M&S managed to relaunch themselves by getting a bunch of models (including Twiggy) to dance around in their undies to a few rare grooves. Matalan followed suit with some slightly crapper tunes and Melanie Sykes in Twiggy’s place. Fair enough; Matalan is to Marks and Spencer as Mel Sykes is to Twiggy.
But now, Debenhams have pulled rank on both of them with their latest advertising campaign. It features a “state of the art” Santa who is thin (natch) and wears a red suit (bien sur), has trimmed his beard (yeah – I always thought that original beard was a bit too rrrrock), drives a motorised sleigh (reindeer are so passe), and is dancing to a def version of “Santa Baby” that sounds like it was produced by the DJ equivalent of Ronnie Hazelhurst. It’s impossible to describe how bad this tune is but if I told you it has someone saying “DJ Santa on the Wheels of Steel” over it, perhaps you’ll have some inkling of the enormous distance by which the mark was overshot.

Once upon a time there was an Emperor who was a bit crap. One day he had a thought: “what if I were to be rebranded ? Maybe people would take me more seriously and perhaps I’d be less crap.”
So the Emperor called the finest consultants in the land and gave them a ludicrous amount of his wealth. The consultants returned in 6 months with a small piece of fag packet, onto which was scrawled a badly drawn crown and the phrase “B0 Emperor!”. The Emperor was furious when he saw how little they had produced in return for his great wealth and ordered the guards to kill the consultants.
“No your highness,” pleaded the consultants, “this is no ordinary logo! It’s a magic logo! It will make everyone in the land respect you except for the very, very foolish.”

You know the rest so I won’t bother to continue.

On a totally different topic, Goldsmiths College has recently been rebranded and they have a glorious new logo:

But it’s more than just a logo! It’s a new visual identity! At this point I feel I should stress that just because it’s the same as the previous logo, but in a different font, and cost £143,000 ($224,000), doesn’t mean it’s an obvious fucking con. It also doesn’t mean that the management there are a bunch of pig-ignorant dullards who don’t know their arses from their elbows.
All I’m saying is, if I were to be put in charge of rebranding, I’d want something more impressive like this:

But that’s because I’ve been getting into PimpZilla a bit too much…and GoldAmp.

Something that has improved my quality of life considerably in the last few days is a firefox theme called PimpZilla. If you have a love for the finer things in life coupled with terminally bad taste then you will love the bling, the fur, the gold scrollbars and the leopardskin. Furthermore you will gain the highest respect from pimps, rappers, players and many other baad dudes. It’s that little touch of class that you deserve. Because you’re worth it etc.

The other life-enriching plugin I’m currently loving is FlashBlock. If you’re sick of annoying sounds, flashing animations and pop-up/unders but need flash for certain things then install it now. All flash is blocked by default and replaced with a small icon. If you want to see it, just click the icon and you’re in business. Coupled with AdBlock you can PwN the web.

Instead of the usual Friday routine, which if nothing else is usually enjoyable at the time, this week I had the life-affirming experience of a double endoscopy; one up each end.

It was the worst hospital experience I’ve ever had and, apart from the loss of dignity, the misery and the sobbing, also resulted in the loss of most of my front teeth. I’m also convinced that despite being fitted with a cannula I was never actually given the seditive I was promised. He told me it was like drinking ten pints but while they were blocking my entire throat with razor blades and shoving barbed hosepipes up my arse it felt more like ten pints of coffee. I was very un-sedated. I reckon they wanted me out of there quickly.

So for the past few days I wasn’t in a very good mood. In fact I was on a right downer. This evening, in a pathetically geeky and optimistic atempt to cheer myself up, I decided to perform some almost totally unnecessary surgery on our trusty server, “teapot”. By simply replacing the 256M DIMM with two 128M DIMMS (don’t ask why) the primary hard-disk broke. Instead of working, as it was doing perfectly happily five minutes before, it simply sat there occasionally making screeching noises that really made the parrot feel uncomfortable. She’d already had a troubling day too, what with sitting through an episode of TOS Star Trek; the sound effects on the Enterprise bridge seemingly mean something significant to parakeets as she does her worried squawk repeatedly while the programme airs.

Anyway, we had a saturday night curry, some wine and watched “Shaun of the Dead” which has improved my mood.

Perhaps it would be better to count my blessings. At least I’m not a member of the England Cricket team.

Adam Laurie demonstrates how easy it is to read, and potentially clone, the new highly secure UK passports. From a distance. Without the owner knowing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1950226,00.html

Last night I released a stupid little blogging tool called Ploppy. It’s a little plugin for WordPress that lets you add a line to each blog describing the state of your bowel movements using the Bristol Stool Scale. For example:

Stools: Type 4 Like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft

Anyway, this morning I received an appreciative email that nearly caused me to issue a Type 7:

Subject: ploppy rules!

You forgot to mention the painful joys of passing a gigantic 2. As you
stand beside the throne, panting with effort and tears of joy and relief
in your eyes, you hit the flush handle and are then presented with the
sight of your ginormous 2 pitching stern-up like a sinking ship and
whirling round and round with the water, coating the insides of the bowl
in all four quadrants. It is, if done at the office toilet, a
statement: "I was here, and I passed what was to be passed, and I did it
mightily. Your mere skidmarks do not impress me." (that's assuming
you're a thoughtless twit and don't apply the brush to it at once)

Just a cheery bit of scatology to entertain you.

Cheers,
Mike

I love the Internet 🙂

“Every time you turn on your new car, you’re turning on 20 microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you’re using a computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I’m using a computer. The only computer you don’t know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?”

   — Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Because neither of us get enough exercise nor spend enough proper time with each other, Michele and I decided to get off the bus early on the way to my parents’ house today; sounds pathetic I know. We alighted in Kidbrooke and, in a desperate attempt to get away from main roads, decided to walk through Sutcliffe Park. Now, in my youth, this was a very dull, flat, park that was only ever really used by local football teams on a Sunday or the occasional funfair. However, a few years ago it was redeveloped and from the road it just looks like they dug a few ditches and left it.
Today we discovered that the redevelopment was a lot more impressive; now Sutcliffe park is a beautiful oasis with the backdrop of urban shite known as “The Ferrier Estate”.
What the council has done is create a wetland environment complete with bridges, a lake, and reedy marshland; it looked just like a mini wetlands centre. We wandered through the idyllic pastures towards the edge of the lake where a few families with young children were feeding the ducks, geese and moorhens. It was beautiful!

One noticeable difference, beyond the landscaping, was the people. When I was a kid they would have been white, battered-faced, fishwife women with tearaway kids shouting “fuck” all the time. Now they were excited but well behaved kids, with fishwife mums all wearing hijabs. Everyone else there was Polish. I love it.

As it was late in the day we had to leave soon after, but on the way out of the park, right where the Quaggy enters, we saw a Heron! A Heron in Sutcliffe Park!
There was also some loony bloke spouting incoherent, growling, claptrap into a video camera with a passionate by slightly mad voice. Look out for him on future Al Quaeda martyrdom videos.

One of the nicest things in the world is having a small, fluffy, green bird, with a beautiful pink neck, perch on the top of your laptop screen, grinding her beak.

Now don’t say I didn’t tell you to Choose Lewisham. And what did you do ? You didn’t Choose Lewisham did you ? No!

As a result of your negligence the poor bosses have had to make sacrifices. Yes, sacrifices! Wonderful, hard-working people like Claire Perry, the Chief Executive of Lewisham Hospital Trust, have had to personally sacrifice 68 of their staff as a result of your indifference. In her own words Claire Perry spells out the simple truth:

“The more people who choose to come to Lewisham, the more income we will get and the better our finances will be.”

It’s that simple. So go out and fucking choose Lewisham will you? I did, even though I wasn’t given a choice, so you can too. If you don’t then they’ll sack even more staff.

Perhaps even more shocking than the 68 staff they sacked are two of the senior bosses who are also about to lose their jobs. These particular people, Vivien Rhodes and Barry Etherton, are far more important than any of the 68 others; you can tell because they both earn around £90,000 which means they must be extremely skilled and talented. They also have further to fall than a bunch of common-or-garden nurses and cleaners so it’ll be harder for them. Thankfully the hospital has wisely decided to bung them £100,000 to cushion the harsh blow. Oh…and they’ll be taking them back on in a consultancy role. Even though the Trust is in financial shite, I confidently expect canny financial management like this will help them save the day.