Posted in: Short 'n Curlies by Si Spurrier | Tagged: short and curlies, si spurrier

Short 'n Curlies #22 by Si Spurrier

BrainFart:

Crazy urban troubleshooting this week…

Problem: How do you stop crowds of listless hoodie-wearing juvenile scallywanks from hanging about in the mouths of warm, cosy tube stations after dark: smoking the flagitious fags of Fear, spitting the sinister swearwords of Savagery, and terrorizing Nice, Virtuous Old Ladies with shaky hands, rosy cheeks, and bitter black hearts pickled by the ceaseless need to write complainy letters to People In Authority?

Additional Factors: You can't afford security guards and the cops couldn't give a shimmering shit. Tricksy high-frequency anti-loitering devices are only going to get the Bat Preservation Society up in arms, and all the commercially-available Heat Rays, Bollock-Poppers and long-range Enema Tasers are asking for a lawsuit from the litigious parents of Poor Little Johnny Meltbrain.

Solution: Play chilled-out, culturally superior and exquisitely bland Classical Music on an endless loop at relevant tube stations, safe in the knowledge that such divine strains are Aural Mustard Gas to the gum-chewing, trouser-drooping, gobbit-dribbling, attitude-beaming, pensioner-bothering Hip-Hop Junkies of today's Yoot.

This is nothing new, of course. Call it TasteWar or CultureSiege or whatever-you-like: it works devastatingly well and — somewhere out there — a sneaky-minded civil servant with a soul made of xylophone teeth got a big fat payrise for thinking of it.

In fact, the not-new-Newsness of it is exactly what's interesting to your verbose host right now, sweet reader, and here — here! — is why:

I suspect… if there's any real narrative justice in the world — or even just a modicum of freaky-assed social evolution, visible to the naked eye — that this cleverclever little trick will gradually lead to one of two glorious, beautiful, BigBloodyFun outcomes:

The first is a culture of delinquent kids who are violently, manically and anti-socially addicted to orchestral Soundz. See them now: rampaging across towns and cities, bow-ties extra wide to conceal skunkbaggies and razor-edged conducting batons, shoes polished to a painful gloss, hair super-floppy for maximum Passion Play Expressionism, piano-key tats along either arm and trumpet-shaped bongs stashed in impossibly-baggy ballgowns. They give themselves names like Fl00t, Try'N'Gul and the Lambeth-based Stokkah-2-Beetz, and show off their string-worn fingertip-scars during territorial "Arrangements". They laugh at "them poofs" in A Clockwork Orange, crash cymbals while travelling on buses (with no thought for fellow travellers' peace), and worship at the altar of Nigel Kennedy.

The alternative? A new breed of Loiterer: pensioners, aspiring middle-classers and arty Europeans, united by their combined hatred of Guitars and the smug, dreamy look they all get whenever they hear the indefinitely-prolonged fartsound of a well-tuned Cello. They assemble in tube stations every evening — canes, zimmers, berets and all — to swap pirated sheet music and intimidate the innocent emo-kids who scuttle, ferretlike, past. By day they plot shopmobility ramraids and paint shopping-list graffitos outside primary schools; at night they descend into a druggy haze of Camomile, Crosswords creaky lube-drenched GreyBangs.

I can't decide which of these outcomes I'd prefer, or whether it might just be the Most Fun to hope for both then pitch them against one another — Symphonythugs Vs. Grannylouts — in a Zone 2 Deathmatch involving shuriken railcards, ballistic barrier-gates, and a climactic bout of Last Man Standing Combat atop the end-of-service train on the Bakerloo line. All, of course, to the stirring strains of O Fortuna. Bah-bah-dah-bah… bah-bah-dah-BAH!

Weirdly enough, since neither ProtoSect has obliged me by making itself known, the TasteWar technique might wind-up having an entirely different and hitherto unforeseen effect: gathering hordes of slightly inebriated writers — notepads in hand, column-material frighteningly overdue, imaginations dangerously overactive — in the hopes that Rousing Melodies + Grouchy Commuters = TRAVELRAGE + Fun.

So far… No.

I Fakt You, Right In The Face:

Small world, innit?

Idiomtest!

Ask someone you know, right now, to estimate the circumference of the Earth at its equator. Better yet, try it yourself. Close your eyes and rrrreally think about it.

For my Americky-type chums, I understand this may be tricky. I know it confuses and frightens you to imagine The Known World extending East of New York and West of Alaska, but if you'll kindly persist in the effort — imagining, say, the grand sweep of the Atlantic, the Bono-clogged kidney of Africa, the colossal and gastronomically intimidating vastness of Asia, the beery bladder-stone of Australia, then the endless hemisphere-bridging cleft of the Pacific (as wide as all that other Foreignese Inhabited stuff put together), and finally your own famously Big, Brash Blob — then I feel sure you'll be able to play along with the rest of us. Alternatively, if you prefer, cast your mind back to some hazy, long-lost memory of a scowling school teacher, perfunctorily wobbling a globe in Geography Class, before turning to more relevant subjects like American History, American English, and Bible/Gun Studies. That's your inspiration. GO.

Estimating the equatorial circumference. Give it a crack. GO GO GO. I'll even wait for you.

…

…

… Done it?

Okay? Good.

You're overestimating.

(At least, 99% of you are. I can safely presume this column has its fair share of readers in the minority bracket labelled "Those SmartArses" — the ones who inevitably assfuck all astonishment-baiting questions like "how old do I look", "guess how much it's increased in value" and "how many Ethiopians can you fit in a car" by Going Too Far And Ruining The Surprise. Or worse yet, already knowing the answer.)

I digress.

The Planet Earth is only 25,000 miles round.

Which, you know, is a lot. But not nearly as much as we all sort of like to think. All those wars, refugees, hilariously odd tribal cultures, mad weather patterns, madder religions, reindeer-herds, insane TV shows, blue whales, digital perverts, Julia Roberts, nuke-lusting eeevil powers and inconveniently angry Islamists: it's all got to fit onto a lifesphere girdled by an equator so pathetically teensy that my knackered, clapped-out old Renault Clio has, in its seven years of puttering, unloved, engine-choking life, travelled far enough to've circumnavigated the bloody thing four times. And it's spent most of that time — if you believe the owner's logbook — parked outside a council flat in Cardiff.

The car, that is. Not the planet. That would be Weird.

But weirder yet: the diameter of our solitary speck of life-supporting rock is a pitiful 8,000 miles. In that very same exhaust-groaning, window-splintering, brake-squealing Renault Clio I recently travelled 1000 miles in 2 days. If I'd done so in a vertical tunnelling machine instead (which couldn't possibly have been much slower, and definitely wouldn't have got stuck behind every tractor between Barcelona and fucking Luxembourg), I could've been banging on the tasty superdense Planetary Core — and mischievously fucking up the entire human race — within 8 short days. Andthat's including overnight stops at catastrophically grotty Euro-motels with their very own room-assigned crackwhores. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Roland Emmerich.

YAY SCIENCE.

So, yes. It's a small world. And not just because I keep bumping into wretched, despicable people from the ravaged mess of The Past when I'm least expecting it; then having to camouflage my off-balance loathing behind asinine mumbled Brit-tastic twirpings about Coincidence, How Lovely To See You It Is, and — yes — What A Small Fucking World It Is.

(Incidentally, I did a bit of delving into my own long-lost School Past in processing all this stuff — specifically the MAFFS required to make Numberfakt out of all things circular — which threw up an old, early-born Hating…)

This Week I Have Been Mostly Hating:

…bloody Pi.

What sort of Universe, I ask you, allows one of its fundamental physical designs — a transcendental geometry which underpins almost every mathematical concept used to explore our reality — to hinge upon a ratio so crap, so ugly, and (frankly) so messy, as Π?

Three-point-one-four-something-something-something-snore.

It's the hobo of the mathematics world! It lurks in garbage-pails out the back of Graphic-Calculators and ruins black tie algebra parties by flicking its wart-scabs at respectable guests. So offensive is its shabby, random, pattern-dodging appearance that authorities have assigned it a neat little Greek Letter so they don't have to think about it too hard and can pretend it's Just Another Sensible Figure.

Probably, once, it actually was: just some law-abiding, tidy whole number with existential hopes and dreams like everyone. But it was fucked-up in the 'Nam of the last Big Crunch, man, and now it's back on the streets, skewed out of dimensional conformity and crazy as fuck: twitchy, ranting, spitting at i-numbers and haemorrhaging decimal places like a gutwound.

When Pi's around, you just know all the other digits are shaking their heads and muttering. Someone Should Do Something, they say: paranoid about plunging property values and anti-social fractions. And they're fucking right, too. If the Universe had the slightest sense of shame for the crimes of its oscillating youth, it'd pack-away poor old Pi to a cosy retirement in some out-of-the-way role somewhere ("≈", anyone?), and find someone less flaky to cover the whole "circle" thing.

I'd volunteer myself, only I'm allergic to graph paper.

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Twitter: @SiSpurrier

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C/O William Christensen,

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515 N. Century Blvd.Rantoul, IL 61866
(Disclaimer: Secretly, I'm nice.)

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