For some reason, someone thought "tow ball" = "balls" (I think Americans call a "tow ball" a "hitch" - where you attach your trailer to the car). And then they developed the large scrotum - in a range of designer colours including gold and silver - that you can hang from your tow ball to announce to the world how much class you have. Perhaps also to compensate for something?
I am disappointed in our local feminists though. Women drive utes these days and hunt pigs. Where are the large dangling ovaries on their 4WDs? Come on ladies, you're letting the sisterhood down.
But these are not the only kind of bollocks that are currently disturbing me - although they are taking up a large amount of my disturbation quotient.
A recent dispute over lack of prior notification of the release of a new version popular kitchen appliance (and I dare you to come up with a more first-world problem) was defended by the company in question by saying that the release was done "in accordance with global brand compliance".
What?
I'll take the adjectives out of that sentence and see if it gets better.
"in accordance with compliance"
Nope. I'm fairly sure the whole thing is bollocks. It means nothing at all. Sounds good, very official, so much like they're following all the rules but all they've actually said is that they are "compliant". With what they are compliant remains a mystery to the aggrieved consumer, but they can take some comfort, one hopes, in the general sense of complicity that pervades the communication.
While still in the kitchen, I am reassured that the fat soaked oats masquerading as health food and labelled as muesli bars are good for my kids by a cattle-style brand on the front of the box reading "lunchbox friendly".
I'm fairly sure that's also bollocks.
The rot probably set in when we started accepting the idea of "environmentally friendly". That doesn't mean anything either. "Friendly" is an adjective so "environmentally" must be an adverb - expanding on the way in which I am friendly. I can be, for example, genuinely friendly, superficially friendly, inappropriately friendly etc. In those cases I am friendly in a genuine way, a superficial way or an inappropriate way. How can I be friendly in an environmental way? Send only recycled birthday cards? Only develop relationships with people that drive small cars and have dreadlocks?
So we try another possible meaning - I am friendly with the environment. It might mean that I have to start describing my relationships in odd ways if I am to be consistent, though - I am Andrewly Friendly or Janinely Friendly. That aside, I think that the idea of developing a mutually supportive and affectionate relationship with a complex, planet-wide ecosystem is a mind-bending mismatching of concepts - like being emotionally blackmailed by Pythagoras' Theorem.
Or, it could be that I, or the product, do good things for the environment - such as I might do for my friends - lend them the wheelbarrow, help them with some paving, babysit the kids, that kind of thing. Gaia has my number - I'm waiting for the call.
None of which helps me with the muesli bars, though. They are not friendly in a moulded pink plastic kind of way, they haven't developed a reciprocal emotional attachment to the Tupperware and they aren't doing it any favours.
Nope. "Lunchbox Friendly" is just what it seems - a bit, gold coloured set of meaningless bollocks.
