Sunday 19 October 2014

Take On Me, Take Me On; carrot based technology, Elvis' album of stage banter & LED nobel prizeworthy

In a reverse of normal 'news like' scenarios , I'm going to tackle the funniest finds first. That doesn't mean the last story will be devoid of anything to make you smile, but it means that the first few items will ( or should) make you laugh out loud. Literally.

The first slab of curiosity is all about the technology based world, and how its marketing can become something that starts to veer towards becoming ripe enough to parody :-

Carrot: A Pitch-Perfect Satire of the Tech Industry

It's pretty obvious as to which particular brand is being lampooned here, but the message remains the same. It's not easy to market a newer version of a product when there are now so many newer versions of every other product also using a similar style of promotion to get their own branding across. So how do you innovate and keep within a brand identity remit? That's a problem I'd love to see solved in real time.

Speaking of time, the next slice of goodness comes from 1974. It's an album of..

Elvis Presley's Bizarre Album of Stage Banter

..spoken word bits , that have been culled from a plethora of concerts that The King ( I was and always will be a fan), performed at during the early 1970's.

Elvis was a supremely talented singer and always believed in delivering a good show. But this record gives you zero indication of that. It's supposed to be a part of the pantheon of recordings that were very common from that time, which is a 'Comedy Record'. There was a whole slew of them, with The Monty Python team doing a few , and of course Peter Cook & Dudley Moore doing some too, as Pete & Dud. This, however, doesn't quite fit the bill.


The self-styled Colonel ( Tom Parker,which was'nt even his real name), who managed Elvis, was responsible for this misstep. And it is shocking. From the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, all at the speed of sound. It's just wash, rinse and repeat of a load of disconnected blatherskite for thirty seven and a half minutes. One of the most notable performers of the 20th century, is reduced to a crap working men's club performer. 

Whoever was responsible for taking the razor blade to the hundreds, if not thousands of hours of tape to cobble this together, doesn't seem like he got on too well with the Colonel, or just didn't want to stick around for longer than necessary. A lot of the banter is also juxtaposed at jarring, ill-timed intervals which make no sense whatsoever, unless you were actually there. So you're left laughing out of a mixture of bona-fide, heartfelt confusion and schadenfreude, all of which happen simultaneously. The whole shebang is almost worthy of a prize.


And speaking of prize-worthy :-

Why A Blue LED Is Worth A Nobel Prize

Now I could go into a very lengthy discourse about why three scientists won a Nobel Prize for their work on blue LED's ( light emitting diodes) because I have some electronics knowledge in my academic background, but I'd rather you discover it all for yourself. Besides which, I have a feeling you'll be smiling at the end. Especially if saving energy, and looking at the screen of your smartphones and tablets is a godsend to you, these days.

And on that note, I'm off to have a look at the news. On three different channels, but not all at once. 

Unlike Elvis, who back in his prime, supposedly had a wall with a lot of t.v. screens on it, so he could watch it all at the same time. Little did he know how people would be emulating that kind of information saturation technique, in a few decades time. 

The King got there first. Well, kind of. 


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