German TV ad campaign F-bombs dieters

Even if you don’t speak German, you’ll understand what they’re saying at the 16-second mark:

This ad is on German television and is intended to sell over-packaged low-cal products.  You can also find it in print.

Of all the horrible advertising I’ve seen in my nearly 15 years of being bombarded by visual crap in this country, this slogan has to be down there with the worst.

The following is what a German website has to say about it.  The politically correct will now be excused.

We really don’t know what they’re trying to say with this adolescent-level slogan, beside which we ask ourselves how this is supposed to work.  You can literally translate “Fuck the diet” as “Shit on the diet” in German.  Why this company has sunk to using such ghetto talk is beyond us, but let’s have some fun with it.

How do you fuck a diet?  Is it code for, “Have sex with fat people, they’ll thank you for it?”  Or should you just have some Cola Light before having sex?  What about using sweeteners instead of Viagra?  It’s worth an experiment.

Well now.

If they really wanted to use such an offensive slogan as part of their ad campaign, at least they could have dropped the wannabe English coolness and used something equivalent in German.  But maybe that might have woken up what passes for an Advertising Standards Council, and it wouldn’t have been approved.

Soak, rinse, repeat! How to get rid of those brown stains

It’s great to be back in Germany.

Best thing I’ve seen in the two weeks since our trip to Canada is this great T-shirt idea.

A man gave away 250 T-shirts at a recent gathering of neo-Nazis in eastern Germany.

The message on it was the usual crap you’d expect to see them wearing, so the sluggos lapped it up.

Problem for them is that a different message appears once you put the shirts through the laundry.

The message tells them to drop their Nazi ways with the help of an organisation of those who’ve already left. 

What your t-shirt can do, so can you.

This is such a brilliantly executed idea, but there’s only one problem: the assumption that the people wearing them actually wash.

Merkel lines on bin Laden

They say that bin Laden
Got shot through the noggin
Flown to the Arabian Sea.
Wrapped in a shroud as white as a cloud
And dumped overboard.  Now he’s just shark sushi.

In New York, in DC, when they heard the news
They flew to the places Al Qaeda had burned.
And crowed out so loud, so long, and so proud
Bin Laden is Dead!  But the news cycle churned

And in reaction, Frau Merkel, said she,
Was glad that bin Laden was as dead as can be.
Poor ol’ Frau Merkel, her words didn’t fit.
You just can’t say that.  It’s un-Christian, you twit.

But if she’d have said she’s sorry he’s dead
I suppose they’d be calling right now for her head.

So here’s some advice for dear Angie to take,
Reflecting on all that’s come in its wake,
Better to say in a roundabout way – just to keep the judges at bay -
I’m pleased that he’s no longer able to harm

Or just keep your mouth shut.
Works like a charm.

Why we said no to Google Street View

Call it Blurmany if you will, call us uncool and throw eggs at our apartment building if you love Google so much, but I’m very happy to say I live here.

It didn’t take long for us to decide to say no to Street View.  After all, we already have an unlisted telephone number that’s kept our place reasonably quiet since we applied for it about four years ago.  We no longer get crank calls from drunk jerks in the middle of the night – usually students my wife teaches or once taught – bored out of their minds and playing around with their cellphones.  We also never get telemarketing calls.  I remember in Hong Kong we used to have to rip off five or 10 feet of paper every day from all the junk faxes until we made HongKong Telecom change our number.

With Google Street view, the angle was more subtle.  It’s very unlikely you’ll get hassles just because you’re visible online, and even less likely you’ll be burgled, the politician’s scare tactic of choice when this whole thing blew up in the German media a few months ago.  And as for getting caught sunbathing on the balcony – well, that’s obviously an argument put forth by those who don’t know how Street View works.

Sure it’s great for businesses, but what possible benefit could we, as private individuals living in a private household, obtain by letting Google put up a photo of the place where we spend the greater part of our lives for the whole world to see?   What have we to gain by it?

I could understand it if we were the owners of some boutique called snotty and desperate for a little free on-line publicity, we’d even pay for the right to have our store burst onto the screen with arrows, flashing  lights and pop-ups.

But here I am, some duff who was always taught to be wary of those on the sell side.  Since Google is basically a multi-billion dollar advertising company with the world’s most powerful search engine attached, why on earth would I want to help them?  What’s in it for me?

Even if we were to  ignore the accusations of WiFi network data theft and other questionable goals as their octopus-camera cruised the streets, the ONLY benefit to Street View that we could think if – and the only argument I found online in favour of not opting out – was that perhaps friends and relatives living far away could look you up.

Well, whoop-de-fucking-do.  One photo from the ground floor and a blanket email and that’s taken care of.

Google Street View is merely one more brick in the infrastructure for a much wider array of capabilities not even invented yet that could further erode what few avenues of privacy we have left.   Maybe it’s like trying to turn back the tide, but if we can spit back at it a little, maybe some good will come out of it.

You say you want to burn the Koran

You say you want to burn the Koran
Well, you know
We all think that you’re insane
You tell me it’s expressing freedom
Well, you know
You’re free to suck a sewer main
You light up a fire and say that it’s your due
But we’d love to piss on your Koran bar-be-cue.

You say Islam’s a harsh religion
Yeah well, you know
Your cross is evil just the same
Your Sunday morning plate donation
Well, you know
It pays to anger and inflame
And if you want money for churches that only hate
I’ve got a dead goat that baby you can fel-late

Your stunt’s a media sensation
Oh yeah, you know
We’ll see it all on CNN
You say it’s in your Constitution
There you go,
Abusing freedom once again
But if you go burning up verses of Mo-ham-med
Don’t cry to us if they torch your place instead

Sung to the tune of:

Laugh along with WordPress.com and the new fun feature

Have any of you wordpress.com bloggers out there checked out the new wordpress.com fun feature?  Go to your dashboard and change your settings to Surprise me, then sit back and wait for the laughs to begin.

Monday  morning in search of yucks midst dreary news of volcanic cataclysms, a fifth day of flight groundings throughout Europe, Polish state funerals in the wake of last week’s horrendous crash in Russia which wiped out a sizeable chunk of Poland’s elite, not to mention personal ailments including a left shoulder that’s half-hanging out of its socket, a left knee that feels like stretched ligaments – oh, and a blood test – all due to be hashed out over an appointment with my doctor later today, I went online.

My go-to place for all things comedy? The brand new wordpress.com hit count!

Used to be you’d go to your wordpress.com dashboard to find the same old graphic across the top of the page.  Boooorring!  OK, you could choose from its vast menu of Daily, Weekly, or Monthly statistics, but doing so was about as funny as waking up hung over in early November, 2004 realising your fellow citizens had chosen four more years of so-called leadership from the world’s most famous white-knuckle drunk.

No more.  WordPress.com under its frolicky good-time Surprise me setting now has the Humanize button featuring links to upbeat, fun news stories that cheer your heart and put a smile on your face just before you head out the door into the harsh light of day.

The laughs behind Humanize are all based on how many hits you have, kiddies!  How fun is that?  For example, if you have 92 hits and click on Humanize it will tell you that there were also 92 people aboard American  Airlines Flight 11.  In case you haven’t been paying attention, that’s one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001!

Laugh?  I needed to change my Depends:

Hey, it gets better!  If you wait around for a little while as that hit count builds throughout the day, you can contemplate the fact that 290 people aboard Iran Air Flight 655 plunged to their deaths after the Americans blew it out of the air because its trigger-happy navy can’t tell the difference between a pterodactyl and a parrot!  Or maybe they just don’t give a shit. Should it therefore have come as a surprise their military can’t tell the difference between a Reuters cameraman and a freedom fighter with a rocket launcher?

But I digress.  There’s more!

If you have just one hit fewer than 92 – that’s 91 if you can do the math without the aid of GPS or the iPad calculator app – you get this:

The King David Hotel bombing?  OK, an attack by Zionists against the British in Jerusalem only a year after the end of World War 2 has neither the spectacular hilarity of a good plane crash nor is it newsy fodder for light-hearted Larry King talk-show banter, but hey.  We all needed another reminder via wordpress.com of just what a crazy world we live in.

I  just hope I’m never hungry if ever visiting their offices.  If this is what wordpress.com calls fun, I’d hate to see what their cafeteria calls food.

Terry Fox, Michael J Fox, what’s the difference?

Canadians always shake their heads when reminded of how little Americans know about their neighbour to the north.

Thanks to Regret the Error for posting this Olympic-scale NBC research blunder:

Any Canadian above the age of six would have spotted the problem long before it was broadcast.

Ah well.  You see screw-ups in the media all the time.

Entire networks, for example, mistake Sarah Palin for someone worth putting on air.

Global warming in a freezing winter

A while back this blog was trolled by another Fox-watcher who thinks that just because some parts of North America and Europe are going through a cold winter, there’s no longer any global warming.    I’ve stopped posting his comments – sent his latest one straight to trash unread and permanently blocked him – because I got tired of reading his personal attacks.

But if you’re still shivering like we are through this winter, it’s not a sign the global warming trend has reversed and is now cooling.

If you haven’t the 9 minutes to watch this video which explains why, here are a few facts:

• August 2009 was the second-warmest on record.
• June – August 2009 ocean temperatures the warmest ever.
• Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean and southwest Asia are going through above-average temperatures between 5 and 10 degrees C.
• The number of record high days has been increasing over the past few decades, the number of record low days decreasing.

Thanks to WriteChic Press.

wordpress.com front page fun

Go on, admit it.  If you’re a sluggo blogger like me trundling along with a few hundred hits a day, it’s fun to see your stats suddenly rocket skyward, if only for a little while.

The new front page at wordpress.com featured a photo from and link to a recent post about breaking my skates while playing hockey, and the view count went a bit nuts.

It lasted about 24 hours and brought in about three times as many visits this humble spot usually gets over a single day.  A few of the newcomers even left comments, which are always welcome.

What’s weird is, I’m not sure why the editors at WordPress.com picked that particular post.  Was it just dumb luck?  Nothing else better out there? Because I can point to dozens of others I’ve churned out over the last couple of years which are more deserving.   Better writing, punchier photos, more interesting content…to me, at least.    But they never made it to the front page.

I’m not complaining!  But if anyone at wordpress.com is reading this, can you let me know how you choose posts for your front page?  Does anyone else have a clue?

New Age musician Oliver Shanti convicted and sentenced to nearly 7 years in prison for sexual abuse of children

Why am I posting about this?

Because I’ve written twice on this subject and promised readers an update whatever the outcome of Shanti’s trial.

Because I was vilified by some of his fans, some who saw my posting about this as some sort of self-glorification, others who just didn’t want to hear about it.

So, to be clear:

German new-age musician and sect leader Oliver Shanti has been convicted in 76 cases of child sexual abuse and sentenced by a Munich court to nearly seven years in prison.

From the article:

Shanti was charged with 314 cases of child sexual abuse against two girls and four boys. But only 76 of these cases could be proven in court and the testimony of the girls was not found to be strong enough for a conviction on their complaints. The children were aged between seven and 13 at the time.

Shanti confessed to abusing the four boys during the trial. (Article in German only.)

By first pointing out how I discovered about a year and a half ago that this guy was still widely selling his music despite being wanted by the Munich police for more than a half decade (Pointing that out was my one and only Wikipedia edit, ever…)

And then updating that with a post about how he had finally been apprehended in Portugal…

…a few decided to play shoot the messenger.

One guy from Russia stuck my photo up in a forum.  God knows what he said – I couldn’t be arsed with Google translate, it’s so useless – but he also spouted off in the comments on my blog about how by publicising this fact, all I am is some jealous no-talent guy trying to bring down some spiritual leader.  Blah-blah-blah, the internet.  Why should I care?

I care because there are still too many out there who think that journalists, bloggers, whistle-blowers and other people who spread the word are somehow guilty of crimes worse than those they are reporting about.

Funny thing, that sort of thing happens in Russia all the time.  Reporters go missing, get shot on the street, whatever.  I didn’t even have to get up off my chair to post what I did – it was already out there on the Internet -  and I got dumped upon.

I’m sorry if all of his fans couldn’t deal with the fact that someone whose music they listened to and even loved was under suspicion of being a sexual abuser of children.

I’m even more sorry for them now that that they will have to deal with the fact that he has been found guilty in open court of sexual abuse, and has been sentenced to prison.

But you should have seen the comments I didn’t print from people who convicted him in the court of public opinion before the trial got underway.  Some of them said he should burn in hell, have his lungs ripped out, but I didn’t publish those comments because the matter was still before the courts.

Because the trial is over I now consider the matter closed.  You can comment in English, you can comment in Russian, you can comment away in God-damned Barcrapistoli for all I care, just don’t come bitching at me if you’re a fan and your beloved musician is behind bars.  He got there through his own actions.  A court of law convicted him.  I wrote about it, and so did major newspapers and television media.  Deal with it.