Sep 2008
A liguistic stinker
The toilets in Future Towers recently sprouted some
signs. They read:
To Avoid Blockages, Please Only Put Toilet Tissue Down The Toilet Pan
Clearly, there’s some weirdness with the <twat>wonderfully vernacular</twat> setting of the type, and the persistent Crazy Caps™ are a bit odd as well, but the thing that stands out most is that it lends itself to a particularly anal kind of, if you’ll excuse the pun, piss-taking, of the “Oh, so we can’t put bodily waste down the toilet now?” stripe. And every time I visit, my mind wanders and tries, vainly, to reword it so it’s concise but immune from gags.
So here’s your task, web peeps: reword this sign, presumably from scratch, so it is both elegant English – nothing cutesy, please – and not open to any kind of punning abuse from work-monkeys. Go!
To Avoid Blockages, Please Only Put Toilet Tissue Down The Toilet Pan
Clearly, there’s some weirdness with the <twat>wonderfully vernacular</twat> setting of the type, and the persistent Crazy Caps™ are a bit odd as well, but the thing that stands out most is that it lends itself to a particularly anal kind of, if you’ll excuse the pun, piss-taking, of the “Oh, so we can’t put bodily waste down the toilet now?” stripe. And every time I visit, my mind wanders and tries, vainly, to reword it so it’s concise but immune from gags.
So here’s your task, web peeps: reword this sign, presumably from scratch, so it is both elegant English – nothing cutesy, please – and not open to any kind of punning abuse from work-monkeys. Go!
Let there be light!
10 September 2008 @ 20:23 in Work
I’m working late at Future, and because folks here
rarely work past 5:30, I’m the only one here.
(Goldberg Variations cranked up to
11; now that’s that I’m talkin’ about.)
CLARIFICATION People here aren’t lazy bastards, and often some folks do put in prodigious unpaid overtime; it’s simply that as an institution Future’s much less about the late working than, say, Dennis was when I was there.
It’s a bit spooky, though; the lights are all motion controlled, so as I sit, lights switch off around me till I’m left in a fitful pool of light on one corner of the office. If I don’t move enough – sitting in one spot typing solidly will trigger it – even these lights will die.
The weird thing comes when you walk across the office to get a drink, say; as you walk, the lights along your path come on in a distressingly messianic way. Set the whole thing to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, slow to half speed, crop to CinemaScope, and it all feels a bit like the watershed moment in an arthouse flick about office workers.
Or maybe I should simply stop getting #13s from the coffee machine.
CLARIFICATION People here aren’t lazy bastards, and often some folks do put in prodigious unpaid overtime; it’s simply that as an institution Future’s much less about the late working than, say, Dennis was when I was there.
It’s a bit spooky, though; the lights are all motion controlled, so as I sit, lights switch off around me till I’m left in a fitful pool of light on one corner of the office. If I don’t move enough – sitting in one spot typing solidly will trigger it – even these lights will die.
The weird thing comes when you walk across the office to get a drink, say; as you walk, the lights along your path come on in a distressingly messianic way. Set the whole thing to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, slow to half speed, crop to CinemaScope, and it all feels a bit like the watershed moment in an arthouse flick about office workers.
Or maybe I should simply stop getting #13s from the coffee machine.
↑ = ✓
So a few weeks ago I had a white board fitted at
MacFormat so we could keep track of reviews stuff.
The plan went slightly awry, however, and it was
horribly abused. And so, before we wiped it the other
day in order to use it properly, I took a (shitty
iPhone*) shot of the madness so that it was recorded
for posterity.
Please note: every single thing on the board is pure wank. Nothing is based in fact and nothing here should be taken as characterisation of MacFormat, the market, publishing in general, humanity, the people at the magazine or, indeed, anything at all.
* The iPhone’s camera is utterly mediocre; for the first time ever today, however, I took a photo in relatively low light using my iPhone that wasn’t dreadful. iPhone in ‘not taking terrible photos’ shocker.
Please note: every single thing on the board is pure wank. Nothing is based in fact and nothing here should be taken as characterisation of MacFormat, the market, publishing in general, humanity, the people at the magazine or, indeed, anything at all.
* The iPhone’s camera is utterly mediocre; for the first time ever today, however, I took a photo in relatively low light using my iPhone that wasn’t dreadful. iPhone in ‘not taking terrible photos’ shocker.
Chup chup chup!
05 September 2008 @ 12:10 in Wife
Wife is slightly obsessed with
birds at the moment, drawing them, painting
them, modelling them from Mod Podge and kitchen
foil and Attenborough knows what else. Our house
is rapidly beginning to resemble a prettier,
more multimedia set for Hitchcock’s suspense
thriller.
Asked last night why she likes birds so much, reason number two was that they “have feet like dinosaurs”. This perturbs me for reasons I cannot quite articulate; what right-minded person, asked why they like birds, would cite their similarity to creatures of which our ancient mammalian hindbrain should be pant-crappingly terrified?
Asked last night why she likes birds so much, reason number two was that they “have feet like dinosaurs”. This perturbs me for reasons I cannot quite articulate; what right-minded person, asked why they like birds, would cite their similarity to creatures of which our ancient mammalian hindbrain should be pant-crappingly terrified?
