I guess there are some downsides to being born in this century: you missed seeing Star Wars before George Lucas flushed it down the loo; you only know the dominance of two football teams; and the ads are shite.

But there is a massive upside.

If you don’t have kids (or smoke dope) it’s unlikely you’ll have tuned into the Cartoon Network lately. You’re probably aware of the insane genius that is Spongebob Squarepants, but are you familiar with The Regular Show?

I quote Wikipedia:

‘Two 23-year-old friends,^[3] a blue jay named Mordecai and a raccoon named Rigby, are employed as groundskeepers at a park and spend their days trying to slack off and entertain themselves by any means. This is much to the chagrin of their boss Benson (a high-tempered living gumball machine), along with their co-worker Skips (a yeti); but to the delight of Pops (a naïve, lollipop-shaped gentleman whose father Mr. Maellard owns the park). Their other co-workers, Muscle Man (an overweight green man) and High Five Ghost (a ghost with a hand extending from the top of his head) serve as rivals to Mordecai and Rigby.^[4] As stated before, the show usually revolves around Mordecai’s and Rigby’s attempts to avoid work and enjoy themselves; however, they oftentimes have to pay for their irresponsible actions, as they always get into more trouble than they thought. This typically results in Mordecai and Rigby going through bizarre and surrealistic misadventures.’

That’s right, a ghost with a hand extending from the top of his head.

But they left out Coffee Coffee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4AC0uvU0jQ

Then there’s Adventure Time. Here’s description of one of its characters:

‘Beemo is a sentient video game console that lives with Finn and Jake. His appearance contains elements of Vectrex, Game Boy, andAtari 2600 game hardware. The letters on his side spell “BMO”. He speaks with a Korean accent. Beemo also has magical powers that can put people into whatever video game that is wanted, but its extremely dangerous and monsters could come out into reality just by a push of a button, but only he can press it. Although Finn and Jake often refer to Beemo as him, Pat McHale, creative director, says that Beemo is more of an it.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp6mU0RYPXU

And last but not least, the Emmy Award-winning The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack:

‘Flapjack is a young boy raised by a talking whale named Bubbie. Flapjack leads a peaceful life until the duo rescues a pirate by the name of Captain K’nuckles, who tells Flapjack of a place called Candied Island, which is made completely of candy. Inspired by the adventurous pirate, Flapjack, Captain K’nuckles and Bubbie get into strange predicaments and “misadventures” in search of candy, Candied Island and the coveted title of “Adventurer”. The three spend most of their time in Stormalong Harbor, their place of residence, and home to many strange characters.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GogsawI6oxU

I mean awesome in the slightly post-modern way that Brits use it, rather than the way Jack Black uses it as some kind of desperate indication of a wacky personality, but with no hint of irony.

Skittles Brand Book.

(Thanks, M.)

Photographers’ cards.

What a waste of 300 gsm paper, gallons of ink and millions of kWh of electricity.

That’s not to say photographers are all bad, but like everything else in the world, 90% of them are much of a muchness.

So 90% of those cards hang around on desks for a while, then get binned without a second thought.

If that’s going to happen, couldn’t there be a less wasteful way of going about it?

Well, there is: First-Stop.org aims to put all those photographers (an illustrators) online.

They’ve saved over 2000kg of paper so far.

And they might save even more if you spread the word.

Last week saw the 2011 D&AD Awards.

I know I’ve written before about this organisation losing its way, but last Wednesday seemed to plumb a new depth.

Amongst the people I know in advertising, I’m aware of only two who attended the ceremony. Many didn’t even know it was happening – in fact a CD of a top ten UK agency was quite surprised when I mentioned the results to him the following day.

On Thursday I tweeted: ‘This just in: last night’s D&AD has just been named the least-given-a-fuck-about awards do of all time.’ It was retweeted by other CDs, including previous winners.

Maybe it’s just an impression I’ve got based only on my circle of friends and acquaintances, but (modesty aside) that is quite a lot of the UK’s creatives. Did you go? Did you care? Was it any good?

I was never interested in attending, but this feeling was compounded by the fact that, as an entrant, D&AD had my phone number and used it to cold call me several times to ask if I was coming, and if not, why not? Funny, in the old days I’d have given my left nut to go, but now I’d rather… What was I doing last Wednesday? Watching TV, maybe?

To me, that seems to confirm that D&AD is now a dim, dribbly irrelevance that went from being an organisation of great power and respect to one that barely registers with the people who used to revere it. And from what I can tell, the next generation of creatives cares even less.

Quite an achievement.

(By the way, to continue my ongoing detachment with the organisation, I’m selling all my old annuals. If you want any or all of the Books from 1982 to (I think) 2008 (missing 1987), send me an email at bwmkay@gmail.com.)

As you can tell from the title of this post, the Water Water Everywhere App is Guardian App of the week.

I’m afraid my meagre writing abilities don’t stretch to expressing how pleased I am about this, so here’s a picture of my pride gland exploding:

I think this Wimbledon-centric remake of Sony Balls is a really good lesson in why the first one was so good and how you can take the same basic script and come out with two very different results:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znreR0ShdGc

Of course, we’re all familiar with Balls and most of us like it, so there’s that baggage for the Wimbledon ad to deal with, but there are other elements that make the remake less engaging and memorable.

For a start, the music is quite bland. The old saying tells us that music is 50% of an ad, and it just goes to show how important ‘Heartbeats’ was to the feeling of Balls (a sharper lesson was learned with Sony ‘Paint’, where the music was so crap, they ended up reshowing it with no music and it was much better).

The setting is less interesting. I’m sure other locations could have been used for Balls, but San Francisco has a kind of ethereal hippiness to it that fit perfectly with the idea and music.

And the balls themselves: a beautiful bouncing rainbow is a much more pleasant thing to look at than a sea of grubby green.

Lastly, Balls didn’t have a pair of fuckwitted cuntpipes at the end of it looking like they’d just stepped out of a Daily Mail remake of Lawnmower Man.

And that last point is of course the real key to all classic ads.

But why would I write about it when someone else has already gone to the trouble on my behalf?

Famous people and their vinyl (thanks, G).

Lorem Ipsum not meaty enough for you? (thanks, D.)

I’m not racist, but… (thanks, J).

Best first lines of all time.

Monty Python censorship negotiation letter.

A couple of months back I asked for some help to create an app for my project to encourage people to drink tap water instead of bottled.

Almost immediately Hayden Stainsby of Caffeine Concepts stepped forward and led me to believe that he could make it happen. Knowing little of the app making process I took him on his word and – bloody fucking hell – he’s only gone and done it really, really well.

You can now download it for free from the itunes store.

The one bit of help he needed was in getting everything to look amazing, so we needed a designer.

Again, within moments of the call going out, Shaheed of The Creative Floor recommended the excellent Crystal Lee, who said yes straight away. Her logo is at the top of this post and her work has really brought the whole thing together to look completely professional.

Both she and Hayden have been absolutely brilliant,  getting things done quickly with the minimum of fuss. I can’t recommend either of them highly enough.

Now, if I could ask you all a favour:

Please, please please download the app and start using it. The important thing here is the ‘submit’ function, which allows you to find a water source we haven’t included (eg: water fountain, pub, cafe etc.) and tell us about it so we can add it to the map.

The more complete the map is, the more people use it and the less damage to the environment.

Thanks again to Hayden and Crystal and thanks in advance for your help.

PS: Also huge thanks to Lizie, George, Us and the rest of the guys at Academy who have taken on the task of making TV and online ads to publicise the app and the campaign. More about that in the near future.

UPDATE: are you or do you know an Android or Blackberry app developer? Apparently the skillz are quite different to developing an Apple app. Get in touch at wweverywhere@gmail.com.

Also, the map now covers the whole of the UK – that’s 5300 locations. Excellent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUStgELCbkk

Got an idea, a twist and some nice production values.

I guess it helps if you don’t already know it’s for Lynx. Sorry about that.

(Thanks, ALS.)