2004-10-05 - 11:23 p.m.

Devo’s genius was to wear flowerpots on their heads. This way they could slip their terrifying warning into the subconscious under the guise of novelty. As I go about my daily business it’s seldom that I’m not party to their nightmare world of mongoloids, consumption, heteronomy and those who dance the poot. Devo were right: things are getting worse. Want proof? Forget about Dubya – there are plenty of examples closer to home. Take tissues. If only I could. They’ve changed the design in what I can only imagine is an attempt to make them easier to use. Putting aside the troubling issue of how much of a fucking fool you’d have to be to struggle with snot-rags, it makes me weep to think that somebody got paid to take a perfectly functioning design and completely ruin it. I have allergies and a lot of free time. Tissues are important to me. Of the many justifications I have for embarking on a killing spree, the daily battles I have with the tissue box is right at the top of the list. It used to be so easy. Tissue boxes had a large enough opening to accommodate a listless hand en route to the nose without once glancing up from that second hand copy of Parade. What was once a simple and reflex action has now become a maddening ordeal.

Tissue boxes were evidently not sufficiently user-friendly. Something had to be done! So some pen-pusher has the revelation that tissues must now stick up out of the box, like a paper turd poking through a plastic anus. We can’t have the mucus-filled waste precious moments of their existence groping about for that elusive rag. Not only does this expose the tissue to all the filth that floats about in the air but it looks fucking stupid. More heinously, in order to achieve this pointless aim, the tissues must all be joined together with perforations. What this means is that extracting a tissue is now a two-handed job. Attempt this basic human right with a solitary mit and the result is catastrophic. Before you know what’s hit you, you’re now hanging from the end of an infinite magician’s plume of conjoined paper. This has to be stuffed back into the box resulting in torn, crumpled tissues and volcanic blood pressure. The maiden tissue is always the worst – the overstuffed box spews like a satanic Jack In The Box, filling the air with a plague of torn white bats. It’s heart-breaking.

Also treating their customers like dribbling retards is Heinz. That they produce the best tomato ketchup on the planet is beyond question. That the arrogant bastards are so aware of this that they can fuck with our eating routines is evil beyond comprehension. I refuse to believe sales were down. This is an act designed purely to taunt and humiliate their captives. It used to be so rewarding and simple: a few shakes of the bottle before that priapic squirt onto the chips. This is deemed too much trouble for the current limp-wristed generation of go-getting metrosexuals so Heinz have saved you the "effort" by doing the shaking for you. Yes, they’ve inverted the lable on the bottle for the benefit of those who hadn’t worked out that this bold step could be undertaken without written permission from the company. What’s the result of this meddling? Well, for starters the bottle now has the pressure of a fire hydrant, causing an angled (!) jet of sauce to come exploding downwards at an arbitrary and unplanned moment. This means the first impact is an unstoppable meteor of red that is completely out of proportion to the rest of the distribution. One barely has time to register what’s happening before the relentless force has to be directed elsewhere lest the plate be completely submerged in crimson goop. Aim at a target as slender as a sausage and you’d better make sure there’s nothing valuable nearby. If you value your sanity, don’t even think about using tissues to clean up the mess. The Devolution is here. God help us.

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