I'll Fix Your Vampire Problem - I'd Stake My Reputation On It

I’ve been watching a new current affairs program from the deep south of America. It's called True Blood and it's been keeping me abreast of some horrifying social developments in that neck of the woods.

Being a solutions kind of guy, I have made some observations and I think I can help Louisiana, and therefore America, with its problems.

First, to some facts as I have understood them:

The vampire virus has some very specific behavioural outcomes. One of them is that the afflicted have to be invited over the threshold to enter the dwelling of another. At first I thought that was silly, but I have noticed with some of my human colleagues that the merest hint of the common-cold virus makes it impossible for them to enter the workplace.

If you un-invite a vampire already in your house, they are dragged out the door like there’s an invisible bouncer holding their collar. Always the door. It’s very specific that way.

As far as the vampire virus is concerned, the ownership of the house is entirely a legal matter. In one article I saw a vampire, called Mr Northman, buy a house that he had previously been un-invited from and after he had taken possession, he no longer needed permission to enter. With a stroke of the pen down at the conveyer’s office, the virus relaxed and was not concerned that the previous occupant’s family had lived there for generations.

The virus also makes vampires susceptible to extreme physical damage from silver.

Now, America, let’s use these facts to your advantage.

Every fly-wire door should have a few strands of silver woven through the mesh. You have a vamp in your house who looks a bit hungry or keeps changing the channel on the TV to something you don’t like, un-invite them. There’ll be a scraping noise as they’re dragged towards the door, a splorchy noise as they are forced through a silver wire mesh and then all you have to do is hose the vampire gazpachio off the veranda in the morning.

But let’s, as they say, kick this up a notch. If the notion of un-invitation from legally owned territory is enough to push a vampire out the door, I would suggest that we only need to speak to five people and the whole shootin’ match is over.

A majority decision from the US Supreme Court (5 from 9) that the borders of the US are the legal homeland of the US citizenry, followed by an un-invitation from America to the undead, and I would say you’ve only got two more things to consider; whether to do it in the day time or night time.  

(Maybe some spinning, silver blades at all immigration points for entertainment’s sake and an apology letter to Canada and Mexico for the mess, but that’s it.)

Now, I’m obviously going to have to make a speech at my inauguration and the conferral of the Public Health Distinguished Service Medal and that’s where I will outline my ideas for housetraining werewolves with electrified flea-collars.

Creative Impulse

I have decided what my new art project should be. I can’t afford it though, so I’m just going to have to describe it to you. That’s so post-modern…

I want to do art installations that look like unlikely or impossible accidents with hybrid machines.

My first work – the news will report that a crash site has been found in a farmer’s field, where apparently a jet powered, flying washing machine has come down, killing all socks on board. Chillingly, only left socks were found, it appears that the right socks may have bailed out.

Second work – freight train wrapped around, as if stopped dead from high speed, a spherical bubblegum dispenser of the type seen outside shops in the 1960s.

Third work – Four wheel drive printing press, bogged in the La Brea Tar Pits. The final few pages seen coming off the printing press have the headline, “Four Wheel Drive Printing Press Bogged in Tar Pit.”

Fourth work – Churches reported to be outraged as paparazzi snap pictures of a PC, giving sacrament to a Mac

I'm Not Buying Your Thing. I Don't Understand You

Making up words and describing things in exciting ways is how the impotent make themselves feel better. You don’t just "start" a computer application. What you are doing is so important it rivals moonshots and maiden voyages, you "launch" it. You don’t "fix" a laptop. What you are doing is so butch and hardcore, you "flatten" and rebuild it. One of the most useless additions to the English language from this brigade of macho-mercenary-gangstas, is "functionality". Function does fine. Stop pretending you’re clever by using the stupid word. You just reveal yourself as a tool.

I expect this kind of crap from men trying to impress themselves but today, the self-important, word-mangling, chump-of-the-day-award goes to a woman.

In describing a medical breakthrough that took a couple of teams working together, she said, “This kind of cooperativity is blah blah blah…” I write, blah blah blah there because I was unable to remember what the rest of the message was, I was so busy wrestling with what cooperativity has over plain old cooperation.

She totally undervalued her opportunity to maximise and leverage her information delivery with the consumer/participants using a benchmarked methodology that guarantees enhanced synergy in the multi-media ecosystem.