Bad products

I've decided to start occasionally posting about terrible products and services. If anyone wants to join in, please feel free. This week: The iPod.

Terrible Product: The iPod
1) It makes you look like you've got a head full of spaghetti
2) There's no radio
3) You can't record on it (without buying a microphone)
4) It's got a rechargeable battery that you can't replace when it runs out and you're on the tube or in Ilfracombe
5) You can't plug it straight into the USB socket - you need cables and cradles cluttering up the desk
6) It makes the user look incredibly chavvy and un-educated, "...need MP3 player...uugh...get iPod..." as though the user is incapable of doing any consumer research for themselves
7) It wasn't the first MP3 player on the market, it certainly isn't the best and yet it is becoming a generic term.
8) For all its drawbacks, it still comes as a premium to better players, rather like a car with no wheels or engine selling for more than a complete vehicle
9) Despite the drawbacks and overpricing, ovine people still buy it, even though there are cheaper, better equipped alternatives
10) I can't think of a tenth thing and that's just irritating.

If you can think of a tenth or eleventh thing that is just plain rubbish about the iPod, let me know.

Also, if you have other products that are just rubbish, bad, irritating, terrible or dangerous, let's have a look at them too.

LargetrouserS: The bottom bracket since 1990

Get to work or Dai trying

This morning, my 6am porridge was interrupted by the sight of an old college friend on the telly. Wyre Davis, or "Taff" as we knew him then, was reporting on the new government proposal to put sponging paraplegics back to work, at least until theit teeth fall out, when I presume Phony Bliar will just use them as draft excluders.

I was minded to think how appropriate the juxtaposition of this story and reporter was. In his younger days, Taff was disabled by a quite appalling degree of Welshness, and considered almost unemployable. However, the plucky little Celt has turned his disability to an advantage and now regularly pops up on reports from the fourth world to tell us how the pobl y cwm are getting along.

Well done Wyre !

MawrllodraU: And that's swearing

I, pod

For a number of years, the authorities have been trying to clean up the Thames in order to encourage salmon back into London. I was never quite sure what the point of this was, especially after cheap, farmed salmon became ubiquitous in the local Happy Shopper, despite it being mostly pink fat and tasting oddly of mutton. Truth be told, I've never really cared for salmon, wild or farmed - by which I mean that I don't like the taste as opposed to keeping one as a pet.
Anyway, recent events have overtaken this well-meaning experiment. The water is now so clean that we've now got illegal immigrants swimming up Old Father Thames. I mean, a bloody whale, where's it going to end ?

Next thing you know it'll have settled in Richmond and invited its whole bloody pod to stay. Of course, being a whale, nobody's going to say anything are they - nobody wants to offend a whale, oh no - heaven forbid, "fabulous creature", "nicely spouty", "not at all as fishy as I'd imagined". That's the problem with whales - they're so bloody middle class, "Oh we had the pod round for sherry and canapes at the weekend - Jocasta made these mini plankton vol au vents from Jamie Oliver's new "Cocking about with Cooking" book".

Now if a giant squid was lolling about at Battersea, you wouldn't see the do-gooders patting it down with a damp towel. The cheeky Chelsea bunch would be down there with their jetskis and Sabatiers helping themselves to calimari.

As usual, its one rule for large cetaceans and another for abnormal cephalopods. Tchoh.

LargetrouserS: Free Willy: ask owner for details

A load of old pony ?

You know when people have too much money. It's when they start treating their pets better than their children.

We've seen designer clothes for dogs, diamond collars for lizards and dieticians for cats.

Imagine my astonishment this evening when I turned on the telly and saw an advert for horse perfume. One can only assume that the enthusiastic equestrian is no longer happy with the astringent smell of saddle soap and thus this new fragrance has been borne of repeated market focus groups.

The product is blandly called "Lovely", almost as forehead-smackingly crass as calling the new Will Young CD "Unlistenable" or anything that David Beckham advertises as "Chav Toss".

Whilst there are no actual horses in the advert, presumably due to some Equine Equity kerfuffel, the makers have substituted the suitably horse-like Sarah Jessica Parker.

LargetrouserS: Two legs: good; three legs: Large

Parkinson's Alzheimers

Last Saturday evening saw veteran celebrity interviewer Michael Parkinson extract 60 minutes worth of "chat" from American songstress Madonna, whose hits include "Papa get the breech...loading rifle, there are poor people on the lawn"; "Vogue ? - no Country Life, actually" and "Get orf moi lahnd" (sorry - couldn't think of a pun).

For someone who started as a penniless jobbing dancer and ended up a lady of the manor, one may have expected a rich and sustaining broth of an interview instead of the flavourless consommé that was delivered.

Nevertheless, the piece served two valuable purposes:
1) the effortless promotion of Timothy Taylor's Landlord Ale, quite possibly one of the nation's finest beers and now favoured by the Duchess of Dirge; and
2) confirmation that Parky really is losing his marbles.

Let me illustrate the second point. After watching his guest perform two of the most openly boystown, leather clad, oiled up, rainbow-coloured, Heaven-sent, bump and grind songs, both of which would have blown Soft Cell, The Communards, Erasure and the Village People off stage, the dear old buffer (Parky, not Mad Donna) was heard to enquire, "...so...why do you think you have become a bit of a gay icon?"

LargetrouserS: The bottom bracket since 1990

Norwegian Blue

Blogging has been somwhat light on the ground, following an outbreak of what was at first thought to be Bird Flu.

When the male inhabitants of Trouser Towers also became somewhat under weather it was obvious that it had mutated to a strain of Bloke Flu, which mainly entailed sitting within easy reach of the widescreen, remote in hand and uttering feeble remarks such as "...I don't think I can make it to the toilet...", "...my arms are all wrong..." and " oh yeah, two sugars'd be nice...".

Following this the virus rapidly mutated through a series of weakly infective and totally ineffective puns.

The hiatus did give us time to discuss a new submission to Large Business by our German correspondent, Herr Grossen Hosen, about the rebranding of Iraq ("Branding Sand...with a Smile"). Keep watching the pies.

LargetrouserS: All trousers, no talk.

Ass lickers

Good evening, and apologies for the temporary hiatus in service.

Tonight we return to an animal theme. The other day, fueled up on a heady concoction of canteen super-saturated lipids and chemically enhanced beverages ("lime", "flavour", "diet", "cola" is a current favoured nutri-narcotic), conversation turned to the surprising recent upturn in the price of donkeys. It would appear that the recent "Shrek" films have enhanced the image of these traditional beasts of burden, such that they have become the must-have urbane pet of the moment.

Those of you who have watched disappointedly as your carefully nurtured sea monkeys fail to sport little crowns and perform acrobatics and stubbornly remain featureless specks, will recognise the way in which the pet donkeys become abandoned in the back garden after they refuse to repeatedly make weak wisecracks and partake in discourse in a jingoistic black patois.

Left at the bottom of the garden, perhaps used to store tools or as mobile planters for spring bulbs, the donkeys are now suffering.

One enterprising idea may be to rehabilitate these equine outcasts as part of a service to city dwellers. Many apartment dwellers have both windowboxes, which having been enthusiastically planted in the spring soon beceme unkempt miniature jungles, and windows, which are notoriously difficult and dangerous to clean at heights.

Dangling Donkeys (TM) Ltd. will solve both problems by carefully lowering donkeys over the sides of large apartment blocks. When the donkey is level with the window of a paying customer the operator will stop lowering the donkey, which will proceed to munch the excess herbage from the windowbox before licking the window clean. Small oscillating movements may then be used to scrub the donkey against the pane to dry the window,providing the customer with a sparkly clear view, unobstructed by wilted daffs.

Of course, there is always the danger that instead of falling on your arse, your ass might fall on you.

A full business plan and cashflow forecast will be available soon for interested investors.

LargetrouserS: Orange is the pigment of my imagination