I wasn’t too taken with his information films for the Inland Revenue, but I hadn’t realised that Adam Hart Davis was such a social miscreant.
Still, good to see he’s working on his issues.
Category: Twins Page 3 of 10
…and placed on adjacent shelves in such as fashion as to make the similarity of colour schemes all the more apparent.
Well, it made me smile.
The eminent philsopher David St. Hubbins once noted that there’s “a fine line between stupid and clever”.
GQ Style, I would politely suggest, are so far into the zone marked stupid they’d need a pair of 20×50 binoculars in order to see the hint of a suggestion of the line, just vaguely on the edge of visibility.
Todays’s advice to would-be swipers: don’t nick both the imagery and the words from someone else’s work, or overgrown adolescents on the internet will poke fun at you.
Back in the olden days, when I worked for Sherratt & Hughes (a bookshop chain long since gobbled up by Waterstones), we received a delivery of the latest edition of The Bible.
And when I say “latest edition”, I don’t mean it had a new foreword by the author and previously unseen material, but rather it was a trendy modern repackaging, with silvery lettering and skyscrapers on it like the opening of Dynasty (actually, that’s appropriate when you think about all the begetting in the first book). Strangely enough, I can’t seem to find a picture of it online, but you’ll take my word for it, won’t you? Thanks.
The reason I was thinking about this is because Wuthering Heights has recently been reissued in a form that’s deliberately meant to lure in fans of the Twilight books and films, as you can see:
Obviously, I’m not the intended audience for this re-issue, but I don’t really have any great objection to this packaging (mind you, I do think it’s a bit blatant to use the tagline from Coppola’s film version of Dracula, but I suppose it’s only old farts like me who are expected to remember this, not fans of Robert Pattinson). I’m not entirely convinced that readers of Twilight will necessarily enjoy Bronte’s book that much, but it might work for some people, and I suspect the hope is that they’ll have bought it by then and that’s another sale.
But in a way, lasting works or characters are often re-packaged and re-purposed in line with the prevailing mood of the times; take a look at the way that, say, books by Ian Fleming or Charles Dickens have changed over the years (often in line with some related TV or film adaptation). Even Shakespeare’s plays get a frequent re-packaging, and as alluded to above, some vastly older volumes have had some profoundly groovy and hip covers. And – as is the case with Wuthering Heights – there are usually other, less zeitgeisty, editions available.
I’d guess that a lot of the fans of Twilight are fans of stuff like Harry Potter who have grown up (as opposed, of course, to grown-up fans of Harry Potter) and are now looking for something in a similar vein (…) though perhaps with a bit more repressed passion. That’s my suspicion for the popularity of the Twilight stuff, anyway – I’m not lured in even out of is-it-good-or-bad curiosity, as I’m not particularly interested in vampires per se (for example, as much as I enjoyed Buffy, the presence of the v-word in the title was actually rather misleading, given all the other Monsters Of The Week).
And in fact, given the current mood of a large amount of the audience, I’m not in the least surprised to see that Oscar Wilde’s only novel, in its latest screen incarnation, is being advertised thus:
Crafty. And given his own tendency for not-always-entirely-accurate self-promotion, I rather suspect Mr Wilde would have approved.
Journalism Examination, Paper One
Compare the following items, and then write about the concept of plagiarism, using your own words as little as possible (50 marks):
5 August 2009 – Cracked.com’s article ’15 more images you won’t believe aren’t photoshopped’
and
21 August 2009 – The Sun’s article ‘No computer tricks, just amazing photos’
Bonus Question: Is it clever to steal stuff that’s been viewed over a million times?
… in the hope that the excitement contained in one might rub off on the other.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the exciting one.
Between 1998 and 2004, there was a comic book publisher in the USA called Crossgen Comics.
As is the case with many comic companies, Crossgen’s various titles had shared themes and some overlap of concepts, one of which was that various characters had been endowed with superhuman abilities or powers after they’d been branded with a sigil – a mark which also doubled as Crossgen’s logo, and which looked like this:
In the comics, the origin of the sigils was a running mystery which was gradually explained over the course of a couple of years, but now, well after the event, it occurs to me that perhaps readers might have saved time by looking a bit closer to home for the origin of the sigil:
Or even – if you squint a bit – this, dating from the 1960s:
And to think people worry that I wasted my time at college. Fie, I say!
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for longer than is recommended under HM Government health guidelines may vaguely recall this post, in which I (rather clumsily, now I re-read it) suggested that the scams of the TV Series Hustle appeared to extend to the meta-theft of the tagline from the film Bowfinger.
Well now, take a look at this film poster which I saw repeatedly whilst in India last week:
From the USA to the UK and now on to India, this phrase seems to be making its way round the globe in an easterly direction … if you spot a version of it from Japan, do let me know.