It’s absolutely freezing in Cambridge at the moment (and no snow to compensate, just crystal-clear skies) and to rub it in my bloody housemate is off on a two-week jaunt to Hawaii, allegedly for “a conference”. Git…

Cool as it looks, I’m betting that this public toilet made out of one-way glass doesn’t make it till the weekend without getting vandalised. (via Bloggerheads)

“What music do you listen to when you are cleaning the blood of a homeless man out of your car?”

Alan Shearer goes on Norweigian radio, only to be quizzed about his post-homicide musical tastes. Sadly the ex-England captain and creosote expert only replied “No comment”.

Speaking of banal England strikers, there was a good documentary on BBC2 last night on fascism and football, but one low point was an entirely gratuitous interview with Gary Lineker - he gave us the revelation that when he moved to Barcelona, he found out they hated Real Madrid. Well, knock me down with a feather.

Any one here remember Batfink? For some reason I woke up this morning with the theme tune in my head and I can’t get rid of it…

More Coke, I’m afraid. Comedian Mark Thomas is planning an exhibition on Coca Cola and their links with the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics, and has asked the b3ta community to come up with Photoshopped artists’ impressions of what it might have looked like (as, apparently, no photos of it have survived).

While I normally like Mark Thomas I have to voice my feelings of distaste towards this - after all Coca Cola have had a presence at every Olympics since 1928, nearly 70 years have passed now, and all they did was sell them sugary water, for fuck’s sake. There’s plenty of other companies that did far worse, such as Ford producing military vehicles, or IBM supplying mechanical computers for the Nazi bureaucracy. And you don’t have to look back to the 1930s to find bad things that Coca Cola do.

Although I wouldn’t quite go as far as comparing it to Holocaust revisionism (as one dissenting b3tan has) to try and pin them together with the Nazis is a cheap form of protest - after all, there is no better brand that says “evil” than the Swastika, so trying to twin Coke with it is cynical and cheap. Just another way of branding a cause - which can be a force for good if it forces companies to be more responsible by threatening to damage their brand.

What I find disturbing is when, as in this case, when attacking the brand for attacking the brand’s sake takes over (as mentioned a couple of days ago, protesting can be more for show than for the cause), and we lose sight of why they should be attacked in the first place. It also lets off companies that are corrupt or damaging society that don’t rely on their brands - Halliburton and Bechtel don’t worry about what the person in the high street thinks of their brand, do they? Brand protesting and branded causes can only go so far - they can win some battles and raise the profile of anti-capitalism, but real political change is the only way to fully defeat rampant corporatism.

PS Sorry to warble lots on about branding and protest by the way, I swear I haven’t been recently reading “No Logo” or anything like that, it just seems the issue has cropped up recently.

Does anyone care? Really? Anyone? I’m a ‘tab and I can’t get myself worked up about it - but apparently over 7 million people in Britain care to watch it. Losers. The Boat Race is one of the most crashingly dull and pointless sporting activities that has ever graced the land, centred around a farcical and elitist rivalry, yet one afternoon every year it becomes the centre of national attention. It makes Formula One look like an engaging, exciting sport of the people.

Maybe it’s just because I hated it the one year I went to the river to watch it - the crushing crowds on the riverbank, a combination of Hurray Henrys and the local tramps swigging away on Stella until they get pissed enough to start threatening each other - it was awful. But even watching it on TV is a struggle, as Barry Davies and someone else try to fill the time with anecdotes and tedious technical analysis, it’s an absolute struggle to get excited about it, even if you are partisan. It is an awful example of British sport, so good riddance to an unnecessary burden on licence-payers’ money.

A brief break from my normally modest musings, but the Wheel of Retribution now comes up third if you search Google for Alastair Campbell and the Policy Maker comes second (beating the man himself!) if you search for David Blunkett. Muahahaha…

Not had much idea about what to do next - had vague ideas for an Oliver Letwin shoot ‘em up, where he gets to mow down evil bureaucrats whilst avoiding schools and hospitals, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do it.

Followup: Looks like Campbell’s had his revenge - I’ve dropped to about 120th now…

A study by Civitas out today say that many people now take part in “recreational grief” - using tragic events and serious causes to assuage their own shortcomings. These are condemned as “attention-seeking” and “phoney, ephemeral and cynical”, as people put on displays of grief (laying flowers and teddy bears, for example) without doing anything tangible about it, such as donating to charities.

The report not only highlights such recent tragedies as the deaths of Princess Diana, Jill Dando and Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, but also wearing ribbons and poppies, and taking part in protest matches. While I can totally agree about how wrong it is to hijack other people’s private grief - it was sickening to read how busloads of people were going to Soham and asking locals to take photographs of them posing by Ian Huntley’s house - the matter becomes greyer if you start looking at people taking part in more political forms of displaying your “goodness”. Although I’ve seen people who use such things as a purely egotistical showing of “anti” without putting any positive alternatives forward, I think it is unfair to liken it to recreational grief. Charities and protest groups definitely exploit their “brand” to get people to carry their message and help them identify with a group (just like people wear Gap or Nike), giving them a sense of belonging. But wearing a poppy or going on protest have underlying good causes, and have been designed from the start to be a public ritual for people to take part in, unlike a family’s private tragedy.

One of these “branded causes” was highlighted in an interesting programme on the BBC last night, about Islamic brands of cola. It followed two brands of cola - Qibla Cola and Mecca Cola - that have been set up as a means of countering the perceived Americanisation of the world by Coca-Cola. These entrepreneurs have come up with the idea that drinking cola can be a form of public protest and have marketed their brands similarly - both used the “if you’re seen buying or drinking this, you are making a statement for others to see” line as a selling tactic, along with donating part of their profits to Islamic charities. Just like the poppy and ribbon campaigns, they’ve cleverly combined a cause with a strong brand, so that people are not only helping towards a cause they believe in, but they can also be seen actively doing it - by drinking from a can of cola in this case, rather than wearing a badge or ribbon. These two brands are going to be infinitely more successful than, say, a simple campaign to boycott Coke by just drinking water and donating your spare cash to charity. Much like the brands of organic and ethically grown food over here, I think they will grow quite strongly in the coming years. It’ll be interesting to see whether these “moral brands” will make as much headway in private enterprise as they have done in the charitable sector.

But as a footnote, it was interesting to note that as much as both brands said they wanted to take people away from Coca-Cola, their brand marks were near-identical to it, maybe as a cunning way of goading Coca-Cola into suing them and earning them extra publicity (they haven’t, yet), but more likely because they just can’t get away from Coke’s pervasiveness - all over the world, red and white equals “cola” in our minds now. No matter how successful they are, the fact that Coke has had that much impact means that they’ll never be able to beat Coke totally. Moral brands may be strong but, sadly, corporate brands are stronger.