The Consumer Category
We bring you the chic and unique, the best and most bizarre shopping offers both online and offline. We offer you tips on where to buy, and some of the less mainstream and crazy, individual and offbeat items on the internet. Anything that can be bought and sold can be featured here. And we love showcasing the best and worst art and design.
Manchester United’s Eamon Dunphy & Leeds United’s John Giles Star In Weird Dairy Milk Advert (With Apologies To Arsenal’s Lim Brady)
JOHNNY Giles, memorably of Leeds United, and former Manchester United player Eamon Dunphy are now TV pundits in Ireland. The duo have been working for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, extolloing the benefits of a diet of sugar and fat in a budding sportsman’s diet.
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Posted: 17th, September 2014 | In: Sports, The Consumer | Comment
Urban Outfitters Sells Kent State University Dead Student Fashions
URBAN Outfitters is delling a sweatshirt “Vintage Kent State Sweatshirt”. It’s splattered in red blotches that look a lot like blood stains.
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Economist Magazine Adverts Look Like Parodies After It’s American Slavery Disaster
FREE Speech looks to the Economist, a magazine read by business suits and people keen to appear smart and knowing. But the Economist is no leader, no thought provoker. It’s a publication as uncertain as a worm in flip-flops.
The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”. The review ends with the line:
Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.
An odd view, for sure. Not all whites supported slavery; but blacks were the enslaved victims.
So. Cue the Twitter mob. Outraged they wrote in.
Baptist told TalkingPointsMemo: “Maybe this is crass, but I did realize as soon as I read it that this is not actually going to hurt. It has definitely enhanced my Amazon ranking.”
So. What did the Economist do? It became a non review. It was given its own page, so as not to pollute the rest of the ‘newspaper’s’ website. And it is now topped by an apology:
Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.
A special page. Blimey. Can this be the same Economnist that has for years advertised it surefootedness and certainty of thought? (Ads via, via, via and).
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Posted: 14th, September 2014 | In: Books, Key Posts | Comments (2)
Artist Paints Women In The Bliss Of Cosmetic Surgery
ARTIST Jonathan Yeo paints women in the reposeful aspect of cosmetic surgery patients.
Between 2010 and 2012, Yeo created works based on cosmetic surgery procedures. He presents the faces of women in pre and post-operative states, as a counterpoint to the traditional portrait. This collection of paintings was the subject of two solo exhibitions, ‘You’re Only Young Twice’ at Lazarides in London and ‘(I’ve Got You) Under My Skin’ at Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin.
The women appear nun-like, selflessly and obediently awaiting something wonderful and fulfilling.
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Posted: 13th, September 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Australian Manhood Ditches Boobtubes And Hotpants
AUSTRALIA needs our help. The land of men in boob tubes and hot-pants (Aussie Rules) has a break-out star:
The All-Black Burger King Burger Reflects Diners’ Dark Moods
START breeding those all-black meat and bone chickens. Japanese Burger King has created the all-black burger and all-black-bun, enrobed (its says here) in all-black cheese. Yeah. It’s black:
Burger King Japan is rolling out another “Kuro Burger” (“Black Burger”), with buns made from bamboo charcoal, an onion and garlic sauce made with squid ink, beef patties made with black pepper, and black cheese, which is also apparently made with bamboo charcoal.
There are two types of burgers: the Kuro (Black) Pearl and the Kuro (Black) Diamond with all the fixings. The burgers go on sale later this month in Japan for a limited time only
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Posted: 11th, September 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
In Japan You Can Buy This Whole Pig Wrapped In Plastic At A Grocery Store
THIS photo from a Twitter user in Japan and shared through the Twitter account Wadai Tweet shows a whole pig wrapped in plastic at a grocery store. The store isn’t identified but the price is 30,000 yen.
It’s like a warning not to put your head in a plastic bag.
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Posted: 9th, September 2014 | In: Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
The Only Writer I’ve Read All My Life is Charles Schulz
THE only writers I’ve read all my life is Charles Schulz:
It was the Peanuts collections in my grandfather’s basement office that really stayed with me through childhood and into college. Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Lucy all felt like real people to me. I even felt so sorry for Charlie Brown at one point that I wrote him a valentine and sent it to the newspaper, hoping he’d get it. I’ve said it many times before, but Charles Schulz is the only writer I’ve continually been reading since I was a kid. And I know I’m not alone. He touched millions of people and introduced empathy to comics, an important step in their transition from a mass medium to an artistic and literary one.
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Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile – Blame The Parents
JIMMY Savile is the subejct of Dan Davies’s book Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. The man known in his lifetime as Sir Jimmy has now buried in muck and filth. Savile never was arrested, charged nor tried in his lifetime. He is the alleged paedophile and rapist who operated on the BBC and NHS’s watch.
Rachel Cooke writes:
As I read Davies’s book, the term “light entertainment” suddenly struck me as the greatest joke. What a misnomer. It wasn’t light at all. It was dark and heavy: clodhopping at best, sinister at worst. All the programmes I enjoyed most as a child came with heavy doses of innuendo, low-level violence, sadomasochism. There was Dick Emery, who dressed up as a sexually frustrated spinster – at the time I didn’t know what frottage was, except I sort of did, thanks to her – and as a toothy vicar whose pious exterior made for a sharp contrast with his visits to “naughty” strip clubs. (Davies, I notice, has a picture of this vicar on his Twitter account.) There were the two Ronnies, Barker and Corbett, whose show included peculiar serials such as “The Worm That Turned”, a dystopian fiction starring Diana Dors, in which women ruled the world (mostly in hot pants and jackboots) and men wore women’s clothes and kept house, and “Band of Slaves”, in which an all-girl orchestra was sold into slavery. Rod Hull and his puppet Emu performed a tango of aggression so convincing, you couldn’t help but rub your upper arms as you watched, imagining the bruises on those of their victims. Benny Hill was forbidden in our house – he was on ITV – but I knew the shtick. He chased girls. Round and round and round. (Hill, incidentally, made a shrine of his dead mother’s clothes, just as Savile did with those of his beloved “Duchess”.) Somehow, Ben Elton’s controversial attack on Hill – the comedian’s routine, he suggested, incited rape and other acts of violence against women – doesn’t seem quite so over-the-top now as when he made it in 1987.
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Posted: 5th, September 2014 | In: Books, Celebrities | Comment
A Humming Toilet Seat Fan That Sucks Out Your Ill Wind
HARD cheese for those of you like smelling your own farts? But good news for eveyrone around you. The toilet-seat with an in-built fan is here. CNet has more:
We are in a golden age for toilet technology. Recent years have given us highly entertaining innovations like toilet landing lights, home toilet wave-to-flush kits, and Bluetooth-equipped toilets that can be flushed using an app. There is no stopping the forward progress of toilet tech, as evidenced by Fresh Air Plus, a newcomer to the lavatory scene.
Fresh Air Plus is a Kickstarter project that replaces your old, lifeless toilet seat with a seat that has a built-in exhaust fan designed to capture and safely vent unwelcome odors outside your house. The Kickstarter promotional video describes the issue as “stinky, gross, and sometimes socially awkward.” The seat has a sensor that detects when someone is sitting down. This triggers the fan to turn on.
The seat also has an anti-slam lid that closes softly. The best part of all is a series of purplish and red blinking star lights on the side that let you and any visitors know that this isn’t your momma’s toilet seat, it’s a high-tech beast of a bathroom machine.
The installation process involves removing your old seat, attaching the Fresh Air Plus in its place, plugging the seat into a wall socket, and then connecting a hose to an exhaust vent running outside. The biggest issue here is that you probably don’t already have a small round vent in your wall, so you’ll have to get handy and put one in or hire somebody to come do it. It gets a little trickier if your bathroom doesn’t have an outside-facing wall. This situation requires running the hose through the wall to connect up with the ventilation pipe used by your bathroom ceiling fan.
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Posted: 4th, September 2014 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Estate Agent Advertises Ipswich Home Fit For A Pig
PSST! want to buy a detached fmaily home on Britannia Road, Ipswich?
It’s had one careful owner, as the advert posted at Rightmove by estate agent Connells, shows:
Posted: 1st, September 2014 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Barbecues Make You Fat Pigs: Which Is The Whole Point Of Them
SO the Daily Mail tells us: we’re total and complete grossouts when we eat a barbecue. We eat far more at one than we do at a normal meal. All of which is terribly interesting but it is rather missing the point about a barbecue isn’t it? That they’re supposed to be the times when we pig out? It’s a bit like saying that we have more calories at dinner than we do with a lunchtime sandwich: that’s the bloody point!
It may not come as a surprise that a diet of sausages and ribs could leave you, well, a little porky.
But you probably didn’t realise that we eat up to three times more at a barbecue than in a normal meal.
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Posted: 27th, August 2014 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
Zara Sells Holocaust-Inspired Fashion For Children
ZARA is selling a “striped ‘sheriff’ T-shirt” for junior police.
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Pussycat Riot Rips Into Putin: Dictator Themed Litter Boxes and Scratch Posts
KITTY Cat kitsch takes on political idologies with these fine scratching posts and litter boxes by The Pussycat Riot.
The voodoo doll-style posts are £4,500.00 a totem; but the poo trays are just £3.00.
Look on as your sweeti pie-foo-foo rips out Putin’s eyes and craps on Kim Jong Un, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
From the very heart of the Internet we raise our banner with #ThePussycatRiot: a new protest movement to unite the cats of the world and their owners in opposition to cyber censorship. We aim to raise awareness of the oppressive regime Preventing people from freely enjoying the boundless wealth of mankind’s innovation and creativity … And cat videos. […]
[The Putin- and Kim Jong Un Cat Scratching Posts are] one-of-a-kind product protest and the ultimate feline satirical statement. An incredibly lifelike cat scratching post Modelled on Kim Jong-un and Putin for your censorship-hating cat to scratch.
Spotter: The Pussycat Riot website, DM
Posted: 26th, August 2014 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, The Consumer | Comment
If Kate Moss’s Breasts Are A Champagne Coupe Who Is The Flute Based On?
KATE MOSS’S has had a champagne glass modelled on her left breast. Quaffers at Mayfair’s 34 can purse their lips to the rim of one of British artist Jane McAdam Freud’s cups.
This honour was once extended to another sparkling white woman, the fabled Marie Antoinette.
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Posted: 22nd, August 2014 | In: Celebrities, Fashion, The Consumer | Comment
All Hail The Stupendous Splendiferous Butterup Butter Grater: No More Holes In Your Bread
YOU love bread and butter. But the butter is rock hard. You can’t wait for it to soften so you stick a shard of it on your doughy white sliced and spread. But it just tears holes in the bread. It’s a disaster. The word is ready for the butter grater.
The Stupendous Splendiferous Butterup is yours for US$16.”
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Posted: 21st, August 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Loom Mongers: The Daily Mail Says Loom Bands Give You Cancer, Kill Turtles And Maim Your Kids
TIME to pick up your iPads and iPods once again, kids, Loom bands are deadly. The Daily Mail tells us that Looms are killing you all:
On August 13: Loom Bands Give You Cancer:
On August 6 Lorraine Candy wailed tht loom bands are “worse than the addictive computer game Minecraft that absorbed them last year”…
Worse than killer computer games! Yes. Beceu loom band wiull kill Gaia.
August 4: Ticking Loom bands are an ‘eco time bomb”:
Know that:
Paul, director of conservation at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, said: ‘Loom bands, like any plastic item, are capable of persisting in the environment for many, many years and there is abundant evidence of small plastic items making their way into the diets of marine animals and seabirds with tragic consequences. ‘I’d be particularly worried about loom bands being taken to the beach as, due to the likelihood of them getting into the sea.’
On July 11, children were being maimed:
And:
What to do? The Mail knows. It’s gong to give them away:
The Daily Mail wants to maim your kids, kill turtles and give you cancer.
Posted: 20th, August 2014 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Video: ‘Electronic Makeup’ Completely Transforms This Model’s Face
THIS is a great video of Nobumichi Asai‘s projection mapping of “electronic makeup” applied to a model’s face.
Asai used Omote, a combination of real-time face tracking and projection mapping to transform a model’s face into mesmerizing patterns.
via Gizmodo and h/t Alice Lowe
Posted: 19th, August 2014 | In: Fashion, Technology | Comment
McDonald’s Terminates Worker Who Put Free Swastika In Woman’s Chicken Sandwich
LUCKY Charleigh Matice found a Swastika in her McDonald’s chicken sandwich, bought at a brand in Morehead City, North Carolina.
Eat yer heart out, Hamburglar. This is the surprise gift that will get the kids flocking to the store.
But Charleigh was upset by the free extra. She says her grandfather fought for the Allies World War II. It’s not what he would have wanted.
McDonald’s is swift to punish:
“We are very sorry for the service that our customers received, and to be clear we have terminated the employee who was involved. We do not tolerate that kind of behavior at McDonald’s, and it’s not what we stand for personally as owners. It is about providing the best level of service and care to our customers, and anything less than that is unacceptable to us.”
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Posted: 12th, August 2014 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Colour Me A Dead Chris Brown For Father’s Day: COLORING FOR GROWN-UPS Is A Book Of Regret
CELEBRATE every moment in your waking life with a Coloring For Grown-Ups artwork.
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6 Weird And Fabulous Items Of Band Merchandise
TODAY, the world’s press heard about Britney Spears launching a new lingerie line, which just so happens to be called The Intimate Collection.
She announced this by posting a picture of her herself wearing the new range on Instagram. And she looked perfectly lovely in it.
Britter’s range will hit the shelves Stateside on September 9th and Europeans will either have to learn how to use the internet to buy things from abroad, or wait a few days and buy in European shops on September 26th.
That’s not the story though. It got us thinking about band merchandise – not everyone can be classy enough to release a range of tasteful undercrackers.
Most bands don’t veer too far away from t-shirts and mugs, but some go a bit mental. Tenacious D had a specially designated cum-rag fercryinoutloud.
So with that, shall we have a look at some of the weirdest (and therefore best) bits of band merch ever? Feel free to add you own in the comments.
Rammstein Dildo Box
Rammstein released a box-set with a load of dildos in it and, of course, they decided to base the sex toys on their own junk. That’s nice isn’t it?
Prodigy Toilet Cover Seat
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Posted: 24th, July 2014 | In: Key Posts, Music, The Consumer | Comment
