Alices In Wonderland: Part 39

... and hoops made from bent over playing-card courtiers. The whole thing is very chaotic... a sense captured very nicely in this 1907 illustration by W.H. Walker. I have this illustration in a much later edition (Chronicle Books, 2000) which collects illustrations by various hands.

DPRK: Spooky Update

Just watched episode one of the new season of Primeval. (For US readers: this is a series where the heroes fight against various horrible time travelling beasties that appear through big glowing anomalies. This parody will tell you all you need to know.)

In tonight's season opener a crocodile-like monster had come through an anomaly controlled by some ancient Egyptian statue. After a bit of a runaround the good guys defeated it. The statue remained in the British museum. In the closing scene we were told that the exhibition was moving on and we saw a crate being loaded onto a lorry.

And no, you didn't misread the title of this post: the place name stencilled on the crate was Pyongyang!

Alices In Wonderland: Part 38

The queen invites Alice to play croquet, but it is a most peculiar game with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls...

The illustration is by Scott McKowen. Although it's a modern edition (Sterling Publishing, 2005) all I've been able to turn up on the internet about the illustrator is various sites selling his books. Lucky then that there are some brief details on the dust jacket. He's an award winning graphic designer, art curator and the designer of Canada's 2001 silver dollar.

To advertise or not to advertise

What, exactly, constitutes and advertisement as opposed to, say, a news item? I ask because of an item that I saw on the BBC this morning. The charter under which the BBC operates specifically forbids them from commercial advertising but at what point does a news item cease to be a news item and become, in all but name, an advertisement?

The item in question was ostensibly about Starbucks closing some of its UK branches in response to the current financial situation. One question - do you think you expanded too rapidly in the UK - was connected. After a cursory answer the executive from the company was allowed to promote the brand, mention the prices and name some products, say that their prices were lower than their competitors' prices and talk about a new range of instant coffee products under the Starbucks brand that reproduce the "unique flavours" of Starbucks. Surely this must be considered advertising and hence in breach of the regulations.

I've seen things before - both on screen and in print - that were adverts masquerading as articles or news items but this seemed rather blatant. Starbucks couldn't have been more pleased with it if they had paid an agency to script it for them.

I sent my comments to the BBC and await their response (though with little expectation of receiving it.)