People we love to hate
Today we turn our attention to Estate Agents. If you live outside the UK, of course, they’re called Real Estate Agents. Why the need for the prefix “real”, I’ve never understood. Is it to distinguish real estate from virtual estate - whatever that may be? And while we’re on the subject, the word “estate” is pretty misleading in itself. Estate is something associated with opulence and grandeur as in, “You must come down to my estate for the weekend, old boy, for a spot of shooting and fishing”. A grubby cockroach-infested bed-sitting room in a run-down tenement block can hardly be classified as an “estate”!
Maybe we should have done with it and just call them “property pimps”.
As you see, the estate agent has always been a favourite bête noir, whipping-boy and general figure of fun for satirists and cartoonists. Still, you can’t help feeling just a little sorry for them since the “credit crunch” and slump in the housing market took effect. And for the time being, at least, they have been toppled from the leading position of Most Reviled Professions by - you’ve guessed - THE BANKER.
In 1985, when this was done however, estate agents were up there occupying No. 1 position:
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Video Games Junkies
We’re sticking with the theme of computer video games after yesterday’s post on which there was a comment which directed me to this link.
So let’s get this straight. It seems, from this web page, that some games aren’t bought, they’re merely “rented”. (This reminds me of a nice piece of graffiti staring out at me from the wall of the gents urinal in a pub while relieving myself - “You don’t buy beer. You just rent it”.)
To me, the company who owns this WoW game can be considered in two different lights. If I’m kind, I’ll say they are equivalent to the owner of a golf course or a squash court, to whom you pay money in order to play the game, which is fair enough.
However, I believe a better and more accurate analogy is that of a drug dealer preying on the vulnerability of punters needing to feed their addiction. In fact the student who wrote the article admits that he is a “WoW junkie”.
Either way, it helps to explain why the video games industry is so lucrative, ($9.5 billion in 2007 according to our old friend Wikipedia).
But all this is several billion light years away from the way things were in the 1980s when this cartoon was published…..
(Cartoon taken from the Education section of Microholics)
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