Sandwich board

Friday 27 April 2012

I can’t be the first to say that Adam “Sandwich Video” Lisagor makes advertising videos so good, I just wish I had a mostly neat tech product to have him make one about.

The latest is this unofficial one for that warmly regarded “AeroPress” coffee syringe:

It’s of note that, like an animal, his kettle is not electric – rather, it operates by being sat on the stove. Clearly, it’s prettier than a typical electric one, and I don’t object to that superficiality or anything. But it turns out that, there in North America, they aren’t so unusual anyway:

An “average” [electric] kettle in the UK runs at about 2800 W and in the US at about 1500 W; if we assume that both kettles are 100% effi­cient then a UK kettle sup­plying 2800 joules per second will take 127 seconds to boil and a US kettle sup­plying 1500 J/s will take 237 seconds, more than a minute and a half longer. This is such a problem that many house­holds in the US still use an old-fashioned stove-top kettle.

Well, now you know.

John Cleese’s lecture on creativity

Thursday 26 April 2012

Milligan; Sandbrook

Monday 16 April 2012

This evening, I have been mostly watching old episodes of the Room 101 programme through the internet site YouTube. My favourite has been Spike Milligan’s, although it has worked me into a frenzy of curated internet web-blog sharing so early on that there’s still time for him to ruin it all by railing against one of my dearest passions – anchovies, perhaps.

That is part one; parts two and three should be watched afterwards in succession.

It has ruined my plan for the evening, which was to position myself into a position of understanding exactly why some solvents are more effective than others for polar molecules such as atenolol, but it is no real disaster. The online movie clip is surely worth one half of anyone’s hour.


Meanwhile, on the national alternative entertainment and informative channel BBC Two, a man is listing some things that happened between the years 1970 and 1979. It is often his disembodied voice, which I somehow hate with the fury of ten thousand burning suns, but upon bursting out of the bath I discover that it is also his big face-like face, poking out to just beyond the blurriness of a blurry room, contorting itself to produce the sounds, with his truncated yet jaunty eyebrows growing out of the top of it. Even his surname conjures nightmarish Proustish nightmares concerned with ruined crinkle-cut crisps by the seaside.

And up and down the country, people must be watching, listening. Good for them. I don’t know if you caught any of the trailers – they were quite creative and things, I suppose.

You might point out that I am surely not being forced to watch this under any kind of duress, so have no right to complain. But I tell you, really I am. And what makes the thing all so much worse is that nobody will believe me, just as you aren’t now. Woe unto me, oh, woe unto me.

Google as a baboon

Sunday 15 April 2012

Google is like a baboon, reports the Atlantic. Inevitably, I am furious, having what is called “prior art” when it comes to comparing wild animals to internet companies.

Like a baboon, Google doesn’t allow the rearrangement of its black upper bar of links, which smells because I never use “Google Play” but frequently have to burrow deeply towards the insignificant Google Reader. But I think the article makes a different point.

Dent(ifrice) in the universe

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Troublingly, by some measures the most important thing I have ever done is ask a question on the internet site Quora. What does the inside of a toothpaste tube look like?

This question has been viewed 17128 times; it has 1 monitor with 495 topic followers and 0 aliases exist.

I don’t understand the world any more.

Of course, a question on its own is just a question, and what use is that? Because I’m all wonderful and humble, I can recognise that the answers are just as important. They are mostly too heavily visual to reprint here, so if you don’t have any sense you will follow the links to read them, but here is one:

It looks exactly like the inside of the empty brain of someone who clearly has no life.

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