THE NAKED CITY – CRAZY CRAZES TO IGNITE THE CRAZED!
Whether it’s fifty or more young people playing Pokemon Go on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House or a queue down George Street for Uncle Tetsu’s Japanese cheesecakes, we live in the era of the instant craze. Fuelled by a ferocious social media these new fangled fads spread like a virus, numbing the brains of the millennial generation and often rapidly expanding their waistlines.
Crazes of course have been with us for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Trawl back through the decades and you’ll find history is littered with the artefacts of an endless list of fads, be they hula hoops, yoyos, pet rocks or Chia pets – to name just a tiny few. In Australia we have often been the target of a cultural imperialism, straight from the USA, when the hoops and yoyos descended on us in the 50s and 60s. In the 50s for example it was Coca Cola who promoted the yoyo craze with dedicated Coke yoyos and visiting teams of US yoyo masters ‘walking the dog’ on TV, in shopping centres and even on special school visits.
Unlike the often heavy monetary investment needed to access today’s techno-crazes, hula hoops for example were absolutely dirt cheap, almost indestructible and provided a solid hip shaking workout, albeit for only five or ten minutes. For the record the longest record for keeping a hoop spinning is held by Aaron Hibbs from Columbus, Ohio who kept a hoop spinning for 74 hours and 54 minutes. In Australia, like many other countries the hooping craze was relatively short lived and for the purist was never the same when those nasty plastic hoops replaced the original bamboo design.
The simple things in life have of course mostly been superseded by the new technologies but not without some often unforeseen consequences. Take the now infamous segway (‘hover board’), one of the most popular gifts in last year’s Christmas stockings. Whilst nobody has ever burned down a house with a hula hoop or yoyo, the same cannot be said for the once mighty faddish two-wheeled, self-balancing, battery-powered electric vehicle. Rest in pieces!
Whilst Pokemon Go does get kids out of their bedrooms, away from their computers and tablets, and into an al fresco environment, it’s hardly an aerobic workout as they shuffle from one pocket monster to the next. Maybe the perpetrator Nintendo could employ a pair of those groovy new virtual reality glasses and generate a virtual hula hoop. The faster players gyrated the more monsters would appear with the sudden burst of exercise going a long way to work off those added calories from Uncle Tetsu’s Japanese cheesecakes.
