Volume 521

07/02/2025

Mustards of the Universe.

So, the Grammys happened. Beyonce won album of the year and made a funny face. Taylor Swift danced like a character from The Sims (which, coincidentally, got re-released this week). Bianca Censori became Bianca Uncensored. And Chappel Roan had a Chappel moan. But the big winner of the night was Kendrick Lamar.?

Kendrick picked up 5 awards as well as the adulation of his peers… for a song in which he repeatedly calls someone a nonce. Culture. It’s nice to see secondary school-level humour getting its moment on the big stage. And when Kendrick wins, so does his producer Mustard (whose real name is Dijon).??

Like his namesake, Mustard typically plays second fiddle to Kendrick’s ketchup, which really highlights the potency of nominative determinism. That’s the same phenomenon that saw Usain Bolt become a sprinter, Svetlana Filippova become a diver and Richard Madeley become a… never mind. But second fiddle no more, because Mustard has just partnered with Heinz for a Mustard x Mustard collaboration. Krafty. Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of your face. Condiments to the chef. Although I suspect Drake will be more of a mayo man henceforth.??

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Ole & Steez.

Denmark and the US haven’t been on the best terms of late. You make one little comment threatening a sovereign state’s territorial integrity and everyone throws a hissy fit. Bloody snowflakes. You can’t say anything these days. This is PC gone mad. Insert fourth platitudinous Daily Mail lamentation. We’re joking, obviously. Of course you can’t just buy Greenland… Can you???

In a beacon of hope for Danish-US relations, Copenhagen-based audio brand AIAIAI have teamed up with the Californian creative collective Brain Dead for a new headphone collaboration celebrating LA culture. And of course they’re wired, because apparently technological regression has become a fashion statement. Taste is cyclical, history rhymes, everything is ephemeral, nothing is real. At least they look aptly fire.?

Hopefully this serves as a reminder that we can all get along if everyone abides by the rules-based order of the liberal world. Even if this particular combination of brand names feels like a portentous prophecy of humanity’s AI-driven extirpation.??

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Opera-AI.

Speaking of AI-driven extirpation…??

DeepSeek have changed the game. Alphabet are in the soup. Meta is metastasizing. Nvidia are having a tougher time than Richard Branson trying to spell Nvidia. The walls are closing in on OpenAI – they might have to whack another whistleblower to cheer themselves up (allegedly). In fact, the only Silicon Valley titan to emerge unblemished is Apple, who decided not to throw billions at building AI capabilities so can now sit back and pick the best models from a newly commoditised selection.?

Long story short: our AI Promethean fire is ablaze. That’s an imperfect metaphor because Prometheus was condemned to an eternal cycle of torment in which an eagle would return to eat his liver each day, whereas the unelected tech oligarchs who brought us AI are set to reshape the social contract in whatever manner they see fit (their words, not ours).??

But if we’re going down, we may as well go down swinging… and singing. The British Columbia Securities Commission launched a musical PSA this week to remind humanity that ‘we’re not all f**ked’. Feel better? Neither. This song will be the last thing you as a cold-metal hand seizes hold of your trachea.??

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Unhinged.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Nobody. There wasn’t a knock. You don’t even have a door. And you’re not really here. Descartes’ Deus Deceptor strikes again.??

When people say they have an open-door policy, they don’t mean it. They want you to think they care about what you have to say, but they don’t expect you to ever actually say it. Same goes for ‘Does anyone want something from the shops?’. What do you mean, ‘yes’? The temerity. The nerve. The gall. I was just being ersatz-polite. I have no intention of buying you a pint of milk.??

A good way to avoid any potential confusion: remove the doors entirely. That’s what KFC did, highlighting their 24/7 service by turning once-locked entrances into billboards featuring zingers like “who needs doors if you’re always open?” and QR codes with directions to the nearest restaurant.???

That knock-knock joke may have been a dud but at least we now finally know why the chicken crossed the road… het got out after KFC took away all their bloody doors.???

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McRituals.

The human condition is fundamentally absurd. Existence precedes essence; we are aware of the inherent meaninglessness of life, yet we persist in our attempts to find some semblance of logos. Rituals serve as a form of resistance against the absurd, creating fleeting moments of coherence in an indifferent universe and serving as a counterpoint to the randomness of life. That was the foundational insight for McDonald’s’ latest campaign. At least we’re pretty sure it was something like that…?

‘Only at McDonald’s’ is a new brand platform and campaign highlighting the relatable rituals, quirks and idiosyncrasies associated with Maccies – like swapping gherkins, dipping fries in milkshake, sticking a hash brown in a McMuffin, or breaking up a fight at 3am. You can tell it’s not real because the ice cream machine wasn’t broken.??

The campaign adopts a minimalist visual approach to focus on familiar fan truths, subtly leveraging the brand’s infamous iconography rather than ramming it down our gullets. And they deserve credit for the bold move of removing the logo from the OOH executions… or at least they would if Kellogg’s, Tesco, BA and Heinz hadn’t all recently done basically the exact same thing.??

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Aura Points.

This week Stephen Fulton defeated Brandon Figueroa to claim the WBC featherweight world championship. But he also gained something far more important than mere trifles and appurtenances of glory like shiny belts. He gained… aura.??

Fulton stole the show – not with his pugilistic prowess, but with his outfit. He turned up to scrap looking like he’d just come from a barbecue that got out of hand, sporting jorts and a pair of Timberlands…?

…or so it seemed. In reality, Fulton’s fight gear was an entirely regulation simulacrum of sartorial nonchalance. But never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In our image-obsessed society, appearance trumps reality. Fulton looked like someone’s drunk uncle, and that’s all that matters. Nobody even remembers that the fight itself was a certified snooze-fest. The now-iconic image of Fulton was shared far and wide, and his profile exploded overnight. Just like that, he has etched his name in the annuls of history and will be immortalised as ‘that boxer who won a world title in jorts’. That’s real legacy shit. Even though I’ve already forgotten his name despite typing it five times in the last few minutes.??

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