gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Promo copycats

If you live in Toronto and take the TTC, you'll no doubt recognize this poster for a singer called Ali Slaight - they were plastered throughtout subways and streetcars for months.

I'm always a little suspicious of artists I've never heard of that take out massive print advertising campaigns - smacks of marketing instead of merit. Also, it's an EP.

But then I came across this Sarah Slean image from Canada Reads site:

Look familiar?

It's not just that the poses are so similar - slouched in the corner, one arm up, head at the top of the panelling, left elbow down (what is Slaight's elbow doing, anyhow? Did they photoshop out the table?) .... I think it's the exact same location! Take a look at the panelling and bench on the left wall - the railing, the slats - it's identical.

Yeah, one's in a dress, one's blonde, and one's in black and white... still. If I were a young Canadian female musician, the least I would want from my label or publicist is a promo pic that varies a little from the next young Canadian female musician.

Not much comparison in their music, though... I don't mind the little I've heard of Slean, while Slaight (hmm, even the names are similar...) sounds like drivel. But I could slug Slean for inflicting Mercy Among the Children on us.

I'll bet you that corner is in a Toronto bar or diner - anyone recognize it? If so, I'll go down there with my camera to take a picture for my own album, Copy the Stars.

College girls love Tibet Snow

I just love this product promo sheet, which a colleague showed me today. It's from a skin cream product called Tibet Snow, which a friend of hers bought in Little India.

The text for this is wonderful - that antiquated colonial ESL that's spelled properly but still not quite right.

"College girls love Tibet Snow. Its use not only makes faces charming and fascinating but keeps off dust."

And this anti-dust property is so magical that "skin remains free from all diseases"!

The winning line has to be this one, though:

"Tibet Snow turns unpleasant odour of perspiration in armpits into most desirable flavour."

(The woman to the right does look like she's ready to lick her armpit.)

Ewwwww.

The product itself didn't stay long in my colleague's boudoir, though: "It was dreadful stuff, with a texture like sugar syrup and corn starch mixed together," she said. "It was dry and sticky at the same time. It took me a long time just to get it off." It hit the trash within a couple of days.

Good thing, too. A quick websearch yeilds few, but fascinating, results - including this query on Yahoo! Answers:

Has any1 ever used tibet snow face cream?
heard its good for blemishes and pigmentation marks....but does it reli work?

And the answer:

tibet snow face cream has mercury in it;
this skin lightening ingredient is harmful to the skin;
not to mention body poisoning especially after long term use;
before you buy any skin lighteners;
know the do's and don'ts...

So much for remaining disease free. Though aspiring beauty queens should have been tipped off by the notice down there at the bottom that Tibet Snow is produced by the esthicians at Kohinoor Chemical Co. in Karachi.

A little alarming to see that their entire website is now defunct.

The product is still listed (but not currently available) at an online Islamic shopping store, with this endorsement:

Classic... You must remeber this on your mothers
shelf?  The smell...MMmm MMmm.  Now you can smell just like mum!

My mom didn't smell like mercury poisoning, but still, if after all this you really must have some Tibet Snow, you can buy it at the Asian Cookshop for the whopping prince of £1.09. Just don't expect me to enjoy the desirable flavour of your armpits.

Starred

First I was Ninja'd, now Starred. Saturday's Toronto Star ran a piece on the Bookninja "book covers revisited" contest, and wouldn't you know it, my Handmaid's Tale (tail?) copy was pictured first.

I created four entries, but that one was the least clever yet most racy image - somehow I knew it'd be the one with legs, so to speak. Sex sells, still.

For those of you wondering, the French maid pictured there is not, in fact, my good lady wife. No, I just snagged it from a Halloween costume website - very likely breaking someone's copyright, although there may be some defence in altering it. And heck, I doubt the Barney's Version guy got permission from Hanna Barbera. Hopefully the Star won't object to my screengrab, as they didn't include the story in their online Ideas section.

Can't wait to see who wins....

My first album

I saw this meme over at Culture Kills, and thought I'd give it a try. Easy enough.

Let’s Make a Band:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
(you might have to click new random quotes at the bottom)

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

You then take the pic and add your band name and the album title to it, then post your pic.

I ended up with a band called Battle of the Alamo, and (happily!) the end of a Lester B. Pearson quote, generating this debut effort:

Preroll

Tim Horton's famous Rrroll up the Rim To Win contest doesn't start until March, but one of my colleagues is getting prepared.

Today he walked in with this handy little device - the most Canadian of inventions:

Know what that is? It's a purpose-built tool called the Rim Roller, which he bought at Lee Valley Tools for a mere $2.50. And it works like gangbusters, I tried it.

That rolled up real good! Now Daniel has months to perfect his rim rolling form, and create works of art like the above. I have no idea why Tim's doesn't sell these at the store and give the proceeds to their children's camps (maybe they will this year.) You have to think the staff would prefer this precision-cut cup to the gnawed-on messes they are normally handed.

Side benefit: as this article points out, you can now unroll someone else's cup you found on the street without worrying about catching a nasty disease.

Of course, if that person comes after you demanding a DNA test, as happened in Quebec in 2006, the Rim Roller won't help (I suppose you could throw it at them) - your saliva won't be there to prove your case. Better lick it first.

So, how much coffee would one have to drink to make this purchase worthwhile. I don't know, but according to this blogger, who has a numbers obsession almost as strange as my own, the odds of winning even a cup of coffee are about 1 in 9.

And according to CBC, the wonky prefab distribution of prizes means there are some places with rrrreally long odds - for example, you CANNOT win a car with a medium coffee in B.C., or an extra large in Eastern Ontario. Still, as Rick Mercer says in this spoof, there's nothing more Canadian than donuts, coffee, and regional inequality.

Construction by numbers

A few weeks ago, I started another counting project, similar to the Commuting by Numbers series I've been running on and off since February. But this one is much simpler:

I'm counting the ratio of construction workers visibly working to those just standing around.

I pass about a dozen enormous construction projects on my way to work each day, and I can't help but marvel at how much standing around is getting done in this fair city.

Don't get me wrong, construction is a tough gig. I've done it, and while it doesn't rate among the worst jobs I've ever done, it wasn't easy either, and I count myself lucky to be doing what I do today.

In construction, some measure of standing around is necessary. You can't swing a hammer or work a shovel for eight hours straight - everyone needs a rest. And building a skyscraper is a complex puzzle of interwoven tasks that can't all happen simultaneously.

But still... it doesn't exactly look efficient. At the job site beside my workplace, it seems like at any one time, half the workers don't appear to be working. So I decided to see what the proportion really is.

So, the task is very simple: take a look at any job site, and count how many people are working and how many aren't. To make it fair, I use a very liberal interpretation of "working": sitting in a truck or crane even if it isn't moving; touching a tool or carrying anything (a piece of paper will do); holding a sign or looking around as if you are monitoring something - these all count as work.

Not working includes standing or sitting alone, eating and drinking, smoking, and the ever-popular watching someone else work (without at least making foremanly gestures).

Standing, like the gentleman pictured above, on the sidewalk with an upside-down traffic sign and leaning on a rail doesn't count. And I'd be remiss if I didn't give you the cutline about such sign-holders from a friend of mine: 'Slow': It's not a sign, it's a label.

Here are a few of my activity observation notes:

Construction site: RBC Centre and Ritz-Carlton, Wellington St., Toronto

Date: July 17, 2007 - 3:00 p.m.
Working: 10
Not working: 25

Date: August 29, 2007 - 2 p.m.
Working: 17
Not working: 27

Date: September 17, 2007 - 9:30 a.m.
Working: 39
Not working: 36

Date: September 21, 2007 - 4:00 p.m.
Working: 11
Not working: 16

For those keeping score at home, the proportion is 77:104 - at any one time, 43 per cent of employees were visibly doing something.

In the future, I may break this down by day of the week and time of day - for examply, anecdotally it would appear that much more gets done in the early morning.

So - take a look at a job site near you, and send me some numbers! I'll post them here. And if you've ever worked construction, let me know what it's been like.

Uninformed

Last week my boss discovered an(other) amusing deficiency in Microsoft Word.

Open MS Word, and type the word "information". Then look for a synonym using the built-in thesaurus.

You are offered:

• in order
• in sequence
• in turn
• in rank
• in a row

Not what I was looking for. If you look up "information" elsewhere, say, answers.com, you get words like "knowledge", "intelligence", "facts" and "data". Look any of those up in MS Word, and you get "information" as the first synonym.

I was kinda hoping "knowledge" would say "be acquainted with a protuberance"...

Wrapped around their fingers

OK, so despite all the blog entries I've got waiting in the hopper, I had to say a few words about last night's excellent Police concert at the Air Canada Centre.

I was a huge Police fan in high school. Huge. Problem was, I was a few years too young to catch them in concert. All my friends' older brothers went to the Police Picnics (they also gave me wedgies) but I didn't really twig to the band until Ghost in the Machine. I was rabid by the time Synchronicity came out, but then, so was everybody.

So last night was a chance to correct a missed opportunity of 25 years. And to seal the deal, I went with my old high school friend Peter, who was also a big fan.

We seemed to be typical of the ACC crowd – security staff were careful to weed out anyone not between the ages of 30 and 40. Like the band, we've aged a little from the days when the Police played the Horseshoe Tavern. Dancing was replaced by happy tapping of feet, and during the slow songs you could see people rhythmically waving their Blackberries. I did smell pot at one point, but it may have been a special effect.

The night began with a reasonable set by mini-Sting, son Joe Sumner's band Fiction Plane. He too plays in a trio – and I'm reminded how uncommon that actually is. He's got a great voice, much like his father's, but the set sounded like mud and nobody really cared. To alter the expression, the Police are a tough act to precede.

While Fiction Plane was droning, I wandered about in search of an overpriced T-shirt. There were many to be had, but they were astoundingly lame, which made me fear for the concert ahead. See, the Police don't have a new album out, and everyone knows why they are touring: a) to make money, b) to give the crowd a selection of greatest hits. (Quality time with Sting Jr. is probably 59th on the list.)

Making money on former glory was the souvenir theme too: previous album covers silk screened on T-shirts (plus a nondescript "reunion tour" shirt indistinguishable from the scalper versions available at Union Station, except that they cost $30 more.) Seriously, they sold the same Synchronicity T I had in high school and now use for washing the car. If I could have found (or fit into) my Dream of the Blue Turtles shirt, I'd have blended right in. I briefly pondered whether buying and wearing a Ghost in the Machine golf shirt would carry enough apparent irony to be worth $60, but decided the answer was no.

Anyhow, soon enough the lights dimmed, the crowd went nuts, Message in a Bottle started, and I was transported back to the great time I missed out on lo so many years ago. The band was very tight – no sign of rust, bickering or arthritis here. Sting looks exactly the same as he did 20 years ago; Stewart Copeland hasn't aged much either. Andy Summers looks a little jowly, but he doesn't play with his face and his hands are none the worse for wear. On the contrary, in concert he was given plenty of opportunities to do those lovely, wanking 70s-style guitar solos that didn't appear on any album. I'd have thrown my underwear if I was 500 feet closer.

To my delight, it appeared that both Sting and Andy Summers were playing the same battered instruments they used the first time around. Sting's bass had no varnish left on it and only half the wood; Summers is the reason I bought a Fender Telecaster in university. (I was about to put it up for sale actually – contact me if you are in the market – but after last night I think I need to play it a few times first. I learned a quite a few Police songs when I used to play, though of course I lacked the talent and effects pedals to do them justice. I was probably the worst guitarist in our school, but I did own a flanger, and fingers long enough to play Every Breath You Take. If I had either tone, rhythm or dexterity I'd have been a rock god.)

That dreaded song did get played, in workmanlike fashion (it's a song about stalking that later made Sting uncomfortable, and its original recording session nearly killed them.) In fact, there was a certain workmanlike, professional edge to the whole affair, as if everyone knew what the assignment was, and decided to carry it out to the very best of their abilities, whether or not the passion of three decades ago was still there. They did appear to be enjoying themselves somewhat, particularly when they acknowledged the crowd between encores.

Anyhow, the concert was a real treat. Before hand, Peter and I decided on the three tracks we'd most like to hear (Next to You, Truth Hits Everybody and Omega Man) and the first two were delivered, with gusto. A couple of songs were altered to accommodate aging vocal chords, and the mix was occasionally iffy (how hard can it be to mic a trio?) but these are small comments on an otherwise delightful evening.

Now, if I could just bring Joe Strummer back from the dead for a Clash reunion, catch a touchdown and date a cheerleader, my revisionist high school years will be complete. Oh, and erase the wedgies.