Moonpig.com, possibly the worst advert in the world?

Isn't it almost precisely the most hateful advertisement to disgrace the world of Commercial Television? 

I know I've ranted in the past about the hateful nature of adverts that don't tell you what they're supposed to be selling. The Moonpig ad is definitely NOT one of them. Oh no.... appearing as a perverse form of punctuation are the words Moonpig  dot com. No, in the land of the poorly drawn pig, there are no commas, no full stops, no exclamation marks, just the words moonpig dot com. Imagine that was normal...

Hello mooonpigdotcom I have come to repossess your sofa moonpigdotcom I moonpigdotcom m sorry moonpigdotcom you really should have kept up with the repayments Mrs Smith moonpigdotcom

What's worse is the fact that the words are not said, they're sung, badly. How hard would conversation be if the world really was as it appears to be in these hideous adverts?

Now let's look at what they're peddling. It would appear that all the crummy greetings cards in the world have been collected together in one place, cards just as they were sold in my local post office when I was about seven, with jokes that weren't particularly funny even then. Then of course, being as this is a dot com company they let you customise the cards. Lucky recipient, he or she gets a shitty card and to top it off, his name is there emblazoned upon the cackness. Even more insulting, they  don't even get a card sent personally by the sender, no, Moonpig send it direct to the recipient, removing all effort on the part of the well wisher, kind of the Internet equivalent of the boss getting his secretary to buy all the presents for his family. Thankfully I've never been the recipient of a moonpig card, so I can't be drawn on the quality of the printing, but really I suspect that it's the equivalent of setting your lexmark to draft mode an printing it on a sheet of 80gsm that you fold up roughly square before bunging it in an envelope that you've tucked the flap inside.

The advert works well enough, you see the product, you certainly do know what the name of the company is so it's all boxes ticked in Alan Sugar's book of advertising. Pity it's such a fucking stupid name, I mean what in the name of all things good and holy does moonpig have to do with greetings cards? You could say what the hell does Currys have to do with electrical goods, but there was once a Mr Curry, who flogged the great and good some bicycles and then the odd radio. Is someone going to tell me that Mr Moonpig and his wife Millicent have started a company? And no, I haven't heard of the Moonpigs of Nether Wallop, and neither have you. I just looked the name up on Ancestry dot com, and there weren't any. So ner! Worse still, or possibly not worse, but at least just as bad as the name is the logo. Look at it there as it grins at you, the head of a happy pig pickled in a goldfish bowl sat next to the chalk outline of a recently murdered half eaten biscuit, and then drawn by an inept blind man with rudimentary  computer skills using a ZX-81.

Not since the last time an advert pissed me off this much has an advert pissed me off this much, and I can't see it being equalled till the next time I get annoyed by crummy advertising. I'll be glad to see the back of it!

Can I Not get a witness?

I had some visitors at my workplace this week, unfortunately I was a little too busy doing my work to get the opportunity that I so desperately craved to tell them to fuck off. Still they did leave me a couple of useful leaflets that I thought I could share with you... while I take the piss just a little bit.

Hopefully this will come out big enough for you to see some of the things that have annoyed me, if not, well you'll just have to trust me. But first a little background...

According to the witness (possibly witless, not sure), god is getting just a little bit peeved with all of us disobeying his rules, you know celebrating Christmas, having blood transfusions, not bothering people in their homes to join some hokey hokum cult and the like, and he's going to bring the world to an end, and make it all so lovely for all the witnesses while the rest of us burn in hell. So let's have a look at these leaflets as they display their vision of a Witless nirvana... Look at the smiling faces, nobody is unhappy, oh no, but look closer, they are all clearly insane. These my friends are the smiles of the clinically psychotic, the kind of folks who grin as they dance through the blood and wrap themselves in the entrails of their latest victims. These people scare me. Look also as children in the left hand picture stroke lions and feed unlikely bunches of blue flowers to carnivorous bears, clearly the artist has captured the moment before the tranquilizers wear off and the animals turn and rip the arms of the foolish from their sockets, just as the fools in question grin at their luck at living in a world where lions are temporarily sedated just so god's chosen ones can pet them. Of course all the willing victims will die, even if they're saved by the other psychos, because nothing helps a person who's lost a lot of blood as their arm is currently wedged in the digestive tract of a sleepy lion than a blood transfusion, which of course is banned by the god who let them pat the wild predator. I think he has a bit of an odd sense of humor that god chap... 

Then look at the right hand image, there's something wrong there. The Jehovah's witnesses are not a sect known for their ostentatious fashion sense (Prince excepted), but someone told the artist that there was a little product called 'Hair Moose' that women like to use. I think he misinterpreted the concept... just a little. I mean no-one wears an actual ^moose^on their head, do they?

The worst film ever?

Normally when I go to the cinema I enjoy myself. I've seen some pretty rotten films in my time. I even saw the Michael Jackson movie, Moonwalker at Hammersmith way back in 1988 and that has stood head and shoulders above the rest on a scale of cackness.

Well yesterday Moonwalker was removed from it's place of dishonour, one that it had held for 20 years, because I went to the cinema. What film could have been bad enough that I can say the best fun I had in the theatre were my futile attempts to remove the flake of popcorn that had become indelibly welded to the roof of my mouth? Mama Mia, that's what. 

In all honesty this was never going to be my favourite film, I have generally had a strong dislike for films adapted from stage shows, Chicago for example was rotten, The Phantom of the Opera was almost as bad, but I never paid to watch those, other than through my Sky subscription, and that was going to be paid anyway. I didn't pay this time either (thank god), but someone did, and really as far as I'm concerned it was BAD value for money.

Why is it so bad? Well the songs are horribly mangled by the sound department. ABBA songs have a lot going on musically, but whoever produced them made sure it wasn't overpowering, and every part of the complicated tapestry was clearly audible. Well in the film someone decided that louder was better, and everything gets turned up to the point that you can't hear anything but a wall of obnoxious noise, and even to the extent that you can hardly hear the words, not that that really matters, everyone knows the words. Even the words that Pierce Brosnan sings, if singing it can be called, because he sounds like a strangled cat, slowed down to make it intelligible.

Now the plot. Oh my freaking god, it's awful, maybe it works on stage, but in a film? Everything is made so obvious that if you can't spot what's coming up there's something very wrong with you. Oh there are plenty of things that are meant to be surprises, but when they give you clues the size of Zeppelin's, there's no surprise, there's only a horrendous wait until the obvious (and very trite) actually occurs. I have honestly never had to sit through a film where I new what was happening quite so far ahead and with such certainty. Oh, and there's a plot twist too, but it's such a twist that I could have told you it was going to happen from the moment James Bond appeared. I won't spoil it, I'll let you find out what happens half an hour into the film.

And at the end, well I WAS happy, but not for the reason the film maker expects the god-damned film was over, and I will never have to see it again. My wife, and quite possibly my Mother-in-Law will tell you that I went determined to dislike the whole experience. I didn't. I didn't have high hopes, but I went with my mind as open as I could manage, I don't dislike ABBA's music, I in-fact have a sneaking admiration for the harmonies and production even if it's not my favourite. Still this film has soured me to the whole situation, if I never have to hear dancing queen again, I'll be glad, but for some reason my wife and daughter enjoyed it so I think any respite I have will be shorter lived than I deserve.

Four Breasted women....

I am a man. I like, no I adore boobies, they are the best thing since whatever was there before boobies, and since I'm no where near old enough to remember, they are the best things ever. Now women with two extra boobies would be a great thing, all the more to play with and all the more fun to be had, I'd kind of like it.

Still there are a group of women, and I saw a load of them out shopping yesterday, who have chosen to have the appearance of four boobs and it isn't a good thing. What do I mean? Me who likes boobies so much that he would love a pair of his own in a box that he could play with whenever he wanted (marriage, he was disappointed to find, was not boobies on tap, he had to have conversations, tidy up and other things not as much fun as boobies). Well all these women seemed to be trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot as the expression goes. More accurately they were trying to fit a gallon into a thimble, wearing a bra almost 14 sizes too small. Now a bra slightly too small can be a good thing visually, just one cup size down will give a wonderful effect, one that I personally enjoy hugely, but when you try to fit a J into a B cup all kinds of things go wrong. All that excess boob-flesh that you haven't managed to shoe-horn into the microscopic  scrap of material you believe sufficient to contain your bust spills out the top and rests there like a misshapen globule of uck. These are not the extra boobs I want, these are heinous crimes against boobdom. 

Perhaps, once upon a very long time ago you fit into a nice slinky pice of La Perla Lingerie, but now you don't, the seventeen feral kids that are gathered round your distended ankles in a swarm of snot, dummys and sagging pampers meant that you wove goodbye to your youthful figure along with your concept of birth control. Of course these women are always mothers, mothers of the worst kind, who's parenting skills are as lax as their self control in the face of sexual advances. They also  all have tattoos of the kind that may seem dangerous and a little alluring on a sexy woman, but in this case serve to mark them out as part of the tribe of women wrapped up in denial of their changing body, and under the impression that they are still a size 10. Of course they will also wear the finest jewelry that is available from Elizabeth Duke at Argos, their necks hung with hideous articulated clowns, their fat fingers adorned with sovereign rings and nine carat gold and circlets with MUM picked out in finest cubic zirconia and their ears hung with either hoops so big they could serve as the perch for a large parrot or the paper thin versions of the horrid things sported by Lilly Allen.

There seem to be a lot of these women, stomach turning in their hideousness, in the food courts of shopping centres across the UK. It really can put me off my lunch.

The Chav Shoe Travesty....

What is it with chavs? They go around in their silly uniforms of designer knock off sportswear, being angry and dumb, trying to appear hard and dangerous and really coming across as a bunch of dislikable saddos.

I saw some today walking down to blockbusters to return some games (I was returning the games, these were the kind of chavs who would steal the box to look like they own the game). Of course these nasty idiots were dressed in the summer uniform, the three quarter length adidas trousers, the colourful Ralph Lauren/Hackett polo shirts, and some semi expensive trainers. They all looked like a pressed out production line set of fuckwits. I guess I hate chavs, but that is obvious, we all do, and thats why I'm not ranting about chavs in general.

No, it was the fact that one of these chavs had made an attempt to mark himself as an individual, which in itself shows that there is some hope for the poor little twat, not much though, because of the way he tried to do it. For some reason he had chosen to wear mismatched shoes, the same model yes, but one black, one white. He looked, in a word, stupid. In more than word he looked like the dumbest fuck ever to have disgrace the surface of the earth by walking on it in his stupid velcro fastened, remedial looking, mismatched tennis shoes. Yes they were the type of shoes that look like they have one sole built up on both feet, as if they are owned by someone too stupid to deal with actual laces. So this fool had choses some ugly shoes, and then chosen to wear them in a mismatched pair. Why? Perhaps he went to two different shops to steal the display ones, but they didn't have matching ones, and walking round in the one he had stolen already was starting to hurt, so he took what he could get. Perhaps he's blind and his mates didn't have the heart to tell him what a dick he looked. Perhaps he's just dumb. I happen to think the last one's most likely, how about you? I cannot explain in words how dumb this guy looked. Yet he was walking along like there was nobody cooler on the planet. Well if you look at him on a scale of cool with nuclear explosions at one end and outer space at the other, he'd be well and truly up there with the nukes. 

What makes my name so very hard for other people?

Well, as I was browsing around on facebook earlier I discovered a group called something along the lines of "People who always have to spell their name for others". On this group I made a wall post describing my frustrations, and I thought it deserved to come here too... 

So here it is, fleshed out a little as, as I am thinking about it, the bile is beginning to rise...

I have what I consider to be a relatively simple name to spell, and also a relatively simple name to pronounce. I'm not talking about my first name, oh no, three letters, nice and simple, only one alternative spelling which I'm generally forgiving of when people use it. It's my surname, one that is not, particularly, uncommon, and certainly one that is well known in the Celtic corners of the British Isles. McHugh, a good solid Scottish/Irish name (and the one I share with the spitting git who was removed from big brother), but one that has unfortunately left me surprised and shocked whenever anyone spells it correctly.

When people hear my name it's always getting spelt wrong, McHue, McQue, McQueue, McCue, McKew and myriad variances of the same with a prosthetic a between the M and c. So I find myself spelling it for them, sounding out the letters one by one, including how to capitalise correctly as the requester of my name takes it down like a five year old learning to write, but not even that precludes errors. Some people seem to have it so entrenched in their minds that my name is not what I say it is that I have seen Mchuegee or McHuge being written down as I spell it. Worse still I am asked far too often as I am spelling it, "Are you sure?" as if I am the idiot, the fool and the imbecile who can't spell my simple name, which of course I frigging can, I've only had it for 33 years and have been spelling it correctly for at least 30. Or at the end of spelling it the writer says, "Ah, McHugh, I see" with the emphasis on the second syllable as if I led them up the garden path by being unable to, or willfully obtuse in the manner of my name's pronunciation, which of course I wasn't, I didn't fucking mumble, I said it the right way, it's not hard I've been doing it for years. Of course I have noticed as I am typing this that the automatic spell checker has decided to mark nearly every misspelling as correct, and the actual name as wrong, what am I to do when even the computers are out to get me.

When people read it far too many of them decide to pronounce it as though they are clearing their throat, or possibly being sick. "Mr McHcgch, the doctor will see you now" or,"Ah, Mr McHueeeegggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, do come in, I apologise for the fact I have just projectile vomited on you, you see it's your name's fault."

Let's get this straight folks, I know how to spell my name, I realise that you may not, so ask for help if you must. I also find it hard to link my name with the varied sounds of a cat coughing up a stubborn hair ball with my name, please try to pronounce it in a manner approximating a word, it's not hard. If you can manage to do these things you and I will get along a lot better...

Grand Theft Auto IV...

Why is this game so good? Why must it dominate my life now that I have a week off work? Why must it make me stay up 'til 2 am every night?

I took this fortnight off so I could rest, it's been a while since I had some time away from the day job, so I could concentrate on rebuilding the reserves of energy that it takes me to get through a day of dealing with customers. I need to rest, I need to sleep, I need to get various things done that the wife has requested of me so I can live a short term nag free existence (it's my fault, I'll admit I should have done it a long time ago). I had a good idea that between the work and the sleeping I could play some games, so I hired GTA from blockbusters.

The damn thing has possessed me. I'm beholden to the multifarious charms of serial killing, car theft, drug dealing and casual sex. The awesome power of the game has me in it's grasp, becoming a part of the living breathing city that appears on my TV when I fire up the playstation, it's beautiful and brutal, and I think I may be in love.

What would be better if Alex would actually respond to my requests for a bit of online japery..... that's what really peeves me!