Joseph Richards

If I could time travel I’d go back to the moment where...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:05:38 +0100

If I could time travel I’d go back to the moment where presumably Rick Rubin, in the name of Kanye’s fucked up idea of minimalism, decided to ‘reduce’ the screams in “Black Skinhead” just so I could stop that shit.

The “Skinhead” premiered at SNL is fitted out with loads of blown-out details: the way Kanye drives his vocal into the red, kissing the mic to explode his voice; those wide-eyed yelps that sound like his trademark ‘HANH!?’ transmuted by Munch (1:28 is a particularly good one); the way the bridge, after that kettle-boil chorus, spikes those blunt end rhymes - Down! Now! Now! Down! jabbing like Batman fight scene intertitles - with a desolate reverb that sounds like the aural equivalent of Kurtz’ thousand-yard stare. It’s messy, desperate and exciting to listen to.

On the Yeezus version that’s all gone, as if a decision was made to go for a cleaner vocal. In the bridge that vocal gets compartmentalised, produced. Those vital exclamation marks get turned into take-or-leave ad-libs, little processed samples; Rap Genius scans them in parentheses, which sums up the castrating effect pretty well. Listening to it now doesn’t conjure up the same existential nightmare of black skin, white masks, and melting clocks spread across empty deserts. Instead I see him cracking jokes between takes. I see Rubin sitting behind him looking genial, beatific like a barefooted Buddah in the sunshine at Shangri-La. It sounds like something that might’ve been recorded on the same day as Kim’s baby shower. I see a Louis V changing bag and cuddly toy wrapped up in the corner of the studio.

Beautiful drums.

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:57:04 +0100

Beautiful drums.

Tapped out: Phone monitoring, young love, and me.

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 15:16:49 +0100

sinker:

When my wife and I were first dating, we’d talk on the phone constantly, the way that new lovers often do. She lived on the south side of Chicago and I was up on the north side and I kept crazy hours at work, and so we’d connect by phone when we couldn’t connect in person. And those conversations would range the way those conversations always do: hopes, dreams, work, laundry.

I was working one of those ridiculous long nights we often had during production of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran back then, and I was idly chatting with my girlfriend on the phone about a story we were working on about Iraq. This was back probably in 1999, when the crippling sanctions on Iraq since the first Iraq war had mostly been forgotten and we were one of the few news organizations (if you could even call us that) still trying to keep that story alive. This was thanks mainly to the work of a single guy, Jeff Guntzel, who would send us dispatches from the country when he’d travel there with the activist group he was a part of. He’d also occasionally call us from a business center in Baghdad—his voice a raspy whisper through the amount of static and noise on the line.

I was working on the layouts for one of Jeff’s stories and was excited to tell this girl I was trying to impress more about it. But, as those young love conversations do, we moved off-topic pretty quickly, jumping from one topic to the next. I don’t remember much about those conversations now, but I still remember the distinct click the phone made when we switched from talking about the Iraq story to discussing her misadventures at the local laundromat earlier that evening.

That click became a regular occurrence on our office line—popping up as you’d move towards or away from more politically charged topics—and was followed not long after by intractable problems with our office phone line. Occasionally you’d pick up the phone and, instead of a dial tone, you’d get the digital static of a modem; other times you’d pick up and there’d be a few moments of silence followed by a click and a dial tone. Mid-conversation you’d sometimes find your voice beginning to echo, then snap back into normality. And of course, sometimes the phone would stop working entirely, and a bewildered customer service representative would mutter words about things being “flagged” before putting me on hold. The line would usually start working quickly after those service calls.

Finally, after an extended period of bad dial-tones and calls getting cut off, the line just entirely went dead. A particularly dogged technician came to the office. He spent time in our space, time in his truck, time up on a pole. If I remember right, he even drove to one of the main switches near us. Finally he came back, looking completely bewildered and said, “I really don’t know what to tell you. It’s almost as if your line goes somewhere else before it comes to us.”

This was before September 11. This was before the PATRIOT Act. This was before Bush was elected and Obama after him. This was, obviously, almost a decade and a half before this week’s revelations of governmental phone metadata collection and the NSA’s PRISM project. We were a tiny magazine—at the time, our readership probably hovered somewhere around 10,000. And yet there was this technician telling me what I’d already deeply suspected: Our line was going somewhere else.

I wish I could say I was outraged by the NSA PRISM project, by the collection of cellphone metadata, by any of it. I am disturbed by all of it, disappointed for sure, but outrage would imply that my worldview was shattered. But the world I’ve lived in for a long time is the world we’ve all been plunged into with the revelations this week. My worldview that things might be different than they are went away a long time ago, broken by the clicks that came up through the line as two young lovers shared their secrets over the phone.

It’s all connected pt.2

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 03:33:01 +0100

It’s all connected pt.2

‘[groans]’ always makes me laugh a lot.

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 02:29:19 +0100

‘[groans]’ always makes me laugh a lot.

"Like The Godfather, Part II — part of a series which might or might not have inspired Arrested..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 21:16:00 +0100

“Like The Godfather, Part II — part of a series which might or might not have inspired Arrested Development in the first place, if this excellent video essay is to be believed – season four of AD manages to be true to the spirit of the original while tinkering with its structure, rhythm, and themes. It’s very different from yet artistically equal to the show’s first three seasons — not in spite of all the production limitations placed on it by the actors’ scheduling commitments and paycheck requirements, but because Hurwitz & Co. embraced those very same limitations, and let form follow function. In his wonderful piece about season four, Time’s James Poniewozik writes that when Hurwitz worked for Fox, he “… made genius of necessity. Restrained by content standards, he wrote a kind of poetry of innuendo.” I think he’s making genius of necessity here, too, but it’s a different sort of necessity, and it has resulted in a different sort of poetry — not one of innuendo, but clever nonetheless, and possessed of much darker shadings than he could show us in the first few seasons.”

- Seitz on Arrested Development: A Puzzle Show Perfectly Calibrated for the Internet Age — Vulture

Was beginning to drift toward the ‘really bad‘ conclusion on S4’s set-up after starting to watch AD from the top - it’s so short and zippy and economical! - but this is a very good, unapologetic and necessary argument for the opposite. To the extent that it makes me think Hurtwitz would’ve done it this way, the made-for-Netflix way, even if it wasn’t for the schedule commitment limitations.

bmichael: tylercoates: De Rossi, who has been very honest...

Thu, 30 May 2013 17:37:17 +0100

bmichael:

tylercoates:

De Rossi, who has been very honest about her struggles with eating disorders early in her career, now must deal with a new kind of pressure from critics and audiences: staying youthful and beautiful while also “aging gracefully.” That her appearance has been cited as a reason why the fourth season of Arrested Development isn’t as good as the previous three, suggesting her face is so distracting that it’s impossible for anyone to laugh at Mitch Hurwitz’s jokes, is more disheartening that the notion that she’s succumbed to pressure and had any sort of plastic surgery.

I wrote about the sexist and stupid conversation people are having about Portia de Rossi’s appearance on the new Arrested Development.

I’ll fully admit to being distracted by de Rossi’s face at first and during my first viewing of AD. I tried to shrug off the scrutiny I gave it by saying that everyone else had changed less, that she was in a sweet spot, age-wise, where the time gradient just would have the most effect, etc. It rather pains me to admit that I spent more than a few minutes trying to figure out how exactly her face had changed, though I 1) never went so far as compare with the aid of google image search or, 2) published any thoughts in any public form including a newspaper, facebook, or cuneiform tablet.

I think the best of us can fail, and I’m definitely not the best of us. The other day, I asked Jesse Thorn on Twitter why Nellie McKay was the only performer at his upcoming music festival whom he described as “beautiful”. The line-up, he replied on his podcast the next week, included such estimable performers as John Roderick and John Darnielle, but McKay just was the only beautiful person performing. Fair enough, I suppose.

The — if this is what it is — de Rossi controversy just again goes to show the (obvious obvious) truth that categorical thinking shapes the empirical stuff of observation to an extent that far surpasses our ability to empirically validate categorical observations. By which I mean that the most ‘honest’ or ‘well intentioned’ observations are still conditioned by an even greater rule, which you may not have signed off on or explicitly attempted to validate. And that, further, making supposedly honest observations tend to reinforce the categoricals behind them, making them even more a part of the way society (or stuff) ‘just seems to be’.

It’s all connected.

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:49:05 +0100

It’s all connected.

On The Form of Arrested Development S4 (Which Is Either Interesting or Really Bad)

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:11:00 +0100

I haven’t got much to say explicitly about the show’s content. You’ve heard all about it on twitter: It’s OK/gets better after episode four/GOB’s episodes are best! etc But the form of the show is something that seems quite interesting to me after my first watch, so I’m just gonna share some notes. I scribbled most of this down on post-its or blurted it out in tweets while watching it straight from launch after 3 hours sleep, so they’re provisional to the say the least but maybe interesting.

It’s pretty much spoiler-free talk about how the show works rather than what it is, but I’ll stick it after the jump for slowcoaches.

The character-per-episode setup was sold as a way to show what everyone got up to after the Bluth’s went their separate ways (‘it’s a prologue not a season!’) but, as the show seems to concede itself in one typically meta joke (photos on chairs), it’s probably dictated by the inability to get all of the cast back on set at the same time.

That set-up also means there’s not much in the way of subplots in the episodes. Instead there are whole episodes that feel like ‘A’ plots and ones that feel more ‘B’ plot-y, where not much substantial seems to happen. To even call some of the earlier stuff ‘episodes’ is a bit generous, because it seems to be working on a different notion of what made-for-Netflix sitcoms can do on Netflix-type services - be bigger, demand your attention over hours, be cinematic, novelistic - that isn’t always successful. To make an analogy, sometimes the episodes - first time around at least - feel more like seperate remix stems: some are functional, unremarkable time-keeping exposition (especially early on); some are curious little bits of ornamentation; a few are really awesome, virtuoso guitar solos that bring the laughs but don’t really further the plot.

Then again, it might just be a mess

But as you might guess from that ‘stems’ analogy, it’s interesting! Hurtwitz has done a good job with the restrictions of a busy cast, and has probably created a season that’s the densest and ‘cleverest’ (not necessarily a good thing) the show’s ever been. The magic happens when those episode-long A and B plots intersect, which they do a lot - just not in a way that’s immediately apparent. Told plainly, chronologically, the story is quite short, and so to get 8-ish hours out of it, the writer’s have gone deep rather than long. It’s ‘Rashomon on steroids’ as Mike Hale put it over at the NYT. We see a lot of the same scenes from multiple perspectives. AD has done this before, rewarded rewatching it, but mostly for inessential sight gags and ironic zings. Here it feels more vital, bigger; because of the way the story cycles back on itself, incrementally adding detail, there are IMDB-trivia style jokes that can only be caught second time around, not just ones that are more likely to be noticed that way.

Denser still, the episodes interlock in an oblique way that shows the scars (or innovations!) of being written and filmed with that original intention of it making sense (maybe different senses) in whatever order you chose to watch it, as evidenced by Hurwitz’s 11th hour, post-edit tweet abandoning that idea.

From twitter there’s a general impression that the show takes a while to find ‘its rhythm’ but it’s probably truer to say it takes a while to build enough connections or throw down enough music stems to start sounding like an actual music rather than *ahem* a woodblock tapping out the time all wrong. The show doesn’t build momentum in the typical sense, but tries to work on a gradual overload of information, a slow-burn making clear. I’d be surprised if the older fans who’re savoring it ‘like TV’ found it as impressive.

It’s not really clear if that works yet. But it definitely seems ambitious in a way that’s a few years ahead of the medium its being shown on in the same way the original seasons were too smart for TV. A kind of hypertext comedy might not be just around the corner, but the season often feels like a semi-linear Choose Your Own Adventure book (it really feels like there should be a menu screen allowing you to choose between GOB’s Story, Tobias’ Story etc), a really big magic eye picture (or maybe a Where’s Wally puzzle), or the Netflix equivalent of a Monkey Island style point-and-click adventure.

Again, it might just be a mess.

***

There’s a thinkpiece somewhere in comparing this to Random Access Memories (that title alone could be the subtitle of this series).Both are singular, initially underwhelming but undeniably ambitious works made by artists very aware of their previous influence; Daft Punk swerve away from the Skrillex fandom of their earlier work; while AD doubles right down on the dorm-room, Python-y fandom it inspires, sometimes feeling a like a fanfic or fan video of itself (there’s a familiar joke later on, about Tobias’s clip-reel, which seems to go on forever - it’s funny, but seems to all but say ‘you like this?’ by the time it finishes). It even feels likely that AD, or at least its fans, will attempt something similar to DP’s remix project over the summer. Inception-style plot maps will be made; less likely, but conceivable, ‘remixes’ that narrow in on one character’s journey, tell the story chronologically, might be snuck out on dailymotion.

The big difference: AD S4 is the kind of messy, bloated, cast-off thing enabled by the internet (not necessarily a bad thing! …he says writing a 1000+ word snap take on form of a comedy sitcom 36 hours after it came out), where RAM is a distinctly pre-digital product that, for its all its similar length and ambition, keeps a lot on the studio cutting floor. Halfway through watching AD it I compared it to an ambitious concept album hindered by the oversight of being made up of very bad songs, but it’s probably more like a 1GB rar file of fun curios dumped on megaupload.

Photo

Sun, 26 May 2013 07:22:36 +0100

"So if Eliot is imperialist and Sainte-Beuve is aristocratic, we need some idea of what makes a..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 02:20:18 +0100

“

So if Eliot is imperialist and Sainte-Beuve is aristocratic, we need some idea of what makes a classic in a democracy. For that, we could do worse than to turn to Sainte-Beuve’s contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, who has always seemed to have the new world’s number. In “Democracy in America,” de Tocqueville observed that Americans esteemed the arts and sciences more for their practical applications than for their abstract value—hence the popularity of newspapers, religious treatises, and self-help books. Reading itself was not done for the purposes of something as perversely theoretical as enlarging one’s soul; it needed to have some tangible function in the here and now: “Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature; but they are excited in reality only by a survey of themselves.”

A look through the Classics section of bookstores—in America or any of the Western democracies—bears out de Tocqueville’s instincts. The offerings are wide-ranging, tilting toward diversity and inclusion. But, more to the point, artistic brilliance is no longer the most important determining factor. What makes a classic today is cultural significance. Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important.

In other words, the current criteria for classics are more a matter of sociology than of aesthetics. That’s why prose-toilers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are securely fixed in the canon while masters such as Frank O’Connor and Eudora Welty could easily be left out. “1984” and “Brave New World” are embedded in the weave of language and history, but what does Welty have going for her apart from stylistic perfection? Henry Miller survives—and will continue to survive—because the country once found him shocking enough to censor. (Likewise, D. H. Lawrence might very well be a footnote if not for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) There’s better prose in the average issue of Consumer Reports than in most Upton Sinclair novels, but “The Jungle” triggered actual legislative reform and will therefore last as long as the United States does.

”

- Canon Fodder: Denouncing The Classics — The New Yorker

"The chorus, which even casual fans may recognize because it is played continually on broadcasts of..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 01:24:41 +0100

“

The chorus, which even casual fans may recognize because it is played continually on broadcasts of every Champions League game, is unforgettable: “The champions!” the choir sings, as if paying homage to some sort of heavenly body wearing shinguards.

There was a moment or two, however, in which “the champions” could have been something else. Britten said that other possibilities included “the greatest,” “the finest,” “the most exciting” and, in what he conceded was probably a stretch, “the most significant.”

“In retrospect, some of those would have been a disaster,” he said.

”

- European Soccer’s Biggest Star May Be a Song — NYT

Marcuse

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:25:25 +0100

Marcuse

thirteen hundred words on the drag scene in the playstation game 'final fantasy vii', supplementary to the immediately precedent post, 'this post consists of approximately one thousand words on the drag scene in the playstation video game ‘final fantasy vii ‘'

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:38:09 +0100

timocraticyouth:

So in a sense FFVII is totally about drag. (In a thousand more relevant senses FFVII is about anything but. I know this. Bear with me.) The game presents Cloud as this sort of self-complete icon of masculine potential (via violence) that’s unfortunately common in the protagonist role in videogame design, in a way that’s only getting worse, still: look at the lead from Devil May Cry, or, worse, God of War. The game then goes out of its way for hours to reveal Cloud as manufacturing this role and this image as a conscious performance; and it starts setting up the narrative moves it will later use to do so in this flashback sequence where the player’s agency as motivator of the narrative is most totally disregarded. It’s surprisingly apt - like, fascinatingly fucking thematically coherent - that before this happens we set ourselves up by granting the player real agency in a scene whose specific idiom is drag: the scene seems peculiarly conscious of how deeply gender performance is embedded in the sort of aesthetics that are going to make the twelve-year-olds of 1997 find it horrendously cool.

"The few thousand titles offer a strange mix of books ranging from the pulpy – Danielle..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 21:47:27 +0100

“The few thousand titles offer a strange mix of books ranging from the pulpy – Danielle Steele’s The Kiss (in Arabic) – to the classic – six copies of David Copperfield – to the canonical – seven copies of Homer’s Odyssey. The Steele book looks pretty well-thumbed but it’s doubtful if anyone has borrowed Homer to pass the time, although some detainees have been there 11 years – longer than it took Odysseus to return to Ithaca via a perilous journey that included more than a spot of waterboarding at the hands of Poseidon.”

- A glimpse into Guantánamo Bay’s library — Guardian

Nina Martyris striking just the right tone in a piece that could’ve easily ended up reading as an amoral bit of fluff about an extrajudicial detention centre.

The tumblr that it’s about is quite an interesting scroll, though. Which probably says something about Tumblr image blogs being a form particularly good at being amoral.

"“I was depressed, you know? In real life. Maybe not online, so much. I loved online. It’s probably..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:55:33 +0100

“

“I was depressed, you know? In real life. Maybe not online, so much. I loved online. It’s probably good the site’s not in my life anymore. I wasn’t social as much as I should’ve been. Not that I was some recluse, like, goth kid sitting by the vending machine hiding. I just didn’t want to be there…I hated high school. I would miss a day a week at least.

“Looking back, part of it is I’m a teacher now. I see my students, I see kids like me and I’m like, ‘You should be a little more involved. I know high school sucks. Let me make it not suck for you so much.’ I look at kids who are into school, and I’m like, ‘I should’ve been like that. You guys are happy.’”

Robinson’s regret seems inevitable for a teacher looking back on his own school years. He sees where he could’ve worked harder, been a better student. “I’m [in San Francisco] with all these kids, we’re going to Stanford, we’re going to Berkeley,” he says. “It’s a college trip, and this whole trip is torture to me because I’m like, ‘I’m such an idiot. I’m such a fool for screwing around.’ I still could’ve done the site and everything, but realistically I don’t think I could’ve done that and taken AP classes and stuff. It was my life for several years. I mean big time.”

”

- This oral history of EyesonFF on Kotaku gives me a real blast of nostalgia for my frontier days on the internet. Final Fantasy VII was my To Kill a Mockingbird/The Catcher in the Rye/Animal Farm growing up. I was an introverted kid but not much of a book reader, and my FF fandom really got me into reading, - Edge magazine mostly - thinking about criticism, and generally wanting to be more articulate about stuff.

But then the quote above about wasted potential, a spurned adolescence, is a regret that really rings true, too. I’m not sure it would’ve been possible to binge as self-destructively on books if, in another life, I’d borrowed Lord of the Flies from my local library instead of renting FF7 from the video rental stop around the corner.

"Influential among Thatcher’s intellectual outriders was the geographer Alice Coleman, who, in..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:33:00 +0100

“Influential among Thatcher’s intellectual outriders was the geographer Alice Coleman, who, in her book Utopia on Trial, presented a stark vision where “security” was all, with architecture a matter of preventing crime via design choices. Dismissing the terrace, the tower, the tenement, the courtyard or the apartment building as “utopian” crime-traps, Coleman favoured one solution – the semi or detached house with a very big garden or driveway in front. The market was ready to provide it, especially in the form of Barratt Homes, notorious for their poor space, but insular and traditionalist enough to reassure worried buyers as the gap between rich and poor widened. Thatcher famously bought a detached Barratt Home in 1985, in a gated community in Dulwich, to great fanfare, as if to assure suburban Britain that she too shared their taste for brick cladding and cul de sacs. However, she never actually lived in it, and cashed in the equity two years later. Under Thatcher’s watch, the quality of cities, of their design and the lives lived within them became more irrelevant than ever. Buildings, especially houses, were now investments, not pieces of a shared and coherent urban landscape. We all live in the Margaret Thatcher infirmary.”

- How Margaret Thatcher bulldozed over Britain’s urban landscape | Owen Hatherley

Read this earlier and went off on a tangent on twitter about Pulp’s fondness for the kind of ‘“utopian” crime-traps’ the Thatcher era mostly did away with. Then found out that, perfectly, Damon Albarn grew up in the antithesis: “one of those burgeoning Thatcher experiments where they were building loads of small estates” - most probably a flimsy Barratt home as derided above (for American readers: a Barratt house) - and it all made sense.

Pulp’s kinky working-class radicalism as the product of the utopian tower block and the post-war social democratic state; Damon Albarn’s put-on Estuary English and Blur’s unconvincing genre tourism as the product of the mock Tudor Barratt house and an atomized ‘all that is solid melts to air’ Thatcherism. Discuss.

"It must’ve given Mrs Brown some time to wonder. Through her soft tears, as she deleted her..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:39:00 +0100

“It must’ve given Mrs Brown some time to wonder. Through her soft tears, as she deleted her daughter’s minor slurs and sexual innuendoes, a parent must have time to really think about what it is they’ve brought into this world. ‘Is this my own flesh?’ she probably wondered. ‘Where did we go so wrong that I am spending my Saturday night individually deleting some 3,834 social messages about the life of a daughter I once cradled in my arms, a tiny fleshy pot of absolute need, that I laid mouth-agape to my bosom, and now has written – what’s that one say? “OMG your fucking kidding me the bus driver looks like a rapist lol”?’”

- How Paris Brown’s ‘Pikey’ Tweets Expose The Modern British Generation Gap I Vice

Not majorly insightful - it’s Vice! - but a funny take on a very strange story about a 17-year-old police ‘youth commissioner’ who was going to be on 15 grand a year (!!??) for helping ‘liaise’ between the police and the ‘youth community’. That is until she was inevitably found to have tweeted a lot of racist and homophobic stuff because young people are stupid.

You might think that the story is tragic, because the police should have vetted her better, and should’ve never let it come to her being reduced to tears whilst delivering a sorry-not-sorry apology to a grizzled political hack on national TV, but there’s something completely hilarious about the role itself; the fact she applied for it; and that things like media training, image consultancy and a willing subject can produce the spectacle of a 17-year-old talking about - in the brief window before some slightly older teenage intern at the Daily Mail tasked with DOXXING her landed the big scoop - how she wants the relationship between young people and the police ‘back that they used to have,’ because clearly a 17-year-old girl would be the sort of person to nostalgically pine for the halcyon olden days ‘where you used to say hello to your local bobby or PSCO’.

"I sent it to Jerry Lewis. Jerry Lewis’s system of approval is a fax machine in his office. You fax..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:29:00 +0100

“I sent it to Jerry Lewis. Jerry Lewis’s system of approval is a fax machine in his office. You fax it to him and you wait to hear from him. We got a phone call from his personal secretary saying, “Jerry is not interested at this time.” We reached out to Woody Allen, who said, “I can’t contribute to this right now.” I got a really nice email from Al Pacino. Martin Scorsese said, [Scorsese voice] “Louie’s terrific, I enjoy the program, I can’t be any part of this right now.” What I learned is that the level I’m at now, I get polite nos. It used to just be nothing but silence.”

- Louis C.K. and the Ballad of Jack Dall I NYT

Losing it imagining Woody Allen as Dall, with a stopwatch and a revolver in his drawer.

In the unlikely scenario it hasn’t popped up on your dashboard a dozen times already, the full interview’s here: The Joke’s on Louis C.K.

"Viking isn’t the first company to have a strategic alignment blow up in its face. BMW once sponsored..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 05:50:55 +0100

“Viking isn’t the first company to have a strategic alignment blow up in its face. BMW once sponsored a high-pressure cold front, naming it Cooper in order to promote its Mini Cooper Roadster. Cooper then went on to kill more than 100 people. “Of course we are sorry. It was not intentional, you cannot tell in advance what a weather system will do,” said a company spokesman.”

- How Broadchurch burned its boats with advertisers I Guardian