Dear Axe Deo,

I use Axe. It doesn't drown me in women. I get angry.

Text reads:

Dear Axe Deodorants,

I am very sad to say that I am on the verge of giving up your line of Men’s deodorants for good. My experience with your extensive bodyspray products has been nothing short of disappointing, and is at the very least a gross waste of time.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me perhaps explain my angst, right from where it all began: as a thirteen year old boy.

Naturally, your product immediately appealed to me. It wasn’t so much that I was brainwashed by the doglike incessant smokescreen that followed all my seniors in an inescapable hormonal fog of Phoenix and testosterone, through which I had to walk on a daily basis and which now serves as an immediate PTSD-esque trigger to darker, younger days, but rather the scientifically accurate promises in your advertising that assured me that all it took to change my virgin life into one of abs and being Brad Pitt in a suit surrounded by literally fallen angels was one mere spray.

And so, I became an Axe User.

But if I’m a true Axe user, then why, please explain to me, am I not wading through a knee-deep sea of bikini models biting their lips and gazing with sultry desire at my rock-hard abdominals?

Am I perhaps applying my can of Axe Twist incorrectly? I have taken painstaking lengths to study, in minute, frame-by-frame detail, the exact techniques the subjects in your many short-length documentaries use to become inundated in female pudenda, but no matter how true I am to the original techniques and hand-flicks, I cannot get more than one girl at a time.

He goes across the body, diagonally down his torso towards his left hip and then snaps the can across his waist and groin area. I have done this repeatedly, sometimes even more than once, and still, I don’t have difficulty rolling over in my bed at night because the entire female population of the planet serves as my duvet. What is going on?

I’ve tried everything. Nothing works. It doesn’t matter if I spend half an hour and entire bottle of Axe Hair Wax to sculpt my hair into a kiff bedhair quiff like those okes in GQ. It doesn’t matter if I inflict multiple coldburns on myself by applying several dozen cans in one sitting. Hell, it doesn’t even make one smidge of difference if I empty all my Axe products into a blender, make a pasty puree of them and soak my entire body in it for half an hour or before I pass out from the fumes, whichever comes first.

I’ve had this problem before. A few years ago I gave up Radox Mens Xtreme Body Wash because it didn’t turn me into John Smit rappelling down a refreshing waterfall after just one mere sniff of the stuff.

Then, to make matters worse, Sky Vodka didn’t transport me to literally a club in the fucking sky filled with babes and disinterested looking gentlemen. Even after six years of drinking a bottle every day, I have yet to get anything sexier, more carefree and youthful than extensive liver damage. And I’m pretty sure we both know how much Michelle Pfeiffer and Scarlett Johansson I’ve gotten in the past months of using certain expensive colognes.

I demand a public apology and a full refund, or at the very least a step-by-step, full and detailed (perhaps even illustrated) explanation of how to fully capitalise on Axe’s female-getting prowess.

Some idiots have suggested to me that I’d probably attract more women if I changed my backwards, unrealistic attitude towards them and stopped treating them like sandwich-making dogs who give you the sex at the mere hint of cheap deo, but of course they are utterly wrong. Why would advertising exaggerate or outright lie about its product’s social appeal or woman-winning powers? It’s absurd to think that companies would ever put soulless profits over the respect and responsibilities that society has come to expect.

So please. Send me the secret technique, or give me back my money. I have just recently started a project to utterly eliminate all inconvenience ever in existence by buying every Verimark product I can think of, and I’ll really need the money.

Until then, I’ll be giving Axe my own axe effect.

Yours sincerely

Author, writer, recent Old Spice client, 13 going on 26,

Matthew de Klerk

PS: I've read in the local news that I'm not the only person you've let down. This is unacceptable.

www.to-muse-and-abuse.blogspot.fr/2014/06/tv-commercial-product-user-still-not.html

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.

Man just cannot believe Apple Juice Special

”Jesus, I mean, just look at it. How can it be R18 for three bottles?

A middle-aged Area man is reportedly awed and flabbergasted today, after leading retailer Pick n Pay’s Friday afternoon apple juice special reduced him to a blithering, stuttering mess in aisle 8.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said, cradling the six-in-one plastic-wrapped paper carton as if it were a newborn child who has survived a particularly traumatic and dangerous birth. “I mean, what else can you get for R18? Nothing! Nothing at all! It just makes no sense.”

However, despite Roy Algala’s shock at this special, sources close to the man indicate that he is also feeling a few shreds of anxiety and scepticism.

“I walked past him muttering to himself and shaking his head in awe of the Ceres Super Saver Smartshopper special when I was grabbing a bottle milk,” said one lady who spoke to us on the condition that we stop shaking her arm and following her around the store. “He sounded worried. He thinks it might be some kind of trick, or maybe that he read the price wrong in that Wednesday weekly specials flier they put through his mailbox. I mean, it does sound a little too good to be true, and we all know how awful it feels to reach the till, see you were wrong and have to ask them the cashier to ring the manager to deduct the item from your bill like you’re some bloody poor person, all the while a line of people behind you stare hateful, sneering contempt at you.”

Some have even played down his reaction as commonplace.

“Yeah, you might think R18 for a three litres of apple juice is amazing, but I mean, come on, it’s not like it’s Mango juice or even Medley of Fruits,” said fellow shopper Jake Harton. “Besides, last week I saw him being as awed at the R24 bacon special and the R20 dustbin bags offer. He’s just really easily wowed, and actually he’s not getting enough of a savings deal to make that kind of reaction necessary.”

Algala has, however, defended his action, saying that he is a smart shopper.

“I know this special is actually special,” he said, stuffing four packs of the juice into his trolley along with an amount of food that indicates he lives alone, is in all likelihood clinically depressed, and will probably drink all that goddamn juice by himself, the lonely, greedy shitbag, “this isn’t the R18 milk offer. That I KNOW is just a trick.”

Muse and Abuse would like Pick 'n Pay to give us some money for this shameless adverting and free product placement. Or at least some goddamn points on the milk we buy, Jesus, we never get triple points on milk.