Shut Your Beak…

My company has adopted a new method of spurring us worker ants on to greater heights.

It involves placing motivational quotes in a small frame mounted at eye-level above the urinal in the men’s bathroom.

Today’s quote read as follows: “If you want to stay young, keep going at whatever it is that keeps you going. For me, that’s hard work, and lots of it.”

Apparently Ingrid Bergman, whose hard work consisted mainly of lounging around in bars listening to pianos, came up with this pearl of wisdom.

I did not find that being told to do more work was particularly motivational.

To begin with, as a real estate agent might confirm, it’s all about location, location, location.

When I’m micturating, I am concentrating on only one thing: making sure that the direction of the stream is conducive to walking away with confidence, even in light khaki trousers.

Since this necessitates peering conscientiously into the bowl, I do not need to be distracted by facile attempts to make me work harder. And the sad thing is that I was so mystified by the fact that someone had thought that this was appropriate, I couldn’t stop my eyes returning to it. It was like watching a seventeen car pile-up on the freeway, except with more dangling.

Location aside, I’ve never been one for deriving great and important insights from those posters that feature such words as ‘DETERMINATION’ and then have a picture of some grinning guy planting a flag on top of a mountain. I find them puerile and an insult to my intelligence. I mean, it really takes determination to climb Kilamanjaro. Lots of it, I’m sure. But I don’t think that the same determination is really required when putting together a spreadsheet detailing how often the printer needs ink.

Whatever… it’s not nearly as bad as a quote that blatantly and unapologetically says ‘Get back to work, minion, a simple urination shouldn’t take you this long”.

When I was a young kid at school, the wall between the girls’ stalls and our rudimentary pissoir was about six feet tall. With real effort and a seriously overful bladder, it was possible to pee over the wall and onto the head of some unsuspecting nine year old. Richard Shepherd, in particular, was an expert.

Any bets on how long before I put the same trick to use on our latest motivational quote?

At the movie theater yesterday there was a preview of a new film. An Indian woman had gone to England for some reason or other, and had met some guy, who then said something, which upset someone else, which set a chain of events in motion, probably resulting in death or despair or deportation or something.

Frankly I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention.

See, I used to like movies that critics described as ‘thought-provoking’, but these days I’m realizing that I’m far happier with movies that are ‘thought-repressing’.

Take ‘Kung-Fu Panda’, for example. Best movie I’ve seen in ages. A fat panda becomes the dragon warrior and uses his fat belly to repel the evil dude!!! And I went to see it twice!!! Of my own volition!!! I even learned the secret Eastern power of Exclamation Mark!

How does it stack up against Apocalypse Now? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Well – none of them has a fulsome indigenous Chinese relative of the bear in them, for a start. But more importantly, none of them make me want to watch them again.

See, that’s the thing with really good movies. They usually take you from A to B. They take their time, build it up, and eventually reveal to you some truth or other that you might not have figured out by yourself.

At the end of the movie, you feel sated. There’s a medium – the film. There’s a message – war is bad. Or mental patients might not be mental. Or computers have irritating voices. But having experienced it once… is there any real need to see it again?

With Kung-Fu Panda, it’s just… hey, that monkey is Jackie Chan! And the Squirrel, or Possum, or whatever he is, he’s just like Yoda! Except more hairy.

It’s thinking at the top level. Recreation through Recognition via Repetition. It’s what we already know, with the words in a different order.

I don’t really have a problem with it.

Sorry.

By the way, there was supposed to be some clever deal here using Jack Black, the voice of the panda, who starred in the truly abysmal movie Shallow Hal, and one of my illustrated examples of a great movie (2001), in which H.A.L. the computer was a protagonist. And I’m showing you how I have no depth. Right? Geddit? Geddit?

Ah fuck it, I’m way too lazy to explain it to the likes of you.