I comment on television quite a lot. I do other stuff. It just sounds like I watch a lot of TV, and I guess I do, but not lockin-fat-bloke-call-the-fire-brigade-to-extract-him-from-the-flat-through-a-hole-in-the-wall to much.
I have just seen yet another advert that portrays men as a)stupid and b)football mad.
Here’s my issue. I don’t like football. I am not stupid. I do not sit in my underwear in a pool of my own filth living on pot noodle whenever my wife is away. I’ve never even had a pot noodle.
Why are there so many adverts that portray men as imbeciles, incapable of buttoning their own shirts, who can be rendered impotent just by waving cup final tickets in front of them.
Another classic advert in this mold is the (I think) Old El Paso stir in powder stuff.
The man is cooking. The woman, his soon to be ex, is talking on the phone to her girlfriend saying something like - ‘He’s cooking tonight, I’ll probably die of food poisoning”. She asks him what’s for dinner.
He says (and again I paraphrase) “I’m making sweet pepper and onion fajitas with pan fried chicken in a rich mexican spicey sauce”
She eats the powder chicken onion stuff and stops criticizing him for a couple of minutes.
The thing is, this advert was trying to tell us a couple of things.
- That chopping up some chicken, pepper and onion, throwing them in a pan, putting in some powder and stiring (in slow motion) is cooking
- With Old El Paso powder stuff, you can fool your wife/girlfriend into thinking that you are not a useless footy mad man-blob and maybe she’ll think you’re sexy or something.
So men can’t cook, operate washing machines (I mean come on - they are about the simplest thing in the world to operate, compared to say, an Ericsson mobile phone) or think beyond the World Cup. I dispair.
The worst thing about these terrible stereotypes is that there are just enough men for whom all this is true, to perpetuate the myth.
(Note- even as I type this another advert comes on - father+child eating cereal out of football shaped bowls?????)
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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I won’t try and be eloquent about this (DitDotDat does it better here: snooze 24) but it’s worth watching the video it’s quite amusing when the BBC fuck up.
Video on the BBC
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Well, thanks to some extreme digging from Stephen and some early morning allotment visits by me, we now have the main crop potatoes in the ground.
It has taken longer than anticipated to clear the section of the plot we ear-marked for spuds due to the huge amount of ‘horse tail‘.
Before Christmas, some old geezer came up to me and started giving me unasked for advice. One of the things he said (and he said a lot) was - “Do you know what horse tail looks like?”
I should have taken this as a warning that he knew something about our plot that I didn’t. He pulled out a small shrivelled root and said, “This is horse tail - but don’t worry about it. It doesn’t take any of the soil nutrients.” So I didn’t worry.
At that time I foolishly thought that horsetail (or mares tail as it is also called) would be a bit like some kind of grass or something. There wasn’t anything to see in December anyway.
How wrong I was. I have since discovered that horsetail is a prehistoric plant that can grow from the tiniest section of root and is almost impossible to erradicate (especially if you don’t want to use chemicals). The roots, which are now like spaghetti (and the soil is like a thin smearing of bolognese sauce) go down 2 metres and cannot be fully removed.
So we have spent an extra 2 weeks painstakingly removing a huge mess of deep rooted weeds from a relatively small section of plot - plus watching horse tail coming up all over the rest of the plot.
I have it on (relatively) good authority, that if you continually cut the tops off horse tail it will eventually die. After two years. Clearing the ground nicely for the bind weed.
Anyway…. Here’s a list of what’s growing so far:
Garlic, onions, challottes, broad beans, runner beans, sweetcorn, mixed leaf salad, early (new) potatoes, main crop potatoes, spinach, carrots, purple sprouting broccolii, tomatos (two varieties), basil, coriander, chillis, sweet peppers, thyme, parsley, courgettes, squash, radish and jerusalem artichoke. Oh yes, and horse tail.
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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