Returning from a month long sabbatical

As a great man once said, I'm sorry for the delay.

My 6.5 readers must be positively furious at my sluggishness in producing another posting for you to feast on with your semi-sarcastic-literature loving brains. Working in a public-facing job certainly gives you a new perspective on life: one filled with the vacant, dopey grin of your average prepubescent science centre visitor rampaging around the venue with all the restraint of an angered mammoth, gleefully crashing into exhibits and thumping exposed buttons and levers with whichever bit of their anatomy is most convenient; before thundering off towards their next target when the machine they've just assaulted doesn't function correctly because it's now broken.

A mammoth skeleton. I'd be pretty damn angry if I was dead.

Such experiences, whilst certainly drawing a degree of my aggravation, apparently do not lend themselves to immediate blogging: and instead take some time to digest and form into coherent thoughts, lest this monologue descend into thirty five paragraphs of obscenities and death threats.

I plan shortly on writing to His Grand Awesome-hatted Holiness The Pope directly, in order to inform him he is looking for saints in all the wrong places. True saints are those that can confront one of these Tasmanian devils with a cheerful smile and kind words, day in; day out, without so much as thinking of braining them to death with a sledgehammer. All power to them.

Anyway, I hope to follow up with some more lengthy posts in the coming weeks. I have a certain TV game show squarely in my sights: which I feel wins the award for "Most Inane Piece of Drivel Ever Excreted From Simon Cowell's Production Company"- a prestigious award indeed. No prize if you guess what it is. Or what colour it is.

See you soon.

Neop

The Big Huge Epic Advert Hating Rant Part 1

Inspired by being reintroduced to TV after my self-imposed televisual exile at University, I've decided to commemorate the stupidest adverts ever (that I can find) with a nice little blogging. Rather than do a countdown of the worst adverts ever (which was my original intention, but has been done many times) I'm going to pick out a few choice pieces of thick-headedness and give them my own coveted Neophlegm Patented Advert Award 2010®. Without further ado, let's see the winners!



The Duct-Tape and DVD award for Most Forced Movie Tie-In


We're probably used, by now, to the relentless capitalist empires of large firms throwing money at big Movie production companies to leisurely paste their logo all over the resulting film. Audi in I Robot and Iron Man, Sony in Terminator Salvation, iPods in.... everything. But while these at least bear a passing relation to the subject matter of the film, I think the forced-marriage of Twilight and Volvo leaves many, many questions unanswered:

The Microsoft Help Centre award for Useless Information

This category is dedicated to all those adverts which tell you absolutely bugger all about their product, under the pretence of being useful. I was tempted to award this to anything with a figure like "75% of Women prefer [Product]" but instead have to award this to any advert which includes the phrase "Up to 100%". There are plenty of these, but the one I've highlighted here is a particularly retarded Head and Shoulders advert which gives you the useful information that it can make you 'up to 100% flake free'. 

This tells you two useful things: That you may be anything UNDER 100% flake free (for example, 0% flake free, which presumably means your head is one enormous flake... yummy), and that it will never make you MORE than 100% flake free (which I imagine would mean it had an area effect which cleared other people's dandruff?). Anyway, video here if you need reminding how easy it is to baffle large groups of people with figures and crap French soundtracks.

The Mel Gibson Award for Barely Concealed Racism

There are a worrying amount of entrants in this category: of note are Sony's poorly thought out PSP ad, and this more obscure advert courtesy of an air-headed Spanish basketball team.

The runaway (pun intended) winner however, is this wonderfully bad-taste piece that appeared from Intel a few years ago, which is definitely not a concealed veil for white supremacy. Original piece on Gizmodo.

The High School Musical Award for most Cringe Inducing Soundtrack

If you're expecting a certain cereal advert for this section, I'd like you to consider that 'cringing' is not the same as 'contemplating murder'. Be patient.

This category though, I think is jointly won by two different stupid pieces of advertising garbage for two different reasons. The first winner is this pathetic attempt to appear 'cool' by one of those oh-so-trendy sofa companies DFS, who saw fit to pick out a bunch of photogenic but otherwise useless actors using a recruiting piece which probably ran "Wanted- Actors to mime horribly to utterly inappropriate soundtrack for Sofa store ad. Must have no appeal whatsoever, and dance moves that would make Michael Jackson cough up blood".

The second winner is something of a no-brainer, and doesn't really need any introduction, except to say that there probably aren't many people left who don't want to cause some amount of bodily harm to this guy.

Anyway- that does it for part 1. More to come in part 2 later this week. Keep your eyes open!

-Neop