Flash Mob

The recent phenomenon of the Flash Mob has generated many hundreds of column inches in the papers at what is usually a slow news period, so editors must be thanking whatever dark gods newspaper editors pray to for this latest expression of ‘individual expression’.
The idea of a Flash mob is simple; it’s an expression of art, an anarchistic means of comical protest, the gathering of hundreds (or even thousands) of people in one place seemingly at random, co-ordinated by email and text messages. Social commentators have lined up to rattle on about how it’s a purely spontaneous movement from the grass roots – people expressing themselves as individuals – and so on, and so on.
The problem is, like most fads, it will get burned out and co-opted by society in very short order. Fringe society might have had an original idea, but how long before Nike start organising a Branded Flash Mob event? (Assuming they haven’t already.)
The basic idea will appeal to people with little better to do for a short while, and there will be derivations on the theme – nude flash mobs, fancy dress flash mobs, all female, all gay, and so on, but the idea will wither and die except where it is taken up by the mainstream both as a marketing opportunity and as a means of gathering & communication.
So in the future we can expect to see the flash methodology utilised by other groups – Flash Hunts (“Fx in th Spnny, brng hnds. Tlly ho!”) and flash fishing (“trt r rsng in strm”) for when country sports are persecuted out of existence, for example. Of course, the methodology has made such things nigh-impossible to police, meaning that the very people who are most opposed to such ideas have provided a method of perpetuating them.
My personal ambition would be to organise a Flash Nueremburg rally, this having the dual benefit of getting twice as many people as any other event (crowds of Black-shirted morons on the one hand, and crowds of protesters on the other) and a jolly good fight for me to watch to boot.

Nike Mayfly

Reading the paper the other day, I was struck by some correspondence about the Nike ‘Mayfly’ running shoe; a shoe which is so light and sleek that it will disintegrate after about 60 miles of running but reduces the weight carried by marathon runners by that vital extra pound. The correspondence wasn’t about this being a waste of resources (Nike actually will take them from you & recycle them when the shoes give it up), but rather about the perceived iniquity between the shoes costing about $100 a pair and the fact that Vietnamese workers for Nike get about $1 to actually make a pair.^* Not for the first time (and no way will it be the last) I was struck by the astounding ignorance of my fellow man. Several things struck me about this.

1) If people perceive an injustice being done within the international world of Nike training shoes, the easiest way to tackle that is simply not to buy their goods. Manufacturers are in the business of making money and if they don’t make money from one product then they’ll either go out of business of make a different one.

2) More notably, whilst it is easy for happy, comfortable, plump westerners like you & I to rail about the evils of global capitalism, the thin, unhappy, third world recipients of it are only too delighted. It’s quite rare that Nike is held up as a shining example of capitalism with a conscience and so I expect that it’ll come as a surprise to most that quite recently it was just that, and the organisation doing the praising was the Vietnamese Communist Party. For all that $1 might seem a nugatory amount to you & I, in Vietnam it is three times the average daily wage and the people who work in Nikes factories are loaded in comparative standards. This influx of relative wealth has brought schools, sanitation, wealth, and health to a town which formerly had none of those.


Now I know that my various socialist friends will claim for some tortuous reason or other that the Vietnamese Commies aren’t proper commies (except when they’re talking about the Vietnam war, when suddenly that perception changes), but I tend to discount such claims as spurious at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
So it seems to me that a net result of global capitalism is that a bunch of people stupid enough to buy shoes designed to fall to bits after a week are bringing happiness, education, and health to people on the other side of the world whose lives, until only recently, had been blighted by the malignant curse of Socialist government.
I find it remarkably ironic that the anti-capitalism protestors who travel the world smashing the windows in Gap could make a much more significant impact on improving the lives of Vietnamese peasants by buying a pair of shoes that will have dropped to bits by the middle of next week, but just try pointing that out to them and see how much fun you have.

^* EDIT: This figure is incorrect and I'm quoting the fool who wrote to the paper, not accurate pay figures or costs.

Bottoms, and a competition

The front cover of this month's Cosmopolitan has a strapline of "Easy ways to change the shape of your bottom".
I'm willing to bet quite a lot of money that their article doesn't feature a single one of the methods that sprang to my mind when I read that.

To aleviate the boredom of this afternoon, I'm annoucing a competition. The person who comes up with the most imaginative way to change the shape of a bottom will win one of those legendary drinks that I'm forver promising and never buying.