God's coppyrytar took a day off

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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.

Announcing the new Vodafone Airhead Tariff

If I ruled the world I’d put most of the bankers up against a wall and shoot them. Then I’d deal with world poverty, the AIDS epidemic, and global warming. You, Miss, I will give unlimited access to daytime TV, Facebook, chocolate, and the time to waste with your pointless friends.

Must try harder

I’m not surprised by this new revelation from HR Magazine: 9 out of 10 CVs get binned in the first stage of the recruitment process.
It’s seriously annoying to see so many typos and poor grammar – mostly from twentysomethings with degrees. There really is no excuse: supposedly declining education standards is no reason to make no effort. Can mobile texting, LOL cats and user generated content be to blame? I really don’t care, so long as you can express yourself in writing without sounding like a moron.
I am now more inclined to employ someone who has English as a second language. These people often speak and write the language in a manner that puts my compatriots to shame. They are also more likely to understand the correct use of the word “like”.
If you have to recruit and are overwhelmed by CVs then I’d like to repeat some advice I gave a couple of years ago about the earliest stage of the process. It has never failed me:
Separate the CVs randomly into two roughly equal piles.
Shove pile #1 into the bin.
You wouldn’t want to hire anyone who’s unlucky, would you?

‘sup?

Look, I’m not going to apologise for not posting for a while because this is only a blog, and I’m not Stephen Fry. The trouble is that feeding this beast is a tough call when I don’t stumble across anything interesting (like this unexpected snap from Google Street View’s recent tour of London), or I’m just too damn busy to get riled up for a piss ‘n vinegar rant.
If you’re following my staggering progress on Twitter then you’ll know that today I am mostly amused by a chihuahua and a dwarf.

She's not dead yet

But this is published by the same high-quality stable that vomits out the Daily Star, Daily Express and various porno mags.

To those of you fortunate enough to avoid British tabloids, Jade Goody is a "reality TV star" dying from cancer.

**Edit: notice the issue number...**

Despair felt as Chavspeak hits Oscar idents

Celebrate with... WHAT !?

Anyone bringing a bottle of Mow-ett to the party will be asked to leave via the tradesmen's entrance.

No news today; let's make some more shit up

More quality from Planet Murdoch.


**Edit** Top marks to The Guardian for not taking the same story seriously. (via New Humanist)

Another bye bye Bushism

This one's from today's Daily Mail; a slightly painful mixing of meanings for Philip's sense and simplicity juxtaposed against Dubya. Philips and sense, yes. But simplicity? As in stupid or stripped of pointless complexity?

No news today; let’s make some shit up

A technology that challenges Einstein’s theory of relativity by enabling matter to cross the vast interstellar void proves inadequate to space aliens who cannot avoid colliding with a huge fuck-off spinning blade in the middle of a field.

The Chimpometer S89 detects casual racism and paedophiles up to 500 yards

This Nikon work from Euro RSCG Singapore is weirdly disturbing and shows a breathtaking lack of imagination.
The snapshot from Paedophile Towers gives me the willies, but not in a good way. OK to stare at if you are a teenager who should be revising for exams, but otherwise just too darn creepy. Why is there a boy hiding behind the curtains? Why aren’t these girls at school? If only Sony would come along and blow this place up with paint bombs. Now THAT would challenge Nikon’s facial recognition widget.
As if our own racial stereotyping of Indians dancing for industrially produced emetic sauces wasn’t bad enough, here’s something straight out of Tintin’s Guide To Spotting Dangerous Natives Of Indeterminate Race.
I’m surprised the hidden chaps from Indiana Jones’ central casting don’t have bones through their noses.

Pics from Coloribus

Listen to Magic FM. It’s just like being dead

Jeez, here’s proof that if you ask a numpty to do a job, then you’ll get numpty work. As if to prove that you can’t find anything less original than a discerning radio listener of saddo middle of the road mum music, Magic FM asked its listeners to dream up ideas for its marketing campaign. A pity then that the winner was someone who probably has one foot in the grave, having manufactured an image familiar to those who guffawed through the laugh-a-minute 1957 Ingmar Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal.
The poster campaign is called “Good mood”. If you’re baffled and thinking “so what?”, then take a glance at the happy fellow leading the pack in the black & white snap. Yes, Death really is this fun. Chess, anyone?

Sacla bleu

It’s best to ignore TV cookery shows, mainly because the chefs are evil. Estate agents are going out of business because of the housing slump, and its about time the gastronautical parasites suffer a penthouse defenestration. I have two beefs with these bastards. One is the fly-on-the-wall restaurant kitchen footage of them flinging good grub into the bin because it’s too runny/grey/cold etc. This is where the Victorian in me shouts "there are people starving in Africa!". Lo! The quest for artistic perfection!
The second is less profound, but more annoying. It’s when Gordon/Gary/Marco etc. chop a fucking onion at lightspeed. What the fuck’s that about? Haven’t they heard of food mixers? The trouble with that is that it forms a challenge in the mind of the viewer. Wouldn’t it be just so cooool to be able to chop an onion like that. With real force. While talking. Nurse!
There was an eSure survey getting the PR treatment last week which claimed that more than "one in 10 people in the UK have had a cooking accident or caused damage to their kitchen as a result of copying professional cooking techniques of top TV chefs". And that’s despite three quarters of them describing themselves as "amateur", "novice" or even "useless"! (The best bit of the survey said that a third would use a DIY blow torch instead of a special culinary one, the fucking idiot numpties).
Which brings me to this, the current TV ad that I hate most. Each time this tosser appears, I pray that there’s an accidental dismemberment, so much do I loathe his effort at cooking green worms. It does achieve its aim of hammering the brand name into your skull, so job done, I suppose.
The idea behind it isn’t original. Here are two arty experiments that played with it, and I’m sure there are more.

See also: Gordon, get out of my F-ing face

Woo! Land Rover Man demands cocksuckage

Here’s another attempt at making a car look cool and macho. Sadly, it succeeds in making the driver look like a twunt. If you sit behind the wheel of a motor in the frame of mind required to jump off a mountain, dismember imaginary opponents, or skid across a frozen lake, then you should lie down in a dark room until the urge to be Anakin Skywalker passes.
Park your arse in a car before driving down aimlessly winding roads in a desolate landscape? Evidently, the propellerheads at RKCR/Y&R have never been to Widnes.

That, sir, is the smell of....

Yeah, we all had a bloody good laugh at today’s story about the Ali-G-speaking chav girl who ordered a “cab-innit?” and, instead of getting a taxi, received a cabinet the following morning.
Read through the story and it mentions furniture firm Displaysense. Dig deeper and you find the story on a free press release service, with a company biog helpfully supplied. Dig even deeper and you find the same company reported in the press earlier in the year as having been the victim of an unusual assault by a non-existent member of the public who was caught having sex with one of its mannequins.
Both stories are bullshit. The story is clearly a PR plant, and it’s a sad fact that the papers are passing it off as true.
Displaysense deserve some praise for the stunts, because its job is to shift furniture. We should be less forgiving of Her Majesty’s Press, which loves to get on its sanctimonious high horse about shagging CEOs, lying politicians, ranting mono-limbed celebrities, neglectful parents and declining standards in public life. Stories like this serve as a reminder that they just need to fill the required number of pages with newsprint to sell, and sod the truth.
If you think this is unlikely, then its happened before. Anyone remember stories about Paul Hucker? He’s the chap who insured himself against the grief of seeing the England footie team getting knocked out of the World Cup. This was picked up by virtually every newspaper and reported as fact. As revealed by Guardian journalist Nick Davies, it was PR from a insurance company.

Tiscali screws around

Q: What are the three words you don't want to hear when having sex?
A: "Darling, I'm home!"
That one's straight out of the Bob Monkhouse Joke Book, circa 1973.
Circa 1973 is also where you're likely to find the first draft of this shamefully inept horror that's currently haunting British telly. Remember, that cowpat from Specsavers is still doing the rounds... you wait forever for a truly shite piece of advertising, and lo! two come at once.
The fact that both ads are being shown over and over and over, it shows that the strategy is the one I call The Chinese Water Torture. It's starts off as a mild irritation and progresses to being a drill hammer straight into your brain. That's the plan - it'll annoy the pants off you, but you'll remember the brand. Sadly for them, Tiscali also have pages of websites dedicated to slagging off their risible broadband service.
As we all know, today's consumers are more inclined to research online, especially for techie stuff. By Googling "Tiscali" and "complaints", the obvious conclusion would be: crappy ad, crappy service.

Ryanair's schoolgirl experiment

Vintage Aston Martin cars; Little fluffy Jack Russell puppies; France's military history; Attractive women wearing school uniform: God created all of these to ease the troubled minds of men. Sadly Ryanair, choosing to use one of these divine gifts in its advertising, still managed to fuck it up.
Observe Christina Aguilera's Lolita pose in a well-covered campaign for Skechers. It ran three years ago in mags such as Marie Claire, Mizz, Smash Hits and Sugar (amongst others), all of which have a high young-female readership. Some of these readers are of school age. It's copy-lite and arguably more provocative than Ryanair's effort. There's even a mean-looking Miss on hand to deliver a spanking. And yet, apart from many sniggering comments, the campaign passed by with nary a complaint.
The anonymous model saucing it up for Ryanair first appeared last year in the national press. It has just been banned by the ASA.
The only real difference between the two concepts is quality. The Skechers campaign didn't need words. Ryanair on the other hand sent its creative brief to the nearest boys' school and lo! ten minutes later the 6th form art department came up with this.
I'm not entirely on board with the ASA's reason for banning this. I'd have broomed it purely for being shite.

More Ryanair:
Osama's new favourite airline;
Ryanair: cheeky monkeys or rip-off merchants?

England have nowt to shout about

So, England are out.
Frankly, I don't give a damn. That's because, being 75% Greek, I still have a team to cheer on at next year's European Championships.
The assumption that England have a divine right to qualify has always puzzled me because I could never understand what could possibly motivate complacent millionaires to win, especially when they're up against modestly-paid but passionate players from "little" countries.
I loved the irony this morning when this ad popped up just after the morning news. It's a prime example of the shit advertising on daytime telly (I'm off work this week to decorate Chimplet #2's bedroom), and has amazingly been around for three years. That's three years of annoying shouty woman haranguing smug git in fake courtroom. Sadly apt for those poor Anglo Saxons with injured pride. I doubt you could make a claim for it though.

Cats, pikey neighbours and gadgets

Regular readers will know how much I dislike my neighbours. It's bad enough that their growing tribe of inbred cats (just one generation away from finding them sitting on the porch, strumming banjos and brewing catshit moonshine) infest my garden.
Eskimos are said to have identified over a hundred different types of snow. By carefully traversing our lawn, I think I have achieved the same feat for cat turds. Previously indifferent to cats, I have since developed a deep prejudice against them.
This is because our neighbours are too sodding lazy to do anything about them. When I'm running the country, they'll be first off the benefits and down the yoghurt mines, doing something useful for the downtrodden middle classes.
You see, gentle reader, the neighbours are what I call the Plasma Poor. Neither of them have been observed going to work, and yet they miraculously appear to be materially better off than anyone else in the neighbourhood. Takeaway meals are delivered four times a week. Sky multichannel is available in all four bedrooms. Two of them are Chelsea season ticket holders. They have (at the last count) five multi-gened children clad in Nike trainers.
At the Future Foundation's State of the Nation conference last week, one of the speakers speculated as to why the middle classes haven't rioted over the apparent inequalities between themselves and the extremely affluent.
I'll tell you why: it's because the middle classes are in a state of permanent bewilderment over seeing their taxes being channelled to the Plasma Poor - Britain's secret underclass of workshy layabouts. By a counter-intuitive masterstroke from the god of improbability, the Plasma Poor are able to afford the sort of goods that the middle classes have to save for. They are the post-early adopters.
Think I'm wrong? Go to a Basildon Dixons on a Saturday afternoon and see who's in the queue.
Dammit, why can't these people be respectably poor, like my Northern grandparents, who were brought up on one lump of coal a day for breakfast, a piece of string for Christmas, and a deferential nod to the factory owner as he rode by on his white horse?
(Nostalgic sigh) It was therefore with mixed feelings that a fortnight ago, I observed the neighbours taking delivery of a 40-inch HD-ready plasma TV.
I'm not sure what to make of this technology. On the one hand, it's bloody amazing (having taken the decision to forego holidays for two years in order to buy our own Sony Bravia). A large flat screen somehow dominates a room in an understated way. Don't ask me how that works, but it does. And when you finally rig it up to High-Definition input, the results are staggering.
On the other hand, it's difficult to decide whether these things have the air of exclusivity that makes a new technology desirable. We've gone through the early adopter phase with flat-screen tellies without, say, the equivalent of the Apple iPod dominating the market. Sales volumes have hit that mass necessary to drive down prices, but which one do you buy? Which brand is going to give you that sanctimoniously smug buttock-tremble?
Sure, the Sony Bravia is probably the one brand name that sticks out because of the Balls ad (the Paint and Bunnies have been less memorable and I believe have somehow diverged from the brand; my own personal dinner-party research revealed that, at first, most people thought the Balls ad was for Hewlett-Packard).
Take this current crop of ads.

Philips' Aurea is an LCD TV with multi-coloured backlights. That's its USP. And its advertising suggests that backlights on a bloke's telly will dazzle foxy chicks into bed. It's a weird hybrid between Ikea-catalogue mood lighting and entertainment. You can achieve the same effect with a lava lamp. It's a lot cheaper too.
Now, I really do like this one from Toshiba. It's a boring picture, but the message is bang on for those wondering when to jump on the home technology bandwagon. The only problem is, the answer could just as easily be a telly from any other manufacturer. The ad might make me go to a TV shop where I'd end up buying a Sony instead.

OK, this is cheating a bit 'cos it's not a telly, even though it's a fine example of integrated technology i.e. all the bells and whistles and geegaws in the camera that are meant to help you make best use of your fancy new flat-screen TV. I can't be arsed to figure out what 3CCD is because, frankly, the image doesn't make me want to read the copy.
As Belinda Parmar (probably the most cheerful planner I've ever met) points out, it's not exactly feminine in its appeal, either. Do Panasonic only want men to buy this camcorder?
I spotted this ad in ES magazine, the Evening Standard supplement aimed at women, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Bored.
Rant over.

We rock too

OK, so Oz has big sky and fierce light, but their Bloody Hell campaign hiccups with this lazy ad. The matey irreverance of the campaign with its cheeky tagline hits the right tone - anyone who has worked with Aussies will know what I mean - and works well when showing the landscapes that are unique to that country.
Well, we have helicopters in England too, and some jolly nice rocks. These are off our south west coast.

See also:
Digging Australia;
Missing canoeists