Memo to me: anti-pyretics and sleep, in that order

Something about True Lies that’s always bothered me. All right, so it’s not a documentary. For a start, I’m willing to concede that even the CIA would notice that the bloke in the office trying to pass as a regular guy and calling himself “Doug” was Austrian, and a steroid-sodden Austrian bodybuilder at that.

But the bit where Arnie and Tom Arnold have captured the man who was making a play for Arnie’s wife? Where they take him out to a clifftop and make out they’re going to pop a cap in his ass (qv) right there? He starts to piss himself with fear. And the two hardened CIA agents look at each other and smirk. What a pussy, right, viewers? What a mewling, puking sack of gristle. He’d never make it as a hardened CIA agent.

Putting aside the way this little segment manipulates you into celebrating a display of straightforward jock-style bullying (“But it’s okay! He was a sleazebag! He had it coming!” Sure, whatever), the real problem is that smirk. Actual agents are, if maybe not familiar, then certainly on nodding terms with the smell of their own piss; sometimes from legitimate fear, sometimes from actual pain. Piss happens. It comes with the job of being (and putting other people) in ludicrously dangerous and painful situations.

I know Arnie then goes on to be completely unprofessional and sadistic to his own wife, but that's a plot point; it's catharsis, it's part of the process he and she have to go through to reach... ‹Vincent Price› closure ‹/Vincent Price›. But in that one moment of minor sadism up on the cliff, Arnie and Tom blow their cover as hardened security officers, revealing themselves to be just a couple of ignorant, petty actors. No shit, you’re thinking, and you’re right, but in the same way that stuff like 24 tries to persuade us that torture works as a way of gaining information (“Really? My own wife was dancing with Satan as well? Oh well, better bring her in”), so pap (yes, entertaining pap) like this serves to perpetuate the myth that if you’re scared, you’re just a slightly crap regular person, not one of the special, mysteriously unafraid people out there fighting your important battles for you. We’d all piss ourselves if we thought the person caressing the trigger was actually about to press it.

Where exactly am I going with this? you’re asking. Good question. I don’t know. Look, I’m not well, I’ve got a temperature, it’s just something that’s been bothering me for a while, and, er... and then I woke up and it was all a dream.

Ow. OW.

Wow. Okay. Here’s what I learnt: should you find yourself inhaling direct from an Olbas Oil* bottle (above, right) because your nose feels completely blocked, do not under any circumstances then inhale direct from it again five minutes later, even if you can feel no improvement in sniffage. The menthol will have taken effect and begun to break up the gunge, so there’s nothing stopping your second intake from directly hitting the back of your sinuses and running down the back of your throat like a trail of napalm. I can’t successfully convey how incredibly painful this is without pinioning every one of you in turn to a dentist’s chair and getting busy with the tools. You feel like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, trapped endlessly in that brief moment when she realises something's terribly wrong, maybe even registering that she’s just snorted Kabul not Colombia. In fact, my recent bitching about torture notwithstanding, it struck me as I clutched my head and waited for the throbbing to subside that here was an incredibly effective method of inflicting pain that would probably leave no trace of its use whatsoever. If in years to come you hear that someone has started using this method to try and extract information, you’ll know they probably once read this journal. You’re welcome in advance.

* If you’ve somehow never come across this wonder product, it contains cajuput oil, eucalyptus oil, menthol, clove oil and a whole load of other oils. The effect is as if a train carrying the nation’s supply of menthol has ploughed into an aromatherapy warehouse, and the resulting explosion decongests you like nobody’s business.

Can't travel without my lucky tub

I have a tub of aqueous cream, which looks similar to the one above. It's an emollient and moisturiser.

The first of the instructions on the tub is the following:

Always take the container of Aqueous Cream BP with you even if it is empty.

... What?


EDIT: Oh, right, they mean to the doctor / hospital / shaman or wherever it is you're planning to go and be healed. Would it have killed them to say so, rather than making their product sound like the most unsatisfying comfort blanket ever?

I'm a make, make, make you puke

There's a moment in the Family Guy Stewie Griffin special where normally straight-laced Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa disintegrates in the presence of David Bowie, falling to her knees, humping his leg and crying “Me love to meet Ziggy Stardust! Me take you home and make you fishball soup! Fishball!” Cut back to the newsroom, where one of the anchors, his eyes on stalks, says “Thank you, Tricia, for setting your people back a thousand years.”

That's much the same effect the new Black-Eyed Peas single has. Fergie lives up to every misogynist’s expectations of women as vain hardbody vampires, boasting how:

I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these ice-ys.
Dolce & Gabbana,
Fendi and then Donna
Karan, they be sharin’
All their money got me wearin’ fly
But I ain’t askin’,
They say they love my ass in
Seven Jeans, True Religions,
I say no, but they keep givin’
So I keep on takin’
And no I ain’t taken
We can keep on datin’
I keep on demonstrating.

Meanwhile the men are protesting that:

She’s got me spendin’.

Fergie concurs, adding:

Spendin’ all your money on me
And spending time on me.

For the chorus, in a rare confluence of penetrating insight and sublime poetry, we get this:

Black-eyed Pea: What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside your trunk?

Black-eyed Pea-ette: I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.

Black-eyed Pea: What you gon’ do wit all that breast?
All that breast inside that shirt?

Black-eyed Pea-ette: I’ma make, make, make, make you work
Make you work, work, make you work.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps.

The net effect, as she writhes around gleefully explaining how her “lady lumps” (did one of the guys write this chorus when he was eight?) encourage men to keep her in jewellery and pretty clothes, is indeed that she sets “her people” (i.e. women, rather than Caucasians being unconvincingly palmed off as Latinas) back a thousand years. Still, I'm sure I’ve read this all wrong and in fact it’s terribly empowering, right, sisters?

(Oh, and please, less of the “I’ma”. She’s the very definition of “whitebread”. She’s as convincing speaking Ebonics as I am.)