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.