Websites

Adbusters

adbusters.org

These veteran "culture jammers" launched their anti-corporate crusade almost a decade ago, with the aim of turning our mass media away from consumerism and towards social awareness. The Canadian-based Media Foundation organises an annual Buy Nothing Day, and other truly heretical stunts. Selections from its print magazine are available here, and also video clips of its own TV commercials, some of which have been banned or refused, not only by US networks but UK advertising watchdogs. An impressive gallery of parody advertisements includes a Joe Camel send-up called "Joe Chemo" and a Marlboro ad featuring a riderless horse in a wintry graveyard.

Hocus Focus

www.hocusfocus.org

More jamming-in-action in this Situationist-inspired attack on Apple's "Think Different" marketing campaign. The Apple promotion makes use of nonconformist or countercultural icons such as Gandhi, Miles Davis and John Lennon, a move which, according to the site, corrupts these "vessels of psychic energy" and turns them into co-opted product-pushers. So this underground artists' action group either modifies or creates its own versions of the posters for unauthorised display in key locations. Hocus Focus is particularly enraged by the campaign's use of the Dalai Lama, since it claims Apple removed his image to appease the Chinese market. He now bears the text "Marketing is censorship".

Radioworld

www.radioworld.net

This ambitious-sounding and highly commercial mix of netcasting and virtual worlds technology offers what it calls a "totally emersive [sic] environment". Paying users who have downloaded the software (no easy feat last week) can apparently travel from city to city in avatar form on something called the "Radio World bullet train".

While doing so they can listen to local radio stations and visit their online suites for special celebrity events. Participating stations get a share of revenue from new subscribers to the site, as well as, they hope, extra advertising income. Punters pay pounds 3 per month to inhabit customised avatars with a choice of "hundreds of heads" and the ability to hold hands and kiss while grooving to the latest cybersounds.

Patron Saints

Patronage Index

members.xoom.com/sjs/ patronnf.htm

Today's saint, according to the online calendar, is the Apostle Paul, but this site also gives details of more marginal players, including those relegated to local status or listed under "cult suppressed" after the Church went through the files in 1969. Here may be found Barbara, one- time saint of powder magazines and arsenals, and Catherine, patron of philosophers and knife grinders.

There are saints for accountants and yachtsmen, saints against abdominal pains and whooping cough, some 679 of them in all, under a thousand topic headings which offer the chance to find the right one for your occupation or condition. The whole impressively researched production is a lay effort by a Catholic convert living in Kentucky. He says: "I'm just a guy in the pews."