Taglines
I believe that Hollywood films would attract even more viewers if their taglines, instead of being
epigrams, were in fact
acrostics. I give some examples below.
Windtalkers
Where
Is
Navajo?
Do
Tell
All -
Look!
Kill
Enemy
Raiders
Soon.
Insomnia
Inspector
Not
Safe!
Or
My
Next
Investigative
Assistant.
One Hour Photo
Ordinary
Natural
Employee
He
Obtains
Uncertain
Revenge
Perhaps
He
Observes
The
Others?
Frida
Female
Rider
In
Da
Accident!
Signs
Strange
Icons
Gonna
Nurture
Suspicion
(This was inspired by two things. Firstly, there is an Asian video shop along the route my bus takes (in Britain 'Asian' generally means 'from the Indian subcontinent' and not 'from the orient' although it can mean the latter as well). There are posters for Bollywood films, all of which have oddly mistranslated taglines. Some of them feature a man called 'Baba' who holds up his index and little fingers, sign of the bull 'heavy metal' style.
There's a film, I can't remember the name, and the tagline is:
"Known... is a drop! Unknown... is an ocean!"
Which seems to make sense... at first. But the more you think about it, the less it means, like that reggae song 'The more I find out the less I know' by that guy, you know, early 70s.
The second inspiration is a dream I had in which I was teaching a class at university in the art of the acrostic, and I wrote this on a blackboard:
Flotilla
Fuel
Lines
On
Top -
Tits
Away!
Which, as you might notice, is actually an acrostic of 'FLOTTA'. Which sounds like a scandinavian girl's name.
Michael Caine on 'Jaws IV: The Revenge'
~
"I have not seen the film, which is by all accounts terrible. I have, however, seen the house it built, which is fantastic."
Clouds
~
It is a little-known fact that all European clouds and cloud formations are actually produced by a company based in Cheshire, England; the clouds are pumped out of a giant machine, wound up, and set free to patrol the skies. In order to protect them from bird strikes they are coated with a thin layer of silver (lead was used until the 1970s, but was banned when it was discovered that clouds which had fallen into the North Sea were poisoning the cod).
Unfortunately, competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East has resulted in job cuts in the cloud factories. EU subsidies have redressed the balance, but have resulted in a 'cloud mountain', which smothers Lyons and has depressed the tourist trade there.
A further problem affecting the cloud industry is 'Mad Cloud Disease', which causes clouds to misbehave by, for example, moving against the wind, or suffocating flocks of geese. Fortunately the RAF have so far prevented this disease from spreading beyond Jersey.
Advances in cloud technology have come thick and fast in the last twenty years; modern cumuli-nimbi are usually fitted with USB ports for connection to a standard Windows PC, which can be used to diagnose faults in the cloud in the manner of a modern Formula 1 race car.
Clouds are also an indispensable weapon in the war against terror. Their appearance is unthreatening and they have a reassuring effect on the British public. Rain can also be used to put out fires, and when was the last time a cloud planted a bomb? Never, that's when.