We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The war is winding down into its “this war isn’t over yet – there are still pockets of resistance” phase, and now, I feel, is the time to be talking about soya sauce, and its various occidental rivals. In connection with soya sauce, my blog-enthusiasm of the week, Dave Barry, is right when he says that you need to experience this. This is a catchy tune full of fun, cleverly illustrated by a team of top graphic designers. This illustrated tune both promotes a Japanese brand of soya sauce, and criticises non-Japanese rivals, such as “Worcestershire” Sauce (which I prefer to think of as Worcester sauce but that may just be me).
Is this one of the futures of advertising on the Internet? It’s no good just putting up a sign saying “buy our soya sauce – it’s very nice”, although I’ve seen far stupider slogans. No, you need a bit of wit, fun, pep, fizz, and Dave Barry appeal. That way your stupid advert will stop being a mere advert and become an Internet Meme.
And could it also be one of the futures of pop music? There was a time when advertising jingles were strictly poor cousins to regular non-promotional pop songs. But could the economics of the music business be about to change this? After all, these people want you to listen to this tune for free, and to circulate it to all your friends and internet contacts. They make their money when everyone reveals their increased awareness of the brand to market researchers and when they buy the sauce.
On the subject of non-Japanese rivals, I was at school with a chap called Perrins, whose family were involved with Lea & Perrins Sauce, which is a particular variety of Worcester Sauce. Perrins had unlimited supplies, but we would have preferred it if he had been called Rowntree (like the gruesome Senior Prefect in Lindsay Anderson’s movie If), or perhaps Mars, or maybe Cadbury. The Lea & Perrins website calls its product “Worcestershire” sauce too, I notice. And this site also elaborates on the Worcester sauce theme, although this one calls it “Worcherstershire” sauce, which is definitely wrong. Personally I don’t much like Worcester Sauce, although I quite like Worcester Sauce flavoured crisps. However, I prefer these Marmite flavoured crisps, which are truly excellent, and also greatly to be preferred to Bovril flavoured crisps, in my opinion.
Best of all, saucewise, is surely Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. Who can forget the product placement of this mighty mayo in Woody Allen’s movie Hannah and Her Sisters? Not me, I can tell you that for nothing.
Aaaaahhhh … braaaaaaands.
Not everything at or linked to by b3ta.com is fun, but a lot of it is.
I liked their picture of the Dalek on a chairlift. As they say: problem solved. This is a reference, I believe, to a cartoon from years back, in which a Dalek confronts a staircase and says: “There goes our plan for dominating the universe.” And they had a good “What if Hitler had won?” graphics competition. (“Reich Crispies” packet, etc.) But I couldn’t find these any more so you’ll just have to take my word for them. I think part of the idea of b3ta.com may be to make money, or to help some people to make money, or something like that, hence the way things get switched off. Elucidating comment welcome.
But you can always dig back in their blog archives and find links to other things, links which don’t go away. I did, and found a link from this page (lower down) to these rather fine teddy bears. Knock them over and up they get again, every time.
Actually I suspect that children may prefer the teddy bears to adults. Let me try again. I suspect that children may like the teddy bears better than adults like the teddy bears. Of course children prefer teddy bears to adults.
I know what you’re thinking. What have jumping teddy bears (for they do indeed jump) got to do with The War? Well, The War has now got to the stage where irrelevant joking around now seems like an appropriate thing to be doing, along with noting the war’s progress with due solemnity, i.e. some. Well, I suppose there could be a Republican Guard version of these bears, where they march towards you with their paws up as soon as your mouse pointer gets anywhere near them. But then what? Ah, that is the big question. Time to end this post.
The British commander of troops in the Gulf admitted yesterday that he had been forced to borrow a pair of American desert boots because of a foot injury. Air Marshal Brian Burridge, asked how he had come by the injury, replied: “Kicking a journalist.”
According to Fox News Washington House of Representatives Capitol Hill cafeterias now only serve “freedom fries”.
So why don’t they just call them by their correct name instead?
Chips.
So, just three things here so far today, one very short and two rather serious. So here are a couple of curiosities.
First, there is this map, which was originally claimed to have been taken posthumously by Columbia before it burned and crashed. You want this to be true, don’t you? As did Michael Jennings. But as I commented at Michael’s, those killjoys at snopes.com have now killed this particular joy. But it is still a thing of beauty, and certainly has my little country looking its best. Snopes says it is “false”, but their map is even bigger than the one Michael put up, so they liked it even as they trashed it.
And the other is a beating heart, courtesy of b3ta.com. Who are those guys?
When you consider all the metaphorical baggage that has been loaded onto the human heart over the centuries, it turns out to be very small and yucky, and you can swap yours for another with “you” carrying on pretty much as usual. It’s just a pump.
And a picture is just a picture.
You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law, Sod’s Law and various other codifications of observations about human affairs. How about this one?
One of the comments to an earlier post of mine, made by Mark Griffith, seemed to embody such a fundamental truth of commercial life that it deserves to be a law in its own right.
“Speaking as someone from Manchester, I can tell you the Guardian is not the only Mancunian organisation to get silly after moving to the capital.
“Marks and Spencers’ troubles really date from the shift of its head office from Manchester to London.
“Come to think of it, I believe the headquarters of the hyper-merde bank Credit Lyonnais were relocated to Paris, not Lyon, a couple of decades ago, before the debt disaster really took off.
“Could we have a theme here?”
Can readers think of any other examples?
It may be a response to our inability to halt the ageing process that causes so many of us to plot out our memories with milestones: first day at school, first kiss, first job, marriage, birth of child etc.
I think we mark these milestones because they provide us with a certain comfort. If we cannot go back then at least we can progress. Change is an option and one never knows what tomorrow may bring.
I say this because I think it is time for me to acknowledge another milestone. Truth be told, it was raised a little while ago but it is only now that I am forced to grant it full recognition: pop culture and I have gone our separate ways. It was a passionate and intimate relationship while it lasted, but now the ‘spark’ has gone. We’ve both moved on and changed. I’m not the same, it’s not the same. There’s no communication any more. Time to call it a day. Not only do I no longer know who is topping the charts, I no longer care.
I think the actual epiphany came about two years when I managed to get myself caught up in some sort of street festival on my way home from work one night. Not even for a fleeting second did the idea of joining in occur to me. Finding myself in the midst of a gang of teen-somethings gyrating furiously to some noise or other reminiscent of a car alarm, my overwhelming desire was to be somewhere else. I was tired, I was hungry and I really, really wanted to be home.
Nowadays my internet radio ‘favourites’ list has been stripped of virtually everything except classical stations the hegemony of which is only occasionally broken by a nostalgia trip back to the 80’s. I would rather drop paving stones onto my bare toes than go to a rock concert and, even if that were not so, just how ridiculous would I look leaping up and down, punching the air among a crowd where the next oldest person was still young enough to be my daughter? I find myself examining old T-shirts and thinking they might make useful dusters. → Continue reading: They all look the same to me
Two delightfully silly things, no doubt with strangely profound cultural over- or do I mean undertones attached to them if only I could think of them, are to be found linked to and exhibited at 2Blowhards today. There are singing horses (be sure, as Michael says, to click on the various horses), and there is the Americanised Mona Lisa.
Alice agrees. (And while you’re there check out her libertarian defence of the Stone Age – press “HOME” on the left if you are doing this so soon that the Blogger archiving idiocy blots it out because it’s the newest posting – google are you listening? I’m bored with libertarian arguing, so I haven’t commented on this, but all those still excited by libertarian arguing should comment away.) Alice and I also seem to agree that the LOTRhymes rappers aren’t so good. Personally I dislike rapping and am also Bored of the Rings, as the pun goes, never having been that excited by them in the first place, so I think it’s a LOT of cRap.
But the horses are great, as is the ML’s new cleavage.
The 13-year-old girl submitted the following essay to a teacher in a state secondary school in the west of Scotland and explained that she found it “easier than standard English”:
My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.
Translation: My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it’s a great place.
Text messaging, or SMS (short message service), has turned into a new mobile phone language and has rapidly become one of Britain’s favourite pastimes. As the keypad of a mobile phone is difficult to navigate, text message groupies, mostly children, have developed a shorthand to make life a bit easier.
But their English teachers don’t like it:
There must be rigorous efforts from all quarters of the education system to stamp out the use of texting as a form of written language so far as English study is concerned.
There has been a trend in recent years to emphasise spoken English. Pupils think orally and write phonetically. You would be shocked at the numbers of senior secondary pupils who cannot distinguish between their and there. The problem is that there is a feeling in some schools that pupils’ freedom of expression should not be inhibited.
However, the decline in literacy has probably more to do with teachers being ‘confused’ about how to teach reading. Another reason why many seven-year-olds cannot write properly is because their teachers do not know enough grammar to teach it effectively.
At the heart of the problem was the education strategy’s “ambiguous guidance” on phonics – a teaching method where children learn how the sounds of words are written instead of trying to memorise their shape. Brian Micklethwait has dealt with this topic on Samizdata.net here and here and I am sure the debate continues on Brian’s education blog. So go and read, if interested. I will just leave you with this txt:
If u wan2 undRst& tXt m$ges thN IMO u nEd a SMS DXNRE or no1 will think ur c%l. nuf Z.
On tonight’s TV show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ a contestant was asked “Who in 2002 became known as ‘The Quiet Man’ of British Politics?”
The contestant – an attractive if not terribly bright brunette – was offered four choices:
- John Prescott
- Kenneth Baker
- Edward Heath
- Ian Duncan Smith
She had no idea. She used her 50/50 lifeline which left her with Baker and Duncan Smith. She slightly guessed the latter but felt she needed to call her father. He promptly said: “IDS”.
Last year a programme on the same game show asked a father and son who the leader of the Conservative Party was. The programme was recorded the day after Ian Duncan Smith made his first speech as leader of the Conservative Party at the Party Conference. The son said “I haven’t a clue”, the father thought it might be Kenneth Clarke. They asked the audience. A minority knew the answer. Finally they called a friend and got the correct response, although on that occasion the friend wasn’t so sure.
One of these blokes is the leader of the Conservative Party… apparently.
Well, it seems to have been a slow day here on Samizdata. Me, I’ve been putting up CD shelves and then preparing for one of my Friday evenings, so I’ve not had much time to samizdatise. But I now have time to get a link to this up before midnight, this being a strange sort of variable diagram where a bunch of cartoon economists watch what happens. That’s a bad explanation I realise. When this diagram gets taken down and historians of this blog wonder what I was talking about, they’ll just have to carry on wondering.
I don’t know what it signifies, but I find it oddly entertaining. Perhaps it refers to the tendency of economists to be rather too attentive towards merely numerical data, and to neglect more important but less measurable phenomena. So, not Austrian economists then.
My thanks to the deeply strange people at B3TA for the link to this.
It is good to see Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of that fine weapon that was for so many years an icon of violent socialism, finally succumbing to full blown capitalism.
Coming to your neighbourhood soon… Kalashnikov umbrellas, snow boards and cocktails: products for real men!
More seriously, it seems only fair that the man who created what is pretty much the definitive assault rifle finally gets to make a buck or two out of his masterpiece.
(link via Kevin Connors)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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