Rock and pop groupies tell all in anonymous forum

The insatiable David Bowie is a rock star who groupies continue to lust after and rave about, and we hear that he's into orgies and videotaping his encounters. David isn't too picky when it comes to race or gender, but he does have a taste for "the beautiful people." If you look like Camilla Parker-Bowles, you'll probably be out of luck in getting David to show an interest in you. As David's wife Iman can tell you, David is also fascinated with black women, so all you gorgeous ebony ladies who want to experience Bowie might have a great chance with him. Bowie also likes his regular sex partners to have a certain amount of intelligence. If you're an airhead who doesn't know the difference between Rambo and Rimbaud, you'll quickly be out of favor with Bowie.

When I was a teenager, books like Pamela Des Barres' poorly-written tell all I'm With The Band and Rock and Roll Babylon were infamous for spilling rockstars' sexual secrets.

But thanks to our internet age, the groupies have organized and are broadcasting many musicians' private moments to the world under a cloak of anonymity on the forum, groupiedirt.com

Rammstein lead vocalist Till Lindemann has gotten mixed reviews for his sexual technique. He's been described as both a good lover and a lousy lover whose penis is hung like a peanut. If you want to get together with Till, don't expect him to treat you like an equal. He's reportedly very sexist who sees women as being good for only one thing.

As usual, this gives the people in question no possible way to defend themselves, as rumour and speculation abound.

The members Insane Clown Posse are rude, crude, and treat their groupies like dirt, according to women who've been with them. The clowns are so desperate for attention that they'll take practically any groupie, no matter what she looks like. Violent J has a big penis but he doesn't have much stamina (one woman said he lasts about five minutes), and he's secretly self-conscious about being overweight. And if you start to lose interest in him, he will start treating you with abusive and hateful behavior. 

Is any of this true? Nobody knows. But like the ridiculous backstage riders on The Smoking Gun, it makes great guilty pleasure reading.

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich is "unforgiven" for being a sexual disappointment. One groupie who had him said his technique is "wham bam thank you maam" and Lars sometimes has trouble getting up his uncircumcised penis. We also hear that Lars talks too much and his fondness for alcohol and cocaine "doesn't make for a lot of fun...paranoid and a limp dick!" We also hear Lars likes lesbian sex, but then again, most men do. Meanwhile, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has earned high praise for his lovemaking abilities, with one lady describing him as "fantastic" with a "gorgeous dick." Kirk is an admitted bisexual swinger who's been known to frequent sex clubs with his wife. Bass guitarist Jason Newsted is also a great lover, according to one lady who says that he was able to satisfy to her needs.  

The site focusses on classic rock and newer pop, with very few hip hop, R&B or soul references (Ice T gets honourable mention for his love of "white pussy").

I guess their groupies are more discreet than those of the boy bands?

This boy band believes in having a lot of girlfriends. AJ loves to give the ladies backdoor action. Kevin is a less than faithful husband. Cutie pie, Nick Carter, has a weakness for model types. 

And not even the "girl groups" are spared...

They might have looked sweet in their videos, but these girls are not innocent. Back in their heyday, they made an after concert video with a drunk roadie. While the roadie masturbates, the girls are giggling in the background. Later in the video, Kathy Valentine shoves a vibrator up the roadie's ass when he is passed out on a hotel room bed.

Of all the ones I've read so far, this is my favourite:

Former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones is no stranger to groupies. He's said to be crudely average and people say that he likes picking up sleazy hookers. Lead singer Johnny Rotten despises groupies. Actually, he despises most people. Groupies who want to avoid cruel rejection are advised to steer clear of Johnny, who is reportedly very devoted to his longtime wife. 

Iggy Pop, by the way, is conspicuously absent.

You can spend hours there. Check it out.

Tip via Buzzfeed

1995 AOL commercial

Isn't that Apollo and Starbuck from the first BSG series?

In 1995, I got my first agency job (after 5 years of freelancing). This is how much things have changed since then:



I'm also amazed how crappy the ad is. The acting and production values made me worried they were about to get naked. But then again, what possible connection could you make between the internet and porn?

Lindsay Lohan is shooting commercials from her house arrest

There's shameless, and then there's LiLo:



Popeater says, "Apparently you can't keep this working girl down. Lindsay Lohan who has been spending some court ordered time at home as of late hasn't let her staycation go to waste. The house arrest ham filmed a commercial from the confines of her cozy quarters to the tune of more than $25,000."

$25 K for 18 seconds hawking penny auctions? That's some hard time she's doing...

F'd Ad Fridays: Hated in France

This video, from France's government body in charge of enforcing copyright, seems to have hit a nerve. The YouTube page is being barraged with dislikes and nasty comments.



As Redditt user BarnabyJones_ comments, "The latest ad campaign from the french government agency in charge of enforcing copyright laws on the internet looks like the biggest troll of all time, but it's real."

He provides this translation:

"French-slovene Emma Leprince started to sing and DJ in underground bars. With influences such as Voltaire, Zola and DJ Fritas (?), this little music prodigy brilliantly combines neo-electro with hard hitting engaged lyrics. Discover "I prefer your clone", her first international single.

French revelation of 2022 - and without Hadopi, Emma Leprince may not be able to release this single in 2022.

Hadopi - Protect today what will be created tomorrow"

Why do they hate it so much? The HADOPI Law, or "Loi favorisant la diffusion et la protection de la création sur Internet" puts the responsibility on Internet users to ensure that no unlicensed copyrighted material is passed through their IP address. In a cryptic "three-strike" process, the user goes from being warned that an infringement has taken place (without specifics), to being monitored by their ISP, and finally banned from the Internet (or at least from the ISP) for up to a year.

All to protect that poor, innocent future pop diva. Because, of course, it's all about the artists...

Kids GIS the darndest things

This could have been a really great campaign about unfortunate Google Image Searches that kids make. But instead of taking it to the next level, the creative team gutterballed it:

“Let kids stay kids. Use parental control.”

"Wet Pussy"? Was that really the best you could come up with? How likely would it be that a kid young enough not to know the slang would choose those exact two words, as opposed to the more common "cat", or "kitty"...

And this one's just annoying, not only because of the improbability of "black cock" as an innocent search, but also because it feeds off of that racist sexual fetishism some people have for black men.

As a parent, I know how this kind of thing really goes down. It's the truly innocent search for "beaver", "facial", or even "toe" that ends up in the bad place. And those examples (only the tip of the iceberg) are far more shocking and more likely to be stumbled upon.

These ads are actually by DDB, Buenos Aires, so I wonder if there's a language issue at hand here. Perhaps they just used the limited English slang that they (and their audience) know.

Via I Believe in Advertising

Don't believe everything you read

The Daily Mail  reports one of the most obvious stories imaginable: that kids will believe anything they see.

Donald Leu, a researcher from the New Literacies Research Lab the University of Connecticut, told a group of American students (age not given) to read about the "endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus" online.

They were directed to this site:

The kids bought it. Leu says that even when they were told the site was fake, the students refused to believe they had been had.

"Most students simply have very little in the way of critical evaluation skills," said Dr.Leu. "They may tell you they don’t believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do. It's a cause for serious concern.

"Anyone can publish anything on the Internet, and today’s students are not prepared to critically evaluate the information they find there."

This study bothers me for a couple of reasons.

First of all, as far as I can tell the kids were told to go to the site by someone in authority. That means they were lead on under a sort of institutional credibility. Why shouldn't they believe what they are told at school? Skeptical students are often treated like behaviour problems. Just ask my genius big brother.

Second, why should they think a tree octopus is preposterous? Maybe they had seen one before, in the speculative documentary The Future is Wild.



This show has real scientists talking about conceivable future creatures, as they are rendered in fairly realistic CG. My son loves it.

And believing everything you see on the internet is hardly a generational thing. Has Leu never visited Snopes Urban legends Reference Pages? Cryptozoology sites? Free Republic? Answers in Genesis?

Yes, children need to be taught to be more skeptical and critical of media. But so does everyone else, of any age.

Besides which, this message has already been delivered in a far better way. With House Hippos.

Online identity theft

I'm not talking about the kind of fraud that runs up your credit card, destroys your reputation, and gets you on a watch list for your apparent love of dead puppy porn. No, this is even worse in some ways.

Adrants today posted about an anonymous woman from a convention whose pic he took and used on a post from some time ago.

She is also on his Flikr.

Well, today this shot of an unknown woman came back to haunt him — quite unexpectedly — in a cheap PPC ad.

 He points out that neither the woman, nor he (the photographer) consented to this use.

This isn't the first case of stolen identity showing up in the digital world. In 2007, The Smoking Gun reported that a British teen's online "sexy" picture (taken when she was just 14) ended up on the cover of an American porn DVD.

The fact is that unscrupulous designers and fly-by-night ad scammers frequently steal images to save time and money.

I captured this one last year:

That's French newscaster (and nerd heartthrob) Mélissa Theuriau. There are hundreds of photos of her posted on Google, yet the person who booked this ad didn't seem to realize subtlety can pay off.

Or not, as the internet has a way of uncovering even the most obscure intellectual property theft, like this Missouri family whose picture ended up in a retail ad in Prague.

How can you protect yourself and your family from becoming the unwitting spokespeople for some bizarre cult or flavoured personal lube? You can't really. Not completely, anyway.

Every photo you post to Facebook, Flikr, etc. that is publicly available can be downloaded or screen grabbed by anyone. Even profile pictures in forgotten online groups, or old shots scanned and posted by former friends and lovers, can be stolen and reused. It isn't legal, it isn't fair, but it is possible.

You can start by cleaning up your old albums and tightening up your security settings. But to be quite honest, the genie is out of the bottle. You might as well accept that you are only protected by your anonymity, and try not to do anything to get the scammers' attentio....

God Dammit...

Copywronging

I really hate to do this, because it's an important campaign for a very serious cause, but who on earth let these ads run with this headline?




If you don't get it, don't feel bad. It just means you're less cynical and paranoid than the average agency or client person. We have to let our minds crawl into the gutter to troubleshoot headlines and images for unintentional (and very unfortunate!) double entendres or easy and damaging parodies. Something everyone involved in these ads seems to have failed to do.

There's a third execution, BTW. And I have no issue with it.



I've seen this campaign on the sides of busses in Ottawa since before Christmas, but failed to get a picture in time. Ironically, I could never remember the call-to-action, and I was afraid that even trying to Google the campaign would get me on some sort of RCMP watchlist. Just this morning, though, I finally found a story about it on CTV.

Cybertip.ca, a national tip line for suspected cases of child exploitation on the Internet, gets operating money from communications giants Bell, Telus, Shaw, MTS Alstream, and SaskTel, among others — including the Government of Canada and the Government of Manitoiba (where the project began).

Obviously, it's in everyone's interest to protect kids while still keeping the Internet reasonably liberated. But as both a creative professional and a parent, I just think it's a shame they didn't look at that copy one more time.

Still don't see it? Good for you. It's better that way.