Update

I've been doing the reasonable thing recently and working and enjoying the sun. Neither of these really allow for internet-based ramblings, hence the drying stream of material. Well, you survived last summer and I'm sure you'll do it again. I'll update sporadically. Honest.

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

Four sites to keep an eye on

Other than this one, of course, here are four sites I heartily recommend for those among you (presumably all of you) who get a kick out of internet funnyisms:

Clients from hell
-Real conversations between graphic designers/web designers etc. and less-than-intelligent clients

F*** My Life
-You surely must've heard of this. Ever had a day you wish'd you hadn't?

Sleep Talkin' Man
-Probably mentioned this one before. Real excerpts from the weirdest sleep-talker in history

xkcd
-Obviously!

Another one!

We've just had another Jack Wills catalogue delivered. Thanks very much to the previous tenants for the continued entertainment. Mwuhahah!

If you enjoy these rants

Check out some of Time's rants in this lovely article detailing the worst inventions ever.

Clickez Here.

I've started you arbitrarily in the middle because of the slating it gives Kanye West. Hooray!

-Neop

Hideous outfit? That'll be all your money please.

So I was sitting here, on teh interwebz, minding my own business and considering how my experiment to see if a human can subsist entirely on ice-cream was going, when suddenly! Good god! Holy Blood Pressure Batman! I realised I could be shooting my word-bullets at blogger.com in a far more productive (?) use of wasted time. I also feel I owe some repentance for not having posted since forever, but I am doing this degree thing, and occasionally we get (totally unreasonably) asked to do some actual work, and exams etc etc. I've already written a sternly worded email to some MP or other about how I feel and I'm certain the entire existing academic system will bend to my finally-honed student opinion.

I'm in the extraordinarily fortunate position of having come into possession (at no cost to myself) of a catalogue. I think it's a catalogue anyway, it pitches itself as a "Summer Term Handbook".

Well anyway it has clothes in it, and prices, and is adorned with that brand name associated with every floppy haired public school ponce in Britain. It is, of course, a Jack Wills catalogue.

Or to give it the full title, Jack Wills University Outfitters Fabulously British Summer Term Handbook (I shit you not).

Or to give it its proper title, The Jack Wills Guide on How To Dress Like a Dickhole for Lots of Money.

I think my expectations of such a document were understandably low when I picked it up, but my GOD does it exceed all of them. I can't believe society tolerates people buying this kind of garish, hideous, clashing, overpriced turd instead of throwing them into a hideous lime-green polka dot insane asylum. Some of the skirts in this book look as though a square of fabric had dolly-mixture shat onto it and a few buttons attached. The models are so ridiculously overdressed they might've been shot with a wardrobe cannon, and the jumpers would make the most knit-happy Grandmother fall on her needles in shame. But the worst, the absolute WORST thing is the prices.

I will probably at some point put some pictures up from the catalogue to illustrate the insanely entertaining hobby of filling in the gap where the photographer cut the head off the model in the photo. For the meantime, I'll pick a few prime examples where I swear some joker buggered around with the printing and added some extra zeroes onto the prices.

Because the Jack Wills website was coded by an overkeen programmer who's just discovered Flash, it's sort of hard to put pictures up.... at any rate, imagine if you will a flowery, mid-thigh length dress with a bow on the front (strapless, if you really care). I guess a large number of asian orphans died making it because it's a staggering £300. THREE HUNDRED. You could buy a car for that. Or maybe (if you're of the feminine persuasion) a really fancy ball gown, but this is a bloody silly frock thing. You'd look classier in a tutu.

There's a jumper here, which is the kind of thing your dear, old, senile granny might give you for Christmas and which you'd lovingly bury deep in your wardrobe and hope never to see again. Mr Wills, however, thinks you'd pay £100 of your hard earned money for the privilege of dressing up like a tosser. There are far cheaper ways of destroying your social life and damaging everybody's eyesight. These two items (one, two), for example.

I can't possibly continue this to the end, but it goes on. There are bikinis made from dental floss for £50, socks for over £20, stupid camp-looking shirts that would make Boy George hack up blood for £35, and it's a good job it's clearly divided into men and women's clothes because, like emos, you can't tell by looking at them. There's a target market here which looks like people who hate owning money and don't have any mirrors. If you're one of those weird people who values currency you'd rightly laugh in the face of anyone cretinous enough to think this sort of stuff makes you look anything more than a pastel-shaded douchebag.

I think the people who see genuine attraction in this stuff probably get their well-off noses stuck in the front fifty pages for a good few hours and have lost all mental faculties by the time they begin to order things. This is because the first portion of this catalogue/well-photographed-freakshow is dedicated to basically soft-porn. Sure there's a couple of photos of people just wearing the clothes and looking like run-of-the-mill retards, but there's also a good number dedicated to barely (or not) concealed female toplessness, females cuddling, females in not-enough-clothes frolicking etc etc etc. Playboy probably ask them for ideas. Surely there's a time and a place for that sort of thing? I guess the lonelier guys out there might resort to a clothes catalogue for self gratification if it came to it but the whole affair looks awkward and pointless, like a hippo pole-dancing.

There's a lot more to be said for this frankly hilarious (and troubling) collection of pages which I might share in good time, but for now just remember that if you're ever tempted by this sort of thing there are perfectly decent, and cheap, plastic bags available in all manner of colours for you to poke your limbs and torso through.

And at the end of it, people will still be able to tell what sex you are.

-Neop

Gah

Never before have I ventured into an exam with the feeling that I have nothing but the most tenuous grasp of a subject. Curse you statistical mechanics!!

Zero Punctuation will keep me happy until my untimely intellectual demise.