Thu 10 Jan 2008
I Put a Smell On You
Posted by anaglyph under Ooky, Perfume, Signs, Words
[12] Comments
Imagine my glee when, during my Christmas expeditions to the Two Dollar Shop (as mentioned previously), I stumbled upon an eau de parfum! In a Two Dollar Shop! Smack me with a sockfull of wet lavender pulp! It wasn’t actually two dollars, coming in at a whopping five bucks, but, dear Acowlytes, this, by Two Dollar Shop standards, is a Luxury Item!
And, in true Two Dollar Shop fashion, this bottle of perfume is just like something in the real world only cheaper, crappier and made from toxic chemicals left over from industrial manufacturing processes.
Cowmrades! I present for your delectation: Bane eau de parfum.
This is the Dictionary.com definition of ‘bane’:
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bane [beyn]
–noun
1. a person or thing that ruins or spoils
One imagines that this sense of the word is not what the creators of Bane have intended and they are in fact hoping to evoke a secondary meaning somewhat akin to spell or poison. Thus is the peril of attempting to be poetic in a language that is not the one with which you are familiar.
Of course, who am I to say? Going by the smell of the stuff, maybe the first definition is really what they had in mind. But more of that in due course.
The Bane packaging is a triumph of product-design tragedy. The designer could only be said to have been successful if the brief went something like this:
Hey Adelheld!* What we’re going for with this is some kind of a half-woman/half-cobra embedded in a rock and obscured by a curtain. It should be really difficult to make out exactly what it is. Oh, and if you can save us some money by, say, using up some old tubes of paint you’ve got lying around – you know, those murky bilious greens that you’ve had sitting in a bottom drawer for a few years – that would be great!
Of course, the whole thing is nicely set off by the gold foil text that just screams tacky! glamour!
Which leads me to the next exciting feature of Bane. A shiny gold button on the box lets us know that this is not just any old Bane. No sirree!
This is New Improved Bane. It is at this point that I wish The Cow was scratch ‘n’ sniff because in all truth that’s the only way I could convey to you the full magnitude of the claim of ‘New Improved’. My God. New Improved Bane smells like a blend of cough medicine, window cleaner and those deodorant lozenges they put in men’s urinals. I shudder to think of what it was like before they improved it. Then again, being generous, maybe the ‘improvement’ was just in the colour? The label lists nearly a dozen colorants. Now what’s that all about? Who cares what colour the perfume is? It spends all its life in a dark red glass bottle and now and then you spray out a tiny quantity that atomizes into a virtually clear vapour. It’s madness – they could have ditched the colorants and had the product on the shelves for four bucks!
Some sense can be made of the whole enterprise by examining a sticker on the cellophane packaging in which the box is shrouded. Here, the makers of Bane attempt to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dior’s famous ‘Poison’ by telling us that Bane ‘compares’ to Poison but doesn’t use the same fragrances. This could be put more clearly on a label worded like this:
Dear Customer: If you lack discrimination, have no sense of smell and are a tightwad, you can buy this stuff and pretend it is Poison. It would be a fitting accompaniment to your fake Rolex, and the kinds of people you probably hang out with will never be able to tell the difference anyway.
Dear Dior Lawyer: Please don’t sue us. Even though we are attempting to trade on your reputation we are just trying to get rid of industrial fragrances left over from our disinfectant factory and only olfactorally-challenged cheapskates would think it was anything like your perfume.
Of course, I could be entirely mistaken here – the manufacturers might simply be equating Bane with rat poison. Or insecticide.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the gilded eau de parfum attribution, one could be easily forgiven for mistaking Bane for a competitively priced alternative to Mortein.
It’s just a shame that it smells so much worse.
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*I couldn’t dig up much information about Bane (or ‘The Dorall Collection’) on the net (unsurprisingly) but as near as I can make out it is manufactured in Belgium. If that’s not the case I apologize profusely to all Belgians for the slight.
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Tue 8 Jan 2008
And Then Is Heard No More…
Posted by anaglyph under Books, Brushes With Fame, Nostalgia, Sad
[4] Comments
Anne Arkham draws my attention to the sad news of the death of Laura Huxley, who you may recall I wrote about in the post Brief Candles.
Rest in peace Laura. One of my very few regrets is that I never called the number you gave me.
The LA Times obituary says:
One of her last projects was to bring “Brave New World” to the movie screen. It is now in development with a major motion picture studio, (estate attorney) Jonathan Kirsch said.
Personally, I hope that this never happens. Some things should just be left well and truly alone.
Sun 6 Jan 2008
Waste Not, Want Not
Posted by anaglyph under Ephemera, Scary, Science, Technology, True Fiction
[11] Comments
As we stumble flat-footed but indisputably well-endowed into 2008, China tries frantically to get Beijing ready for the 2008 Olympic Games. It is by now becoming apparent that it has a mighty long way to go before it can face up to the ongoing criticism of the West and make a dent in its massive pollution problem. A lot has been written already about the country’s choking air quality, eclipsing, perhaps, some less obvious concerns.
Here at Cow Central, we have it on good authority that the Chinese Government has taken cunning measures to deal with other kinds of contamination, and our TCA Special Correspondent, operating deep behind enemy lines, wandering around the shops at Christmas, has uncovered a fiendish Chinese scheme to offload solid toxic waste onto an unsuspecting West; worse than that, even: a Machiavellian plot to deliver their atramentous filth into the hands of innocent children!
Allow me to elaborate. Inevitably, at this time of year, a shopper finds him/herself dawdling into the precincts of the now-ubiquitous ‘Two Dollar Shop’.* All manner of zany gadgets and trinkets seem to find their way into these places, and a Christmas visit here is almost mandatory for the acquisition of that kooky little ‘something’ to give to the special someone in your life.
This year, TCA’s Man On The Street brought our attention to the Two Dollar Shop item (masquerading as a ‘toy’) pictured above: a small plastic drum with the word ‘Caution’ stencilled on it. Or, more accurately, a whole box full of the damn things! A check at ‘Price World’ in my own neck of the woods uncovers a similar trove. Given the pervasive nature of the Two Dollar Shop, we may conclude that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of these little black barrels arriving on our shores every week! There is no doubt at all where they originate:
The fiends are so brazen that they don’t make even the slightest attempt to cover their tracks! Now, as I cautiously open the lid and allow you to examine the contents, I will understand completely if you tremble with fear as the full understanding of this dastardly plot dawns upon you!
Yes, my friends, not only are they very effectively getting rid of their foul effluvium, but they’ve concocted a racket where we actually buy it from them! And then pass it on to our kids, in the guise of a carefree play item, so that they may absorb it through their skin, thereby creating a new generation of hideous yet feeble mutants addicted to glitzy flashing lights and the smell of rarified hydrocarbons…
Sure, China gives the appearance of a massively uncoordinated country bravely attempting to shake off the stigma of the Third World and march proudly into a Shiny Capitalist Future, but I say BEWARE! Remember these people invented the word inscrutable!†
Today the Olympic Games, tomorrow The World!
(If I mysteriously disappear anytime soon, I ask only that name be recorded on a monument on Manhattan Island in the future world capital New Shanghai, along with the words ‘I told you so’).
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*I am speculating that there is an equivalent to this phenomenon in other countries; pokey little shops packed densely with shelving that offers all manner of cheap, usually Chinese-made, junk. In Australia, the shops go by such monikers as ‘Buy Rite’, ‘Price World’, ‘Bargain Zone’ or ‘Reject Shop’ but are universally known here as ‘Two Dollar Shops’. I actually really love the Two Dollar Shops because they are a reminder of the kind of corner-store I grew up with as a kid. I am fully aware that their cheap flashy plastic gew-gaws probably represent the exploitation of poor Chinese peasants and the plundering of fragile ecosystems.
†Well, OK, it’s an English word so they probably didn’t invent it. But I bet they have a Chinese word that means pretty much the same thing. And I bet they use it often, followed by a sinister laugh.
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Tue 1 Jan 2008
Happy New Year!
Posted by anaglyph under Rasputin, True Fiction
[113] Comments
I hereby declare the Annual TCA Rasputin Poetry Competition open!
(Really, why fight it?)
My dear Acowlytes! Let me offer you all the best wishes for a happy, healthy and jape-filled 2008. Let the jousting commence!
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If you haven’t got the faintest idea what all this is about, maybe you’d like to click here!
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