Anti-Social

My gmail account has three headings
for communications directed to me,
Primary, Promotions, and Social.

Part of me feels that Google
missed a vital category; Anti-social.

I am unsure about the messages
that Mr Google would leave there. 
Communications from my family?
More likely over-familiar advertising
for companionship that was temporary
enough to keep me wanting more.

But then any message that met me
at my point of need would not be advertising, 
adverts inflate and promote want,
rather than define and meet needs.  

When The National Dish Is The Language Of The Menu

'You never Know it might be the effect of their pioneer history. All that rancid belly of pork which frightened them off food, and made them think that anything that you could actually taste must have something wrong with it. Sometimes the only way of identifying the food in America is by eye, rather than palate. It has to be food shaped. Where has all the flavour gone?

One theory is that it has been syphoned out of the cuisine and put on the menu. There your hamburger is a Kingburger, a Bulgy burger. A Hugeburger, is not cooked, but  smoked oh so slowly over crackling hickory logs prior to nestling within, being cuddled between, or indeed graciously amassed upon, two  super-soft bake oven baps and served knee deep in sweet mustard sauce.

That is why when it arrives, piping hot, from your hosts genial charcoal heart, I should  say hearth, it tastes of nothing. Drowned in rhetoric, the flavour dies. The national dish of America is the menu.'

-Robert Robinson on American cuisine

Pigs And Humans; An Orwellian Comparison

George Orwell wrote,
somewhat reductively,

'Advertising is the sound of a stick
rattling inside a swill bucket'.

Sadly, his quote demeans
the sensitivity of pigs.
Though it is accurate
about the vast expanse
of human passivity.

Reform Through Consumerism

In the midst of a riot
the Sky News reporter
shouted at the looter
'Where are you going
with that television?'

The looter replied
'I am taking it home,
to 'believe in better'*
through watching
Sky satellite news.

If they show this clip

we will both be on it.'.



*Sky's advertising strap-line.