Fan culture

By PHILIP GOLD
Fan culture (photo credit: MCT)
Fan culture
(photo credit: MCT)
Daily, we’re barraged with the images and reports. Soccer hooligans. Racist incidents. Riots and disturbances for no particular reason. Scandals.
Around the world, and especially in America, hundreds of billions of dollars and equivalents spent annually on tickets, memorabilia, and the opportunity to wear overpriced jerseys with somebody else’s name on the back.
On the more positive side, rampant joyousness whenever some title-starved city’s team wins something and, certainly in Israel, delirium whenever some darling athlete wins a medal, or almost wins a medal, or thinks about winning a medal.
This, however, is not the fan culture that concerns us here. Rather, we write about the culture of fans. You know. Ceiling fans, floor fans, desk fans, table fans, and those that fall into no discrete category, except that they’re fans.
Before coming to Israel, with one exception that has returned to haunt me, I never thought much about fans. When I lived in the American Northeast, it was either central air conditioning or those nifty, easy-to-install window units you shoved in and plugged in. When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, air conditioning was rarely necessary. So for those 15 hot days a year, you took yourself to Walmart or Costco (may the latter come quickly to Israel), plunked down some plastic and carted home a fan.
Not so in Israel. And the more I think about fans, the more apprehensive I become.
My wife and I arrived in Beersheba in late winter 2010, to an unseasonal mini-heat wave. We needed a couple of room fans quickly. The shuk offered none. So we went to some chain store, where my wife discovered that, although most things in Israel are negotiable, it’s hard to barter with a bar code when you’re standing at a computerized register.
After significant fussage (she’s a better Israeli than I am) she wrangled a discount from the manager because the fans were slightly damaged floor samples left over from last summer.
They lasted well into the next hamsin.
When we moved north, I discovered that I didn’t like Israeli air conditioning very much. Turn it too low, it does nothing; turn it too high, you feel clammy. Either way, it costs. So, ever since, I’ve been buying fans: perhaps a dozen to date. My immersion in this activity has led me to the following discoveries and conclusions, which I offer as a civic service and patriotic duty: • All fans are made in China. How do I know this? Simple. Everything is made in China.
• There is no relationship between the cost of a fan and its efficiency or durability, except perhaps that the more expensive, the faster it “kaputs.”
• This fact suggests that the government might consider tighter regulation of imported fantasies.
Certainly, moving hot air around falls within the current regime’s activities.
• Each fan is a little different, and even the same models vary from year to year. There is only one reason why this should be so. The Chinese hold “fan design” contests every year in their industrial arts middle school classes. The winner gets... just hold off for a bit; you’ll understand soon enough.
• Each fan comes with either too many pieces or too few, and it’s generally impossible to decide which situation applies without reading the directions.
• The directions are in Hebrew.
• And this brings me to something I first suspected back in America: There, the instructions were in English, written by Chinese operatives whose grasp of the language seemed less than perfect. Then I realized. These were not innocent fan assembly instructions, since they had little to do with assembling the fan. The grammatical and syntactical errors were coded messages, vital instructions to those who had the code. And why did such persons have the code? To do us no good, I concluded.
And now, I suspect that the same thing’s true in regard to the Hebrew instructions, except my Hebrew’s not good enough to tell where the Hebrew’s wrong – that is, where the secret messages are embedded.
Finally, as we know, the Chinese are a very smart, methodical people with a well-thought-out plan for galactic domination that they’re implementing relentlessly. I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to Crack the Code. This means, inevitably, buying more fans.
No problem there. The two I just bought on sale – they’ll die soon enough. Meanwhile, the better to unravel this Conspiracy So Vast, I think I’ll learn some more Hebrew.
Especially: How do you say to a visiting Chinese, “When you were in middle school, did you ever win a free trip to Israel?” If the person says, “Yes,” I’ll march him or her right on down to the nearest Mossad front.
Probably some store that sells fans.
The writer, an American immigrant, wishes to assure his readers that there are no secret messages embedded in this column... that he knows of.


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