This struck a chord, in general, but especially in light of this post:

I think the Vimrod cartoons, now conveniently available on Flickr, are very funny. It took me a while to warm to them, during which time I suffered considerable scorn and condescension because I poured scorn and condescension on those who did think them funny, but now I too am superior. Still, I don’t expect everyone to agree. If you don’t get them, or you just don’t like them, or you don’t see why they’re both clever and funny, I won’t look down on your stunted sense of humour (if humour is what you call it).

The PublicAffairs division of Perseus Books has published a memoir by former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan. The book is titled, What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

It somewhat overshadows an editorial by Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy for four years from mid-2001. Published in the Wall Street Journal, How Bush Sold the War is a highly critical assessment of the White House’s foreign policy positions — and one with which I find myself largely in agreement. But unlike Feith’s well-reasoned and carefully considered judgement, McClellan’s tell-all memoir is getting all the press. After all, a book by a man on the lecture circuit needs selling.

Here’s how I reckon the conversation between McClellan and his publisher went:

Scott McClellan, author: Hey, I want to cash in on a book deal, like all the other losers who’re out of jobs and get ghostwriters tell their inside-track stories. At least I was actually employed by the White House. Unlike, say, Joe Wilson.

Peter Osnos, publisher: Not sure a PR’s story is going to sell well. You lot are not much more sympathetic than lawyers and estate agents, in the eyes of the public, and the media hate your kind. So what do you propose writing about?

McClellan: Bush, and what a great job I did defending him in difficult times.

Osnos: Bye-bye. Nice talking to you. May I recommend Vantage Press? Vanity publishing won’t cost you that much, and most people never even notice.

McClellan: Okay, what would you need?

Osnos: To make money? How about inside-track confessions? Sordid tales of sex and betrayal? Did you know Bush lied about the war? Did you have doubts about White House policy?

McClellan: No, not really. If I had, I would have taken my own advice, as I said about Dick Clarke when he published his memoir, Against All Enemies: “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let’s look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry’s campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments [that Mr. Clarke made] up on their website.”

Osnos: Best you never bring that paragraph up in public again. We can’t have people questioning our publishing ethics, now can we? Okay, let’s try another angle. Did Bush and Cheney confide in you?

McClellan: No, they didn’t. I just made press statements. Karl Rove actually ran the show.

Osnos: Then here’s an idea: write how the evil twins, Karl Bush and George W. Rove, didn’t confide in you, and told you only what they thought you needed to know to lie to the media.

McClellan: Like what?

Osnos: Take Katrina.

McClellan: Her name was Monica, and that wasn’t Bush, anyway.

Osnos: No, you idiot, the hurricane.

McClellan: Oh yeah. Forgot about that. What about it? I had my hands full defending the White House against charges that they should have violated states rights to send in the cavalry, when the fools in charge of Louisiana didn’t bother to summon federal assistance. Not one reporter would believe that Bush’s powers are actually limited by the constitution.

Osnos: You were the spin doctor, right? Did you set up disaster photo-ops?

McClellan: That’s my job. PRs stage photo-ops.

Osnos: Excellent. Nobody likes staged photo ops. Like spin, or PR, they’re synonymous with insincerity and lies. So just explain matter-of-factly how they were staged, and your book will sell like hotcakes. Nothing of actual substance required.

McClellan: And then?

Osnos: Well, just write how Bush screwed up on this, that or the other, in your extremely well-informed opinion. Without hindsight, book publishers like me would be out of business, and great authors like you would never make the bestseller lists.

McClellan: But my opinion wasn’t well-informed.

Osnos: Who cares? You stood on the podium in the White House briefing room, didn’t you? You have hindsight, don’t you? So you were the only dolt who actually said “yes” to a question on whether Saddam was involved in 9/11. Most people think that was a Freudian slip anyway, because they think a press secretary is supposed to be well-informed of what goes on in the inner circle. People will believe whatever you say now, just because of that White House seal behind you, and the hindsight in front of you. Hindsight will not only make you look well-informed, but it will make you look like you were smarter than them all along.

McClellan: Yeah, I guess. So I write about what I think about Iraq, and the PR job leading up to it — before I was in charge of PR, mind you — that sort of thing?

Osnos: Exactly! Or take the Plame affair. Everyone knows a special investigation failed to turn up anything incriminating at all, except maybe against that Armitage fellow over at State, who wasn’t even being investigated. Bush, Cheney and Rove never did tell you about their role in leaking her identity, did they?

McClellan: Of course not. They knew nothing about it. Well, except that Joe Wilson was a proven liar, and then offered to campaign for John Kerry. Even Kerry washed his hands of him. I advised the White House that if he’s too toxic even for the Democrats, they’d better not comment at all, because that would only give his story credit it didn’t deserve.

Osnos: No, you prat. Want to make money from your book? Just write that the cabal didn’t tell you anything, but they did “collude” to get their stories straight, so they wouldn’t make the mistake that poor fool Libby made. Presumably, this is standard PR advice, but don’t mention that. Just say they met at the time to discuss the Plame case and how Fitzgerald’s investigation might affect the White House. This makes them look like liars, without actually calling them liars, and without implicating you in any way. So you get to dodge lawsuits, and the book will sell millions. Then, when they heed your advice about Joe Wilson once again — not to respond to your book, for fear of looking defensive — everyone will believe they’re guilty as sin. The headline will read: “Bush White House doesn’t deny that Rove and Cheney were in cahoots”. They’re hung by what everyone will think is their own petard — not knowing it’s yours — and you’ll come out smelling like roses.

McClellan: But I have no idea what they actually discussed.

Osnos: Who cares? Write exactly that, in fact. In fact, not taking you into their confidence suggests dishonesty. So why don’t you call it a “culture of deception” or something?

McClellan: But I don’t think calling the White House deliberately dishonest is very smart. Or very honest.

Osnos: So write about “Washington’s culture of deception”. If Barack Obama can say it, why can’t you?

McClellan: Won’t all this look rather dishonourable?

Osnos: Look, Scotty. Mind if I call you Scotty? There are a million people out there who already believe all the adjectives in the world aren’t enough to describe the evil of the Bush cabal. They already believe every word you have yet to write, and more importantly, every word you won’t write. Most won’t even bother to read the book, but will blog about it anyway. Just write them something that doesn’t conflict with their partisan prejudices, and you’ll come out looking like the brave dissenter who did your duty but whose honour now compels him to go public. Who cares that you’re not going public with anything of actual substance? For that matter, who cares about honour? This is Bush we’re talking about, remember?

McClellan: Wow. And I thought I was pretty hot stuff as a spin doctor.

Osnos: No. You gave two-page press releases to journalists who are paid to read them. A mechanical monkey can do that. I’m hot stuff. I have to sell turgid 500-page tomes filled with the partisan drivel of non-entities to a million illiterate nobodies, and get them onto the NYT and Amazon.com bestseller lists to boot. You’re an amateur. That’s why you’re on that side of the desk, and I’m on this side. You have no idea how to spin stories.

McClellan: I see now what you mean by your “innovative and aggressive new model of publishing” that ensures profitability. I’m impressed. Just remember to put in the blurb something like that I was kind of the power behind the throne — one of Bush’s closest aides, or something — and that the White House couldn’t say anything without going through me. I hear what you say. You’re a professional. So am I, so let’s go make some money. I must say, this book-writing business is pretty cool. Used to be you had to actually save for your retirement, and protect your integrity. Now you can just turn around and screw everyone you worked for and make a killing. Here I thought PR was a pretty dishonest but profitable job. It’s clearly got nothing on book publishing.

Osnos: Indeed it doesn’t. Now let’s go find some rare whiskey to toast with. I’m buying.

McClellan: Och aye. A wee dram would numb the pain of prosperity.

Osnos: That it does, Scotty. That it does.

I don’t fear global warming much, but since this would be a particularly disastrous impact, the BBC’s news yesterday was a relief: Great tits cope well with warming.

Those alarmist Beeb boobs¹ must feel a little deflated, though.

(Hat tip: Leon Jacobs.)

1. The word boob, unlike tit, is derived from booby. A booby is bigger than even a pair of great tits. [↩]

There’s bad news on the platinum front: AngloPlat’s output has fallen by a quarter. But, says Business Report, there’s a silver lining:

Power cuts and flooding cut platinum output by up to 24%

Cape Town — Power cuts and flooding had resulted in refined platinum production falling as much as 24 percent to 428 600 ounces in the quarter to March, compared to the same period last year, Anglo Platinum said yesterday.

But the power shortages at local platinum mines, which dominate global production, has had a silver lining, as platinum prices shot through the $2 000 (R15 172) an ounce barrier earlier this year to reach a record of $2 255 last month.

Wonder if they’d write the same about food producers. “Bread output is down by a third, and milk production is 25% lower. Lucky their prices went through the roof, so company financials won’t suffer too much.”

Maybe it hasn’t occurred to this reporter that the PR spin from AngloPlat, that price increases made up for production losses, is just that: spin. If they had kept production up, the price would still have increased (albeit by a bit less, perhaps), and AngloPlat results would have been significantly better. You want to sell into rising prices, not sit on the sidelines while your competitors do. Without the production losses, investors would have earned more capital appreciation, which they could have re-invested, which would have improved South Africa’s current account balance, and which would have bolstered overall economic growth.

Instead, the jobs and incomes of mineworkers have been put at risk by lower output. Silver lining? That AngloPlat’s numbers are reasonable despite its inability to exploit rising prices? Tell that to unemployed miners when they can’t put food on the table next month. Perhaps the mineworkers can send a press release to Business Report saying that their second quarter calorie-intake was worse than expected, but in the context of higher unemployment levels in the broader economy they didn’t do too badly, and there’s a silver lining: at least they don’t have to risk the mining safety issues Anglo Platinum management has attributed to the power cuts.

This would be very funny, if it didn’t concern such a grave subject. The only good thing is this fellow had the balls to admit it. And maybe that he is making a small contribution to a more pleasant and productive climate. Here’s the Angry African on the Loose:

So you see. I am a traitor. The people in South Africa is ashamed of me. They will deny knowing me. They will call me names. They will tell their children and the children of their children what happens to people when they leave the hallowed shores of South Africa. The softening of African men. The shame it brings to families. The weakening of the bloodline. The acts of a traitor…

I am sorry my fellow South Africans. I am truly sorry. I beg you for forgiveness. I am but a weak man. Who gave in to temptation. A man who knows to little. A pathetic excuse of a man.

Brave, but I doubt there can be any forgiveness. For the full, awful story, click here. And for the Angry African, I hope the image above haunts you forever. (Said image comes courtesy of Chuck Cage at the excellent Toolmonger blog.)

PS: The angry traitor may earn a small measure of redemption, for reminding me of this wonderful lesson in witty column writing: Oxfamming the whole black world by Binyavanga Wainaina.

More even than George W Bush (Hail to the Chief!), the man everybody loves to despise is Dick Cheney. So what’s this all about? A standing ovation to welcome him? Laughter and mirth? Is it, to pilfer a line from Cheney’s speech, some right-wing gathering of bitter men who cling to their guns? Nope, this is the assembled media. Could he, belatedly, be winning them over?

Part one:

Part two:

The full transcript of this very amusing talk before the Radio Television Correspondent’s dinner can be found here. It’s better in the reading, if you don’t have the time/bandwidth for the video. Cheney really was joking about his natural charm and charisma.

Yet another big banner headline. Yet another braindead “news” room exposed. “Lost girls in MXit drama”, the bold black letters scream, above photographs of two teenagers. The sub-headline repeats the headline, as if readers are too dumb to get it the first time: “Chat service linked to disappearance”.

The basis for this sensationalist drivel in the Saturday Star is that, amazingly, both girls are among the 5.2 million people in South Africa who (the article claims) use MXit. Unnamed experts warn of the “massive risks” on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (which have squat to do with MXit). Desmond Olivier, a “private investigator” associated with Missing Children SA, says MXit is “evil”.

If the girls had disappeared from the mall, would the headline have screamed “Lost girls in mall drama”? If they had met some guys at a disco, or communicated by telephone rather than by text, would the story have railed against the dangers of nightclubs? Would it have called the telephone evil?

Besides, what massive risks? Two missing girls among 5.2 million users is 0.0000385% of the user base. Stop the presses! Hold the front page! Oh wait, that’s exactly what the idiots did. Yet by my reckoning, such odds make MXit the safest possible thing for kids to be doing while awake.

It would have been real news is if they managed to disappear without being able to communicate with anyone. That takes some doing.

It gets better, though. One of the kids, 15-year-old Chantelynn Janse van Resnburg, lives with her father in Orania. She travelled alone, by bus, to visit her mother in Naboomspruit (which someone should inform the sub-editors is officially known as Mookgophong) and upon her return, instead of meeting her father in Hopetown, got off the bus in Johannesburg. Now I haven’t been to Orania, a kind of ultra-conservative white Afrikaner enclave, but I have been to Hopetown. There, I met the local satanist, a 17-year-old boy, so known by the townsfolk because he preferred black t-shirts and wore an earring. That his sights were set on escaping to the “big city” was not the most surprising news I’d heard that day. If I were that teenage girl, I’d also get off the bus in Johannesburg, rather than return to Hopetown or Orania.

The other girl, 17-year-old Hannelie Grabie, packed a suitcase, and took her make-up, hairdryer and back medication with her. Either that, or robbers who specialise in teenage accessories stole them. “We don’t know if she’s run away or disappeared,” says our private investigator. Boy, I hope he has a day job. What do you think, genius? That you need a hairdryer to access MXit? And this is the Clousseau who proposes to find South Africa’s missing children? I sure hope he’s not representative.

Both sets of parents are surprised at their daughters’ disappearance. Aren’t most parents of runaways surprised? If they had a clue, the girls probably wouldn’t have felt the need to run away.

I feel for the parents, and I hope the girls are found, and that they’re okay. But there’s nothing more to this story than a pair of runaways. Plain and simple. Unhappy at home, bright lights in their eyes, fell in with dodgy company, who knows? Slapping this on the front page, and blaming it on MXit, or Facebook, or MySpace, or the internet, or cellphones, or postcards, or bus services, is absurd. It’s braindead sensationalism which does the girls’ case more harm than good and slanders both the creators of MXit and its 5 199 998 other users.

The front page of the Saturday Star is worse even than its back page. At least the back page features serious news, such as: “‘My Nazi orgy with twisted F1 boss’”. Now that’s real journalism.

Pieter de Bruin, of 1* P***** Avenue, Ceres, may well be dead. If not, I munged his address because I fear for his safety. Big Oil will surely get him. His only hope of survival is to let them buy his silence with a few billion dollars, but he will have to live in the lap of luxury knowing the price is depriving thousands of ordinary South Africans not only of a money making opportunity, but also of a real chance to save the planet from imminent carbon doom.

While sitting in the dark, caused by an acute attack of global warming, I perused by candlelight an advertisement De Bruin placed in the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. This magazine has always been a rich source of entertainment, and De Bruin’s ad is a classic: alongside a photo of a bakkie with lots of signage, such as “test vehicle” added in Microsoft Paint, he’s flogging something he calls HHO. The letters stand for hydrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, and represent a “fuel saving technology”.

“This technology does not mean we are running on water, but introducing HHO, which simply and effectively creates the effect of using the same fuel in a more economical way. It supplements and CORRECTS the behaviour of fuel,” the advert claims, directing readers to a remarkably amateurish and painfully illiterate website at HHO4fuel.co.za.

Whoever wrote the copy didn’t actually read the website themselves, since it says quite clearly: “HHO = Oxyhydrogen = H2O = Water”

This, of course, is not true. Anyone who studied chemistry at school will know that there’s no way two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom will form a stable bond other than in the form it takes in water, and there’s no way that could be written other than H₂O, or HOH, at a push, because a hydrogen atom in the middle wouldn’t care much for the oxygen on its right once it had bonded with another hydrogen atom on its left. So what’s going on here?

Surprisingly, the notion is not entirely weird, though it does attract every shade of crackpot under the sun. It is also not new.

De Bruin (”the Brown”, in Dutch) is talking about Brown’s gas, which is simply a mixture of hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂). Water can be split into these molecular gases by electrolysis. Hydrogen is a flammable gas, and as such can be used as fuel. Hydrogen-powered cars are nothing new either. You’d make a lot more money if you can solve the high-pressure storage problem, or the high-volume distribution problem. You’d make a right fortune if you can figure out a way to produce hydrogen gas using less energy than just burning regular unleaded.

Blowtorches using “oxyhydrogen” or “oxy-gas” have been in use since Yull Brown (of Brown’s gas fame) patented it in the late 1970s. They use either a bottle of each gas, or an electrolysis unit plugged into the electricity mains. Research papers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (such as this 1974 paper and this one from 1976) describe how adding hydrogen to the fuel mixture of a car allows the engine to run leaner that it otherwise would. It stands to reason that a leaner-running engine might save fuel, provided its power output doesn’t drop by the same amount.

Of course the energy required to generate the hydrogen is a bit of a problem. It takes a lot of electricity to generate separately. De Bruin’s device electrolyses the water on board, and instead of running the engine on hydrogen, merely adds a little to the fuel or air inlet. So as not to bog your engine down with generating the power for this process, one shouldn’t expect a lot of hydrogen to be generated, so your fuel saving will probably be modest, and don’t expect to keep your warranty intact.

Though elaborately presented in fashionable magenta with lots of exclamation marks, De Bruin is only marginally more honest than other purveyors of this hyped stuff. He doesn’t claim 50% fuel savings, he claims 30%. He doesn’t have to explain why, if his car can run 100 miles on four ounces of water, he needs a hybrid engine, nor does he claim that an oxy-gas torch is a new invention and that its 2 000°C flame doesn’t feel very hot. All of these far-fetched claims are made by Denny Klein, of Hydrogen Technology Applications, who promptly hijacked Brown’s gas, renamed it Klein’s gas, and patented a trivial variation of a decades-old, perfectly obvious and previously patented process for generating the gas by electrolysis. A gullible television insert that includes the claims he makes can be seen here.

Not only the popular media, but fairly respectable science publications are taken in by the idea of running a car on water. Witness New Scientist, for example, claiming that, “Before long, you might be able to run your car with nothing more than water in its fuel tank. It would be the ultimate zero-emissions vehicle.”

Nothing more, in this case, except for 18kg of boron. The water is “reacted with” the boron, to produce the hydrogen on which the engine runs. This just happens to turns the boron into boron oxide, which needs to be reprocessed — using energy — in order to be used again as boron. So in reality, boron is the primary fuel, producing hydrogen and boron oxide, hydrogen is the secondary fuel or energy carrier, and water isn’t a fuel at all. The entire process is marginally less efficient than Freddy Flintstone’s ultimate zero-emissions vehicle. And even the Flintstone ZEV isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Contrary to the Flintstone Incorporated press release, it emits methane, which is a dangerous greenhouse gas — though admittedly a far less significant greenhouse gas than H₂O.

Either way, if De Bruin is still alive, he is in mortal danger. Doesn’t everyone know that when Big Oil fails to convince alternative fuel inventors to sell the patents to them for billions, instead of selling them for billions to car manufacturers, they send round the cleaners? There’s this guy, Stanley Meyer, who invented an HHO driven car. He figured out how to make it more efficient that the Flintstone ZEV, using a revolutionary fuel cell. First, the courts called him a fraud. Who controls the courts? You guessed it. And now he’s dead. Coincidence? Of course not. Another inventor died in prison. Another fell down stairs and broke his neck. Who built those stairs? Right. Who writes the building codes? Don’t you know it. Another guy mysteriously died of old age. I’m not kidding. These people are dangerous.

While De Bruin sells his $100 kits, he had better hope the men in dark glasses think Ceres is like Oros: not 100% real. After all, the water-fuelled car, discussed in whispered tones only on secret underground websites, are suppressed by the vast right wing conspiracy and the very same fossil fuel companies who blew up the twin towers and tried to make Jesus kill the Romans.

But there’s still time to accept the billion dollars from the Arabs that the late Stanley Meyer so foolishly turned down.

This could have been a mildly interesting story. US house prices are falling and credit is becoming more expensive, which is not exactly the way many consumers bet a few years ago. They were taking a calculated gamble that their asset value would reliably go up, and interest rates would remain low, thereby covering a home loan they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. They bet wrong. Result? Foreclosure. And the result of a spate of foreclosures? Many unoccupied houses, repossessed by banks, now find themselves going cheap in a buyers’ market.

So far, this is elementary stuff, although Democrats are trying hard to complicate matters by outbidding each other with dumb populist promises, funded with money they expropriate from responsible borrowers who didn’t bet wrong.

But now, what happens to these empty properties, besides depressing market prices? As you can imagine, vandalism and looting is becoming a bit of a problem. Metals and expensive fixings such as airconditioner units left in empty houses are tempting targets, after all.

Here’s how one Jason Szep from Reuters spins the story:

Some homes worth less than their copper pipes

BROCKTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes — a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

Perhaps the looters figured that the house would be slightly harder to fence than copper. Which makes them smarter than this reporter.

It should be noted that this article was published on 1 April. However, the feature’s length, the perfectly serious vein in which the rest of it continues, and the Massachusetts dateline suggests this is mere coincidence. Jokes only work if you consciously intend to make them.

The story talks about houses being sold for “$100″. Granted, that would be less than their copper pipes, assuming that they had any. It’s not like the story gives further detail on such bargains, such as what condition the house is in, where it is located, whether there are any buyers in the market, whether it was sold in a firesale at auction, or whether it includes the mortgage. If it’s a gag, it’s braindead. My bet is that it’s either a misprint or a misquote, and if I had to choose, I’d wager it’s a misquote.

If that was the basis of a joke, however, consider this:

In Brockton, which suffered 400 foreclosures last year, blamed largely on predatory lending [sic], and which is bracing for another 400 this year, Charney said the thieves inflicted about $15,000 of damage on the home on Vine Street. […] After haggling, the bank shaved $5,000 off the $105,000 price.

Clearly, Reuters reporters are not beyond parroting partisan political rhetoric, such as “predatory lending”. Last time I checked, predators use force against prey, but mortgages are voluntary contracts in which one party stumps up a great deal of cash, and the other party vouches for their ability and intent to pay off the loan. If one party were to breach that contract, the other party can only make the best of a bad situation, and exercise whatever rights they have to compensate for their losses. Reuters calls it “predatory lending”. I’ll see them and raise them “greedy borrowing”. And I’m not bluffing when I say I might throw in “fraud”.

Not that Reutervillians would understand elementary economics, to judge by their arithmetic. Not that Reutervillians understand the difference between reporting and editorialising, judging by their ability to draw sweeping conclusions from a sample of one. Not that Reutervillians grasp the complex nuances of the conditional value and positional magnitude of the zero digit in our numerical notation, judging from the fact that the very house used in the example is worth $105 000, which, according to the headline, is less than the $15 000 in damage caused by the looters. Perhaps they were referring to the actual price of the stolen copper, but then they’d surely report on the fellow walking down the street with 13.5 tons of copper wiring in his hands. And that would be funny.

Thanks to some straight-up, hard-nosed, unbiased reporting, we now know that when it suits the political leanings of the reporter, $15 000 exceeds $105 000. Nice to know Reuterville still has its share of village idiots.

No less an orator than president George W Bush of them great misunderestimated United States, trotted out this line in an address to the Economic Club of New York just now. He promised to strongly promote his free trade proposals, and spoke eloquently against isolationism and protectionism — sentiments that I, as a foreigner, cheer.

This raised a laugh:

It makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the US markets. It’s our money to begin with. It seems like we ought to let it back.

Proof that seven years of regular practice can make a moderately competent speaker out of anyone.

You can’t make this stuff up. From CNN International:

I’m pretty upset today. I found a promotional roll of three-ply toilet paper in my pack of two-ply. If I wanted three-ply, I’d have bought it, dammit.

I use two-ply Baby Soft toilet paper, made by Kimberly-Clark of South Africa. Elsewhere, it may be known by different brand names, like Cottonelle or Andrex, but basically, it’s the best a bum can get. People who use other brands annoy me, and I worry deeply about people who use only single-ply when they can afford better. How can you trust people like that?

In my bathroom, toilet paper hangs with the sheets coming from underneath, so a deft one-handed manoeuver involving a yank and a well-timed tap with the thumb is all that’s needed to sever the required length. I’ve got it down to a fine art, and get exactly the same number of sheets every single time. Even when I’m drunk. I cannot for the life of me grasp the convoluted brain contortions that are necessary to deal with any other way of hanging a toilet roll. My method may be controversial, but it’s me.

Bog roll should be soft. None of this recycled 220-grit stuff, or industrial-strength tissue with the texture and absorbency of cheap newsprint. I demand expensive, luxury softness, as only Baby Soft two-ply delivers. With micro-pocket technology.

Bog roll should be white. Not with pastel butterflies on it. Not with pictures of George Bush on it. Not with funny-ha-ha images of the Rolling Stones tongue. Not with prints of Hello Kitty, which is just sick. Just bog-standard white, of the kind you achieve by adding copious amounts of poisonous bleach as you manufacture your expensive, luxury, soft, white two-ply Baby Soft.

So now I discover this offending three-ply roll in my pack of two-ply, wrapped in a separate promotional cardboard wrapping. That idiotic marketing gimmick alone was a right pain, considering that I grabbed the roll in question when my injured cat wet my bed. This was not the time to make me remove unrequested advertising from the roll, or ask me to read it. Time was of the essence.

Then I got around to hanging the remainder of the roll in the bathroom, but the remainder wasn’t much, since it has only 230 sheets. That’s 120 fewer sheets than comparable two-ply. If I wanted less toilet paper on a roll, I’d have bought it that way. Face it, you’re not going to use only two-thirds of your customary length, which is what the marketing scum are counting on. So they’re ripping you off. And that’s not counting the fact that 230 times 1.5 is 345, not 350, which is what you’d get on a two-ply roll. So they’re ripping you off twice. By contrast, 350 times 2 is 700, which is considerably more than the 500 sheets you get with single-ply toilet paper. So one-ply is stupid, two-ply is a bargain, and three-ply is a ripoff.

As if this torment wasn’t enough, I discovered that my skillful yank-pause-tap technique for severing the required length doesn’t work with this newfangled bog-roll, because the paper is too thick. You need two hands to tear it sheet from sheet — pull, stop the roll, find the perforation, and with a hand on either side of it, tear — which is annoying and inefficient. Moreover, I found it too thick for my liking. I won’t go into detail, but single-ply is too thin, and three-ply is too thick, which is why I buy two-ply. Dammit.

Why can’t they just give me what I choose to buy? I’m paying for it, after all. Most importantly, don’t mess with my toilet routine. I was potty trained 35 years ago. I don’t want to have to acquire new habits just because some marketer thought they’d give me something I don’t want. Not for free as an added extra, but in stead of one of the two-ply rolls I’d normally get.

So, Kimberly-Clark marketing drones, if you insist on marketing at me, put some more of those little fluffy toy puppies in the pack. Kids love them, and my dogs think they’re real and carry them around everywhere. That’s cute. Springing three-ply on me when I’m faced with a cat-pee disaster is just plain evil. Do not ever do that again.