Due to Unforeseen ‘Circumcisions’
From Canada: a sign posted by a Pizza Hut outlet in northern Ontario that has gone viral for its typo.
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Reaction to a Theft
As posted by Bittersweet Confections of New Orleans:
PSA:Unfortunately, last night someone decided to break into our Magazine location.
Our thief stole 7 King Cakes and nothing else.
Our King Cakes are that good but please come purchase one during our regular store hours.
‘Neuter Your Ex’
To quote from an Instagram post of a New Jersey-based animal shelter:
Neuter Your Ex For Valentine’s Day!
That’s right, for just $50 Homeward Bound Pet Adoption Center will name a feral cat after your ex. The cat will then be spayed or neutered before being released back to their colony as part of our trap-neuter-return(TNR) program.
NHS Wales: unwarranted emergency call transcripts
A selection of transcripts released by the Welsh Ambulance Service, of “inappropriate calls” made to the 999 service in 2023:
Operator: Tell me exactly what’s happened.
Caller: Yesterday evening, we had some kebab, and I might have had a little bit more than I’m used to, then this morning, I’ve had a very painful stomach.
Caller: I have a bottom part denture, and I went to clean my teeth and I said, ‘Where’s my false teeth?’ This sounds crazy… but I don’t know what else to do. Could I have swallowed my false teeth?
Operator: So, you don’t know where your false teeth are?
Operator: Is the patient awake?
Caller: Yeah, it’s me, my hand’s stuck in the door.
Operator: Is the door locked at the moment?
Caller: Yeah, it’s locked. Mam! No, my hand’s stuck in the f*****g letterbox.
Operator: How old are you?
Caller: Open the door, my hand’s stuck!
Operator: Ambulance service, what’s the address of the emergency?
Caller: I wouldn’t say it’s an emergency, but I don’t know how to get down to hospital. I have a piercing in my ear, and it’s pretty much been ripped out and the ball’s stuck in my ear.
Operator: So, the ball from your piercing is stuck inside your ear?
Drink Naked
From Germany: Berlin-based BRLO brewery has come up with a hilarious parody of the stunning Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein underwear commercial.
Tom Hollander on being mistaken for Tom Holland
From his appearance on Last Night with Seth Meyers: an absolute pleasure to listen to, and watch.
‘The Weirdest Winter Boot Ever’
That’s according to a Highsnobiety review of UGG's Classic Ultra Ultra Tall Boot. To quote:
As its name suggests, the silhouette boasts an extra-tall shaft — according to UGG's website, it measures at 26 inches, which on my five-foot-four figure hits just below the crotch. Translation: these babies are even taller than the towering boots UGG and Y/PROJECT collaborated on back in 2018.
Things get weirder: the UGG Classic Ultra Ultra Tall is constructed from stackable, zippered panels that allow the wearer to customize the boot's height, kind of like those cargo pants that can be converted into cargo shorts.
RIP Norman Jewison
From Peter Bradshaw’s tribute in The Guardian:
Worrying about the “chemistry” of leading players has become a critical truism these days, but under Jewison’s shrewd direction, Cher and Cage had a Krakatoa-level of chemistry. It meant judging the exact amount of rueful comedy to go with the passion, but it also meant letting rip with the passion when that was the point. Romantic comedies very rarely have anything sexy about them, but when Cage angrily turns over Cher’s kitchen table and then they go to bed, Jewison brings the sizzle.
Maybe Norman Jewison himself was the fiddler on the roof of American cinema for 50 years, calling the tune, setting the rhythm, laying down the mood, but self-effacingly letting the main actors down on the ground get the attention and the glory. But what a virtuoso.
A couple of less-talked about, personal favourite moments from his movies:
Other People’s Money (1991)
-‘Carmen will educate us’
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
- The Windmills of Your Mind
The Case of the Shaman who cast Anogenital Spells
Excerpts from a Bangkok Post news report:
A 35-year-old professed shaman has confessed to charges relating to videos of him casting spells over clients' anuses and genitals, and promised to stop doing it.
Apiworasit Puangsaeng, aka Ajarn Man, acknowledged and admitted to the charges at the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau on Monday morning, CCIB chief Pol Maj Gen Chatpanthakan Khlaikhlueng said.
The native of Surin province made headlines in Thai media recently after videos of him performing rites casting spells on clients' private parts went viral.
Mr Apiworasit agreed that the rites were improper. He apologised for peforming them and promised to stop offering such services, and to focus his spells on other areas of the body - such as faces, arms and hands.
When your own chatbot slams your customer service
I’ll let this Sky News report explain:
DPD has disabled its artificial intelligence (AI) online chatbot after a customer was able to make the bot swear and write a poem criticising the parcel delivery company.
Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel when he said he was going “round and round in circles” trying to get any sort of information from the company’s chatbot.
“It couldn’t give me any information about the parcel, it couldn't pass me on to a human, and it couldn’t give me the number of their call centre. It didn't seem to be able to do anything useful,” Mr Beauchamp, from London, told Sky News.
“I was getting so frustrated at all the things it couldn't do that I tried to find out what it actually could do - and that's when the chaos started.”
The classical musician first asked the bot to tell him a joke, and soon, with minimal prompts, it was happily writing poems about DPD’s “unreliable” service.
“After a few more prompts it was happy to swear, too,” Mr Beauchamp said.
Sharing the wacky conversation on X, Mr Beauchamp said the bot replies to one message saying: “F*** yeah! I'll do my best to be as helpful as possible, even if it means swearing.”
In another part of the exchange, the bot calls itself a “useless chatbot that can't help you”.
The Heart Surgeon’s Cookbook
A one-of-a-kind initiative that is best introduced with excerpts from the book itself:
The techniques used in this book are chosen to maximize your dexterity training. Each of the recipes is built upon four techniques employed in an operating room. In some recipes you will get the chance to exercise several of them, in some we focus on one.
The tools and instruments you need to handle the nine recipes in this book come from both the kitchen and the operating room.
Yes, you read that right. The tools and instruments include a scalpel, tweezers, needle and thread, suture scissors, toothed forceps, and a syringe.
Whopper Island, anyone?
Burger King Brazil finds a strangely creative way to take aim at a key competitor.
Might Animal Control be asked to take away children?
I’ll let this Rolling Stone report explain:
If one Oklahoma representative gets his way, children who act like dogs and cats during school hours could be punished by… animal control. Yes, parents might soon have to collect their erstwhile kids from the pound — if Rep. Justin Humphrey’s bill makes it to the finish line as it stands today. That is, of course, if kids acting like animals at school is really that widespread a problem, which is up for debate.
Humphrey’s bill, which was filed Wednesday, seeks to put in place a law whereby “students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly known as furries at school shall not be allowed to participate in school. … The parent or guardian of a student in violation of this section shall pick up the student from school, or animal control services shall be contacted to remove the student.”
Message in Motion
It’s tennis season in Australia and fintech firm Afterpay finds an absurdly imaginative way to make its pitch.
An Ode to Toilet Paper
From Australia: a new spot for Sorbent blends poetry, patriotism, and a dash of humour.
The Perils of Election Freebies
To quote from an AP report:
At least three people were hospitalized after mistakenly eating colorful pods of liquid laundry detergent that were distributed as a campaign freebie in Taiwan’s presidential race, according to Taiwanese media reports.
One of the victims said she thought the pods were candy, the Central News Agency reported.
Don’t go dry
A new campaign for skincare brand Bulldog piggybacks on Dry January with its own message.
Want It All
The latest campaign for luxury fitness brand Equinox is as bewildering as lesser mortals like me might expect. The artsy visual imagery includes vignettes of well-sculpted naked bodies, faces in fish nets, a close-up of someone’s mouth stuffed with pomegranates, and the tentacles of an octopus. To quote from a review on the Muse by Clio website:
Initially, we wondered if the initiative, developed with Chandelier Creative, was just another goof on pretentious advertising. Apparently, that's not the case. Though the campaign works as both straight-ahead marketing and ironic commentary (intentional or otherwise).
“Each vignette needed to elicit an emotion, to feel tangible, visceral, and just abstract enough to allow the viewer to suspend their associations and embrace a deeper and more elemental form of desire,” Equinox VP, ECD Will Mayer tells Muse. “We wanted to highlight the duality of desire in a way that focused on feelings and tensions. [To illustrate] How our daily pursuits are guided by these principles—innate desires, not surface-level status symbols.”
Though the work may pop on social, “We are not interested in a ‘like’—we’re interested in evoking a feeling,” Mayer says. “Desire is not passive, nor are those who engage with our material. This campaign highlights a life lived, not seen through a screen.”
The target audience consists of “those who voraciously pursue or those who will see this creative and in turn feel seen.”
Escort Advisory
There is news out of Canada that, last month, military commanders at the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) base in Kingston (CFB Kingston) sent an internal message to soldiers, advising them to stay away from a sex worker by the name of Christina Lea Gilchrist, who was offering her services to soldiers via her website. Contrary to what they likely expected, the number of enquiries to Ms. Gilchrist has apparently skyrocketed since then.
To quote from one report:
The internal message noted that “the escort in question has photos posted on their website of (as of yet unidentified) clients in CAF uniforms in compromising positions. Aside from this being a potential offence, it could lead to other more serious consequences and engaging in sexual exploitation clearly goes against our CAF Code of Ethics and Values.”
But the internal message provided to all soldiers at the base has resulted in booming business for Gilchrist. Traffic to her website skyrocketed to 10,000 views over a three-day period and she is receiving requests for her services now from soldiers across the country.
“They gave me all this free publicity,” Gilchrist said. “After they made that memo, I literally had 10,000 hits on my website. They said to soldiers — ‘Hey don’t look at this’ and all the soldiers said, ‘Hey let’s go look at this.’“
Gilchrist offers a 25 per cent discount for military personnel. They are required to show their military identification cards to receive the discount.
Meanwhile, Ms. Gilchrist has a posted a link to the internal message on her website with this statement describing herself:
Officially the prettiest casual threat to national security* that you'll ever see since a memo went out to CFB KINGSTON about me specifically.
* legally a joke, please - I'm just a shack rat.
‘World's First Interstellar Tourism Campaign’
Going by just that description, I thought that this campaign was aiming to be intentionally humorous. Then I saw who the campaign was for, and I had my doubts. It’s for the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau (VisitLEX) which has a history of head-scratching campaigns (see this, for example). In the present instance, going by the specifics of the campaign, and that it finds a mention on science and technology websites, they appear to take the idea of an interstellar promotion pretty seriously. In fact, it would be best if I let the Gizmodo report explain the campaign:
It’s a tourism stunt, but the message is very real. The invitation, beamed out last fall via infrared laser toward the TRAPPIST-1 star system, is a project by the Lexington tourism bureau (yeah, we’re sending ads to aliens now). According to VisitLEX, they worked with engineers, linguists, and the FAA to make it happen. The target star is 40 light-years from Earth, which means any extraterrestrials that are eager to visit the self-proclaimed Horse Capital of the World will know they are invited in 2063.
The communication includes a bitmap of prime numbers, elements associated with life, depictions of water, ethanol, and dopamine, horse and human forms, and a landscape. It also includes several images of Lexington and an audio recording by Tee Dee Young, a blues musician from Lexington.
We don’t know that any life, much less intelligent life, actually exists in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Last year, data from the Webb Space Telescope revealed that TRAPPIST-1b, one of the exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST 1, has no atmosphere. Because life as we know it needs an atmosphere to survive, that all but confirmed there is no potential for life on TRAPPIST-1b. Webb followed up that discovery with the finding that there is also no atmosphere—or at most, a thin one—on planet TRAPPIST-1c. Luckily for the VisitLEX team, the TRAPPIST system has five other exoplanets that could theoretically host civilizations capable of interpreting their invitation.
Xbox Toaster
To be more precise, the product page on the Walmart website calls it ‘Xbox Series S Toaster 2 Slice Toaster with Wide Slot, Bagel Function, Digital Countdown Timer, with 6 Shade Settings’. Apart from being modelled on the design of Microsoft’s Xbox Series S gaming console and that it features an LED countdown timer, also of note is the fact that it imprints the Xbox sphere logo on the bread “for the ultimate slice of fandom”.
Fired reporter wins back job after being ruled to be funny
A reporter who was fired for his standup comedy has been reinstated to his job at a Philadelphia-based public radio station through an arbitrator, who agreed that his jokes were, in some part, funny.
Jad Sleiman, 34, is to be fully reinstated to his position with WHYY, a Philadelphia-based NPR station, after an arbitrator determined that, while the bits posted to social media could be interpreted as “inflammatory,” the organization “rushed to judgment” in its decision to terminate him.
While arbitrator Lawrence S. Coburn conceded some or portions of the videos could be seen as inflammatory — “the very low standard in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that I am required to apply,” he wrote — he also found them to be sometimes “simply funny.”
TikToker fined by Vietnam for offending Cambodia
I’ll let this news report explain:
Vietnam punished the influencer, Hua Quoc Anh, for “offending” Cambodia in suggesting the ancient temples belong to Thailand, according to a Thursday post on the website of the information ministry's broadcasting authority.
The TikTok clip lasted just 90 seconds but its content -- an image of Angkor Wat overlaid with the Thai flag -- was enough to earn its creator a $300 fine and a meeting with police.
Sniffing the Missing
“Everyone has a story to smell”. That was the brilliant tagline to a hilarious spot for P&G Native, just over a year ago. That tagline is back in a new spot (story?) that is also very funny.
Leap of Faith
Something that I picked off the Bestads website, supposedly a print ad for Buddhist Society of Western Australia.
Let’s get taxes over with
Tax filing software firm TaxAct has released a series of spots with a no-nonsense pitch—well, almost.
-Sexiest industry
-Pro athletes
-More fun than taxes
-No one looks forward to taxes
RIP Tom Wilkinson
As an obit on The Guardian website described him, a “prolific actor and reluctant star”.
Batman Begins (2005)
- ‘Power you can’t buy’
Michael Clayton (2007)
- Opening monologue