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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.
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