Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
Compendium of quirky calendars for non-conformists
December 9th, 2009 | 
Author: I’d like to apologise to our readers and my blogging colleagues for the unannounced and prolonged downtime experienced over the last couple of weeks. I have resigned from the finance department and a chimp equipped with basic numeracy and organisation skills has been found to usurp me.
Ostentatious debutantes eviscerated for your year-round delectation
Somehow we have entered December, after what feels like only a few months into 2009.
Tesco and all the despotic UK retailers have been ready for Christmas since minutes after Halloween fizzled out, merchandising decorations and the like everywhere you turn.
Marketers love spinning sales off the back of the seasonal festivities that pepper the calendar year. September is the ideal time to buy back-to-school home and contents cover. DFS love to drive home the importance of getting a brand new sofa every December, “the ideal family Christmas present”. (That of course relies on you having not already bought one every bank holiday so far this year. But make sure to leave room under the stairs for just one more settee which you’ll inevitably rush out to get at 12:01am on Boxing Day!)
One thing you’ll find in nearly every shop around now is 2010 calendars. There’s a calendar for the usual tastes out there, from cute West Yorkshire terriers to marine life photography. Yay! Dolphins frolicking about in enclosures in the Dominican Republic, secretly plotting our demise…
For all the hormonally addled teenster there’s calendars of Hollyoaks hunks or The Bill babes. Mm, Roberta Taylor in a negligee in January.
But that’s all a bit run of the mill. For more select tastes, you can gawp at goats that’ve climbed trees to gain a better picture of the surrounding pastures.
Or, if you’re a loathsome sadist, there are 12 captivating photographs of non-descript beasts with their viscera caulked all over the highways of America.
Have you got a hilarious idea for a calendar? Are you set to appear in one, in a reputation-shattering compromising situation? Let us know!
Alive and tweeting
Twitter bird finally giving up the ghost
The whole developed world is in the grip of #TwitterMania – even the interred are getting in on the action.
The bizarre movement of providing a global audience with a play-by-play of sordid exploits began life as a medium of communication for lazy bloggers and self-important narcissists three years ago. Some purport that its name is an acronym for the unnatural phrase “text (of) what I’m thinking toward everyone reading”. This is unconfirmed by the bastard who created the damn thing, Jack Dorsey.
@somepointmid2008 the corporations got their sleazy mitts on it and turned it into an advertising medium more sinister and asinine than TV – something I never thought possible.
Now, with a new and inevitably bleaker decade approaching, and with nearly all the good old celebs dead, metaphysical brainfarts from our loved and lost idols are beamed in from both realms of the afterlife, lest we should miss out on a single minute of the infernal quandary or unbridled paradise of famous souls milling about waiting for The Final Judgement.
Where the elite have no shame
Only a truly self-righteous prick would want everything they own to be red.
Bono is widely accredited with being smug, arrogant and self-righteous. Not content with this public stance he continually goes on to prove everyone right by using the plight of the third world as a marketing outlet.
Project Red customises popular wares with a unique red fascia. Phones, iPods, t-shirts and what have you all come in red so that people just as bare-faced can simultaneously accessorise and brag about their tireless charitable efforts.
Purchasing the Motorola Red phone sends £10 straight to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, and £130 to Motorola. I daren’t suggest what proportion of this went to the Global Fund to Kit Bono out with a Limitless Collection of Ostentatious Commodities (GFKBLCOC).
Message for the kids: don’t do Grog
El futuro del journalismo: copio y pasto!
I have, as we all know, great respect for journalists. In the UK, journalism is a singularly snobby and inbred profession, filled with cantankerous buffoons who earn too much money for too much opinion, which ensures we receive nothing but the highest quality of reporting and commentary.
The internet has proved a massive boon for these bastions of bollocks, as now all they have to do is cut and paste any old twaddle and suddenly they have a news story, such as this famous little gem that appeared in several of the London freebies and the Private Eye last month. Fact checking? Pah! Fact checking is for pussies.
Stupid ways to earn a living #2: writing
JK Rowling: queen of fiction and everyfuckingthing else
I know. You’re thinking, what the hell? That’s a weird topic, considering a sizeable proportion of Iwilldothatformoney’s team are writers. The thing is, we’re not pretending anything. We know Iwilldothatformoney is never going to make money — we produce this blog for the mere joy of enriching the world every day with pithy, insightful and witty commentary… And as for our other writing, well, we do that because we’re mental. A strong dose of insanity is needed for someone to want to be a writer.
Being a writer is not easy. It’s a peculiar thing. Many writers hate writing; loathe it with a passion (as much as they hate clichés) — and yet, they must write, because the alternative (which would be not writing, for those following at home) is so much worse. Who would voluntarily select a life of such day-to-day repugnance?
Celebrity gossip – a value proposition
More relevant and relatable than you: Banff National Park squirrel shot to fame accidentally - his upcoming album is now tipped to be Christmas #1
Imagine Iran launched a nuke right in the middle of the Baftas, or Grammys, and it was aimed at the hypothetical venue in question, killing everyone important in the world (everything crossed! – alas, I jest.)
Our tabloids would be devoid of content after a week.
They have Sunday supplements and obits prepared eons ago, waiting to be sent to press at the touch of a button. But what then? There will probably be attempts to make icons out of grieving relatives, but I have little enough faith in humanity to expect this to be met with widespread derision and the eventual collapse of the gossip tabloid market. Yay! Here’s hoping!
Tags: celebrities, dumbasses, exploitation, fashion, gossip, marketing, media, money waste, publishing, tv | 
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Picking a paper: a bluffer’s guide to the UK press
UK newspapers: toilet paper for the inky arsed
Journalism in the UK is regarded as being some of the most exciting in the world. We’d like to think this is because we have that famous British sense of irony, but mostly it’s because our papers really enjoy pissing people off.
As a foreigner coming into the country, picking a paper can be daunting. The paper you read can define not only your politics, but also your social status and even your level of intelligence. The British are notoriously snobbish about many things, and we love nothing more than to exhale sadly at someone’s choice of paper.
Never fear, though: as always, we’re here to help. Read on for the bluffer’s guide to the UK press. From the hallowed pages of the Financial Times to the dirty toilet paper of the Daily Star, you need never worry again that your colleagues will see the paper you’re reading and think, “My god, that people are as dumb as a bag of hammer.”
Essex police unveil new meaning of the word ‘fact’
Ignore the facts, the police chief knows all.
People in Essex have more chance of winning the Lotto than being mugged, police authority chief Robert Chambers claims. However, the data available from Camelot and Essex Police websites tell a different story.
Mr Chambers insisted that his statement was ‘fact’. “You are more likely to win the lottery than you are to get mugged in Essex,” he said, “That’s a fact.”
Figures on the force website record 276 robberies in Essex between the start of April this year and the end of June; the monthly average is shown to be 92 muggings throughout the county.
Dumbasses for Dummies – a guide to virtual stupidity
Available now from all bad bookstores
The internet is a marvel. Since its incarnation as a tool to enable research to be shared between universities, it has grown so much. It is now an interactive platform capable of enabling myriad arseholes an outlet for their barely coherent and almost always misinformed outbursts under the guise of “Having your say”.
Anyone who has used the internet to share their opinion, ever, will be familiar with the kind of ignorant nonsense that some folk consider to be worthy of voicing. Go to a news site, or forum, anywhere, and scroll down to below the story. Read the first comment from “NRA_4EVA” – see?
When YouTube was first launched I fully expected it to turn into a catalog of near death experiences captured by dim-witted American college kids, yearning to imitate their Jackass heroes. For a while I was right. Then the corporations found out they could “leverage” sales out of “viral” marketing yada yada yada.
Tags: art, crime, dumbasses, exploitation, fake-tan, infomercial, link salad, morons, opinion, publishing, review, social media, spam, video, web 2.0 |
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Terry Smith: proving that crime minus thinking doesn’t pay
The Art of Armed Robbery
‘Dumbass’ is a rubbish word. With so many insults available to advocates of the English language, it is a word that should be buried and left for dead. ‘Idiot’, ‘ignoramus’, ‘cretin’, ‘dolt’, ‘moron’, ‘simpleton’… All of these should be more than capable of ousting the word ‘dumbass’ from common usage.
Except that, sometimes, there is no other word that so perfectly captures the essence of a person. Some people, through their own ridiculousness, are so suited to being referred as a dumbass that the word simply cannot be laid to rest, lest we start thinking of them as somehow intellectually equal to goats.
