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Righto. Off to Glastonbury for five and a bit days, so no posts during that time – but check my Twitter and Flickr for updates on how, er, swimmingly it’s going. I hear the weather’s going to be lovely…

The past few days have been spent frantically haring around, trying to buy stuff to cope with the fact that the weather has just gone shit. Up until this last weekend, it looked like the biggest concerns down in Somerset would be having enough sunscreen, a big enough sunhat, and possibly a big enough camel. Then it all went moist, and everybody was suddenly looking for ways of waterproofing everything they’ve ever owned. And crucially, people started buying wellies. This proved harder than I at first imagined, as I had completely underestimated a number of factors:

1) The sheer lack of places in London that sell wellies in the first place. The last time I shopped for wellies, I lived in Cornwall. Where lots of people want to own wellies, so lots of shops sell them. London, it turns out, is a big city, where people by and large don’t need wellies. So shops don’t sell them.

2) Every other bastard in London was also trying to buy the same small stock of wellies.

It turned into a sort of thrillingly secret treasure hunt. Going shop-to-shop down the roughly 500 camping stores on Kensington High St, I kept on encountering people on the same mission. We shared knowing glances, amused shrugs and “what can you do?” raised eyebrows. We bonded over whetehr the kids sizes would go big enough to fit our feet (answer: in theory, yes, but they’d sold out of all the big kids ones. Someone had got there before us. Someone who also had small feet.) We swapped tips, rumours, whispers of where we’d heard might have wellies. “I hear that Asda have them.” “Where? They don’t in my local.” “Maybe one of the big ones. Down in Crossharbour, perhaps.” “Might John Lewis…?” “They might. I don’t know. They might.”

Eventually, Homebase came through. Barely. Thank goodness for my small feet – they’d been cleaned out of everything except a few stray boots, from which I was abel to cobble together a pair of size 4s that, while a squeeze, did just fine. I think I got out of it better than the very proper middle management-type chap in a suit, who left with a pair of lovely pink floral print ladies boots, because they were the only ones in his size.

To be fair, he’ll probably fit in just fine.

Amidst the deep and abiding strangeness of the “photoshopped portrait photography where people are kissing themselves” collection at Pupsam Selfkiss – about which the only things to say are that it’s strangely hypnotic, oddly stilted and possibly the least even-theoretically-erotic thing I’ve ever seen – one portrait stands out from the others… on the grounds that it’s the only one where the subject appears to be auditioning to be on the cover of a Suede album:

There’s a beautifully liminal area of reaction to some things, where your response traces a strange attractor-style path between between “great”, “aaaargh”, “why?”, “why not?”, “yes” and “noooooooooooooooooooooooo”. This is one of those things, I suspect.

(via qwghlm and BR)

A small data point: at last night’s Glamour magazine Women of the Year awards, the woman honoured as Writer of the Year was Desperate Housewives actress Teri Hatcher.

I know, I know. It’s Glamour magazine, not the Nobel committee. I just felt that, somehow… no, forget it. Never mind. It was silly of me to bring it up.

One thought that did occur to me while pondering The Great Lisa Simpson Oral Pleasure Fiasco of 2007 – do branding specialists actively try to anticipate things like that?

By which I mean: in large political campaigns, there’ll be members of staff who spend at least some of their time mimicking and predicting the attacks of their enemy. They’ll dig for dirt on their own candidate, think up inventive, vicious and sleazy ways of attacking their guy’s credibility – all trying to anticipate (and therefore block, or prepare for) their opponents next below-the-belt blow. Do branding firms do the same?

The sheer speed with which many people independently spotted, and then everybody picked up on the “Lisa giving head” interpretation of the 2012 logo just made me wonder if anybody at Wolff Olins had noticed it already; whether or not they take their proposed designs, and give them to a crack team whose job is to get into the minds of “the opposition” – which could range from corporate or political opponents, to Ad Busters style culture jammers, to b3tans who have Photoshop and aren’t afraid to make rude jokes with it. And if not – why not?

Anybody who works in branding care to shed some light on this?

I think we might be entering the calm after the web storm that followed the unveiling of the unspeakably hideous London 2012 logo today. Aside from all the Lisa Simpson jokes, swastika rearrangements and stealth goatses, there’s really very little to add to Chris’s excellent, spot-on dissection of why it isn’t just a eye-buggeringly ugly design, but one that manifestly fails to achieve its stated goals.

But – as a Londoner who is actually quite excited, albeit from a rather sceptical and pessimistic perspective, about the Games – what was almost more distressing than the day-glo fellatiform abomination of the logo was the irredeemably vacuous guff spouted by Coe and co at the launch. So I’m going to slag that off instead.

The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible reflecting a brand savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks.

It’s not just that this is buzzword-laden marketing arse talk. It’s not even that that it’s deeply unimaginative, badly written arse (using “dynamic” twice in one sentence? Hire. A. Copy. Editor.) It’s that it actively, almost aggressively, has no connection whatsoever to the actual emblem they’re talking about. Or, indeed, to reality.
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