Dom Davis (The Blog)

For reasons I’d rather not go into on a public forum this morning left me so angry I was shaking. It’s home time and I’m still pretty pissed off, however, I have a remedy for that.

Say what you will about Mr Clarkson and his chums but I find Top Gear to be hysterically funny (I will probably agree with every complaint you raise about them, only I find these things good things). The Zozo, unfortunately, does not, so in order to avoid inflicting it on her I have the latest series on my iPhone (yes, I know, it’s taken me a while to get round to it).

45 minutes (the length of the train journey, unfortunately not long enough to take in an entire episode) of Clarkson shouting “Power!!!” while driving something ridiculous, May trying to be sophisticated in the face of the other two and failing and Hammond reversing into May all the time is guaranteed to put a smile on my face and mean I’m not in my current killer mood when I get home. In the olden days I would have just sat on the train listening to angry music and seething. Isn’t modern technology grand

Soap. It’s pretty boring, fairly ubiquitous, hard to differentiate and low margin. We’ve gone from plain old bars (Imperial Leather, remember that?) and tried every trick in the book to make the product stick out and increase market share and margins. Bars with metal plates that stick onto magnetic holders, soap on a rope, liquid soap, soap with moisturiser, smelly soap, hypoallergenic soap, soap in dispensers, it’s all been tried. Recently one company has taken this to extremes allowing you to buy an automatic, hands free dispenser for their soap. The marketing pitch? With this product you don’t have to touch the nasty, icky dispenser that’s been touched by your families dirty hands.

Let’s step back and think about this. Let’s take our hypothetical hands and cover them in hypothetical dirt. Now we need to clean them, so let’s go to our hypothetical sink and wash them. We turn on our hypothetical taps, pump our hypothetical lemon and lime liquid soap (enjoying the thoughts of sherbet lemons it conjures) and… oh no, the soap dispenser may have put dirt and germs on our hands! Whatever will we do? Now at this point we could bemoan the lack of automated soap dispenser as we risk near certain Ebola, however, I’m going to suggest an alternative. Let’s carry on with our thought experiment. Let’s take our wet, dirty, soap laden, germ coated hands and let’s wash them. Look! Clean! Magic. Kind of renders the automatic dispenser moot. Sure, there’s the gadget appeal but it’s also not the cheapest thing in the the world.

They’ve missed a trick though. Let’s continue our thought experiment, where we take our lovely clean hypothetical hands and turn off the taps. But wait, our lovely clean hands are touching the now filthy taps, necrotising fasciitis ensues followed by death. Automatic taps, that’s what we need.

Last night The Zozo and I were subjected to the new 2010 advert for webuyanycar.com, a low budget affair that relies on the musical equivalent of malaria¹ to lodge itself in the brain. The lyrics of the tune as follows:

webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – any make, any model, any age, any price, from fifty quid to a hundred grand.
webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – buy a newer car and don’t part ex, you may get a better deal when you buy next.
webuyanycar.com – enter your reg number now at webuyanycar.com.

Most important to note is the ‘dot com’ part of ‘we buy any car dot com’ is said in a slightly different voice and it is this that makes the tune so hard to remove from the brain once it’s got lodged there.

This morning The Zozo and I have both been suffering from having this tune stuck in our brains and it’s not got to the stage where she will go ‘we buy any car’ and I will go ‘dot com’. Worse still, I’m not putting ‘dot com’ on the end of bloody everything [dot com]… see!!

I’m hoping the meme will burn itself out but in the mean time I’m trying not to go crazy with the little voice in my head going ‘dot com’ to everything [dot com]. Gaaaaahhhhh!!!! Make it stop!².

¹Highly infectious and not pleasant if you have it

²dot com

So Specsavers decided that they would use Postman Pat for one of their advertising campaigns. The storyline, such that it is, is that Pat accidentally sits on his glasses and then proceeds to drive off trying to deliver the post but, ultimately, failing.

What could be wrong with using Postman Pat you ask? Nothing… you’d think. After all this is a children’s TV character. What could be more innocent than that? Well lets look at the facts shall we.

Pat sits on and breaks his glasses while getting into his van. So far so good. Pat then proceeds to drive off, not noticing that Jess, his black and white cat, is still on the bonnet of the van. He hits a road sign, leaves the road, crashes through a fence, then a brick wall before he looses the Jess (thankfully she seems unharmed) driving through a garden. The next scene shows Pat picking up a bag of vegetables instead of the bag of post and he then goes on to try to deliver said vegetables. Pat is last seen driving off after hitting a sign.

Ignoring, for the moment, that glasses could correct any kind of vision defect that would cause you to fail to notice a cat in your field of view, or mistake a bag of vegetables for a bag of post, Pat should have been aware of the fact that his eyesight was poor. As an upstanding citizen he would have reported the fact to the DVLA and would be issued with a driving license that would require him to wear glasses to drive. Pat ignores this and proceeds to drive while being unable to see. He then fails to stop at a number of accidents after causing hundred, if not thousands of pounds of damage.

Next, one has to question this persons lucidity. Regardless of if you could see or not, the act of striking road signs, fences and brick walls with a vehicle has got to be noticeable. One has to be criminally negligent, or on something, to fail to notice these events. This goes doubly for posting vegetables through a persons letter box. You could argue that the two sacks containing the vegetables and the letters were similar but when it comes to the contents their not even the same shape. To have a postman who is either so off his face, or who cares so little about his job so as not to notice that what he is holding is a large spherical object and not a thin rectangular one is just beyond comprehension.

Finally, given Pats complete inability to see anything, let alone read, coupled with the fact that the vegetables are not addressed how does he know which letter boxes he should be posting things through? He can’t, he’s just randomly distributing the contents of his bags.

So we have a criminally negligent, possibly high person who has broken a number of laws, destroyed property and woefully failed at his job being used as a spokes person for a company. I don’t know about them but I’d be distancing myself from Pat as soon as I could. I’m pretty sure that once the police become aware of the (readily available) evidence that Pat will be facing prosecution, not to mention the loss of his job.

There must be something about the Antipodes and the way that pretty much everything there wants to kill you (especially in Australia) that produces the likes of Steve Irwin (nutcase who used to pick up snakes while telling the audience just how many people a single drop of venom could kill – now dead) and The Lion Man (the nutcase currently on TV).

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to realise that big cats, no matter how hand reared and friendly, are great fun to play with right up until the point that they get bored of you. You’ve seen house cats. They roll on their backs, do the whole friendly ‘lets play’ thing and are a big bundle of cute fluff right up until they get bored, the claws come out and they try to take off your hand. That’s a domesticated cat that’s much smaller than you. What happens when a big cat does that? Death. That’s what happens. But no, this bloke is playing football with lions, including Savannah; “…his favourite lion and the one most likely to turn on him”. Lets just revisit that shall we: “…the one most likely to turn on him”. So he knows there’s a chance they might decide to stop being friendly and, in a fight, my money is with the fully grown lion.

His wife seems to have slightly more brains as she’s decided that going into the enclosure to play football is not up there with the world most sensible ideas, then changes her mind, goes in, gets scared (really can’t blame her) and makes a quick exit.

I love big cats, I love watching them and photographing them, but most of all I love the sturdy fence between me and them. Lets just hope that the Lion Man doesn’t end up as Lion Food.

The red car and the blue car had a race - Good start, we’ve introduced the main players, identified the situation we’re in.

All red wants to do is stuff his face – OK, not exactly what you’d expect from a story involving two cars, but now we’ve anthropomorphised the cars and indicated that reds mind may not be entirely on the aforementioned race. Still, twists are what keep a story interesting.

He eats everything he sees, from trucks to prickly trees – Now this is a worrying development. A car, ordinarily, eats things derived from hydrocarbons. Since we have anthropomorphised these vehicles we’d possibly expect them to be eating human foods, but trucks and prickly trees are just completely left field and smack of a serious eating disorder. Think about it, here we have a vehicle that is so desperate to stuff it’s face with food that it will eat its own kind, namely a truck that is many times its size. This is very worrying.

But smart old blue he took the milky way – Great, so we’re congratulated blue for being ‘normal’. Never mind that red has a serious psychological disorder and is in need of help, no, smart old blue, doesn’t eat trucks. Isn’t he clever.

He’s looking for a chocolate treat fluffy and light – Talk about rubbing it in. Red probably has big self image problems and blue is simply thinking of himself and taunting red with his desire to eat chocolate. Furthermore, by describing it as a ‘treat’ we’re reinforcing the idea that blue is somehow better than red because he’s more normal.

Cos he knows it won’t spoil his appetite – Lies! When this was rereleased in 2009 the line was changed to ‘Cos he knows it tastes just right’. Why would they do that? The only reason I can think of is that advertising standards have got a lot more stringent since the advert was first released and they can no longer tell us that Milky Way won’t spoil your appetite (Yes, this tawdry tale of alienation against those with eating disorders is an advertisement for a chocolate bar which showed in the UK some years ago and was repeated last year… what did you think I was on about?) So what are they saying now? What is the message being put across now? A chocolate bar tastes nicer than prickly trees and trucks. Well duh!

Oh no! the bridge has gone, old red can’t carry on – Poor old red, just because he eats weird stuff he’s supposed to be a porker that can’t complete the race. What about blue? Blue stuffs his face with chocolate which, contrary to advice given in previous year, probably does ruin your appetite and, by extension, probably isn’t as good for you as was once implied.

But smart old blue, he took the milky way – which makes you realise that blue is an annoying suck up. Oh, smart old blue, isn’t he clever. Makes you wish the bridge went out with blue on it.