Alice Piddens had a thought.
Nothing surprising there, but it was enough of a thought to cause her to hit PAUSE on a re-run of the old Untouchables TV show (“Tonight’s episode: The Waxey Gordon Story”).
She loved that show.
The way Eliot Ness (toothsome Robert Stack) and his implacable crew ran down and routed the scumbags, all the while maintaining their sharp suits and steely integrity in spite of having to work under the hypocritical, squirrelly and megalomaniacal micro manager, J. Edgar Hoover.
She sometimes found herself standing to attention as the majestic theme played over the opening credits.
After starting her blog Stop That Nonsense, Alice found herself constantly searching for grist to grind in her online mill.
She couldn’t afford to let a crackerjack idea go to waste.
She sparked up her dystrophic old Dell laptop and hollered for Wes to, “Stop that freaking racket!” (a sublime four-bar passage of guitar from a Joe Bonamassa tune that he’d been on the point of mastering – loudly – for the past hour).
“Control the language, control the culture,” Alice muttered with conviction.
If language was any indication, modern culture was circling the drain and gurgling creepily.
“I’ll stop their nonsense,” she vowed confidently while typing this rousing rubric:
STOP YOUR NONSENSE. REJECT THE MAD and MEANINGLESS.
Avoid these words. Starve them of oxygen and make the world a more sensible place.
Awesome: Run of the mill.
You are amazing: I don’t know one impressive thing about you.
Inappropriate: I can’t come up with a cogent argument against it.
Religious: superstitious.
Devout: creepily superstitious.
Devoutly religious: Really, really scared of dying, whereupon I will be ‘saved’.
Influencer: See snake oil, homeopathy, Nutri-Grain, chiropractic, vitamin supplements, Botox, weight loss breakthrough.
Old White Males: A blighted race of pernicious has-beens – confined, for the common good, to their comfortable, paid-off homes and banned from writing novels, releasing records, making movies, creating works of art or expressing themselves in public.
Café culture: Having a mag while eating dessert (which Louis XVI would have declared, ‘too sweet to swallow’) in the morning, and wondering, “Was this coffee ever hot?”
Vaccine hesitancy: possessing an overwhelming hatred for that abominable, milk maid-abusing monster, Dr Edward Jenner, who abominably defeated smallpox and greased the skids for a descent into a hell where a baby’s life expectancy rose, tragically, from 40 years to (shudder) 70 years.
Going forward: All our tomorrows.
Beats: Music that takes three minutes to compose, three months to mix and will be listened to for 30 seconds, or forever if played through a 50,000 watt car system.
Google Assistant: See laziness, Siri, surveillance, 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner, China.
Reliable power: I rely on Big Fossil Fuel to stay in power.
Alternative medicine: selling the placebo effect as an alternative to anything therapeutic.
Olympic ideals: Don’t mention the war.
You deserve it: I share your creepy sense of entitlement, especially if I can sell you something.
Independent internal investigation: Bury it quickly. Report back slowly.
Everything happens for a reason: The universe is looking after me/I slept through a lot of Science classes and don’t really know why anything happens.
Good school: A place of glossy brochures depicting students wearing oversized period uniforms with high wool content. A place where the government will actually pay you to avoid the ‘riff raff’.
Cosmetics: A cult that worships skin. Followers believe they can bring dead skin back to life if they rub enough money into it. See Aztec sacrifices.
After a brief sulk, Wes had mooched up to Alice and started reading over her shoulder.
“Hey this is pretty good stuff, Ali, but do you really think people will take any notice?”
“A prophet is a stranger in her own land. They laughed at the woman who invented the wheel.”
“Did they though?”
“Well, they laughed at Lucille Ball.”
“Fair enough.”
“And, whatsit? You know.”
“Hannah Gadsby?”
“And they laughed at Stephen Bradbury, and Eric the Eel.”
“But that was gentle laughter.”
“Well, they laughed at Idi Amin and Adolf Hitler.”
“Isn’t that a bit inappropriate? Ouch! Ouch! What? Ouch!
A lesson to us all.
Bullgoose
and then