The joke of the millenium…
This really would be a stunning joke to be remembered for ever and a day…
When the crew of the next NASA space shuttle re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere back from their orbital mission, we should all slip into monkey costumes and freak them out!
May contain nuts
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been living under a rock, having just emerged to find that the world has gone mad.
It’s useful if you have allergies to see ‘may contain nuts’ (or traces of nuts or whathever) on the label of a cake, especially if the cake is covered in chocolate and cream and you can’t tell by looking at it that there’s nuts inside it.
But how much can you dumb down this stuff? Packets of nuts now have labels that read ‘contains nuts’! I heard about this, and I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself. If you were allergic to nuts, would you really eat a packet of nuts if the label didn’t warn you that they were nuts? And what if you were dyslexic?
Can you imagine the court case? You’re suing Nuts Co because you are allergic to nuts, and knowing this, you ate a packet of their nuts believing that this was okay because the label didn’t say that their nuts are actually made out of nuts, just like every other nut on the planet.
If I were the judge, I would throw you in jail and drop the key in the ocean. And that’s just for being stupid.
Where do we draw the line? If you have to mention that nuts contain nuts, then I suppose you have to point out that toilet paper is made out of paper! But why stop there? Why not go back a step in the process? On the packet of toilet paper we could write: contains bits of tree.
If people with nut allergies are likely to get confused if the label on a packet of nuts doesn’t warn them that the nuts contain nuts (and that’s another thing: don’t they know what a nut looks like? If something can potentially kill you, you’d make a small effort to try and memorise what the thing looks like so that you can avoid it…)
But anyway, if there are indeed certain individuals that are likely to get confused when the label doesn’t mention that nuts contain nuts, how are they going to react when they read that the piece of tissue they’re about to wipe their undercarriage with contains bits of tree?
I say we confuse everybody and reverse engineer everything on the label. Let’s go sub-atomic: people would be dropping dead everywhere, from stupidity.
If we go back enough (or down, however you want to look at it) to the particle world, you’ll find that everything is made out of the same stuff anyway, so what do you write on the label then? Contains stardust?
And here’s another quantum conundrum: if I’m made out of the same stuff as a Mercedes-Benz, how can I be allergic to it?
And where is my badge?
Where the hell is the sell by date?
I refuse to believe that I am the only person to whom this happens on a regular basis:
Checking the sell by date on a tin or a can…
You start by looking at the label, where you would think somebody logical would place the sell by date, so that it can be found easily. But no, of course the sell by date isn’t there: why on earth would they print it on the label, where somebody might find it?
So you turn the can around in your hands and you read the label a few times, scanning for those elusive words and discovering instead a host of ingredients that you didn’t know you’d been consuming all this time, and by the third turn you’re beginning to think that maybe it’s better to eat the stuff and keel over after all than to spend the best years of your life trying to find the damn date.
But damn it, you started this and you’re going to finish it!
Okay, so having turned the tin this way and that, you finally run out of places to look at. So then you check the bottom of the tin, which is ridiculous of course because who the hell would write the sell by date on the bottom of a tin? But no, there it is, in full shining glory: the very thing you were looking for, right on the bottom of the tin.
But no, hang on! It’s not the bloody sell by date is it? The print actually says: check top (or side, or elsewhere) for the sell by date!
Why on Earth do they do this? What a waste of print! Why bother going to the trouble of printing on the item: check other side for sell by date? Why not just write the sell by date there in the first place! It uses a less ink! You could have the sell by date printed on both places – in the place where they’re going to hide it anyway, and in the place where they’re going to write ‘check on the side for sell by date’! This way they save on ink and production costs, and you stay sane! It’s a win win!
And if that’s too much trouble, why not use a bright orange (or yellow) label to write the sell by date in?
And yes, this just happened to me AGAIN.
Dyslexia
Why is dyslexia so hard to spell?
Is it so the rest of us can see what it’s like?
ADDIS
I have a distinct memory of a particular advertising campaign some years ago, but it’s so ridiculous that I’m not entirely sure whether my mind (for some bizarre reason) has fabricated this.
Round about the time when HIV was first receiving a lot of media attention, one particular phrase became a kind of slogan. It was:
AIDS, don’t die of ignorance
For some reason I seem to remember laughing uncontrollably (and in disbelief) at another advertising campaign run about that time, for dyslexia – or rather, for dyslexics (which is quite ironic when you think about it, to try and reach them with textual adverts… some people should just be sacked on the spot).
Anyway, the advert I remember said:
ADDIS, don’t die of dyslexia.
Did I imagine this?
PS I’m serious!
There are 9 million bicycles in Berlin…
What a great song by Katie Mellua… who I thought was actually Katie Tonsil
But every time I hear it I want to know if it’s true that it’s a fact!
How does she know this? Is there a census for bicycles in China?
This bothers me.
I’m going to stop listening to that song…
Phoneticalities…
Why is the word phonetic NOT ‘phonetic’ in itself! If it was, it would be spelt ‘fonetic’!
I believe the Irish spell the word ‘fonetic’. This makes me tremendously happy. Somebody somewhere does think!
But back to the cretin who thought fonetic should be spelt with a ‘ph’. Could this perhaps be the same joker who then came up with the ‘phonetic alphabet’.
Do you know what the first word of the fonetic alphabet is?
It’s Alpha.
Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid?