Bad hair day

Sodium laureth sulfate, cocamidopropyl betaine, propylene glycol, PEG-55 propylene glycol oleate, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate – smile, it’s simple. Eh? That’s what it says here.

I’ve spent the last week working out my tax for last year. In such a situation, anything poses a potential distraction – not even imagining the most ludicrous claim in line with MPs’ expenses. Just anything to keep me away from Excel. Setting up fiendish real-life Heath Robinson mousetraps. Snorting Lemsip. Sniffing out BSG plot loopholes. Jogging. Christ, I’m even writing a blog.

And now I have in my hand a near-empty bottle of my sister’s Simple Regeneration Age Resisting Facial Wash: Green Tea Goodness. And I’m reading the ingredients (“our special blend”). There’s over 30 of the fuckers.

When your grooming regime consists of wondering whether or not to take a set of clippers to your head, face and all, once a week, cosmetics kinda slip you by. But my girlfriend’s latest obsession has lead me to deduce one thing: the beauty industry is pretty ugly.

Take the ingredients listed above:

Sodium laureth sulfate [SLES] - a detergent and surfactant found in many personal care products (soaps, shampoos, toothpaste etc.). It is an inexpensive and very effective foaming agent. It is also a known irritant.

Toxicology research by the OSHA, NTP, and IARC have supported claims by the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association (CTFA) and the American Cancer Society that SLES is not a carcinogen [phew]. However, SLES and SLS, and products containing them, have been found to contain very low levels of the known carcinogen 1,4-dioxane, with the recommendation that these levels be monitored. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers 1,4-dioxane to be a probable human carcinogen (having observed an increased incidence of cancer in controlled animal studies, but not in epidemiological studies of workers using the compound), and a known irritant (with a no-observed-adverse-effects level of 400 milligrams per cubic meter) at concentrations significantly higher than those found in commercial products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration encourages manufacturers to remove 1,4-dioxane, though it is not required by federal law.

Cocamidopropyl betaine – not harmful, but an extract from fungi, namely Trunk Rot. Yum.

Propylene glycol – “known also by the systematic name propane-1,2-diol, is an organic compound (a diol alcohol), usually a faintly sweet, and colorless clear viscous liquid that is hygroscopic and miscible with water, acetone, and chloroform.”

Potential health effects:

Eye
Causes mild eye irritation. Contact may cause irritation, tearing, and burning pain.

Skin
Causes moderate skin irritation. Contact with the skin may cause erythema, dryness, and defatting.

Ingestion
May cause gastrointestinal irritation with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Low hazard for usual industrial handling. May cause hemoglobinuric nephrosis. May cause changes in surface EEG.
Inhalation

Low hazard for usual industrial handling. May cause respiratory tract irritation.

Chronic
May cause reproductive and fetal effects. Laboratory experiments have resulted in mutagenic effects. Exposure to large doses may cause central nervous system depression. Chronic ingestion may cause lactic acidosis and possible seizures.

PEG-55 propylene glycol oleate - moderate hazard depending on product usage. Contamination concerns – ethylene oxide, 1,4-dioxane. Restricted in cosmetics; use, concentration, or manufacturing restrictions - Not safe for use on injured or damaged skin. May contain harmful impurities. Toxicity hazards: suspected.

Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate -

* Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate is NOT a natural preservative.
* It is actually a skin and eye irritant.
* Not recommended for sensitive skin.
* No long term studies on the effect on the skin.
* Not many research studies done on Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate PERIOD.

And you smear this stuff on your face. My girlfriend tells me that this stuff is at the better end of the spectrum, designed for people with sensitive skin. Blimey.

Since this is the internet, where in true geek conspiracy nut style the truth is out there, there’s a whole community of bloggers dedicated to unravelling the ingredients of household cosmetics. Lots of inspiring everyday folk turned biochemists who go “no poo” – this means they don’t use shampoo, which is very bad, but also resulted in comical schoolboy tittering from me. All of these people know more than a lazy dude with no hair and a tax return to do.

And there are companies doing good things, too. Take Aubrey Organics. Better still, Dr Bronner’s are some old school Victorian elixir maker turned modern day pharmaceutical activists. They’ve actually taken companies that have produced goods falsely advertised as organic to court.

They also pose the question: can you get high off soap? I don’t know but fuck Excel, I’m going to spend this afternoon finding out.

Taking the piss

In folklore, the streets of London are paved with gold. And talking cats – you can’t move for the buggers. Only in reality, the capital has the UK’s highest rate of unemployment. Which might explain another fact they don’t tell you about London: that wherever you are, you’re never more than 10 metres away from a toilet attendant.

The toilet attendant isn’t a phenomenon unique to London – they exist beyond the M25 as well. But there is a sense of social mobility to having someone turn on a tap for you. If you stumbled into the gents in a nightspot in, say, Portsmouth, to find a dude willing to pass you a towel rather than jab you in the eye because he thought you looked at his cock – maybe I did, what of it? – you’d know you were in one of the city’s flashier venues. Or at least that’s how the club sees it. But in London any old pisshole – literally – can have a dude who will insist on squirting soap into your palms, and expect a shiny monetary deposit on his little metal tray as recompense.

With a sigh, this was once more the sight that greeted me in the bogs at the hardly-sumptuous 12 Acklam Road last week when I rocked up at Book Slam (which otherwise was skill). I may be a relatively recent arrival in the Big Smoke, but I know how to operate a tap, thanks.

Even without the presence of an attendant, I’m sometimes shocked by the number of blokes who post-piss (or dump, even) bypass the sink and head straight back into the pub, to shake hands, pinch crisps and grope members of the public. Add a leering fella on a stool offering lollipops (who actually wants sweets stored in a toilet?) with a plate lacking your coinage and the percentage darting straight out the door no doubt rises higher than I can wee.

Now, I’m blessed with both a mighty thirst and a bladder that a shrew would laugh at. Rather than deal with an attendant or avoid washing my hands altogether, I have been known to risk near-accidents and suffer some fairly painful tube rides home. But not this time: I was going urinate and I was bloody well going to wash my hands and all.

So I gave him a pound. But only after I pissed on it.

Watch this space

Playing catch up isn’t as much fun as, say, playing Russian roulette with the cast of Hollyoaks. Provided you don’t lose.

Once again I was a bit slow on the uptake, but I’ve since been binging my face off on space crack. Now I’m only 10 episodes from the end of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Which is good because I still have 10 episodes to watch. But bad because I still have 10 episodes left to watch.

I can’t amble through the internet looking for clues because everyone already knows what’s happened and seem to take delight out of ruining it for me. Even Obama wants to spoil it. Bastards. All of you.

Then there’s the pricks that haven’t bothered watching it yet. What is your problem? You’re falling over yourselves to pour The Wire through your eyeballs just because a couple of Guardian journalists won’t shut up about it. But because BSG is all about robots and space and shit you can’t bring yourselves to watch it. A billion hours of televisual stimuli isn’t healthy whatever it is, but there’s more nutritional value in one hit of BSG than an entire season of 24, for example.

I don’t know much about TV programmes to be honest but I have seen Taxi To The Dark Side, from which I can only conclude that 24 is some form of training video for US interrogation operatives somehow unleashed on the world. BSG meanwhile managed to critique the Bush administration exactly by being about robots and space and shit. It's close but not too close, so they could get away with it.

I have some issues with BSG. Some people (Wired, particularly) have commented on its strong female characters. I can’t help thinking this is misleading. Where the male leads appear complex, especially as the programme hurtles anxiously towards its climax, the women just come across as nutbags. Especially frakking Starbuck.

Also, why are the only black people all fat god-fearing simpletons?

And why don’t more doctors smoke big fat cigars when they treat patients? Oh. Right.

Otherwise, from the distance of space (which tastes of raspberries, btw), this series sticks a mirror right in the face of humanity and dares it to peer in, take a long look at itself and draw a deep breath. Look at all the greasy blackheads and congealed sandwich crumbs! Look at them!

On reflection, even IKEA might be ahead of me on that idea.

Who watches the watchmen?

Us, as it turns out. You and me – the plebs with the cameras. (Sorry, this isn’t anything you won’t have read somewhere else these last few weeks, I’ve just finally got around to writing about it.)

As you’re probably aware, there was a bit of a shindig in London town the other week. A bunch of world leaders rocked up on the promise of free sandwiches. And some peace-loving crusty-types smashed up a bank and headbutted police truncheons. Or at least that’s how it appeared through the gaze of the media. Unless you were reading the Guardian Twitter feed, in which case you were probably keeping abreast of what outfit Russell Brand was wearing.

I happened to be next to the bank in question on that afternoon at the very moment all the fracas occurred. Although I was round the corner and didn’t see the actual break in – I assumed people were taking pictures of Russell Brand. Hence the CS gas thrown into the crowd I felt at the time was a bit of an overreaction.

I did see a dude spray a heart onto the side of said bank, which was nice, and a wall of police officers arrive on horse back – in fact, I was amongst the last people to flee the area before it got “kettled”. Imagine me explaining to my boss why my lunchbreak overstretched by eight hours.

What was missed on the day: most of the people there were either peace protestors or curious workers who just dipped out of Eat. One such man, Ian Tomlinson was knocked over by police officers and left to die.

It took (illegal) photographic evidence from members of the public to reveal this – weirdly, all the CCTV cameras in the vicinity had been switched off. And various officers were seen without identification marks on their shoulders.

Meanwhile, embarrassingly, two Austrian tourists get their holiday snaps confiscated. So go the anti-terrorism laws…

Now the police will be investigating themselves to review whether their tactics were heavy-handed and whether officers are justified and proportionate in "the use of force" when dealing with protesters.

The force is indeed strong.

Suck my tweet

Unless you’ve been locked up in an Austrian basement for the last 24 years you will be at least vaguely aware of Twitter. It’s a microblogging site where fuckwits yap on about the inane meaninglessness of their lives in the futile hope that someone, somewhere out there isn’t too busy guffing about their self to take notice. (This SuperNews! cartoon pretty much sums up my feelings). Fat chance. Unless you’re Stephen Fry, that is.

Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift and the whole world takes a deep breath. Stephen Fry accidentally posts a picture of a jar of Nutella, the sandwich spread that keeps the cardiology department in Italian hospitals in business, and twitheads fall over themselves to come up with the most vacuous comment.

trinityrs on March 23, 2009
I love nutella!

mongooseson on March 23, 2009
Not my cup of Darjeeling thanks.

GertrudeSusanne on March 23, 2009
Nutella - yummy! If I had been Paddington Bear, that´s what I´d have taken on my journey to the UK :o)) Ta 4 all the great piccies xxx

“I took a massive dump in my brother’s jar LMAO ;-)” I mean it’s not even a giant 5kg tub of the hazelnutty chocolaty goo.


Now that is worth tweeting the fuck out of. (And worryingly, should anything happen to me in the next few months and I become martyred by the 24-hour rolling depression channel that is The News, this is the image of me that will no doubt be seared into the retinas of viewers. In case of emergencies, always keep your kith and kin updated with a fairly recent and decent looking picture of your mug. Thanks Christine.)

Twitter is just too needy. For me, two blog posts in a month is a pretty good figure. I did better than Faith No More, who manged an almost 11 year long gap between posts. But Twitter demands your almost constant attention and I just don’t have that level of commitment. (I notice, for example, very few entries in Barack Obama’s Twitter feed since early Novermber – are you tell me he has something better to do?). “Feed me!” the cute little bird chatters, before pecking out your eyeballs.

My advice: leave the narcissism to the people that have made an artform out of it. I speak, of course, of Russell Brand, a man who would not exist if he fell over in a woods and there was no one there to marvel at/be outraged by him doing it. Here’s just a few snippets from his feed:

"My booky wook is number 6 on the New York Times best seller list. Alas, i want it to be number 1. Please go and intimidate bookshop staff."

Followed by:

"No.1 in the New York Times best seller list is "My Wookie Book" by some arsehole called Chewbacca. We must usurp this illiterate goon."

That and like I couldn’t condense all that down into 160 characters. If you're going to write something that nobody is going to read, at least do it properly.

Police, Camera, Action!

Last summer, Google went around 25 cities in Britain, drive-by shooting 22,369 miles of road – taking pretty pictures, I mean. Sewn together, these 2D images have created Street View, not so much a 3D map of Britain but a moment trapped in amber – complete with fully-functioning Woolworthses. So it goes.

Aside the comical spottings (although Google Earth might have better comedy potential), there are security concerns.

Some people with a less-than-informed grasp of technology (and perhaps reality) (goaded no doubt by the, sigh, Daily Mail) have noted that this is a breach of civil liberties and now, using this tool, anyone can stalk you remotely from anywhere in the world. Or at least the you from eight months or so ago when the photos were taken. If they know your address. And you were there at the time the photo was taken. And they’ve not got better things to be doing like, y’know, rearranging their socks into alphabetical order or something.

Me, I’m just miffed there’s a Winnebago parked outside my gaff, obscuring the view.

Sidestepping privacy issues like a ballet-dancing crab, Matt Brittin, head of Google UK, said that the company has had discussions with the Metropolitan police "and they have said it actually helps track and monitor crime."

But what puzzles me is how Google got around section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which makes it illegal to photograph police officers – the Government claims that it is for security purposes but maybe Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is worried about police officers having their souls stolen or some such voodoo witchcraft. (Incidentally, as Mark Thomas has pointed out, you *can* still take photos of Community Support Officers and if they try to nick you, you can report them for impersonating a police officer – smirk).

Did they pick a day when there were no police officers on the street (insert comment about “bobbies on the beat” here)? Or did the Google cameras shy away from police stations/donut shops/collections of ethnics in need of a good frisking and possibly a shooting?

I would trawl through Street View trying to find an answer, but my underwear drawer won’t sort itself out.

Won't somebody please think of the children

Gah.

I can talk. But. What is it about the internet that allows people to voice opinions that would seem a bit OTT in Mein Kampf? For a while I’ve been tracking Speak You’re Branes, an amusing if throw-your-head-at-a-wall-sobering collection of comments scraped from the barrel of the BBC’s Have Your Say word vomitorium, then exposed to public ridicule. Funny. It’s just a pity this seems to be the tip of the iceberg we're making light of here.

(Also, what is it about the internet that allows the continual recycling of clichés, eh? Answers on a postcard...)

Anyhoo, my point is that what should be a valid exercise in democracy just makes you hate people even more. We're just an infinite number of monkeys shitting on to our keyboards.

It’s not enough that the fuckers kickoff about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand without having actually heard what they are supposed to be offended by. Now they are appalled that our children are being subjected to disabled people on TV. In their own living rooms. It’ll be black people next.

Take these considered words from concerned parent "Barry":

"Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on Cbeebies [Cerrie Burnell, who has one arm that ends at her elbow and chooses not to use a prosthetic limb, the cowbag] may scare the kids because of her disability?

"I didn't want to let my children watch the filler bits on the bedtime hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter's mind and possibly caused sleep problems... and yes, this is a serious post."

I think your views might scare your children. Also, as a mate pointed out, the Paralympics must blow your mind.

And don't think the irony of me moaning on about folk on the internet moaning has escaped me.