Hello, friends from 'not England'! How are you? Or should I say 'g'day, y'all bonjour danke'? You come to this blog day-in, day-out (don't you?) looking for advice and guidance about new cultural phenomenons sweeping my little nation, made of grass and scarves. Well you're in for a treat today, because I'm going to tell you all about the author of Britain's TOP-SELLING AUTOBIOGRAPHY LAST CHRISTMAS. Having worked in a bookshop over Christmas, I can tell you that the above fact is true. He was massively popular, outstripping other celebs you've never heard of such as Chris Evans (a DJ, not a comic-book loving actor) and Paul O'Grady. The success is even more impressive when you learn that this writer is not human, real, or English.
Alexsandr Orlov is an anthropomothic meerkat, less Timon and more Queen Catherina The Great of Russia. He is the frontman for an advertising campaign by a price-comparison website, Compare The Market, and has appeared in a number of adverts for the company. He also has this tie-in book, and there are reports he will win a record contract in the near future. Alexsandr is a Russian character, and the premise of the adverts is that "market" pronounced in a Russian accent sounds like "meerkat". Britain is not very advanced nowdays.
Alexsandr promotes a website called "comparethemeerkat.com", and in each advert he bigs up this website where customers can go to compare different kinds of meerkat and vote for which they like best. He will typically then get irate because people get his website mixed up with "comparethemarket.com". The advert will end with him naming both sites, in an accent which makes them sound exactly the same, before winking at the camera and making a clicking noise. This is the most popular thing in England right now.
A few things concern us. One is that Alexsandr is meant to have fought through several hardships in the 1970s, before he became the businessman he is today. However, meerkats only live for about 12-14 years. So how has Alexsandr managed to live for so much longer, three times longer than any other meerkat in history. Is this why he can talk? Is the advert suggesting that, were meerkats able to live long enough, they'd eventually learn to speak human dialect and develop fingers flexible enough to manage a computer - is this what the advert is suggesting? Because if so, that seems like tacit support of evolution and all Catholics should protest against the adverts immediately.
Another worry is that Alexsandr's new website is called "Meerkovo". Now, I don't know about you, but that immediately brings to mind "Kosovo", a disputed land in the former Yugoslavian Republic which has for decades now been the centre of horrific war. Why are the advertisers bringing "Meerkovo" into the public eye? What are they going to do. If this ends with Meerkovo getting bombed by angry car insurance salesmen....
Our point, readers, is that we find this whole thing to be very disturbing indeed. While small animals are cute, apart from skunks who are misogynistic, the promotion of these meerkats seems shady and unorthodox. What happens if the adverts cease to be popular? Are we literally going to see civil war followed by acts of mass violence and the whole thing becomes an uncomfortably taut allegory for war-torn Europe? Readers, this whole thing stinks.
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