fits this blog completely: drivers must carry a hygienic body bag suitable for carrying a corpse weighing up to 120 kilos. Failure to do so will result in a fine and a possible 6-month jail sentence.

That's 6 months in a gulag but with 3 months off for a clean windscreen.

One of the most popular absurd general laws comes from my home country of Great Britain. It refers to the – admittedly small – possibility of a whale being washed up in London. In such an event, by law, the head belongs to the King and the tail to the Queen. I don’t suppose many of you have had first-hand experience of washed-up whales but, by all accounts, they tend to be ever so slightly niffy. In fact, they stink. And because they’re big, they stink big time. Now I’ve tried to think of some logical reason for this law but the only one I can come up with is either that nobody knew what to do with said cetacean and therefore called on the highest authority in the land to dispose of it, or that it’s some sort of veiled insult to the monarchy – and particularly to the Queen.

To conclude, I refer you all to my old pal Charles Dickens, who famously said the law is an ass. And you can take that any way you want.