As you're all aware, the Raven thoroughly detests spammers and telemarketers and is always looking for ways to even things up a bit with them. Martijn Engelbregt of the EGBG Control Group in the Netherlands has come up with a completely brilliant idea. As he points out, telemarketers employ a "telescript"—a printed flowchart that contains all of your potential responses—to maintain control of the dialog. Engelbregt correctly notes that "this script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer."

See, the telescript gives the marketer a great deal of power because it keeps him or her one step ahead of you. So Engelbregt has come up with a delightfully effective counterscript that contains all of the marketer's potential responses to your statements.

Check out the flowchart and download it in .pdf format or click here. Now you are one step ahead and can direct traffic, as it were. I can't wait to get to the "What kind of toothpaste do you recommend?" bit. [Metafilter]

7:10:27 PM       

Earlier this year I ran into the Emperor Norton record label and fished around their artist listings. Very indie, very weird. I didn't realize what I was listening to and because of that the experience wasn't framed in comprehensible terms. In other words, sounded like a lotta crap. We're talking synthetic German-technobeat with scratchy pop lyrics that would be at home on a Mike Meyer's SNL "Sprockets" skit.

Turns out I'd had my first exposure to electroclash and, like most people, I wasn't eager to repeat the experience. But the essential component of electroclash is art, not music, and once you grasp this then the music part becomes much more interesting. Darren Keast takes this subject on in a story for the EastBay Express this week titled Turbocharged Freaks, and it's a fun read.

The reigning diva of this scene is arguably Peaches, the alter ego of Canadian-born schoolteacher Merrill Nisker. Sort of like Kim Deal meets Patty Donahue meets Deborah Upton. According to Keast, electroclash is the brainchild of Brooklyn impressario Larry Tee:

According to Tee, the producer-driven, DJ-fronted way of doing electronic music has failed. The remedy? A crop of "really fuckable stars," he suggests, who choreograph stage routines, don self-made costumes, devote at least as much time to crafting their images as punching buttons in the studio and, most important, actually sing. For Tee, the faceless, voiceless, and fashion-senseless are so last decade.

They run two labels (Go and Stop Records and ChicKs On Speed Records), make proper, gallery-exhibited art, sell themselves on cable TV, style their own clothes, write comic books and generally flout convention and question society's foibles in a wilfully sexy, visually stunning and slightly seedy manner.

Then came Tee's next act, W.I.T. ("Whatever It Takes"). Instantly, as the three cute ladies began their cute, choreographed attempts at kitschy pop, I felt an acute pang of nostalgia for the comparatively massive genius of Bananarama. This angsty feeling only increased when they proceeded to massacre the Cars' "Just What I Needed"—when I start feeling outrage over injustices done to the back catalogue of Ric Ocasek, then it's time to head for the bar, and quick.

Tee agrees that it can be a little shallow, but responds, "The next wave of artists coming up looks to be pretty musical and with some content that makes you stop and think."

"It depends, ya know," she says. "Sometimes people stand there with their arms folded, just staring at me. One guy in Glasgow kept yelling, 'This is shite!'"

9:27:33 AM