Rimmed madness

There used to be a saying: Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. But that has long since been consigned to the dustbin of history, along with other potentially politically incorrect gems like a woman’s place is in the home and a woman’s work is never done.

In fact, wearing glasses has become the new cool. And it’s nothing to do with the Panzer-like advance of women’s liberation. Instead, the trend owes its success to none other than a skinny young lad with magical powers.

Harry Potter, say retailers, has made the wearing of glasses hip. It’s a by-product of the Potter industry, satisfying our need to copy our hyped-up heroes. The sort of need that compelled hordes of spotty-faced schoolboys to go around thrusting plastic wands in folks’ faces and screaming Expelair Lexus! or something like that.

This time, it has migrated to the adult community. Glasses have not only become cool, they have become an accessory whether you need them or not. One retailer has been selling specs with plain glass in them for people with 20-20 vision.

Some even have no glass at all – just the rims, so you can look trendy without even having to clean them. Another advantage I have detected, is that even at the height of a torrid Middle Eastern summer, they won’t steam up when you get out of the car. We sure are a funny little species inhabiting this little planet. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth saving at all…

Which brings us smoothly into the next bit of strange behaviour… If ever there was a case for giving people with 20-20 vision spectacles they don’t need, then our rock stars and other celebrities must be prime candidates. They could be given rose-tinted ones they can wear all the time, then they wouldn’t have to strain their eyes imagining a perfect world of which they alone think they are the saviours.

I am still reeling from the massive Al Gore-inspired Live Earth concerts that spanned the globe and were seen by a TV audience estimated at two billion. Can somebody please explain to me why Madonna belting out yet another version of “Like a Virgin” is going to stop the ice caps melting?

They say it’s all about raising awareness about global warming. But is there anybody out there who isn’t aware of it? As far as I can see, the only thing it made people aware of was pop stars.

It’s not like the Live Aid concerts of yesteryear, which tangibly raised cash aid for those in need and did a lot of good. All this latest one did was pump megawatts of sound, platitudes, hypocrisy and self-important hot air into an otherwise beleaguered atmosphere.

Even Bob Geldof, creator of Live Aid, was scathing about the show and its overweening self-indulgence.

“We are all aware of global warming,” he said “but isn’t this just an enormous pop concert for the umpteenth time?”

Can’t they just get on with the singing, and leave the preaching to people who don’t live in glass houses? I find it difficult to take a lecture about global warming from someone with half a dozen homes around the world, a private jet, a Hummer, and a stable of vintage cars.

There is an inescapable reek of the Champagne Socialist about it all.

Still, it works wonders for sales of their CD’s. All that extra plastic, all that extra aluminium…ah’mm. Let’s take a look at some of the environmentally-concerned stars at the global gigs in London, New York, Washington DC, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Johanesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Hamburg. There was Madonna, who the day before her Live Earth gig at London’s Wembley Stadium, took a short trip to her gym in a gas-guzzling chauffeur-driven limo.

Then there was Sting, appearing at the New York concert. He is not short of a home or two in nice places around the globe. Personally, I think Sting is sincere in his support of rainforests and general ecological concern. But when you are a celebrity in the spotlight, embarrassing little things can come creeping out of the woodwork.

In a recent industrial tribunal at which Sting and his actress wife Trudie Styler were sued by their sacked chef Jane Martin, it was revealed that one of the unreasonable demands made on Martin was that she was ordered to travel from Sting’s home in Wiltshire to Sting’s home in London just to cook a plate of spaghetti for the Sting children, a round trip of over 200 kilometres. As one wag put it - not so much spaghetti carbonara as spaghetti carbon footprint.

The British band Razorlight had hired a private jet to take them from the Wembley concert to their next gig in Scotland. But Al Gore, the Major Domo behind this international farrago, persuaded them to switch to a more bio-friendly turboprop plane instead. Big deal! If they were really sincere eco-champions, they would have grown beards, donned tight, sweaty, lycra shorts and cycled the 500 kilometres to Scotland with giant clockwork amplifiers strapped to their backs. Mr. Gore himself has come in for some stick too. The former U.S. presidential candidate’s local newspaper, The Tennessean, reported that his 10,000 sq ft Nashville villa and guest quarters used 20 times more energy than the average American household.

Rocker Matt Helders summed it up in an incisive attack of honesty: “It’s a bit patronising for us 21-year-olds to try to start to change the world, especially when we’re using enough power for 10 houses just for stage lighting. It would be a bit hypocritical.” And Helders has a vested interest in it all. He’s in a band called the Arctic Monkeys, so presumably they must be really concerned about their homeland melting and sliding into the ocean.

It’s not just the power used to light the stadium, run the amplifiers, and run the transport for hundreds of thousands of fans that is disconcerting.

I’ve been doing a calculation. It goes like this:The average TV set and its appendages uses, say, about 100 watts of electricity. There’s two billion people watching the gigs around the world. Let’s be generous and say four people per TV set. That’s 500,000,000 sets.

At 100 watts per TV, that makes a whopping 500,000,000,000 watts being consumed in the name of saving the planet.

So if instead those two billion people had switched off the show, or better still not switched on at all, they’d be doing a lot more to save our lovely planet. Think about it.

Don’t hold me to this calculation, though. It is very nominal, scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet in the way Aristotle Onassis did his billion-dollar deals. In fact, it will be the last fag packet scribble I, or anyone will be able to do in the pub. As I write, the lights are going out all over England. The government has banned smoking in all public places, leaving the highway, the odd car park and one’s own home as the only places to light up.

The fag packet scribbler’s days are numbered. Our works will be banned, and we’ll have to go and live in exile, like James Joyce and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.