Cunning as serpents

Y’know those Dove firming cream ads full of sexy women in their undies, the ones that have various moonbats howling because the cuties violate the ad agencies’ traditional zero-tolerance guidelines for plumpness?

Well, Majikthise points out that this ad campaign is brilliantly designed to obscure the fact that the product being sold doesn’t work.

UK Hugos for a UK Worldcon

Odd things about this BBC News article about British SF:

• Even though it’s about written SF, the photo is a Doctor Who publicity still, and the first paragraph mentions the TV series.
• Not only are all of the Best Novel Hugo nominees by British authors, but two of them have the word “iron” in the title.
• Charles Stross is quoted so as to ascribe the ascendence of British SF to American preoccupation with 9/11, even though his own nominated novel, Iron Sunrise, is about terrorism and weapons inspections.
• The two fantasy novels on the list — China Miéville’s Iron Council and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — are both set in the 19th century, and therefore not futuristic at all, except perhaps by the standards of the Tolkien-derived pseudo-medieval swords-and-sorcery that until recently dominated fantasy.

I expect a list of Hugo winners will show up on my Friends page within seconds of their being announced; perhaps even while, if the con’s wi-fi extends far enough. I can just about imagine autopope winning, and blogging about it on the way up to the podium.