It seems that less and less people have a sence of humour

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23601215

^ Well there's 250 people with nothing better to do with their time. I thought it was quite funny, especially with Michael Buerk's voiceover.

Every now and then. my Gmail email address (which I use a lot) attracts randomness. Someone decides to put their name with @gmail.com into something, and if it is my name, I get their email. Sometime people assume that if they pau a name with @gmail.com at the end of it, then the person they are thinking of will get the message (because email, is psychic, right?). If that person has the same name as me, I get it.

I have had:
• A resingation email - yes, someone emailed their boss resigning.

• Invitations to a press conferecnce (I asked for travel expenses from the UK, plus hotel and other expenses to be paid - I got no reply)

• Near confidential corporate information. I replied to everyone on that one (there were a couple of cc) as well as copying it to the CEO telling that what happened. I hope someone got a bollocking for that.

• An email from an attorney (why are these idiots mostly always American) to a client about a fatal motorcycle RTA that the recipient’s brother has been involved in

The latest has been a string of emails reminding someone of their mobile phone e-bill. So I have the bill amount, but no phone or account number. I have each time one of these have come through emailed the company concerned to tell them what is happening. Each time, i get a boiler-plate response about it being investigated. Each time, though, nothing happens. So I have had three of these emails. Interesting, the first had a full stop character in it, the last two have not. However, as we all know, these characters are ignored by Gmail. so your.name@gmail.com and your name@gmail.com both relate to the same account.

So I posted something on Twitter. They asked for my details by DM which I gave them - but nothing more. I wonder how long it will go before someone realises at their end realises that things are not working as they should. I expect when their customer asks why they have had no emails from them, suppose. Usually, this has taken one email to sort out. The person at the other end has apologised, said they’ll get more robust contact details. This time, however, it’s proving a little tricker. Even AT&T were on the case pretty damn fast when I started getting emails from them.

I will stress that this is not a regular occurrence. Once every 6 months or so.

The PS3's utter failure at recognising an internet signal if it wasn't there when you switched the machine on. I haven't found any way round it except rebooting the machine, since you get an error message that means fcuk all to most people... And that's when it doesn't randomly log you out or tell you you've been disconnected from some media server you didn't even know you were connected to.

I've been mulling this over since a friend posted the Guardian's coverage of it somewhere.
If you've ever had a pet or child removed by the authorities, I can imagine it was a pretty traumatic thing to go through.
I can understand why 250 people felt it trivialised something very nasty.

Only if those 250 people have a massive shortage in sense of perspective. They're not trivialising anything, because they're not even attempting to make that point.

No, however they did set out to mimic the 'real' thing as you'd expect to find it on a documentary. Not quite, but it's close enough.
If you'd been through something like that, I doubt you'd want to be reminded so Unilever can shift some jars of the brown stuff.
Perhaps they'd follow it up by having families receiving knocks on the door from military personnel to tell them that their jar of marmite has been finished in action by some hungry Taleban, filmed as if it was a documentary.
It'd be hilarious, and I'm sure there'd be no complaints, because everyone has perspective.

Well, I can sympathise, but as the saying goes 'you don't have a right to force me not to offend you'. A lot of TV is based upon things that somebody could have a negative mnemonic association to. If we ban all of those, there'd be no shoot outs, no car chases, no crime dramas at all. In fact nothing where anyone is in any sense of jeopardy, because pretty much every dramatic situation where someone is in peril is based on a real situation which somebody in the viewing public may have been through, or been harmed in and their relatives might be watching. So that's crime dramas, any sort of domestic drama in which marriage breakup might feature (so no soaps!). Oh and the news, that will have to go too.

You can't make TV so that nobody is ever offended or upset by anything that's on it. Well, you can, it's called CeeBeebies. You can (and we do) have rules against things which are designed to offend but incidental offence is generally seen as 'unfortunate but one of those things'. I expect to see an small news item in a few weeks that the relevant body has found against the complainants.


Mm.. that's a bit of a straw man argument to be honest with you. I don't think in reality there was ever likely to be a Marmite advert with that plot line.

Jon

The big difference is that we're not talking about factual, or even dramatised violence.
It's an advert to encourage people to buy Marmite because Unilever have a wickedly subversive sense of humour that's, like, totally close to the bone. The kids get it. 250 people don't. If you're cool, you'll get it. We don't care about those squares.



Anti-vaccination campaigners, Rastamouse is racist... more of a minefield than you'd imagine, children's TV.



You're absolutely right. I'll be interested to see what the outcome is, one way or the other. Like I say, I can see both points of view on this.



My point is that if that you're prepared to make an ad that makes light of animal cruelty, then why stop there?
Agencies generate many scripts, not all of them see the light of day. Usually someone will go "Actually, that's a bit close to the mark for our target market" and it'll be shelved.
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if there's not a rough draft or treatment, or at least mentioned in a meeting of that one knocking around, if they came up with this one.

Oh God, remember the kerfuffle when CBBC got a presenter in that was missing one of her forearms? My life, the noise...


I don't think they were, frankly. They were making light of the fact lots of people have bought a jar of marmite, took one taste, thought 'Christ almighty!' and stuck it at the back of the cupboard. That's what the ad is actually about. The way they did it was pretty tasteless, but I don't believe it went beyond the bounds.


You could cynically believe they designed an ad that they knew would get a few headlines. However the fact is even the most innocuous thing these days can offend a few people on the internet and then somewhere like Mumsnet gets involved and suddenly you've got a silly season story. Which in reality is all this is.

Then there is Grandpa in my Pocket.

I loved the pixelation over the dogs face to protect its identity.

Thanks for that. I was not sure how accessible it would have been.

My bedroom window. You open it just a smidge to let air in but not the insect disco outside (there's a party every night by the streetlight!), then the fcuking thing swings wide open cos it wasn't installed properly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-23612766

FAIL all round.