After Brad Pitt's Chanel advert, there's no way back to cool If you haven't seen it, here's a synopsis: in the corner of what looks like an NCP car park stands Brad, sporting his trademark shower-scum goatee, shirt open at the collar. "It's not a journey," he says in a bedroom voice, eyes on some indefinite point beyond the camera (presumably a large placard with "$7 million," the figure Brad was paid to record this bilge, scrawled across it in marker pen). Every journey ends but we go on. Plans disappear. Dreams take over. But wherever I go, there you are. Judging by the lighting, either the studio lamps are on the fritz or Chanel are using one of those energy saving lightbulbs. There's always the third possibility: that Brad's beauty is so luminous he comes with his own dimmer switch. He goes on spouting a nonsensical string of words until the camera's so close you can actually smell the pretentiousness. Time for the pièce de resistance: "My luck," concludes Brad, with King Lear-like elocution, "my fate, my fortune. Chanel No 5. Inevitable. They call them "selfies," the self-portraits youngsters have started compulsively sending one another on Snapchat - an iPhone app that allows the user to take a photo, scribble a few words across it, and send it to a friend. Nothing new there, except that these self-portraits have to be as ugly as possible - oh, and they self-destruct three seconds after being viewed. Social media has always been a perfect tool for inverted modesty, and these phony attempts at self-deprecation are no different. Like the make-up-free pictures actresses, models and Demi Moore enjoy posting on Twitter, "selfies" are really calling attention to your virtues. They're funny because they're "so not the real me." If I had my way everything on social media sites - every Facebook post and Twitter feed - would self-destruct after three seconds, cleansing the world of cyber garbage. It would be even handier if they could devise an app that makes anyone who puts a picture of themselves on a social media site self-combust three seconds later. "It's that special time of year," says a large blackboard outside a Chinese restaurant in downtown New York, "when white people make everything taste like ------- pumpkin." The expletive is necessary. For over a month now every bakery, coffee shop and restaurant in the US has been forcing pumpkin-flavoured foods and beverages down people's throats. You can't order a coffee without being told how good the pumpkin spice lattes are; you can't eat out unless you fancy pumpkin curry, pumpkin soups, pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin martinis. Squashes are the most pointless of vegetables, which is why people core them and fill them with other stuff. According to a chef friend out here, there's another reason Americans engage in pumpkin-mania for two pre-Halloween months every year. It's a cheap, supposedly healthy filler which is, in fact, a receptacle for sugar. What's not to love?