Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine Volume II, Issue 31, Year AD MCMXCVII Monday, August 4th, 1997 ISSN 1482-0471 ------------------------------------------- URGENT: Important Notice Capital of Nasty is temporarely going down. The server on which the magazine resides, Scriba Org, is being turned off on August 4th and will be moved down to Atlanta. There it will be reconnected as soon as possible to re-establish service. Although mail will not be lost (you might just receive a notice of a non-fatal transient error), (un)subscriptions will take four days to be processed. The web-pages will be offline completely. If you need to get in touch with us, alternate e-mail addresses are provided as follows: CoN Editorial --> con@ifront.com Leandro A-N --> leandro@ifront.com Colin B. --> tyrannis@ifront.com Our server should be back into service by the next issue of CoN. Thank you for your patience, and special thanks to Gard for his excellent administration service, CoN Staff ------------------------------------------- Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible. Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a huge, unrecoverable error. ------------------------------------------- 1. Readers' Letters 2. Why women are always late 3. Marketing slogans screw up ------------------------------------------- This week's Golden Testicle Web Award goes to: The Darwin Award: It's an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. A celebration of natural selection at work. http://www.shsu.edu/~stdelr01/darwin/ ------------------------------------------- 1. Readers' Letters From: Brianne Date sent: Mon, 28 Jul 1997 01:42:52 -0400 (EDT) To: CoN Editorial Subject: FaceOff I liked your review of the movie because I completely agree with you. I think the film SUCKED. We left the theatre laughing. But, Cage's character's name is not Chester. It is Castor. I don't really know why I am compelled to point this out to you. I like your e-zine, though. It think it's pretty great. Brianne --[Editor's response]-- Dear Brianne, I thought Face Off was pretty terrible myself, but I keep on hearing people around me that it was great. It depends what you compare it with I guess. "The Island of Dr. Mureau" is bad, and "Face Off" is quite an amazing movie if compared to that. However if you really need to set a standard for what a bad movie is, I suggest renting out "Can't stop the music". If you love the village people, you find that Bruce Jenner has a sex appeal, all whipped together with bad disco music, you'll love this movie. Suddenly "Face Off" will win an oscar. =) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Mon, 28 Jul 1997 12:55:58 -0400 From: Lynwood@aol.com To: Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro Subject: Re: Capital of Nasty Errata Corrige II.29a Please cancel!!! Do not send to me by e-mailor any other way!!! I never subscribed to your alleged newsletter, or whatever you call that waste of time, energy and cyberspace. Therefore since I haven't subscribed, you should not be sending it out to me. DELETE MY E-MAIL ADDRESS FROM YOUR MAILING LIST. --[Editor's response]-- Dear Lynwood, ahhh, I just love getting these type of e-mails. Net-morons are the best, because they are dumb enough not to know how to use a computer, yet have managed through some error in the evolutionary chain (and some disfunctional gene) to evolve to a point where they know how to type on the keyboard. They also seem to find a certain degree of fascination for that upside down 'i' they use at the end of every sentence (although sentences are a little longer then the above example and better expressed). What's an e-mailor? E-mailor Moon? Must be some sort of new Japanimation E-Cartoon I wasn't aware of. Please, tell me more! Listen up, primate: when you subscribed you got a file which clearly listed the information on how to unsubscribe. Read it and develop a culture. It's not that hard. So re-read carefully that file and you'll be glad you did. Have a totally bitchin' day, I hope they feed you well at the zoo. Leandro+ p.s. Don't throw turd at the tourists. ------------------------------------------- 2. Why women are always late by Leandro+ Since my girlfriend promised me to write an article on "why guys never call", I will write about the fact that girls are never able to arrive in time. It is true that guys are messy (my room is the living proof of that), disorganized (ie. get ready for a trip 5 minutes before they go) and to often lose things (keys, glasses, the floppy disk my girlfriend gave me with the stories for CoN) but for sure we are (almost) never late. In fact I think that since a guy just puts on a pair of pants and a t-shirt that falls in the category a) looks fine and b) smells fine, he doesn't have to waste so much time in getting ready. Girls on the other hand first have to try on several hundred dresses, be upset because the dress they wore in their high school graduation is too small, and put unnecessary makeup to cover for some faults we never see anyway. What's the point? Guys can't tell the difference between two dresses or if her hair is different than it was the day before. A girl might say to a guy: "Meet me tomorrow morning at 9AM for breakfast at Caracas, by the big oak tree". You can be your left testicle (the right one is reserved for some special purposes which I am still investigating) that the guy will be waiting there for at 8:45AM if not earlier (there is a chance that he might completely forget about the appointment, in which case he should use the "deny all" technique, but that's another story). The girl will arrive at least half an hour late, smile, say "sorry, I'm late" (nooooo? really?) and before the guy can say anything, she will show him all the great things she bought at this amazing deal, while the poor guy couldn't care less about new shoes for women, or that dress. What does the girl expect us to say anyway? "Oh my gosh, those shoes are great! That dress is fabulous! Quick, where did you buy it?" and after finding out, we'd run there and try on the dress to make sure it fits us. If a guy is late, say by 2 minutes, and by golly, she happens to be there already, a guy has to be reminded a million times that she was there waiting for him (probably a whole 30 seconds, since she probably had just arrived there herself). She had to wait a while 120 seconds for you, and you better obtain your forgiveness somehow! Eventually the woman will giggle and smile and forgive you, since this can easily go for the time (out of the many) that she was late. "Now we're even" she'll say, while you are probably wondering how can 16 of her lates equal one of yours. The explanation is both cultural and genetic. Culturally since the bride always arrives late and everyone takes this as normal. The bride can arrive 2 hours late, and not a person wonders what happened or why she made everyone and the groom stand so long in the church. But what if the groom was late? I don't think the reaction would've been quite the same. Genetically males are built in being first. When I was born I decided to see the world before the due date, and I plopped out of my mom in an hurry. My sister on the other hand put my mother in a long awaited delay, until finally she decided to come out. My girlfriend asked me one day to wait for her at the subway station of Greenwood. After I had waited for one hour and a half, and decided to go home. I open the door of my house and I see her shoes at the entrance. I am greeted with a "geez, where were you?" "At the subway station waiting for you as you had asked" I snarled. "Oh, oops" she smiled "well, you should've called!" ------------------------------------------- 3. Marketing slogans screw up courtesy of Lizzy Maxine The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth." In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead." Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin' good" came out as "eat your fingers off." The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, "Salem - Feeling Free," got translated in the Japanese market into "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty." When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, it was apparently unaware that "no va" means "it won't go." After the company figured out why it wasn't selling any cars, it renamed the car in its Spanish markets to the Caribe. Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals". Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse. When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company mistakenly thought the spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It wont leak in your pocket and make you pregnant " An American t-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired "I Saw the Pope" in Spanish, the shirts proclaimed "I Saw the Potato." Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got terribly mangled in another Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused." Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before finding out that the phrase, in slang, means "big breasts." In this case, however, the name problem did not have a noticeable effect on sales. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno mag. In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water. Japan's second-largest tourist agency was mystified when it entered English-speaking markets and began receiving requests for unusual sex tours. Upon finding out why, the owners of Kinki Nippon Tourist Company changed its name. In an effort to boost orange juice sales in predominantly continental breakfast eating England, a campaign was devised to extoll the drink's eye-opening, pick-me-up qualities. Hence the slogan, "Orange juice. It gets your pecker up." [Please keep Lizzy Maxine in your prayers tonight. She is fighting bravely against cancer. This however has not stopped her yet from laughing. -Ed.] ------------------------------------------- Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine "media you can abuse" In memory of Father Ross "Padre" Legere. Published every monday (or Tuesday) Disclaimer: unintentionally offensive. Comments and Queries welcomed. http://www.capnasty.org/capnasty - ISSN 1482-0471 CoN is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. CoN is available on Usenet newsgroups: alt.zines, alt.ezines Or, to subscribe, send a message to join@capnasty.org Brought to you by C.C.C.P. (Collective Communist Computing Proletariat) Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro Colin Barrett Special thanks to Summer Scarbough for the Nasty Acclamations. ZimID 708EC8D1 1994/09/14 EC B0 97 59 1D FE 7C 32 7E 04 2C 66 47 41 FB 7D