I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite sur­prised this morn­ing by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and cer­tain posts — the one about casu­als, the one about col­lapsed lungs, and any­thing about how to do stuff on a com­puter — actu­ally get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell.

So, I thought I’d try a little exper­i­ment and… add some adver­tise­ments to the site. You know, so I can profit from foot­ball hooli­gans arrang­ing fights and unwell Amer­i­cans with­out health insur­ance. Might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Of course, this is wrong and bad and I should kill myself at the first avail­able oppor­tu­nity, so, to salve the ter­ri­ble guilt, if I make more money than it takes to pay my host­ing and domain reg­is­tra­tion fees (around £60 a year, I think), I’ll give it to charity.

I don’t want folk who actively read the site to be trou­bled by these ever-​so-​discreet tex­tual intru­sions of Mammon, so, just in case you’re not already block­ing them, adverts will only appear below entries a week after they’ve been posted, and will never appear in RSS feeds or on the home page.

Here’s what they look like:

What do you reckon, then? Sen­si­ble plan, or revolt­ing act?

Enable Scot­land launched an inter­est­ing fundrais­ing cam­paign today. From the BBC report:

A char­ity for chil­dren and adults with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties has launched a cam­paign high­light­ing the greater dona­tions given to animal charities.

Enable Scot­land said animal char­i­ties received nearly twice as much fund­ing as dis­abil­ity ones.

Its new cam­paign fea­tures posters of adults with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties along­side straplines like “If I ate out of a dog bowl would you like me more?”.

I reckon they should be applauded for being brave enough to high­light the fact that many people would rather donate money to aid ani­mals rather than humans, but I worry that the cam­paign will be counter-​productive—the posters could easily be read as anti-​animal char­ity, rather than pro-​human charity.

You can donate to Enable Scot­land here.

This col­lec­tion of early hip hop flyers is just stunning.

Some are scrawled in felt tip, others are metic­u­lously drawn, others are mar­vels of sharp-​knived cut and paste.

And then there’s the line-​ups, which make you really, really wish Sci­ence had got its arse in gear and invented a time machine already.

You might not have noticed, but there are cur­rently two sep­a­rate cam­paigns airing for prod­ucts that stop your loo smelling of poo fea­tur­ing camp speak­ing toi­lets. (I can’t for the life of me remem­ber the brands in ques­tion - they’re bad adverts in every sense.)

In both, women are shamed by their talk­ing toi­lets into taking more care over the odors emi­nat­ing from the bowl, lest their house­guests think ill of them. In one ad., the loo is voiced by Julian Clary (or an imper­son­ator) in the other, it’s a generic Ken­neth Williams-​esque voice that chides the housewife.

The reason for this queer­ing of the toilet bowl is simple: you can’t have a woman sit­ting on the face of a humanoid toilet that is explic­itly hetero - the wonks script­ing the ad. are in weird enough ter­ri­tory as it is with­out intro­duc­ing a cun­nilin­gual sub­text to the rela­tion­ship between the Every­woman hero­ine and her newly clean and sweet-​smelling shitter.

In his com­plaint about the Muller cam­paign, Tom chooses to miss out a layer of the Muller spot, one shared by the adverts fea­tur­ing our poofy toilet friends - the gay Air Stew­ard (what a lazy, lazy stereo­type) who looks at a man’s willy to make people buy yoghurt (do they really want to asso­ciate yoghurt with cocks?) doesn’t do so with a las­civ­i­ous glance, nor does he make an aggres­sive pass. Instead, it’s a purse-​lipped end-​of-​the-​peir mug to camera. So, instead of have the pro­tag­o­nist fuck his girl­friend in some yoghurty way, we are shown her get­ting dis­tracted by a deli­cious tub of Muller Light, while her boyfriend is forced by cir­cum­stances beyond his con­trol to have a non-​sexual encounter with a gay man.

WTF?

On the one hand, this could all be seen as an exten­sion of media rep­re­sen­ta­tion of gay men as inher­ently asex­ual, non-​threatening fig­ures of fun - just as dam­ag­ing a stereo­type as the one Tom iden­ti­fies when he says:

When I was grow­ing up gay I was under the mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that gay people were dirty and sick­en­ing and pathetic because of adverts like this.

But I think it’s more com­pli­cated than that. In all these adverts, sex is being used to sell prod­ucts - whether it’s the wink­ing harpies (Harpics?!) who trade double-​entendres with their living toi­lets, or the woman who prefers a tub of live cul­ture to the atten­tions of her man - but the impli­ca­tion of shag­ging is dif­fused through a neutered-​but-​sexual homo­sex­ual. That’s at least as dan­ger­ous a mes­sage (or chunk of social con­trol, if you’re feel­ing para­noid) as the, erm, straight por­trayal of gay men as threat­en­ing pervs - these adverts say, effec­tively, that gay men are naugh­tily sug­ges­tive of sexual activ­ity, but also that they them­selves are barred from that activity.

It’s a bit like dress­ing your Barbie doll up like a slut, only to point out to every­one that she has no cunt.

There’s a point buried up there some­where, I think (in this post, I mean, not your Barbie doll). It’s prob­a­bly that until the tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing indus­try starts pre­sent­ing gay men (and les­bians, who are sim­i­larly much-​used in their most unthreat­en­ing, lip­sticky form) in the way that, say, adver­tis­ing has, on the whole, learned to present mixed race cou­ples, or ethnic minori­ties in gen­eral, with­out making it an issue, let­ters of com­plaint like Tom’s are much needed.

They are, I think, time­wasters lack­ing a coher­ent polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy; pre­fer­ring instead to point out the crush­ingly obvi­ous fact that unfet­tered free-​market cap­i­tal­ism might not be all that great for poor people, with­out both­er­ing to offer an alter­nate model. (More triv­ially, the fact that these rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies invari­ably smoke roll-​ups packed with Impe­r­ial Tobacco’s finest and wear Con­verse - owned by anti-​globalisation neme­sis Nike, fact fans - tends to make me want to laugh in their faces.)

Anyway, the other night at Mise En Scène - The Chateau’s excel­lent short film night - I watched Bill­bored, a brief guide to sub­ver­tis­ing, ad-​jamming, or what­ever you want to call the act of recon­fig­ur­ing hoard­ings to pro­mote vague anarcho-​hippie mes­sages instead of shilling prod­uct for The Man.

You can watch it at the i-Contact Video Net­work Archive, assum­ing you have - oh look, another irony - RealPlayer installed. It’s a decent enough little video, explain­ing the trend well and offer­ing a few tips for the bud­ding subvertiserista.

One shot, though, reveals every­thing that is wrong with this brand (pun absolutely intended) of junior dis­sent: a masked oper­a­tive, spray­can in hand, looms toward the corner of a bill­board and strikes, oblit­er­at­ing the sick, twisted logo embla­zoned there, doubt­less paid for with filthy cap­i­tal­ist pig-​dog lucre.

Who could be deserv­ing of such ire? Which vile outfit are these urban gueril­las attacking?

Unison

Yep, that Unison.

And that’s your anti-​globalisation pro­tester right there: some­one so caught up in the glam­orous world of covert twigh­light mis­sions against The System that they can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between a sin­is­ter multi­na­tional, glee­fully count­ing its prof­its as impov­er­ished Third World inden­tured slaves work them­selves to death, and an organ­i­sa­tion devoted to fight­ing for fair pay and con­di­tions for the public sector work­ers of the UK.

Idiots.