Behold My Massive Lobes

Reheated (44)

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Repent at Leisure

Graduate job-seeker is shocked to discover that choices have consequences.  

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark - who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes, to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along?

Comedy Economics

Improving the species through enforced poverty.

The New Economics Foundation is convinced that, once implemented, its recommendations would “heal the rifts in a divided Britain” and leave the population “satisfied.” That’s satisfied with less of course, and the authors make clear their disdain for the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.”

Scenes of Extended Fretting

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman discovers how competitive piety can be.  

Mr Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers, believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Just Surrender to the Will of Clever People

Private education must be banned, says leftist academic. And reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”

Sadly, Dr Swift doesn’t say whether he has any personal experience of the state education system that he thinks the rest of us should make do with in the name of “social justice.” But perhaps he could share his comforting words with some of the children left at the mercy of such schools, where, as one national survey of teaching staff puts it, “a climate of violence” and “malicious disruption” is the norm, the assaulting of staff and pupils is commonplace, with almost half of those surveyed witnessing such behaviour “on a weekly basis,” and where vandalism of personal property is “part of the routine working environment.”

I’ve hidden free puppies in the greatest hits


Repent at Leisure

The Observer’s Nicole Mowbray reveals the hitherto-unguessed fact that poor fashion choices can have practical consequences

After seven unsuccessful job interviews, 24-year-old Luke Clark began to think something other than his CV was playing havoc with his job prospects. Potential employers didn’t seem to like the 4cm “flesh tunnel” holes he had in each ear as much as he did. Clark had begun stretching his lobes at university several years earlier, and the problem was that when he took the plugs out his stretched earlobes looked terrible. Now one of the fastest-growing cosmetic procedures in the UK is repairing stretched earlobes.

Several readers of said paper are, however, quite upset. Specifically, they’re upset that not all employers are impressed, either by the Urban Bush Warrior look or by self-inflicted comedy lobes with large, baggy holes in them:

It’s just a bigger hole than what society has considered to be “standard” and judging someone’s ability to do a job based on their outward appearance is incredibly ignorant… If there wasn’t such a pointlessly negative view on stretched ears, people like teachers and professional golf players wouldn’t have to get them sewn up.

Possibly a contender for our series of classic sentences

And this chap here, he’s upset too: 

Until you know that person, you have no right to criticise, judge or alter the life chances for them. Those who make decisions about the future of others based only on appearance, are themselves the shallowest of people, and do not deserve to have such a position of influence.

You see, he should be free to deform his anatomy into eye-catchingly unattractive shapes, thereby announcing his heroic radicalism and disdain for bourgeois norms, entirely without consequence. But you mustn’t be free to run your business without him, regardless of whatever message he’s chosen to send via the medium of disfigured earlobes. No bad decision that he makes must ever “alter his life chances” because… well, obviously, it’s all your fault.

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark, who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes - to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along?