Election Protection

I was immensely pleased when I found someone selling political condoms on the street last week, so much so that I bought a few overpriced johnnies in a move so optimistic, it can be compared to Mr Obama's presidential campaign.

I'd read about the 'Election Protection' range a while back, but decided against making a purchase, but when I saw that there was also a Sarah Palin edition (for 'when abortion is not an option') I thought I'd pay the $10 for a set.

If you look at the photos, you'll see they've all got jokes on the packet, though at first I felt they'd missed a trick by not including 'When it comes to sex, NO means YES WE CAN', until I realized how rapey that sounds.

Anyway, all we need now is some Hilary Clinton spermicide, and a diaphragm shaped like McCain's bald spot, and we're ready to go.


Edit: Anyone who says there's already a Joe Biden douche, I thought of it first.

Nec Tamen Consumebatur?

"Would you like that microwaved, Sir?"

"No thank you, its a Snickers."

Extract from my first encounter with a NY shopkeeper, 2010

Contrary to this initial comment, the majority of my hosts so far have been very healthy eaters, so I stopped looking for evidence to the contrary, until I found this little beauty:

That's right, with the Col-Pop device, you no longer need to worry about using both hands when you stuff yourself on coke and friend chicken.
I would call the device ingenious, but it's impact was immediately diminished when I saw someone buy two at once; one for each hand. Sigh.

USA Part 1: In Which I Land and Get Cursed

A week ago today I landed into Newark Airport, and began my journey.
A succession of trains took me in to Manhattan, where I stumbled over to the East Village, and a street whose closest UK equivalent would be Camden Market. I met up with my couchsurfing host's flatmate, Sara, who showed me around their appartment until Amanda, who approved my visit, got back from work.
The flat had a novel set up, in that there were 2 bedrooms (housing 3 girls in US student bunk bed fashion), a living room/kitchen (where I slept on a sofa bed), and a bathroom, which could only be accessed by walking straight through Sara's bedroom, which never ceased to feel odd.
Nevertheless my hosts were really cool and didn't mind this creature sleeping in their living room.
The excitement picked up the following night, when we went out to meet Amanda's workmates for drinks.
We were told to meet them in a bar to the East of us, but when we tried to enter, the Amanda and Sara, being just 19, had their (fake) ID's taken by a bouncer. During the post eviction rant, I learned that being 'carded' was common, but actually having the fake cards confiscated was a rarity.
Kindly enough the people they knew in the bar came out to meet us and we found a dive bar just down the street, called The Blarney Cove.

The Blarney Cove was everything I'd imagined an American bar would look like, and as we passed the owner (a 50 something woman in black with a Clockwork Orange-esque tattoo round her left eye) and her clientele (big men with mustaches), I felt things were looking up.
The barmaid decided to ID us, but Amanda's friend Jason convinced her to let us stay if the 'minors' drank coke. Having agreed on this, the same barmaid instantly approved of serving everyone beer.
We, which by this point consisted of Amanda, Sara, Jason, Lindsay (another work person), 2 more work girls and I, sat and drank for 25 minutes, enjoying ourselves, until a woman in the bar punched the barmaid and after being thrown out, kept kicking the bar door, before shouting "I've got a gun", as if that would convince us to let her back in.
This prompted action from the bar's owner, who ran up and down, telling us about the 'psycho cunt's' prison record, before checking we all had ID for when the cops arrived. Upon finding out Sara and Amanda were 19, she decided 'cunt' was the word that would see her through the evening.
The owner told my hosts to get in the cellar and hide until the cops left, lest she loose her license. The girls obliged, and ran behind the bar and down into the Anne Frank re-enactment center.
The owner stormed up and down the bar, kicking the walls, throwing stools and proclaiming that she 'saw this coming', and that we were cursed until 2:11, thanks to a lunar eclipse.
This tirade of prophecy and profanity lasted 10 minutes before the cops arrived, and as Jason (who worked as a chugger) tried to get the cops to sign up for his charity, Lindsay and I shared glances and tried not to laugh or think about how much we would prefer to be outside with "psycho cunt" than inside with someone who listens to the moon.
Eventually the police turned up, took a statement and left without incident, before the owner threw us all out and told us to never come back.

I went to bed feeling my first 24 hours were well spent.

Lorraine Kelly Will Eat Your Young.

I found this at work today:


To sum it up the book states that she will start with the toddlers, then move on to the babies.
Horrific.

Eau noes!

Again, another old post, given a fresh airing on here, so excuse me if its a bit out of date.

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We all want to be healthy. Rather, we all want to feel healthy.
These two things are very different. Being healthy is often something hard to achieve, but you can feel healthy by doing something good for your body. It's put up with a lot recently, so it deserves a treat. You could wipe your conscience clean with a day's worth of salads and water, or by giving up booze for an hour, but in the end, you're no healthier than yesterday.

That's why the kind folks at Glaceau have invented Vitamin Water, the product with something for everyone.
Before I go off on one, I'll admit I've enjoyed a few of these in the past, albeit making sure everyone around me knows I just buy it for the placebo effect, lest I look like I fell for their advertising.
Anyway, at first glance the packaging looks fairly plain, just 2 colours and lots of black text, but stare at the bottle long enough, and it begins to look like a giant pill. See?

If it's a pill, its also medicine, right?

But the genius of the bottle lies in the fact it also looks like a container for medicine. The small black text is laid out specifically to look like the ingredients on a medicine bottle, while titles like Defence, Endurance, and Balance help you compensate for whatever your frail body lacks at the time. Fortunately, for those of you not taken in by those titles, there are also more scientific names, such as Multi - V and Formula 50.

The subtitles state the main 2 vitamins featured in your bottle, helping you break down your bodies' myriad needs into a dozen or so building blocks that can be accessed at any decent corner shop.
Nutrition experts will know better than to buy these drinks, if only because there are cheaper alternatives, but the product is not aimed at them, it is aimed a psuedo-nutritionites, who often buy something healthy, only to be seen with it.

They will often be curious about the contents of the bottle and might actually read ingredient style blurb on the side, are instead placated by cutesy informal messages about how these vitamins might help you through humorous situations throughout the day.
Obviously these is a list of ingredients on the bottle, but the company makes such an effort to distract you from it that I felt it was worth a mention.

All this said, its a great idea for a manipulative product design, I'm only moaning because I wish I'd come up with it.

Ursa Immodicus

Right, my blog was looking a little empty, so I've decided to update it with old news.
I made this just before I left uni. The assignment was to make an 'art'. It had to be printed, but that was all they said, other than you must later justify it.
So here it is, complete with my somewhat pretentious 'justification' of why I should be allowed to get away with nicking so many ideas from other artists.
Also, thought I've no right to complain, but a few months after I made this, a lot of Great Bear imitations appeared online, making this appear even less original. Pah.




Ursa Immodicus


March 2008


Essentially a re-working of Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (1992), which itself is an adaptation of Henry Beck's London Underground tube map, this print replaces each tube line with a particular theme, and while Patterson's creation dealt with famous explorers, actors and engineers, this piece charts topics of tabloid news stories.
As such, we see how casually topics as contrasting as horse racing, soft core pornography and child murder can be displayed together, prompting the viewer to consider the hypocrisy of such presentation.
The river Thames has undergone a colour change, increasing the presence of a tabloid colour scheme (in the vein of Gilbert & George's recent Tate Modern exhibition), but also implying drastic consequences of these journalistic misdeeds, as we are reminded of the biblical curse to make the rivers run red with blood.
At first, the map would appear to be a level playing ground, with only labels and names to go by, no one child is more adorable than another, no killer looks more suspicious.
Nevertheless, our eyes are inevitably drawn to the centre of the piece, which makes up a veritable who's who of missing children, public hate figures and Grand National winners, some names are inevitably pushed aside, meaning that the numerous dead of the recent Burma crisis will not be granted the same spotlight as that of a single infant who has been absent over a year.
Alas, infamy is also favoured over scale, hence your ability to recall the face, victims and miscellaneous details of a single murderer, whilst you are unable to recollect the region in which 100,000 people have recently died, contradicting the belief of 'the mors*, the merrier'.
We can also see that the centre of the map is surrounded, almost framed by an impenetrable wall of television channels, which, reassured by one another's company, can look out on all the distant people and incidents from their cyclical domain, endlessly following one another's leads.
While making numerous examples of tabloid content, be it good or bad, the piece also points out the omissions within the format, by including one theme on the key, but removing the corresponding thread from the map.
The name of the piece translates roughly as 'excessive bear', or in other words 'too much to bear', alluding to the grim nature of the tabloid content.

*[Latin: mortis, genitive of mors; death.]