Quentin has a nice link to an amusing site which collects domain names that are unintentionally funny. Example: an organisation with the perfectly respectable name of Experts Exchange, but the URL www.expertsexchange.com. And then there is the pen specialist, Pen Island. I leave you to imagine the URL.
Category Archives: Asides
Words as weapons
Although the content of the speech was highly political, especially in its clinical dissection of post-war US foreign policy, it relied on Pinter’s theatrical sense, in particular his ability to use irony, rhetoric and humour, to make its point. This was the speech of a man who knows what he wants to say but who also realises that the message is more effective if rabbinical fervour is combined with oratorical panache.
At one point, for instance, Pinter argued that “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the second world war”. He then proceeded to reel off examples. But the clincher came when Pinter, with deadpan irony, said: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events. He also showed how language is devalued by the constant appeal of US presidents to “the American people”. This was argument by devastating example. As Pinter repeated the lulling mantra, he proved his point that “The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance.” Thus Pinter brilliantly used a rhetorical device to demolish political rhetoric.
Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian on Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture, delivered from a wheelchair.
Lovely phrase that — “voluptuous cushion of reassurance”. Must remember it.
Buy shares, tip them in your column, go to gaol
The three Daily Mirror financial journalists who tipped shares they owned have been convicted and may go to gaol. The odd thing is that this kind of thing has been going on for as long as I can remember. But these guys were small fry — they only netted between £17,000 and £41,000. If they’d made serious money they would probably have been safe.
Dear Santa
Alan Coren in The Times, imagining the kinds of letters which might be arriving in Lapland this year. Sample:
dere snata
i am riting on behalf of my partnr, nicklas, 8, on acount of he wares this micky mouse wotch, and i am ashamed to be seen out wiv him, it is not sheek like yu see in mens magzines, i wuld like him to ware sunnink cool and fashnibble such as a wane roony wotch, wich he wuld do if yu brung him wun for crismas. if yu felt he woznt reddy for that, praps yu culd meet him half-way, with, frinstance, a micky roony wotch. for miself, i wuld like a DVD of teddys bare piknik
yuors
cheryl
Barcode magic
Here’s a neat little scam. Print your own barcodes (using the Barcode Magic program), then stick a $4.99 code on a $150 iPod and pass it by a dozy checkout operator. Tut, tut!
The Yellow Press
Uncharacteristically sunny and almost nostalgic piece by Christopher Hitchens about the portrayal of journalists in novels and film. Waugh, Orwell, Frayn, Powell, Greene — they’re all here. Sample:
In the opening pages of Scoop, as William Boot is still in the train from Somerset to London and as yet has no idea what awaits him at the offices of the Daily Beast, he recalls that:
“He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor.”
One of the most disorienting things about modern newspaper offices, by the way (for those of us who remember the good old bad old days), is that the squalor has disappeared. Too many newspaper premises now resemble Toyota dealerships. And nobody drinks at lunchtime any more. Sigh.
The message
Can’t see what a supermarket trolley has to do with it, though.
Keeping the torch of communism burning
But perhaps not quite in the way Comrade Vladimir Ilyich envisaged. A friend with a macabre sense of humour picked this up in a shop in Budapest!
What Tony Blair needs for Christmas
Yes, you guessed it — a Virtual Air Guitar! It’ll transport him back to his Oxford student days.
Skin your car
Er, from Gizmag:
Auto Skins is a product that has been on the Australian market for several years. Developed by the aptly named promotional company Decently Exposed, the AutoSkin is a digitally coloured skin for automobiles. You can have high resolution artwork emblazoned on the skin which is then bonded to the car and indestinguishable from normal paint other than its at photographic reproduction quality. The AutoSkin has the double advantage of forming a protective coating which can be stripped off to reveal the original, as-new unblemished duco the car came with. Over 2500 cars have been reskinned to date with corporate branders the logical first-movers, but an increasing number of innovative marketers and consumers keen to individualise their most public personal expression.
Hmmm… Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go round putting new skins (bearing environmental messages) on SUVs…