Relax, They'll Still Be Traditionally Painful When You Step On One In Bare Feet...

People are outraged that technology is being used to improve something again....

Tom Donaldson, senior vice president at the Lego Group, claimed the new smart brick system “brings creativity, technology and storytelling together to make building worlds and stories even more engaging, and all without a screen”.

Some people just seem to want to complain about every change to childhood favourites - I understand why, as so often it turns out not to be an improvement at all, but a response to some snowflake who wants things to be more 'multicultural', but this seems to be a genuine improvement!  

The smart bricks communicate with each other and will even decide whether enough accurate laser blasts have been delivered to achieve destruction. The smart bricks also emit light and play music. At a demonstration of the new toys, a Lego executive explained that, when playing with Darth Vader’s craft, “once in a while you get The Imperial March, just to get the vibe going”.

As a kid, who wouldn't want that? What could the objection possibly be?  

...some argue new ‘Smart Play’ technology undermines the Danish construction toy’s gift for harnessing a child’s own imagination.

Well, imagination doesn't seem to be something valued in children anymore, since they might use it in ways policymakers don't like. 

First World Shop Problems

Shop owners are usually worrying about light-fingered customers making off with their goods. But for one independent craft shop in East London, the real scourge is patrons with “excessively greasy hands”.

It's Hackney, so why are people's hands greasy?  Fried chicken? 

Fabrications has been trading on Broadway Market in Hackney for over 25 years, specialising in handmade, one-of-a-kind garments, sustainable fabrics and woven blankets. Its next door neighbour is the luxe cosmetics brand Aesop, whose distinctive amber bottles haunt the bathrooms of Millennial creatives and small plates restaurants across the city.Anyone who passes Aesop can try their £80 Resurrection hand balm for free – bottles of the woody, citrus-scented lotion are fixed in a bracket “strategically placed at the front door"

Oh, I see. 

While this is designed to tempt customers into the store, it is having a “major, accumulative, detrimental impact on our business”, according to Fabrications owner Barley Massey.In a sign posted in the shop window, Massey bemoaned the “free and unsupervised” use of the “aromatique and greasy” lotion. “Passers-by have been taking excessive amounts of this balm which is impossible to absorb into their hands,” Massey wrote. “We regularly witness people rubbing the excess cream on their arms, legs and even other people’s hands, faces, arms and legs”.

How revolting! But I guess that's Hackney for you. 

This meant that customers who then came into Fabrications were leaving unwanted smells and stains on their materials, causing “unnecessary stress” to staff. Fabrications were even losing business from “having to prevent customers with excessively greasy hands from entering the shop”.

Frankly, they sound like the sort of low-impulse-control customers you wouldn't want in your shop, so it could be argued that Aesop's doing you a favour by allowing them to mark themselves as such... 

According to Fabrications, Aesop has shown “no regard or interest to the problem”. The local MP, Meg Hillier, has even become involved, and Aesop was asked by Hackney Council to remove the sample bottles. Aesop did not immediately respond to The Standard’s request for comment.

Her requests have so far been brushed off, though at one point a manager did get in touch with a peace offering: some free Aesop hand sanitiser.

*chuckles* Well played, Aesop, well played... 

Turnips! Turnips For All!

That it's revolting, greasy and tasteless?

Well, no. Hipsters seem to like that, after all...

But what seemed a crisis in the long term now presents as a clean-eating emergency here and now with urgent warnings that in Mexico, the unprecedented international appetite for this unique fruit is indirectly fuelling illegal deforestation and environmental degradation. Those oblivious to such things in far-flung places will no doubt carry on regardless. But what are those who view the avocado as a basic food group supposed to do?

Beats me...

It’s a moot point whether the Mexicans who actually grow these on-trend fruits eventually harvest their fair share of the economic benefits. This lucrative trade is increasingly controlled by a drug cartel known as the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar). So when you buy a Mexican avocado, a greedy share of revenue may well accrue to criminals.

Wow! I thought the Knights Templar had bigger ambitions than that..!

You might think, OK, I’ll buy avocados from some other less problematic source then. But would an avocado from Chile, Peru or the Dominican Republic automatically be more sustainable or equitably produced? The fact of the matter is that we know pitifully little about the environmental and working conditions of faceless people in faraway places who grow fruit for our tables, but I have seen enough of foreign fruit “farms” to suspect the worst.

Oh, dear. What to do?

The fact of the matter is that the further away from home our food comes, the less chance we have of interrogating its origins and its impact on its native environment and workforce.

There's nothing for it. Hipsters will have to start eating turnips.