The Weekly Wit: Living on a Prayer

Tech bro discovers the fountain of middle-age; Canada makes smoking seductive again, and Biden takes a trip.

Chez le Père Lathuille by Édouard Manet (1879)

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Welcome to The Weekly Wit, a satirical review of news and culture.

Living on a Prayer

A tech mogul who spends millions a year in a bid to stay young is infusing blood from his 17-year-old son.

Bryan Johnson, 45, has a team of 30 doctors and experts all tasked with reversing the ageing process.

This week, in another spurious ‘first’ of which to proclaim, Mr Johnson announced that his son Talmage, 17, and his father Richard, 70, are swapping their blood. They called this little caper, the ‘world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange,’ which sounds like a comic convention.

So, Talmage had a litre of his blood whizzed around a machine. Bryan did too. Then they juiced Talmage’s blood into Bryan’s veins. They repeated the process for the old man. For reasons unbeknownst, the three then donned wife-beater vests and posed for what I can only assume is the album cover for an intergenerational white power band.

Mr Johnson’s rigorous regimen includes putting on goggles two hours before his strict bedtime to block out blue light. He then wakes up at 5 am and conducts an hour-long workout with 25 exercises.

He wolfs down dozens of supplements including creatine and rinses his teeth with tea tree oil. Following a strict vegan diet, he eats exactly 1,977 calories per day, including almond milk, walnuts, flaxseed, berries, and heaps of blended vegetables.

He says his Operation Blueprint could if successful ‘change society’s relationship with time.’ His team reckons he’s reversed his epigenetic age—that is, his DNA—by around five years.

In fairness to Mr Johnson, he does look good for his age. He looks like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho if Bateman were around 45 years old. Behold! The fountain of middle age.

According to a newfangled app, your humble narrator might be of use to Project Blueprint.

Let me explain. Six months ago, I started hiking just three miles per day with a pack on my back. (Like all good boy scouts, I take with me a supply of wine and tobacco. I’ve seen that film, Alive. Better to be safe than sorry.)

Anyway, I have this app which measures all manner of things. Body fat, water levels, bone density, etc. Accordingly, my biological age is eight years younger than my chronological age. Oh, my brothers! your humble narrator has reversed the ageing process.

I know. I cannot believe it either. All this painstaking effort I put into avoiding the nursing home is clearly not working. If I made the effort of Mr Johnson, at this rate, my biological age would be minus five. Technically, I’d be unborn.

Sadly, this app of mine doesn’t tell you the estimated date of your death. Perhaps it should. That would teach you to put some more life into your years and not some more years onto your life.

Mr Johnson, my wine-tainted, nicotine-bubbled, age-reversing plasma is for sale. Enquire within. And no, I do not accept crypto.

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Smoking Thrills

I resisted smoking until age ten. Back then, the local boys and I would tramp over the local fields in search of dried ferns upon which to practise the deadly, seductive art of smoking.

By high school, we’d graduated onto the proper cancer sticks. Every morning, we’d pool together our lunch money, and skulk outside the off-license in wait for a nameless reprobate to slip into the shop and, for buyer’s rights of one cigarette, smuggle us ten Lambert and Butler.

Since then, save four years of misguided, anti-smoking zealotry, I’ve smoked with a sinful enthusiasm. Few share my woeful pursuit.

This week, Canada announced a ‘world-first.’ They’ll soon begin printing health warnings directly onto cigarettes.

Neophiles with an addiction to ‘progress’ laud this wearisome world-first. Giddy are the pink-lunged puritans.

Sorry to be facetious, but if I were a teenager and I read on a cigarette the words, ‘Poison in every puff!’ I’d think it was a catchy marketing jingle. I’d happily sign up for a lifetime of chuffing away my health.  

Perhaps they should market specifically to Millennials. ‘Who cares? You’ll never buy your own home,’ is particularly resonant.

This is all part of a scheme to cut smoking rates to below five percent by 2035.

Reader, what happens then? Once the health fascists defeat us smokers, from whom shall they siphon their righteous fix?

The irony: as smoking declines, obesity balloons. Between 2003 and 2017, obesity deaths spiked by a third. One in four deaths is now related to one’s weight. Corpulence chalks more bodies than the cancer stick.

I’m yet to see a warning label plastered on the side of a family bucket of KFC. But give it time.

You can live as long as you like, as long as you don’t like living.

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Decline and Fall

Back in my bog-standard, failing comprehensive school, we amused ourselves with anything but the school curriculum.

In the schoolyard, the worst that could befall someone was for them to trip over. The befallen would endure days of mockery, or at least until some other sap fell over and nominated themselves to the stocks.

“She—fell—oh—vah! She—fell—oh—vah!” still rings around my skull whenever I see someone flop to the floor.

This week, President Biden fell over. The maelstrom of concern was nothing to do with the fact President Biden is 80 years old and showing every day of those eighty years. Nor that a fall at his age is often no laughing matter. Of course not.

Nearly half of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. Around seventy percent of Americans don’t want Trump or Biden to run again. Most cite Biden’s advancing age in their reasoning. At this early stage, forty percent find the prospect ‘exhausting.’

These are entirely valid concerns, and nobody should be ashamed to reveal such concerns. And yet, there’s a long way to go. Is Trump versus Biden the rematch cut and dried?

I don’t think so. Aside from the fanatics, who wants another four years of this desperate little circus?

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Witticism of the Week

“You can pretend to be serious; you cannot pretend to be witty.”

— Sacha Guitry

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What I’m Reading

• The Free Press: R.F. Kennedy Jr. and the Populist Wave by Peter Savodnik

• The Atlantic: A World Without Martin Amis by James Parker

• American Mind: AI and the Return of Creative Elitism by Issac Simpson

• The Free Press: The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death by Suzy Weiss

• New Statesman: What Happened to Ordinary? by Marie Le Conte

• New York Times: Eat Bitterness: China’s Jobless Young by Li Yuan

• The New Yorker: ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chaing

• Book: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

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A personal note…

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Fortune’s always hiding,
Christopher

Oxford Sour

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