The Guardian devotes page 3 to a story about Coldplay writing a theme song for the Conservatives. The back page carries a full page ad explaining a new service that enables you to scan your Nectar card with your mouse. Inside, BMW announces new pixel paint that makes your car look blurry to anti-dawdling speed cameras.
God, I hate April Fools.
It’s not that I’m scared of falling for a fake news story, or of embarrassing myself by phoning BMW to enquire about their pixel paint. It’s that mostly, the spoofs aren’t funny. Vaguely amusing ideas are stretched to breaking point, mangled until every last bit of comedy has been squeezed out. It’s a collective sense of humour failure, the print equivalent of the pub bore who tells you the world’s least funny joke and then howls with laughter until you stab him in the eyes with a sharpened cocktail stirrer. It’s this bloke:
Comments
0 responses to “Ha bloody ha”
You are of course right about all the april fools stories, but thats not the real revelation of this post. I mean FFS! You read The Guardian? Are you kidding? I picked up a copy once and it was jobs supplement day. I swear if I hadn’t bought the damn thing myself I would have been convinced it was a spoof. Page upon page of jobs for social workers and teachers and nothing else….
It’s very much a hack’s paper – most journos I know read it, particularly IT ones. That’s probably because its tech coverage is much better than in other papers, although the constant banging on about podcasts gets annoying after a while.
Best newspaper website too, in the UK at least.
Page upon page of jobs for social workers and teachers and nothing else….
Ah, the Society supplement. Cleverly named to show how superior they are to those who aren’t concerned with the Really Important Issues in the world. And to prove Thatcher wrong. “There is such a thing as Society: it’s in the Guardian every Wednesday.”
Haloscan ate my /i !
I suspect you’re maybe reading too much into it, Stephen. Sure, it’s a section for the stereotypical guardian reader, but as it covers public sector jobs and runs stories about social work, public housing and so on it’s a pretty good description. Same way the Film & Music supplement is about Music and Film :)
>There is such a thing as Society
Ah, I love the there’s no such thing as society comment. It must be the best misunderstood/taken out of context comment since the classic ‘Only man who could lose the war in a day’ about Jellicoe…
Not convinced. “Society pages” is practically a generic term.
Anyway, resuming our scheduled programming: I did enjoy reading about the iZilla; if you’re tired of that wimpy iPod…
iZilla