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It’s a pain in the cracker thinking up new year’s resolutions. Here at Quark Inc., we take the pain out of the process by creating some for you. Why not go for a bulk deal, and buy your resolutions for the next five new years? Volume discounts available.
Choose your New Year's Resolution from:
1. Invent a new jam
2. Launch new ways of pronouncing own name and convince 80% of friends to adopt them, however ridiculous, by 30 April 2008
3. Promote campaign for worldwide ban on middle names
4. Save World - or failing that, save £5 a week
5. Cure flatulence, but refuse to tell anyone on the grounds it amuses small children
6. Do one thing different every day (but maintain horrendously high levels of tea-drinking throughout)
7. Take up smoking in flagrant defiance of government legislation and prevailing cultural norms.
Each resolution costs just £7.50 (incl P+P).
You’ll be glad your new year started at Quark Inc!
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Monday, 17 December 2007
Editing Love Songs for Sense and Style
When an author finishes a novel, typically the publisher then employs an Editor to go right through it, blowtorch together any gaping plot flaws, hammer out infelicities and shore up the more rickety of the metaphors. The novel’s then published, and despite this attention to detail, will probably be read by a few thousand people at best.
Songs produced by recording artistes, some of them destined for the orifices of millions, get slapped out into the market, their weakly thought-through lyrics preserved in all their inconsistencies and inadequacies for all of us to cherish. Why are there no editors in the recording business?
For instance, when John Farnham wrote his lumbering 80s pop anthem ‘The Voice’, why wasn’t there someone on hand to point out that ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it’ sounds an awful lot like ‘You’re the voice, dumbass, try and wrap your misfiring synapses around the concept, if it isn’t too much TROUBLE.’
And only lack of an editor meant Band Aid could get away with giving Bono the line ‘And tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you’. Unedited subtext: ‘Millions are starving in Africa. On the plus side, at least it’s not you or me, eh? Cup of tea? Slice of cake?’
Editors could also recommend that writers of love songs avoid on principle references to nesting birds as, like it or not, doves play only a very minimal part in people’s lives, and not nearly enough to justify their regular appearance in the bespattered streets and fetid public squares of Love Song Land. Doves: you only got the gig because you rhymed with something. If mankind had turned out differently, and enjoyed songs about say, kitchens, rather than love, you’d be nowhere, and we’d all have a thing about pigeons instead.
Altogether now: ‘I adore you as any man would his kitchen/Outside on the window ledge, there’s a ruddy great pigeon.’ Which is why this is a blog, and not a song.
Next week: why gloves aren’t any good as a metaphor, either.
Songs produced by recording artistes, some of them destined for the orifices of millions, get slapped out into the market, their weakly thought-through lyrics preserved in all their inconsistencies and inadequacies for all of us to cherish. Why are there no editors in the recording business?
For instance, when John Farnham wrote his lumbering 80s pop anthem ‘The Voice’, why wasn’t there someone on hand to point out that ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it’ sounds an awful lot like ‘You’re the voice, dumbass, try and wrap your misfiring synapses around the concept, if it isn’t too much TROUBLE.’
And only lack of an editor meant Band Aid could get away with giving Bono the line ‘And tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you’. Unedited subtext: ‘Millions are starving in Africa. On the plus side, at least it’s not you or me, eh? Cup of tea? Slice of cake?’
Editors could also recommend that writers of love songs avoid on principle references to nesting birds as, like it or not, doves play only a very minimal part in people’s lives, and not nearly enough to justify their regular appearance in the bespattered streets and fetid public squares of Love Song Land. Doves: you only got the gig because you rhymed with something. If mankind had turned out differently, and enjoyed songs about say, kitchens, rather than love, you’d be nowhere, and we’d all have a thing about pigeons instead.
Altogether now: ‘I adore you as any man would his kitchen/Outside on the window ledge, there’s a ruddy great pigeon.’ Which is why this is a blog, and not a song.
Next week: why gloves aren’t any good as a metaphor, either.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
What Technology Should Be For
The obvious drawback to highly advanced digital technology is that it often can’t be bothered to work. The more arcane drawback to it is that its principles, disappointingly, can’t be exported into real life.
How many of us, having said something crashingly tactless, or twatty, have searched in vain for the back button? How many of us, on the twentieth back-breaking press-up, have moaned to just cut and paste the last five?
And if only daily conversation worked like the shuffle does on an iPod. You’d never know what conversation you were getting – it’d be satisfyingly random. You might pop into the newsagents, ask for a copy of ‘The Daily Quark’ and perhaps a bar of tasty ‘Caramac’ – and instead be treated to a short verbal treatise on, ooooh I dunno, The Glorious Revolution of 1688. In meetings, when it came to the Ops Report, instead the ‘conversation shuffle’ might throw up a debate about ‘Photography – is it an art, or isn’t it? And either way, are my holiday snaps ready yet?'
After all, most of us seem fated to have the same conversation over and over again throughout our lives – or, at best, the same few conversations. ‘What is the point of this job?’ and ‘Why do I support this team again?’ and ‘You’re definitely sure this will support my weight?’ We need, my friends, the ‘conversation shuffle’, and I’d be grateful if one of you could invent it.
That said, I was sitting on a tube train last Wednesday when a complete stranger turned to me and tried to start a conversation about The Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Naturally, I told him to f*** off, the pointless freak.
How many of us, having said something crashingly tactless, or twatty, have searched in vain for the back button? How many of us, on the twentieth back-breaking press-up, have moaned to just cut and paste the last five?
And if only daily conversation worked like the shuffle does on an iPod. You’d never know what conversation you were getting – it’d be satisfyingly random. You might pop into the newsagents, ask for a copy of ‘The Daily Quark’ and perhaps a bar of tasty ‘Caramac’ – and instead be treated to a short verbal treatise on, ooooh I dunno, The Glorious Revolution of 1688. In meetings, when it came to the Ops Report, instead the ‘conversation shuffle’ might throw up a debate about ‘Photography – is it an art, or isn’t it? And either way, are my holiday snaps ready yet?'
After all, most of us seem fated to have the same conversation over and over again throughout our lives – or, at best, the same few conversations. ‘What is the point of this job?’ and ‘Why do I support this team again?’ and ‘You’re definitely sure this will support my weight?’ We need, my friends, the ‘conversation shuffle’, and I’d be grateful if one of you could invent it.
That said, I was sitting on a tube train last Wednesday when a complete stranger turned to me and tried to start a conversation about The Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Naturally, I told him to f*** off, the pointless freak.
Monday, 26 November 2007
Wanted: Job Title Jockey (good hours)
Job titles: we’re not being imaginative enough. My friends, Something Must Be Done. We owe it to that bundle of unused business cards crunching in your pocket to develop their potential. It’s not enough to be a ‘Client Manager’ any more; our own personal brands demand more than merely ‘Services Operative’, or even the slyly deceptive ‘Publishing Executive.’
No, what we need to see on business cards is: ‘Saviour of the Planet (Mon-Weds only)’. Put aside ‘Business Manager’, let’s see ‘Product Panjandrum’. Forget ‘Internal Marketing Manager’, let’s have ‘Mission Statement Messiah’.
Failing that, perhaps we could go the opposite way and have refreshingly frank job titles instead. ‘Panic Merchant.’ ‘Consummate Politician’. ‘Director of Own Personal Ego.’ For the colleague on whom good ideas tend to snag, and never progress: ‘Ian Briggs, Corporate Barbed Wire Fence.’ For the fussy colleague who prefers detail over activity: ‘Rose Humphries, Niggle Tsar'. And for the colleague quick to snuggle up to senior managers when they heave into view: ‘Anthony Williams, Apple Polisher.'
Quark: you’re fired.
No, what we need to see on business cards is: ‘Saviour of the Planet (Mon-Weds only)’. Put aside ‘Business Manager’, let’s see ‘Product Panjandrum’. Forget ‘Internal Marketing Manager’, let’s have ‘Mission Statement Messiah’.
Failing that, perhaps we could go the opposite way and have refreshingly frank job titles instead. ‘Panic Merchant.’ ‘Consummate Politician’. ‘Director of Own Personal Ego.’ For the colleague on whom good ideas tend to snag, and never progress: ‘Ian Briggs, Corporate Barbed Wire Fence.’ For the fussy colleague who prefers detail over activity: ‘Rose Humphries, Niggle Tsar'. And for the colleague quick to snuggle up to senior managers when they heave into view: ‘Anthony Williams, Apple Polisher.'
Quark: you’re fired.
Quark’s English for Commercial Travellers No 2
‘Henderson’: Former schoolmate or work colleague who forces you to get back in touch via Facebook or similar, even though you knowingly cut all contact with them years ago (source: Kevin Henderson, Class 4B, Trinity School, Croydon – the original and worst perpetrator)
Sunday, 4 November 2007
Killer Ladybirds threaten the galaxy
Quark Towers has come under attack. Ladybirds of every description are everywhere. You can see them, small black dots clinging to the curtains as if someone has shaken all the full stops out of a novel.
They’re marching across the carpet in highly drilled formations, and the more fanciful amongst us fully expect to see a diminutive brass band bringing up the rear, playing ladybird MOR classics, with one eye on the Christmas market for an iTunes only download. In short, they’re aware of technology too.
Oh sure, they seem cute. Oh sure, they seem harmless. But Quark can assure you this is nothing less than an invasion. Don’t be fooled: those shells are helmets. And they can fly. Be prepared to be divebombed by ostensibly cute, ultimately deadly small insects.
One of these days we’ll wake up and St Paul’s cathedral, St Peter’s in Rome and Sacre Coeur all boasting domes coloured scarlet with large black dots. And then, my friends, you’ll remember my words; but by then, it’ll be too late.
We need to rearm now.
They’re marching across the carpet in highly drilled formations, and the more fanciful amongst us fully expect to see a diminutive brass band bringing up the rear, playing ladybird MOR classics, with one eye on the Christmas market for an iTunes only download. In short, they’re aware of technology too.
Oh sure, they seem cute. Oh sure, they seem harmless. But Quark can assure you this is nothing less than an invasion. Don’t be fooled: those shells are helmets. And they can fly. Be prepared to be divebombed by ostensibly cute, ultimately deadly small insects.
One of these days we’ll wake up and St Paul’s cathedral, St Peter’s in Rome and Sacre Coeur all boasting domes coloured scarlet with large black dots. And then, my friends, you’ll remember my words; but by then, it’ll be too late.
We need to rearm now.
Thursday, 1 November 2007
‘Daily Quark’ campaign for warmer weather succeeds
The ‘Daily Quark’ campaign for warmer weather has succeeded. Temperatures are soaring into double figures as our quarktastic campaign sends the cold fronts packing. Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister, said yesterday: ‘I fully support the Daily Quark’s inspired campaign to stop cold weather coming into this country. And I will continue to do so as long as there is any chance of such support delivering me votes. Brrr.’
Without the ‘Daily Quark’ campaign, Britain would have suffered early morning frosts as early as October, icicles would have appeared on the noses of any goblins who happened to be in the area and glove sales would be up again for the second year running. Thanks to the ‘Daily Quark’, foreign cold fronts have been banished from our shores, and Britain has been kept for British weather. [See page two of your warmfrontderful ‘Daily Quark’ for our new campaign to stop the sea coming in]
Without the ‘Daily Quark’ campaign, Britain would have suffered early morning frosts as early as October, icicles would have appeared on the noses of any goblins who happened to be in the area and glove sales would be up again for the second year running. Thanks to the ‘Daily Quark’, foreign cold fronts have been banished from our shores, and Britain has been kept for British weather. [See page two of your warmfrontderful ‘Daily Quark’ for our new campaign to stop the sea coming in]
Thursday, 25 October 2007
The effect of leaves on a post-industrial economy
Trains in England have begun broadcasting warnings that they may not necessarily run on time due to excessive leaf-fall. The leaves fall, and the trains shudder to a halt, like cartoon elephants terrified of cartoon mice. Is Autumn really that stark an innovation, or so profoundly unpredictable - coming as it does every year without fail, around October - that this couldn’t have been guessed at by the timetable boffins, working their dark, macabre arts?
It’s a crisis. Knowledge workers are being kept from their memos, marketers are being kept from their USPs and positioning statements, business managers everywhere are being kept from leveraging whatever they’ve taken it into their heads to leverage. The economy must be wobbling like a jelly.
It’s hard to imagine the Victorians, who bust sinews and bored through hillsides to create the damn railways in the first place, giving in this easily to excessive foliage. Then again, as the railways were probably built with child labour, amongst other things, maybe where we’ve failed isn’t as significant as where we’ve improved.
It’s a crisis. Knowledge workers are being kept from their memos, marketers are being kept from their USPs and positioning statements, business managers everywhere are being kept from leveraging whatever they’ve taken it into their heads to leverage. The economy must be wobbling like a jelly.
It’s hard to imagine the Victorians, who bust sinews and bored through hillsides to create the damn railways in the first place, giving in this easily to excessive foliage. Then again, as the railways were probably built with child labour, amongst other things, maybe where we’ve failed isn’t as significant as where we’ve improved.
On utterly unnecessary frost
Fine, if you're in an 80s pop video, I can see the point of lavish amounts of cold: bit of a brisk wind, epic seacape in the background, in come the swirling synthesisers. Makes sense. But for the rest of us, why bother? Why stand shivering on train stations, when there's clearly no danger we're collectively going to pop up in a Flock of Seagulls video - but instead are destined to freeze our (in many cases, metaphorical) nads off? I've already broken out the duffle coat in the manner of a hunter in the Canadian wastes breaking out the last pack of cartridges as all around the wolves howl (and no, I'm sorry, I don't think that's an extreme comparison). If God had meant us to be this cold, this early in the autumn, he wouldn't have given us ears.
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