Friday, April 14, 2006

Mank Wolfenstein's Weekend News Digest

Heh! This news item about a recalcitrant feline had the best headline...'Therapy and kittens fail to move trapped New York cat'. Someone at the BBC enjoying their job - dig that hip satire on those voguish modes, baby!

Tabloid & TeletextPopworld communique of the week had to be 'OH MY GOD! Preston and Chantelle to wed'. Oh my god! No, i'm actually on my knees imploring here. My god stands next to your god which is a building which is on fire, as Talking Heads once nearly suggested.

Stop telling me about these people for the sweet, sweet love of all that's pure and good and right. The new Posh & Becks, or perhaps our very own Pammy & Tommy Lee, Peter Andre & Katie Price renewing their vows in some sure to become nationally feted annual celebration, vernal equinoxe ... alongside suggestive spring is in the air heteropolitan achiever couple template, Just the two of us, Vernon Kaye & Tess Daly, their very names dripping with connotations of vigorous and enthusiastically frequent hormonal secretions. It's all just so... unseemly. :-/

couplings and recouplings subplot of megapixellated i-podtainment lingering century of the self amplified chav Austen doubtless masks sinister agenda to encourage breeding in docile prole population... ah, wrong forum.

Now this - robot football, yes!- is much more like it.

GOD OF WAR: MY DRUGS HELL

'I just can't be arsed' says former earth-render.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

SPAAAAZZY! Spazzy spazzy spaz spaz spaz

Tiger Woods has been forced into making an apology for using the word 'spaz' cazually.

Cerebral Palsy is an inconvenient condition to have. Spaz is a derisive and offensive term. One of those sentences is factually accurate.

SCOPE forbid anyone from using the term 'spaz'. SCOPE used to be called the Spastics Society. But not any more. Now they've rebranded. SO NO ONE CAN USE THE WORD, OR ITS DERIVATIVES, EVER. IN ANY CONTEXT. Let that be a lesson to everyone.

Next time you fuck up a putt, remember to say 'Goodness! I played that shot like a CP sufferer. Who's not very good at putting.'

And next time you say something you wish you hadn't, why not say 'Oops, what a Tiger!'?

That'll show the insensitive cunt.

" It's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."

Monday, April 03, 2006

Kong my whopper

I wish to commend Burger King for one of the most tightly knotted pieces of intertextual marketing it has ever been my privilege to witness. "Kong my Whopper". I know, without breaking stride as I sweep into the eaterie, that this means an outlandish amount of meat, in a bun. Whopper is already pretty big - whopping, even. And now they're offering to Kong - confer Giant Ape status upon - it. Well this super ape inna babylon couldn't be more pleased.

However, fake advertising awards aside - why does everything have to be spruced up slightly to make it seem more complex than it is? BECAUSE IT'S SHIT! This is why Burger King and the like have undone their decent Kong My Whopper work by having started engaging in pithy faux-conversation with the idle muncher of their products. Ambling chat that says nothing printed on the side of fries packs and the like. I want junk food, not an Interactive Meal Experience! What's wrong with you?

Furthermore, they say things like 'We may be the king but you, my friend, are the almighty ruler.' ??? The contemporary vogue for self-emphasis has reached its apogee, or perhaps nadir, here. Conferring deity status on the customers is not clever, it's asking for smite-related trouble. And they don't even mean it anyway! It's like they're saying, ' "The customer is always right", but we're going to buffer this anachronistic sentiment in some cagey language so you think we're being obsequious-but-not-overly-so, and so you know, further, that we're actually better than you because we're right clever with words and that.'

Shut up and Kong My Whopper, burger jockeys, and less of your lip!

And! Sorry to come back to the bread and apostrophe shunners Pret a manger, but they're doing it as well. Astoundingly, they print 'how to make a (sandwich x)' instructions on the side of their sandwich bags. Is this marketing fuckwittedness on an interplanetary scale, or is there, as per BK, a more sinister agenda of customer mockery going on, whereby they gleefully poke fun at the lunch slaveys coming out for their sustenance with NO TIME TO EVEN REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO MAKE A FUCKING SANDWICH ONCE?

Excuse me, I have some troughing to attend to before The Man once again makes onerous demands of my afternoon.

pret a mourir

I know I'm straying ever so close to writing about work things, but there's something about being re-immersed in the semi-fictive universe of employment, the city, etc [of which "'"'"'Popworld'"'"'" is one glamorous color-filled sattelite] every monday that invariably brings the hyenas of irritation guffawing round my door. get this. I was in well-known sandwich emporium 'pret a manger' - which is french for 'nearly food for cattle' - earlier, accompanying a butty-buying buddy. They vend a product called a 'no bread sandwich'.

I bet there's some marketing kid on a zillion pounds a minute being applauded throughout vast marbled boardrooms at Pret-a-deranger Towers for that particular bit of semantic sleight-of-hand. Here is what their own sorry Pret-a-pleurir web dungeon says:

No Bread Sandwich More than Mozzarella:
"Its not a sandwich and its not a salad. Its new and the answer to a good low carb, light lunch.Mozzarella, bistro mix, spinach, avocado, sliced tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, black olives and a drizzle of french dressing."

Hmmm - salad ingredients... plus a dressing... in a dish with a fork. That IS a fucking salad! Pret-a-vomir's "no bread or apostrophes" terminology be damned! And it's not 'an answer to a good low carb light lunch', it just IS a low carb light lunch! Whose life has degenerated to the point where low carb light lunches interrogate their every waking step? Apart from me writing this shit, I mean? And, apart from anything else, I'm seated as I type - and half-asleep.


'More than mozzarella', IAY.

daaanger-mOOUUUUUSSSE! etc

BBC news tells us that the only chart that counts has entered a new epoch...

so, first download only release to get to number one! living in interesting times (chinese cursed by last post, clearly) the tune itself is pretty neat - today is the first time i've heard it, given that radio 1 usually totally passes me by, and boy do i feel superannuated as E V E R Y O N E at work asks who's playing Gnarls Barkley... it has that instant mash timeless classic effect, a tune out of nowhere that appears to have existed since pop music became.

It's the words on the Gnarls Barkley website that really seal it for me.

'Gnarls Barkley St. Elsewhere

“You are the best. You are the worst. You are average. Your love is a part of you. You try to give it away because you cannot bear its radiance, but you cannot separate it from yourself. To understand your fellow humans, you must understand why you give them your love. You must realize that hate is but a crime-ridden subdivision of love. You must reclaim what you never lost. You must take leave of your sanity, and yet be fully responsible for your actions.” -Gnarls Barkley, in a letter to the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs '

... so stick that in your post-everything postbag and post it!