The Hindu Business Line : E-mail braggers and gadget bores

Bam earthquake hit Iran in December 2003. "Of the $1.1-billion pledged" as relief, "only $17 million ever turned up," accounting for a mere 2 per cent, write Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur in Is it Just Me or Is Everything Shit? from Time Warner Books (www.twbg.co.uk) .

The book, billed as `the encyclopaedia of modern life' tells more about `disaster relief porkies' thus: "Another trick is to count money spent on the military who may offer assistance," and, thus, subsidise the military to recoup military expenditure from `supposed charitable donation'.

Were you to thumb back from D to A, `advice slips' has an entry, where the authors are flummoxed that a message such as `you haven't got any money' should be called advice?

"Cash machine is also a misleading term: it sounds like an amazing mechanical device for the production of free money." That way, `any time money' can be more misleading.

Slide to E, to listen to e-mail braggers — "people who complain about how many messages they get sent, especially after thy get back from holiday."

In F, learn `fashion journalism', which, helpfully, is not about clothes, but trickily about "being so Now that by the time you've finished typing the word Now it's too late, because by now you're Then."

Casually drop French phrases, such as `au courant and de la saison', advise the authors.

Stop by `food advice', but be warned that food experts can turn healthy eating into a big task; also, `alternative foodstuffs' may not resemble food. The authors fret, "Even if you wanted to, you can't buy these items - `ayurvedic cleansing tri herb combination Triphala' - anywhere in the world except on their personal Web sites."

G begins with `gadget bores' who may well be the pilgrims of Akihabara in Tokyo - "a dense maze of neon straight out of Blade Runner with electronic widgets so amazing you will probably want to sign up to be turned into an android."

What are hotdesks? "Fewer desks than employees."

That way, everyone is "doomed to insecurity, and battling for scarce resources, never allowed to settle in one place."

There are soapy facts under `Lush, the soap shop' - such as that King Louis XIV of France "beheaded three soap-makers for making a bar which irritated his skin."

Management consultants are explained as "a flourishing sector of the business world that is employed, at very great expense, by managers in other businesses to explain how to manage - in particular, how best to cut costs."

Networking is more than cables; it is "the dark art of pretending to like people in order to advance one's own self."

Another `N' is not nuclear but `novelists writing about current affairs', where Steve and Alan take a dig at `showboating prose'.

The `O' section begins on sombrely with `obituaries in the future'.

The authors predict, "By 2048 the size of The Times newspaper will have expanded to fill the average two-bedroom flat."

Why? "To cover stories about all the new celebrities and also to report the deaths of the old ones."

A book, in case you're dying to catch up with the lingo of `modern life'!

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in