Sunday, July 22 / 11:26am
A class of their own ... the Zoo Weekly spread. Via Crikey
You’ve made the difficult choice to flee your homeland. Perhaps your ancestors backed the wrong horse in a centuries-old religious split, or the blood-curdling whir of hovering death-robots was getting you down. Maybe you wanted to avoid selling your children to a criminal gang threatening to destroy your only source of food or water.
But do you look hot in a bikini? Read more…
Wednesday, July 11 / 02:36pm
Pitbull, AKA Mr. Worldwide, a husky-voiced rapper from Florida, will almost certainly be sent packing to Kodiak, Alaska come Sunday, as a result of a botched social media marketing campaign.
In an arrangement with Walmart and Sheets Brand energy strip, Pitbull, a short, powerful-looking man with a pugnacious face and sloping shoulders, agreed to perform at any US location with a Walmart which gets the most votes in a Facebook contest.
Hugely popular, with his trademark handsfree mic and chunky shades which make him look like the hair-trigger security detail at an Atlantic City casino, Pitbull guests on songs by the likes of Shakira and J-Lo. The rapper also shills for brands to a degree many find irksome, including writers Jon Hendren and David Thorpe.
So in response to this latest marketing campaign, Hendren (@fart) and Thorpe (@arr) started a Twitter campaign for people to vote for the most remote Walmart location in America – Kodiak island. More than 70,000 people have done so. When the competition closes on 15th July, Pitbull will likely have heard the collective call – get the hell out of here.
Monday, July 9 / 07:14am
Ostraka ... Simon Cowells of Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks hit on some very clever and durable ideas in their time. Democracy was a particularly good one. Euclidian geometry has also come in handy, as, to a lesser extent, has philosophy. It’s probably reasonable enough to say that they invented Western civilization. Some of their innovations, however, never really made it past the death of Alexander the Great. One of these is the tradition known as ostracism. The term itself, of course, is one we still use today, but we use it only in a more or less metaphorical sense. When we say that someone has been ostracized, we are saying that what has happened to them is a little like what used to happen in ancient Greece. Read more…
Monday, June 25 / 12:00am
(Photo: NASA, ESA, and Martino Romaniello - European Southern Observatory, Germany)
If you’re of the opinion that self-help material is inherently suspect, the tragicomic Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy might be for you.
It won’t make you rich. In fact, it’s not really even a self-help book. Cosmos features plenty of examples of Percy’s deeply satisfactory turn of phrase, but very little by way of actual advice.
But like many self-help books Cosmos does feature a series of quizzes, and invites the reader to consider how he might react in various hypothetical scenarios. In a chapter entitled “The Envious Self”, Percy imagines the reader as a sales executive picking up the morning paper while anxiously preparing for a pivotal sales pitch. Suddenly a young person drives past the house and shoots you, the reader, in the armpit. Read more…
Sunday, June 24 / 11:13am
The neck. From Gray's Anatomy
How much time do you spend thinking about your chin and neck? And do you fret about a lack of prominence, or an excess of fullness in the region? If the answers are ‘a lot’ and ‘yes’, then help is at hand.
In this age of video phones, our necks are under heightened scrutiny, which is why cosmetic surgeon Dr. Robert Sigel of The Austin-Weston Center in Virginia, USA has recently expanded his offering to include a neck-and-chin focused procedure he is calling the ‘Facetime facelift’.
A videochat on a smartphone or iPad will tend to accentuate the neck, presenting a tucked-in, unflattering view of the soft tissue area between the caller’s digastricus and suprasternal notch. Sigel’s wife noticed as much when she first started using the video feature on her iPhone, mid-2011. Read more…
Monday, June 18 / 03:29pm
Mitt Romney & some of the A-team
The big news around here is that we have jettisoned the gauche “co.uk” suffix of our UK global headquarters, and we now mingle freely among the dotcom crowd. We are honoured to be part of the A-team. While we’re here, we would like to thank the faceless entity who offloaded this piece of internet real estate for little more than the price of a Travelcard – thank you whoever you are, we’re hoping it’s a real fixer-upper.
www.theracket.com
Subway is the Goliath of global food retail. There are 35,000 chains in the Subway franchise, more outlets than even McDonalds, each churning out low-end soft baguette sandwiches all the livelong day.
Funny story – for a long time, Subway sandwich makers would lay out their triangle-shaped cheese slices in an overlapping-teeth like formation, making for an inconsistent sandwich bite. This time two years ago, though, in response to consumer pressure, Subway switched way the cheese was arranged in every one of their chains, to a criss-cross formation, for total cheese coverage. This was not Subway’s idea. Read more…
Tuesday, June 12 / 12:25pm
Mark Cantan(kerous)
I am stubborn, cantankerous, and hard to please, yet most people seem to like me. Here’s six ways I do it:
Allow You
There’s no argument quite so tiresome as the one that goes: “Let me get this.” “No let me.” “Seriously, it’s my turn.” “Maureen, if you touch that bill I will cut off your leg and use it to slap some sense into you.” When people want to buy me a concert ticket or a meal I give them the gift of giving me a gift.
Two go-to anecdotes
When meeting new people I have a couple of stories that I can whip out should conversation start going south: “The Au Pair” and “Aidan in the Aillwee Caves”. Figure out your two stories. I could tell you mine but then what would we talk about when I meet you. Read more…
Friday, June 8 / 03:16pm
Splayds verb
The last convict was transported to Australia in chains in 1853, but it was not until 1946, with the invention by a wiley Sydney cafe owner of this little beauty, the Splayd, that Aussies finally threw off the shackles of British imperialism.
Not for William ‘Splayd’ McArthur the stodgy vagaries of British table manners. He didn’t care about working from the outside in, or knowing an escargot pricker from a quail egg defragger, or generally being a condescending Pommy dropkick – instead, what McArthur was after was an all-in-one, plate-to-mouth food transporter. No fuss no muss.
The Splayd is Australia’s rejoinder to the lesser, American Spork, patented almost a century before but missing the crucial blade element of the Splayd. As this handy pie chart shows, what the Splayd approaches is a grand unifying theory of cutlery. McArthur’s single-handed fork, spoon and cutting blade is the kitchen equivalent of Tolkien’s ring: one utensil to rule them all.
If humanity really did tend towards self-improvement, surely the world’s cutlery drawers would by now be single compartment affairs, all stuffed to the brim with these package deal utensils. Alas, we have yet to make this evolutionary leap. However, McArthur managed to sell the idea to a tableware manufacturer in 1960 and the Splayd found its niche as a popular wedding gift, becoming the toast of buffet lunches and barbecues across sixties Australia.
Thursday, May 31 / 11:19am
O'Connell: hell bound?
When he’s not investigating charisma or grilling superhero gerontologists, The Racket writer Mark O’Connell occasionally moonlights for scrappy zines like The New Yorker, writing chiefly about books. His latest post for them, in praise of author Marilynne Robinson, is well worth a read.
This particular piece elicited a reader response on Twitter from none other than Westboro Baptist Church member, Megan Phelps. As well as being a prize numpty, Phelps is in flagrant defiance of Twitter’s 140 characters guideline here – TLDR: neither Mark, Marilynne Robinson, nor any member of the Foo Fighters will be joining Phelps in heaven. Read more…
Tuesday, May 29 / 05:56pm
Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is master of his domain (sure he is)
While we’re on the subject of self-help, Foreign Policy has taken a long, hard look at the Iranian government’s approach on sexuality and, in particular, masturbation.
Writer Karim Sadjadpour outlines the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s exhaustive treatise on the rights and wrongs of sex acts which, with its repeated focus on farmyard animals, revealed more about the proclivities of Khomeini’s rural hometown than they provided practical instruction for Iran’s youth.
While some acts were given a pass by Khomeini—sodomizing the father, son or brother of one’s new wife, for example, does not invalidate the marriage—the act of masturbation has always been given short shrift. Indeed, the current Grand Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei has gone so far as to forbid masturbation during the month of Ramadam. Read more…
Friday, May 25 / 12:00am
Lil' Wayne et al. Via Derick G
Like the best self-help hucksters, many rappers peddle the idea that you can simply daydream your way to prosperity. Look no further than the endless array of MCs with songs titled “Million Dollar Dreams”. There’s Kirko Bangz, Bruce Leroy, Jimmy Boi feat. Sen P and T-Double, Fed X & The Jacka, J Raines, Boogz Boogetz, MDotl, Scotty Dreama, J Cole, Wallet…
Lil’ Wayne was 15 when he featured on “Millionaire’s Dream”. “Pull up in my Lexus sipping Dom P”, he proclaimed, though he wasn’t even old enough to have a driving license. “All my life eating steak and potatoes,” added the boy who grew up fatherless in the crime-ridden Hollygrove division of New Orleans, and shot himself in the chest with his stepfather’s gun aged 12 (hardly all steak and potatoes). But on “Millionaire’s dream” he obeys the cardinal rule of self-help: fake it till you make it. And it worked: a few years on Lil Wayne can been seen, in this decidedly unglamorous video, sporting a $1 million wristwatch. Read more…
Wednesday, May 23 / 03:59pm
Alice Quillet. Photo by Guillaume Belveze.
Stupid thing #1 Using crappy utensils - slippery boards and dull knives
Avoid a trip to A&E by following these two simple rules. Always place a damp kitchen towel under your cutting board to prevent it from slipping when you chop. Contrary to what people might think a sharp knife is much safer than a dull one. A dull knife can easily slip off food and cut you. A fingertip cleanly sliced off with a sharp blade is much easier to stitch back on than jagged one. From experience they also heal much faster and less painfully. Read more…
Monday, May 21 / 11:03am
'lacks the right sort of spatial and typographic crafting'
The Racket creative director Andrew Guirguis is a big fan of basketball and a huge admirer of Jay-Z, both for his lyrical artistry and his indomitable entrepreneurship. However, one thing Andrew is not a booster of is Jay-Z’s logo (above) for recently transplanted basketball team, the Brooklyn Nets.
Indeed, Andrew was so offended by the logo he took it upon himself to come up with a new one, in an unsolicited design drive he is calling ‘Reset the nets’. Read more…
Tuesday, April 24 / 06:06pm
Tom Hodgkinson at home in Devon. Photo Rick Pushinsky
Tom Hodgkinson has built a glittering career around the pursuit of idleness. Here he offers some pointers for the aspiring loafer. Read more…
