Alex’s Blog

I spotted this make-up advert while I was in Hong Kong:

There’s something disturbing about it. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the range is called “Nude Inspiration”, yet the model is wearing thick, dark, make-up, there’s just something… erm, wrong about her eyes.

Is this a Photoshop disaster? Admittedly not quite as bad as Ralph Lauren‘s, but possibly more disturbing for being subtle.

Or is it just a trick of perspective?

Whichever, to me her eyes are either not at quite the same level, or one is closer to the centre of her face than the other.

Oh and her mouth is fucked up too.

I recently bought some Tesco Finest Handcooked Crisps, and I was rather impressed by the Serving Suggestion for the Lightly Salted flavour:

Yep, that’s right. Tesco’s recommendation for serving these crisps is… a sack of potatoes and some salt.

So, presumably Tesco thinks that the best way to consume these lightly salted crisps is to throw the packet away and make your own?

And as for their serving suggestion for the Sea Salt & West Country Cider Vinegar Flavour:

“We suggest to enjoy these crisps at their best, chuck ‘em away and just have some apples with some salt and vinegar. Yum yum!”

Here’s a joke I’ve seen doing the rounds:

Don’t know if this is just a sick coincidence but…. 2007 – Chinese year of the Chicken – Bird Flu Pandemic devastates parts of Asia 2008 – Chinese year of the Horse – Equine Influenza decimates Australian racing 2009 – Chinese year of the Pig – Swine Flu Pandemic kills pigs/humans around the globe. It gets worse…. Next year… 2010 – Chinese year of the Cock -what could possibly go wrong?

And in a briefer Twitter version:

2007 – year of chicken (bird flu). 2008 – year of horse (equine flu). 2009 – year of pig (swine flu) – shit – 2010 is year of the cock.

This fails as a joke on so many levels, it might actually be funny after all, but only as a hilarious example of how not to construct a joke:

• The years are wrong. 2007 was pig, 2008 rat, 2009 ox, 2010 tiger. And equine flu hit Australia in 2007.
• You don’t even need to look up the years anyway, as obviously a chicken and a cock are the same frickin’ animal (rooster, incidentally, which was 2005)
• The punchline asks us to imagine a scenario where genitals catch influenza, which doesn’t make much sense.

When I point out the failure of this joke, I get comments like “it’s supposed to be a joke – why let facts get in the way?”. Well, a good joke shouldn’t have glaring errors in it – if the audience’s response to a joke is “huh? Is that right? That doesn’t quite sound correct to me” then you’ve fucked it up.

Three men walk into a bar – an Englishman, an Irish woman, a Scotsman, a young Welsh girl and pigeon. The barman says, “is this some kind of poorly constructed joke?”

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Starburst (a.k.a Opal Fruits, if you insist, but come on – they changed the name in 1998) now have “50% more fruit juice”.

Which made me wonder, how much Starburst would you have to eat for it to count as one of your “five a day” fruit and vegetables?

• There 45 grams per pack.
• According to the ingredients, the fruit juice content is 13%
• So that makes 5.85g of fruit juice per pack

Now, 250ml of fruit juice is one of your “five a day”. Assuming that’s about 250g of juice, that means you would need to consume over 42 packs for it to count.

Or to put it another way, nearly 2 kilos of Starburst.

So that is how much Starburst the government recommends you eat, per day. Yes. That is what Gordon Brown himself has decided is the correct daily intake.

And with 403 calories per 100g, you’ll consume 7750 calories (3.1 times your Recommended Daily Allowance), and with 61.2g of sugar per 100g, you’ll consume 1.176kg of sugar. Which might contribute slightly to the obesity problem but at least you’ll be eating at least one fifth of the fruit and vegetables you require, and that’s good because they’re full of antioxidants and stuff.

In 1979, Gary Numan sang “You know I hate to ask… but are ‘friends’ electric?”. He was obviously making a very prescient point about the increasingly online and less personal nature of our social interactions thirty years into the future. Although to be honest, looking at the rest of the lyrics he was probably just singing any old random bollocks that came into his head.

All of which leads neatly into a discussion about Twitter.

I was catching up on a few blogs last week and I read three separate people talking about Twitter, so I thought I’d give it a go as it seems to be the latest hot internet thing, just like Facebook was a couple of years ago.

Now, I did get almost embarrassingly excited about Facebook back in April 2007, but so far I’m wondering what the point of Twitter is really. It’s a bit like Facebook status updates, instant messaging and blogging all rolled into one massive time wasting machine.

It’s cool in that I can now add my updates to my website, those same updates can appear as my Facebook updates, and that anybody at all can “follow” those updates, but it doesn’t really feel like I’m particularly gaining anything.

I suppose one of the attractions is that you can “follow” celebrities. Just like MySpace, you can pretend to be friends with a celebrity, with the advantage that it doesn’t require the celebrity to give a fuck about you. Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross are largely responsible for Twitter’s sudden popularity in the UK, and I can see that the prospect of reading about Russell Brand’s latest sexual indiscretions “live” as they happen must be pretty compelling, for a certain type of person.

So I don’t think I’ve particularly “got it” yet. At the moment I’m enjoying picking up interesting links to look at when bored, and it’s quite fun following people like Charlie Brooker and Richard Herring, whose “tweets” can be quite amusing, but I don’t think it can be too long before the novelty wears off.

I expect Twitter will develop over time, just as Facebook has, and it will find its mainstream niche. Hopefully it will become a bit easier to use – there are some strange conventions on there at the moment for things like “ReTweets” (basically forwarding someone else’s tweet) and sticking a hash “#” in front of a ”tag” to make it appear in some kind of search channel thing, all of which can make someone’s Twitter feed look pretty alien to a newcomer. I do wonder how much it can evolve though before the essential premise becomes lost. The worst thing would be for Twitter to “do a Facebook” and ruin the current simplicity by replacing it with a “platform” for garbage applications.

That said, there are a few simple things they could do. It’s hard to see replies to someone else’s tweet, other than by searching, and it would be good to have a bit more control over whose public replies you can see.

I’m interested in how Twitter is going to develop, so I think I’ll stick around for a bit longer.

If you’re interested in Twitter, here’s a link to a good NYTimes blog post about some of the current conventions and etiquette.

And if you want to follow me, here I am: http://twitter.com/alexwarren