And that’s not all. Being a meat-eater myself, I might not have come across Vegan Porn if it weren’t for the link in MemeMachineGo!, one of my regular reads. But I did. And there I learned about marketing pork to children.
Cool to be a beefy lass
Randomly following links, lily-padding from blog to blog (like a blogfrog, naturally), I came across Cool 2B Real. The cutesy graphics and predominance of pastel colours looked like a typical young girls magazine, but the rather saccharine text (“… strive to be the best you can be!”) made me wonder if it was more of a religious thing.
Then I scrolled to the bottom… links to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Right. Eat lots of beef and you’ll have loads of cool friends for sleepovers and nice clothes and the coolest room and loads of great CDs and…
Even more sinisterly, the third link at the bottom of the page is for the Circle 1 Network, specialists in “marketing to kids and tweens, and marketing to families through interactive strategies”. I’ve said this before: some Americans really scare me.
Posted in Food/Drink
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The voice on the Tannoy tells me to Hoover up the Biros
Call me naive, but I like it when people I admire and respect keep on doing more things that make me admire and respect them. In most cases, I’ve been lucky. Even when my favourite musicians, authors, actors or even friends have done things I haven’t really appreciated on an aesthetic level, I’ve generally been able to rest easy in the confident assumption that they were being totally faithful to their principles.
So, what I’m ramblingly building up to is how utterly stoopid I think Google are being over this whole issue of the verb “to google” entering the lexicon.
I mean, what do they have to lose? Unless somehow the word comes to have negative connotations (unlikely as things stand) I fail to see how the absorption of “to google” into our stock of generic verbs can have any negative effect on the Google organisation. Are they worried that people will start googling on Altavista?
Posted in Language, Technology
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Pax Romana – a dissident’s view
The “Pax Romana”, I’ve just learned, ran from about 27BC to 180AD. Given current events and the alleged plans for a “Pax Americana”, it’s interesting to note how Tacitus described the Pax Romana…
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”
Posted in History, Language, Politics
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Mah-Jongg, Mercury Rev and midnight snacks
This evening, Nicola and I made the 45-second trek (!) to our local, the Robin Hood, where we met our friends Lindsey and Howard. A couple of months ago, we gave Lindsey a Mah-Jongg set for her birthday, and this evening we made fine use of the warm, comfortable environment in the Robin Hood and learned to play the game. And what a fine old game; almost feels like we need another winter to give us an excuse to sit round the fire in the Robin Hood, playing Mah-Jongg…
In between the usual dribs and drabs of weekend domesticity, I managed to complete my Mercury Rev album collection with the purchase of ‘See You on the Other Side’, from 1995. The band’s first album with Jonathan Donahue as leader after the departure of David Baker, this album is more clearly a product of the band behind ‘Deserter’s Songs’ – simultaneously luscious and fragile, with a courage to embrace melodic naivety with a total lack of irony. The Flaming Lips link smacks of facile journalistic barrel-scraping (it’s 13 years since Jonathan Donahue’s one-album tenure as a Flaming Lip) but it’s difficult not to draw parallels between the two bands. Read the last-but-one sentence above – that could so easily apply to much of the Flips’ output.
Finally, I just drank a cup of tea and ate an oatcake with some dry-cured ham. Deadlines all overdue… it’s going to be a long night…
Posted in Drivel, Friends, Music
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New Chris Morris short film
I am, it must be said, a really quite hopeless Chris Morris fanboy. I have more of his work than I have time to watch or listen to. But that’s good. As is the news of the DVD release of his new short film ‘My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117′. Seems odd, though, that the release of a new CM project will presumably not be accompanied by the usual ill-considered knee-jerk blatherings from the Daily Mail.
Googling for a suitable link through which to introduce the unenlightened to Chris Morris, I happened upon a nice collection of stuff at the Observer. And for a more general introduction, Ray Kirby’s Rethink page is the one to look at.
Posted in Art/Culture, TV/Radio
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Another me in a different world
Funny what you find when you go through your webstats. One of the referrers to my site was from the personal site of a guy named Ami Mukerjee. He’s a law student from New Jersey. His site looks uncannily like this one in terms of basic layout and structure, and in his blog, he mentions having copied some code from another site. I just think that’s amazingly cool… the idea that someone has learned something from what I’ve done and used it to make their own life more fun. Whoa! And he likes the Flaming Lips, which is wonderful.
At this juncture, I should pay tribute to my own inspirations. Building navigation menus in “ul” tags is pretty popular these days; I first got the idea from waferbaby last year and put it to use on my Recording Collective site. Then there’s the layout inspiration – Mark Newhouse’s Real World Style. Mark kindly replied to my emails with some useful CSS tips.
Posted in Drivel
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Congestion charge
Also on a political theme, but in a far more localised sense, central London’s Congestion Charge began today. Now, as a non-driving, willing user of public transport, I’m prepared to admit I may be too biased to have a balanced view, but this is my blog…
I do sympathise with people who are not exempt from the charge, but still have to drive around London as part of their jobs. They (especially if they’re on low wages) are notable examples of how the system obviously isn’t perfect. However, that doesn’t include City traders who can’t cope with not driving their Porsches and Mercedes into work, and wouldn’t deign to sit with other people on bus, tube or train. They can suck goat prong.
Oddly, the majority of protesting voices I’ve heard on TV/radio have been upper-class. Everyone else has already realised the blind, time-wasting stupidity of trying to drive into central London, especially to and from work. Sure, public transport isn’t exactly stress-free, but at least you can read your book and eat your sandwich. One woman on the BBC TV news explained, plummily aghast, how this final straw might even give her cause to leave her car at home. Well halle-bleedin-lujah! All the benefits of a comfortably middle-class upbringing and education and it’s taken her this long to understand the fundamental nature of efficient urban transport…
Posted in Politics, Travel
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Marching
Well, the real political effect will be difficult to identify, possibly even non-existant, but the anti-war march in London seemed to go pretty well. The atmosphere was friendly and inclusive and there was a gratifyingly broad range of class, race and age groups.
The Sun made the typically facile point that 58 million British people didn’t march, but taken as a proportion of people sufficiently fired up, not at work, willing and bodily able to come to London, the turnout was impressive. Sour grapes, I’m sure; one of the most popular banners on Saturday was the one produced by the Daily Mirror. What’s more, we have to discount around 3 million Sun readers, who have little chance of understanding the issues, or even reading the directions to the march.
(That was a joke… but only just)
Posted in Journalism, Politics
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America, fallacy of WW2 comparisons
Brian Eno talks of how everything that was great about the USA is being eroded by their bunker mentality. (From Time Magazine, quoted by Robert Garvey in the alt.fan.frank-zappa newsgroup)
Ben Hammersley, meanwhile, points out the stupidity of those who use World War II as a justification for bombing Iraq.
Posted in History, Politics
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