Archive for May, 2008
DFS, dwarves and urban legends
What’s your favourite urban myth? I was reminded of my favourite on Popbitch today, in a post by “onthehushhush”:
i was told today that sofa firm DFS * uses dwarves** in their adverts to make their settees look bigger than they would normally. I don’t know why I found this so shocking/funny.
????????
Sadly it was immediately punctured by another poster, who pointed out that if DFS wanted to mislead the public it’d be a damn sight cheaper to make giant sofas for the ads than to pay the wages of people of restricted growth. So a favourite myth bites the dust.
What about you? Any favourite bits of bullshit you secretly wish were true?
Hey! Let’s talk about smoking! Again!
Hardly unpredictable I know, but the Scottish parliament plans to ban the display of cigarettes in shops in order to - yes! - protect the kiddies. The next step, apparently, is to legislate so cigarettes are sold in plain packaging. As ever, the online comments are lovely: this lot is from the Scotsman.
Dacinda72 hasn’t read the article, or possibly any newspaper since 2006, because she doesn’t realise the smoking ban is already in place or that cigarettes are taxed quite a lot.
Smoke all you want. Just don’t do it around me. And don’t expect me to pay your medical bills.
The Geniune Mario Antionette, a champion speller, adds:
All licensed & age related products should be banned from the main consumer checkout areas. There should be a seperate till for these. Scotmid stores are the worst. People with their essential food/grocery items can’t get out the store because the smokers, boozers & gamblers clog up the checkouts, where these items are kept.
Which is amusing, as I get annoyed when it takes ages to buy my cigs because fat bastards are buying chocolate.
Alternative High Octane Fuelhead invokes the Nazis, and therefore loses.
Subrosa smokes, but it’s society’s fault.
We should go far further than this. Only have tobacco licenced outlets as in Spain. I speak as a life long smoker now suffering from COPD and chronic bronchitis who’s health is permanently damaged by cigarettes.
God, I love online debate. It’s so illuminating.
Anyway, back to the actual news story. What’s annoying about it is that none of our elected representatives are being honest here. If they were to say “We don’t like smoking, and we want smoking to be as much of a pain in the arse as possible” then at least they’d deserve some respect. But suggesting that putting cigs under the counter - legal ones, that is, not the growing numbers of smuggled cigs that are already available from under counters - to protect kiddies shows a major misunderstanding of how and why teenagers smoke, not least because the move doesn’t do anything to curb the evil trade in OPs.
You won’t see OPs advertised anywhere. They don’t have distinctive packaging. But they’re the favourite brand of apprentice smokers. They’re Other People’s cigarettes. They’re the cigarettes offered by someone else, the cigarettes you sneak from jackets, purses or kitchen worktops, the cigarettes you buy for 10p (well, it was a long time ago) on the bus, the cigarettes you smoke at parties even though you’re not a smoker and won’t get addicted.
Unless you’re very mature-looking for your age, or live in a certain Ayrshire town in the 1980s where one local chippy famously sold single fags to anybody older than a foetus, OPs will be your brand until you’re properly hooked and ready to buy your own cigarettes. But even then you don’t march into a shop, peruse the display and decide on a particular brand because of its sexy packaging. Nope, you give too much money to someone’s big brother, they go to the shop and return with something made from factory floor sweepings, ear wax and paint.
In support of the plan, it’s been suggested that kids of smokers are more likely to smoke than children of non-smokers. Which is absolutely true, but it’s not because of the packaging (and I fail to see how plain packaging will make any difference anyway. Unless maybe the plan is also to make cigarettes look like something else, like big purple dildos, or inflatable elephants or something? Otherwise once the packet is opened, the kids might well spot that hey! Their parents are smoking cigarettes!) It’s because it’s one of the best ways to annoy your parents and demonstrate how cool and clever you are, and it’s particularly great if they’re smokers, because you can expose their hypocrisy and, like, how it’s so unfair. Nothing says “I’m smarter than my folks” than committing yourself to thousands upon thousands of pounds in unnecessary expenditure, ruining your fitness and embracing the distinct possibility of a very painful death.
The Scottish government’s plans won’t do anything to address that. Instead, they’re just the latest bit of evidence that there truly is an international campaign to piss me off. And come to think of it, given the laws on health warnings, cigarette counters at present are a wall of black and white type proclaiming the dire consequences of smoking. Surely putting ‘em under the counter removes that oh so important health message?
It’s very simple. If you smoke, you’re an idiot. If you don’t smoke and you start, you’re an idiot. If you’re linking to this blog - hello again! - to back up some pro-smoking agenda from a magical world where cigarettes are good for your health, you’re delusional. And if you think that making cigarettes more like drugs or pornography, adding a frisson of “The Man doesn’t want me to smoke” attitude to a packet of Bensons, is going to make smoking less attractive to teenagers then you’re so stupid you’re probably a member of the Scottish Parliament.
Me, I’d really appreciate a bit of honesty here. Cut the pointless, grandstanding bullshit - if politicians are serious about stopping us smoking, then just go ahead and ban tobacco entirely and sacrifice the five-quid-a-day tax from every one of us. Anything else is just scribbling in the margins.
Elsewhere, the FAA has banned pilots and air traffic controllers from taking the anti-smoking drug Chantix (Champix in the UK) on the grounds that they might flip out and kill lots of people in a kind of passive anti-smoking massacre. Somewhere, Bill Hicks is giggling.
Spam as an economic indicator
Instead of the usual horse porn and herbal viagra, the last week’s spam crop has been largely about money: insanely high-APR car finance, insanely high-APR credit cards, insanely high-APR personal loans and the like. Most of it for UK companies. Anybody else noticing the same thing, or am I just lucky?
A right royal pain in the GTAs
I’ve written before about the bad design decisions that can suck the joy from a game, encouraging you to put it back on the shelf and never return, and Grand Theft Auto 4 has a doozy: stupid bloody save points. It’s particularly noticeable on a mission where you have to trail a drug dealer’s car before taking out his associates; get any part of it wrong and you have to replay the whole mission again, cringing as once again your character makes an ill-judged and unfunny wisecrack about stalking women. It wouldn’t be so bad if the bits you had to replay weren’t so ARSE-NUMBINGLY DULL.
Is Apple about to unveil a tiny laptop?
If you’re bored with 3G iPhone rumour mongering, here’s an alternative bit of speculation from MacUser:
Considering that Apple has an OS perfectly suited to running on small, low-power devices, that it knows where the laptop market is headed, that it has implemented a flash-based storage system already, and that it has a close relationship with Intel, it seems almost a no-brainer that it should produce an Atom-based device running OS X.
Jurassic Bark
Dog cloning. Is this real?
Emo ho ho ho
The ever-brilliant No Rock’n'Roll Fun, reporting Emo fans’ plans to demonstrate outside the Daily Mail, made me laugh like a drain:
Hundreds of angry young people wearing black shirts marching up and down the streets of London. That was the sort of thing that Mail loved back in the 1930s, wasn’t it?
Fun with lifestyle photography
The Asus Eee PC has a new face: a cheery, wine-drinking housewife, as shown on Reg Hardware. But it’s a lie! It’s just a lifestyle shot with some salad removed and an Eee PC ’shopped in! The original, Eee-free version is here, courtesy of Reg commenter David Gosnell.
It’s a sad day when you can’t trust PR photos.
Update: The Eee has a ridiculous mascot, and a rat. Idiot Toys has the pics.
The Home Office has gone completely mad
A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.
The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.
As The Register notes [emphasis mine]:
Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act passed in 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, companies like telcos and internet service providers already have to keep this information in case it is needed by a police or security service investigation.
It appears what is different now is that this information will be actively collected and stored in one place by the government. Reports on the proposals suggest authorities will still need to go to the courts to gain access to the database. However, such a massive amount of data will be ripe for speculative data-mining and fishing techniques, rather than more targeted searches.
More to the point, given this government’s gross incompetence in safeguarding any of our data, having all our comms info in one place has to be a major concern.
…The government is blaming Europe for the changes. The European Data Retention Directive seeks to ensure that investigators have access to this information, as they do under existing UK law, but does not call for centralised, government-run databases.
…Unregistered mobile phones and VoIP services like Skype mean that the proposed law will catch only the densest of criminals.
Shop surveillance
Oh, for crying out loud. Shopping centres can monitor people’s movements by tracking their mobile phones. The technology could “identify unauthorised individuals”.