Mostly This:

Unbearable blandness of unofficial olympic advertising.  Meanwhile Nike and Lucozade have fallen into the “can’t be bothered” camp too with there “stick an athelete on it” approach to trying to shave off some london 2012 glory.

If you can’t stand out - don’t waste your time. 

Clearly the agencies involved had something better to do that afternoon. Plus the limitations of attempting to do a london 2012 advert when you can’t mention anything to do with the olympics.

3/10 could do better.

Lazy minds, think alike. BMW’s olympic campaign is one of the least inspiring pieces of advertising ever, but when it came to the outdoor they seem to have reached new lows of blandness.

What you see about isn’t two BMW adverts, Its a BMW and a VW ad. They are bascially identical.  Come on VW/BMW shake a leg, make your agencies earn their money. 

Veet Petit! Here’s a PS Vita….. erm BOX, it’s what you get when you put a £25 deposit on one at game, has some PS branded headphones inside, and a PSN voucher for money £5 off selected titles, ‘early access’ to Frobisher Says and some virtual goods. Roll on Feb 22nd

Official ‘underground street art’ Disney Vinyl Toys, once you had to score the backstreets of Hoxton or soho to find niche toys like this, now they are in the disney store! 

Angry Bird’s Flapjacks with rice (uk translation egg custard slices)

I made this recipe from the angry birds cookbook with the kids:

The book is great fun, but very american.  So a cup of flour = 110grams (4 oz) 

and 1 cup of liquid = 8 fluid oz (1/2 an american pint).

The flapjacks turned out to be nothing of the sort, but were delicious all the same, I’d do again with some nutmeg and cinnamon, and serve with some spun sugar.  The kids seems to like it once they realised it was just a custard pudding.  

My friend Thayer’s tweets this morning reminded me to load up some Nokia Music Radio Playlists, it’s a sweet free app, thats ‘very like’ Last.fm. The downloadable playlists are a major bonus when travelling/commuting etc. It’s basically radio without the adverts or presenters, a nice alternative to when your music is all a bit ‘last upload’ 

The Symbian iPlayer app was the only one that had this feature, download the shows at home, watch on the move. I hope the WP7 iPlayer app will continue this killer feature.

Angry Books: I went along to the launch of Rovio Books at Nokia House this week, the star title being the Angry Birds Cook Book - a lovely illustrated book of egg related recipies from the games pigs.  But they also launched some activity books called ‘Doodle Books’ as you can see these went down VERY well with my kids, as well as the cook book, which was pored over by my oldest.  

The popularity of Junior Bake Off and Angry Birds making this a topical delight.

The books are out now, at amazon and several other retailers.

X Factor: Likes <> Votes?

Last year I looked at the number of likes in facebook for each of the act’s pages

http://mostlythis.com/post/1619576267/whos-going-to-win-x-factor-does-facebook-give

The correlation between likes and voting off was very close last year, this year there is less granularity between the acts. with two way out in front - Frankie and Janet. Frankie has already been in the bottom two. Sophie, midtable has gone, But theres not much between the acts, and the numbers are way down.

Last year several acts had around 100,000 or more, this year only Janet does.

Apathy seems to have set in a little.

Janet 232,684

Frankie 78,461

The Risk 35,592

Micha 35,022

Marcus 32,485

Sophie 31,969

Craig 28,760

Little Mix 24,826

Johnny 23,709

Sami 15,428

Kitty 14,079

Nu Vibe 13,550