Tag: David Thorne

Coffee Out the Nose Funny: David Thorne’s American snow trip adventure

There are very few things in this world that are genuinely laugh out loud funny when you’re reading them in your head. David Thorne’s delightfully nasty bits of revenge, posted online for the world to see, are up there with the best of them.

David went to a ski shop in the US. The service was less than adequate. The gloves he purchased, that he was assured were waterproof, were not. They got wet, and the black ink that provided their ebony colour ran. And it ran all over his jumper. And when he went back to exchange them the staff abused him. So this is what he did:

The store received 5,000 calls enquiring about the free snowboard. And this email exchange ensued.

It was at this point in the exchange that coffee shot through my nostrils:

“I should probably be thankful that your staff were too occupied with having their earlobes stretched by Tonka-truck tyres and wearing pants around their knees to sell me a snowsurfingboard made of sugar or goggles made of bees.”

Or perhaps this point:

“Also, I apologise. While the average male height of 5″9 statistically means anything under is considered short, my question was without diminutive intention. I’m sure there are many advantages to being so small. Target carries an excellent range of boys clothing at competitive prices and a lower centre of gravity should, once helped up onto the ski-lift, allow you to snowboardsurf with greater stability. If I were small, I would buy a cat and ride it.”

There is, as is often the case with Thorne’s work, a language warning attached. It didn’t end all that well. Thorne punctuated the exchange with this:

January 28, 2011

Power to the people

David Thorne didn’t like his latest electricity bill. Which involved an inexplicable $600ish increase. He tried his best to come up with reasons for the jump in a series of emails with his electricity company. In these emails he claimed to have been experimenting on alternative sources for energy.

He seems like a funny guy.

“As every meter reading for the last two years at this address has been under two hundred dollars, rather than pay you $766.05, I would prefer to spend that amount on thirty eight pizzas, ensuring sufficient fat reserves to survive having the heat turned off, or have my apartment lined with polyester socks and wear a suit made out of carpet – possibly generating enough power to start my own grid company. I would then construct a number, calculate an amount based on this and send out accounts stating that the amount is based on a number and is therefore mathematically correct. If anyone questioned the basis of the number the amount is calculated from, I would simply declare “I have the power” and point out the scientific implausibility of their experiments, forcing them to investigate other, more viable, designs.”

But we already knew that.

September 3, 2010

Spider man helps find lost cat…

David Thorne, you’ve heard of him right? The guy who tried to pay his debts with a picture of a spider. Amongst other things (hit the David Thorne tag below for all his hijinks that I’ve previously featured).

You’d think, if you worked with such a renowned internet prankster, he’d be the last person you’d turn to for design help. Which is what his colleague did after her cat went missing. She asked for a “lost cat” poster – here are some of the suggested designs (read the email thread here).

July 20, 2010

Thorney hijinks

These David Thorne specials made me laugh. He’s the spider drawing guy…

In this one he takes on a school chaplain (Thorne is an atheist) who sent out a parental permission form for a dramatic Easter presentation from the local uniting church with the “yes” box already ticked. Thorne recounts his own experience in a church play.

I was actually in a Bible based play once and played the role of ‘Annoyed about having to do this.’ My scene involved offering a potplant, as nobody knew what Myrrh was, to a plastic baby Jesus then standing between ‘I forgot my costume so am wearing the teachers poncho’ and ‘I don’t feel very well’. Highlights of the play included a nervous donkey with diarrhoea causing ‘I don’t feel very well’ to vomit onto the back of Mary’s head, and the lighting system, designed to provide a halo effect around the manger, overheating and setting it alight. The teacher, later criticised for dousing an electrical fire with a bucket of water and endangering the lives of children, left the building in tears and the audience in silence. We only saw her again briefly when she came to the school to collect her poncho.

In this one he tenders his resignation after his boss asks him to produce a speech about graphic design for a school. There’s a language warning on both articles. Here’s a bit of a crash course in graphic design though…

And that is what graphic design and branding is about; when the client asks you to fit eighteen pages of text onto a single sided A4 flyer and increase the type size to twelve point, simply find your special place and dance. It doesn’t matter if there is no music; create the rhythm by clapping, humming or building a musical instrument using tightly drawn string and a cardboard box. A stick with bottle tops nailed to it does not count as a musical instrument. Nobody wants to hear that. I usually tap out No Sleep Till Brooklyn by the Beastie Boys with spoons but it comes down to personal preference and implement availability.

In this one he demonstrates that bees are attracted to yellow while not test driving a new motorbike that he doesn’t want. And he, I believe, fooled some people into thinking that McDonalds purposefully leave items out of drive through bags…

I have been researching bees on the internet for the last four hours at work. When I type “Do bees like yellow” into google, it states that there are 2,960,000 results. It will take me a while to look at that many pages so I doubt I will make it in there today.
One of the pages states that Qantas once had a yellow kangaroo as their logo but when it was painted on the tail fin it attracted nests of bees so the logo was changed to red in the mid fifties. This would seem to support the argument that bees are indeed attracted to yellow and contradicts what you have told me. Admittedly though, another page states that bees are technically unable to fly due to their wings being too small for their body weight but I have seen them doing it so this can’t be true – somebody should check the internet and make sure everything on there is correct.
Regardless, I do not think having to dodge bees in addition to the already present dangers of learning to ride a motorbike for the first time would be very safe. Once when I was a passenger in a yellow taxi, a bee flew in and I screamed causing the driver to swerve and hit a wheelie bin. I will continue my research and confirm that this would not be a factor before I arrange the test ride.

April 24, 2010

The art of wasting people’s time

David Thorne strikes again. With moderate success.

I like that he’s a bit of a Robin Hood. Fighting for the everyman. Taking on the corruption inherent in the system.

This time he had some overdue DVDs from Blockbuster.

Read the whole lot here…

He poses a question you’ve no doubt wondered about for years – why are late fees so high…

I have checked pricing at the DVD Warehouse and the cost of replacing your lost movies with new ones is as follows:

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay $7.95
Waterworld $4.95
Journey to the Centre of the Earth $9.95
Logan’s Run $12.95

This totals $35.80 so I would rather pay that than the $82 late fee. I have no idea why Logan’s Run is the most expensive of the four movies as it was definitely the worst. Have you seen it? I wouldn’t pay $12.95 for that. I would use the money to buy a good movie instead. Probably something with Steven Seagal in it. The entire premise comprised of living a utopian and carefree lifestyle with only three drawbacks – wearing seventies jumpsuits, living in what looks like a giant shopping centre and not being allowed to live past thirty. This would seem logical though as I would not want a bunch of old people hanging around complaining about their arthritis while I am trying to relax at the shopping centre in my jumpsuit trying not to think about the computer crashing.

November 17, 2009

Spiderman Strikes Again

David Thorne, from 27bslash6, is up to his old antics once again. This time he’s terrorising a real estate agent. And I think we can all agree that real estate agents deserve it. Particularly because inspections are a pain and their need to come back again and again borders on voyeurism…

So I enjoyed this…

The email exchange after that report begins like this…

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 30 September 2009 6.04pm
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Inspection Report

Dear Peter,
Thankyou for the surprise inspection and invitation to participate in the next. I appreciate you underlining the text at the bottom of the page which I would otherwise have surely mistaken for part of the natural pattern in the paper. I was going to clean the apartment but had so many things on my ‘to do’ list that I decided to treat them all equally and draw pictures of sharks instead. I have attached one for your honest appraisal.

I have read through your list of chores and intend to rectify the situation by wrapping my entire body in eighteen rolls of super absorbent Thick’n’thirsty® paper towels, hosing down the apartment, then rolling around on the floor and rubbing myself up and down walls. I will cover the more stubborn marks with Liquid Paper. I will also get back to you in regards to the premises being inspected in another two weeks, my agreement to do so will depend on availability and not wanting to.

Regards, David.

And it ends like this… read everything in between here. His site contains a fair bit of material that may offend though, so I wouldn’t click around too much if you’re the easily offended type…
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 02 October 2009 10.36am
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Nom nom nom

October 6, 2009

Spider man strikes again

David Thorne gained international (or at least internet) notoriety for trying to pay his bill with a drawing of a spider.

So he’s not the kind of guy you should send this sort of letter to. You’re really just asking for trouble…

There’s some pretty funny stuff on his site – but also some not so funny stuff. Be warned.

Here’s a sample from the string of emails he sent to his real estate agent…

“Currently I only have eight dogs but one is expecting puppies and I am very excited by this. I am hoping for a litter of at least ten as this is the number required to participate in dog sled racing. I have read every Jack London novel in preparation and have constructed my own sled from timber I borrowed from the construction site across the road during the night. I have devised a plan which I feel will ensure me taking first place in the next national dog sled championships. For the first year of the puppies life I intend to say the word mush then chase them violently around the apartment while yelling and hitting saucepan lids together. I have estimated that the soundproofing of my apartment should block out at least sixty percent of the noise and the dogs will learn to associate the word mush with great fear so when I yell it on race day, the panic and released adrenaline will spur them on to being winners. I am so confident of this being a foolproof plan that I intend to sell all my furniture the day before the race and bet the proceeds on coming first place.”

June 8, 2009

Spiderman

The guy behind the spider drawing – David Thorne – has a website full of funny anecdotes, emails and characters who have sent him things. It comes with a language warning – but this is a particularly ingenius account from his own life:

My Confession

When I was in year ten, I would wag school to catch the bus into the city. I would hide the contents of my schoolbag and go to a christian book store called the 'Open Book', covering two levels and a second hand section in the basement. I would go in with my empty bag, select expensive theological volumes, and fill my bag with several hundred dollars worth. I would then use the toilets to remove any price tags before going downstairs to the basement where they would buy my books for half the retail price. I did this twice a week. I figured that if they caught me I would cry and ask for their forgiveness and as christians they would have let me go but they never caught on. I remember one person buying the entire Amy Grant tape collection when it had been on the shelves not ten minutes before. I was saving for a motorbike and bought a Suzuki Katana. The 'Open Book' went broke a year later so it worked out well for everyone.

November 20, 2008

Weaving a web of success

The spider drawing story I posted last week now has a fitting conclusion. The picture, originally valued at $233.95 by its creator has "sold" on eBay for $15,000. I say "sold" because I think the chance the buyer will honour the deal is not high. From ninemsn:

"After the exchange hit inboxes, the “original” drawing was put up for sale on eBay by a Swedish man.

"David Thorne was … kind enough to give the spider to me," eBay user “Andreas” says.

"However, this spider is driving me nuts. Also he's lacking a leg and thus is useless to me."

The listing shows there were 18 bids for the drawing, with a starting price of $233.95, and that it was sold for US$10,000 ($15,000)."

November 20, 2008

Ahh… it’s a monster.

FAO Shwarz – the site behind the build your own muppet feature I posted earlier today also lets you create your own monster toy – from any drawing . Which is pretty cool. But even more expensive – at $249.

Perhaps this guy – who tried to pay a $233.95 debt with this picture of a spider – could instead get the toy made, and everyone could live happily ever after.

November 12, 2008