This is what happens when you try and work out who Craig Revel Horwood is.

And what’s happened to Ringo’s voice?

I love the scrunched curtain & the smoke alarm. They’re so… homely.

Two Pepsi ads, a clip from CBS news, and I’m a broken man. Truly, I’m sick at us all. We suck so hard my ears just popped. Here’s what I just watched, in order:

1. A Pepsi ad, stitched to the front of the CBS clip, in which The Black Eyed Peas flute us towards a unified world – “one tribe, y’all” – in which we’re all the same, and where we’ve been is where we’re going and “the continent is called Pangea”…

The song suggests this as a way forward:

“We are one people
Let’s catch amnesia,
Forget about all that evil,
Forget about all that evil,
That evil that they feed ya…”

The ad is for the Pepsi “refresh project”…

Let’s overanalyse this. We’re told: “every Pepsi refreshes the world”, i.e. restarts it, reloads it, sets it back to square one: to Pangea, the prehistoric landmass). A singularity of prethought. And how do we get there? “Let’s get amnesia”. Stop thinking. Forget about otherness, forget about the “evil” that sets us at odds. Let’s refresh ourselves to a mindwiped oneness, with Pepsi.

We’ll come back to this.

2. The Pepsi trailer ends, the CBS clip begins. A report from a couple of years ago about a teenage Guitar Hero sensation, Chris Chike.

It’s a haunting clip, raw footage with no news commentary, in which Chike sits unblinking while his fingers blur meaninglessly across the five Guitar Hero finger pads. Rigid he sits, only his fingers move, the game screen pops and flashes, people stand around in awe, watching this bizarre dystopian hypnofeat. Blink rate zero. A new world record!

I found it plain scary. The act alienated from the music. Movement alienated from the corporeal. A deathly triumph of toyskill cheered by adults.

Then I clicked on this madness:

3. The second Pepsi ad, and a celebration on every level of brainwiping “refreshment”. The ad itself is a ‘parody’ of the famous and very brilliant SNL Roxbury sketch about barhopping coke fiends. In the ad, people nodding off wake up after a jolt of energy from the “invigorating cola” that is diet Pepsi Max. “Wake up, people!” screams the voiceover. What follows is a bafflingly (and I mean BAFFLINGLY) retarded ‘behind the scenes’ recap of the ad by the four celebrities featured in it. I cannot overstate how unprecedentedly moronic this bit of the video is.

Here’s what LL tells us about his character in the ad, explaining his motivation: “I have no energy, I’m exhausted, I’m lethargic, I’m – you know – I’m fading… quickly.” But then “I have a sip of my Pepsi Max” and the energy kicks in, “it just takes me to another level”. You have to watch the video to appreciate how bonkers this aftergame analysis is. Everyone – the celebrities, the people at whom the ad is aimed, the people who made the ad, and everyone in the world, alive and dead – even the birds on the trees are belittled by the stupidity of this advertisement.

What’s fascinating is the (barely) underlying Pepsi = cocaine message. It’s medication. And it medicates us into this state:

Busta Rhymes there, on a Coke Pepsi high. This is the state of ‘being awake’. A state of buzzing nowness, of mindless wakefulness, amnesiac consciousness. Eyes as wide as Chris Chike. Mind wide shut. UnZen zerothought. WAKE UP, PEOPLE.

And eveything suddenly seemed to me so stupid, so blank and crass – as though we’ve all been reduced to a “one tribe” unison of idiocy, we’ve crashed to some hideous Pepsi Minimum – a prehistoric senseless present. Refreshed to Coke Zero – only our fingertips twitching – alive in a grinning deathslumber. And I became sad. And I became angry. And I mean, seriously, I don’t want to labour the point or anything, but what kind of a numbnut bunch of fucktard pond scum have we become?