An unexpectedly long absence from the blog, broken by- what else?- irritation.

Advertisers: do you think you could, as a matter of extreme urgency, come up with some words to describe your products other than "fun" and "cool"?

Food, in particular, can be described in many verbose and flowery ways. But outside of a Hal Roach finalé and the nauseating extremities of "sloshing" it cannot be considered fun and is only ever as cool as the refrigerator that houses it.

Yet the Kelloggs company are currently opening one of their tv spots with the statement "We all know how much fun Coco-Pops and milk are." Really? Am I missing something? Coco Pops are a pretty black and white proposition, I think, either delicious or emetic. But they can't enliven your breakfast with a song and dance number, give you a challenging set or two of tennis, dazzle you with anecdotes about life on the road with their jazz quartet, teach you magic tricks or randomly sling fluorescent cuddly toys at passers-by. I think you'd have to have lived in a sensory deprivation tank for a considerable length of time before pushing chocolate flavoured puffed rice into your head could be considered fun.

"Fun" is in danger of losing its linguistic currency through over-use, in the same way that "fine" has slipped from meaning something of the highest quality to anything just this side of okay and "nice" now equates with the very faintest blip on the pleasure-meter rather than something beautifully subtle and precise. Pretty soon, everything short of having one's body rent asunder by wild jackals will be covered by the term "fun".

But worse by far is "cool". Cool is now the copy-writer's description of choice for something that's either stultifyingly uninspiring or ethically troublesome, yet must be portrayed positively if the commercial is to succeed. Case in point, the advert for a how-to-be-jailbait-comic based on tv show Zoe 101 which manages to describe itself and its associated bits and pieces as cool no less than three times in the space of fifteen seconds.

That a bit of slang coined in the fifties is so ubiquitous in contemporary advertising proves the extent to which an industry that prides itself on its ability to measure what they insist on calling the zeitgeist is hopelessly unmoored from reality. A good example of this is the advert for Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popcorn. In this, a typically buffoonish tv dad (the way men are portrayed as a race of useless twits on British television is a subject Charlie Brooker's explored to hilarious effect, so I won't touch it) tells his moppet children they're having popcorn tonight, but does it amid an impression of W.C. Fields. The male child is sufficiently delighted by this to exclaim "Cool!" The very idea that a child would get excited over such a niggardly treat as unsalted, unbuttered, uncaramel-and-peanutted microwave popcorn is a stretch, but that he'd be amused by a reference to a screen actor who died about fifty-five years before his birth requires a brain bruising suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, what else? I've been busy since the New Year, but in the worst way, doing a hell of a lot of administrative and otherwise non-drawing tasks. Taking care of business, I guess. Still, there's been time to squeeze in a fair bit of caricaturing and a piece for today's paper. And I've had an unbroken run of six weeks so far on the Toon Weekly site (link on the left). Lots happening on the political front too; there's a big cultural summit happening in February, also the month in which consultation on the proposed replacement for Disclosure Certification closes... Long story short, it's an unfair tax on the self-employed. Speaking of tax, I'm also lining up meetings with all the various party political spokespersons to see if we can't hold the SNP to their promised tax break for Scottish artists. Planning on having a week-long presence in the parliament itself later this year too.

Plans for Feb's anniversary (Y & I will have been together for a decade) have been abandoned thanks to the intransigence of her employer. All focus now on the summer trip out West. This weekend is family, family, family though. A brother and sister-and-law we haven't seen properly for almost a year, an uncle recently turned fifty and a grandmother about to turn seventy-five. Should be fun. And cool.

Postscript: Except it won't be quite so much, because despite their much vaunted interconnnectedness on goodhardpunchintheFacebook, the various members of my family certainly love and cherish but don't actually talk to each other. Important information isn't passed on, yet pretend cartoon animals are fed imaginary treats. This is progress!