What the hell were you thinking?

What the hell were you thinking?

Good Advice for People Who Make Bad Decisions!

By Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour and Tech Answer Guy

In the Alternate Reality News Service – Ira Nayman, Proprieter

ISBN: 978-1927645062

Review by Geoff Nelder

Those of us in the know already know that the news mostly isn’t new and largely fabricated by journalists who cannot work to deadlines if they have to find real information. In other words newspapers and broadcast news is so edited, rushed and desperate for catchy headlines that it might as well be fiction. So, why not get your news as a form of entertainment as a metafiction? [Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions. – thefreedictionary.com] Once again we are treated to a perfect example of fictionalised news in the Alternate Reality News Service vicariously penned by Ira Nayman. In this instance we go straight to what every newspaper and magazine reader loves the most—the agony aunt columns. Okay, so some of them aren’t relationships but technical, but those are agony too and thus treated to Nayman’s deliciously whacky sense of wit and humour.

Two main journalists cover readers’ questions. Amritsar is a devilishly, fiendish female reporter who wears leg warmers around her spine because what some readers ask her sends shivers up and down her spine so much. TAG (with or without a #) is Tech Answer Guy who often can’t believe the ineptitude of some readers with the consequence of ludicrously funny exchanges during which the editor has to intervene. Great example of insult-tennis over 8 pages from p128.

Yo, Tomtom,

Every kid says that, but every kid does it.

The Tech Answer Guy

Yo, Tech Answer Guy,

Not me.

Sincerely,

Tommy from Tacoma

Yo, Toms,

Even you.

The Tech Answer Guy

Yo, Tech Answer Guy,

No way.

Sincerely,

Tommy from Tacoma

Yo, Thompson,

Way.

The Tech Answer Guy

…

[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF BRENDA BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI: Jesus Begesus, you both suck! Do you have any idea how much slapping I would be doing at this very moment if there wasn’t a minor present?]

…

Often the points raised to TAG are about technology that’s so nearly here they might actually already be on your phone without you being smart enough to know it. Take the Far Kempt app: a brilliant piece about a phone app that makes your calls to a taxi firm. It analyses your journeys and via probability calculations it ‘knows’ what you’ve been up to. Eg Glory Holes are your illicit visits to a sexual partner unknown to your spouse, whereas Gory Holes are where you meet with hit men to arrange removal of said spouse, or maybe the sexual partner becoming too demanding, one way or another…There’s graphs with this piece too—marvellous.

I felt in my pocket with irony at agony advice to a woman on Mars escaping her jilted ex to ‘be wary of nitro-glycerine being snuck into your re-cycled water’. Like millions of others who allowed game-playing cardiologist shove stents into my coronary artery, I carry a nitrolingual pump spray of GTN, which is basically nitro-glycerine. Just don’t mess with me or I’ll throw it at yer—d’yer hear?

Another piece of personal interest to me is one on ‘le droit a l’oubli’ the right for individuals to insist that Google and other web databases remove personal information. TAG explores the logical consequences of the world disappearing up its own backside as forgetting becomes such a personal right taken to extremes. I cringed with recollection of my ARIA Trilogy–ironically about infectious amnesia—because Wikipedia deleted the page about it created by my publisher’s publicist. If you search there for ARIA Trilogy now it is says it doesn’t exist, did you mean Area? The Wikipedia police force said it was removed because it (and by association, me) was insufficiently notable to be worthy of an entry. This in spite of it winning two awards (admittedly minor) and the only novel to be about infectious amnesia. At least they didn’t delete me, yet, and Wikipedia’s rival database does have an entry on ARIA Trilogy*

Once again Ira Nayman, as the proprietor of the Alternate Reality News Service has come up with a genius collection of short pieces that will have you in stitches yet wondering if these futuristic alternatives are already here. To help you in the usual manner of not, there is an index at the back. It speaks volumes that you’d have to know what the near-random chapter titles mean in order for it to make sense: a kind of joker in the tail.

Highly commended.

Amazon UK page for What the hell… is here.

* A wikia page about the ARIA Trilogy is at http://nelderaria.wikia.com/wiki/NelderAria_Wiki

Nelder News

If there was a plant for my ARIA books there are two contenders: Forget-me-not and the plant that strangles Earth in book two – a variety of Bindweed. Which is which?