Lost Worlds

That's What They Think We Are Like

On a sachet of Nescafé Latte Skinny Less Than Half The Fat:

• Empty a sachet into a mug
• Fill the mug with 200ml of hot but not boiling water, stirring all the time. Add sugar or sweetener if required.

Is that how stupid they think we are?

No. They think we're stupider. Because the instructions continue:

• Enjoy your deliciously frothy latte!

Ah. Thank god they told me. I had been wondering what to do with the damnable stuff.

Technorati Tags: infantilization, advertising

"Gonna Miss You Loads" My Ass

Oh lord. Oh god. Shall I... no. Further comment would be otiose and we all kno otiose comment's like gunna make Kong like totally crap on the rug, right?

Technorati Tags: culture, infantilization, web

Irony-Free Zone, If Only Briefly

In 1994 the British conductor Paul McCreesh reconstructed a Lutheran Mass as it might have been sung on Christmas Morning 1620. The music was mostly by Michael Praetorius, with some by Samuel Scheidt and Johann Hermann Schein.

He recorded it in Roskilde Cathedral, Norway.

The 1640 organ at Roskilde

Praetorius is better-known for his secular and deliciously sexy Terpsichore, a collection of Renaissance dance music. This shows his other side, as a composer who delightedly embraced the new opportunities of Lutheranism. The recording is an astounding achievement -- certainly for me one of the finest recordings of the 20th century of anything, by anyone -- and a marvellous corrective to the seasonal sludge of sleighbells and hooting, viscous carols. Whether or not the Incarnation celebrated at Christmas was in any sense true, or whether the religion whose heart it lies at has any claim to validity, Praetorius's music and McCreesh's flawless and joyful interpretation make it all too clear why so many wanted, and want, to believe it. If the final In Dulci Jubilo -- a "macaronic" hymn which swings between the German vernacular and the pre-Lutheran Latin, and which, in doing so, sums up the spirit of Martin Luther's reforms, does not leave your heart singing, then there is no life in you. Imagine the cold morning, the filled church, the town trumpeters waiting (by Praetorius's own recommendation) outside in the snow, and then the doors thrown open, and the sound flooding in on a tide of light as they sing of heaven

Where the angels sing
New songs
And the bells ring
In the court of the King
Oh! to be there; Oh, to be there!

Bah? Possibly. Humbug? Perhaps. But a wonder all the same.

(And faintly, though unseasonally, pleasant to think that General Pinochet probably never heard it, nor ever will, even if there is no purgatory waiting to scour him or hell to gape.)

Technorati Tags: music, Baroque

The War On... What Was It Again?

Miles Davis would be in prison in the USA today; as a felon, he would be stripped of his right to vote; when released, he would be unable to get a student loan. His driving licence would be revoked and he could not travel to work.

So would Samuel Johnson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Gladstone, John Keats,Jimi Hendrix, William Wilberforce, Dorothy Wordsworth, W C Fields, Elvis, Sarah Bernhardt, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, Johnny Cash, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ray Charles, Wilkie Collins, Janis Joplin, Bella Lugosi, Sir Walter Scott, Marvin Gaye, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Eden, Branwell Bronte, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Lenny Bruce, Jean Cocteau and Tim Buckley.

Quite right too. They were all drug users. And the state must punish drug users. Ideally, the state must mostly punish black drug users, and the USA is doing well at that. As are we. But white drug users will do at a pinch.

Or you could look at it this way: if you are a black woman in America and you have a son, there is a one in three chance that your son will end up in prison.

Aren't we doing well, with this war on drugs?

Now go and have a look at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and ask yourself: What have we learned?

(Nothing. Absolutely nothing.)

Dies Irae, Adonai Elohenu al-Hamdalillah

The Sunday Times reports that

Thousands of dying patients are being denied the last rites because hospital chaplains are not being given access to their personal records to establish their religion.

Why? The Data Protection Act -- foreseen by Aeschylus in the Oresteia; in which the watchman says "For them as knows, I'll speak. For the rest: my mind's a blank."

Another. Damned. Disclaimer.

The Burger King "I'm a man" commercial? Where Men in muscle vests and hard hats show how Manly they are by eating 20,505,321 calories of meat? Have you noticed how, halfway through, a subtitle flashes up which says:

"FILMED ON A CLOSED ROAD

?

What it should say is:

Most MEN in muscle vests and hard hats are actually GAY ICONS and
LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and
eat LETTUCE

Vista™®™™®™®™™™® - It's™ sublime®

The image of Windows™®©™ Vista©™®:

What are they looking for, this cosy adventurous couple perched in a Rousseauiste landscape of uncompromisingly pure sublimity? A computer that works, perhaps? But this has nothing to do with computing, and everything to do with not-computing.

And whatever it is they are looking for, they haven't yet found it.

But let's remember that Rouseau found it necessary for the™ sublime to make him afraid.

Technorati Tags: computing

It Was The Voices In My Head That Made Me Do It, Honest

If the corporation is a legitimized psychopath[1] then the advertising industry is a schizophrenic; behaviour associated with schizophrenia includes confabulation (making up stories to fill in the blanks), associative looseness, neologisms, clang association, word salad, and echolalia...

ADDENDUM: The redoutable Seamus McCauley accuses me of supporting the film of The Corporation and Bakan's thesis in general. Just to clarify, I haven't seen the film [2] and I think Bakan's thesis is, in essence, bollocks - largely because it houses, at its very core, a nasty little category mistake.

[1] Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.(First published in the USA by Free Press - Simon & Schuster, 2004). London: Constable, 2004.

[2] But am now going to have to see, thanks to McCauley's attack on it and me. Sodding blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: film

Sorry, But You Are So Stupid You Need It To Rhyme

I bought some miso. It is perfectly decent miso. You squeeze it out of the little plastic packet (which is itself satisfying) and add hot water and lo!, miso, and LO!, bits of seaweed.

But they can't just sell miso. No; they need a little rhyme. Here you go:

Sushi made Japan-easy™.

Is the terrible thing

(a) That they think a little rhyme will make us think "Gosh, I'll buy that stuff, which I wouldn't have otherwise"? Or
(b) That the little rhyme itself is so inane? Or
(c) Grown-up people with families and hopes and lives actually sat round thinking it up? Or
(d) They were prepared to take the money? Or
(e) Some asshole actually trademarked the little rhyme, filling in all those forms and putting a suit on and being important? Or
(f) The trade mark people didn't say "Oh for heaven's sake grow up and fuck off."?

Or is the terrible thing, as usual, that that's what they think we are like?

The Post-literate Society

Mark Bernstein blogged this pictogram:

One of the very few which doesn't fall foul of the Utterly Bloody Pointless Pictogram rule, which goes as follows:

(1) Not everyone can read.
(2) Therefore we should give them notices -- NOTICES! We need LOTS OF NOTICES! -- in pictographic form.
(3) But the pictographs are often incomprehensible, so
(4) Underneath the pictogram, we write an explanation. Which means that
(5) A significant number of people can neither understand the pictogram nor the explanation. Which in turn means
(6) They are just ignorant (from the Latin ignoro, 'I do not know') while we are fools (from the English fools, "fools".)