{InjuredLizard} - blogs/tom

Gorilla

I’ve just read the transcript of Cadbury’s gorilla advert, which I think is even better than the ad itself.

It’s also a fantastic example of what this A List Apart article by Amber Simmons is on about: copy on the web that fulfils the emotional purpose of its context; alternative text that replaces the video in spirit, not just in name. This advert could, quite reasonably, be summarised in text as, “video of a gorilla playing the drums”. Isn’t Cadbury’s version (copied here since I suspect it’ll disappear at some point) so much nicer!

We open on purple recording studio wall. A title appears: A Glass and a Half Full Production. We start listening to the first sounds of ‘In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins.

The camera slowly pans down as we hear the keyboard’s atmospheric intro. When we start listening to the first lyrics we spot a hairy thing in the edge of the frame. As the camera keeps panning, the mysterious figure gets revealed.

We realize that in front of us is a gorilla.It looks calmly to camera. Phil continues singing: ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight.’

The massive Gorilla stares at us - concentrated. We are almost sure that he knows we are filming him, but his eyes look through and beyond the lens. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for all of my life.’

The gorilla focuses back on the camera. All we see is neck and head. And hair.

The camera gently zooms out revealing the Gorilla’s surroundings. We see more of the studio. And we discover a series of metallic things around him.

We realize that the Gorilla is sitting in front of a massive drum kit. One of those Eighties big kits with loads of things to hit. Loads of tom-toms, hi-hats, double bass drum, etc.

We know that the best drum solo in the whole history of rock - ever - is coming. The Gorilla knows it too.

The Gorilla hits the drums with passion and vigour. Elegance meets power. He’s phenomenal on the drums - feeling every beat.

The camera leaves the ape and his drum kit in the studio.

The screen fades to purple. We see a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar of chocolate appear above the words ‘A Glass and a half full of Joy’

The carrots lie

The Lord in Lego

I’ve just come across The Brick Testament, and it’s absolutely brilliant! The God figure is very cool indeed, and the amount of expression you can find in the arrangements of plastic blocks is incredible.

The last time I got to play with large amounts of Lego was when one of my housemates in third year at York and her boyfriend paid a visit to Legoland and came back with two sacks full of bricks. I made this, of which I was rather proud at the time:

Marking down the clipboard

While googling for something vaguely unrelated, I’ve just come across a handy-looking technique for running John Gruber’s Markdown and SmartyPants scripts on the contents of the Windows clipboard.

You’ll need Cygwin, a Perl install (either Cygwin’s own or ActivePerl will do) and (somewhat obviously) a copy of the Markdown and SmartyPants perl scripts. After that, it’s as simple as creating a batch file to do the job:

C:\cygwin\bin\getclip.exe |
  C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe "C:\Program Files\Markdown\Markdown.pl" |
  C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe "C:\Program Files\SmartyPants\Smartypants.pl" |
  C:\cygwin\bin\putclip.exe

(Note: this needs to be all on one line.)

As an aside, there’s no reason you couldn’t achieve the same using PHP Markdown and PHP SmartyPants (using php -q to prevent it from outputting HTTP headers).

I’ve put a shortcut in my start menu and assigned it a ‘shortcut key’, so to format a window full of text I can now press:

CTRL+A (select all)
CTRL+C (copy)
CTRL+SHIFT+M (Markdown+SmartyPants)
CTRL+V (paste)

It seems a little long-winded when written out like that, but it’ll do for me.

Four down, three to go

I’m exhausted. I’m out every night this week, Sunday to Saturday, so there’s still days to go before I get an evening’s rest. We’ve just got back from Girls’ Brigade, where I’ve been helping Kirk out recently, which went really rather well this evening.

Last night I went up to Delancy to help Angela and Sean out with the Catechetics session there. The group are fantastic at discussion. We were, however, supposed to be writing down some answers to the Bishop’s latest set of questions in an ongoing series; at this they were somewhat less successful. They got plenty out of the session though. On Monday we held our Boys Brigade Battalion annual meeting, which Kirk ranted about at the time; I spent Sunday evening at the Harvey’s house for a music group “small group” — we got through a fair amount of material, including this, which I’ll be singing on Palm Sunday, and a very upbeat psalm setting for Easter.

Anyway, I’ve finally got this design to a state where I’m happy to put it live. It’s not finished (it probably never will be!) but, for the moment, I’m pleased enough with it as you see it now.