I kinda like the “Sponsors of Tomorrow” campaign that Venables Bell & Partners put together for Intel. For reasons yet to be explained, Geek Chic remains a popular trend, and VBP has capitalized on it — humorously, cleverly, and in a visually distinctive way.

That said, the script for the spot embedded below drives me nuts. It features two nerds talking about the best way to cut a cake-cum-microchip (or maybe it’s supposed to be a motherboard, which wouldn’t make sense, but whatever). Eventually, a fed-up, presumably hungry fellow employee zips around the pair, lops off a corner of the cake, and walks off with a “Was that so hard?” expression.

By my thinking, the nerds’ response to this act of heresy should be hilariously geekified — like, “Fine. You explain to management how it’s supposed to work without a logic gate”, or, “I hope you enjoy the taste of that gallium arsenide core”, or anything that continues the nerds’ earlier conversation, wherein they discuss the cake as if it’s an actual microchip. (I’m not always a great copywriter myself, but I’m okay at spotting problems.)

Instead, the folks at VBP decided that one of the nerds should just look after the douchebag in question and shout, “Why don’t you just pop all the balloons and spit in the punch?” Which is fine in terms of cadence and consonance, but entirely misses the boat on continuity.

Of course, underlying all this is a far more important question: AM I THE ONLY IDIOT WHO OBSESSES ABOUT THESE THINGS? Take a look for yourselves and see if it’s as bad as I’m making out:

BEYONCE has come under fire for her lack of knowledge about ancient Egypt – by the country’s INDIANA JONES.

Revered historian Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief Egyptologist, reportedly called the pop star a “stupid person” while speaking to journalists during Beyonce’s recent tour of the Giza pyramids near Cairo.

Reporter Summer al-Gamal says Hawass, who claims he inspired Harrison Ford’s Raiders of The Lost Ark character, was annoyed by the pop star’s apparent lack of interest as she toured the ancient site.

According to Gamal, Hawass said, “I showed her the Sphinx and I gave her a book on King Tutankhamen,” during his self-guided tour.

The reporter says, “Then he stopped being diplomatic and said in anger, ‘She’s a stupid person and she doesn’t understand a thing and she doesn’t want to understand… She’s coming here to take pictures and that’s it.’”

[full story here]

[via BananaGuide]

[via CTRL+W33D, obvs]

A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city’s Olympic village.

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

–full story at BBC [via Towleroad]

Hmmm. If Tim Gunn were perusing that plan, he’d say “It’s a lotta look”. Sadly, I’m not Tim Gunn, so I’ll just suggest that it might be time to edit.

[via copyranter]

New warning on ‘perfect vaginas’

Women are undergoing surgery to create perfect genitalia amid a “shocking” lack of information on the potential risks of the procedure, a report says.

Research published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology also questions the very notion of aesthetically pleasing genitals.

–full story at BBCNews