Ideas I Do Not Want

Darth Gayder

For a lot of kids who grew up in a world that they found vaguely disappointing and craving an elegant weapon for a more civilized age,  Star Wars seemed like something they could really invest some serious time in. It seemed doable.

I’ve always felt that if you were a boy and you grew up not liking Star Wars it’s probably because you probably weren’t smiled at enough as a child. The truth is that if the manner in which you were raised put any kind of premium on imagination, it was literally impossible to not like Star Wars because it’s a perfectly fantastic adventure, completely compelling to anyone with an ounce of dream in them.

Like the bible it replaced in so many minds, the holy trilogy encouraged individual fans to create their own interpretations, posit their own theories, imagine their own backstories to the story they loved. With the arrival of the prequels, this trend was much blunted because of a simple fact:

The prequels were about as appetizing as a dogshit sandwich.

They were conceptually weak, narratively ridiculous, the characters were about as nuanced as an unlubricated fisting and the way they hamfistedly slotted bullshit explanations for questions we never wanted asked made me feel like Lucas had switched from beloved trusted uncle to secret genital toucher.

Watching them however did provide me with one inescapable conclusion: 

Darth Vader’s inner turmoil and apparently boundless anger was actually driven by the fact he couldn’t accept that fact that he was gay.

Now first of all I should mention that there have been rumours about the real reasons behind George Lucas’s 30 year period of strict bachelorhood and multiple adopted children for years.  There’s no solid proof either way other than a lot of anecdotal “I saw him in a bookshop with a bunch of books that were kinda faggy” stories on the internets, and either way it doesn’t make the tiniest amount of difference. In fact it would kind of make sense that only a gay man could create a character like Han Solo, who’s roguish grin and devil may care attitude made a generation of otherwise straight men stop and ask themselves some hard-hitting personal questions. But if he is gay it would seem strange that he didn’t really address it in his movies.

Or does he?

The truth is that if he IS gay it would explain the following addition in the Phantom Menace:

Anakin Skywalker created C-3PO when he was about eight. 

So why is this important you ask?

Well, eight is a really strange age. You’re pre-sexual so any gender identity you tend to identify with is pretty telling about where you’re going later in life. While many gay men don’t manifest their gay identities till much later in life, I think we can all agree, there are a lot of plainly already gay eight year olds out there.

You know, in the most general terms, the kid who when you play with figures always wanted to use your sister’s Barbie to represent themselves? The one who when he plays video games, uses the character creation screen to make himself a six foot two inch African Woman? The one who constantly insisted on being called by a different girl’s name and striking extremely feminine poses every week when you were playing Ninjas?

This is important because when Anakin Skywalker was eight, he chose to make himself a robot friend. A friend he could confide in, a friend he could tell secrets to, an effete protocol droid that in his slave lifestyle he had absolutely no use for.

He made himself an incredibly camp, gay robot friend named C-3PO.

And I think that’s rather telling.

Now, I’m not saying that this is some indication means he was DEFINITELY gay but I am saying that maybe he didn’t GO to the Dark Side so much as he was just born that way.

It would of course make the entire series have that much more impact if you understood that The Dark Side was a huge metaphor for Lucas’s suppressed gay lifestyle. That the relationship of “Master” and “Apprentice” between Darth Vader and the Emperor was a little darker than previously thought of. That when the Emperor was going for Luke, the younger more boyish Skywalker, it wasn’t strictly his strength in the Force that he found so attractive. That Darth Vader’s murder of the Emperor had a tinge of the spurned to it. It would also make sense that Vader was in the end so focused on stopping his son, the one shred of evidence of his fake heterosexual identity from following him down a Dark Path which he felt would forever dominate his destiny.

Vader’s mask then becomes a powerful metaphor, and the less said about the fact he died flaming the better.

Ok, maybe Darth Vader was gay because George Lucas wanted people to understand his own struggle with his sexuality. Or maybe it was just a piece of shitty writing forced out of a creative brain long since gone to the Dark Side.

Either way, Darth Gayder is an idea I do not want.

Dat/Cog

“I’m a cat person” she said, “Oh, really? I’m totally a dog person.”

His eyes immediately flicked to the clock by the door, how long was it polite to pretend that this date wasn’t already over?

This would be the last time they ever spoke, the soul-mates that got sidelined by pet partisanship. 

Some people say they love cats, some people say they love dogs. Personally, I think that’s bullshit because there are things about dogs that cat lovers love even if they refuse to admit it.

In my mind, the problem with cats is that the good ones, the ones that people really love, are the ones that act like dogs. They’re playful, loyal, loving, they jump on your lap and show affection when you pet them. They roll around and attack things and make for good YouTube fodder. They act like kittens till they die. They jump and hide and scratch and meow. They have personality and moods. They’re still independent, they can look after themselves, but ultimately it’s the ones that like dogs, make you the center of their universe, that are the most desirable. 

Dogs however, are kind of a pain in the ass. They take up a lot of time. They always want attention. They’re not graceful or lithe. And they’re a real commitment because the most genuinely doglike ones are big, they take up a huge amount of space. This is why years back someone decided to solve the dog problem by breeding them down to Chihuahua size. That clever so and so thought that we could could take all of the good things about dogs and put them into a pet that fits in your handbag. But in my mind there’s a simple problem with small dogs:

They all look fucking ugly.

Almost every one of them look squashed, pinched, uncomfortable, jerky. They have weird proportions, off putting personal behaviors and strange and occasionally psychotic personalities. And the truth is I don’t understand why we have to endure them sitting there staring freakishly at you in their minute insanity. This is especially true when we already have the perfect physical template for a small four legged pet we know that we find beautiful. 

Yes, I’m wondering why it is that we can’t make a dog that looks like a cat.  A Dat, a Cog. Cats and dogs already look pretty goddamn similar, it can’t be hard, look at the difference between a wolf and a Dachsund. Are you saying we couldn’t have bred shorter noses and more expressive eyes? That we couldn’t make a dog with a long feline tail and excellent balance? We already have a head start,  they’re roughly the same already!

Four legs, long tail, whiskers, I mean they’re practically identical.

I guess the new Dat wouldn’t be able to purr and would still bark and wouldn’t do that cool “always lands on their feet” thing, but how cool would that be, a cat that was just a more rugged, not quite so bloody effete? You could finally take your cat for a walk or go hunting and he’d be totally into it, plus you’d never have to buy two different kinds of pet food ever again! Convenient! And, no more cat fur allergies! Awesome!

So here’s what I propose: We start from scratch, we take some wolves and we start selectively breeding them in four different ways: smaller, more symmetrical head shape, leg shape and torso shape. Within 30 generations we’d have a dog that looked almost identical to a cat. He’d probably still have dog eyes and a few of the more fundamental things you couldn’t really change, but to the casual observer this new breed would look exactly like a cat. We then take that brand new Dat from it’s freakish mother and have it be raised by a regular cat alongside kitten bretheren, who would teach it the ways of feline independence and convenient in-box shittery. We could phase out cats within ten years and put an end to this divisive and destructive war between cat owners and dog owners. Peace would be achieved soul-mates would marry and all would be happy.

Other than the freakish mutant Dat, or Cog,  as other than the crippling genetic legacy of inanity and depression, it would also be an idea I do not want. 

Pound 4 Pound

I think that first of all, reality television is a pretty great place to start when trying to figure out what humanity is capable of when it’s feeling really fucking lazy and stupid.

The truth is that the business end of our televisual culture isn’t complicated. It isn’t progressive. It isn’t even genuinely provocative unless you think that Jerry Springer doing a special on Nazi Klan Wive Cheaters somehow actually addresses the contemporary divorce epidemic. It’s cheap TV in every sense of the word.

And the only reality in reality television seems to be the reality that you can’t help but fucking watch it, for reals.

And maybe it’s because is that you’re so bored of being “challenged” by watching openly unreal TV that your need for downshifting combined with your lifelong programmed openness to televisual marketing means you can’t help but kind of believe it when some coked up thirtysomething sex-tape making ultimate jizzhole makes a “Reality TV show” about her new life as a nun? Or maybe all Hitler needed to do to actually get people on his side was get a cool new wardrobe, a really awesome theme song, a jazzy logo and a bunch of really good looking Aryan friends with catchphrases like “That’s SO Jewy!” and names like “The Master-Racer”?

But the truth is that whether you like it or not, Reality TV is actually pretty bloody real, because the reality we interact with isn’t actually that real.

Nice eh?

So because it basically acts as history’s greatest conceptual delivery system, television seems more real than reality because it has a narrative that reality lacks. This is important because the way we make sense of the world is by making it into stories. So reality television makes sense to us, even though it really fucking doesn’t in reality. It also means that as an industry it will represent every level of easy to make, degradingly mindless, pointlessly controversial, socially irrelevant smegma because since it’s so fucking loosely defined yet easy to create, Reality is a commodity that you can buy cheap and sell dear.

This makes it incredibly profitable.

Which is why I had an idea to for a Reality TV show called “Pound for Pound” about 6 massively obese women and 6 anorexic women who have to live in a house together for 6 months to help each other get to a more normal weight. The catch is that every time one of the anorexic women puts on weight they get paid a hundred pounds for every pound they put on and every time one of the overweight women loses a pound they get paid ten pounds for every pound they lose. BUT HERE’S THE SECOND CATCH: If one of the anorexics LOSES weight then the overweight women lose their all money and if the overweight women put it back on the anorexics lose all theirs.  The entire show would show women trying to achieve a goal while at the same time trying to help someone else achieve the exact opposite goal.

This makes Pound 4 Pound awesome because its basically a mixture of the trifecta of successful reality tv shows - Weight Loss, Bitchy Girl Drama and Freaks. It literally could make a trillion dollars. It would have moments of real human sadness and pain, women denying their sickness, meglomaniacal manipulation for personal gain and human interest. It would be one of the most successful reality TV shows ever. And one of the absolute worst things that our current society could ever create.

And that is why I really really believe in actual reality that it is an idea that I really really don’t want. 

Who Wants To?

You know, I spend a lot of time on here so this is basically one of the only things I can say with some real authority: the internet is just too fucking complicated.

 It’s an over engineered solution to a really basic problem. A conversation where at least one of the participants is either high on coke or totally fucking autistic. Web designers and visionaries and entrepreneurs and masters candidates and ten year olds with a dream and Harvard dropouts with investors and Russians with insane egos and sixty year old retirees with no understanding and international committees with an agenda all think that they have a right to jump around in your face and shout about options that are “moneti$able”. No-one seems to be addressing the simple stuff, the stuff that people actually want at four in the morning when they’ve lost the ability to prevaricate or listen to a sales pitch.

It’s not hard to define, four in the morning me is a very simple guy with very simple desires that are widely known. There are a billion attempts to come up with specific sites that specifically define a specific desire, but very few sites that are open enough to keep it simple enough for four in the morning me, or even eleven in the eveneing me. Where do I go if I want ****?  Is there anyone still up who wants to ****? How about we ****? Why isn’t there a site which caters to sudden, inexplicable, unjustifiable desire?

If there was, it would be called whowantsto.com and it would be incredibly simple. It’s the simplest site in the world, the one where you’re like I need someone to do something so like “Um, who’s up for *******?” It would fill a HUGE number of niches and would stand between every individual and the group who was missing them. Now, I know what you’re thinking: That site would be INEVITABLY populated by sex fiends and psychopaths bent on wearing heads as brassieres, but surely that would kind of be the point, no? It would add a tiny bit of spice? You want to go for a pint with a stranger in Berlin when you’ve just moved there? You want to find someone to travel to South East Asia? You want someone to move into a flat in Eastern Prague? You want someone to cowrite a screenplay about your abnormal testicles? You need someone to teach you the prison harmonica? You would like to dress up like a ninja turtle and learn the bo-staff? 

It just seems weird that Craigslist is the closest we have to this, and that’s only existant in America. Why not stop dancing around the underlying reality of people’s interests and just create utilitarian catchalls that will mean that even if you get stuck home on a Friday night cause your best friend has a chest infection, you’ll have some shit to look at and laugh about. At least you’ll know it could be worse. Or maybe a lot better.

But regardless of who wants to what, this is still an idea I do not want. 

Wheel of Days Off

At the best of times, work is pretty good. In fact, if you’re really lucky it can occasionally be pretty darn smashing. What is almost always shit however, is dealing with your fucking career.

The problem is that seperate to the challenge of actually doing your job, everybody’s expected to be thinking about the answers to incredibly fucking neurotic questions about our “career” and “where it’s going”.

It’s like as if there’s a belief that a “career” is something innate in our very being, even if we’re technically member of a species that’s a few thousand years away from trying to discover how to light fire by vigorously rubbing our hands in front of our own farts.  We’re using brains evolved to remember where the ripe fruit is to direct the context of our destinies and to a large extent all that does is cause a lot of internal tension and ignored, overripe fruit.

This means that for the majority of the us who are the non-super ambitious psychopath type the end result of trying to deal with our career is just stress. Pure and simple.

And for those of us who on top of that work for other people with no clear idea of why we’re doing it,the question of our “career” generates a feeling of sullen powerlessness to boot. If not correctly framed in a positive context, work can quickly become a process of braving fear-induced drudgery as you try to hide from the implication that you should somehow be the ambitious master of your career. Instead of the ostrich who just wants to be left alone.

The truth is that for many people, this means that the only way they can interact with their “career” is by waiting for some random occurrence that will push them sideways or up to some other better job or some other more interesting place, the whole time believing that if that thing doesn’t come along that they’ll probably just die a silent bitter death full of regret and self hatred for their weakness and lack of self-direction.

No these are not the go-getters, but they’re also not the bed wetters. They’re probably just people who are working in a job cause they need the money and are clever enough to be good at it but still don’t know what to do with their “career”. And then they spend their whole working lives WAITING for something to happen because they’re not the type who stands out.

And the truth is that it might take fucking AGES to happen, if it even does. They might spend YEARS sadly waiting for a random chance occurrence that may never come. When looking at this fact it’s important to realise this:

That is a fucking drag! Can’t we do something to help this process along?

It is, but yes, we can. By changing the way they look at randomness.

We do this by giving people like this a push, by giving them some small yet important element of CONTROL over when the chance comes and that we do it with something they really care about. Something that engages them on the level they’re at. By doing this you’re giving them the ability to decide WHEN to make the gamble rather than IF they should. 

So basically workplaces need to start instituting a Wheel of Days Off.

The basic concept is simple. You have a certain number of days off every year. When you hate your job and are hiding from your career, those days are all you have. You LIVE for those days spent not having to worry about your career and would do practically anything to get more of them. Maybe even gamble the ones you have.?

And this is where the Wheel comes in.

Say I have three days of holiday time off, but I really want to go on a week’s holiday. The simple idea is that I could choose to SPIN THE WHEEL OF DAYS OFF. Depending on what I landed on, different things would happen to those days, anything from multiplying them by another number, dividing them by some other or even, BEING ALLOWED TO STEAL THOSE DAYS FROM SOMEONE ELSE.

By adding some random chance into the mix, by turning holiday time into a currency of excitement, possibility and randomness people are encouraged to think bigger, to stop being so timid and neglect the high level thinking. Sure, you might lose but maybe being faced with the loss of the only thing that’s keeping you going might be the the kick in the ass you need to decide to work harder or quit or anything. It’s hilarious, but by giving these people some control over some randomness, it’s very possible that you’re giving them the ability to finally start thinking about their careers.

Because for a brief moment, as you spin the wheel, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

And that means that when the wheel has stopped spinning, it still is.

But even so, regardless of where the Wheel stops, it’s still an idea that I do not want. 

Warm Tap

When I go to the bathroom, I’m a busy guy. I’ve got things to do. This is especially true  considering the fact that on top of all the other things I do in there, every bathroom visit requires a minimum of five minutes looking at myself in the mirror and saying “Who’s a beautiful Baby?” over and over again.

So I don’t have time to fiddle with taps. I don’t have the energy to put into getting just the right nuanced mixture of super crazy hot and super crazy cold. If the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears taught us anything it was to not waste time with too hot or too cold and just go straight to just right or the bear will come home and eat your stupid ass for breakfast to replace the porridge you just stole. Like a chump.

Taps piss me off. It’s like no-one’s really thought about the “Two Taps” system since we all had to haul water from a pump and heat in a cauldron over a fire. Like the only options available are freezing cold and boiling hot and it’s up to you to freestyle to what you prefer EVERY TIME YOU USE WATER.

So I don’t like the fact that “Warm” isn’t a standard in water terms. It seems prehistoric. I should be able to shout “MUM THE WARM WATER IS BROKEN” at the top of my voice whenever I have to wait more than three seconds for the water system to work AND EXPECT THAT IT WILL BE FIXED IMMEDIATELY AS WARM WATER IS MY GODGIVEN RIGHT AS A HUMAN BEING.

Yes. I hate that I have to fiddle with my taps to get the right standard of water coming out of my tap like I’m on a bloody U-Boat in WWII. I want water that’s straight away not too hot and not too cold because ninety percent of the time when I use water in the bathroom, all I want is water that is warm enough to run my hands under while I check myself out in the mirror and think about what I’d look like with two noses. 

And even though I know that I would look sweet with two noses, this is still an idea I do not want.

A Brief Exchange

As you may or may not know*, I’m a recent graduate from a school in Sweden called Hyper Island that teaches advertising for the internet. While there I specialised in interactive copywriting, or being the person that does the big thinking and general creative internet wordsmithery. I returned to the big bad world of freelance employment and it’s been quite a ride so far.

This of course means that it goes without saying that I am always looking for work. It doesn’t though, as this blog evidences, mean that I stop having ideas for campaigns when I’m not working.

These ideas should, if the natural order of things were such that I had a way of doing so, be sold to an advertising agency for huge slabs of dirty cash money. That is how life SHOULD be. Instead I’m reduced to putting them here to prevent them from driving me INSANE.

This is silly.

I should have somewhere else to put them. Somewhere more productive. Ideally, I’d have a central place that I could go to interact with other people looking for jobs in creative advertising. Some place where I could go to talk to other people who are looking to exchange ideas, tips and most importantly briefs.

A brief is a document that a client gives to an advertising shop stating basically what it’s problem is and what it wants to achieve with their campaign. When you’re not working with an agency, you’re not getting briefs. When you’re not getting briefs, you’re not really expanding your porfolio. And the main reason most junior creatives can’t get a break is because we don’t have enough pieces in our portfolio to show what we’re capable of. 

This is the problem. 

Another problem is that making ads usually requires a number of people. Not everyone can do everything, unless of course they’re Swedish and born knowing every conceivable element of every creative discipline in which case they can go fuck themselves. For the rest of us non-Swedes it’s very easy to end up with functional roadblocks in place like being a designer with no conceptual ability or a copywriter who can’t draw to save their professional life that prevents you from actually coming up with decent briefs, executing them and thus expanding your portfolio to an acceptable standard, getting a job and finally burning the bathrobe you spend your entire life in instead of ever getting dressed. 

Here is where A Brief Exchange comes in. It’s a website that facilitates interaction between students and new graduates in the advertising field by exchanging briefs they made up and showcasing the resulting work. It allows them to discuss the best briefs, bin the worst, to act as the client to each other, pushing each other to produce on a schedule. It gives a much needed platform for critique and improvement. 

It also allows Agencies to set briefs that the great mass of hopefuls out there can have a go at and possibly get a job or some kind of validation from the bastards who are actually employed. At the very least it’ll give students some kind of place to talk about how crap it is being students, instead of having to set up tumblr blogs like this one and crap their multitude of stupid ideas out into the digital space before they rot and destroy their positivity. 

Looking at it now it actually seems like a quite good idea, which makes it a strange candidate to be put here, but I know I’ll never actually make it for the same reason no-one ever has.

You don’t focus on the shittiness of having to get a job when you actually have one.

So A Brief Exchange will remain just one more idea I do not want.

* You do not know.

Mouthse

Monkey hands are good for a lot of things, opening fruit, swinging from branches and microsurgery, apparently. I like my hands. They’re pretty. They’re quick. The fingers work. They’re graceful. The only real problem I have with my fingers is that I pretty much only have ten of them. I have two hands total.

And that, is complete and utter bullshit. 

We have to use our hands for almost EVERYTHING. Our feet are great at the whole walking thing but our toes can go fuck themselves in terms of everyday actively brain controlled functionality. So we’re stuck with our hands and as such we’ve designed the vast majority of our interfaces to be hand centric. It makes sense. If Siri’s apparent  inability to understand Scottish has proven anything it’s that we’re still a good ways away from having a functional voice interface. This means that as far as interaction tools go it’s still all about the hands. And I’m not sure why.

We’re cursed with minds that go at the fucking speed of light and yet we ONLY GET TWO hands that can only type at best a hundred and twenty words a minute? I can think about a thousand words a minute so for me, that is fucking ridiculous. I hate that it has taken me a good twenty seconds to write this. I hate it more than I hate only having one nose to breathe through. I hate it more than having my sex organs be located in the same place as my waste management system. It makes me sick to my stomach, which I also apparently only have one of.

Bullshit.

Plus on top of that, we have to use the same typing hands to control a pointing device? Or pick up our phone? Who’s bullshit idea was that? I spend a good eight to ten hours every day using a computer and the only crappy equipment I’ve got to do so consists of two stupid hands, four fingers and two lazy fucking fat awkward thumbs.

I suppose that this is a pretty good deal when put in the context of the alternative, like I don’t want to tempt fate or anything, but I’m saying that it could definitely be better. We do have other body parts that we could use as a user interface. No, I’m not talking about tele-dildonics, get your mind out of the gutter for one second.

I’m talking about the mouth. Not the voice, but the mouth. My teeth. My tongue.

I want to be able to use my mouth to interact with my computer. My teeth are a ready made set of seperate locuses for different programmes. My tongue is almost purpose designed as a quick selector. I want to create a set of super thin gumshields that you can wear that will act as an platform for interacting with your computer. It won’t replace the mouse, but it could definitely make interacting with a web browser, or selecting programmes to activate, or picking up your phone or any of the millions of little interactions that need to be hands free that much easier. Your mouth is a small little weird conceptual world of private sensation, so unlike your crappy huge hands that everyone can see, you’d be able to utilise the fact that the tongue is pretty much the only part of your body that you have intricate levels of control over, but that other people can’t see.

The strange thing about the mouth is how it’s kind of halfway between the body and the mind already. You have a mental map of your mouth that is about as close a fit to the way we perceive digital space as I can conceive of. You can never see your teeth and tongue without a mirror so in your mind they are largely conceptual, which makes them perfect candidates for digital interaction. I want to click my right incisors together and have my web browser go forward a page, I want to click my left incisors together and have it go back. I want to scroll through a page by running my tongue over my front teeth. I want to have different programmes embedded in different teeth and select them with my tongue. I want a paper thin bluetooth enabled gumshield that’s powered by a battery that’s charged when I chew my food and enables me to change the channels on my TV. It would be called a Mouthse.
 
And coincidentally, this Mouthse, is also an idea I do not want.

Sheen

Shampoo and Conditioner confuse me. I don’t really understand why they exist. I know that we need to clean our hair because even people like me who are rapidly losing theirs want whatever hair they do have to have a delightful lovely yummy lickable quality to it that convince the body politic of our youth and vigour. However, they still confuse me.

An entire industry has been created off the back of the idea that women’s hair should bounce in a healthy, delightful manner at all times or else she is a nasty filthy slut whore. Unfortunately, unlike dogs who apparently get a glossy coat from simply imbibing copious amounts of a top-secret substance called marrowbone jelly with their dog food, we have clean ours on a daily basis and the two things that we use to do so are called Shampoo and Conditioner.

These are two things. The shampoo is for cleaning the hair, and the conditioner is for giving it the lovely yummy bouncy yum yum.  

Two separate steps to clean hair.

And this is my problem. 

Why are they still separate steps?

We have had the ability to buy shampoo and conditioner sold IN THE SAME BOTTLE for YEARS now, yet we still insist on buying them separately. Pantene 2 in 1, Wash and Go, Bertie’s Traditional Shampditioner, all* these products exist and they combine both of the necessary unguents giving exactly the same results for less money and taking less time yet people still insist on buying them separately. Why? Do they love giving money to huge chemical conglomerates? Are they just using it as an excuse to spend more time in the shower? If that’s the case, why don’t we start coming up with MORE absolutely necessary chemicals that must be applied to our bodies in the shower? WHY DONT WE ALL JUST LIVE IN THE SHOWER THEN??

Hm. Where was I?

Oh yes.

Having Shampoo and Conditioner be available separately is incredibly risky on a personal level because say you only remember to buy shampoo then your hair goes unconditioned, you will go forth into the world with unconditioned hair and as we all know any person found on the streets with unconditioned hair may be legally enslaved, raped and eaten by any citizen in good standing. Fact.

So I wondered why it is that when it was sold as combined shampoo and conditioner, no-one really bought it, at least not as much as they bought them separately. The problem it seems like when you combine the two of them, there’s a perception that they probably won’t do their jobs as well because the cleaning rays of the shampoo will get in the way of the luxurious beams from the conditioner or something. People think that the hair must be cleaned before it is made bouncy.

This is simply wrong. I frequently put shampoo and conditioner on my head AT THE SAME TIME and afterwards my hair looks and feels EXACTLY LIKE IT DOES WHEN I USE THEM SEPERATELY. Modern shampoo already has huge quantities of conditioning agents in them so having the idea that they should be applied seperately is ridiculous.

So, I reckon what needs to be done is for us to abandon the idea of Shampoo AND Conditioner altogther. To leave them in their incredibly floral smelling grave. We need a new paradigm, with new perceptions and new consumer habits. If we keep calling them shampoo and conditioner, people will never buy them combined. Calling a product that combines Shampoo and Conditioner a combination of Shampoo and Conditioner makes you think that you’d be better off buying them and using them seperately.

This is not a battle we could win. The idea of clean then yum yum is just too deeply entrenched.

In the war for the hearts and clean minds of humanity, we need to change the game. We need a new product, a new product that MAY coincidentally only contain the chemicals that make up  shampoo and conditioner, but isn’t shampoo OR conditioner. It’s something else. It’s something new. It’s not a brand, it’s a just a type of product. From Pantene to Aussie, all the companies that used to make shampoo and conditioner will just make this new product. It’ll just become the stuff you buy to clean your hair in the same way toothpaste is the stuff you buy to clean your teeth.

I call it “sheen”. You’ll never shampoo or condition your hair again. You’ll just sheen it and then it’s clean and you can go on with your life.

This is an idea I do not want.

*Some of. 

Mul-T Bag

This is literally the first idea I ever had that I can remember not really wanting.

It’s pretty straightforward, I used to have to make my mother Tea, many times a day. I love my mum, but her tea addiction was at one stage the major reason that I had to get up out of my lovely couch seat, stop watching TV and go out into the cold desolate wilderness of the kitchen. To a spastic ten year old with a screen addiction who runs everywhere because he wants to get to the next oasis of television, a minute spent away from a source of entertainment you’re missing is like en eternity of worry, panic and existential hatred. I got very good at making tea very quickly.

My mother took her tea like this: Boiling water, a drop of full fat milk and one sugar. Later in life as she became more diet conscious, the sugar got dropped and milk became skinny, but back in the good old days this is how she liked it. For me, it was a recipe for time.

First, run out and put the kettle on, then run back. It takes an electric kettle roughly three minutes to boil with one cup of tea’s worth of water in it.  That is two minutes and fifty second’s worth of bliss.

Second, run out and grab mug. At the time, mugs were hanging way above my reach so there was a stool I had to run over to set up so I could frantically clamber up onto the countertop and get the mug. I think Mum had a favourite, I can’t remember what it looks like now. 

Third, get teabag from old grey teapot. This was easy, drop that bastard bag into the mug and let it stew in the air for the last few seconds before it became garbage. 

Fourth, carefully get kettle and add boiling water. My mother frequently admonished me to be extremely precise and careful with the boiling water. I always said I was but frankly that was almost always a lie. I went through much of my childhood with tiny secret burns from flecks of splashed boiling water. They were badges of honour I took with pride in the cause of television, I don’t regret the scars one bit.

Fifth, run to fridge and get milk. Milk was always thin on the ground in my house. It was a frequent occurence that I would reach this stage and curse in whatever childhood language I had created to fill the gap between verbal innocence and adult vocabulary. Mum was always understanding when there was no milk, but I felt like the least I could get out of this dreaded process was my mum’s happiness. No milk meant less happy. So, when there was milk, I’d grab it and leaving the fridge door wide open run back to the mug, put an exact splash and then grab the milk to do the three step run down to the fridge while closing the top, then the door. This process has a liquid fluidity to it, not least because I frequently spilled the milk al over myself while doing it.

Sixth, the sugar. This was a step that had two parts to it, one part having two functions. I liked this step because it felt efficient. You needed a teaspoon to get the sugar AND YOU ALSO NEEDED THE SPOON TO STIR THE TEA. So, get a clean teaspoon from the drawer snapping it open and closed like a piston. Grab the sugarbowl and put it next to the mug, spoon out EXACTLY one single level teaspoon of sugar and stir like your life depended on it. Take the teaspoon out of the mug, throw it in the sink, put the sugar back where it lives beside the Aga and you my friend, have made your mother a motherfucking cup of motherfucking Tea. Bring that shit inside to claim your prize, a nice little thank you and smile and a good HOUR of TV time before it became possible that you might have to repet the process.

Now, this whole process from adding the teabag to the mug to putting the sugar back where it lives beside the Aga, took roughly about a minute to perform at the height of my abilities and I could have competed at the Olympics for that shit. And like any good athlete, I had theories about how I might improve my time.

The major idea I had to shave vital seconds off was simple, the process was too scattered, it had too many elements. I needed to create a new tea bag, one that would unite all the ingredients in one location, removing TWO WHOLE STEPS from the process.

Yes, I wanted to make a tea bag with powdered milk and sugar ALREADY IN THE BAG. I called it the Mul-T bag.

I thought you could sell them in different packs with different arrangements of ingredients for different tastes. If you had a house where everyone like milk and two sugars you could just go that way, but mostly it would be sold under in variety pack, to cater to all tastes.

Now I never actually tried to do this, and it’s entirely likely that the powdered milk would have tasted like shit, but it’s the first  idea I can ever remember having that just sat around in my mind festering and infecting other ideas like a plague victim.

It’s an idea I do not want.