In Lorem Ipsum Veritas

This French wine has been Greeked... in Latin.

Vince shared this hilarious labelling gaffe. (via)

It's about as meaningful as any of the puffery they put on those things — "Hints of chocolate, ripe plums, tobacco and barnyard..."

LG "massaging" ads give unintentional happy endings

Working on national accounts in an officially bilingual country, I deal with linguistic and cultural adaptation of ads every day. So I'm always annoyed when international agencies working on global accounts can't be bothered to check their English when they translate their ads for worldwide sharing and award consideration.

This gaffe, by Media Marquee in Cairo, is particularly hilarious to a filthy mind like mine.

The combination of the typo in the headline — "Massaging should be as fun as your friends" — with a talk bubble animation that looks like homuncular sperm makes me think that this phone gives happy endings.

Perhaps it just has one hell of a vibration mode...

(Campaign via I Believe in Advertising)

I still suck at Twitter

Twitter is no place for my sense of humour, obviously...

Epilogue:

Ambiguous copywriting kills God

Well, that's unfortunate.

This real church billboard was placed in Mansfield, Ohio, as a response to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Good without God" campaign.

It caused Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist to comment:

"Not only are they telling us that god doesn’t exist (in a large font, no less), they’re also telling us to be skeptical of what we hear! I couldn’t have said it better myself :)"

Castrating the fertility tree

L'albero di Fecondità ("the tree of fertility") is a fascinating piece of medieval art history and/or political propaganda that was unexpectedly uncovered in the central town fountain of Massa Marittima, Tuscany, at the turn of this century.

This is what it looked like:

Source

If you click to enlarge the image. you'll note something rather odd about the fruits of this tree:

Yeah, that's right. It's a penis tree. Uncovered during restorations, it was hailed as a glimpse into the medieval world of political insult (note the German eagles — then representing the Holy Roman Empire and its Ghibelline faction) in flight, while a group of women look on. The women have also been interpreted as witches performing a ritual in which severed male members were placed in birds' nests. Yeah, mediaeval artists were weird.

When first discovered, the fresco lay underneath a layer of whitewash, and the penises had been plastered over with inoffensive flowers. But that was not to be the last indignity the work was to suffer.

This summer, after years of restoration, the fertility tree was re-opened to the public. Art historians were not impressed. The restoration team were accused of fading out the phalluses, and in some cases, gelding them:

The Daily Mail reports:

Chief restorer Giuseppe Gavazzi denied there had been any intention to remove the penises that have disappeared and said: 'It's possible that the aggressive nature of the chemicals used made them disappear.

'It was not a deliberate act. People have to remember that the fresco was already in a very poor condition when we started work on it and the restoration was carried out accordingly.

It's difficult to find "after" photos online, but La Nazione had this screencap:

F'd Ad Fridays: the worst attempt at viral marketing I have seen this week

Buzzfeed lists are one of the laziest ways to generate content. You just come up with some kind of observational humour angle, then compile a bunch of photos and captions. Most of them suck. So I don't even know why I clicked on something as unpromising as:

Notice who/what the submitter is? I didn't. I guess I was tired. And bored. So much so that I endured several of these lame and obvious dichotomies hoping for something surprising.

Then I got to the kicker. If it can be called that. It was actually the most hamfisted transition to a sales pitch ever:

Are students much stupider than they used to be? In my day, this kind of craptacular attempt at stealth marketing would have led to backlash against the brand. And we didn't even have social media; we actually had to write editorials in the student newspaper to register our disgust. (And they called us "slackers" back then.)

Now, all it gets is this:

All I could think about, reading this, was that someone let a summer intern run with his or her "OMFG, this is totally going viral!" idea without really giving a shit.

Meh..