Motivation Fail

As literally dozens of you might have noticed, we haven’t updated the blog for a while. The reasons for this are many and varied. We’ve been, oh, we don’t know, visiting farmyards in Oaxaca and coughing on pigs to see how they like it or something topical and witty like that. We’re back now, and as tradition dictates we haven’t really got any good ideas on what to write about. Time for some idea brainstorming!

IDEA ONE: Spoof on the new London Evening Standard adverts

(See image above.)

Suitability: A bit pointless. It’s not that clever, the vast majority of our readers don’t live in London, including us, and the adverts aren’t even on telly. 3/10.

IDEA TWO: An embedded video of Applemask’s ace new local telly retrospective

It’s on ITV in the South-West of England this time, it’s in three parts, and it’s well worth watching. Embedded goodness below, but if you want to see it in HQ-o-Vision visit the YouTube page proper here.

(Note: The Windows Live Writer preview suggest the above could be three copies of a video called “Cop Tasers Child!!!” Hopefully that’ll fix itself when we publish this.)

Suitability: Well, it’s really very good, and it is about telly, and Applemask did tell us about it which makes us feel a little bit important, so all that goes in the ‘plus’ column. But, it is just us embedding someone else’s YouTube videos, and Applemask’s work just throws our loss of mojo into even sharper relief. 5/10, although if we’d done the video we’d be giving it 9/10, like when BBC News tries to make out The Bloody Apprentice coming back is an actual news story and not just shameless self-promotion. Though we’d have used a colour rather than red for the ‘rant in progress’ caption because it tends to clash quite badly on a stark black background when encoded to .flv. Also, we liked Best Defense, because the bloke who played Sledge Hammer was in it.

IDEA THREE: Something about Failblogs and Failblogging

Failblog.org is generally a force for good, and we don’t begrudge them winning a Webby award (unlike with the New York Times, who pipped us to the ‘Best Writing’ award. Man, they’re like the Whizzer to our Chips). However, what does irk us is when they post an image of a perceived mistake that was quite clearly intentional in the first place. Such as this:

Which is supposed to be funny because someone is suggesting that the owners of a gas-guzzling SUV are claiming to be environmentally friendly. Except! The whole point of the vehicle is to draw attention to the fact it has been converted to run on hydrogen, and as such it actually is both environmentally friendly and eye-catching, so, erm, FAIL FAIL. Similarly:

Which isn’t fail at all. It’s a very deliberate title for a satirical book by Lewis B. Frumkes mocking the entire self-help book industry. After all, what possible reason could there be for a book having that title otherwise? JOKE GET FAIL.

Anyway, with the above two examples in mind, we’re sorely tempted to send this to Failblog:

Do you see?

Suitability: Making some sort of point about something largely inconsequential, but it’s still not about telly. 4/10.

IDEA FOUR: An embedded video of an old Shaun Micallef sketch

Hells yeah!

Suitability: A great skit, but really, get it together. If we don’t turn this round in time for our live Eurovision special, we’ll probably end up firing ourselves and bringing in some fresh blood from a local employment agency. 2/10.

FONTE