Cherryflava

Festive idea: A way to have a VERY Merry and Green Christmas

Posted on 05. Dec, 2007 by Jonathan Cherry.

All the beer drinking that you have done all year can finally be put to good use this Christmas season… and we don’t just mean your acquired beer belly that will nicely fill out the red suit as you play Santa to the kids…or the wife.

Besides, no one will point any fingers at your festive boozing if they think that you are doing it to save the trees.

Here’s a cracking festive idea: Round up all those empty beer bottles lying around the house and construct your own Christmas tree. Since there will be no pine needles or fake Christmas tree branches to sweep up, the cleanup afterwards will be minimal, because you can just recycle the whole lot. Great news, since having to clean when you are sporting a massive hangover is never any fun.

Now if that isn’t enough to get you into the Christmas spirits, we don’t know what will!

[Via]

SA’s Battle of the Bands takes the fight online

Posted on 05. Dec, 2007 by Jonathan Cherry.

At Stellenbosch they used to have a kickin’ Battle of Bands competition every year in the dark, skanky corridor just outside The Neelsie.
The concrete venue kinda added a nice reverb onto any wayward, over-powered and mistimed guitar riff, sending the members of the makeshift moshpit into an excited frenzy, which just added to the live appeal of the event.

Times have changed, The Neelsie is now a shopping mall [sniff] and the Battle of the Bands has embraced digital access and gone online.

Sarah sent us a heads up about the HP Design Your Personal Life Battle of the Bands competition. If you’re a wannabe rock star, this may be your chance to get your stuff off MySpace and into an arena that could win you fame and glory, coke and chicks.

It all ends with the Top 5 public voted bands taking an international stage, which will be hooked up with the rest of the world via satellite broadcast. Worth playing for?

It’s a nice way of getting more people to discover new bands – but doesn’t come close to the experience of stumbling over them in a smoky, pewk and pee saturated pit.

See: Design your personal life – HP

Doc Martens rebirth – Part 2

Posted on 04. Dec, 2007 by Jonathan Cherry.

90′s grunge fashion icon brand Doc Martens are still determined to come back into vogue.

After their last shockvertising attempt, which featured Kurt Cobain print ads – loads of viral coverage and a Courtney Love lawsuit…and bombed terribly – they’ve hired a new ad agency and are trying a different angle of approach.

The campaign, by Exposure Communications of London, features young
models wearing Docs with grunge- and punk-inflected outfits and
expressions of bored disaffection; the spots are appearing in the
United States, Britain, France and Germany in publications like Teen
Vogue, Spin and British GQ.

The shoes have also stomped into
numerous magazine editorial features and fashion spreads, appearing
recently in GQ, Vogue, Seventeen, Lucky and Us Weekly (which declared,
“They’re baack!”)

Well in true ‘design your own’ fashion – the agency has also created a website which allows you to design the next Doc boot. Apparently more than 11 000 designs have already been submitted.

But can fashion trends really be dictated to by corporations with big ad budgets?

The whole reason Docs became fashionable in the first place was because they represented the very essence of anti-commercialism that grunge stood for. Ironic then that their possible resurrection could be in the hands of profiteering capitalist corporation.

If the brand makes a comeback, we’ll know for sure.

Design your own: DMbootdesign.com
More: Anti-fashion icon returns – NYTimes
Previously: Dr Martens says sorry to Courtney Love – Cherryflava

iCatching: Air travel trends and…

Posted on 03. Dec, 2007 by Jonathan Cherry.

- Don’t think that engine’s falling off planes is restricted to domestic South African flights only. Turns out a Southwest engine managed to ‘blow-up’ mid-flight in the US on November the 17th – just 10 days after the Cape Town incident. [Cue Twilight-zone theme tune]. See: Consumerist

- The anti-consumerism drive is hitting Christmas hard. Like Hummers and battery chicken eggs, traditional, lavish gift giving is developing into a big no-no. Enter Changing the Present – a clever site which allows you to give the gift of donation this festive season. Hell Oprah’s endorsed the thing so it’s way past being fringe. See: Changingthepresent.org

- Dubai gets it. Instead of just building more structures – they’re creating massive drawcards disguised as new apartment blocks. Check at this thing, called The Pad. It’s being hailed as "the first cybertecture apartment building in the world." It has:

…real-time projection feeds [let you] change your outside
view…projecting the Caribbean or New York skyline onto your
windows….

Bathrooms fitted with equipment that [monitors] your temperature, weight and blood pressure….

…have dinner with loved ones from across the globe via a video conferencing link projected into your dining room…

Rotating living and dining rooms giving you 360-degree views of Dubai…

…reactive lighting that responds to incoming phone calls and the residents’ moods…

The Pad is scheduled to be finished in late 2009. [via Core77]