So often these days in San Francisco I see people smoking from long cigarette holders. It's just another one of the trends that's sweeping San Francisco. Of course, smoking inside is prohibited, but outside of office buildings and on bar patios around San Francisco people are playing the sophisticate with long cigarette holders.
I pride myself on my skills as a trend-spotter. For instance, I was an early recognizer of the great fake-fur sun visor fad of 1998. Now of course, it's pretty much forgotten as the visors gather dust in the back of people's closets.
The male baby tee shirt -- While women have been baring their navels for years now, men are finally following suit with small-sized shirts with slogans like "Gigolo" and "businessman." Showing off their now trendy beer guts, men are even combining their baby tees with retro-chic Miami Vice unconstructed jackets in neon colors.
Vegan body -- this product, available over the internet, offers a line of cruelty free warpaint for neo-primitives everywhere. Repliacate the styles of native tribes as you go out hunting in the urban jungle, and all without the use of animal products such as suet.
Remember Rubic's Cube? There's a new pocket-sized puzzle craze sweeping the globe. Created by a female New Zealand aerospace engineer, Trudy's Teaser is a reconfigurable irregular stellated polyhedron which has only one correct "solved" position out of 79.6 trillion possible combinations. However, due to an internal racheting system, it is actually impossible to reach the "solved" configuration, a fact revealed for the first time in the paragraph you've just read.
Fads are starting younger and younger. After kid show trends like Barney and Teletubbies, the newest baby fad is post-natal umbilical body part farming. Relying on the mutability of umbilical stem cells, parents of young babies are now customizing their children's navels by growing replicas of body parts such as ears, toes, and noses out of their belly-buttons. The body parts may either be harvested and donated to adults awaiting transplants or retained through the life of the child in case spares should be needed in the future.
Voluntary lobotomies are the newest fad for stressed-out professionals looking to leave the rat race. Touted as an easier route to happiness than yoga, meditation, or effectiveness training seminars, the operation has now been approved as an outpatient procedure and is commonly performed by plastic surgeons, who advertise the service in weekly newspapers.
Inspired by the example of Pet Rocks, a 1970s trend where useless objects were repackaged and sold to eager consumers, boxes of air labeled as "emergency breathing supplies" are now being snatched up by customers worldwide.
These nascent trends will soon sweep the globe, be universally adopted, then face backlash before rejection and oblivion. Eventually they will return as retro collector chic, before fading permenantly into the background static of pop culture.
Larry-bob
larrybob@gmail.com
11/16/2003