Pointless But It Does My Head In

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
PBIDMHI: the phrase "for you own comfort and safety".

In public announcements and notices it always appends or prefaces some bit of obnoxiously patronising/infantilising 'ealf-n-safety microfascism.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
To Satisfy Our Pathological Fetish For Treating Mentally Competent Adults Like Wayward Toddlers, Please Do [X]/Do Not Do [Y].

My brother had a good one recently - he was on a train (en route to an airport) which moved about two feet and then stopped. He waited for a while and then there was an announcement about a fault somewhere or whatever, so he thought fuck it, I'll get a taxi. Except some jobsworth bitch wouldn't let him off the train "for his own safety" because it had "left the platform". Of course if she'd let him off the train he might have spontaneously combusted or something, and you can imagine the paperwork that would entail!

Eventually the train did move and he *just* managed to get away in time so that, a very expensive taxi ride later (missed the connecting train of course), he made it to the airport and we had a family Christmas after all.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
To Satisfy Our Pathological Fetish For Treating Mentally Competent Adults Like Wayward Toddlers, Please Do [X]/Do Not Do [Y].

My brother had a good one recently - he was on a train (en route to an airport) which moved about two feet and then stopped. He waited for a while and then there was an announcement about a fault somewhere or whatever, so he thought fuck it, I'll get a taxi. Except some jobsworth bitch wouldn't let him off the train "for his own safety" because it had "left the platform". Of course if she'd let him off the train he might have spontaneously combusted or something, and you can imagine the paperwork that would entail!

Eventually the train did move and he *just* managed to get away in time so that, a very expensive taxi ride later (missed the connecting train of course), he made it to the airport and we had a family Christmas after all.
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totally ridiculous, yes...but they probably do that as a safeguard against getting sued. there's always the one-in-a-million chance some nitwit will go to step off a train that has "left the platform", trip and fall and file a stupid-money lawsuit, which the transit authority often will be compelled to settle out of court for fear of losing even more money. maybe i'm just thinking of the US, where everyone sues over anything.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Leo said:
totally ridiculous, yes...but they probably do that as a safeguard against getting sued. there's always the one-in-a-million chance some nitwit will go to step off a train that has "left the platform", trip and fall and file a stupid-money lawsuit, which the transit authority often will be compelled to settle out of court for fear of losing even more money. maybe i'm just thinking of the US, where everyone sues over anything.
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Oh I know it's not entirely the train company's fault, it's the law and the lawyers and the whole fucking shitsystem that basically rewards stupidity and selfishness.
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
when people ask a designer, without providing any other information, "how much do you charge for a website?"

it's like walking up to a real estate agent and asking "how much for a house?"
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
http://adage.com/article/creativity...mail&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage

mccain-120207-1of1-adagesotd.jpg


Smell-Vertising Hits U.K. With Potato-Scented Bus Shelters

To promote its new product, Ready Baked Jackets, McCain Foods is tempting U..K consumers with the wafting smell of "3-D baked potatoes" as they wait at city bus shelters in York, Manchester, London, Nottingham and Glasgow.

When people press a button on a poster, a hidden heating element warms the fiberglass 3-D potato and releases the aroma of oven-baked jacket potato throughout the bus shelter. The aroma was developed over three months in collaboration with a specialist scent lab.

The shelters will also dispense a discount for the product: baked potatoes that are ready to eat from frozen in five minutes, but claim to offer the same smell and taste of slow oven-cooked potatoes.

Creative work is by ad agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay, with media booked by PHD and Hyperspace--the innovation division at Aegis Media's Posterscope.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think this is great and I can't wait for it to be extended to other commercially under-utilised senses. How about feel-vertising for the latest quilted toilet paper?
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
all this bitching about the GRAMMYs, not that i don't sympathize or find it amusing,
but WTF did you expect?? that the establishment would actually champion underground music??
or ANYTHING based on actual artistic merit???

it's like what Zizek said about people who criticize Obama -
WTF did you expect from a pawn like him, a real socialist revolution???
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
e/y said:
this Kony 2012 thing...feels wrong, even if the intentions are good.
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i just read about it quickly and it's a remarkable use of virals and well-intentioned, but yeah the whole thing leaves the same taste in the mouth as always in that it allows everyone to pretend (a) ongoing wars in the developing world 'just happen' and are not intimately linked to Western policy of perpetuating impoverishment; and (b) any white and Western war criminals, or non-Western criminals who are 'friendly to the West', will ever be in danger from something like this.
 
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yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film
There is growing outrage in Uganda over a viral internet film viewed by more than 32 million people in four days that suggests Africa’s longest-running conflict is still raging in the country’s north.

By Mike Pflanz, Nairobi

The 30-minute video, Kony2012, was produced by three American videographers campaigning for greater efforts to capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

But Kony and his diminishing troops, many of them kidnapped child soldiers, fled northern Uganda six years ago and are now spread across the jungles of neighbouring countries.

“What that video says is totally wrong, and it can cause us more problems than help us,” said Dr Beatrice Mpora, director of Kairos, a community health organisation in Gulu, a town that was once the centre of the rebels’ activities.

“There has not been a single soul from the LRA here since 2006. Now we have peace, people are back in their homes, they are planting their fields, they are starting their businesses. That is what people should help us with.”

Joseph Kony, a former church altarboy, has spread terror through eastern and central Africa for almost three decades, as he has pursued an aimless war that has killed thousands of people and at one point forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.

The video, from Invisible Children Inc, an activism organisation, was posted to YouTube and Vimeo, a film-sharing site, on Monday night and by late on Thursday it had been viewed 32,600,000 times.

It aims to make Kony “famous” by encouraging supporters to plaster US cities with posters, in order to make the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army an issue of “national interest” to Washington.

That, the video’s makers claim, will ensure funding for 100 US military advisors sent to train African armies to find Kony will continue.

“Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” said Javie Ssozi, an influential Ugandan blogger.

“Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.”

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist specialising in peace and conflict reporting, said: “This paints a picture of Uganda six or seven years ago, that is totally not how it is today. It’s highly irresponsible”.

There were criticisms that the film quoted only three Ugandans, two of them politicians, and that it spent more time showing the filmmaker's five-year-old son being told about Joseph Kony than explaining the root causes of the conflict.

Invisible Voices has faced criticism over its finances. Of more than £6 million it spent in 2001, less than £2.3 million was for activities helping people on the ground. The rest went on “awareness programmes and products”, management, media and others.

“It is totally misleading to suggest that the war is still in Uganda,” said Fred Opolot, spokesman for the Ugandan government.

“I suspect that if that’s the impression they are making, they are doing it only to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda.”

Invisible Children said the video focused on Uganda because its "people and government...have a vested interest in seeing him stopped".

"The LRA was active in Uganda for nearly 20 years, displacing 1.7 million people and abducting at least 30,000 children," it said in statement.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...2012-growing-outrage-in-Uganda-over-film.html
 
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