Generating a buzz

This German marketing stunt deploys micro banner ads attached to live flies, which is guaranteed to raise both product awareness and the likelihood of infectious insect-borne diseases.



[Via Guardian Viral Video]

How not to be a secret agent

In 1985 French secret service agents planted bombs on board the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior, which was moored in downtown Auckland and was shortly to protest against France's nuclear test programme in French Polynesia. One crew member of the ship was killed in the blast. Some of the agents responsible for the attack were later caught by the New Zealand authorities, in part due to the number of mistakes the agents made during their mission:

- Arousing suspicions of locals by sailing Ouvea [their yacht] into the hazardous Parengarenga Harbour
- Crew of Ouvea arousing interest of customs inspector by the spotlessness of the yacht (which didn't appear to have sailed the South Pacific), by having three new, uncreased and unmarked passports, by not fitting yachting stereotypes, by having no cameras aboard despite one crew member being a photographer
- Driving on the wrong side of the road and almost causing an accident, thus alerting a bystander who noted the vehicle's registration number
- Not understanding that internal New Zealand toll calls are traceable
- Using and abandoning a Zodiac, an expensive rubber dinghy, that was noticed because of its rarity and desirability in New Zealand
- Dumping two oxygen cylinders with French markings, which were so conspicuous they were reported to police and could be traced to a Nice manufacturer of special equipment for French armed forces
- Acting so suspiciously on Tamaki Drive, Auckland, that their van registration number was noted and the police called
- Returning rental van to Auckland airport and demanding a $130 refund, instead of leaving the van in airport car park
- Inconsistencies in Turenges' stories
- Turenges both having Swiss passports issued in Paris on the same day with wildly different serial numbers
- Turenges keeping file of receipts on their 'honeymoon'
- Turenges speaking French in front of a New Zealand police officer who was French-speaking
- Being conspicuous for being rude wherever they went
- Being such bad actors
- Phoning numbers in Paris traceable to the French security services
- Getting caught

Source: Mary Trewby, Beachcomber: A New Zealand & Pacific Miscellany, Auckland, 2004

The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain

Performing a medley of five songs sung in the round, possibly set to the music of Handel. (Yeah, like I'd know either way!) I love the oh-so-English vocals.



[Via SuperTom]

The greatest vampire film ever

'Yes I saw Twilight - my granddaughter made me watch it, she said it was the greatest vampire film ever.  After the 'film' was over I wanted to ... smack her across the head with my shoe, but I do not want a book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die, so instead I gave her a ... DVD of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu instead and told her, now that's a vampire film'

 

- Screen legend Lauren Bacall on Twitter (Quoted in Guardian, 28 October 2009)

The importance of clear guidelines

From a list of trivia relating to the film The Right Stuff:

Original composer John Barry left the film because he found it impossible to understand what Philip Kaufman wanted from the score, citing a meeting where the director described his ideal score as "sounding like you're walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot."

- IMDB.com

Roughing it in the South Island

'...[T]he experiences of the surveyor and explorer Thomas Brunner, scrawled in a damp journal while traversing the south-west coast of the South Island [of New Zealand] in 1847, exposed just how little British civilisation (or any other for that matter) had penetrated these vast tracts of the country's territory [...]

26th. I am getting so sick of this exploring, the walking and the diet being both so bad, that were it not for the shame of the thing, I would return to the more comfortable quarters of the Riwaka river.

27th. Worse and worse walking, the rocks being steep and rugged, and covered with underbrush and quantities of brier, the bush almost impassable for the quantity of dead timber and moss. The evening showering for rain.

26th. Heavy rain all day. Broke our fast on a species of fungus found on the rotten trees.

24th. Last night we were again visited with a deluge of rain, which completely covered the surface of the earth, so that we had to sit all night ankle deep in water.

27th. [...] our dog nearly consumed (I was compelled, though very reluctantly, to give my consent to killing my dog Rover), and we could find no other eatable: the weather too cold for eels, and birds are not seen in the black birch woods'

- Quoted in Paul Moon, The Newest Country in the World: A History of New Zealand in the Decade of the Treaty, Auckland, 2007, p176.

Bedroom antics

'Turning a blind eye to [French] politicians' love lives has been traditional in a nation of strict privacy laws.  For years, the press politely left unreported the mistress and child of the socialist president, Francois Mitterand.  Jacques Chirac's sacked chauffeur wrote a book about his boss's weakness for women, inspiring the joke: "Chirac?  Three minutes.  Shower included"'

 

- Guardian, 12 October 2009

Licensed crime in Ankh-Morpork

'Ankh-Morpork's enviable system of licensed criminals owes much to the current Patrician, Lord Vetinari. He reasoned that the only way to police a city of a million inhabitants was to recognise the various gangs and robber guilds, give them professional status, invite the leaders to large dinners, allow an acceptable level of street crime and then make the guild leaders responsible for enforcing it, on pain of being stripped of their new civic honours along with large areas of their skin. It worked. Criminals, it turned out, made a very good police force; unauthorised robbers soon found, for example, that instead of a night in the cells they could now expect an eternity at the bottom of the river.

However, there was the problem of apportioning the crime statistics, and so there arose a complex system of annual budgeting, chits and allowances to see that a) the members could make a reasonable living and b) no citizen was robbed or assaulted more than an agreed number of times. Many foresighted citizens in fact arranged to get an acceptable minimum of theft, assault, etc, over at the beginning of the financial year, often in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, and thus be able to walk the streets quite safely for the rest of the year. It all ticked over extremely peacefully and efficiently, demonstrating once again that compared to the Patrician of Ankh, Machiavelli could not have run a whelk stall'

- Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters, 1988

Never trust a sailor

'[During a sea voyage] in the early 14th century, Ludolph de Sudheim was amazed to see flying fish:

There are some marvellous [fish] which lift themselves out of the water and fly for quite a long time like butterflies, but I don't know how long they can stay in the air. I asked experienced sailors about this, wanting to know where the fish came from. They replied that in England and Ireland very beautiful trees grow on the shore bearing fruit like apples. In these apples, worms are born, and when the apples are ripe and fall they break open and the worms fly away because they have wings like bees. If they touch first on land they become airborne and fly with other birds. If they touch first at sea they become sea creatures and swim like fish but from time to time they also use their natural ability to fly.

Perhaps wisely, Ludolph remarked that he wasn't sure if trees like this really existed but he recorded what he'd been told'.

- Quoted in Susan Rose, The Medieval Sea, London, 2007

Space Trek And Wars

From a Mitchell & Webb live comedy performance comes this space opera pastiche. 'Captain, the little green men have made a hole in the silver wall with their laser thingy and now the space is getting in!'