A Philosophical Guide To Superdry®

Hello!

Let's start with the big question: how old is too old to wear Superdry® clothing?
I'm afraid is it almost impossible to answer this scientifically. The received wisdom is that once you reach 25, 30, 40, ... you are too old to walk around covered with logos of any kind, let alone the Superdry® ones. But we've seen middle-aged dads, grandads even, doing so. Yet these outlaws are not arrested, deported, or even given a stern verbal warning from security staff. Let's for argument's sake assume that there is no age limit (it'll make things easier).

What about Superdry® jackets? Well, perhaps a more pertinent question is how many zips is enough zips? They, as a rule, have too many zips. Last time I zipped up a jacket I found one zip was all I needed to get the job done. Yet Superdry®, inspired perhaps by the unnecessarily multi-mouthed alien in the 'Alien' films, give their outerwear upwards of thirty zips. Stop it. If you particularly crave zips, for whatever "reasons" you may have, go ahead. Some of their jackets don't have loads of zips, and in my humble opinion these would be the ones to go for.

Now let's get on to t-shirts. They're the cheapest entry into the world of The 'Dry® (as no one calls them), and as a result the most popular. Which ones should you choose? We will concentrate on the words printed on said t-shirts, because it's all about the words...

The Superdry® Logo

Which one? There appears to be loads of different ones, which is a problem for corporate identity. Their stationary must be all over the shop (no pun intended, none taken). You could argue that the smaller the logo, the smaller the issue, but Superdry® are all about the big letters on t-shirts. So instead of buying a Superdry® t-shirt with a tiny logo, you could be buying a cheaper t-shirt with no logo on it at all.

"Real"

As opposed to those virtual t-shirts you mean? I'm guessing this is to differentiate themselves from pirate versions of Superdry® garments. Of course if anyone was going to counterfeit Superdry®, the last thing they'd think of putting on them would be "Real" (*eye-roll emoji*). The word "Real" is pointless here, let's see what else they've got...

"Genuine"

See "Real" above. Otherwise touch one; if it exists, it must on some level be genuine. "I feel, therefore it is", as the man said.

"Yokohama High Flyers"

No idea really. Do you automatically become a member of this (no doubt august) body of men/women merely by buying a t-shirt? I've never had flying lessons; is it easy? Does buying one of these t-shirts get you a discount on high-flying lessons in Yokohama? Do you have to show your Yokohama High Flyers membership card before buying one of these? So many questions. Perhaps too many questions...

"Classics"

We'll be the judges of that, sunshine. If the design they refer to is a classic, why would it have "Classic" written on it? They never called Classic Coca Cola "Classic" from the start did they (*points at brain*)? Did they decide at the outset that these designs would already be classics? If so that's brave, fucking brave.

"Vintage"

First you must ask the same questions as "Classic" raised. Then, and only then, you have to spend at least eight hours getting your head round what "Vintage" might mean. Are they second-hand? You know, like, are they from a particularly good year for Superdry® and some kind soul decided to donate them to the store curator unworn? Were you supposed to buy them in the 60's and shrine them away until they matured enough to be wearable? Problematic.

The-Ones-That-Look-Like-The-Football-Strip-Of-An-Actual-Superdry®-Football-Team

Yeah, right.

"Team"

See The-Ones-That-Look-Like-The-Football-Strip-Of-An-Actual-Superdry®-Football-Team. These may be referring to members of staff of course, in which case all the questions (so many questions) aimed at "Yokohama High Flyers" apply here too.

"OSAKA"

It's a place in Japan. If you've been there and forgot to get a t-shirt to commemorate the experience, you might do worse than get one of these. Depending on font and colour preferences, this could be one of the more "fair enough" choices, because it doubles as a tourist souvenir as well as a fashion statement.

To conclude, once you've taken on board the above questions, it really depends on whether you like the look of Superdry® garments or not. I think they suit girls more than blokes, but hey, wear what you like. If anyone has suggested you're too old to wear a Superdry® t-shirt, perhaps now is the time to give them *the fingers* and take the plunge. If they do them in your size, then according to the laws of this still green and pleasant land, you're allowed to wear them.

Ricky G•rvais Comes Out as A Leicester Fan

Kevin Spooner writes:

Legendary documentary maker, and star of BBC sitcom 'Upstart Crow' Ricky Gervais, has admitted he is a Leicester City fan. When I tracked him down to his one-bedroom flat in Slough (or wherever it is he lives), I asked him what first attracted him to the role.

"Well.....(pointing both index fingers at himself) ... success, mainly. I mean, I'm successful.... won awards and shit, and they're successful. I mean, hello! Winners of THE BEST LEAGUE IN THE WORLD, the P-r-e-m-i-e-r league yeah? I mean what have your team won?"

I point out that Manchester United won the F.A. Cup a couple of weeks ago.

"Right, the F.A. Cup, well done, no really, well done on that, nice little trophy, don't get me wrong, but it's not (grimaces)... the Premier League title is it?"

In fact, Mr Gervais, who is roughly middle-aged, has even been approached by Nick Hornby to star as Claudio Ranieri in his Hollywood movie version of The Leicester City Story.

"They gave Clooney a screen test, but he couldn't do the accent (points at self again); range you see, some have it, some don't. I'll basically play him as a chilled-out entertainer, with a penchant for expensive leather jackets."

I asked Nick Hornby at his North London home 'The Emirates' if The Leicester City Story was really hollywood material.

"I've thought about that," he said, "if they don't like it, I'll turn it into an insufferable middle-class comedy drama with a few references to Arsenal to keep working class viewers interested. In fact it'll be all about Arsenal, it'll make things simpler. The soundtrack can be culled from my Spotify playlist, and Ricky could play Arsene Wenger, 'cause he's great at accents."

Leicester City fans not sure what to wear this Summer.

Leicester City fans, who have been clad head-to-toe in Leicester City shirts, shorts, socks, scarves and hats, while holding those things that make a noise, aren't sure what to wear this Summer.

Now that the football season is over, The Foxes' supporters will be reduced to telling everyone they meet, within 30 seconds, that during the football season they support Leicester City. The alternative is to carry on wearing Leicester City kit and chanting Leicester City songs (if they have any), throughout the closed season.

Although England have qualified for Euro 2016, they tend to play in England shirts, which aren't even blue. If Leicester fans were to walk around in white shirts they might be mistaken for Leeds fans. Leeds haven't won the Premier League in ages, compared to Leicester, who actually won the title last year (we looked it up).

A spokesman for the Leicester City Supporters Club said: "It's a dilemma: we want to live and sleep in our Leicester kit, to let everyone know we're connected to a group of well-paid sportsmen who have done what they're paid to do, but we're starting to stink, and those clapper things are getting on everyone's nerves. The kids can keep going on those bastards for up to twelve hours a day."

Superfan Ken Fravington admits he'll not be able to leave the house at all: "I'm playing it safe, I'll spend the whole Summer in the garden, trying to do an elaborate tartan pattern on the lawn."

Serious Question: Why do you watch 'I'm A Celeb'?

Hello. Let us start by assuming that 'I'm A Celebrity, Please Get Me Out Of The Jungle As I've Already Been Paid And It's Really Shit Here' is, to all intents and purposes, a torture show. Yes it is. I've seen enough clips on Gogglebox to come to that conclusion, without ever putting ITV on to form a wider view. It's okay, I'm not going to accuse anyone who watches it of enjoying people being tortured, you know, being fed horrible things, cut off from friends and loved ones, undergoing physical discomfort... no, definitely not.

You're safe from the moral dilemma of watching people suffer for your entertainment because of the distance between you and them. For a start I bet hardly anyone reading this is in Australia, which we are led to believe is where the show is made (and NOT the Eden Project place or Kew Gardens or a disused TEXAS Homecare just off the A13 near the Ripple Road roundabout). No, there is a distance between you and the infliction of discomfort on others, which is why, presumably, you can still sleep soundly at night after watching it.

And they're getting paid right? If they win they get £ALot apparently, so they've asked for anything that's thrown at them, or placed through them, or on them. And it's this bit I want to focus on. In 1961 a psychologist called Stanley Milgram ran an experiment in the U.S. to try to get to grips with one of the biggest questions of the 20th century: why do people do harm to others? At the Nuremburg trials after World War II, Adolf Eichmann claimed that he carried out atrocities against the Jews because he was simply 'following orders'. Milgram wanted to try to set up an experiment to test if ordinary folks might be capable of such acts if told to do so.

The experiment involved three people. An ad was placed in a local paper, it asked for volunteers to take part in a psychological test for a pre-paid fee of $4. Two volunteers would then draw lots to be either the 'teacher' or the 'learner'. Thing is, this bit was fixed: one of the 'volunteers' was a stooge, and they always became the 'learner'. The third person was an authority figure, a man in a white coat who oversaw proceedings. The 'teacher' and 'learner' were separated by a wall (here's your distance), and the 'teacher' then gave the 'learner' a series of memory tests which got progressively harder to repeat.

If the 'learners' got a test wrong, he (and they were ALL men) were given an electric shock.

The 'teacher' was given a very mild shock before the experiment began, enough to be uncomfortable but not to actually hurt. So, the 'teacher' knew what the 'learner' was going through. The big deal with this experiment is that the amount of shock administered was variable. As the stooge deliberately started making more and more mistakes, the man in the white coat and the clipboard advised the 'teacher' to increase the charge. Pre-recorded cries of anguish, turning to pleads to be released, were played as the charge increased.

Put yourself in the 'teacher' position. When would you stop the experiment? Will they take my $4 away if I bail straight away? Once you know there's an electric shock involved you'll get cold feet and politely call it a day right? Once the poor guy in the other room starts "ow"ing, that's the cut-off point, surely? In the actual experiment, almost all of the 40 'teachers' went beyond 330 volts! Despite recorded screams and even a faked physical episode, most went on to deliver potentially fatal shocks.

It can't have been the money. Even accounting for inflation, $4 isn't enough to risk someone's life for. No, the experiment shows that when people are told to do things by someone in (even bogus) authority, they tend to do as they are told.

Milgram's experiment was heavily criticised because of the stress it placed the 'teachers' under. Later versions had two authority figures, one saying 'stop' as well as the one saying 'you must carry on'. You'll be pleased to know that this made a difference. Although the original experiment was, for want of a better phrase, a nasty piece of work, it was the most instructive.

I think if anyone tried a similar experiment today, there would be a strong chance that the guinea pigs would know something fishy was going on. We've all seen Dom Joly's 'Trigger Happy TV', where he picked on old people or unsuspecting members of the public who don't use English as a first language, to play 'hilarious' (but also humiliating) pranks on. The distance between him and the victims was, oh hang on, there wasn't any distance! He was taking the piss out of these people and filming it and is proud to have done so. What a dick. Then there was 'Game For A Laugh', 'Fonejacker', 'Brass Eye'... all happy to humiliate in the name of entertainment. Admittedly no-one got hurt on those shows (I remember Dennis Norden commenting on 'You've Been Framed': 'It's funny, as long as they get up afterwards'). But no-one was really hurt in Stanley Milgram's experiment either, and no-one on 'Trigger Happy TV' was asked to be humiliated, or were offered a fee beforehand for the opportunity to be humiliated...

He really was a dick, wasn't he?

You would have to find people who haven't watched a lot of television, perhaps because they are always on the television. Because of inflation, you would have to increase the fee for such research. Ordinary people won't get out of bed for less than $4 today; if you want to experiment on celebrities in a controlled environment and film the results for posterity, you'll need to pay £Thousands, even £Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps it could take place in a jungle, with the public voting on who has to go through certain 'challenges'...




The proper historical bits from this are contained in:
'Investigating Psychology' edited by Nicola Brace and Jovan Byford
'Investigating Methods' edited by Jean McAvoy and Nicola Brace

Both are part of the Open University module 'Introducing Psychology'.

Witnesses

I've just read an interesting article on psychologist Alfred Binet, the man responsible for the first IQ tests. He wanted to use them to find ways to help those with learning difficulties, and not to highlight those difficulties as weaknesses. He thought it was as important how you asked a question as the question itself. A technique which highlights how the results of questioning can be warped by the questioner is 'interrogative suggestibility'. Just for fun (don't phone in), here's an example:

Case 1:

Kevin spots the actor Terrence Stamp in Oxford Street and says 'hi'

Kevin spots the actor Terrence Stamp passing in a 73 bus the day after.

When Kevin tells Rachel, she says that Terrence Stamp was being interviewed on Radio 2 at the same time as either of these sightings, what is Kevin's defense?

This isn't a court-of-law situation, so I'm not going to pretend to know the correct procedure for analysing the evidence, but just for fun...

I believe the first sighting to be true because Kevin spoke to the actor. Celebrities are used to being recognised (some positively crave it, especially Nick Grimshaw, the idiot), so to say hello to a complete stranger is unusual in London. It is possible that the person looks like Terrence Stamp and is used to being mistaken for him, or is the sort of person who says hello to strangers on the streets of London. A weirdo.

If we believe the first sighting I think it is logical that the second also occurred. If you've seen Terrence Stamp in the street AND spoken to him, why would you make up a story about seeing him on a bus? It is possible it's the same weirdo again, but the odds are mounting against it.

If Kevin saw Terrence Stamp on one, maybe two occasions, the Radio 2 interview could have been pre-recorded (and Steve Wright, the bastard, pretended that it was happening live). The second sighting is easier to dismiss as wishful thinking, or 'having Terrence Bloody Stamp on your mind too much'. Watch the road for heaven's sake, it's dangerous out there.

One way the prosecution could try to unseat Kevin would be to use interrogative suggestibility and ask the following question:

'What colour scarf was Terence Stamp wearing?'

When Kevin thinks long and hard (or long and woolly eh? Eh? Oh never mind) and answers: 'Brown, I think.' And the prosecution shouts: 'HA! We know for a fact that Terrence Stamp has never worn a scarf, brown or otherwise!' You know that they have used interrogative suggestibility in its evilest form. 

It could be enough to convince the jury that Kevin was making it up, which is perhaps better than being found guilty of stalking Terrence Stamp. 

Dismissed.

The Not So Big Questions

"Will watching 'The Great British Bake-Off' make me put on weight?"
Clive

"If a mobile phone has loads of apps on it, is it heavier?"
Wendy


"How heavy is a memory?"
Samsonite®


Three questions, or possibly the same question. Let's take them one at a time.

Clive is being rhetorical when asking if merely watching 'The Great British Bake-Off' is going to result in him gaining weight. The implication is that watching Mary Berry and Doc Hollywood presiding over endless sugary dessert foods will induce Clive to either take up baking, or go to Marks & Spencer and purchase four chocolate eclairs and eat them all at once with a cup of tea. You could argue that if he takes up baking but shows a will of steel, he could ration himself to a tiny portion of cake, or give ALL his cakes away to the poor or greedy. If he takes the M&S option, all is lost.

Logically, we must answer "no". The evidence linking Clive's gain of two stones after the first show of the last series of 'The Great British Bake-Off' is purely circumstantial. The eclairs were on 'special' that week anyway.

Now, to mobiles. Your 'phone weighs 132 grammes, you add an app, ('Facebook', for argument's sake) which is 48.9 MB of whatever-that-is, does this make your iPhone (other devices are available) heavier? I tried it, and the kitchen scales were not sensitive enough to give a change of reading.

Logically, I think the answer can't be "no, it gets lighter."Adding things to things never makes them smaller, unless it's a wolf to a flock of sheep. There is, however, a way in which the answer could be: "it stays the same." I'm no scientist (so take that back!), but the 'phone could have a weight, or more appropriately mass, that is capable of holding a certain amount of apps. When the 'phone's capacity is full it simply refuses any new apps, photos etc. After all, there is no physical feed to the device when adding apps, and no wires are needed. I'm going to guess that the "cloud" is a weightless one.

And finally to Samsonite®. Their new ad starts with the line: "How heavy is a memory?" Like Clive, the (M)admen are being rhetorical, in this case to falsely suggest that the most important part of any holiday is your suitcase. In the same way, the new UPS ad tries to take credit for all the thrusting new businesses in the world forging ahead and changing the world. Yeah right, it's all down to the post guy. The new Samsonite® suitcases are quite light, apparently; but they've been making the buggers for ages. So, big deal. A memory weighs the same as an app; it's the dirty pants and stolen towels that make a return journey more exhausting.

The First Cut

You are on Twitter and someone is annoying you. Not trolling, or being deliberately offensive to anyone in particular, just annoying. You know the ones, they pick a subject and won't let it lie, they choose to relay a 140 character missive over eight tweets

like

this

and you see the one that says "this" first, and have to check their feed to find out what "this" refers to and it turns out it's only "or that". That. It doesn't matter how they annoy you, they annoy you, so they have to go from your timeline or you'll have to read that book you got for Christmas or tidy up instead of going on Twitter. There are ways to do this.

1. Muting. This is a relatively new thing on Twitter (I'm always late to this stuff, you're putting quoted tweets in little boxes now, so each tweet has a subsection attached which has to be read before/after the one you're doing and it means the 140 character limit which makes Twitter such fun to deal with is blown out the window stop it now!), where was I? Oh yes, muting.

Muting is the stupidest, lamest, lilly-livered way of removing arseholes from your timeline.

"I can't stand what that guy's saying and he holds no interest for me whatsoever, but instead of walking away from him I'll carry on standing next to him, but I'll cover my ears up."
No-one, ever.

Then there's 2. Blocking. I've read some very sensible pieces on blocking as The Way Forward®, and it is a very logical solution. With one swipe the dick is erased from your Twitter experience. Okay, you might see him (and let us not be coy here, it is nearly always a him) and his @ mentioned in one of those group conversations, the subject of which you have no idea because some of the people involved are in locked accounts and others have blocked you... where was I? Blocking is the scientific, clean, fair way to get rid of him. He will just see his follower/followee numbers reduced by one and think another spam bot has been reported. You never interacted with him, nor he with you. No problem, move on.

But wait. You want him to know that you've blocked him, don't you? If you block you've let him off scot-free for moaning all day about lame celebrities and then bragging about his article in the paper that's really, really lame AND FULL OF TYPOS TOO. He might, at some point in the future, click on your @ thinking: "Didn't that guy follow me once?", only to discover the terrible truth. This would be sweet: he'd sit back in his armchair, reach for the brandy and realise someone out there doesn't think he's the absolute arbiter of taste he thinks he is. Sweet indeed, but there is no way of guaranteeing this will happen, and sitting in your armchair waiting for it to possibly happen will be a much more stressful and unrewarding experience than the one he might have to go through.

Then there's 3. Soft-blocking. For those at the back, this is where you block then immediately unblock, a sort of "my mistake for following in the first place, sorry". There is no place for soft-blocking in this particular story.

And finally there's 4. Unfollowing. Aha, didn't see that one coming did you? I now believe that good old-fashioned unfollowing is the deepest cut of all. Why? Because I guarantee that the stain in question checks who is unfollowing him on a weekly, daily, perhaps minutely basis. Of course he is, imagine the embarrassment of him exchanging dull pleasantries with a minor celebrity who has a few more followers than him, only to find that they ditched him months ago. He can't take that risk. So unfollow, and soon enough he'll be doing that armchair/brandy thing and mwahahahah etc.

But don't delay, best if it were done quickly, lest you find he gets in first and does you.