Offmessage

Sheer class (from this week’s B3ta, of course):

This week’s top 10 Masterchef innuendos.

Trickling by on the new Twitter homepage is a popular tweet linking to If Calvin Took Ritalin over at Laughing Squid. I was about to link to it myself, but had the sneaking feeling that I’d seen it before.  Apparently I had, on waxy.org back in 2004.  I liked it enough to blog about it then too.  Truly nothing is new under the sun.  And the Internet will eat itself.

I think they want us to think that this, like the Obama compaign before it, will be an Internet election.  Where smart people use the power of social media to get across the real messages of the election, empowering democracy and “getting the right result”.

What we’ve seen however, is the denizens of the Internet take the piss out of everyone  and both the main competitors make a complete hash of it (most recently).  Today’s example has to be the meta tags on www.number10.gov.uk:

<meta name="keywords" content="budget 2010,health,jobs and growth,life sciences,football,ada lovelace day,sarah brown,
            women,thameslink,trains,budget cabinet,israel,ssrb statement,piercing,tattoos,small businesses,
            trade credit insurance scheme,armed forces,idenity" />

Please, explain… tattoos? piercing? Ada Lovelace Day? Idenity?

Replace “Ubisoft” with “any traditional media that has, thus far, failed to ‘get it’” and one animated gif pretty much sums up the current state of play:

Not content with the damage his Mom has already done…

The amazing folding plug (video below if you’ve not seen it already) wins the Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2010.

What I want to know is when can I get one? My lovely Waterfield bag is hideously disfigured by the plug that gets forced into it every day.

A while ago I tweeted about being in a musical rut, and asked for help.  I thought it was worth reporting back the ones that really did it for me:

• @greatbiglizard recommended the most excellent Mungolian Jet Set “We Gave It All Away, Now We Are Taking It Back”; weird twisted psychedelic balearic disco funk – really rather fantastic
• Nik recommended The Juan Maclean “The Future Will Come”; DFA does Human League. That description is accurate, but doesn’t do it justice
• @dpotta (also well worth checking out on SoundCloud) recommended T.p. Orchestre Poly-rhythmo “The King Of Benin Urban Groove 1972 – 80″; I’m not sure Dave knew how much I love Afro Funk (check out Voodoo Funk for some amazing mixes, by the way), but this was a sure fire winner – and nice to be recommended Afro Funk that’s neither Fela nor a compilation

My word.  The KLF are featured in this month’s issue of Re<ords, one of many iPhone music mags. I’m new to publications on the iPhone, so far games (Plants vs Zombies at the moment, thank you for asking) have taken up most of my time.  The idea of monthly content suddenly seems really obvious, just amazed I hadn’t realised it was out there.

I done gone made a thing – portify converts audio files from any format to one more suitable for your portable player.  For me, sadly, that means converting everything to mp3.

Testers are welcome, particularly on non-Linux platforms, but please be gentle

I don’t really want to get all banker bashing, but these 3 stories really sum up my utter confusion about the end result of the “financial crisis”.  I’m an intelligent enough chap. I ought to get it, oughtn’t I?

• RBS paid £1.3bn bonuses on profit of just £1bn
• Threat to ’25,000 council jobs’
• Gordon Brown tells police to keep officers on the beat

I seem to have this awful Emperor’s new clothes kind of feeling that just won’t go away.