What kind of monster empathises with animals? Is it because they’ve got the same colour blood as us? In fact, there’s people out there who have more sympathy for animals than they do people from different cultures.

Humans are stupid and this is proven by the need for them to have animals as pets.

Think about it. There’s people in this awful world that like nothing more than staring at silent fish in a tank. There’s people out there who like to dress their dogs up like little humans. There’s even people who think that cats are anything other than selfish, greedy snobs who only cohabit with humans to get an easy feed.

If aliens came to Earth, they’d almost certainly ask about our need to live with other species and not eat them. We spend years fattening these creatures up and then, somehow, we end up letting them lick us in our mouths and sleep on our beds while we leave the radio on for them so they don’t feel lonely while we’re at work.

Like animals have the clout to feel ‘loneliness’. The only thing they’re sufficiently able to do is produce waste-products from all that food we’ve given them.

And for what? A short life span which sees them absolutely dying before we do, leaving us to be thoroughly upset about something that never showed true kindness to us. It was an imagined kindness. We put human emotions on them because we’ve become unable to deal with our own. We’re too filled with fear to mix with other communities or people of different ages, divided by social spheres and musical tastes, and so, we transpose what we would like to see in people onto them.

This is how an actual conversation with your cat goes like:

Owner: Oh, hello Snookins! I’ve had an awful day. *puts plethora of bags down*

Snookins: FEED ME

Owner: Oooh! You are adorable! Have you missed me?

Snookins: FEED ME.

Owner: Just a second Snookins! Just let me pour myself a glass of wine.

Snookins: FEED ME. I HAVE URINATED BEHIND THE TELEVISION.

Owner: Aw, you! You’re the only person I need! You understand me don’t you? Oh Snookins, I don’t know what I’d do without you.

Snookins: FEED ME OR I’M GOING TO THAT OLD LADY’S HOUSE DOWN THE ROAD WHO BUYS CAT FOOD EVEN THOUGH SHE DOESN’T HAVE A CAT.

Owner: Oh, you are the most handsome cat in the whole world Snookins! Don’t you want letting out?

Snookins: I’M SCRATCHING AT THE DOOR BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT FEEDING ME FAST ENOUGH SO I’M GOING TO THE OLD LADY DOWN THE ROAD. THEN I’LL KILL SOMETHING AND BRING IT IN THE HOUSE. THEN I’LL DEMAND MORE FOOD. I AM INCAPABLE OF THIS THING YOU CALL LOVE.

Owner: Go on. Out you go Snookins. I’m not alone as long as I’ve got you.

Snookins: I HATE YOU BECAUSE YOU MADE SOMEONE CUT OUT MY REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS. I’LL WANT MORE FOOD LATER. I’LL STICK MY BUMHOLE IN YOUR FACE LATER.

Owner: I love you Snookins.

Snookins: I BARELY KNOW YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE A DIFFERENT SPECIES.

And that’s the truth of the matter. With dogs, they simply want feeding constantly. They won’t even show behaviour what looks like malice, unless you count the mindless violent they perform on postmen around the world.

It’s this inherent failing and loneliness in humans that has been our downfall. While animals get on with surviving, we’ve developed empathy which, in turns, enables the heartless to exploit us all one-by-one until all we have left is passive-aggressive status updates on various social networking sites.

And pets are entirely to blame.

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There has been the vague, wet, typical outpouring of mild-ire surrounding an indie band allowing one of their songs to be used in advertising. It’s ‘selling-out’ apparently. And god knows, that’s the worst thing an indie band can be accused of, right?

And of course, there’s a terribly saccharine John Lewis advertisement that’s doing the Christmas rounds this year which features a cover version of The Smiths’ ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’.

Johnny Marr is at pains to point out that the song featuring in a commercial doesn’t sully the memory of the song at all and The Smiths haven’t sold out, actually. And you know something, he’s right to say that it doesn’t sully the memory of the band.

Marr took to twitter to answer disappointed Smiths fans (is there any other kind of Smiths fan?) and claimed that the memory of the group hadn’t been sullied at all.

He said:

Writing ‘Please Please…’ one Friday in ’84 is one of the best memories of my life. This ad has not sullied that memory one bit.

He went on to criticise the fans who had been…

“bitching and moaning whilst, wait for it, watching X Factor”

And Marr is absolutely correct in his assertion that the use of a cover of a Smiths song in a television advert doesn’t sully the memory of the band because, the point here is that we’re dealing with a band so gaspingly overrated, so mediocre from top-to-bottom that any use of their song doesn’t harm their legacy, rather, brings the fine reputation of John Lewis down.

That’s right. Lovely John Lewis who sell all those nice things are now associated with dismal, vacant 6th form poetry shot through faux-kitchen sinkery and a collection of faces so long that you could trip over their chins.

Poor ol’ John Lewis. Being lumped in with those talentless berks.

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Winners. Who needs ‘em? Winners are the biggest pains in the rump, ever. They strut around with their winning medals, their certificates of achievement, their degrees, their neat handwriting and, most importantly, a complete absence on personality.

See, if you’re the kind of person who devotes themselves to winning and excellence, then chances are, you’ve no friends.

That’s because everyone ultimately loves a loser. That’s because there’s more losers than there are winners. And yet, such importance is put on coming first, that the glorious last-placer has to define themselves by other things. Brilliant things.

Think about it. The jock that wins the trophy is celebrated in that last-minute cup final goal, that last ditch field goal, that desperate, lunging interception. They make the annals of some book of statistic and then, while all the losers in the bleachers leave the sporting arena to get drunk, that field of people who consistently won throughout their lives dust themselves off and start all over again.

That’s because the quest to win never stops.

However, the loser who is lousy at sports and doesn’t get the girl or boy, channels their loserdom into something else. Something marvellous. Just think about this for a second – the vast majority of great art created was about some loser not getting any action.

All the greatest music ever made was explicitly about people talking about their lusts and desires. That’s because they sucked. The sucked so bad that they couldn’t get the eye of the person they wanted. Those that could certainly didn’t have time to be creating art about it. They haven’t got time to be bored enough to create or haven’t got the wherewithal to take stock of that tumultuous, gut-wrenching feeling because they’re fending off suitors with a big stick.

And even when losers do find love, they spend their time mawkishly telling everyone about it because they can’t believe their luck!

That means, every great ballad, every great tale of love-lost, every great story of a yearning heart, was written by a miserable loser. A glorious, wonderful runner-up.

So forget the notion that you should chase first-place all the time. You shouldn’t. Leave that for the dullards with their gym-memberships and salaries.

A pessimist is never disappointed and no medal ever articulated the heart. Embrace your inner-loser.

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Ladies. When you’re feeling frisky, should the mood take you, you can impress the object of your affections by donning your nicest underwear. It even has a special, sexy sounding name – lingerie.

There’s fancy bras, stockings, corsets, see-through nighties, peep-hole this, assless-that… it’s a cavalcade of things designed to let people know you’re in the mood and feel wonderful.

And what do men have? Underpants and socks.

See, if a man wants to let someone know he’s in the mood, they have few options. Sadly, everyone of these options is dreadful and embarrassing.

Imagine the lady, seductively draped over something, cooing at her betrothed in her finest garments, looking like she’s ready to pounce.

Now, imagine a man, stood in a freezing cold hallway wearing nothing but his undercrackers, winking at you. It’s hardly the same is it? Even if you take the briefs away from him, he still looks pathetic. Or worse, slightly predatory.

And this is why the world of wooing is such a treacherous place to be for the gentleman. Because, apart from the insultingly obvious, he has no way of letting anyone know he’s in the mood, he has to resort to asking.

That’s right. Asking. Or, translated into English, begging.

While women have the monopoly on underwear, men simply glare at their gruds like they’re either practical or, worse still, supposed to be funny. The only men who look good in their underpants are airbrushed sportsmen, shot in black and white for various stupid companies.

Effectively, underpants are there solely to keep things in the correct place. And even then, then don’t do that job very well. They are to genitals what a hammock is to graceful snoozing. While the premise is all well and good, there’s an equal chance that you could end up in a twist, looking ungainly and squashed.

So going commando is the answer? No likely. On a hot day, all you’ll get is a situation when you find your bits and pieces spread so wide that it looks like a translucent bat’s wing has been put into a Dyson airblade.

We don’t stand a chance. So we remain, stood there with that terrible, hopeful look on our faces in our ugly, ugly underpants hiding the ugliest bit of anatomical design, ever.

Brilliant.

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Small people are just weird aren’t they? What happened to them in the womb to make them so abjectly tiny? Could they simply not be bothered to ingest the nutrients their mother gave them?

Randy Newman had it right when he sang: “Short people got no reason to live”, pointing out their “tiny little teeth” and their penchant for wearing “platform shoes on their nasty little feet.”

You have to “pick ‘em up just to say hello”. So what’s the point of them?

The thing that people don’t like about the scariest of insects – like spiders – is that they’re relatively small, but can move at a fair lick. Anything that is tiny and fast is automatically terrifying. Like little humans.

Of course, we’re not talking about people with dwarfism here. Those people are great. We’re talking about the terror of people who aren’t tall. It’s plain sinister to be short AND in proportion. It’s like someone got a proper human and simply scaled them down.

In Les Miserables, there’s a song about little chaps and chapesses which sings “A worm can roll a stone, a bee can sting a bear, a fly can fly around versailles ‘cos flies don’t care, a sparrow in a hut, can make a happy home, a flea can bite the bottom of the pope in Rome.”

See? Small people are a terror. They go around biting the clergy on the backside and harming bears. What kind of lunatic passes their time like that?

At least tall people spend most of their time hitting their heads on doorframes and getting things from shelves for small people who have, in hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, been too lazy to develop a system of doing things a lanky swine can do.

And some people are so little that they take great glee in the fact that they can buy shoes and trainers cheaply, because they have such tiny little feet.

People accept this as a boon, without ever thinking ‘WAIT! That human is walking around, without a care in the world, disguised as a child!”

Just imagine how terrifying they’d be if they were full sized.

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Science is a confusing beast. In the pro-column, it gave us the internet, space travel and video games… but in the con-column, it gave us bombs, animal-testing and sentient Glade air-fresheners.

Sadly for science, for every likeable kook like Einstein, there’s a sanctimonious swine or a million tripping over themselves to bray like sarcastic mules about a whole host of topics.

The worst thing to talk to science-nuts about is God. Yeah, the supposed creator. Science will stand by its Large Hadron Collider, make absolutely no ‘Large Hard-On Collider’ jokes and moo about God not existing.

While it may be funny watching Robert Winston getting drunk in the name of science on television shows, there’s no hiding from the feeling that science is charging into a pious area, recently vacated by The Church.

Religion, thanks to a number of terrorist attacks and sexual abuse cases, has never been so under the cosh. It’s only purpose at the moment is to stay quiet and hope that all those badly behaved lunatics go away. Pray, pray, pray that they stop or that God (whatever it is) serves up some kind of holy justice.

Of course, this makes the science believers laugh like drains! Praying? You may as well try and kick a tide into reverse!

And yes, it’s pretty obvious that God doesn’t exist in any form. The very idea of It is very, very silly indeed… however, we’re humans and therefore prone to silly superstition.

While there’s a lot of tolerant science-dwellers who are happy to let religious people be, there’s an equal number of religious folk who do little more than worry, pray and occasional charity work in the name of their chosen deity.

However, the loudest hooters are all at loggerheads, getting nowhere and trying to accuse the other one of causing the most misery.

And while God provides a certain relief in times of trouble for certain people, so too does the knowledge that science can ease your migraine. It’s all much of a muchness and, if science isn’t careful, it’ll start losing the battle of PR, leaving Anglican churches and Buddhists to step forward with their bendy spines, offering some peace and quiet from all these gargling claptraps that pace around, either side.

Currently, Richard Dawkins has created a monster in loudmouth supporters, which in turn, could well turn rather feeble believers into raving evangelicals.

And where would that leave us?

The Sanctimonious Fact Seekers versus the Westboro Baptist Church. And who honestly wants that?

In the meantime, while frogs are dissected and jihads are declared, we advise you play some computer games and listen to some gospel records by Mahalia Jackson.

Okay?

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Who goes on dates? What’s the point of them at all? Dates are just willingly putting yourself before a one-person jury, being prodded and poked at while you pull at your collar, sweat profusely and babble on inanely with your cripplingly awful anecdotes.

The fact is, if someone agrees to see you again after the way you act on a first date, then you know for certain that they’re an idiot.

Only a complete simpleton could fall for you while you thrash around in an unyielding and stressful situation. It’s less an exercise in love, and more akin to seeing what you’d be like if you were taken hostage.

Think about it. Dates are hideous experiences. It underlines that you are a complete social outcast, unable to function properly on a normal evening out. If you were a rational, confident person, you’d woo them while two groups of people randomly bumped into each other on a night out.

You’d make them laugh, smile and impress them with your social skills without the worry of having no escape. They might say “I’d like to see you again”, and so you agree. It’s a fool’s errand to say “maybe we should go on a date.”

If you organise another night out, where there’s distractions and fun – rather than glaring at someone from across a table while you nervously spill cocktails into your lap, or indeed, fail to notice the entire spinach leaf stuck between your teeth – the whole thing can roll by without the pressure that the solitary confinement of a date brings.

Dates are like being trapped in a lift.

Yet, America has bestowed this awful construct on the rest of the world. Right now, there’ll be shrieking nincompoops worrying about what they’re going to wear on a date tonight. Fraught with worry, they’ll try on their entire wardrobe and pretend they smoke less, drink less and eat less while conjuring up the vaguely exciting elements of their life, ready to be thrown into a stilted conversation. Effectively, it’s a job interview where sex looms large. At least in the adult entertainment industry, it’s a given that you’ll have to drop your scads – on a date, there’s a whole awkward dance routine revolving around it, leaving any sane person just giving up entirely and sloping off into the shadows, alone, wondering why they ever bothered in the first place.

Then, of course, there’s the rigmarole of trying to work out how long you should leave it before you get in touch again. Do you look keen? Do you play it cool? Inevitably, you do neither and end up depressed and eating bread straight from the packet, crying into your pyjama bottoms while watching The X Factor, convinced that you’ll be forever alone.

At least there’s speed dating, right? At least you can get the same disappointing result in a third of the time. This mechanical process to love making is a godsend for the masochist. They can sit at a table and be rejected by a year’s worth of people in one felled swoop before trudging off toward solitary alcoholism.

Dating, indeed, is an odious pastime designed for those outrageously vapid individuals who like to conduct their love like farmers indulging in animal husbandry. They parade their wares in bars and restaurants everywhere, happy that they’ve got out of the house… secure in the knowledge that they’re being ‘proactive’ about their life.

And the people who successfully date deserve their tedious, boring, functional relationships where they talk about their work and the stupid soups they’ve made from scratch.

Leave these people to it because, while they slide into an inevitable funk brought on by their absence of personality, they will feign happiness by having children and thereby ruining their lives, leaving singletons to stop worrying about the notion of a date, to simply sit in the pubs of the world, mockingly laughing at those two in the corner, on their stupid date, willing themselves into a world of hopeless holidays, car insurance premiums, probiotic drinks and joyless sex.

That’s dating for you. You’re better being stood-up.

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Language. What a stupid thing for humans to design. Sure, it can be beautiful and breathtakingly powerful… but let us be honest here: for the most part, it feels misused, redundant, stupid and utterly misunderstood.

Take one look at absolutely any social networking site and you’ll see that people just don’t give two hoots about language, where punctuation has been replaced with pointless laughter. Seriously. Have you noticed?

It started with LOL and currently resides in an awkward ‘ahah‘.

For some irritating reason, people are becoming unable to close a sentence with a fullstop. Like a living hashtag, people need to eschew the wondrous variety of words to convey their feelings by simply sticking a laugh on the end of a sentiment to show that they’re not being wholly serious.

“God I hate work ahah”

If you walked into a room and said that, followed by either uproarious or nervous laughter, you’d be rightly booed at and chased out of town under the threat of being beaten with a rubber hose. What that sentence is actually saying is rather clunky (much like this whole article, obviously): ‘God, I hate work… well… I don’t really hate it, but I need to give it some context. Basically, I’m just letting you know, with a laugh, that I have had a lousy day. It isn’t really that funny, granted, but I’m hoping that you don’t find me immensely irritating when I keep mentioning things that are incredibly boring to everyone but me. In fact, I’m boring myself now. Ahaha. Oh God. I hate myself.‘

While ‘ahah’ is a wonderfully succinct way of pointing out all of that awkwardness, it doesn’t make it a good use of language. A better use of it would be to shut up and think of something more interesting to say.

And ‘ahah’ (not to be confused with ‘haha’ which denotes being amused at someone or something) is the cousin of LOL, which is fast becoming the way to end absolutely every sentence ever.

Hipsters use it ironically (and, annoying, have begun to say it out loud, usually when something mildly depressing wanders by their worthless lives) and many use it for… well… everything, sometimes stretching it out to LOOL to portray actual amusement.

Imagine a world where a stand-up comedian is met with an audience actively replacing their laughter with a chorus of literal LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLing. Terrifying.

It goes without saying that language is a living thing, constantly adapting and in flux. Words are added to the lexicon all the time. The English language is especially good at forming and adapting new words, unlike our German cousins who simply stick a load of existing words together to make very, very long compounds like rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or ‘beef label regulators’ if you prefer.

And, despite the protestations, it’s this stupid, wilful approach to language that we humans have that makes it so wonderful and rich. While the Queen’s English promotes itself as the truest form of our baffling tongue, the common vernacular is the real word on the street. It is something that has obsessed us for years.

In 1959, the New York Times’ Carl Sandburg said:

“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.”

So while we complain about the LOLs and the ‘ahah’ which has crept into our communications, instead of simply bemoaning it, we should invent new ways of complaining and protesting.

In short: STFU.

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People who exercise are sickening. People who have gym memberships should be flogged in public. We’d do it but we’d get a thousand stitches trying to catch them and, when we finally did, we’d be too tired to raise our hand to successfully thrash them. Good thing some lazy oaf invented guns.

Exercisers spend so much time running on the spot to attain so body ideal (that they’ll never, ever attain), that they miss the world around them. They run and run, without ever moving forward. Sure, they’ll develop abs… but that is always overshadowed by their pious attitude to the lovely, nourish tubby gut.

And yet, gym bunnies feel like they are maximising their potential. They’re not. They’re performing seals for men in vomit inducing lycra who have hoodwinked a world that we indeed, need a building where aerobics is the name used to cover up what is ostensibly yuppie bulimia.

Man is capable of so much more than mere exercise. Even the first man on the surface of the moon agrees. Neil Armstrong, one of the greatest human beings who ever lived, in an interview, said of exercise:

“I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I’m damned if I’m going to use up mine running up and down a street.”

Neil Armstrong! There’s a man who has aimlessly plodded around on two completely separate orbit spheres. Not like you. You’ve just run on the spot, trying not to puke and idiotically justifying that little treat you’ll allow yourself when you get home.

All the while, the good folk have caught the bus home, missed out the notion of a stupid gym, tucked into enough cream filled tasties to fell a herd of elephants, opened a bottle of booze, watched 2 films, wriggled their toes in relaxation, written a terrible joke on twitter, been to the pub and back, swallowed a battered sausage, shared a fine cigar, laughed, loved, brawled and lived, lived, LIVED… while Gym Person is still stinking up the place with B.O. and self-worth.

Yet, this projected self-worth is only masking a gigantic self-loathing.

The gym-goer has proscribed to a culture of disgust. In an effort to maintain this body of yours, which will absolutely fail you one day, you spew your energy to attain some imagined ecstasy of absolute fatigue. You are becoming mechanical. A thing designed to occupy a space with grunts and a total thrill of thwarting death just that little bit longer, ’til you realise that, you’ll be down the hospital dying of absolutely nothing, having outlived those who gorged and indulged themselves in whiskey and cake.

And all the while, the bone idle woos your partner with chips while you row your tiny boat on the floor of some fitness factory, filling your ugly jogging bottoms with sweat, unaware that those who have truly lived may repulse you, but they’ve been learning how to fulfil someone’s needs, as opposed to merely looking good with no shirt on. You were too busy working on a specific definition required for your glutes, staring at them in the mirror, to even notice that life was happening around you and your wretched equipment.

You can’t make love to a dumbbell.

Six packs may stimulate the eye on the cover of a glossy magazine, but everyone knows that there’s more fun to be had with a variety pack.

Gyms. Who needs ‘em?

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Justin Bieber is really making it too easy to make jokes about him at this point. With a preternaturally smooth face that screams androgyny as much as it does ‘Please slap me,’ he’s released everything from nail polish to a women’s scent. If, by ‘women,’ he meant the people who paid for their tickets to see his movie entirely in 10 pence pieces.

The only thing slightly more preposterous than the release of quite so many concurrent women’s products is that book and movie deal – with so many trips to rehab and love children with other people’s wives under his belt, heck, he’s got one story to tell.

Except, oh. None of that ever happened. His entire story is based on closet lesbianism and a stupid shiny face. Nothing more.

With the life experience of a family pet behind him, Justin is beginning an empire of unrelated products aimed solely at extracting tooth fairy money from pre-pubescent girl fans. His latest product is named after the ‘secret’ file of JPEGs on every Belieber’s iPhone, ‘Someday.’ As in, someday, he’s going to need that restraining order.

Justin claims to have created the scent so he’d have an excuse for sniffing girls’ necks. We’re not even kidding.

He told Ryan Seacrest on Monday:

I want to be smelling the girl’s neck. I want to tell the girls what I like and what I think is… attractive to me. So I wanted to make a fragrance that I think will be appealing and make me want to chase the girl that I smell. It smells really good, not too strong; it’s like a nice, spring, light smell.’

Yes, he really said that. And, no, the authorities have not been called.

Because his scent isn’t creepy enough in name and concept, it’s got an equally creepy advert to accompany it. In it, Justin’s supposed to be an asexual Peter Pan type who sexually harasses some model who’s spraying the product – the vague, subliminal context… buying his crap guarantees he’ll sleep with you.

Watch the advert below. You can do that and dial 999 at the same time, surely?

This was a guest post by Amy Grindhouse, so three stinkin’ cheers for that.

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Remember those Evian babies? They skated, danced and clung onto a wire mesh fence like they were performing adults… in nappies? Remember those guys? Well, they’re back – kinda – with a new dance routine, only this time, with adult heads.

Okay, that might sound a bit terrifying, but this isn’t some kind of Fly-style experiment gone wrong.

Rather, the babies are appearing in stop-frame animation and are looking for co-stars. That means you could appear with some gyrating toddlers. That’s right! All your dreams will come true!

A whole two years have been and gone since we last saw the roller babies and, in that time, it broke all kinds of records for being the most viewed ad online. Presumably, Evian are hoping for something similar with their new Live Young campaign.

And you, dear consumer, have a chance to become a part of the campaign.

You can create your own version of the video over at LetsBabyDance.evian.com. And people have already had a go (and half the time, don’t understand the whole ‘match your body up to that of the prancing toddler body’ thing, but that doesn’t matter as its supposed to be fun, right?). The whole idea is to make the longest music video ever, all soundtracked by ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ by Tom Tom Club, remixed by DJ Mehdi with Uffie.

Visit Facebook.com/evian for updates and stuff.

And all these prancing children got us thinking. Who are the best child performers like, ever, ever, ever? There’s a whole bunch of them knocking around at the moment and there’s been some fine ones from the past. And so, while these choices aren’t strictly babies, they may as well be.

Let us peek at some of the best child singers who ever graced a stage. And no, there’ll be no Justin Bieber.

Little Stevie Wonder

Little Stevie Wonder (or ‘Really Quite Big Stevie Wonder’ as he’s known now) was once a child singing sensation! Yes indeed! Many thought he’d be a flash-in-the-pan novelty act, like a mini Ray Charles (what with his penchant for shades), but how wrong they were!

Frankie Lymon

Frankie, lead singer with The Teenagers, was a young superstar in the ’50s, famous for singing the wonderful ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’ (a question no-one has yet answered sufficiently). Alas, like a lot of young stars, trouble wasn’t far away and by the age of 25, he was found dead in his grandmother’s bathroom from a heroin overdose. Cheery.

Willow Smith

When people heard that Will Smith’s daughter was releasing a single, many expected a big fat pile of dross. However, Willow went and surprised everyone by releasing one of the most monstrous pop-singles of the last decade. There’s a very, very strong chance she’ll never top ‘Whip My Hair’.

Helen Shapiro

At the age of fourteen, Shapiro went to the toppish of the charts with the aptly titled ‘Don’t Treat Me Like A Child’ before getting a brace of number one hits in the shape of ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’. That said, she was still a whole year older than Frankie Lymon who hit the top spot in ’56. The old biddy!

The Dilly Sisters

Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! Sorry, these young scamps from The Banana Splits show will be going round your head all day now.

Michael Jackson

Perhaps the greatest child singer of them all. There’s no point talking about him because you invariably know everything you need to know about the Jackson family. Here he is belting out ‘Sugar Daddy’.

New Edition

Featuring a young Bobby Brown, New Edition were seen as an ’80s equivalent to the Jackson 5. They had a smash with ‘Candy Girl’ and… well… they pretty much vanished after that. Bobby, of course, went on to have a great but short career when he got older. Then, like all good child stars, went nuts.

Jimmy Boyd

Jimmy Boyd was a child-actor and singer, who had his first hit at 13 years old. He performed with country and western troupes before hitting it big with the first version of ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’, as well as performing with George Clooney’s aunt Rosemary.

Lil Bow Wow

The most potty mouthed of our child stars, Lil Bow Wow (presumably plain ol’ ‘Bow Wow’ these days) was a protege of Snoop Dogg and rapped his way into the hearts of youngsters, selling 3million+ of his debut LP. He then grew up and everyone lost interest.

George Dawes

He’s a baby! He’s a baby!

We know, we know – you’re all surprised to see hecklerspray taking such concern with feminine hygiene. But it’s a real issue, you know? In some third world countries women have to use really tiny bundles of hay because the lady corks that come in packs of twelve are just too expensive to buy over and over again.

Imagine then, a crotch clogger that you only have to buy once – because it lasts forever.

In Nigeria, for instance, all a village-woman would have to do is trade an exceptionally shiny squirrel pelt (the national currency, we think) once, and her monthly girl needs could be met for life.

Well this is the dream of all people down at Permo-pons HQ.

That’s why we’ve made a commercial that’s not fake or stupid at all.

Women of the world who can’t afford to keep buying tampons all the time because you’re really poor or lazy – it’s time to loosen your sticky clench!

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If you have even the vaguest trace of a pulse, then there’s a strong chance you fancy Beyonce Knowles. Even if you’re a massive racist, you probably still would. Well, if you think she’s looked hot in the past, brace yourself to become full-on aroused.

Her advert for her new perfume, called ‘Heat’, is sexually charged to the point where you may convince yourself that your computer is about to cum.

As such, the commercial for her personal perfume has been hammered by the folks at the Advertising Standards Authority. But not, you’ll be glad to learn, barred by us who are more than happy to show it to you.

The commercial in question (shown below) is so smokin’ hot that they have deemed that it should not be shown on television before 7.30pm.

The ASA declared that:

“Beyoncé’s body movements and the camera’s prolonged focus on shots of her dress slipping away to partially expose her breasts created a sexually provocative ad that was unsuitable to be seen by young children.”

Christ! That quote sounds like the prose from a mucky book your mum might read on holiday! Anyway, you don’t want to read these sexless words do you? You want to see Beyonce partially exposing her breasts and singing the sexiest version of ‘Fever’, ever.

You’ve already skipped to the video aren’t you? We could say anything we liked here.

Oh well.

Get the tissues ready.

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There are plenty of reasons to hate television advertising. The very fact that six Hoxton-finned bastards in two grand suits get paid six-figure salaries to ‘touch base’ and talk about the best way to con you out of your pocket money should be enough.

Stylistically, the most common reason that you’d hate an ad at the moment is probably that the ‘creatives’ have cynically designed it as a thirty second blast of brain-shredding torture which instantly lobotomises you. The kind of Clockwork Orangesque propaganda that leaves your brain wiped of reason, emotion and love and replaced with a jingle.

Or a catchphrase from a fucking meerkat. You know who we’re talking about: GoCompare, We Buy Any Car (dot com!), Compare The Market, that sort of guff.

At the other end of the irritability scale are the adverts of high pretension. You’ve got Nicole Kidman or Scarlett Johansson or Josh Hartnett… and they’re prancing around at a movie premiere on Jupiter, flashing you their bums and shooting diamonds out of their eyes. In the background there’s some ridiculously fashionable Parisian dub-jazz that you should’ve heard before, but you haven’t because you’re not as cool as Nicole Kidman or Scarlett Johansson or Josh Hartnett. You can’t really relate to any of that lot as you watch from your bedsit in Egham, can you?

But perhaps the biggest offenders in Badvertising are those adverts squarely in the middle. The dull ones. Ads that respect you. They’re set in the real world. They know about the problems YOU face day-to-day. They don’t need fancy talk, music or graphics; they’ve got that c*nt from My Family in them:

Well, at least the BT ads do anyway. A running narrative in an ad can be a nice device, like when Him Off Buffy and Trevor Eve’s Missus flirted over Nescafe Gold Blend during the late eighties. But when it’s That Ugly Twat From Love, Actually and Some Woman From Something Or Other It Might Have Been Spooks Or One Of Them Programmes drearily living their lives, it’s not quite as effective.

So ineffective in fact, that I actively avoid using any BT product or service for fear that I may turn into a massive, blonde, Robert Lindsay-bothering tool who doesn’t take his role as a step-father seriously enough and bases all his major life decisions around his landline fucking telephone bill.

And it’s been going on for five years now! On and on and on… The one where they get together, when the ex husband comes round, the dodgy haircut one, when he goes to Cornwall, nightmares about expensive broadband, watching the telly at his mate’s house, blah blah blah blah blah…

Think about it; which is more insulting – The Crazy Frog or a telecommunications-based soap starring Kris Marshall?

At least The Crazy Frog can look at himself in the mirror.*

* He can’t really, he’s a fictional, animated frog.

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Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t really had to do much since his sitcom finished all those years ago.

Still ranked by many as the ‘funniest thing ever’ and ‘really, really good’ and earning a hell of a lot of money for the people involved in it, Jerry Seinfeld obviously thought he could rest easy.

At least until a movie about a bee came about, which was clearly what he’d been waiting for all his life.

But now it seems the star of the sitcom with the bloke who drops the ‘N’ bomb on stage wants some more money – that has to be the reason, as agreeing to star in adverts for Microsoft isn’t something you do for integrity’s sake.

No, if reports are to be believed, agreeing to star in adverts for Microsoft is something you do for $10 million. The campaign is planned for the Fall (which is still called Autumn over here) and will see Seinfeld starring alongside the big man himself, Bill Gates.

No details have been confirmed beyond that, but we would wager the ads will be along the same vein – or a counter to – the awful, awful, awful Mac vs PC adverts of the other year. You know the ones – ‘oh, I use a computer to be cool, not for actual functionality – I’m a Mac!‘ and the rest of the bullshit they decided to cram down our poor, weak throats.

And lest we forget the British versions of the ads, which ruined the credibility of David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Though, to be fair, they’ve now decided they’re happy to whore themselves out to any company that wants to sell anything ever, providing their stupid voices in exchange for cold, hard cash that they probably use to fund transport to their next recording studio, where they can then record another shitty advert that no one cares about.

Ahem…

Anyway, the hope is that Seiny-F will be able to slam some kind of ‘credibility’ into the ‘brand’ or some other marketing spiel. Speaking to CBS News, Brian Steinberg, television editor for Ad Age, said:

“Seinfeld does represent sort of a challenge. He’s not Dane Cook. He’s got a more sophisticated everyday take on things. He often comes across as a questioner of conventional wisdom but also can be kind of a crank. It’s a fine line to walk when you’re dealing with a younger person.”

A fine line to walk when dealing with a younger person would involve hitting them with a brick if they wanted to see Dane Cook in anything, ever – surely? Well, maybe not a ‘fine line’ – more ‘the right thing to do’.

Expect to see the credibility-destroying adverts aired towards the end of the year, and expect idiots to then believe that Microsoft are cool. These will be the same people that thought Macs were good, and not actually useless machines invented for particularly idiotic children. As we all know they are.

Plus didn’t Seinfeld have a Mac in his apartment in the show? And, in fact, we’ve just found (thanks to commercial-archive.com) out that Jerry Seinfeld once advertised Macs back in the early 90s. Look.

It’s a favourite word of ours, but still: integrity?