Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Vic.
1. Turtle Power!
It was World Turtle Day on Monday, and while I was a bit annoyed by the number of people who didn’t know the difference between a turtle, a tortoise and a terrapin, I did see some lovely photos of all the members of the Testudines order on Twitter. Yes, I am a nature geek.
As well as giving people the chance to share some ‘turtle-y’ great photos and ‘shellebrate’ all that is awesome about them on social media, the purpose of World Turtle Day was to help raise awareness of the issues affecting these animals.
This is a terrapin:
This a tortoise:
This hardcore mother hubbard is a snapping turtle.
And these are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – a man-turtle hybrid.
When the evil Shredder attacks, these budget suits; will chafe up your sacks…#WorldTurtleDay pic.twitter.com/jP1LRcQ6Py
— GoaT FacE (@EndhooS) May 23, 2016
2. The most devastating blow to Brexit so far
As a way of being ‘down with the kids’ the Brexit camp planned a ‘mad wicked’ event in Birmingham, hoping that the ‘yoof’ would get on board with their political messaging once their idols made it cool or something. But it didn’t go to plan.
The anti-EU gig was already in need of a ‘Little Bit of Luck’ after losing DJ Luck and MC Neat, followed by Sigma, Electric Swing Circus, and Ella Eyre. Now nearly all of the acts have pulled out of the pro-Brexit pop concert, BPop Live, citing the reason as not being aware it was a political event.
For those of you who parted with £23 for a ticket to see an amazing line up of Alesha Dixon, East 17, Sister Sledge and two members of 90’s boyband 5ive, I’m afraid you’ll probably have to make do with Nigel Farage, although The Poke were more optimistic about the revised line-up:
3. You’re a towel
For those of you wondering why Towel Day is a thing that exists, it’s all down to sci-fi author Douglas Adams, who died 15 years ago.
Fans of his work, which includes “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” carry a towel on May 25th every year. But why?
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
See, totally makes sense.
4. Google announces changes to AdWords
Earlier this week, Google did a big summit.
Basically, they banged on about ‘mobile-first’ and ‘micro-moments’ for ages, and then announced that they will be introducing new longer text ads (50% more characters), more granular bid adjustments for different devices, and new display ads for mobile. There will also be a complete redesign of the AdWords interface.
You can watch the announcement in all its tedious glory here.
Look out for our blog, which will provide a more in-depth run down of the new features next week.
5. Each to their own
There isn’t much to say about this really, other than a channel 4 documentary introduced us to some people known as ‘human pups’ who dress up as, and behave like, dogs.
Some of them put in more effort than others. Spot, for example, had a brilliant latex man-dog suit, whereas some of them resembled gimps more than they did dogs.
You can watch a clip below, or check out the whole show on All4
There’s a certain type of person who may be a human pup: anyone… #HumanPupshttps://t.co/IyGWMALO1X
— Channel 4 (@Channel4) May 25, 2016
