You know what it’s like in hospital: bang, bang, crash, wallop, wail, rattle hum. The chances of actually getting any healing sleep are virtually nil.
So I’ve got some sympathy with this youing German lad, as reported by Ananova:
Teen unplugged ‘noisy’ life support machine
A teenager in intensive care unplugged his neighbour’s life support machine because the noise was keeping him awake.
Frederik Moelner, 17, said he had been trying to sleep as he recovered from a car crash but the noise of the life support machine as it helped 76-year-old Hermann Berghof breathe kept waking him up.
A police spokesman from Landshut in southern Germany said: “He told us the noise was getting on his nerves and he thought this was the best way to make sure he got peace and quiet.
“Luckily the medical staff acted promptly and reconnected the life support machine. If there had been any delay the old man could have died.”
See the opressed Cape Buffelo masses rise up as one to overthrow the lion aristocracy after suffering one outrage too many! Long, but worth watching all the way through. Somewhat inane commentary courtesy of South African tourists.
This “news” article on what grocery stores should do to attract more men is not only written in that annoying business p.r. language, but also seems to make the case American men are oafish helpless morons the moment they step into a store:
Many men have difficulty finding items, forego buying rather than risk purchasing a substitute for an item on the grocery list and hesitate to ask for help if they can’t find an item, Putnam said in her report.
“They never ask for help, except maybe from the butcher, but they always say they never had problems finding anything when the cashier at the register asks,” she said.
[…]
“They were great at picking out the stuff that they bought before. It’s the new stuff, or something new and different that a manufacturer is trying to promote, that they have trouble with,” said Putnam, who walked along with men as they shopped as part of her study.
Men also tend to bristle at the overwhelming number of choices in grocery aisles, with the cereal aisle being one prime example, Putnam said.
“One guy I thought was going to have a nervous breakdown in the cereal aisle,” Putnam said, adding that this man, in his early 30s, worked the night shift as a police officer in a dicey part of town and was otherwise used to stressful situations.
Today’s comedy double is all about sex education The first group is a collection of public service safe sex and condom ads from all over the world, and because they’re ads they’re pretty much worksafe, depending on how tightassed your boss is – or you are, if you’re working from home. But then if you’re such a tightass, what on earth are you doing here?
The bonus clips are longer and much more graphic, though equally funny. Probably not safe for any workplace though. The cats had to go and hide in the bathroom at one point, poor sensitive loves.
On with the motley then.
I love condom ads; unwritten boundaries of sexual taste and decency vary so widely from country to country, testing the transgressive creativity of ad-makers to the benefit of us viewers. So to soften you up for the condomfest to come here’s a sex-ed ad from Canada and oh god, we’ve all been at this school event or something very like it:
An ad like this next one, also from Canada, might prove more effective in its aim. Works for me.
First the stick, then the carrot, hur hur; from South Africa comes a condom ad that does it with subtlety, style, humour and ooh, eyecandy:
Then there’s the typically idiosyncratic Dutch approach. I’ve never seen them do this on KLM, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they did:
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But some people really do need the message hammered home, if you see what I mean and I think you do.
If you’re male and at all sensitive about the family jewels, I’d suggest you don’t watch this next one, or maybe you could watch it from safely behind your chair. How not to test a condom:
Right, now that we’ve got our condoms and know how to use them, it might be wise to use them responsibly. This one’s from France on the side-effects of easily available contraception:
It’s funny, but I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying there – that contraception makes women bad mothers?
Now for the bonus clips: they’re quite long, so you might want to save them for your lunch break or at home. First, Family Guy on abstinence ed:
Abstinence, schmabstinence. You might as well ask a cat not to lick its itching nads as to ask a teenager to be sexually abstinent. But they tried, and still do: here’s a mashup of American ’50s sex-ed films:
I dunno though, sometimes understanding parents can be worse. Much worse….
That is one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve seen in a very long time.
Far from hymning abstinence or trumpeting fake understanding, this next ad takes humourous acceptance of sexual diversity to whole new levels. I don’t think they’ll be seeing this one in Kansas, do you? What a great ad though:
The last bonus clip is an animated short which I think may be Czech: it’s pretty sexually graphic so definitely not safe for work, but what an excellent safe sex video, funny and touching with great animation.
Now my work here is done, mwahahaha. I’m off to sit in the garden in the sun for a while, at least until disturbed by local cat politics in action.
Today’s comedy double is all about Holland and the Dutch – it’s about time I did my tiny bit towards cross-cultural understandingconfusionah fuck it muddling along as usual, and as I’m often asked, “what’s life actually like in Holland?”, here it is – life in Holland, via the magic of comedy.
This clip from cable ‘yoof’ channel BNN shows the sorts of things we see in the streets every day:
If you watched that and you’re still going “wtf?”, here, from Amsterdam’s very own US expat comedy theatre Boom Chicago is a quick primer on the difference between European and American senses of humour:
Anyone whose ever been to NL will give a shudder at the mention of Dutch supermarkets. Let’s face it, they’re just weird. The Albert Hein chain of stores, for instance, combines all the glamour of Kwiksave with the aspirations to gentility of Waitrose, but with a complete and utter bonkersness that’s all its own. Recently all the Dutch AH customers went mad for the Wuppie, a little furry doodad given away free with groceries. The key word here is ‘free’ – the Dutch bow to no-one in their ability to grab anything free that’s going, no matter how useless or ugly it might be. “But it’s free! ”
This is how excited the Dutch can get over a cheap supermarket giveaway:
It’s not just me thinks Dutch supermarkets are weird – here’s a vintage clip (you can tell it’s vintage cause he mentions guilders) of British comic John Fearley attempting to explain Albert Hein, in English, to the Dutch:
You see what I have to put up with? As much as I loathe Tesco’s attempts at world domination, every day I cross my fingers and wish for a local, wuppie-free and most of all reliable Tesco. Or even a Somerfield. Whatever, just somewhere where the assistants don’t alternately scowl and snarl at you and the veg don’t rot the minute you get them home and there’s milk and bread after lunchtime… and they open after 6.
But leaving Dutch supermarkets aside, because it makes me depressed, no visit to NL or Amsterdam would be complete without the obligatory nod to history.
We’re surrounded by history and people gawping at history and this time of year it gets particularly difficult. If only we could make historical tourism more user friendly….
So it’s back to Boom Chicago (who have) for the first bonus clip and -Anne Frank is Lonely Girl 1944:
Ooh, that’s mean, and very, very Dutch. Boom Chicago may be expats, but like me they’re being assimilated despite themselves.