Give Brando a Sweet

Brando, the agency I'm currently interning at, are running this really clever and fun project via Twitter. It's called Tweet Sweets and it makes going into work even more fun than it was before.

Some of you will probably have seen an awful lot of #imjusttestingthisatbrando and then, more recently, #tweetsweets appearing in my Twitter feed. Apologies for clogging up your feeds with annoying hashtags for a while, things should go back to normal now.

'But what the hell is going on?' you're wondering?

Well, the clever kids a Brando have hooked a gumball machine up to Twitter so that whenever someone sends a tweet to @Brando_Digital containing the hastag #tweetsweets.

There's a live webcam set up so when you tweet us a sweet you can watch us collect and eat the sweet. We also get up to all kinds of silliness and crazy antics just to entertain our tweeters (and to avoid having to do any real work).



I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing in the photo above but on Friday I made a fool of myself on camera by doing the Hucklebuck, the David Brent dance, playing Rocky and Harry Potter, among other things.

It's great fun and a great way of having conversations with people.

We've had an unbelievable amount of sweets tweeted in so far, the collective weight of everyone in the office has probably risen by several stone in the two days it's been live, I shudder to think how many sweets we'll all have eaten by the end of next week.

The magic gumball machine is resting for the weekend so it's ready to pump out sweets again come Monday morning.

Be sure to pop over to the Tweet Sweets Website on Monday, send us a sweet and make us do something silly.

Are you a Plank or an Owl?

Me, I'm neither. And never will be. I should hope you're the same.

Everyone's seen this new 'craze' sweeping the globe and clogging up my twitter stream - Planking and Owling.

I'm not going to soil this blog by posting pictures of either activity here - I'd rather post pictures of a certain female former minister for health dressed in her birthday suit - but if you don't know what they are a quick google image search will show you everything you need to know about this moronic activity.

Seriously, is this what we've become? I just don't get it. How or when did this become accepted as something that we not only tolerate but that we actually encourage people to do, and then look at their stupid photos afterwards?

We are (supposedly) an incredibly advanced race, capable of amazing and wondrous things. We've been to outer space and to the bottom of oceans. We've created the internet, a mindblowingly powerful communication tool.

And what do we use it for? To post photos of people lying on random objects and squatting as if they're about to poop on top of a chair/table/person/wherever the hell you think it's funny.

I despair, I really do.

Thankfully karma can be a bitch, and has a great way of righting some of the wrongs that these planks and owls have inflicted upon us.

I have no sympathy for this girl. But I do owe her a huge thanks, she made me laugh almost as much as the weird clown girl dancing to Beyonce.



Please be sure to share and more videos of spectacular planking fails.

Apologies for the amount of anger and vitriol in this post but it's Monday, I'll cheer up soon, I promise.

Right, I'm off to curl up in a ball and lie on a lit barbecue, I think it could catch on.

Ireland in Bitesize

I really enjoyed this video with some interesting and 100% accurate observations about Ireland from the brilliant Colm O'Regan.



Colm is playing at Whelan's tonight tonight (and I'll be there, not performing, possibly heckling) and you can find more info about his upcoming shows and read some of his previous articles he's written for The Cork News I suggest that you pencil in a free afternoon for these because once you've read one or two you'll want to read the whole back catalogue) at his website.

Now, time to go enjoy a bit of this rare sunny afternoon.