The Evening Standard in London is generally sold by vendors standing by tube stations and other strategic locations. They advertise their paper by shouting "Stannnnarrrrrrrr" and other almost unrecognisable versions of the name of their paper and generally stand by a little metal podium which has a poster on the front, detailing some salacious headline or another. Usually they will try to suck you i with something like "TV Star Dies" and then when you buy the paper desperate to find out which major celeb has died, you discover it's actually the bloke from the confused.com advert or something (he isn't dead, but maybe wishing it will make it come true).
In fact I have become so inured to this trick that a few years ago when it read "Punk Star Dead" I assumed it would be some minor figure from some unknown one hit wonder outfit and was then doubly stung to discover that it was in fact Joe Strummer. It seemed strangely insulting to him.
But often whoever writes these billboards has to edit the gist of a story down to four words, which can lead to some funny sentences. I think often these may be a deliberate attempt to have fun and to mess with people's heads. There was a great example today.
I was heading up to the Fortnight Club to do the new material night and saw a headline that my brain really struggled to make sense of -
It seemed to read "Deadly Skunk Floods London" and it took me fully five seconds to understand what it meant. Let's just say that the scenario I came up with, genuinely without trying to be funny, was much more interesting than what I eventually realised was the truth, that some new dangerously strong marijuana was being sold in bulk on the streets of my city. Instead I was imagining some renegade Pepe Le Peu deciding to take revenge on the world that had deemed him a joke and tampering with the Thames Barrier. It amused me as much that it took a few seconds for the jigsaw to slot into place in my head. I am sure the person who put the words together must have known what he was doing and it would be cool to live in an alternate universe where all the stories that you would prefer come true.
