WTF? If you're too fat to wipe

Just don't scratch your back with this.

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

When the turtle shows its head

Am loving this innovative idea featured in Creative Review. It reminds me of my last job. It was in a paperless office, which was fine until I needed a shit.

You won't need a toothpick

Terrifying packaging idea from some propellerhead with a shit-eating grin.

Pic from b3ta

Call that an impact? THIS is an impact

Clicken to embiggen

It seems like they've been around for years... these fucking awful ads that stare at you from every bloody carriage of every bloody train on my route.

The bird - is it an emu? an ostrich? a rhea? Who cares - but what any school child will tell you is that this type of bird has a brain the size of a pingpong ball. Its natural programming includes a limited number of instructions along the line of PECK ... RUN ... POO ... SIT ON EGG but I'll be buggered if there's a subroutine that says MAKE A FUCKING IMPACT. I'm sure Darwin would agree. As for a fish with a brain the size of a pinhead...

Several years ago, and on the same train route, I was slouching in my seat on the Vomit Comet (the last train home on a Friday night), listening to the usual racket of drunken City Boys and smelling the stench of McDonald's and KFCs when two tramps boarded.

One was male, the other female. Both had that red-faced, dirty, rugged skinned look typical of those for who had lived for decades on the streets. They both carried half-full plastic pint glasses and both were extremely drunk.

They were treated with wary glances, except for the City yobs, half a carriage down, who were happily laughing at the leery duo.

The two tramps leaned against the toilet doors, about four feet away from me.

That curiously British habit of pretending that nothing unusual is happening has been well captured by recent series of Dr Who which has shown the natives behaving normally even amidst a violent alien invasion. Such a thing happened here, even when the tramps started singing a tuneless, wordless ballad that only they were familiar with, while the movement of the train caused the cheap beer to slosh over nearby passengers.

Who's gonna bolt first, I wondered. We all obeyed the golden rule: Avoid Eye Contact.

And then Mrs Tramp collapsed into the seat opposite me and ran her hands through my hair.

"FUCK OFF!" I yelled and yes, dear reader, I was the first one to scarper, finding refuge behind the City yobs. Even so, I had a superb view as, spurned, Mrs Tramp stood up and, eyeing the people sitting around her (I think she was so pissed that she hadn't realised I had made myself scarce), shouted something like "Wyyyyyyyuuuuuuuurrr woddddda fuckinell yoooooo orlllll lookin at yer fucknfuckfuck wuuuuurrrr!!!"

And then, while Mr Tramp looked on laughing, Mrs Tramp squatted down in the middle of the carriage, tugged her filthy knickers down to her knees and released a chocolate hostage.

She knew how to make an impact.

Parp

Crude graffiti on a wall in Manchester. I am still very easily pleased.

via

Hot air from Pooh Corner

This piece of green propaganda seriously annoys me. It's a leftover from the Live Earth jamboree (cost = several zillion gigawatts of electricity), and uses cow shit to create an association in your mind between excrement, farts and eating flesh in order to turn you into a veggie. I have no problem with salad murderers (Chimplet #2 has been one for over a year, bless him) but if we were meant to be vegetarian, then why are animals made of meat, eh?

Just plopping in for a chat

It's funny how the poo taboo is being eroded in advertising. We've seen a couple of virals, one from Charmin, the other from Kellogg's, with obvious references to cable laying, but here's something a little more mainstream. Mind you, this ad from Reckitt Benckiser by Euro RSCG is meant for the Spanish market.
No, I'm not going to fling the metaphoricals at my Iberian chums, but I will say that southern European cultures are not so het up about bodily functions.

150 years of shit!

Earlier this week I was hanging over the Thames in one of the London Eye's pods. The blasted thing was stuck for 20 minutes and Baby Chimp #3 was getting restless.
Being only six, with the expectedly short attention span, she was orbiting the interior of the capsule discretely, convinced she had become invisible. This illusion was immediately shattered when she exclaimed "Yeeuuuw!!! Look Daddy - the river's full of poo!!!"
Of course, being halfway to the top of the Eye's revolution, the object of her derision wasn't poo at all, but the swirly dirty brown current of disturbed mud that flowed along the length of the river at high tide.
150 years ago the Thames really was a river of shit. Open cesspits and drains leaked human effluent into the waterway and in the summer of 1858 London was treated to The Great Stink. Parliament was particularly worried about cholera. In those days, people thought that bad smells could transmit diseases. The result was the commissioning of the greatest sewer network the world had ever seen.
The engineer behind it was Joseph Bazalgette.
This week, Big Brother inflicts itself on British TV once more. The UK chairman of the company behind Big Brother is Joseph Bazalgette's great-great-grandson.
As Stephen Fry has drily remarked, Peter Bazalgette was undoing his great ancestor's works by pumping shit back into our homes.

Two posters that NEED to go together

First pic from Flickr, the second from the always excellent Mediawasp.

There was an old lady who swallowed a duck. WTF?

If it looks like a duck, walks like duck, and sounds like a duck, then it must be a duck. And never was a quack more profoundly obvious when nutritionist to the numpties, "Doctor" Gillian McKeith waddled by.
To the uninitiated, DrGMcKwack is a diminutive Scots-American best known for bullying fatties on the TV. Her method of attack in her TV show You Are What You Eat is extremely distasteful. It involves the ritualised humiliation of obese people - first by confronting them with a table-load of their favourite food and demanding repentance, and then by examining the product of their bowel movements. The message is simple: you look like shit, you eat like shit and even your shit's shit. One notable episode saw her make a fat woman cry by presenting her with a tombstone made out of chocolate.
Her gurning visage looms from sales promo cutouts at Holland & Barrett health food shops and from dubious-looking food supplements.
Any justification for her aggressive manner may be excusable if she were a blunt but benign doctor, except a doctor she most certainly isn't.
The ASA has at last said she must stop referring to herself as a doctor in her advertising (although at time of writing her website continues to plaster the undeserved title across the page) and, last week, Guardian reporter Ben Goldacre, who has long targeted this fraudulent woman, wrote his most devastating expose of McKeith. Goldacre managed to get his cat the same PhD qualification as McKeith, from the same "University".
For fuck's sake people, stop watching her wretched programme, stop buying her books and products. Let's all pray she disappears up her own arse, never to return.
Some quotes:
"I think it is obvious she hasn't a clue about nutrition" - Amanda Wynne, senior dietician of the British Dietetics Association.
"In my view Dr Gillian McKeith is a charlatan" - John Garrow, professor emeritus in human nutrition at London University
"McKeith is a menace to the public understanding of science. She seems to misunderstand not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology" - Ben Goldacre, author of The Guardian's Bad Science column.
The great b3ta site has run a Gillian McKeith image challenge.

Embrace the darkness

Scamp asks whether ads should be happy, and reveals that he and his creative partner are servants of the dark side. They prefer their ads to be dark, weird, and melancholy
In keeping with this mood, the first ad (if you can classify it as one) that sprang to mind when reading Scamp's post is this public information film that haunted British telly in the early 1970's.
Imagine being small and enjoying Rainbow, and then this video plays during the break.
My reaction upon seeing this for the first time remains etched upon my memory.
I cried and shat my pants.

An uncontroversial thing the Americans got right

Diarrhea.
I have just learned how to spell it properly. The British spelling of diarrhoeia is illogical. I had to look the damned spelling up.
Thus I have derived a little more knowledge thanks to some vintage US advertising.

I'm going to need a good few hours to plough through some other examples of Giant magazine's "50 Greatest Commercials of the ’80s", but at some point I will, because there is something fascinating about the naked commercialism of US ads from this era.