Monsters Inc.
THIS WEEK: Baffling phone accessories, Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story
LAST CALL FOR THE LUCYVERSE AUTUMN SALE! Get an annual subscription for just £30, the lowest it’ll ever be… for that you get access to the full archive, six paid posts a month and a chance to own exclusive (badly made) merch, coming soon! ENDS TODAY!
THING: Baffling phone accessories
Last week, my friend bestowed a beautiful gift upon me.
But what is it, you ask? Well, it’s Mike Wazowski, the star of Monsters Inc. I’ve always loved Mike (I’ve been saying ‘think romantical thoughts!’ every week for 20 years). But since I went freelance, he’s become my little green spirit animal/alien – possibly because we’re both a walking, twitching eyeball with off-the-scale levels of cortisol.
Also, it’s a phone ring. (Yeah, me neither.) As I’m not 14, dressed like Chappell Roan and drinking a bubble tea in a depressing board game cafe, I had no idea they existed, but now my life has changed forever!
I can dangle my phone on one finger, effortlessly prop it up on surfaces and every time I pick it up, it feels weird because there’s a massive metal door knocker on the back of it in the shape of Mike Wazowski. There’s no going back now, though. The adhesive on the back is so strong that you could use it to glue a horse to the floor, so essentially it’s a permanent modification. My phone has had a Prince Albert.
This isn’t the only weird and wacky phone accessory out there for the young folks, though, oh no siree. The world is cluttered to the very brim with them. But which ones answer your call and which ones should be left on read 4 EVA? Let’s swipe shite…
POPSOCKETS
God, I hate these things. If a phone ring is a Prince Albert, this is a butt plug. Popsockets are glorified suckers for your phone that supposedly help you to grip it, and were invented way back in 2014, before we all completely lost our minds. Since then, the world has become a terrible place. Coincidence?
They must have terrifying people on their legal team, though, because I cannot find a single non-branded Popsocket out there - not even on Temu. Anyway, they look like your phone has grown a huge polyp and you can just imagine them getting caught in the oesophagus of a peregrine falcon.
VERDICT: Massive bung
PHONE STANDS
If you’re watching something on your phone - perhaps a YouTube apocalypse prepper telling you what kind of tarpaulin to buy for your bunker, or Nicole Kidman in a terrible wig shouting ‘Ah’m done, Tag, done I tell ya!’ in an accent somewhere between Melbourne and Swindon – you need it to stand up on its own. As I’m now an expert, technically, a phone ring would do the trick, as would a butt plug. But why would you choose either of them when you could have this?
Look at these badly moulded little bastards. God, they’ve cheered me up no end! I can’t decide which one is my favourite, though. I think it might be the grey one with the expression that says: ‘I’ve just burned your house down, you c***.’ What about you?
VERDICT: Cat stand
PHONE CHARMS
If I was a teenage girl now, I would be really into dangling pointless bits of crap off my phone. But I would also be the sort of teenage girl who wouldn’t understand which hole I should thread the phone charm through, so I would have to sellotape them on and people would laugh at me in McDonalds and I would cry and then write about it in my diary that one day would not become a bestselling novel. Still, if all else failed, I would just hook this bad boy around my ear.
VERDICT: Mon the hoops
PHONE STRAPS
Thankfully, I’ve reached the age where I don’t have to tether things to my body to stop me losing them. But there are plenty of people out there who still need to wear Y2K inspired phone straps with their name spelled out in beads because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to function. This phone strap has forgotten to take its meds and is definitely going to call you at 3.17am asking whether you’re really its best friend, then tell you a longwinded conspiracy theory about how Avril Lavigne died in 2002 and was replaced by a girl called Melissa.
VERDICT: Crap strap
PHONE CASES
And finally, the kids tend to favour awful plasticky, rubbery, wobbly, psychedelic mushroomy phone cases, and it seems the uglier they are, the better. This one, from the hellish cesspit of Shein, is verging on obscene. Its official description is ‘funny sausage mouth.’ (Hi, Keir!) This nightmarish creation also has two tufts of what looks like human child hair sticking out of it, and will probably come alive at night. Can we please just turn capitalism off and turn it back on again?
VERDICT: Free the sausages
TV: MONSTERS: The story of Erik and Lyle Menendez
I’m not a true crime fan, as I believe we shouldn’t gossip about vile acts and grisly murders on podcasts like we’re discussing what we had for our tea (chicken teriyaki, if you’re interested). But I make an exception for extremely camp TV movie reenactments that feature actors who would struggle to get jobs in Christmas movies.
This show hits the spot. The Menendez Brothers were tanned, toned tennis pros who killed their parents in the late 80s and then went out to buy lots of new clothes and fancy apartments, which makes them absolute gold dust for the Netflix content velociraptors. Instead of a balanced portrait, though, the producers have gone all out for some kind of homoerotic Joey Tribbiani vibe, involving a lot of ‘brotherly’ basking around in the nip. Basically if you wanted to replicate it at home, all you’d need to do is wave two Action Men around to the soundtrack of Now That’s What I Call Music 11.
Despite the brutal murders, though, the main casualty of the show is reality. The acting makes a telenovela look like a Lars Von Trier film, and what kind of world do we live in that even monsters now have to look like buff, beefy AI avatars?
Mike… is that you??
VERDICT: Wowzowski
Niche observation - drivers of cars that are new enough to have bluetooth but too old to have fancy integrated sat nav thing (technical term) have a pop socket holder on the dashboard to use their phone as a sat nav. That's my story and I am sticking to it.
Who knew the amount of crap you could stick on your phone, good work.