Until so recently the selfie-stick was the top gizmo of choice for gadgety-minded people everywhere. But in the United States, something else is now hogging the limelight: the Ideal Conceal, a .38 calibre handgun that folds up to look exactly like an iPhone-sized smartphone. Unfolded, it fires two shots before needing to be reloaded and costs $395 (£275).
Advance orders are flooding in. Its inventor, Kirk Kjellberg of Minnesota, says the idea came to him when he was walking through a restaurant. Being in possession of a “concealed carry” permit, his weapon was just visible. A small child said: “Mommy, mommy, that man’s got a gun!” And Kjellberg says he thought to himself: “There’s got to be another way to carry without bothering other people.”
What a lovely anecdote. However, it could be that Kjellberg, despite his ingenuity in allowing more guns to circulate more freely, is actually missing a trick. How about a gun that not just resembles a smartphone – but is one too? A phone that unfolds into a gun. A phone that will make you think twice before complaining about people texting in the cinema auditorium. It’s going to happen.
The Fresh Meat minister
The Night Manager has been a massive hit. But there is one television show that for me has been even better: Channel 4’s university sitcom, Fresh Meat, created by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. It brought off the considerable trick of morphing from comedy to tragedy in its final episodes and tonally mimicking studentdom’s desperate sadness, denial and mortality-awareness as graduation day dawns. Youth is receding, and the adjective in the show’s title becomes horribly ironic.
“You’ve got to join Real World Soc,” sneers the Cameron-lookalike brother – horrifyingly named Tomothy – of Jack Whitehall’s Sloaney JP. “It’s a terrible soc and you’ve got to go to all the meetings.”
The most memorable performance for me was from Charlotte Ritchie as Oregon, the former student president and glassy-eyed careerist, pondering postgraduate work and mortified beyond measure to get a 2:2. Weirdly, as a result of some kind of zeitgeist ectoplasmic transfer, Oregon actually lives on, outside the television, in the form of the education secretary, Nicky Morgan.
Morgan is Oregon grown up, with exactly the same aspirational clothes sense, the same hairstyle, the same strange flash of panic in the eyes. We won’t get a sequel to Fresh Meat: but I’ll think of Oregon every time I see the education secretary.
Non-chron Instabomb
Instagram posted a chillingly calm tweet this week: “We’re listening and we assure you that nothing is changing with your feed right now. We promise to let you know when changes roll out broadly.” That should be read aloud in the voice of HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001.
Instagram had been preparing to go non-chron: that is, instead of putting up the most recent photos first, it was planning to use a non-chronological sequence, in which the most popular – the most viewed and liked and commented upon – would take pole position. You could take a beautifully filtered selfie, and then try to find it. Where is it? Nowhere! Somewhere way down the queue! Your first picture is still the one you took on holiday in the Peak District in 2013.
Instagrammers freaked. Everyone likes to think that their most recent moments are the best: if you’ve just achieved something at work, you don’t want your memory, in some stubborn assessement of actual success, to keep flashing up an image of getting your 100-yard breaststroke diploma from infant school. Instagram didn’t understand: we want narrative, we want progress – or the illusion of it.
