Stella have just launched ‘Le Recyclage De Luxe Show’ – the next TV show by a brand to be potentially lost in a mass of YouTube videos. Despite not being a massive fan of these (there’s nothing wrong with them, but I haven’t been bowled over) this one is pretty sharp.

As with the billboard and TV ads (hedge fund references are lost on me) it’s retro 1960s French chic. The subtitles are a bit of a pest though. I suppose I’m won over by anything that calls itself retro and gets in Florence and the Machine to do a 60s style performance.

Also they have some great poetry:
My Heart,
It aches,
Like my shelf,
Full of sartre.

Beaker, of the Muppets type, does the best rendition of Ode to Joy I’ve ever heard. So good it’s going to be my ringtone. A Christmas ringtone no less, which means it must be super as anyone with a Christmas ringtone deserves to be shot (mostly become Christmas ringtones are horrible beeping creations of Nokia on a 3300) . Also my current keyboard cat tune isn’t so festive. (There’s a Muppets version of Bohemian Rhapsody that everyone’s talking about and led me to this, too.)

As the grumpy old men say, “watching these videos makes me worry about the future.”

Dylan Moran talks about couples in his new show What It Is. Death, he says, we are all avoiding. When we’re young it preys on our minds and so men and women try different tactics to avoid it. Women try to choose curtains. ‘What colour?’ they ask of the men, waving two nauseating colours of grey cloth around – but men are too busy thinking that lots of sex is the answer to avoid death. ‘Sex sex sex’ they think. It’s okay in the end though because sex ends in children, and then the children pull the curtains down.

How do you spell Summer Fate? One issue Google hasn’t been able to help me with.

Anyway, the new Vampire Weekend video is ace. It has lots of fun bright things including summer fate(?) flags and bright paint, and confetti, and bells. And coloured paper circles doing what they do best (falling and bouncing).

Not just any confetti either (not the church kind) – speedy swirling confetti the video zooms along its dolly tracks in to. (Use of running up and down the dolly tracks – another things I like about this). Cheap budget, crap props, ace video.

I wasn’t a massive fan of the song when I first heard it, but whilst watching it in order to compile the above list of fun and bright things it grew on me a lot. Actually I’ve had to restrain myself from bouncing around in my chair. I’m cool.

Made by Garth Jennings, the director of Hitchhiker’s guide director. It’s not the first interesting person they’ve had direct – Richard Ayoade did a couple too.

I have some tapes left over from when I was three made by my Father.

My Dad’s the computery type. When I was young I used to sit on his knee whilst he would show me the exciting things you could do with excel (changing the colour of cell backgrounds mostly). Which was great..

He also got hold of some tapes and read me stories into them. I think the idea was that I’d master the tape machine and play them back to myself; some sort of Utopian parenting. Unfortunately the recordings captured real life which involves small-me talking and prodding the tape machine. That said, there’s a great rendition of chicken licken on them.

I’ve got hold of this archaic thing, from Maplins. It records tapes into Mp3 format via USB, which is nice because you don’t loose too much quality and the original’s pretty 1990s quality so could do with being preserved.

So I’ve now got tapes full of my Father’s story-telling voice and my small interruptions onto my laptop (apparently far before the story even started I was quite aware of Chicken Licken’s impending doom). There’s also also some unpleasant recordings from when I was seven and had learned to sing Fara Jacque out of tune which have pointedly not been digitalised.

We’ve never had a video camera, and I think this might be better.

I made some candles recently. They didn’t require a massive attention span, and the internet told me I could use yogurt pots as molds, which pretty much sold it for me.

It was lots of fun. I suppose these have turned out to be one of the “well they’re ugly as hell, but they’re mine and I love them” things. They’re probably not very nice for you but I love my little blue and white-ish candles. They’ve been sitting around looking very pretty and I’ve only just braved some terrible fear that lighting them will break them (by break I mean I’ll have fundamentally made them wrong and they’ll explode).

I’ve written up how to make them over at Bitchbuzz.

As for today I’m beginning a long slow fight with a pair of knitting needles. I’m using happy red thread to keep my spirit up.

When I first saw these I scowled and felt foolish because they appeal to my love of small things and crafty woolyness far too easily. The second time I saw them I caved and bought two in a special offer. It’s a clever marketing ploy – I bought a green drink that I’ve never tried before because it matched the hat (all very necessary). Very sadly the stripey red and white hat disappeared on the way home so I am left with a naked drink. I am playing with the pompom for comfort.

Now with a slightly vile temporary layout.  Will be changing that to some sort of monotone grey when I can, but now I must watch ‘The Boat That Rocked’.

I am enjoying illustrated tweets today. Lovely and peculiar illustrations by Katie Vernon of tweets plucked from the public timeline. Of particular note are the father-like hairy legged animals; my father is made of 90% beard and had some glasses exactly like these in the 80s. (He was a trend setter, and is still rocking the look today.) Anyway these are ace.

I have been remembering and relearning things at Fireworks parties with my blundering and honest compliments.

“I have to say, I love your coat.

I mean, it’s the ugliest coat ever. It’s got a drawstring around the middle and I’ve never seen anyone make that look good. That’s the type of coat your 50 year old child-minder wears and it doesn’t look cool, it just makes them look fat and sexless. But you, you’re the only person in the world I’ve ever seen make that coat look actually awesome. That’s insanely impressive.”

“Oh. Well, thanks. How convoluted.”

An explanation from someone who overheard:
“Well she probably sees the coat as an extension of herself, representing a part of her. She probably saw it in a shop and thought YES, This coat is my essence, this is perfect. It will represent me and my soul perfectly, it is amazing, I love it. Because it’s not just something that suits her, it makes up part of her.”

I forget this. I suppose I do the same – that’s why brand image is so important, because people are buying into the product. They want the values and to become part of that through the product. Like the BMW man buys into thick sunglasses and driving badly. These are his ideals (though I’ve heard that Audi are the New BMW).

It’s strange how we can give our own alternative values to the ugliest items found in a charity (or vintage) shop or to old wildly ugly nikes twenty years later.