Posts Tagged 'australia'

Breaking Free

I feel so much better after getting out of Melbourne. At the weekend I trekked down the Great Ocean Road with a coachload of wrinklies and backpackers, saw the twelve Apostles, proper surfing waves and some two-dimensional seaside towns. I took photos, nibbled buttery fish and chips on the beach and stared out at the ocean. Now I feel revived, reinvigorated, and I’m almost afraid to admit why.

Because it was beautiful. And Melbourne just… isn’t. Fed Square, Flinders Street Station, Crown Casino, the Arts Centre; all paragons of architectural ugliness. It’s all new and sharp, angles and concrete, blocks and sprawling roads, and – what I hate the most – the tram lines everywhere, dissecting the sky, like giant fishing nets to hold us in.

Va-jay-jay

This made me laugh recently. I didn’t get it at all the first time I saw it, but now I find it utterly hilarious. It’s PG Tips monkey meets the Calvin Harris ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ video; really brilliant. An irreverent, humorous take on intimate personal care that makes up for decades of awkwardness. I’m sure it won’t be long until someone takes offence and it gets pulled, but until then I hope it makes people switch to U. And it’s not just sizzle, there’s sausage too – it’s a fun, bright, exciting product. The ad is so perfectly targeted towards the intended audience and so refreshingly amusing. And their website is fantastic too.

The Name’s Man, Media Man

This is the most amusing man I have come across since the worst person in the world.

He’s worked his way up from ‘managing’ a restaurant to running his own media agency, dealing with everything from PR and TV presenting to online advertising, journalism and quite horrifically, web design.

According to his website, ‘Only time will tell, what is next for Greg Tingle and his team, but rest assured that Media Man Australia will remain in the media spotlight, and its full impact has yet to be experienced.’

The CV is particularly impressive, including such gems as:

‘Receive e-mails of appreciation from clients’

In his later career this progresses to:

‘Receive e-mails and telephone calls of appreciation from clients’

I can only dream of being able to write this on my CV one day.

The ‘testimonials’ section lists some excellent quotes from people he has known throughout his career. Has he travelled through life carrying a notebook of ‘Things people have said about me’? We can but wonder.

“I would thoroughly support him” Dennis Heffernan, Head Teacher, Communication and Media Studies, TAFE

“you should do very well in the media” “Big” Tim Bristow, Private Investigator

Plus it’s great to know that ‘additional testimonials are available’, just in case the twenty-odd he’s already listed aren’t enough.

The guy is probably great at what he does but from this eyeball-torturing website he seems like another self-proclaimed paragon of PR that ironically fails at portraying themselves in a good light (much like my amusing interview at itpr). Perhaps I’m just jealous, as he clearly has a talent for self-belief and self-promotion that I lack entirely.


Flickr Photos

Nice and easy

Green and orange

Awkward scraping

Paint coming off in sheets

Two inches deep

More dust falls out

And it all falls out

Poke

Appears to be filled with damp plaster dust

More Photos

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