Source

Letters of Note

Last question. I have to know, because I love this story and want it to be true. There have been stories about you sneaking up behind people in New York City, covering their eyes with your hands, and saying: Guess who. And when they turn around, they see Bill Murray and hear the words “No one will ever believe you.”

[long pause] I know. I know, I know, I know. I’ve heard about that from a lot of people. A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right. [long beat, and then he breaks into a huge grin] But by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?

The Dutch fleete are in great squadrons everywhere still about Harwich, and were lately at Portsmouth; and the last letters say at Plymouth, and now gone to Dartmouth to destroy our Streights’ fleete lately got in thither; but God knows whether they can do it any hurt, or no, but it was pretty news come the other day so fast, of the Dutch fleets being in so many places, that Sir W. Batten at table cried, “By God,” says he, “I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.”

Why Old Spice matters:

The Old Spice videos weren’t one-liners. They actually pretty quickly established running themes and in-jokes. Taken all together, they mapped out a coherent world—a very small, weird world, populated by one man and one towel, but still: a world.

Now imagine for a moment that this hadn’t been the brain-child of some smart ad guys. Imagine instead that it was the opus of some young Lucas.

Imagine that all the parameters were the same: One actor. One scene. Simple, rich cinematography. Live production stretched over a couple of days. Lots of audience interaction. But the story he’s telling—the world he’s creating—is much more interesting. Maybe the scene is the cockpit of a spaceship; maybe it’s a cramped room in an interstellar hotel.

What would the Old Spice campaign look like if it was directed by Joss Whedon?

(Via Snarkmarket.)

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title:

“In May of 1974, after reading through a pilot script written by John Cleese and his then-wife, Connie Booth, a clearly unimpressed ‘comedy script editor’ by the name of Ian Main sent the following memo to BBC Television‘s Head of Comedy and Light Entertainment. Luckily for the general population, and thanks in no small part to the persistence of Cleese and Booth, Main’s opinion was ultimately ignored by his superiors and a year later the script had evolved into a programme which to this day is considered one of the funniest ever to grace our screens. The show was Fawlty Towers.

Speaking in 2009, John Cleese said of this very memo, ‘It just shows you people have no idea what they are doing.’
(Via Letters of Note.)

From what I’ve heard of BBC script editors, this doesn’t surprise me.

How to Have Culture in an Algorithmic Age — The Late Age of Print:

In the old cultural paradigm, you could question authorities about their reasons for selecting particular cultural artifacts as worthy, while dismissing or neglecting others.  Not so with algorithmic culture, which wraps abstraction inside of secrecy and sells it back to you as, “the people have spoken.”