So, apparently the US Congress might not have declared pizza to be a vegetable afterall – though that’s been the public perception of their move to identify pizza as a healthy lunch time snack for school children… that’s neither here nor there though. Because you’ll still totally want one of these pizza sleeping bags…
The same seller has this nifty bacon scarf which is complementary, rather than complimentary. Or whichever one isn’t free but goes well with the other…
Wow. I don’t think any company has ever misread the public mood quite as badly as Qantas did today. Their social media people should probably have learned some sort of lesson from the Radike Samo fiasco back in August. That was a previous Twitter comp where they picked two white guys in blackface costumes as their winners – and the Twitterverse condemned them. Now, I have a little bit of sympathy there – because the white guys clearly weren’t racist – they simply loved a rugby player who happened to have a different coloured skin, so naturally, to dress up like him they painted their faces… anyway. It should have been a lesson to Qantas that Twitter campaigns need to be handled with care – or they can blow up, and create negative media attention.
The percentage of Australians who are active Twitter users, and who understand the medium, is quite small, compared to the percentage of Australians who still get their news via a mix of traditional media – ie the people who will read the stories about how badly Qantas screwed this campaign up. Apparently they’ve had more than 30,000 negative tweets in the last few weeks – this isn’t the way to fix it.
Seriously. What on earth were they thinking. Their brand is so incredibly unpopular right now, and the uncertainty about their strike stuff still hasn’t gone away, and they’re giving away luxury pyjamas?
The “offending item”… via @QantasAirways
That in itself is questionable. But to do it by asking for your company to trend on Twitter with a pretty spurious hash tag (let’s face it “luxury” isn’t going to be high on the list of Qantas word association game options right now) in the midst of one of the biggest brand meltdowns in Australian corporate history is playing with fire. And if you play with fire… well… you know…
This happens… and then the story becomes how badly you botched your marketing, as well as how badly you botch flying your planes.
When your CEO is being visually compared with Hitler, and thousands of people are laughing at you, and hundreds of thousands are reading about how bad your marketing is, your marketing campaign has failed.
The other day a nasty policeman followed orders, and government policy and sprayed a bunch of peacefully protesting university students, who were peacefully protesting on the campus of their university, in a peaceful protest approved by university faculty, in their peaceful little faces, with some not very peaceful pepper spray. There were cameras everywhere. The cop has since been identified. Because that’s how the Internet works these days.
This image is evoking exactly the kind of reaction you’d expect, potentially providing a new set of martyrs for the Occupy Movement – because students are the 99%.
The other way the Internet works these days is via memes – memes which add fuel to the fire. I give you the “casually pepper spray everything” meme. And the tumblr (there’s some artwork there, as in famous paintings, not just meme fodder, featuring some nudity – just a warning (and some language)).
Some meta-memes…
I never got into the Magic card game… maybe if all the monsters came with standard issue googly eyes that would have changed.
That’s the purpose of this ‘ere tumblog.
Made in the Now is seriously cool. They turn around a T-Shirt design a day, based on current quirky news events from around the globe.
Here’s a few samples.
The other day scientists invented a new lighter than dandelion substance…
Here’s the shirt.
Here are a few more…
I like this one, which was released when Rebecca Black put our her second single (you know she’s got a third out now…)
This is the one about an Amish beard cutting rampage recently.
Each shirt is only available for 24 hours.
Sadly, they’re a little expensive (at $40 a pop).
Doug Giles wrote the book on raising tough daughters. No. Literally.
He seems to be confusing getting “game” with shooting and mounting animals on your wall… at least that’s the visual aid in this video on being a ballsy man of God. Where he says we need “cajones” to proclaim the gospel, or our nation is screwed. And by our nation he means his nation.
At least he doesn’t equate masculinity with cage fighting.
The photoshopping in this Flickr collection is pretty amazing. The only downside is that there’s no Democrat equivalent. Bipartisan clowns would be awesome.
Michelle Bachmann.
Sarah Palin
Ron Paul
George W. Bush
Rupert Murdoch
Rick Perry
Gold. Jerry. Gold.
I was skeptical about this. As sceptical as I am about the spelling of the word skeptical. But then I checked all the movies available for viewing on my Apple TV.
And its pretty much true.
My favourite type…
The whole list, with samples, is here.
I would add a 14th though, but maybe it’s just my colourblindness kicking in… I think there’s a black/white/red combo (which this French site confirms).
Also. This is obviously an over-simplification. There are many other types – it is staggering how many fit these varieties though.
Delicious.
Things will shift. Things will change. There’ll be elections and an economy and stuff. Truth and error will collide. Unlike last year… or the year before that… or the year that REM wrote their song…
These videos from prophetess Patrcia King seem pretty much to be an exposition (rip off?) of REM’s lyrics…
” it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane…world serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs… a government for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck… Uh oh, overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do…Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right – right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.”
Yeah. So. Things are going to change next year. I can feel it… It will certainly be a different year to this year.
He looks so happy with his head rub…
If you feel like you should be on the cutting edge of Biblical scholarship, or if you just want to get the point… here’s a visual guide to various scholarly approaches to the Bible, applied to cutlery. For your edification and education…
We begin with what we have. A fork. It is a very clever implement. Great for stabbing food and carrying it to one’s mouth. It has the perfect number of prongs; one less and small food would escape, one more and the fork would be ungainly.
The foundational assumption in higher criticism is that this fork is a development of history. It is unlikely, given its perfect suitability for the job, that there were not previous, primitive versions.
These versions may have been the result of a series of communities, each with inadequate eating utensils (form criticism)…
There may also have been a “genuine” original tradition, that others have built on, adapting the fork to their own communities and types of food – if you don’t just eat a big hunk of meat, then you need multiple prongs… There might be different metals involved in the handle and the prongs… there might be a brand name stamped on the fork… there are myriad avenues for speculating about the various forms that have combined in this one utensil.
Or they may have been the result of somebody sitting down with various eating utensils and combining them (source criticism).
Source criticism is also pretty useful when you’re dealing with a complex and evolved version of a fork – when we already have a version of the fork to compare things to… We can conduct “Spork Criticism”…
Or, for the more highly evolved, Splade Criticism…
Things start to get a little bit more complicated as the cutlery gets more complicated…
Maybe the final form it the result of somebody bringing a bunch of different utensils together.
Or maybe it represents one tradition’s approach to cutlery and efficient design.
One of the interesting things about this level of complexity is that sometimes sources and forms collide… sometimes what one group saw as a “tradition” actually turns out to be from two different sources.
Either way… what we have is a final form fork. And we can speculate about its compositional history.
Sometimes this allows us to study the previous types of fork, and draw conclusions about the people involved, and their diets. Sometimes we can see the seams where new prongs were welded on. This excites some people more than others. This process – either in source or form criticism – is called Redaction Criticism…
If you do redaction criticism with the final form of the fork you can understand the community who put it all together… This is close to the traditional view of fork scholarship, one might call it a Canonical approach.
Some people are just born skeptical – they have doubts about the fork, our hands are natural, the products of science and stuff, so we should eat with them. Fork users are gullible, and if there is a fork, it’s probably a symbol of the hand anyway, used by powerful people to control the eating habits of the masses. This is “Radical Criticism”…
Sometimes it just makes more sense to see the fork for what it is – a cleverly designed implement that serves a purpose. All this studying of forks sometimes gets in the way of just using the fork for what it is made for. Eating. This is the “traditional” view.
This is great. Really brightened my Greek filled day…
At least by keeping me from Greek for four minutes.
Gomez is one of those bands who consistently produces good music, I don’t think there are any other bands in my itunes collection with as many albums of such consistent and cohesive quality.
I’m really enjoying their new album.
This is my absolute favourite.
But this one is good too…
They’ve put up some cool clips on YouTube.
So have other people…
This isn’t from the new album (obviously).
And neither is this…
A Danish Dressage guy named Andreas Helgstrand apparently performed a dressage routine at the 2006 World Equestrian Championships that wowed the crowds (see below).
Somebody decided that routine would be better with hip-hop.
There’s a language warning in this song (I seem to be posting lots of language warnings this week).
The original, in case dressage is your thing…
