Friends of the Stars resort to Payola

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Bit of a plug this week on Radio Scotland’s mid morning show.
Click on this link and scroll through to 1hr and 5 minutes.
The story is this….
I’m pals with Graham Virtue, journalist, curry afficianado and all round bon viveur. Graeme does the TV previews on BBC Radio Scotland’s Macauley and Co show.
EPISODE1 “The Set-Up”:
On February 4 Graham has to review the new Minder remake but wanted to enliven what would have otherwise been your run of the mill “it’s sh*t” twinkledance. Cue me and my rudimentary skills with Logic. 
EPISODE 2 “The Gag”:
Attic Lights  have redone the famous Dennis Waterman-penned Minder theme-tune… Graham’s electro-pop rock covers band EC/PC could have done a better job (cue Kraftwerk-style snippets of Minder and Black in Black). 
EPISODE 3 “The Deal Goes Down” :
I give up my Saturday to work on the tunes with Graeme, for beer, pizza and a plug for Friends of the Stars the next time he’s on the radio.
EPISODE 4 “The Betrayal”: 
On the show itself, mild laughter in the studio and one enthusiastic fan email ensue. But the giddy Graeme totally forgets to plug FOTS. ..Baaaad Medicine…Cam No Like.
EPISODE 5: “Retribution”:
Graeme makes good his promise the following week… this week in the company of replacement host Richard Gordon (Radio Scotland’s Football King)
EPISODE 6: “The Sting”:
Graeme twats it up again by saying Friend of the Stars… and “friendofthestars.co.uk”… like, totally singular as fuck.
Its part of our marketing outreach strategy BTW
x

Put A #Donk On Twit

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I’m guilty, it’s my fault. I started the #donk thing on Twitter.

I had no intention of starting a wacky internet craze or meme surrounding the word ‘Donk’, I was merely thinking aloud and the internet did the rest. Honestly, it did.

By way of background, Put A Donk On It is a record by The Blackout Crew and is without a doubt one of the high watermarks of popular music in the 21st Century so far. The fact that it wasn’t a global hit remains an absolute mystery to me. Here’s how it goes:

I’ve become mildly obsessed with the record and the word “Donk” has become part of my everyday vocabulary. Why simply say “Yes” when you can say “Put A Donk On It!”? So, when the following thought occurred to me at around 4pm today, I posted it onto my Twitter profile:

(If you don’t get the image, the Tweet said “How long would it take to make “Donk” a trending topic on Twitter? #donk”)

Like I say, it was an idle thought. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I got one just the same. The answer, it turns out, is 1hr and 31 minutes. Within minutes of posting the message, my own small corner of Twitter went #donking mad. The vast majority of my personal Twitter network are, like me, from the Birmingham area and so were all online at the same time, which helped. A few of them responded to my question and quite quickly a few of them retweeted my message. Once again, I thought that would be the end of it.

Then two very interesting things happened…

Firstly @jakedubber started to insert superfluous #donks into his tweets and other people began to copy him. Then @jonhickman, @bounder and @pigsonthewing started posting song and movie titles with the word ‘Donk’ replacing certain, similar words (“Donk Go Breaking My Heart”, “Honky Donk Women” etc) and it became a game….a game that caught on super fast.

Quite quickly every other Tweet on my screen featured the word #donk in some form or another, and a search revealed that the word was indeed a trending Twitter topic, which isn’t bad going considering that Valentines Day and Follow Friday are extremely popular subjects today.

At the time of writing this (7pm UK time, 3 hours after my original tweet), the United States has began to wake up for the day and many are wondering what on earth #donk means.

I’ve no idea how long Twitter will keep on donking, but I suspect it won’t be very long, but if it does keep going hopefully this post goes some way to explain it. In a nutshell, blame the Brummies.

…and if you’d care to comment, please don’t forget to put a banging donk on it.

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