A Barbie world

Barbie's a bit topical at the moment, after Christie's sold a collection of 4,000 of the dolls yesterday for a total of £111,384. Sorry to go all quotey on you again, but the Wikipedia entry features some fascinating stuff on the issue of ethnicity and the Barbie doll.

Apparently the first of Barbie's black friends came out in 1967 and was called 'Colored Francie', but was withdrawn because of racial tensions at the time. The first African-American Barbie ("Black Barbie") followed 13 years later.

The inventors of Barbie, Mattel, originally created 'black Barbie' by simply filling the 'white Barbie' mould with dark plastic. But since then, they've atoned by developing "ethnically accurate head moulds" for their non-white dolls.

And finally (from Wikipedia):

In 1997, Mattel joined forces with Nabisco to launch a cross-promotion of Barbie with Oreo cookies. The toy producer introduced "Oreo Fun Barbie", marketed as the perfect after-school playmate, someone with whom little girls could play after class and share "America's favorite cookie". As had become the custom, Mattel manufactured both a white version and a black version.

Unfortunately for Mattel, its product developers were unaware that in the African-American community, Oreo has another meaning. It is a derogatory term for a person perceived to be, like the chocolate sandwich cookie, black on the outside and white on the inside - someone with an ambivalent racial identity, who does not identify with African American culture, or who is perceived as a "race traitor" or a self-loathing black person.

The black doll hit the market with a thud, production on it ceased, and Mattel quickly recalled all unsold stock.

Fine and Danandy

I'm rather sceptical about Paul 'Desperate' Danan's Wikipedia entry, which has one or two unlikely elements to it. Highlights follow: [NB I've censored the libellous bits]

Paul Danan (born in Essex) is a British actor who played Sol Patrick in the UK teen soap opera Hollyoaks. To millions, Paul is a legend. He likes to live life at 100 miles an hour and openly **** *******...

He recently presented a British Television series entitled **** *** *****' ITV2. In the show he ***** various ************ ***** to the limit and dates girls he meets. Paul has been in America working on a new pilot comedy sitcom. Paul is playing support in a comedy sitcom starring Bill Cosby and Minnie Driver. The pilot shows have been well received and the show will officially start in Febuary 2007.

In a bid to boost flagging ratings, Paul was thrown into ITV1's Love Island for a second time but was voted off on the 7th August. During the show's run, he admitted to being allergic to radishes.

Paul has used Love Island, and Love Island: Aftersun to launch his new rap career as Randy McDanan.

thelondonpaperwars

"Get yourself a proper paper! Proper newspapers here for 50p!" shouts the man selling the Evening Standard outside Euston station. With the recent release of both Standard-offshoot London Lite and new kid on the block thelondonpaper, and distributors on every major street corner and office thoroughfare, the evening newspaper wars are well underway.

Because there's only a London Lite seller on my particular office route, I often take it, though I do frequently hanker after the beautifully-designed and stupidly-named thelondonpaper, a shrewd cross between the Guardian and Funday Times, with an interactive bent (you can vote off columnists you don’t like) and fun colours (purple! green! other colours!). But when I’m taking a different route through town, I often get both, which is probably deeply annoying for the sales and circulation department of both organs.

Last night I discovered that my friend Rick gets not one, but four free papers a day – he picks up both the aforementioned newbies in the evening, a Metro for the tube in the morning and City AM, a free rag for city business types. He apparently goes for the latter because he feels sorry for the largely-ignored vendors, and gets worried they might feel discouraged. And well they might, facing such fierce competition.

The content of both new freesheets is so very superficial (celebs, gossip, silly news stories), one can't help thinking that if they got any 'liter' (perhaps with the launch of London Very Lite or thelondonpaperlite), they'd probably consist of the words ‘YOU ARE IDIOT’ printed in large letters in the centre of a plain white sheet. Maybe then you’d want a proper paper.

Pun of the week

From a Daily Express story about Prince William's visit a new specialist babycare unit:

From heir to maternity

More hot pun action

Anecdotalist

I truly am the anecdote king. Last night I managed to tell an ex-colleague an anecdote about me telling an anecdote (it was the one about meeting Celebrity Big Brother Preston's French ex-girlfriend and immediately launching into the infamously filthy 'Aunt Sally' anecdote). I mentioned this to my friend Darren. "So now you're telling an anecdote about telling an anecdote about telling an anecdote," he said. "That's fucked up."

No place to go

Drinking in a Soho bar last night, I got up to go for a piss, and found an out of order sign on the door of the gents. Didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, and there was nowhere else to relieve myself, so I snuck in. As I was urinating, I could hear the sound of booming hip hop from the bar area and some lyrics wafted past my ears: "...just a rebel with a cause, no place to go..." Strangely prescient.

Lessons learned from... Sleeping Dogs Lie

Never mix monkeys and midgets.

Other lessons learned

The fate of Atlantis

The Atlantis space shuttle has just landed safely, after a successful 12-day mission. They go up there all the time now. Even Transport for London are getting in on the act - apparently they’re going to extend the East London line into space.

Spare time

Generally I hate Wednesdays, but this one was swell. Finished work at 5 and tubed down to Oxford Circus; I was due to review a film at 6.30 in Soho. Walking round Noho looking for a guitar shop, I spied two hipster with instruments and asked them. They pointed me in the way of a place.

The guy behind the counter, as rude as you'd expect, was on the phone, so his assistant helped me out. I got some electric guitar strings (I have highly corrosive sweat, meaning I have to change them frequently) and he asked the guy on the phone how much they cost, and tilled it up. Then I annoyingly decided to get acoustic strings too. He had to ask which ones were best, then totallled it up. Then I realised I needed a cable. He didn't know where the cables were, so had to ask the guy. I picked one and he totalled it up again. Then I spied the plectrums (plectra?). Unfortunately he didn't know how much they cost (even the plectra! How humiliating!), so had to ask the rude guy the price yet again.

I headed along to the new Fopp on Tottenham Court road with my paraphernalia. The shop's massive, so big that they have a budget ambient minimalism section. Another nice touch: their 24 box sets cost £24. I bought R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant on CD for £5. You can't pay any more than that for something you already have on tape, it'd be incredibly extragvagent.

Then on to the press screening. Went up to the screening room bar, where there were some highly pretentious movie reviewers hanging out and talking about who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1996, and so on. I sat down and did the London Lite sudoku. After a bit, we went in; the film was called Sleeping Dogs Lie and it's a low-budget indie romcom about a girl who once **** a dog * **** *** and her dilemmas about whether she should tell her fiance about what she did. Weirdly, it was directed by the guy who played Zed in the Police Academy films, who goes by the odd name of Bobcat Goldthwait. It was rather good. (Trailer here.)

After the film I dashed to an empty late night coffee shop and scribbled out some review notes with a pot of tea. I quite liked that image of myself, I should have taken a picture. Would've been better with cigarettes, of course.

As I walked to the Underground, popping into a few shops on the way (book shopping at 8.30pm! Thank you London!), I saw a guy riding a bike going down down Oxford Street with his girlfriend sitting on the crossframe, both laughing, and I felt a wave of happiness.

Did the Metro sudoku on the tube home - finished it by Pimlico, yesssss - and stopped off at Millennium fried chicken back in Stockwell. There was a delivery man in there wanting £60, but the boys didn't have the money for him as he was a day early. "Problem with The Man?" I asked Shiva. "Yes - normally they are come Thursdays then now they are come today," he said sounding unperturbed. I vaguely considered offering to pay the £60, thus earning myself around 25 chicken meals on credit. But that could be highly dangerous to my health. "Nandri, Shiva," I said as I took my meal and walked out. The chicken shop is one of the few times that London lets me feel part of a community, as well as allowing a short burst of linguistic posing, so I relish it. "Vannakam!" I shout, to Shiva's delight. A few words of Tamil goes a long way in this crazy city.

I got home. Jamie was watching a programme on More4 presented by transvestite potter Grayson Perry about how people spend their spare time.

Cascading Style Sheets

A band to look out for: CSS. They combine the goodness of Yeah Yeah Yeahs with the fun of Helen Love, but from Brazil. They'd be one of the "internet phenomenon" things if their name wasn't an acronym for a stylesheet language used to described a page's presentation in HTML (meaning you risk being launched into geekland if you Google them). It actually stands for Cansei De Ser Sexy, Portuguese for "I'm tired of being sexy". Much better.

If you want an iTunes taster, the standout track from their self-titled album is Music Is My Hot Hot Sex. Much like Madonna's Music, except cool and young.