Whilst flicking through a wildlife magazine the other day looking for something to take the piss out of (yes, I’m in that sort of mood) I came across a couple of perfect targets. Needless to say, both were adverts...
The first offending piece of marketing bollocks was for a ‘High Powered Telescope’ with 60x magnification. Every time they mentioned the 60x magnification it said ‘6000%’ in brackets. Three times in a full page advert. Who ever measured optical magnification as a percentage? No-one (at least no-one sane). That figure is there simply to impress idiots.
There was also a little inset bit that read ‘Observe wildlife, sports, the night sky, in detail, from a distance.’ Question: how the fuck else are you going to observe the night sky other than ‘from a distance’?
But the advert got better. If you buy this amazing 6000% magnification scope from them (for a mere £79.95, saving £120 on the price it was being sold at three years ago), you also get a FREE SPY SCOPE (worth £9.95)!! This appears to be a pen, but no, wait, it has ‘precision-engineered optical lenses, so powerful you can see up to 7 miles away!’
Only 7 miles? I can see further than that through a fucking toilet roll. I can see about 230,000 miles if I look at the moon through my precision-engineered bog roll. And if I look elsewhere in the night sky (yes, even from a distance) I can see objects up to a couple of million light-years away through my 1x magnification (100%) cardboard tube. And I can wipe my arse on the ‘special paper’ that came with it – bet you can’t do that with your ‘spy scope’!
There was one more item in the magazine which caught my jaundiced eye. I’d better not name it, but it was some sort of clip to stop your bins swinging while you’re walking along with them round your neck. The description said ‘A new “must-have” accessory... a device which is fixed to the binoculars or camera and then clipped to the user’s coat or shirt preventing the inevitable bounce and swing...’
This sounds like exactly the sort of pointless invention that regularly gets laughed out of Dragons’ Den. I can just imagine Duncan Bannatyne (if he was a birder, which as far as I know he isn’t, and if he was allowed to swear on the programme) saying: “The only person who would find this useful would be someone who hardly ever uses their binoculars. I want to be able to get my bins up to my eyes in a fraction of a second; any longer than that and the bird I want to look at might have moved or disappeared. I don’t want to be pissing around undoing a fucking clip before I can lift them, and for that reason, I’m out.”
The first offending piece of marketing bollocks was for a ‘High Powered Telescope’ with 60x magnification. Every time they mentioned the 60x magnification it said ‘6000%’ in brackets. Three times in a full page advert. Who ever measured optical magnification as a percentage? No-one (at least no-one sane). That figure is there simply to impress idiots.
There was also a little inset bit that read ‘Observe wildlife, sports, the night sky, in detail, from a distance.’ Question: how the fuck else are you going to observe the night sky other than ‘from a distance’?
But the advert got better. If you buy this amazing 6000% magnification scope from them (for a mere £79.95, saving £120 on the price it was being sold at three years ago), you also get a FREE SPY SCOPE (worth £9.95)!! This appears to be a pen, but no, wait, it has ‘precision-engineered optical lenses, so powerful you can see up to 7 miles away!’
Only 7 miles? I can see further than that through a fucking toilet roll. I can see about 230,000 miles if I look at the moon through my precision-engineered bog roll. And if I look elsewhere in the night sky (yes, even from a distance) I can see objects up to a couple of million light-years away through my 1x magnification (100%) cardboard tube. And I can wipe my arse on the ‘special paper’ that came with it – bet you can’t do that with your ‘spy scope’!
There was one more item in the magazine which caught my jaundiced eye. I’d better not name it, but it was some sort of clip to stop your bins swinging while you’re walking along with them round your neck. The description said ‘A new “must-have” accessory... a device which is fixed to the binoculars or camera and then clipped to the user’s coat or shirt preventing the inevitable bounce and swing...’
This sounds like exactly the sort of pointless invention that regularly gets laughed out of Dragons’ Den. I can just imagine Duncan Bannatyne (if he was a birder, which as far as I know he isn’t, and if he was allowed to swear on the programme) saying: “The only person who would find this useful would be someone who hardly ever uses their binoculars. I want to be able to get my bins up to my eyes in a fraction of a second; any longer than that and the bird I want to look at might have moved or disappeared. I don’t want to be pissing around undoing a fucking clip before I can lift them, and for that reason, I’m out.”
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