This party's over

That’s it
Because it’s easier to open the valve on Twitter
Because I’ve been so damned busy
Because the anonymity thing is feeling just a tad jaded
The blog started by accident. I was playing around with different blog platforms, experimenting for the sake of the agency planning department, which wanted its own blog (still going strong on Typepad). I have no idea why I picked FishNChimps as a name. Maybe I had a takeaway the previous evening. I thought it would be fun to demo the blog with a few articles about the harmless subject of chimps in advertising. And then my spleen took over.
A big problem is finding something to say. It was easy enough most of the time. My job means that I regularly come across some interesting stuff, almost by accident. But then the middle ground of satirising stuff got stretched to, on one side regurgitating amusing links, and on the other pontificating on things that annoy (what the great George Parker would call piss ‘n vinegar).
I must say, it did damn well for a long time, even becoming for a very brief period the UK’s #1 advertising blog. This was partly thanks to some timely links from those huge, Star Wars Episode 6 Death Star-sized blog beasts AdRants, Copyranter and AdScam.
So, I’m killing this blog and starting afresh with a rebooted Blogger version of my shitty Wordpress blog. Wordpress is supposedly a good platform if you’re an html freak but not even I, with a passing competence in it, could tolerate its stupid restrictions. Blogger’s a bit simplistic, but very easy to customise. I do, after all, have other things to do with my time.
My brief for the newish blog is, very loosely, advertising (my industry) + science/scepticism (my interest) + researchy stuff (my job). There may occasionally be monkeys.
Let’s see how it goes.

There's real gold, and there's chav gold

Somebody's getting rich in this recession, and they probably look like this guy, smiling happily as a certain class of person flogs off the family gold. I say "a certain type", because if the following extraordinary ad is anything to go by, the target market is the plasma poor. This is the British tribe that thinks having a wad of cash and talking posh makes you posh, but as any fule kno, they are betrayed by the gold-standard of lower class chavdom: having a telly that's bigger than their front room.
Just watch this ad and weep, cos you'll be needing to cash in your gold to pay for the new screen that you've just smashed in exasperation. Christ, are these actors on acid?

God's coppyrytar took a day off

via

Because The Sun would

via

D'you get milk with that?

Apparently not a spoof.
She could look a little happier, one would have thought.

via uTalkMarketing

In case of fire

Twittered via Swordfish

Death by juxtaposition

This really is awful - surely the worst example of automated web advertising to date. The story is already in most of the newspaper websites - a young woman fatally shot by Iranian police. I'm not going to link to LiveLeak because they should be ashamed of hosting the video in this way.

Tauntaun trick was a taunt

Remember how Wispa fans got Cadbury to relaunch the nostalgic chocolate bar? It seems like this behaviour now has an added dimension as some consumers demanded a product that doesn't actually exist.
A Star Wars-themed blanket was knocked up as a one-off for a joke, promoted as a spoof, and created enough credulous demand to make the jokers consider selling it for real. Total capitalist nerdgasm.

The man who put semen into basement

Humongous fuck-up by WH Smith who put Fritzl book on Father's Day promo.

You are hope, you are imagination

Yeah, and I know I'm a genius too, so why do I need these space cadets to tell me I'm special? It's a tweely sinister ad from that business masquerading as a religion, but with severe mafia tendencies: Scientology.

Strong stomach

For all those who have survived eating the shit they call food at Pizza Hut.

FACT! Fish!

"Today there are over 10,000 species of fish, which is far more diversity that all other land vertebrates. This diversity pattern can be explain by the notion that fish, being aquatic, survived the Great Flood, while many land vertebrates went extinct during this catastrophic event."

For more examples of stupidification, check out Fuckwitapedia

See also:
FACT! Surgeon!
FACT! Flood!
FACT! Evolution=Nazis!
FACT! Pianist!!
FACT! Throat!
FACT! Hedgehog!
FACT! Femininity!
FACT! Toronto!
FACT! Religious War!
FACT! Rocks!
FACT! Chuck Norris!
FACT! Fornication!
FACT! Pens!
FACT! Kangaroos!
FACT! The 19th Century!
FACT! Dinosaurs!

WTF? If you're too fat to wipe

Just don't scratch your back with this.

If Carlsberg did supermodels

Received via email

Wiggle room needed

Watch out for the following item appearing on eBay via Phil Spector's management.

It's not his wig that'll need purifying if he drops the soap.

Imaginary friend

Amusing reason for returned subscription mag.

If you don't vote, this is what happens

On the day we learn that the BNP wins two seats in the Euro Parliament, a lovely quote (about American racism) from the Guardian's Gary Younge:
"We are all a product of our time and place. Born in the midst of a random variety of narratives over which we have no control, most of us spend our lives trying to write the best story we can with the material we have been given."

Tweet #fathitler and speed this disillusioned chump up the disapproval rankings.

What I'm not reading this weekend

via

Pow indeed

Saw this one in Metro and it made me laugh. Good work from AMV - simple and fun. Twinings is also my favourite brand of real tea - the only non-perfumed (e.g. Earl Grey) one that IMHO can be drunk black without that sickly tannin aftertaste.

In a pickle

Is this the real Barry Norman?

via Ben Goldacre

The vendor/client relationship

Just took 3 minutes off saving the world to chuckle at this. Have you ever been in a meeting with a client where you smile while thinking "f---ing twat"?

Monkey shock

Jesus, after the weekend I've had, I need cheering up. Here's 30 seconds of two monkeys doing what they do best.

Greenpeace top another week of angst-driven class war shaftings

My bonny fido working class sensibilities (lower class aristocracy, born in a barn etc), worn invisibly on my Primark-clad sleeve are being metaphorically burned Chinesely by a week of observations from the class war front line. We have the assorted oiks in the House of Commons caught red-handed with their hairy fists deep in the pockets of Joe Public in a shameless reach-around that coincides with the long-term effects of the eye-watering rear end shafting from the bankers. Less metaphorically, Irish Catholic priests have been exposed after decades perverting a US Marine motto by ensuring that No Boy’s Behind Is Left.
Yes, a bad week for the ruling and privileged classes.
To further offend your eyes with painfully poor metaphors, a couple of loosely-marketing-related class war stories have also thoroughly pissed me off. This time, the culprits are the squeaky-bottomed middle classes (thus described by the observation that those who are most sanctimonious are identifiable by the sucked-in lower lip and clenched buttock look – you really can’t swipe a credit card through the crack when they’re in full flow) who have been thrusting their angst-driven ethics down our throats in a manner that would have choked Linda Lovelace to death.
In one case, death is really on the cards as the effects of the anti-MMR vaccine campaign manifest themselves with a measles outbreak. Lest we forget, the UK experience is a mirror of a yummy-mummy campaign in the US led by Jenny McCarthy (see the body count on the right), always cheer-led by those with an innate distrust of science.
I’ve just looked on the TGI survey and observe that distrust of regular medicine, appreciation of alternative medicine (better described as alternative to medicine), and anti-GM sentiments are heavily correlated with the B and C1 sociodemographic. Yup, that just shows you what an education does when combined with an empty head.

So, what has four legs and a cunt halfway up its back? A Greenpeace campaigner on his high horse. Yes, it’s the Plant More Trees But Kill The Pesky Foreign Peasants group back again, this time railing against genetically modified rice.
Christ, just to shut these fuckers up, let’s kill GM right now. That way, we can ensure the Malthusian Economic Model is verified in the deaths of millions of Third World peasants. Shit, you wouldn’t want all that barren, pest-riddled land used to grow food that’ll make them darn foreigners have more babies, would you? And let’s waste more arable land to grow the less-reliable organic lentils that the Greenpissers sprinkle on their Bran Flakes.
Admittedly, this single ad does touch on the one weak point in the pro-GM argument, which is the control of the technology by the biotech firms. After all, you don’t want those friendly food brand logos replaced with biotech ones, eh? But, and it’s head-slap time here, isn’t the obvious solution to allow foreign governments (I’m speaking of those governments in developing world countries that get it in the neck from the Western anti-GM campaigners again) to introduce farmer-friendly legislation that’ll feed their own people with nutrient-rich GM? But no, that’s taboo, and the High Priests of Greenpeace would rather you give them your donations while you bend over and pray.

Evil cat plays off your misfortune

A quick look at Google search trends reveals the sudden birth of the Keyboard Cat internet meme. Michael Martin is the focus of the biggest scandal in UK politics since, ooh, last week and included on the above chart to illustrate how a long-dead cat is more important (in Google terms) than the Speaker of the House of Commons.
The cat's owner unearthed an old film of Fatso playing a keyboard - something that YouTube users have incorporated into hundreds of videos each of which appeal to our schadenfreude.

Beyonce plays Abu Ghraib

Brilliantly offensive stuff from a b3ta regular

Screw Star Trek...

...THIS is the film I want to see!

Gorillas

Of course, these cricketing gorillas are realistic apart from the bit where they fail to chuck poo at the annoying spectators. Oh hang on, that’s chimps. Someone get that bowler into the England team.

The power of prayer

This is a bit naughty but by God it’s funny. The prolific scientific blog (which isn’t really about science at all – it’s a platform for an angry biologist professor to rail against religion and pseudo science), Pharyngula, regularly calls upon its readers to crash web polls. Here’s an anti-gay prayer group website asking its readers whether they’re going to participate in a national day of prayer.

Before

After

Another blog post with the word "arse" in it

...but this time, with good reason: to stop the locals from shitting in the river. Explanation from NewScientist

Bury yourself in apologies and go blrrblbrrblbrrbl

Sorry

Sorry

Well fuck off then
The Evening Standard hasn’t done anything wrong, so why apologise? Its campaign of "Sorry for being out of touch" "Sorry for being predictable" etc comes across as a smug attempt at fishing for complements at a time when the London newspaper is trying to decide its place in the world after being bought by a Russian spy.
It’s made worse by a new campaign from Marks & Spencer, who did do something wrong. M&S wanted to charge women more if they bought larger sized bras. There is a certain logic in covering the extra costs of applying more gravity-beating engineering and fabric to prevent those crowded balconies from toppling onto the pavement. But it still didn’t seem fair. There were protests. M&S relented and did the right thing. And it sounds right too.

**Edit** With brilliant comic timing the Evening Standard lands this apt headline story. Just goes to show: brands are happy enough to apologise, even when they've done nothing wrong. As for greedy money-grabbing venal politicians...

1,000th post, and it's a pig

Bollocks to feeding this blog beast. Am too busy single-handedly keeping this agency afloat. Whilst doing so, I've been employing Spotify as ear wallpaper. Kudos to this brilliant playlist that amuses and entertains.

Arse, Arse attack

Juxtarseposition reinforcing the idea that Prescott always has been an arse.

Snapped under 30 seconds ago on Telegraph website.

For Christ’s sake

Oh no, here’s another case of oversensitive religious nuts squitting about some harmless advertising. You’d think.
Actually, rather bizarrely, I’m siding with the religious space cadets on this one (but only just).
The fuss is rather amusing: A complaint was made to the ASA about the above ad for Antonio Federici Gelato Italiano ice cream on the grounds that it was demeaning to people who have chosen a religious vocation. I don’t see why this grants anyone special dispensation from mockery when the advertising comedy dustbin is crammed with occupational stereotypes. Why does belief in a desert sky fairy make someone more prone to offence?
Naughty nuns and priests are part of the cultural landscape because, let’s face it, real nuns and real priests are as prone to real-life guilty arse-fuckery as are Welsh sheep farmers. It’s the church that calls its followers a flock, after all, which is possibly the most sinisterly subliminal message in choirboy history.

The Committee of Advertising Practice rules on religious offence state "…linking sex or sexualised images with religion may cause particular offence; for example, despite the tolerance towards the depiction of men and women of the church, portraying nuns in a sexual manner is inappropriate".

I love this quote from Antonio Federici's creative director which earns a mental head-slap:

"Neither the nun or priest are touching or kissing and we don't accept that this beautiful piece of photography could cause offence to anyone except possibly to a tiny minority who might have an acute sensitivity to such matters."

The quote is swiftly busted when you go to the brand’s website. Look at their gallery and find this piece of creative work which I suppose is still waiting to be published in a jizz mag. It’s hardly breaking any taboos as a quick glance at my, er, best friend’s cousin’s neighbour’s private DVD collection will tell you.
What would really be dangerously provocative would be the hint that the jolly priest is wearing a condom.
God forbid.

Send this fucker a bacon sandwich

A woman's work is never done, I was told, which is why they're paid half as much. I've had to let half of my scantily clad monkeygirls go because of the recession (it was either the staff or the champagne lunches - don't anyone tell you that my sense of priority is wrong). The downside is that now I've got to do more frickin' work, which is why my steady stream of pointless blogging bullshit has been drying up.
I need to excrete some piss 'n vinegar on the subject of this wretched flu thing that's getting the Daily Mail all excited. I wish someone would invent a flu that targeted those nazi bastards, but we've got to make do with some rather loose animal-themed branding. Which is why I want to direct a loud FUCK OFF to some twat in Israel who objects to the naming of Swine Flu. I knew someone was going to complain. By his book, offending a religion is unacceptable if the alternative is some casual racism. And never mind the poor fuckers who are dying from the illness. Fucking idiot.

Banking on change

This is the most unusual example of TV advertising I’ve seen in a long time. The wretched new YouTube headlining feature spoils the pleasant surprise caused by the convention-breaking characterisation within this Argentinian creation. Cynical and exploitative, possibly, but I can’t help liking it. Daily Mail readers would hate it.

via boingboing

Being Greek is cool again

Being 75% Greek, there aren't many current events that I get to crow about while wearing my ethnic bobbly shoes. 2004 was a good year (winning the UEFA European Football Championship and the Olympic Games coming home), but since then, nothing... until now, a third of the way through 2009, when something appeared on British telly that really made me proud.
(Skip forward one minute to avoid the preamble)