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

Fat: The New Smoking (Cont'd)

The new NICE "guidelines" on obesity in the UK - download them here or read a -- hahahaha -- pre- digested version just confirm that being fat is the new smoking. Worse than smoking, even.

Well of course anyone can give up smoking if they have the willpower and are ostracised and nagged and made to feel repugnant so I suggest we probably should do the same to fat people. Don't let them be fat on aeroplanes or buses. Have No Fatties sections in restaurants and No Sweating sections on public transport and Thank You For Not Wheezing And Puffing signs everywhere. Make it legal for employers to specify No fat people need apply. Make them stand outside in the rain if they want to be fat at work.

But of course they wouldn't mind being outside in the cold and rain. Being fat keeps you warm.

Technorati Tags: culture, health, Medicine, Nanny State

And You Thought It Was More Dangerous in The Dark...?

Scarborough (oh God help us) has cancelled its switching-on of the Christmas lights because people were coming to watch. Which gave rise to concerns on -- all together now -- "health and safety grounds".

And how (according to the inevitable spokesman) was the decision not taken?

"Lightly," of course.

Technorati Tags: health & safety, tragedy

This Is Your Captain SpeaKABOOM

Thinking of flying RyanAir? A recent report from the AAIU into an incident in which a collision (with the ground, at Knock) was "narrowly avoided" has shown up so much corner-cutting, toothless regulation, bad cockpit management and just about everything else you mightn't want to happen on an aircraft you were flying on, that you might want to think of flying on another airline or maybe just not going at all.

Some of the comments on PPRUNE, the Professional Pilots' Rumour Network, that are really disturbing. Anyone who's ever flown RyanAir knows that its management are cost-cutting pricks who have nothing but contempt for their passengers, headed by the prick-in-chief, Michael O'Leary - who allegedly has threatened to move his entire operation to Eastern Europe if the toothless old whore of a clapped-out "regulatory" body, the IAA, don't co-operate.

There's too much stuff in the PPRUNE forum to quote here. But when you see the pilots sitting at the sharp end of your next RyanAir flight, you might like to know how their day began:

Well yes, believe or not we do have pre flight briefings but just try to do them in 45 min. for a 4 sector day including:
* gathering all the info. (aircraft reg, pax numbers, stand, etc.)
* printing your own plogs
* printing your own met & notams
* ordering your fuel
* brief cabin crew
* collect jepp. fotocopies of all the destinations, alternates and of course checking that each single plate is up to date.
* Fill our container with water for the day (I am embarrassed to even tell that one)
* long walk to the aircraft
* and nowadays we do fuel supervision as well.
Throw on top of that printers that don't work, zero wind plogs, missing jepp. plates and a total chaotic crew control with only one person to control 45 flights during the first morning wave and you will see the recipe for a disaster happening very quick.
Of course you always have the option to show up well before and break the IAA approved 10 hour minimum rest that we get.

Reassuring, yes? Nice to know the regulators of the Nanny State are looking after us so well. For, of course, our comfort and safety...

Technorati Tags: air crash investigation, aviation, RyanAir, travel

They Just Don't Learn, Do They?

Another perpetual-motion scam (with the usual it's-not-quite-perpetual-motion scam provisos in its corporatist huffing) has demanded that all websites remove all references to it.

Oh men of Nikkogen, don't you realise that that sort of blowhard nonsense is only going to make more of us plaster references to Nikkogen, together with possibly (though probably not quite) unrelated phrases such as "pull the other one" and "bollocks, if you ask me", all over blogs which wouldn't have mentioned Nikkogen (although we might well have mentioned other annoyances, entirely unrelated to Nikkogen, such as people who think we're idiots, and grandstanding assholes who think that by sending out stroppy letters they'll get us to do exactly what they want.

Doesn't work any more, Guys At Nikkogen. The estimable Tim Worstall explains why. But if you want to read the stuff for yourself -- the horror! the horror! -- have a look at what seems a little slippery, in the way that snake oil is slippery: a slipperiness which is explained at the excellent Ministry of Truth.

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

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?