Rick Astley sings about dessert spoons and a naked aunt
The singer has teamed up with Specsavers to increase awareness about hearing loss and, along the way, create a ‘misheard version’ of his most famous song.
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Marvel Your Routine
From Italy: a new spot for toothpaste brand Marvis is a contender for the most surreal oral hygiene commercial I’ve ever seen. Among other oddities, it features —believe it or not— a swimsuit-clad lobster riding a surfboard and a cross-dressing firefighter doing a pole dance.
Asa Butterfield bonds with Robert De Niro
A superb script and great performances make this spot for Uber One an absolute delight to watch.
The Florida Man Games
It takes the phenomenon of ‘Florida Man’ to a whole new level. A short selection of the events/ entertainment lined up:
EVADING ARREST OBSTACLE COURSE
Jump over fences, through back yards, and away from actual police officers to earn your freedom!CATEGORY 5 CASH GRAB
Subject yourself to category 5 winds as you scramble to catch as much real cash as you can.BEER BELLY FLORIDA SUMO
Dive in to the beer belly of the beast as you try to blast your opponent out of the ring.CHICKEN COOP BINGO
SELFIES WITH ALLIGATORS
Two chickens will decide whether you win or lose in this fun, dirty game inspired by our Floridian family in places like Deland or Interlachen, where they literally do this for fun because they don't know that cell phones exist yet...
The insurance company doesn't love this, but we don't care!
Snail Advisory
Excerpts from a message from UK’s Royal Mail, taped to a postbox in a village in Devon, England, as reported by the BBC:
Dear customer,
We wanted to inform you that snails seem to enjoy making a home in this postbox and eating the glue that holds an envelope in shape.
We remove the snails daily, but they are very determined & return.
It is our business policy not to exterminate them with pellets or by other means.
Whilst you are very welcome to continue using this postbox, we wanted to mention that your letter may not arrive without some nibble marks around the edges.
Céline Dion and ‘Siren Battles’
Porirua —a small town in New Zealand— is in the news after a petition by some of its residents put the spotlight on its ‘siren battles’ — between music enthusiasts who load their cars with industrial speakers and compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds. Notably, music by Céline Dion appears to be a favourite among the participants. To quote from a BBC report:
The battles involve groups of people gathering in an area with their cars, blasting music from sirens more typically used for emergency warnings.
The idea is to play music from the sirens the loudest - and the clearest.
French-Canadian diva Dion has become the artist of choice not only because of her popular emotional ballads, but because much of her music - including Oscar-winning My Heart Will Go On, from 1997 film Titanic - has high treble, NZ website The SpinOff reports.
“Celine Dion is popular because it's such a clear song - so we try to use music that has high treble, is clear and not much bass,” Paul Lesoa, one of founders of a group that runs siren battles in Auckland, told the site.
The cars can have anywhere between seven to 10 sirens, with competitions usually held throughout the night. They take weeks to prepare for, as participants source sirens online and solder speakers and amplifiers to frames that sit on cars.
Mr Lesoa told The SpinOff he felt the stigma around the battles was unfair.
“We just love music, we love dancing, and doing this is better than night clubbing or drinking in a bar in the city, where there’s fights etc,” he said.
He said he had applied to Auckland Council for a permit but was yet to hear back.
“Basically everyone has a hobby and while our hobby can be quite disturbing and we understand how disturbing it can be, we just want our own proper, safe space away from people to do it.”
‘The most advanced hydro-muscular workout device’
That’s the latest bonkers pitch from canned water brand Liquid Death. This is how the campaign video explains it:
With other workout devices there's no easy way to hydrate but now there's the Chest Blaster by Liquid Death. It may look just like a can of Liquid Death but the Chest Blaster harnesses the power of hydrodynamic inertia to sculpt tone and completely hydrate in a fraction of the time of other devices. Workouts that used to take hours now last only about 20 seconds. Simply grip it and rip it while you sip it.
‘Taking the piss’ out of Amazon
Oobah Butler finds an audacious way to highlight the inability of Amazon drivers to take proper bathroom breaks in this clip from his new Channel 4 documentary The Great Amazon Heist.
Sign Subterfuge
From a report posted on Facebook by a local Sheriff’s office in Florida:
On Saturday, October 14th at around 2:45pm, [Polk County Sheriff’s Office] deputies went to a residence on West 10th Street in Lakeland, after receiving a tip that a wanted person was at the residence.
The wanted person was 41-year old Johnny Yates and he was wanted for Aggravated Battery, False Imprisonment, and Tampering in a 2nd Degree Felony.
When the deputies arrived they noticed a note written on a dry-erase board in front of a window that said, “Johnny Yates does NOT live here!!”
Gee…a dry-erase board never lied to us before—should we believe it?
A person was then seen leaving the house, so the deputies asked that person about Johnny, and they were told that he was inside the house with a few others.
The deputies surrounded the house and began calling out via a loud speaker. This went on for about an hour, with nobody inside responding.
Enough was enough, and the “Surrender Smoke” was dispensed inside the house, and four people exited the home, but no Johnny.
Deputies called out some more, but still no response from Johnny, so a second helping of “Surrender Smoke” was put inside the home to waft around a bit. Yet still, no response from Johnny.
Finally, deputies and K-9 Dexter entered the house and located Johnny who was hiding in a modified chest of drawers.
Johnny was arrested and taken to jail.
Streamed Swearing (NSFW)
Expletives take centrestage in this dazzling, fast-cut montage for the Life Uncensored campaign from Lionsgate+.
Misfortunes of a Truck Thief
To quote from a post on the Facebook page of a local police department in Colorado:
On 10/4/23 around 230 am, Springfield Police Responded to a motor vehicle theft just occurred.
It was discovered that a male party attempted to take a Semi Tractor Trailer that was idling on the 1200 block of Main Street. The male party attempted to drive away, however, he must have forgot that he doesn’t know how to drive a semi, because he was unable to release the brakes and killed the truck before being able to drive away.
The local truck driver, who was not taking any of the nonsense from this guy, ripped the male out of the semi and the male took off running.
SPD searched the area and around 320 AM, were able to locate the male who did his best to hide, by standing “super still”, in a business corridor on the 900 block of Main.
The male party was arrested and booked into the Baca County Jail for 2nd Degree Aggravated Motor Vehicle Theft.
Brimming and Bewhiskered
The idea of wisdom being consumed and cultivated takes on a rather literal meaning in two new spots for UK retailer Currys.
Feeding Time
Jack in the Box celebrates Halloween season with a scare-packed 7 minute short that was released, quite fittingly, on Friday the 13th.
Much argument over nothing
From France: a series of tongue-in-cheek spots for tutoring service Acadomia.
Hands of Sicily
A 2-minute short that presents portraits of the island through the hands of its people.
Arrest Qualification
What if you get stopped by a cop who you have seen performing on a porn site? That’s pretty much the situation that a Minneapolis driver found himself in, when he was pulled over by a police officer whom he recognised as an OnlyFans model he’d been following for a while. This is part of what he had to say about that:
You can’t arrest me no more; I’ve seen your private parts.
Emergency Pizza
I’ll let this press release from Domino’s do the explaining:
When life gives you lemons, Domino's gives you free pizza. Domino's Pizza Inc., the largest pizza company in the world, is introducing Domino's Emergency Pizza: a program that offers a free medium two-topping pizza to customers to use whenever they need it most.
“Perhaps you burned dinner, the power went out or maybe your in-laws just dropped in without notice – whatever your emergency situation, Domino's believes a free pizza can make anything better,” said Kate Trumbull, Domino's senior vice president – chief brand officer. “Why did we launch Domino's Emergency Pizza? With so much uncertainty in everyday life, we believe everyone needs a pizza pick-me-up at some point! The hardest part may just be deciding when to use your Emergency Pizza!”
Any Domino's customer who places a qualifying online order can earn an Emergency Pizza from now through Feb. 11, 2024. Customers can then redeem it from their Domino's Rewards account. Domino's recently launched Domino's Rewards, its new and improved loyalty program, which gives members even more opportunities to earn and redeem points, as well as exclusive access to member-only deals like Emergency Pizza.
Benjamin Franklin… as you’ve never seen him
From Bolivia: fintech app Blink has a new spot that is inspired by the wackiness of Asian advertising, with a touch of risqué humour.
Of water, underwear, and doctors
Canned water brand Liquid Death wants to brainwash doctors. Or so it says. And the way it says it wants to do that —believe it or not— is by releasing a limited-edition range of “subliminal” underwear. This is how it explains the idea:
Doctors are basically the only people who will ever see you in your underwear. That’s why we tricked MeUndies into making a line of Liquid Death underwear. Using this innovative, subliminal underwear marketing tactic, we can brainwash doctors everywhere into drinking, promoting, and prescribing Liquid Death.
Helicopter triggers crocodile sex frenzy
All of the big males got up and roared and bellowed up at the sky, and then after the helicopters left they mated like mad.
That’s the owner of a crocodile farm in Queensland, Australia, telling ABC news, what happened after a Chinook helicopter —part of a military training exercise— flew low over his farm.
Naked and Suspicious
According to a news report out of Japan:
Police in Fukuoka Prefecture on Sept. 24 issued a prefecture-wide email warning regarding a group of suspicious men wearing a skimpy item of lingerie or nothing at all seen in the city of Koga the previous day.
According to Fukuoka Prefectural Police's Kasuya Police Station and the crime prevention email, about 10 of the men were completely naked and about 10 were wearing garter belts when spotted at about 2 p.m.
The station is advising residents to take personal safety measures such as, “Shouting loudly if they spot suspicious people and avoiding dark or secluded streets.”
Dog Driver
Police in Slovakia have fined the owner of a car after a speed camera appeared to show a dog in the driver’s seat. To quote from a Facebook post by the police (machine translated):
Senica police officers could not believe their eyes on the police radar. Instead of a photo of the driver, a brown hunting dog smiled beautifully at the camera, sitting obediently behind the wheel of the glove box, peeking through the windshield at a hopeful young doe.
The post also carried a copy of the snapshot while clarifying that it was neither photoshopped nor a fake:
However, the post did not mention the specific grounds for the fine. To quote from the BBC report of the news:
It's not clear if the fine - issued to the owner, rather than the dog - was for speeding, or for failing to secure the pet in a moving vehicle.