Smutty What3words addresses

Looked up a What3words reference for our information design summer school, about to start,

It gave me //friends.cuter.behind which is just too Benny Hill to actually give someone (#metoo), so I moved a few metres sideways and got //honey.sizzled.call.

What’s going on? 

Guns for your garden

erm...

The meaning of life?

On a church door in Italy. 

I know that's supposed to be a tourist guide in the top icon, but having just emerged from the Uffizi I'd seen a lot of images with a larger central figure with raised hand and a halo...

Incidentally, that's a man's hat in the icon - women are fine with hats, and in fact St Paul insisted on them.

That's what I call personalisation

How did Tesco know that's how I was feeling that day? 

 

Sh*t, S**t, S***

A friend remarked approvingly that I used the word 'shit' in a recent post. It's odd how words shift their position on the spectrum of rudery (or should that be prudery).

My late mother, who would have given Hyacinth Bucket a run for her money (although she was the real thing), would use the word freely (as in 'I've put chicken shit on my roses'), as a straight synonym for manure. 

I always think that when a newspaper prints a coyly bleeped word like 'sh*t' it forces me to think of all the rude words I know that might fit - not very edifying. Sometimes I'm stumped which makes me feel rather naïve.

I mentioned this in this blog a few years ago, after seeing the word 'w***e' in a headline. Click here for the answer, which disappointingly isn't even rude (unless someone is using to describe you). 

Why do flies shit on our HomePod?

It's a little hard to see in this picture, but there are several black flies sitting on our black Apple HomePod, which has dots of black fly shit on top. Why do they do it? There's nothing in the user guide.

Oddly enough I haven't seen this commented on. It's rare to get a dead end on Google.

Oversharing

I've just ordered some items of a personal nature for an elderly person who is not online. Amazon suggest I share the news on social media.

For mystery callers

After reading my doorbell post, Karel van der Waarde (the other person who reads this blog) sent me this almost poetically baffling sign.

Please don't

After being called off my sick bed to answer the door to chuggers from the Battersea Dogs Home (this is Somerset, for goodness sake), and then again to an 'art student' who couldn't speak any English but had translated cue cards for every response he thought he was getting...

I thought I'd put up a polite notice saying please don't... 

You can buy them online:

- Paper not wanted: Leaflets, flyers, advertisements, menus, junk mail.
- People not wanted: Sales people, charities, religious people, cold callers.
- Consequences: dogs, police, trading standards, prosecution.

Highlights of this collection for me include:

'Strictly addressed mail only' (write your own dominatrix quip).

'We don't need any advice'.

'Please leave and do not return'

What would a polite brush-off look like? I don't want to seem rude.

Toilet confusion

This brilliant post by Nick Parker is firmly of the type: 'I've been wondering about that too'.
I confess that when I read 'Depress and let go' on the label, I was expecting a psychotherapy angle.

If you can stand one more...

David Murphy confesses that parsing signs has become quite addictive (particularly near the beach, I notice). So here's another one.

Bare feet only?

Bear feet only?

My mother's maiden

Keep your security questions short if you want them to fit in an iPhone scrolling menu. Or perhaps these are real life examples of those Nihilistic Security Questions I mentioned a few months ago.

Perhaps we could mix these up a bit...
Why were you born?
Who is your favourite mother?
What is in a name?

Water coolers, squirrels, cocks

Thanks to David Murphy for sending me this, from his local health clinic. He has a very nice blog, which I  discovered earlier this summer. Mostly on distance learning, it reconnected me to my first job, at the Open University.

I first met David when I visited Australia in around 1981. I think he was possibly at Deakin University, which enables me to mention one of those odd 'small world' experiences that happens from time to time.

They had launched a course on visual design and semiotics, and one example of a visual-verbal clash in their course materials was of the sign outside an English pub.

The pub was called The Squirrel, and this is the logo.

The small world experience was that the pub was our local in Ascot, Berkshire, where I grew up.

Of course it never occurred to me that the logo was a cock-up (ho ho). It was not at all strange as many Berkshire pubs were owned by the Courage brewery, and this is their logo.

Context and usage blinds us to obvious communication failures, and they happen all the time with more serious consequences than this (for example, water coolers disappear).

Our local paper

Well it could have been a quartet  - the viola player might have stayed in the car.

Security questions again: I wish I'd thought of this

Have a look at Soheil Rezayazdi's Nihilistic Password Security Questions.

Sample:
What is the name of your least favorite child?
In what year did you abandon your dreams?
What is the maiden name of your father’s mistress?
At what age did your childhood pet run away?

Profound infographic insight about Nigel Farage

Don't you just love it when the numbers make a neat pattern. Thank you, Daily Telegraph website.

Exemplary caption from Time magazine

A December article on Starbucks had this exemplary caption. It's important to know which day in June it was that Getty Images captured this unique moment.





















I'd like to see this level of journalistic integrity adopted for all the library shots that adorn today's quality papers.

For example:

Who are these people? Why are they on the beach? When exactly did this happen?

Picture editing at its finest

Another magnificently baffling picture choice, this time from the Independent.

Photojournalism today

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but newspaper photography is now rarely about news. Sometimes the connection between the story and the image is tenuous, sometimes downright misleading, and sometimes just daft. A few recent examples:

The story is about people in housing benefit. The stock image is of the Barbican in the City of London, where one bedroom flats fetch over £900,000. I suspect that few residents are getting housing benefit.

The story is about female employees at tech firms being offered the chance to put off having children by having their eggs frozen. "Find me a picture of some frozen eggs", the art director cried.

The story is about Bitcoin. Every story about Bitcoin has a picture of a coin. But the whole point is that it's not a coin.

The other Robert Wallers

Please excuse the egocentricity of this post, but I'm excited to discover I am listed in the Wikipedia entry 

'PG Wodehouse minor characters'. Well, a character with my name.

I've often wondered why every other Waller I come across seems to be called Robert.

There's obviously the Bridges of Madison County one, but there's also an election expert who emerges every four years or so, a psychiatrist whose emails I occasionally get by mistake, and the Rob Waller Band (which I only discovered by vainly googling myself). And my grandfather.

Fats Waller was an exception, of course. He was Thomas.

When I worked for the Open University in the 1970s, there were three Wallers on the staff, all Roberts. One of them was in the IT department, and as design tools became computerized our interests converged, and I started to be less and less sure whether mail was intended for me or him.