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The Fatberg that ate London: Disgusting blob the size of an airliner removed from city’s sewer
09.03.2014
10:35 am
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00fatbergpop.jpg
 
The Fatberg!

Beneath the busy streets of London lurks a monstrous hideous man-made creation that is slowly engulfing the city’s sewers with its gross oily bulk.

The Fatberg!

Soon this monster will be oozing out of the sinks in kitchens and toilet closets, encasing everything it meets in lard!

The Fatberg!

When you see it—you’ll scream “No, no, no, no!”

You can run but there is nowhere to hide from the hideous Fatberg of Old London Town!

This may all sound like the trailer for some 1950’s sci-fi feature, but the “fatberg” is a very real threat to Londoners and their Victorian sewerage system.

The “fatberg” is created by stupid, inconsiderate and selfish people pouring cooking oil down kitchen sinks, and flushing wet wipes and sanitary products down the toilet.

The cooking oil mainly comes from the restaurants, and those innumerable fast food outlets that have spread like cancer thru-out England’s capital.

Last week, a giant “fatberg” the length of a Boeing 747 jet was removed from a sewer in west London after it threatened to send effluent and waste spurting back into homes. It took Thames Water workers four days to clear the foul-smelling blockage from over a 260 foot stretch of Shepherd’s Bush Road.

Dave Dennis, Thames Water sewer operations manager, told Sky News:

“The sewers serve an important purpose - they are not an abyss for household rubbish,” he said. “Fat goes down the drain easily enough, but when it hits the cold sewers, it hardens into disgusting fatbergs that block pipes. Wet wipes cling to the fat. Fat clings to the wipes. And pretty soon your fatberg is out of control and sewage is backing up into roads, gardens and in the worst cases flooding up through toilets and into homes.”

Yuk!

Last year, a 15-ton fatberg (the size of a bus) was removed from a sewer in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London. If people (that’s you restaurant and fast food fuckwits) don’t wise up London will one day fall under its own mass of waste.
 
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You wanna see more? Well, here’s a report on last year’s massive fatberg….
 

 
H/T Arbroath

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.03.2014
10:35 am
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‘Managing your meat’: Burger King’s homoerotic, Soviet-inspired corporate art confounds and delights
05.27.2013
10:28 am
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Burger King fake union poster
 
Okay, first of all, let’s get this out of the way: big, burly men declaring that they’re “managing your meat everyday” is quite possibly the best imaginable homoerotic theme for a fast food advertisement. So let’s just have ourselves a giggle. Go ahead. Someone clearly meant for you to laugh, because there is no way that wasn’t intentional.

But moving on…

If you don’t follow labor news (not that it’s easy, since the largest media outlets tend to ignore it), you may not be aware that New York has had a recent upswing in strike activity, particularly among the notoriously difficult to organize service sector.  Since November, coalitions of unions, community organizations, and labor rights groups have been endorsing fast food workers in their fight for a living wage and a union.

Since Burger King is one of the targets of these protests, it was particularly dizzying to see this corporate art decorating the wall of one of their locations in Tribeca, in Lower Manhattan. The aesthetic appeal of a “Stacker’s Union” might’ve seemed “cute” to the marketing execs, a nostalgic reference to a time when unionized industrial labor held the promise of a good life for a working class family. I doubt, however, that any of Burger King’s employees (or the workers who pick their tomatoes) would find it so cute.
 
fake union logo
It even has a little fake union logo, to represent the fake solidarity of the union workers that don’t actually exist!

What’s even weirder is the style of the art. At first glance, it appears to be referencing the public art of the Work’s Progress Administration, the New Deal program that put so many Americans to work during The Great Depression.
 
WPA poster
 
Hmmmm… close, but not quite. However, upon further inspection, this poster is so Soviet-inspired you can practically taste the corn syrup-suffused borscht (made with real beet extract):
 
Lenin poster
Bingo!

I’m not sure what to make of it, honestly. On the one hand, I find it completely believable that a giant union-busting corporation would intentionally appropriate the title and aesthetics of labor to seem warm and fuzzy. On the other hand, I could also believe they’re all clueless idiots who just hired someone (who is apparently a droll comedic genius) to make them a cool-looking poster.

Marie Antoinette used to dress as a milkmaid for kicks. At the time, the bucolic peasantry was a signifier of idyllic, simple beauty. While it seems absurd to us now, the habit of the powerful to emulate an idealized working class persists today. We see designer jeans for hundreds of dollars, intentionally distressed so as to appear rugged, aged in the nobility of hard work. Folks mount their expensive, high-tech electronics on “rustic” stands. These are microcosms of the tendency, for sure, but Burger King playing “dress-up” with unions isn’t really too far off from Marie A playing dress-up as a farm girl.

Then again, we all know what happened to her.

Posted by Amber Frost
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05.27.2013
10:28 am
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Ronald McDonald is feeling McGuilty
08.06.2010
09:17 pm
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image
McGuilty by JSalvador Design
 
(via Super Punch)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.06.2010
09:17 pm
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