arifirh

I said:

Dear All,

It is with deep sadness that I read of your decision to bow to the narrow perspective of a few homophobes and withdraw an advertisement featuring a split second of affection between two men. I'm really not sure what could have motivated such a choice, given that the few hateful bigots genuinely concerned enough by such images as to boycott your good must be far outnumbered by the entire gay community plus all those heterosexuals who find discrimination deeply distasteful and who by now know that you have let us all down.

Are you aware tha the 1950s were, in fact, approximately fifty years ago?

I applaud the creatives at BBDO for such an enlightened and sweetly toned spot, and I think that my great uncle, Morris Drake, would be deeply disappointed by this abandonment of forward thinking advertising by the company for which he coined the phrase 'Beans Means Heinz'.

Yours


they said


Dear Joff

Thank you for your recent email regarding the Heinz UK commercial for Deli Mayo. Consumer feedback is very important to us and we appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Heinz pulled the ad in the UK because our consumer research showed that the ad failed in its attempt to be humorous and offended people on all sides.

Heinz apologises for its misplaced attempt at humour and we accept that this ad was not in accordance with our long-standing corporate policy of respecting everyone's rights and values.

Again, our sincere apology to anyone who felt offended. We appreciate you taking time to contact us to express your opinion and allowing us to address this issue.

Liz Pickstock
Consumer Contact Department


o_O
What?
The?
Fuck?


so I said

Dear Liz


I'm not entirely certain what this reply was supposed to achieve. I complained that you failed a huge portion of society, that you rolled over and allowed bigots to dictate the content of your advertising and force you to stop including vague homosexual imagery. you have replied with a stock response apologising for including vague homosexual imagery.

How exactly is apologising to me for offending hatemongers and homophobes going to help?

I'm now not only offended by your cowardly decision, I'm deeply offended by your total unwillingness to even hear my point of view. To send me a cut and paste template mail claiming that "Consumer feedback is very important to" you which makes it painfully obvious that my feedback meant so little you failed to even gather the gist of it is one of the most blase and arrogant mistakes in PR that I've witnessed for a considerable period..

Yours in increasing and obviously mutual contempt

Yes, there's an awful lot of horrible stuff going on in the world at the moment. Heinz and Britain's Next Top Model are in for a particularly large amount of clue-bat hitting.

But here, in my little corner of the internet, I've had enough political wrangling for one day.

Instead, have a piece of fanfiction. The first in-any-way substantial piece of fanfiction I've finished in a very long time. It's in Doctor Who fandom, featuring the 8th and 9th Doctors and a special guest fresh from his appearance in Battlefield. It contains, I am sorry to say, no slash, smut, sex, or suggestion of any kind. It is entirely gen. It does, however, contain a large amount of angst, and hurt/comfort.

My thanks to liminereid for being my human thesaurus, and to darwinianwoman for grammar nitpicking; and to both of them for generally being online all day to listen to me faff.

Comments are love - constructive criticism is good, I want to be a better writer, but to do that I will also need to sustain the little bit of faith in myself that I seem to have got going, somehow.

( Cut for gratuitous psychological cruelty, and gratuitous cuteness )

On a more whimsical note...

Things that make me feel less bad about the series finale (about which I let off some steam here, at least on the subject of Rose - Donna is a whole other tantrum to be had):

1) dwseason5 being soon to start (if you couldn't guess from the name it would be spoilery, you are just too stupid to live). Eee! If you didn't read dwseason4 by the same author last year, what's wrong with you?
1a) The Children of Time by calapine: plotty fix-its, hooray :)

2) apotropaios saying over gchat ( cut for spoiler ) Fic, pls?

3) The fact that it's one year closer to not having to read interviews like this any more (not that Moffat doesn't have major issues, but at least he doesn't talk like a primary school teacher). Scroll down to the bit about Why We Can't Have Girl!Doctor, in particular.

[eta: back to the rargh, this post (short) pretty much sums up the squick]

Oh dear gods. Do click - it's the frankly staggering winning photoshoot for Britain's Next Top Model. I wonder how blatant the colonial imagery had to be for one to lose.

Hate Mail article it's sourced from: doesn't mention the imagery, unsurprisingly, nor do at least the first few comments. (please, don't make me read more)

Apologies for spammage, but flicking through the Hate I just found this - it's the winning photoshoot for Britain's Next Top Model. ( cut for horrendous )

Remember this?

( I wrote... )

( Today I got a reply... )

Yeah, yeah, complaints dept in "not actually reading complaints" shock...

ETA: Form letter-receivers of the world unite!

Q. What have we learned today, children?

Background: Heinz recently ran an advert which featured two men (rather chastely) kissing. A small number of bigots complained. Heinz pulled the ad. This offended me.

( My initial letter of complaint )

( The response from Heinz )

( My reply )

A. That's right, kids - Heinz aren't just homophobic scumsuckers - they're ILLITERATE homophobic scumsuckers!

So, not only have the Church of England agreed to women bishops (which they had before); the provisions made for conservatives who oppose will be via a code of practice, NOT written into the law. This means women bishops will have equal status to men under the law. There will be no erroneously dubbed "super-bishops" to cater to those who are unhappy with their dioesan bishop, because she's a woman or he has supported or ordained women. (though I don't this affects the current "flying bishops" for those opposed to their bishop having ordained women priests).

Separate diocese for those not wanting women bishops (splitting the Church) have also been rejected.

All in all a good outcome at Synod. Happy days for Christian feminists.

Took "The End of the Affair" (really liked) back to the library today and the copy of "Lucky Jim" what I reserved was in! Mmm, books.
I still have to finish "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" though.
4 chapters down and 1 to go.
It's a weird book.
It doesn't seem to be getting any less weird.
Am not convinced Joyce is the genius people say he is...


Bisous,

Rose

PS: Also, randomly, I typed my full name into google and came up as the third entry in the results bit. For my Morocco fundraising page. Must put travelogue online at some stage.

I saw Dr Who. I had thinky thoughts about Dr Who.

( Cut for spoilers )

I’ve been experimenting with connecting my Linux box to t’Intertron via my mobile. It is surprisingly easy. Plug in the phone, add the following to /etc/wvdial.conf and type sudo wvdial. The important thing to note is the ‘deflate 9′ bit which enables compression on the network traffic and has single-handedly made the browsing experience bearable.

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = three
Username = three
PPPD Options=defaultroute deflate 9

Poll #1219153
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Nuclear Power

Oh yes, LGBT Pride, ten out of ten there.

"Official stewards who were running the toilets at Trafalgar Square announced that I, and any other transgender or transsexual woman, had to use the disabled toilets and was not allowed to use the regular women's toilets. I pointed out to the stewards that I transitioned and had surgery before they were born; I was more polite than a polite thing. No dice."

Really. 2008. I'm not even sure where to start with this. Read Kira Cochrane being Right about Stuff over at the Guardian. Why is she the only one saying it in the mainstream media?

I think that the political apathy has finally paid off, guys. We're about to get a great swing right-wing and if we don't watch ourselves we're on the verge of losing everything we've gained in the last forty years of blood and sweat and activism.

And Collins will recount his exploits as an Anarchist - including the tale of his successful reprogramming of the MIT virtual reality equipment to self-destruct as it broadcasts the words:
"Actual Reality - Act Up - Fight AIDS!"

I have had a properly packed weekend, including the following:

-Dinner at Greek restaurant with Sasha-Goblin
-Finding a DVD of Galaxy Quest for 50p in Portobello Road market (which is weird cross between stalls of street sellers abroad and car boot sale)
-V short TUC young members' forum meeting
-Bimbling round National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery
-V nice dinner and cake at Andrea's
-Jazz at Ronnie Scott's, finishing with Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll duetting on Hallelujah (poss my favourite song of all time, ever!!)
-Lazy Sunday, watching Sweet Home Alabama before heading homewards

Possibly the standout thing for me though is that both times I got taxis home (which I haven't done in yonks), the cabbies knew exactly how to get to my gran's, which is something of a miracle. Usually they go "er, where?"

And once again I have missed Dr Who! I'm so getting the boxset this Christmas...

Bisous,

Rose

Take a band that Emma loves very much. Dress them in Venetian carnival finery, peacock-feather masks and red satin capes and tailcoats and glitter. Put them on stage to play a cracking set, pianist and vocalist especially on form, so much that Emma starts to fangirl individual members of the band in a way she never has before.

Have them finish the cracking set amidst much strobe-lighting and glam guitar-posturing and "Girl Anachronism" rhythms and "Aladdin Sane" piano.

See Emma. See Emma scream and scream and scream.

Then have half the band - the beautiful half, the oh-so-talented pianist and the swaggering lead singer - return for an encore.

Have that encore be the Leonard Cohen song, "Chelsea Hotel No.2".

See Emma. See Emma have no hyperbole left that does this justice.

So, I may have mentioned at some point earlier this week that shimgray is the proud and somewhat bemused owner of a canoe. Well, a kayak. Well, a CANOE. (I named it Gnu the Canoe. He objects. He is quite wrong about this. I mean, if you had a canoe, what would you call it? Precisely.) I have spent most of my weekend doing things of and pertaining to said canoe. We got it home yesterday with what others may call a minimum of effort but what I call being squished on the floor covered in blankets in the back of a Ford Fiesta and hanging on to some ropes for dear life. We put the canoe on the roof, tied it down with blankets and rope and bundled me in the back, while they sat in the front and drove out very slowly. And then, over speed bumps and up and down hills and chiasmata mentioning blithely that she'd have trouble if we had to do an emergency stop.

"Yes!" I yelled, somewhat muffled, at this point. "If you do an emergency stop I WILL BREAK MY NECK!"

Quoth my dear friend and my boy, "It was nice knowing you. Goodbye."

(Note: Shim has just said that he didn't do anything to me yesterday save turn me into a "bonsai Quasimodo". I think I should just let this speak for itself.)

Sweethearts, all. Anyway. We passed policemen on bicycles, and I did hide under the blankets while clinging to the rope, and we were not arrested. We got the canoe home and carried it into the garden and felt very pleased with ourselves. The rest of the day was spent making cakes - glorious sticky chocolate golden-syrup things; we eventually made four batches of the things, and I fully plan to foist the recipe on likethesun2 later this week - and, once we had a pack of people to eat the cakes (triptogenetica and luminometrice found the house by asking the neighbours "which house had asbestos removed recently" and brought with them eighteen tubs of Petit Filous) we watched Doctor Who.

On which I have ( this to say )

Following Doctor Who, we watched Dr. Strangelove. Which was, frankly, a surreal experience. I'd never seen it before. I probably should have watched it before I spent three months of my life studying the Cold War. The evening descended into soft sticky-cake eating and dissecting Who, and, finally, lying around reading (currently, the latest by Mary Roach - she who wrote a book about corpses (Stiff), one about death (Spook - I bought it at the Strand in New York a year ago) and now, Bonk: a study of sex research. (I have to stop myself reading out the bits about penile implants when there are men in the vicinity; they tend to cringe.)

This morning, bright and early - well, no, at quarter to twelve - we went out to Hinksey Park, onto the boating lake, carrying a canoe down several streets to get there, and had a go. No one fell over, or out! chiasmata discovered a veritable talent for canoeing herself about, but I had a marvellous time too, pottering about scaring the ducks and just about mastering the art of cleaving a straight line through the water. It's odd, actually, being on a level with the ducks. And there were ducklings, and wee baby froglets bouncing about. It was a delight. I hadn't been in a canoe for about ten years, but it was great.

Tomorrow, quite probably - although, not for certain - my degree results come out. But, right now, I'm happy. I am not up north. I'm here, I'm happy, we have a canoe, I'm getting a cat. Next week, chiasmata and shimgray are going out again, possibly on the river. The river leads to the Thames which leads to the estuary which leads to the sea. Next week, I will be on the Pacific coast. I will go down to meet them being washed up in San Francisco Bay.

So that's how the Church always has so much money...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7491851.stm

"The judge said much of the work of the [Vatican] tribunal involved petty thefts of Vatican visitors' wallets."

i should have gone to bed ages ago. >:(

  

I hated this less than, umm, all of LJ..

( spoilers )