Archive for August, 2010

26
Aug
10

In The Interest Of Boosting Site Views, I present to You: More Puppies

You want internet fame and fortune there are basically only three ways to go about it.

1. Porn
2. YouTube videos of people hurting themselves in hilarious ways
3. Babies

It’s a sad fact, but no matter how many great, funny and insightful posts I write about meaningful shit, I’ll still get 3 times as many hits by simply posting a picture of a hot girl with great breasts.

Such is life my friends. Such is life.

So with no further ado, here are pics of my favourite of the 14 puppies we’re looking after. This special little guy is the runt of the litter and I know it was fucking retarded of me to do it because we can’t keep him, but I went ahead and named him.

Ladies and gentlemen. Meet Rocko.

 

 

 

 

And just like that – KAPOW! Site views hit 1k.

My work here is done.

-ST

25
Aug
10

Where The Music At Yo?

If you love this site as much as I do (not humanly possible) you might have noticed there haven’t been any music reviews as of late.

Reason being I’m now officially writing album review for a radass site called www.pulpmag.co.za.

So the deal is I publish a little taste of my reviews on this site, just the first couple of sentences, then if you wanna check out the full review, you click a HYPERLINK* included at the BOTTOM of the post that says “Read the whole enchilada here…” and ka-pow! It’s a done deal

So to kick things off, here are all the reviews I’ve written to date, enjoy!

Album Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

If Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero protagonist of The Catcher In The Rye, had to grow up and start an indie rock band, that band would be Arcade Fire.

 

 

This phenomenal Canadian group, which consists of no less than seven members, has a powerful grasp on nostalgic indie anthems that deal with themes of innocence lost and disillusionment with adulthood that would have made Holden proud.

Their debut 2004 album Funeral instantly became a firm favourite among music critics and aficionados the world over as did their 2007 follow-up, Neon Bible, which earned the band numerous awards and accolades and proved there was much more to this band than just their debut album.

And so Arcade Fire approached their third album which, many would argue, is the most difficult album to record. Repeat the material of your previous two albums and your audience will yawn in your face and move on. Stray too far from your roots and your fans will balk like skittish ponies, bitching and moaning all the while about how you either sold out or took WAY too many drugs this time around.

Read the whole enchilada here…

Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

Before I start writing this, a confession. This is not a new album. It’s been out for just over a year now, BUT iTunes released the deluxe version of the album three weeks ago which, coupled with the fact that pretty much no one knows this band, is justification enough to review this gem of an album.

 

 

Not a whole lot is known about Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros and the few interviews I found with the band on YouTube are difficult to watch because frontman and lead vocalist Alex Ebert has taken a lot of drugs in the 32 odd years he’s been alive and has this way of staring off into the distance in interviews and making absolutely no sense.

That said, the band itself is nothing short of seriously awesome. Like Arcade Fire, Edward Sharpe is made up of enough people to start a slow pitch softball team. Everyone in the band sings, though Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos handle the majority of the vocals.

Read the whole enchilada here…

Also look out for the “Tiger Bites” section on the site. That’s where I wrap up the week’s news in the music world.

We live in interestin’ times I tell ya. Interesting times indeed…

-ST

*WARNING: NEVER click more than 5 hyperlinks a day, it’s like feeding gremlins after midnight…

24
Aug
10

Marketing People

I deal with a lot of marketing people, sometimes as many as 3 in a single day, and the conclusion I have drawn about this kooky bunch is that they are (with one or two exceptions) from another fucking planet.

 

 

What do they do to these poor people that makes them think that whatever it is they are marketing is basically more important than life itself?

In my mind I see horrible torture chambers filled with marketers-to-be all chained up and getting stretched on racks and shit while their directors whip them and pour boiling oil over anyone who thinks the product or service they’re trying to market isn’t the single most amazing thing the world has or will ever see.

I mean christ, I’ll be honest here and straight up say that these people fucking scare me.

They march into meetings armed with an entire arsenal of information about their target audience and are generally flush with all kinds of demographic information, statistics about what people supposedly like and don’t like and all kinds of other stuff I don’t even begin to understand.

 

 

And that right there is the beauty of what they do. No one understands it. And the reason no one understands it is that they invent their own fucking language to explain it. Here are the only examples I remember right now, but I swear there are at least 10 000 000 000 more I’ve heard and instantly blanked from my mind.

  • “Ideation” – to what? Create ideas? Isn’t that called “thinking”?
  • ”Release” – specifically used to describe the way consumers conduct themselves in social situations, ie. “we need to be careful we don’t end up marketing our product to an audience seeking release”. In plain English this sentence reads: “don’t target people who like getting fucking wasted. If we do that it’s back to the torture pits”
  • “Push back” – as in, “you need to manage your pushback” which is a nice way of saying “stop being so fucking lazy and do some work. I was up until 3am working. What were you doing at 3am huh? HUH?!?”
  • And so on and so on…

Funniest thing is that marketing people have this innate ability to make other people buy into their bullshit even though those other people have no idea what any of it means!

 

Case in point. I recently sat in on an eyeball-gougingly productive meeting where someone from another agency was describing this new target audience that the bad, bad people from marketing had invented and given a snazzy name.

In an effort to figure out what this invented target audience is into, I fired off a whole bunch of questions about them which yielded the following answers:

  • They get bored quickly
  • They all want to be celebrities
  • If given an option for a prize, they would choose cash over anything else
  • They won’t engage with anything unless some kind of reward is guaranteed
  • They aren’t on Twitter
  • They aren’t on Facebook
  • They don’t read blogs
  • They only ever consume mainstream media and nothing else
  • They don’t understand what Tetris is (long story)
  • They wouldn’t know what Mayans are (also long story)

So what we’re basically describing here is a bunch of really, really stupid and lazy people who are self-obsessed and disinterested in anything that doesn’t immediately benefit them in a tangible way.

And all the while, I’m sitting there thinking, If these people actually do exist, I really don’t like them and the LAST thing we should be doing as human beings possessing any kind of moral conscience is trying to sell them alcohol!

 

 

It’s a crazy world we live in folks and thanks to people like marketers, advertisers and me, it’s only getting crazier.

Ain’t that wonder 😉

-ST

23
Aug
10

Guardian Angels

By the time you see the blue lights flashing, it’s already too late.

Thursday night we get pulled over, I’ve had two tequilas and about five beers so basically I’m up shit creek and I fucking know it.

They run through the usual pleasantries of “Have you been drinking, sir?” and “Please get out of your car sir” and all the while all you’re thinking is, “It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine. Somehow everything’s going to work out. Just be cool.”

They make you check the nozzle, check it’s freshly sealed in plastic and no one’s tampered with it before they open the plastic and attach it to the breathaliser.

“Point zero five is the legal limit sir, are you aware of that?”

“Yes, I am.”

She aims the breathaliser at me like a firing squad and I fill my lungs to bursting with clean, fresh air…

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *         

Friday night we’re going down Kommetjie road, J-Rab’s driving and we see a line of cars pulled over.

“Oh fuck,” she says.

“What is it? Is it a fucking accident? Please tell me it’s a fucking accident.”

“It’s a road block.”

“AGAIN?! WHAT THE FUCK?!”

Again. It’s happening all over again…

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *         

The number on the breathaliser is changing. I feel like I’m watching a roulette wheel spinning. Point zero three. Point zero five. Point zero six.

How is this even possible? I wonder. I’m WAY over the limit, how is this even fucking possible?

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *         

“Can I see your license please miss?”

It’s like some kind of recurring nightmare. If he gets a breathaliser out we’re fucked. God, anything could happen to her in those cells.

I feel sick to the stomach.

He checks her license, moves around to check my license disk. Holy fuck, isn’t it expiring soon? There’s no way we’re getting through this, it’s just not possible. The license disk has expired, we’ll get a fine, he’ll smell the drinks she’s had on her breath.

She’s not drunk, but she’s over the limit.

God, we are so fucked.

I take a deep breath, fill my lungs to bursting with fresh, clean air…

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *         

The numbers stop changing. There’s a moment of silence so heavy I think my heart’s caved in.

This isn’t happening. How is this even happening? How?

“Point zero four. You’re under the legal limit sir. Drive home safe”

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *         

“Your license expires at the end of the month, but remember, you still have 21 days after that to get a new one so don’t worry too much about it and have a nice night.”

“Thank you,” J-Rab says.

And we drive home both times, safe as houses and jump into our warm bed and hold each other, laughing, just laughing and so goddamn happy to be home.

                                     *          *          *          *          *          *

I found this drawing on a wall on Saturday night at a house party we were at and I spent a long time staring at it and smiling. The other people there, they had no idea why.

But when J-Rab saw me staring at it she smiled too.

“Guardian angels,” she said.

“Guardian angels,” I replied.

 

 

-ST

20
Aug
10

Friday puppies!

One of these radass little guys is gonna be my dog. J-Rab says we can’t keep one, but LOOK AT THE PUPPIES! JUST LOOK AT THEM!

 

 

 

Have a killer weekend guys 🙂

-ST

19
Aug
10

SlickTiger puts on his journalist hat, gets to work

Something you might not know about your Tiger pal is that there was a time when he had his sights set on becoming a journalist, no shit.

I even went through the motions of studying a degree in journalism and everything, but in the end the dark side won me over with promises of regular working hours and a much better salary and so I became a Sith Lord of spin instead.

 

 

So it was pretty hilarious when Nokia invited me in my capacity as a blogger to check out the new Nokia N8 at the Grand Daddy Hotel on Longstreet. I kinda felt obliged to go because the kind folks at Nokia’s PR company hooked me up with the badass X6 I’m currently rocking so fair’s fair right?

I wish you guys could have been there, it was so funny. I walk upstairs to Daddy Cool’s (15 minutes late for the demo, just like a REAL journalist) and everyone’s like “Hi SlickTiger! How are ya! Klap gym boet! Hahahaha!”

And I’m like “Hahahaha!”

And they’re like “Hahahaha!"

And I’m thinking, Is that buffet I smell…?

And they’re thinking, This douche better give us a good write up or that X6 is comin’ STRAIGHT back…

Then I meet the guy giving me the demo and he introduces himself but I’m not really paying attention because right behind him, I shit you not, is a FUCKING AMAZING BUFFET!

 

 

I’m talking wraps, mini wraps, kebabs, you name it! More delicious noms than you could shake a stick at, all laid out neatly on a table for me and me alone.

“Please, do help yourself,” Demo-man said, smiling.

Huh, these Nokia people are nice, I thought to myself, chomping through a steak wrap. Being a journalist is sick!

“So,” Demo-man says, “tell us about the people who read your site.”

“Oh yeah, the people who read my site, well, um, they’re not your average consumer y’know?” I said in my important-sounding voice, “They’re better than that. They read my site because they don’t buy into the load of crap that other sites try sell them, they want to read something an actual human writes. They’re pretty cool that way, um…”

“And age wise?”

“Twenties, early thirties, around there.” I’d like to thank the Academy.

“Ok, and have you yourself had any experience using a Nokia phone?”

“Yes, he has the one we gave him, the X6,” the friendly lady who greeted me confirmed.

Uh oh, I thought. She’s subtly referencing the X6… quick! Say something that won’t make them take it away!

“Amazing phone!” I affirmed with gusto, “The touch-screen technology is just, amazing! Unfortunately I don’t have it on me at this exact moment I er, left it on the toilet at home this morning.”

“You know, studies show that a high percentage of people actually tweet and check emails on the toilet,” Friendly-lady said.

Great, I thought to myself, Now she thinks I’m one of those people. Siff.

“Anyway, if you’ll turn your attention to the screen in front of you we can begin the demo,” Demo-man said.

From there on in I made an earnest effort to take in and mentally record everything that Demo-man showed me. I then mentally archived this information, deleting some of the porn in my brain to make room, and cleverly filed it for later reference.

So, here’s what I got:

 

 

Luckily the good folks at Nokia gave us press packs on seriously slick memory sticks so that I can actually substantiate this otherwise meandering tale of utter crap with some solid facts about the N8, after which I’ll sum up neatly with another whisky and my overall impression of this phone.

Check, check, check it out yo:

 

  • This phone has a 12 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA. That’s 12 motherbitches, as in after 11, before 13? Which means the pictures it takes are guaranteed to fuck your shit up the INSTANT you see them
  • It also has an HDMI output which means you can plug the phone directly into your sweet 52-inch LCD TV just like Demo-guy did for me and pull up all your pics and movies and they look so amazingly crisp and clear you’ll probably pop wood instantly
  • You get maps. Bam! No fucking around. Maps for 70 countries worldwide and it won’t cost you a goddamn cent
  • You can download apps, not thousands and thousands like on an iPhone, but give it a year and I reckon there’ll be a decent selection. What’s cool about the N8 though is that if you buy apps, they get billed to your service provider and added to your monthly bill. No dicking around entering your credit card info for jerkwad pirates to steal on the interweb
  • The music you buy on the phone through the Ovi store isn’t DRMed up the wazoo and can easily be stored and played however the hell you want, unlike the ‘Comes With Music’ music that sends a homing missile to your house the second you try give the music you’ve bought to your buddies
  • Everything is flippin’ integrated with everything. Don’t grill me on the details here, but the phone’s built for ‘social media addicts’ so yeah. Think of it as a crack pipe for Twit-heads, Face-boobs and Blog-jammers
  • It looks pretty slick. Take a gander:

 

 

Final verdict is I went to the demo to mooch some free food and came out actually impressed with what I saw so yeah, go out and buy everyone you know one of these, they’re gonna sell for R5 500, pre-orders start 27th September.

I’ll be getting one in early September to review so you can expect a follow up where I’ll give you guys the real low-down as to whether this is amazing as Demo-guy made it out to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I just have to go rinse the taste or corporate dick out of my mouth and we can resume broadcasting as usual 😉

-ST

18
Aug
10

There should be puppies here

The cutest little fuckers you’ve ever seen! Three day old happy, fat little puppies squeaking away in a puppy pile of no less than FOURTEEN pups.

There should be puppies here to brighten up your day and remind you that the world can be a pretty rad place from time to time, but like a total douche, I left my cell phone with all the pics on it sitting on the toilet.

How fucking random is that?! Why did I even put it there in the first place? Eeeeeeeedeeeeeeoooooottttttt.

To make up for the lack of puppies, here’s a kitten wearing a frog bonnet:

 

 

Um, yeah. That’s all I got today guys. But exciting news is that later today I’ve been invited to a press function to watch the guys from overseas demo the Nokia N8.

There better be a giant buffet there. That’s all I’m saying. Giant buffet and the phone gets a glowing review.

All together now.

Giant buffet.

-ST

17
Aug
10

The SlickTiger Help-A-Blogger In Need Initiative

Hi guys (*serious face).

There comes a time in every man, woman and child’s life when he, she or it becomes aware of something that previously he, she or it was not aware of before.

That time in my life came about when I was 25 years old and, trawling the internet one day for worthy causes that I could support to make the world we live in a better place, I, for the first time in my life, became aware of “bloggers”.

 

 

Bloggers, ladies and gentlemen, are not like you and me. You see, unlike you and me, bloggers are different from us because of a number of factors that I have researched thoroughly and dedicated my life to raising awareness of such as:

  • Their parents are cousins
  • They drank high quantities of alcohol during their formative years
  • Repetitive head wounds, and
  • Twitter

The epidemic of “bloggers” began about a year ago when online social-media website 2.0 platforms began to exist in the “blogosphere”, and were made popular through peer-to-peer MySpacial networks over Facebook.

Before the internet made them famous, no one had any idea that these people even existed and typically these “bloggers” spent most of their lives locked in basements eating gruel and communicating to one another in a series of wails and grunts.

Many argue the world was a better place when “bloggers” were chained in these subterranean lairs, such was the ignorance of the world at large back in those early days.

 

 

I implore you not to turn a blind eye to this epidemic! Pretending they don’t exist is not going to make this problem go away!

Instead, I encourage you to email tellthetiger@gmail.com and pledge money toward the Swiss bank account I have set up in order to help these unfortunate individuals and properly integrate them into society where they can find meaningful jobs as Refuse Collection Agents, Street Sanitation Officers or Public Relations Consultants.

 

 

So don’t delay, send all your banking details to tellthetiger@gmail.com today and join the SlickTiger Help A Blogger In Need Initiative, or SHABINI for short.

You CAN make a difference in the life of a “blogger” TODAY!

-ST

16
Aug
10

The Weekend Gets A Solid 8/10

Even though it’s fucking shitty Monday again and even though we’re all right back here, right where we were last week and even though no one’s boiled up any fucking coffee yet because everyone that works here are jerks and all those emails you chose to ignore on Friday are burning little holes of guilt in your inbox like smouldering cigarette cherries through your prep school blazer, even though all this shit’s happening, I think we can agree that the weekend that just past?

It was pretty awesome.

 

 

Mine kicked off with a few rushed beers with my main man SupaDan at Neighbourhood where we hurriedly tried to bang out a fresh storyboard for the next TigerTV extravaganza. All I can say at this stage is we’re taking things to the next level this time around and the shit we’ve got planned is going to make that whole necrophilia thing we did a few months back look like a big fucking joke.

See what I did there? Course you didn’t! Get some coffee in you fer chrissakes, you’re still half asleep 😉

Then right at the end of my drinks with Supa, this guy flags me down like he knows me and I look at him like I know him too, which is completely fucked up, and just as we’re about to do the whole, “Hey man! / Hey bro! / How things? / Yeah good and you? / Yeah good! / Well good to see you! / Yeah you too!” this guy says my favourite fucking sentence to me:

“Hey! Don’t you write that SlickTiger blog?”

To which I replied, “Fuck yeah! I am SlickTiger!” (affirming who you are through a fabricated alias is so fucking cool. It’s like someone coming up to you and saying “Hey! Look everybody! Batman!”).

 

 

And that’s how I met Bowlphilosophy, the guy who posted one of my favourite comments on the site so far, right under this post.

After that I went with my boss-lady to the Cape Town convention centre for the annual Highlands Ball hosted by the Keepers Of The Quaich.

For brevity’s sake I’m not going to go into all the details of what went down, but basically I tasted some of the best single malts money can buy, watched an enraged Scott slash a haggis to ribbons (some kind of tradition) and went dressed like this:

 

 

Then, as if my life wasn’t fucking weird enough, a crazy thing happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

See, right behind where we live on a wine-farm-that-shall-not-be-named, are enclosures for Anatolian Shepherds that we look after. They’re flippin’ MASSIVE dogs that mostly just bark all night and add to my sleep-deprivation-inspired madness but are also a lot of fun to pal around with because they’re so big and friendly.

Anyway, one of the Anatolians (Mercedes) has been pregnant for some time and at 4 on Saturday morning, she gave birth to two puppies.

J-Rab was on call for the puppies and rushed out the second the woman watching Mercedes called to say the puppies were breaching.

I half remember J-Rab running off in the wee hours to attend to the birth and then I went back to sleep. Six hours later, J-Rab still hadn’t returned and when she did, it was with the news that Mercedes had not given birth to two puppies, nor four puppies, but TEN FUCKING PUPPIES AND WAS STILL HAVING CONTRACTIONS!

An hour after that, it was 11 puppies. An hour after THAT I watched as puppy no. 12 was born.

Who knew one mammal could spit out so many little wet furry worms?!

 

 

Then while J-Rab and her aunt and cousins and I were all having lunch at Dornier and enjoying some fine Cab Sav, J-Rab gets a call that puppy no. 13 has been born.

At which stage we all poured another glass of wine, more than a little concerned that the world was about to be completely overrun by some kind of puppy apocalypse.

The final count, I shit you not, is 14 puppies. Mercedes was in labour for 18 hours in total before the last little squeaker plopped onto the straw and into the world.

That’s enough for an entire Iditarod Sled Dog team, just like in Iron Will! You know, the movie about the guy whose dad is killed in the mushing accident and so he decides to take part in a dog-sled race to save his family farm starring MacKenzie Astin? C’mon! Everyone knows that movie!

Anyway, bottom line is if this whole blogging gig doesn’t work out for me, I’m taking my Iditarod dog sled team to Alaska and there’s nothing you can say to stop me.

So now here I am, sandwiched between cheetah cubs on one side and 14 Anatolian puppies on the other.

And lemme tell ya, life couldn’t be better 🙂

So yeah, what did you get up to this weekend?

-ST

13
Aug
10

Tell The Tiger (Episode 10)

It’s not every day that I get juicy, sex-related mails in from the confused masses that write to Tell The Tiger, desperately seeking my advice on how to make their lives better.

Sometimes people write in with perfectly ordinary, everyday problems that I do eventually get around to answering when all the juicy sexy ones dry up. It’s not that I’m prejudiced or anything, like a father with countless mentally unhinged children, I love all the mails that are sent into TTT equally.

 

 

It’s just that some (like the guy whose girlfriend wanted him to pee on her in bed) stir a lot more shit than others and stirring shit is what Them’s Fightin’ Words is all about. Stirring shit or shooting the shit. Anything involving shit really.

So check, check, check it out yo, here’s this week’s reciprocate of my malevolent wisdom:

 

Hey man, you have to help me with this one.

I read this chick’s blog every now and again and it’s funny as hell. Except, I don’t like it when she reviews stuff. How do I tell her the reviews make me all melancholy and to keep the other stuff flowing more often? I know she’s going to take it the wrong way because she’s is mad as a bat, so I want to put it to her subtly, in a way that’s not going to get her panties into a knot and come after me with a cleaver or reveal my email address to all her readers or something like that?

Sincerely
unfunny guy

 

Hmm… I don’t mean to get all paranoid here, and maybe it’s just the crack talking, but this isn’t some kind of veiled, clever-word-gamey attempt at suggesting I should write less reviews is it?

 

 

I mean, let’s examine the facts here:

  • Fact no.1 Blog is funny as hell
  • Fact no.2 “She” reviews stuff
  • Fact no.3 “She” is mad as a bat
  • Fact no.4 unfunny guy fears some kind of drastic retribution for getting on “her” bad side…

I’d say it’s a pretty close fit EXCEPT my reviews don’t make people melancholy, they just piss people off. Checkout Jason’s comment on my Pearl Jam review, or Raymond’s comment on my Deftones review. Those guys are anything but melancholy, that’s fer damn sure.

Thing you have to realise about bloggers is that we’re stuck quite far up their own arses. Take me for instance, I’m at least 2/3rds of the way up there, which is probably just a little higher than the average.

As such, we don’t take kindly to criticism of any shape or form because God forbid anyone should disagree with what we think, say or feel about basically anything.

Bottom line, she won’t write less reviews just because you suggested it. BUT if you can provide constructive criticism about how she can improve her reviews, then you’re a lot less likely to come home after a stressful day of work and find she’s boiled your pet rabbit.

 

 

Failing that, just go in there guns blazin’. Sometimes bloggers need to get knocked off their high horses, in the long run you’re probably doing her a favour – just fake your email address 😉

That’s all the time we have for this week folks, but do keep your emails comin’ to tellthetiger@gmail.com. Don’t suffer in silence. I’m here for you.

Have a killer weekend 😉

-ST