Floppy disks perform the Imperial March from Star Wars:
Beautiful shot of water balloon not popping on a man’s face (thanks, M):
Henry Hill speaks (thanks, J).
Bacon Hitler (thanks, J).
Charlie Brown entering puberty (thanks, P)”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkCqm8VyFg4
Kid finds out Darth is Luke’s father:
History of lyrics that aren’t lyrics:
Anatomy of a virus (thanks, G):
Funny bad lip reading (thanks, P).
Anomaly London asked fans of the Vaccines to submit photos of themselves at festivals to create the band’s new video, ‘Wetsuit’.
What do you think?
It continues that well observed through-the-ages thing, but jumps around a bit from era to era just to keep you on your toes. Lovely little touches, like the teacher’s smile when the kids don’t turn Elton John down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC07KCeVITs
As another point, though, how come so many ads are ‘through the ages’ these days? Is it a good-old-days-trying-to-help-us-forget-how-fucked-the-economy/government/footie-is thing?
I for one don’t buy it: the seventies always look a bit brown, dirty and depressing, like a long distance lorry driver’s shreddies. The eighties were full of rah-rah yuppies and Grange-Hill grimness. The nineties were all Color Me Badd, laddism and the awful arrogance of the Conservatives followed by the foetid cynicism of New Labour. Then we got into the 21st century where everything looks really rather lovely (except for the phone hacking, famine, genocide, tsunamis, Clive Allen’s moaning etc.).
For me, a weekday lunch falls into three categories:
1. Nip out, buy something within 5-10 minutes walk, come back, eat it at your desk (82%).
2. Lunch with mates. You go out for an hour or so and sit down, but you know you’ve got to be back at your desk soon after and you don’t go over one or two pints of cooking lager (17%).
3. Long, luxurious lunches that are paid for by someone else as a thank you, celebration etc. (>1%)
Now that I work within spitting distance of Soho (literally; sorry to that bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue who got a grolly on the shoulder of his pac-a-mac) I have an enormous choice of wondrous comestibles from around the world. I’m a big fan of Yalla Yalla, the Beirut street food restaurant, although I have to say that I mainly go to Leon on Old Compton Street. Then there’s a great Japanese, Kyoto, on Romilly Street, the whole of Chinatown and roughly 457,967 burrito joints within a few hundred yards.
Spoilt, that’s what I am.
But it wasn’t always thus: when I worked at AMV there wasn’t much beyond two M&Ss and the Pret on Baker Street (I never really went to the Baker Street KFC, McDonald’s or BK). The situation has since improved with at least an EAT, but back in the late nineties I used to walk up to Selfridges and go to the EAT in the food hall (EAT has been far and away my consistent favourite over the years).
Then I moved, first to Goodge Street, which had the Tottenham Court Road EAT and Busaba/Charlotte St/Salt Yard for more extravagant occasions, then to Spitalfields, which has Verde, my favourite sandwich bar in London. It makes a Turkey with cranberry sauce that is substantial enough to have half at lunchtime and the other half as a four o’clock snack. Spitalfields also has a Leon, but I was a big fan of the Italian place opposite Verde, which makes a ridiculously good prosciutto and mozzarella toastie, something I usually combined with a bar of chocolate from Montezuma.
Having worked in 15-20 other places over the last two years, I’d recommend the following: Lowe is near the EAT on King’s Road, but Bibendum makes a very good, reasonably priced sandwich in its little forecourt cafe; 180’s food situation is a bit crap because it’s in Amsterdam, but the soup place whose name I’ve forgotten, and the Italian deli, whose name I’ve forgotten, were both excellent; Saatchis London has the Tottenham Court Road EAT but also an Itsu, which I’m very keen on; and that brings me to 4Creative, which also has a walkable Itsu, EAT and a good Lebanese place on the way to St James’s Park; JWT was Wasabi for a while, but the heat of their chicken soup thing is unpredictable, which made me go back to the EAT on Knightsbridge; when I squatted at Coy! for a while I really liked Pho on Great Titchfield Street, and then at Dentsu, which was broadly in the same area, I often went for a burrito at Tortilla on Market Place (often with Stephen Gash, whose production company is above it); RKCR/Y&R is quite close to my home, so I know that Camden High Street is pretty dodgy, sending me running into the dependable arms of Pret or EAT; M&C Saatchi was Leon, but in the neighbourhood I sometimes met Simon Veksner at the Mongolian place on Kingly street, which made a nice change.
What do you do and where do you go (international comments and contributions very welcome indeed)?
A couple of years ago I joined Twitter.
Prior to that point I had spurned its charms, condemning it as pointless, solipsistic and tedious. But then I was about to have a book out and Penguin had sent me a guide to maximising your internet presence; its advice included having a Twitter account.
So, what the hey? Why not give it a go?
Like most people I dipped my toe gingerly into the water and grappled with hashtags, DMs, following, unfollowing, celebrities etc. I wasn’t sure what to write, I wasn’t sure to what extent to swear, I wasn’t exactly sure who was reading my Tweets, but as the days went by I found ways of making it work for me until it became the website I spend the most time on.
A couple of weeks ago my wife said she’d rather I didn’t use my iPad so much. I explained that I was just checking my Twitter feed and asked how it differed to me reading the newspaper. In many ways it’s much better: I follow the exact news, sports, celebrity, professional and friend accounts that I’m interested in and they get updated all the time, so if you check them every couple of hours you have a regular digest of everything that interests you (I’m now really struggling with the desire to write ‘simples’. But I can’t do it. I just can’t).
From what I’ve noticed, more and more people are joining, so in case you’re interested, here are the top however many things I’ve learned about it over the least two years:
1. Following/Unfollowing is a weird one.It’s tempting to think that, like Kanye West, your Twitter status resides in your ratio of followers to those you follow. I think that’s what I thought initially, but then a while later I thought ‘fuck it’ and just followed everyone who followed me. It felt polite. But now I’ve stopped doing that because I can’t be bothered. But it’s all bollocks anyway because of point 2…
2. You can’t possibly cope with following 900 people. That would be like trying to read every magazine in the newsagent every week. So the best thing to do is to check that feed out occasionally but create a ‘List’ that makes things more manageable. You can stick, say, 30-40 people on the list and make them the people you regularly follow.
3. You think you want to follow certain celebrities, but then you see what/how much they Tweet, and you stop following them (see Simon Pegg and Kevin Smith).
4. Jokes that people have never heard before and cool links get you followers. Swearing about Arsenal results loses you followers.
5. But swearing in general seems be catnip to a certain type of reader (see Creature Dan’s feed for evidence of this).
6. Finding out who Twitter thinks you’re similar to and who it thinks you might like to follow can be a chastening experience.
7. Twitter has been responsible for some great things, such as pointing out the #humblebrag.
8. But (and if you aren’t on Twitter this will be utterly meaningless), the jury is out on gratuitously hashtagging as a little punchline to your Tweet.
9. It’s easy to forget that DMs are better than your normal Twitter feed for organising your social life.
10. Justin Bieber fans? WTF?
Interesting analysis of The Matrix and The Truman Show (thanks, K).
More top breakdancing (thanks, P):
The history of English (thanks, P):
Batman has a conversation with himself (thanks, J):
A quite marvellous gif (thanks, K).
Worst national anthems ever (thanks, P):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQ5hZadFok
What is Fire? (Thanks, P.):
And most stairs climbed on a head (thanks, P. I should mention here that ‘P’ is always the same P. The lovely Peggy who send me loads of great links from Germany every Thursday evening):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnq2SopOQh0
And as a couple of people have mentioned it to me, it has indeed been a quiet week on the blog. There didn’t seem to be much to write about, so I didn’t. Plus I was out every night. I’m not dead or anything.
If you follow Charlie Brooker on Twitter you might have spent Saturday evening reading his 140-character rants about the wasteful cost of BBC trailers:
Last night at around 4am I got irrationally angry about how much the BBC spends on promo trails for shows.
Hadn’t even seen a trail to prompt it. It was during a conversation on a night shoot.
It’s not that the trails are bad, just that they cost so much fucking money. SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY.
I reckon the BBC could’ve made Avatar for the amount they spend on trails for shows each year.
They could definitely keep BBC4 afloat. Fuck, they could probably shoot all the BBC4 shows with a gold camera for that money.
Every time I see a glossy trailer on the BBC I see banknotes being shat into a burning dustbin.
Once turned up to record a trail for Screenwipe. Massive hangar-size studio, huge crew. Could never afford that in the show itself. Never.
To clarify: not talking about trails made up of clips from shows. I mean this sort of thing (random example):
MONEY IN A BIN:
MORE MONEY IN A BIN:
(Incidentally, I believe those last two were part of a very expensive Radio 1 campaign that never even saw the light of day, so nobody had a chance to watch Zane Lowe setting off explosive bags of flour and think, ‘I know, I’ll give Radio 1 a listen’.)
Let’s face it, he’s got a point. The BBC are threatening to close down BBC4 because of lack of funding, so when you see this somewhat indulgent approach to getting people to watch/listen to its programming it does rather stick in the throat.
What I don’t understand is why they cost so much when the programmes have relatively tiny budgets. People in TV often complain about the amount of money that sloshes around this industry, but how come they can produce an hour of TV for the price of a minute of advertising?
Surely it’s questions like this that are behind the reductions in advertising budgets. And the natural conclusion of that has to be much less cash in the industry.
Brace yourselves…
Draw a stickman (thanks, ALS).
The Museum of Obsolete Objects (thanks, P).
School dinners around the world (thanks, H).
Turn your words into cocktails (thanks, P):
Face shit:
Maths in the world around us (thanks, P):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBL3pyosp8Q
Very clever wedding invitation (thanks, S).
Biggie Smalls The Tank Engine.
I want one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irkxIpNBJJU
Continuing this week’s Tom Selleck theme, selleckwaterfallsandwich (thanks, T).
An office worker going bat-shit crazy (thanks, K).
