Skip to main content

Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?


I was idling away some time in the excellent public library at Albany Village. Small but perfectly formed. Picked up an interesting looking book called: Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? by Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur. Very, very funny. I laughed out loud. A Cynical, laddish, opinionated A-Z…perfect. If you like the likes of Jeremy Clarkson or Charlie Booker.
I read pretty much the lot (except the obscure British topics - because, let's face it, who cares about their provincial little concerns and minor celebrities). Here's what they say about Prince Andrew:

In 2003, the fourth in line to the throne decided to travel from London to a lunch engagement in Oxford by chartered helicopter at a cost to the taxpayer of £2,939. When faced with complaints about squandering the public purse, a palace spokeswoman explained that reliability was paramount as the Oxford date was a state banquet in honour of Vladimir Putin. Sadly, 'setting out earlier' was, she continued, simply not possible as there was 'something he'd forgotten to do' and also 'something on the telly'.

Prince Andrew loves helicopters so much that when no helicopter can be found for him, he scampers up and down the palace corridors shouting: 'Mummy! 'Copter! Mummy! 'Copter!'
They are less flattering about Charles and their views of Prince William are just disturbing.

Another highlight was the entry about Che Guevara t-shirts (and other merchandise). You can read it and other extracts from the book on the website.

Don't buy the book from their site though. Buy it here and make an old man happy:

Is it just me or is everything shit?


It's probably bad e-commerce practice…distracting you from my latest compelling recommendation with some TV…but check out this Charlie Booker clip. At the very end are a couple of Scots geezers talk about old TV shows about technology. 'Parently there was one called DATBASE - at the end of which they broadcast software using the racket that dialup modems used to make and probably still do if you live in one of the many Telecom forsaken areas that don't have broadband access. Quite an interesting cultural artifact....recorders at the ready?...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St
Post a Comment
Read more and leave a comment

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse
1 comment
Read more and leave a comment

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer
9 comments
Read more and leave a comment