I agree with nick, but…

I don’t agree with copyright infringement.

The latest article/free downloadable poster from the Guardian - which asks if Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is the British Obama - is almost enough to put me off reading the paper forever.

Yesterday began with London Mayor/Tory toff/Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson extolling his party leader, David Cameron, who had ‘aced every question’ during last week’s leaders’ debate, and carried on with an anecdote of how he once bet £1,000 that his party would win the next election. Mayor Boris even suggested someone had spiked the water supply, to explain so much new support for Clegg.

Now, my feelings toward Cameron/the Tories is largely based on the fact that Cameron chose Take That’s Gary Barlow to back his campaign/earn some stripes with the kids. (Obama had the Boss, even George W. Bush managed to get Britney Spears onside… but Gary Barlow? What could Cameron know about young people if he’s calling Take That for help?).

I didn’t agree with Boris, but his article was far more entertaining than Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian piece, which asks:

Is Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg an Obama-style hero for our times, a Churchillian leader or a popular rebel in the mould of Che Guevara? Perhaps he’s just another great British underdog

Poor Che, victim of so many crimes against popular culture, he doesn’t deserve the commercial fate that has been thrust upon him by souvenir shops, college kids and Guardian’s political team.

As for Clegg in the iconic* Hope picture, I sincerely hope the Guardian commissioned Shephard Fairey to re-imagine his earlier work, or better yet, consulted the Associated Press. They would’ve had to, right? Considering that Fairey spent most of last year in court fighting the AP over copyright infringement for his Hope picture of Obama, the Guardian must’ve checked their sources.

In the Fairey vs Associated Press case, AP believed the popular street artist used Mannie Garcia’s photo of Obama (above right) as the basis of the Hope picture, effectively replicating the image in a ‘paint by numbers’ without obtaining proper copyright permission. Fairey actually filed a pre-emptive lawsuit citing ‘fair use’ of the photo, which he transformed into a:

…stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message.

(Bless him, he might actually be stretching the terms ‘radical’ in this sense).

Fairey also claimed he used the Obama picture above, with George Clooney, as his reference. This was a pertinent point in the case, as it meant Fairey’s close-up Hope image involved more original input (that’s without even mentioning the fact that he added a badge to Obama’s lapel!).

The lawsuit took an odd turn in October when Fairey admitted that he had in fact lied about using the Clooney picture as a reference, and had even gone as far as creating new documents in his defence. The case continues, obviously without any limits on further ‘fair use’ of the AP/Garcia photo if national papers such as the Guardian are free to re-imagine it once again.

This latest (mis)use, in Burkeman’s article on the ‘Clegginess of Clegg’, is part of a selection of images - Clegg as Obama, Che, Churchill. Fortunately, Burkeman manages to bring the Cleggomania back to reality, before it gets too out of hand:

Nick Clegg looks kind of normal, he wears normal-looking clothes, he has some good ideas, along with a few that are a bit rubbish; he might do OK, but if we’re honest, probably not brilliantly, and he has provoked a low-key outburst of restrained hysteria.

So maybe it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek after all. Still, enough with recycling these old images of politicos - I think we’re ready for a new icon.

Read the Guardian article or Mayor Boris in the Telegraph.

<Nick Clegg from the Guardian and Hope/original AP pictures from PD online, who’ve been following the lawsuit for months and have plenty of juicy details>.

*I know, mum, ‘icon’ should be reserved for religious reasons. It’s late, ok?

Pasta with black people. i mean pepper.

Last week Penguin Group Australia reprinted 7,000 copies of the Pasta Bible following an AUD$20,000 typo.

According to The Age, a recipe for spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto* called for salt and freshly ground black people, rather than the intended salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Head of publishing, Bob Sessions, could not understand why anyone would be offended by such a slip. He said almost every recipe called for ground black pepper, not black people, which occurred only once:

…[a] misprint occurs which obviously came from a spellchecker. When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable.

Sessions does not specify if the spellchecker was human or computerised. I’m guessing computerised (with added human error), which led me to the following experiment…

Using Microsoft Word, and giving the author/layout person the benefit of the doubt that they are not a cannibalistic racist, I assumed they intended to type pepper. I typed variations of the word black pepper, to see just what it took for my spellchecker to throw back black people:

1. Peoper: pepper, proper, pauper, popper, paper. Note pepper out in front.
2. Pepoer: pepper, peppier, paper, piper, popover. Again, no people in sight.

And then, assuming the typist was thinking about actual people, but just couldn’t spell it right:

1. Pepple: people, pepper, popped. Interesting.
2. Peopel: people, propel. Hmmm…

It seems there is a pattern to my spellchecker. Try typing pepper, and you get pepper, without a person in sight.

Try typing people, and you get people. Sometimes, pepper.

Back to Mr Sessions though, who continued his indignant rant to explain Penguin would not recall the cookbook due to the fact it would be extremely hard to do so:

We’ve said to bookstores that if anyone is small-minded enough to complain about this … silly mistake, we will happily replace [the book] for them.

Who is this guy? While it’s refreshing to read such honest ignorance, I find it offensive that one of the world’s major publishing houses can’t find a proofreader who can handle a cookbook. Sessions, of all people, should know the many steps a manuscript goes through during production, and just how many eyes would go over every page before it goes to print. Even once it’s printed, Penguin should have someone doing final quality checks before the book is distributed nationwide and sold for $20 a pop.

So call me small-minded, but I cannot accept a major publisher making such a small mistake,  blaming the spellchecker, then worst of all, refusing to understand how anyone could find it offensive.

And that’s without even touching on the fact that the recipe calls for freshly ground black people.

*Spelt! Bloody hippies.

Surprisingly fitting black pepper picture from Hodgers. 

Give us some easy ones, bambi

Some kid with seemingly encyclopedic knowledge won University Challenge. Despite the reports, he did not do it alone, although he probably could’ve managed.

This show makes me uncomfortable as I always start questioning the quality of my childhood/secondary/tertiary/life education. If I were to somehow end up on University Challenge, I’d probably be like Neil in the clip below*:

It appears while I was studying popular culture (or whatever it was I did at university**), Alex Guttenplan was busy learning the following:

1. Who argued for the theory of evolution of species in the 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker?
2. According to the Book of Exodus, Amram and his father’s sister Jochebed are the parents of which prophet?
3. What period of time is 11 days shorter than the solar year?
4. Which Scottish Island gives its name to the 93 chess pieces discovered there, right?
5. International Books Day is held annually on or about 2 April, which is the birth date of which children’s author born in 1805 in Copenhagen?
6.  At its brightest, which planet can reach an apparent magnitude of -4.7 in the earth’s sky?
7. In the Schrödinger equation of quantum wave mechanics what quantity is represented by “h”?
8. King Thibaw was the last king of which country?
9. What is the highest two-digit number, both of whose digits are primes?
10. Named after a Dutch physicist born 1865, what is the splitting of atomic spectral lines in a static magnetic field?

Are you still there?

Forget it, I’m going to watch The Young Ones.

*For readers in the US, that was indeed Hugh House Laurie, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson, all doing their best for Footlights College.

**Try telling your father you’re taking a class called From Elvis to Madonna. Or that an entire lecture (in a different class) focussed on Prince’s Little Red Corvette, of which the significance now completely eludes me.

Answers: 1. Richard Dawkins; 2. Moses; 3. The lunar year; 4. Lewis; 5. Hans Christian Andersen; 6. Venus; 7. Planck’s Constant; 8. Burma; 9. 77; 10. The Zeeman effect

Questions courtesy of the Independent, along with a nice little look at the Guttenplan man.

The oriental yeti/when wombats attack

So hunters in Sichuan province think they have discovered a new mammal, dubbed the ‘Oriental yeti’. A photo of the beast – resembling a hairless bear with a kangaroo-like tail – has been splashed across the UK papers with skeptics declaring its merely a belated April Fools’ hoax, or a civet with mange. You remember civets, they’re the most respected coffee farmers in the world*.

You may also remember mange, as it was blamed for wild wombat behaviour earlier this morning. It appears a man stood on a wombat, who then dragged him to the ground for some ol’ fashioned fisticuffs, before said man grabbed an axe and overcame the crazed marsupial. Only in Perth could this happen.

As for the ‘yeti’, only science will reveal his true identity. Perhaps we can look to Lu Chin, the hunter responsible for bringing him in, who suggested one theory:

There are local legends of a bear that used to be a man and some people think that’s what we caught.

Okay. Either way, the guy’s going to need a new moniker as ‘Oriental’ always sounds a bit colonial. It’s strange how the British don’t seem to think so. Over here, Orientals are Asians and Asians are Indians…and an Oriental yeti may actually be a Chinese man.

The mind boggles.

*One cup for £50! Good thing the money was going to charity.

Due to how sad and sickly the caged ‘Oriental yeti’ looks, and the general tone of this site, I much prefer Formatbrain’s version of the mysterious yeti, above, while the buck-toothed wombat (who was not involved in today’s incident) is care of Feverblue.

Summer is a verb, says new preppy bible

Summer - verb (used with object)
To spend or pass the summer. They summered in Southampton.

So says Alice Richardson, author of Summer is a Verb blog. She’s looking forward to True Prep, the long-awaited sequel (due out in September) to The Official Preppy Handbook, which she describes as ‘like a Bible to us’ in a recent New York Times article.

The NYT says Muffy & Biff (which I assume are akin to Tarquin and Beatrice in the UK?) can rejoice in a revised version of the Preppy Handbook. The original was released in 1980  (‘when it was fun to hate the rich’) and quickly became a cult favourite both with preppy kids – and those who wanted to be them.

This new version ‘dispenses a dollop of  upper-class frugality’ for the modern ‘prepster’ and even includes advice on rehab and new technology, as well as specific sections on the gay and black preppy scenes. (How inclusive of them!).

As for the new guide’s target audience, Ms Richardson (who at 44 is something of an OGP) is listed alongside ex-sorority girl Helen ‘Hopsy’ Goblirsch (from Kappa Prep, with its delightful ‘WASP Wednesday’ series). They’re just two of the many preppy bloggers who chronicle their lives in pink and green. (Apparently preppy folk like these two colours. As did my cousin when she 11. I thought it was a hideous colour combination and wondered why she would ever make an email address declaring her love for the two. Perhaps she was just a ‘prepster’ in the making?)

True Prep is in now in production thanks to Chip Kidd, ‘one of the industry’s best-known book designers’*. Kidd is working with one of the original writers, Lisa Birnbach, whilst the guy who came up with the entire concept, Jonathon Roberts, has refused to be involved. He explains:

The only reason you do something again is if maybe you’re going to do it better — like Godfather II.

But Preppy Handbook? I mean, come on. The subversive idea behind it was if you can reveal all of the secret systems and totems by which a portion of society keeps its elite status, you kind of pull the rug out from under them.

Respect. Roberts deserves a medal for this splendid display of integrity in the face of a book deal.

For similar satire of the upper classes in the UK, please refer to 1982’s Official Sloane Rangers Handbook. Author Peter York was asked in 2007 to update his guide to the traditional values of the privileged, although no such book has been released.

Yet. 

In the meantime, please see Orlando’s exploits in the jungles of Burma, below.  Not a preppy bible, as such, but rather an acute jab at the privileged youngsters who (literally) travel far and wide on their gap year. Then chunder everywhere.

*Which industry is that, NYT? The preppy-guidebook-loving book designer industry?

**OGP c.f. OGT

Read more about the photo guide to preppy style.

Slippery sevigny has a change of heart

Style icon/sulky sourpuss Chloë Sevigny has executed a perfectly-formed media backflip by blaming the reporter for candid comments she made during a recent interview.

Speaking to Chicago’s AV Club last week before the release of new film Barry Munday, Sevigny seemed enthusiastic and open as the the interview followed the usual ‘coolest girl in the world’-indie it girl-Boys Don’t Cry Oscar nomination arc. 

When talk moved to the latest season of HBO’s Big Love and the reporter mentioned the show had taken some flak for being over-the-top, she quite frankly admitted:

It was awful this season, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not allowed to say that! [Gasps.] It was very telenovela. I feel like it kind of got away from itself. The whole political campaign seemed to me very farfetched. I mean, I love the show, I love my character, I love the writing, but I felt like they were really pushing it this last season.

Such honesty is rare in Hollywood, and made me re-think my whole perception of her as an actor slash muse slash queen of the Brown Bunny bj. Maybe she’s worth all that indie cred, after all?

But two days later, she spoke with Entertainment Weekly and blamed the whole thing on the AV Club:

I feel like what I said was taken out of context, and the [reporter] I was speaking to was provoking me. I was in Austin and really exhausted and doing a press junket and I think I just… I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. You know, after a day of junkets sometimes things slip out that you don’t mean, and I obviously didn’t mean what I said in any way, shape, or form.

Check the context.

Or the AV Club’s response to her about-face.

& if you need further proof that she’s kinda beautiful (above Terry Richardson photo notwithstanding) and wears lovely clothes but ultimately lacks any real backbone, look what she did with Beck: