mutterings from the corner

Why Joe Pasquale will never rule the world

2012-01-05T09:42:00.000Z

Want to feel more powerful? Do a Barry White impression

BPS Occupational Digest: Stuck on your ideas: fixation in group brainstorms...

2011-11-01T13:55:00.000Z

BPS Occupational Digest: Stuck on your ideas: fixation in group brainstorms...: Brainstorming, when people gather to generate ideas together, is great in theory: many perspectives mesh to generate diverse outputs. I...

Are we really blind to Internet banners?

2011-10-17T15:00:00.000+01:00

Are we really blind to Internet banners?

BPS Occupational Digest: Noise and music are more distracting to introverts...

2011-10-12T13:53:00.000+01:00

BPS Occupational Digest: Noise and music are more distracting to introverts...: Many workplaces allow the playing of radio or recorded music during working hours, providing a chance to personalise and brighten the workin...

For Christians, Dawkins and the Qur'an leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally

2011-09-26T15:17:00.000+01:00

For Christians, Dawkins and the Qur'an leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally

Positive pollyannas more frustrated by unmet expec...

2011-09-16T11:54:00.000+01:00

BPS Occupational Digest: Positive pollyannas more frustrated by unmet expec...: A tendency to view the world positively yields many benefits, such as higher wellbeing and a sense of personal effectiveness that gets you ...

Economic indicator

2011-08-18T14:31:00.002+01:00

Have come to realise that we have another indicator of the economic state of play - the fuel guage. The moment my fuel guage is more than 1/4 full then I know that the recession is over. Whilst the amber light is on I know that we are still in recession. Simple. Who needs price indices and Mervyn King.

Take vitamin pill, eat cake. How supplements can encourage unhealthy behaviour

2011-08-17T16:09:00.000+01:00

Take vitamin pill, eat cake. How supplements can encourage unhealthy behaviour

We sit near people who look like us

2011-07-19T13:21:00.000+01:00

This is not good news if, as happens to me, rotund and ripe smelling people always make a beeline for the seat next to yours on public transport:

We sit near people who look like us

Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain?

2011-07-19T13:17:00.000+01:00

Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain?

It's that knob off the telly...

2011-07-04T12:09:00.000+01:00

Does retail therapy work?

2011-06-07T11:13:00.000+01:00

Does retail therapy work?

10 Keys to Leading Creative People | TonyMorganLive.com

2011-04-20T10:26:00.000+01:00

10 Keys to Leading Creative People | TonyMorganLive.com

An afternoon nap tunes out negative emotions, tunes in positive ones

2011-03-21T14:07:00.000Z

An afternoon nap tunes out negative emotions, tunes in positive ones

Traditional direct mail creates a more lasting impression than new media

2011-01-26T12:55:00.001Z

Read all about it in this study from Millward Brown.

subtle

2011-01-12T16:42:00.000Z

I think our bank is trying to tell me something - they keep sending me paying in books

Lovely packaging

2011-01-11T14:05:00.005Z

Few companies do really great packaging, the sort that you really don't want to open because it's just so perfect. Apple spring to mind and now Rapha, the love 'em (that'd be me) or hate 'em cycling accessories brand, join the party. Introducing Rapha soap. I've no doubt it's good soap but I simply couldn't bear to open such wonderful packaging. The map of Mont Ventoux is a beautiful touch.

To order your Rapha soap click here.

Wonder if Lotus do a bike rack?

2011-01-11T13:34:00.001Z

http://tinyurl.com/5txgrg3

Quality service...

2011-01-10T13:36:00.005Z

...not

accepting that we had shocking weather, Christmas and New Year and it only had a second class frank, I have to say that 4 days short of a month is taking the whotsit to deliver.

A letter posted in Manchester on the 14/12/10 (c. 30 miles away as the pigeon flies) it landed here at Pigs & Bees towers on 10/1/11 - shocking

Re-MOO-ving stress in the workplace

2011-01-06T16:44:00.004Z

Picture the scene - farm yard (Longley Farm), snapper (aka Owen Phillips) and willing client (Yorkshire Therapies' Marsha Dawson) - the brief was simple - shoot the client with the cows (not literally), hence demonstrating the intrinsic benefics of massage and complementary therapies to employees in the workplace. Oh no, not a simple thing. Cue relunctant Jersey, nervous yet brave client and intrepid snapper. Needless to say we decamped to a safer enclosure of cute calves. Job done.

The Longley Farm produces some of the nation’s favourite dairy products and the agreed to take an unconventional approach to maximising productivity - enlisting the help of Huddersfield based complementary therapy practice Yorkshire Therapies.

Whether a calm workforce is the secret ingredient in Longely Farm’s delicious products they wouldn’t say, but the massages received an overwhelming thumbs up from Longley’s staff (the cows however now have a deep distrust of anyone with a camera or smelling of tea tree).

Anyone interested in finding out more about how a corporate stress reduction day could benefit their organisation should call Marsha Allen Dawson at Yorkshire Therapies on 01484 664 774 or visit www.yorkshiretherapies.com to find out more about the range of treatments available both off and on site.

Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning

2010-12-17T15:43:00.000Z

Comic Sans improves learning? Sweet mother of all that is holy tell me it's a mistake...

Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning

Doodletastic

2010-12-01T12:21:00.001Z

The snow brings out the Auteur in me

2010-12-01T11:29:00.002Z

Mr Bounce and the SEO experts

2010-11-29T15:48:00.004Z

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker

We were privy to an interesting discussion on SEO and CPC advertising recently. A business owner had a bounce rate of around 50% on their paid for clicks and was quite happy with such a rate. Their previous agency had told them that 50% was the best they could hope for. Now anyone telling their clients that they should be hoping for success must walk with bowed legs when they present their invoices (bolas grandes). Anything that has a 50% chance of happening is not good odds - it's pure chance. Let’s put that 50% success rate into perspective:

Whatever you are bidding for each search term, you are actually paying double for each visitor who explores your site.

People are no more likely to visit a second page of your website than if they were using a coin toss to decide whether they stay or go. How many purchasing decisions do you base on a coin toss?

Finding out why people bounce from your home page is not straightforward. It could be that they find all the information they need there on one page. It might be that they simply hate the look of your site or that your site shares a similar name to another business (the one they were actually looking for) or any other number of reasons. What struck us about the cases in question is that they had been advised to ‘cover all bases’ by sponsoring searches for terms that were distant cousins to their what their business actually offers. The problem with this strategy is that the first thing many visitors to your website will experience is disappointment. Imagine if half the items you bought in the supermarket contained something other than what was promised on the box. I’m looking for X and you offer Y. Yes, someone might discover that they prefer the taste of Y compared to the X they were looking for but does that sound like an effective way to attract new customers?

People no longer search for generic terms. Type ‘used cars’ into Google and you get nearly 250 billion results. Type ‘used cars uk’ and you reduce this to 78 billion. Change it to ‘used cars west yorkshire’ and you’re down to 435,000. Most of us know this yet there are still ‘SEO consultants’ out there advising people to part money for search terms that haven’t got a hope in hell of winning them any new business.

Unlike John Wanamaker, anyone using Google Adwords can quite easily discover which part of their (online) advertising budget isn’t working and make it work. If you’d like to find out how, give us a call on 01484 689 400 and we'll be happy to demonstrate what can be achieved online.

How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns?

2010-11-16T09:58:00.000Z

How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns?

Spam? I'd rather eat dog food

2010-11-12T11:59:00.005Z

Above: Ted. A dog who prefers crisps to Spam

How hungry would you have to be before you tucked into a bowl of dog food? What about a tin of Spam? John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch carried out an experiment to see if people could tell the difference between dog food and pâté based purely on taste. In a double blind taste test, volunteers were presented with five dishes all prepared in a food mixer to have the same consistency, chilled and then served with a parsley garnish and a side of crackers. The five dishes were organic dog food, duck liver mousse, supermarket liverwurst, pork liver pâté and good old Spam.

Despite the participants consistently rating the dog food as having the worst taste, Bohannon et al found that they were no better at identifying the dog food than someone simply guessing. They suggested that people were so poor at predicting which dish was the dog food because they had been primed to expect dog food to taste better than it does. In other words, the worst tasting dish wouldn’t be the dog food. This is a good example of the power of suggestion, a corner stone of successful advertising.

Perhaps even more surprising though was that the aggregate ranking of dog food and Spam showed no statistical significance. So how does a product for which people show no significant preference for over dog food sell over 7 billion units across 41 countries? That’s the power of a strong brand.

Link to Bohannon et al's experiment

sketch.odopod.com

2010-10-29T15:57:00.001+01:00

2010-10-29T13:54:00.000+01:00

The Devil isn't always in the detail

2010-09-17T09:23:00.000+01:00

Study demonstrating how people's religious beliefs influences whether they focus on the 'big picture' or the details.

Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention

We're still here...

2010-09-01T14:49:00.001+01:00

...just busy impressing clients so much they bring us gifts of beer. Happy days!

DuoFertility viral video

2010-01-21T15:15:00.003Z

While the country ground to a halt under 2 weeks of continuous snow fall we grabbed a video camera, waterproofs, ice axe and full Mountain Rescue kit and headed off up yonder hill to create a viral video for Temperature Concept's DuoFertility monitor. Thanks to the very big brains of a team of Cambridge University PhD graduates and some cutting edge technology, the DuoFertility monitor allows a woman to know her most fertile period up to 6 days in advance.

Find out more and buy one here

Bang bang bang our own drum

2009-10-19T16:10:00.002+01:00

What a nice surprise to be sifting through the mail on a Monday morning and find a client has not only written to express their gratitude for all your hard work (as in a proper letter, not an email) but also made sure that the postman knows that they think you are wonderful.

The craft of copywriting

2009-08-06T15:59:00.002+01:00

Who says the craft of copywriting is dead?

What you might have heard if you'd been walking past the office this afternoon

2009-07-28T16:36:00.005+01:00

Pigs&Bees (eating a packet of Swizzels Matlow Fizzers):
Call me pedantic but it says on this wrapper, no artificial colours. Surely that should be 'no artificial colouring agents' or 'no artifical colourants'.

Scoth Eggs:
Yes.

Pigs&Bees:
Yes, it should be 'no artificial colouring agents'?

Scotch Eggs:
No, yes it's pedantic. But I see what you mean. Colours are naturally occurring. Perhaps it should be 'no artificial pigments'?

Pigs&Bees:
Colours aren't naturally occurring though when you think abut it. They're abstract constructs. You know, a way to label something intangible. They're the label we attach to the perception that arises from our senses and, if you subscribe to a constructivist theory of perception, its integration with stored knowledge. So all colours are artificial in that we construct them.

Scotch Eggs:
But if artificial colours exist that would imply a naturally occurring variant of the same thing. So the packet might be correct.

Pigs&Bees:
Yes.

It's raining again.

Scoth Eggs:
It'll do the lettuces good.

Hoorah!

2009-06-19T13:46:00.002+01:00

We've been appointed to Business Link Yorkshire's roster of agencies to provide support to Business Link themselves (we were already on their preferred supplier list).

Hoorah!

Another crazy floor

2009-06-17T14:21:00.004+01:00

The flat floor tiles of Basilica of St. John Lateran. You wouldn't want that floor in your local ale house.

Picture by Tino Warinowski

better than our famous stripy floor

2009-06-17T13:07:00.002+01:00

Learn more about how it's done here.

Investment tip

2009-05-19T14:22:00.002+01:00

Buy cattle and buy shares in Wahl. In the future everyone wears a full length leather coat and shaves their head.

Curious

2009-04-16T14:35:00.003+01:00

If you are stood at the top of a stairway and give way to someone at the bottom they will run (at least for the first couple of steps) up the stairs. If you are stood at the bottom of a stairway and give way to someone at the top, they will walk down at a constant (normal) speed. Why?

Question of the day

2009-04-09T14:04:00.001+01:00

Why?

Charlie Brooker's 10 biggest cocks in advertising

2009-04-08T13:35:00.001+01:00

If you're easily offended don't watch this:

Question of the day

2009-04-08T11:49:00.001+01:00

Who invented chips?

I'd like to shake their hand.

Question of the Day

2009-04-06T17:23:00.001+01:00

Is loose leaf tea worth the extra effort?

Andy Gallacher photographer

2009-04-02T14:09:00.006+01:00

To view more of Andy's work check out his new website.

question of the day

2009-04-02T09:11:00.002+01:00

Can you still win if you've got nothing to lose?

question of the day

2009-04-01T12:44:00.001+01:00

Why is there something, rather than nothing?

Get me up on my Social-Networking Soapbox

2009-03-24T10:25:00.007Z

Social-Networking is the new black, it seems. Everyone's on there somewhere, Myface, Bebook, Twitface - the world is online, merrily conversing with one another, uploading their drunken photos, twittering their ...whatever it is you twitter.

I'm a victim too, I'll admit it. I use the thing for swapping my drunken photos, organising gigs, and keeping in touch with people I haven't seen for years and was more than happy to never see again until facebook came along. One thing troubles me though, and that's those self righteous 'facebook campaigners' who bombard you with requests to join groups, with the aim of petitioning this, that, or the other. It now seems that if something in the world bothers you, you don't march on London with a placard, or write a strongly worded letter to The Times or to your local MP. What you do is start a facebook group. Because everyone knows the real social injustices in the world can be ironed out by a poorly conceived petition with an ill-informed mission statement written in something that could almost pass for English if you added the punctuation and all the vowels back in, and truncated the smattering of smiley faces and words spelled phonetically from numbers.

Here follows a few brief examples of groups I've recently had requests to join, together with a few choice words of my own on the subject:

"Oooh no! they've changed facebook, I don't like it! Mummy, make it stop! I'm gonna start a group petitioning against it and they'll bring the old one back if enough people join!"

Right... how about this; if you don't like facebook, stop bloody using it. It's free. It's not compulsory. If they suddenly painted the inside of your local supermarket a slightly different colour would you climb up onto your high horse and get a petition going to change it back because you liked Magnolia better than Arctic White and you couldn't find your favourite brand of baked beans against a slightly different coloured background? No you wouldn't, so shut up.

---

"I say, what's happening in Zimbabwe is an outrage! If we all get together and form a Facebook group, maybe Robert Mugabe will change his mind and stop persecuting his people and decimating his country"

Of course he would. Because Mugabe is going to really lose sleep over the fact that a bunch of middle-class wannabe do-gooders have got together and signed their names on an obscure campaign list lurking somewhere in a sprawling social-networking site, deep within the bowels of the internet. A list that is directed specifically at... no-one, other than those individuals that make up its numbers, as a method of asserting their self-righteousness. Oh and I'm sure the fact that said middle-class 'campaigners' come from the former colonial power that stole his country in the first place and raped it of its mineral resources before finally being persuaded to give it back is going to throw some extra weight behind the argument.

If you want to make a difference, give to charity, lobby your MP, write to those in power, use your power as a consumer of global goods to lodge your opinion. Don't join a bloody pointless facebook group.

---

"Paying for a TV license in this country is obscene - it's £120 a year just to watch telly! I'm putting a stop to this right now with this facebook group!"

Okay. Have you seen any foreign TV recently? Any American channels where the program you're trying to watch is played in brief breaks between the endless, shitty adverts? Any dodgy, low budget European channels full of garish colour and the cheapest presenters scraped up from the nearest dole queue to some obscure stage school? Have you seen ITV for god's sake? Or the plethora of rubbish digital channels available on freeview where you spend an afternoon flipping through what's on offer and find nothing even remotely interesting to watch? Every so often on said digital channels you'll come across a hidden gem. And chances are its been made by the BBC, and bought in to give said channel just a little bit of gravitas in its otherwise dreary representation of what they think the British Television Viewing Public want to see. The BBC is an organisation to make the world envious. Its output is professional, (mostly) superbly high quality, and is not littered with adverts every 10 minutes. They have at least 8 TV channels delivering this content, which you pay for with your 120 quid. On top of this they broadcast at least 7 national radio stations and countless local stations absolutely free. They are also custodians of what I believe is one of the most comprehensive and informative sites on the internet, which even gives you the ability to re-watch or listen again to pretty much all of their broadcast TV and radio content for a week.

A tenner a month for all that? If you ask me that's pretty bloody cheap. Stop whinging.

---

"I want to eat shit even more conveniently, so I want McDonalds to deliver to my door. If we get enough people to join this group they will"

McDonalds have no interest in you apart from turning your finances into their own fat profits by the cunning method of repackaging chemically-infested arse-ends of the commercial factory farmed food industry into garishly coloured cartons and flogging it to little kids by bribing them with cheap plastic toys. If you really want to eat this homogeneous, tasteless, nutritionless rubbish, the least you can do is get off your arse and burn a few calories going to get it. To be honest, I very much doubt it'll improve the flavour much having half an hour of transit time added into the recipe, even if McDonalds would instigate such a service based upon a few people who've signed up to a measly facebook group. Which they won't.

It used to be a practical joke to leave a paper bag full of shit on someone's doorstep. Now it seems people are willing to pay for the privilege.

---

"RIP Jade Goody, your untimely passing has left a gaping-unrepairable hole in my life, and I just had to start this facebook group to cope with it"

At risk of sounding cruel and heartless, what is going on here? Yes, it's very sad that a young woman has been struck down by a hideous degenerative disease, and has, in the prime of her life, lost the battle and left her husband and two kids to fend for themselves in the world. But can we please have some perspective? According to Cancer Research, 2,800 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Britain every year. Wikipedia, unfortunately had no figures for Britain, but gives an estimate that in America in 2008, 3,870 women were killed as a result of the disease. Where are their tributes? I'll be willing to bet that the vast majority of their kids don't have four and a half million in the bank to help them get started in life. Although little Bobby and Freddie may have to periodically part with chunks of cash in order to keep paying their Dad's bail every time he beats someone up, it's still a pretty good start.

Jade Goody, was famous for the sake of being famous. She made her millions by selling her soul to cheap television and women's glossy weeklies. Perhaps you feel some kind of collective responsibility for her because you bought the mags, watched the crap TV programmes, and by robbing her of every scrap of her private life, propelled her from being a lowly, semi-literate dental nurse into being a semi-literate z-list celebrity millionaire. Oh yes, you've also conveniently forgotten that only a year ago you hated her with every sinew in your hypocritical body for acting like an ignorant racist cow on national television. Or rather, you hated her because the aforementioned tabloid media told you to, because just as they made a shedload of cash from propelling her to stardom, they were more than willing to make another shedload from dragging her down again, albeit as a result of her own, ignorant comments.

It's a sad case of affairs that the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed so-called culture we perpetrate in this country should now stoop to the level that Jade's last public act was to sell her death-story to OK! magazine, in order for them to publish a macabre pre-death obituary and make another shedload of money from her passing.

Today, in Iraq, 25 innocent people attending a funeral and mourning the loss of a loved one were killed by a suicide bomber. An agonising death, women, children, ripped apart by red hot shrapnel. Countless more were injured. Do they have a facebook group to mourn their loss? No, because frankly, no-one's making a fat pile of cash out of their lives. Nobody can sell thousands of crappy womens' glossy weeklies by cashing in on the gory details of their untimely death.

If you want to mourn Jade, go and buy OK! magazine, read her inflated story, give a little bit of cash to her kids and her jailbird husband to add to their millions. And by doing so, give more cash to her fat-cat publicist, Max Clifford, and the media barons of the cut-throat tabloid press who propelled her to fame in the first instance. A life lost. They don't care, it boosts the circulation figures.

If you want to pay a real tribute, give your money to Cancer Research instead. They'll actually put it towards preventing many, many more women suffering silently at the hands of cancer. But you don't need a facebook group to do that, you just need some common sense and a sense of perspective.

---

Seeing as how this is a subject I evidently feel passionately about, I felt the need to create my own facebook group to further my cause, albeit with a certain sense of irony. It's simply called Stop asking me to join pointless bloody facebook groups and you can join simply by clicking on the link.

Great news! (But you'll have to look hard to find it)

2009-03-03T16:22:00.003Z

Here's the rather pessimistic headlines from Yahoo! this afternoon:

Winter weather due to hit parts of Britain again

Jade Goody's husband found guilty of assault

Kids' presenter accused of swearing on live TV

The BBC have a much more balanced view of the world. They draw our attention to misery the world over with:

Hunt for Lahore cricket attackers

Man convicted of killing toddler

Murder police charged with perjury

Northern Rock makes £1.4 billion loss

And of course the good old Daily Mail:

World to end sooner than thought - it's the immigrants who are to blame

Ok, I made that last one up. But the others are true. Well they can't choose the news, you might say. And I would agree. But they can choose how to report it. Many years ago I was told the difference between a reporter and a journalist was that the reporter gave the facts while a journalist gave an opinion backed up by facts. It seems these days the only opinion is that we are all doomed. Now, being raised on a diet of Samuel Beckett I've long ago come to terms with the futility of life. However, rather than wallow in my ontological despair I would much rather focus on the good things in life. I'm not one of those delusional optimists whose legs you could chop off and they'd say how grateful they are because they've always wanted to be able to park closer to the entrance at B&Q but at the same time I don't expect the worst.

So what has this got to do with anything? Well I can't help thinking that given all the doom and gloom in the world a little bit of light relief can be a real competitive advantage to any business at the moment. Do you really want to spend your limited cash with someone who can't muster the enthusiasm to offer a polite greeting when you phone them up with an enquiry? Even the banks (spit) have twigged that talking to their customers like human beings is a way to get their attention and maybe even buy one of their products. It happened in the local branch this morning. A pleasant exchange rather the usual robot like stamping of deposit slips and I'm happily getting an insurance quotation. I've received no end of direct mail from the same bank. Did any of it work? No. But a pleasant few words did.

Try it. Even if you don't get a sale at least you'll feel better for taking your mind off the doom and gloom headlines for a few minutes.

Strange things to do when the kids are in bed

2009-02-09T14:40:00.001Z

Create your own alien invasion in the dining room using their Ben 10 aliens, a slate place matt, and a bike light.

you don't get a view like this when you work in the city

2009-02-06T16:49:00.000Z

I remember now...

2009-02-03T10:10:00.003Z

Like one of those smug cabriolet drivers who get to rub it in our faces for a couple of sunny days a year, the drive to PBHQ this morning reminded me why I suffer 21MPG on a good day, silly insurance, and am single handedly supporting the brake disc industry by driving a Subaru Impreza. This was the view from behind the wheel:

food for thought

2009-01-21T17:11:00.005Z

Watching history being made and hearing Barack Obama say how 60 years ago his father may not have been served in a local restaurant I wondered if a country whose Presidential Oath ends with the words 'so help me God' will ever elect an atheist.

On the subject of America, I saw Dan Gilbert (of what makes people happy fame) talking about the USA's reaction to 9/11. America's borders have never been more heavily guarded yet, in the 12 months following 9/11, twice as many people as were killed in the twin towers perished in road accidents due to the increased traffic caused by a fear of flying. America was guarding the door while the boogie man was already in the house.

We've grown complacent about people dying on the roads. Nutters flying plane loads of people into a tower block was something we never imagined would happen. Cancer is the same story. 1 in 3 of us will get cancer, so the stats tell us. So where's the war on cancer to rival the war on terror? It doesn't exist. Cancer is a fact of life. 3 out of 4 grandparents. My father-in-law. And statistically at least one of me, the wife, or our two kids will get it.

I put this ad together using clips from YouTube. Post your opinions below.

We won!

2009-01-07T11:51:00.002Z

Not the usual ranting and drivel that we post here but...just before Christmas we won the brief to rebrand Pennine Yorkshire on behalf of West Yorkshire Tourism Partnership . Over 100 agencies expressed an interest and 61 submitted work. We won.

We're right chuffed.

Schools kill creativity

2008-12-19T13:39:00.001Z

From ted.com

social networking - it's the future...

2008-11-27T16:33:00.003Z

...along with flying cars and holidays on Mars.

From the Twitter website in answer to the question 'how does Twitter make money?':

While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.

Now THAT's a sandwich!

2008-10-23T13:19:00.003+01:00

Coronation chicken on home made bread. It doesn't get much better than this.

Have that, Katie Melua!

2008-10-21T12:16:00.003+01:00

Here at Pigs & Bees no one can accuse us of not being up-to-date. So here's an article from 3 years ago.

The Grauniad - Katie Melua's bad science

After reading this, I feel like some great injustice in the world has been righted. Simon Singh may quite possibly be proving himself to be the world's greatest pedant, but he's one after my own heart. Give that man a knighthood.

Ideas worth spreading

2008-10-15T12:49:00.004+01:00

TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is an annual gathering of some of the world's most innovative thinkers in those three fields. Each gets around 20 minutes to deliver a talk on their specialist field. BMW have stumped up the necessary to allow the organisers to distribute the talks for free. School was never so interesting:

Phil Zimbardo talks about what makes people evil.

Dan Gilbert talks about how we synthesize happiness.

Enjoy.

An open letter to the Co-op. Custodians of the English language.

2008-10-09T14:03:00.003+01:00

As an almost daily visitor to your stores, and indeed a member of the Cooperative, I'd like to bring to your attention a matter that has concerned me over the last few days. Many's the time I have perambulated down your amply stocked aisles, exclaiming in wonder at yet another 'buy one, get one free' offer on a particular favorite confectionery of mine, or marveling at the astonishingly cold temperature to which you can refrigerate you apples. During the brief moments of indecision that inevitably hamper my soup selection I am often gratified to find that the audible frequencies that would otherwise meander aimlessly though the empty airspace around your neatly ordered foodstuffs are filled with the subtle, inoffensive entertainment that is Co-op Radio.

Occasionally as my hand is wavering between the oxtail and the scotch broth my concentration is momentarily diverted by one commercial or another, graciously informing me of an offer or promotion currently available on one or your product lines. Usually this does not cause any offence, indeed i may even raise my eyebrows and, after making a hasty plump for the oxtail, go forth and seek out this particular sundry in order to make the most of the promotion and to allow my daily allotted funds to stretch a little further.

However, on recent occasions a furrow has crossed my brow, as a particular item broadcast on your community-information service has caused me a certain amount of consternation. I was well aware that your many and varied services included the provision of fresh food and other daily consumables, financial services, medicines and other pharmaceuticals, jet-set holidays and, heaven forbid, should I have the misfortune to keel over and die, another branch of your organisation could convey me to the ground with minimum fuss and utmost efficiency.

I was not, however, aware that you had also taken upon yourselves the great responsibility of being custodians of the English language. Indeed, it is a bold and tumultuous step to move from merely utilising and preserving our mother tongue to actually taking an active part in the evolution of our lexicon. So it is with awe and not a little fear that I observe your courageous adaptations to the very cloth from which our language is so finely tailored. Not a timid change of meaning, or a subtle shift of inflection have we here, but the audacious invention of entirely new words.

Let me elaborate. A recent advertisement broadcast on your radio service has caught my attention, extolling the virtues of a popular brand of instant coffee. This undoubtedly fine tasting beverage is, apparently, on sale in your stores at a 'celebrational' price. Well let me say I very nearly sent an a array of tins spinning towards the ground in shock. We're entirely used to our American cousins bastardising our language - merrily appending words with superfluous and entirely unnecessary syllables in order, possibly, to convey some illusion of grandeur to the lesser mortals who might have the misfortune to be listening. But we, on the other hand are British. We have the a great literary heritage spanning many hundreds of years. We have educated, informed and reserved media publications, we have a Police force who will politely ask you to stop before they resort to the use of firearms for such innocuous offences as littering or speeding. We proudly play host to such bastions of correctness as Radio 4.

We know that the correct word to use in this context is 'celebratory'.

A word that has functioned well for many years without the need to be embellished or adultorated at the whim of the speaker. Please, Co-op Radio, don't try and turn American or I may have to purchase my soup elsewhere.

An open letter to Jewson

2008-09-30T10:39:00.005+01:00

Please send a big thankyou to your delivery cretin, who, whilst driving along Manchester Road, Slaithwaite, Huddersfield at 9AM this morning, decided to use a conveniently large puddle to hose out most of the inside of my van, and give me an impromptu diesel-scented shower.

It's certainly saved me the effort of cleaning the van out, and I've always preferred the comfort afforded by wet muddy upholstery as opposed to the regular dry seating. I can now also spend most of the day drying out and smelling of derv, as presumably can the pedestrians he also generously showered. I'm sure we all hold the utmost gratitude as , due to the wideness of the road at that point, he must have gone out of his way to perform the favour. Keep up the considerate driving! Just think, if he hadn't committed this act of common courtesy in a wagon with your company name on the front of it in huge letters i'd have never been able to write and thank him.

Coming soon

2008-09-17T13:29:00.004+01:00

We've all probably sat through a dreadful film realising we'd been sold a pup by the slick trailer that inspired us to go watch it. But how far could you go to misdirect an audience's expectations? Here are two examples of classic films with re-edited trailers.

First, family favourite Mary Poppins turns into a sinister thriller:

And here's The Shining turned into a feel good flick for all the family:

We're looking for freelance conceptual creatives

2008-09-12T14:37:00.003+01:00

We're looking to add more conceptual art directors and writers to our pool of freelance talent. We need ideas people who aren't afraid of a business to business brief or direct mail. It's people who can get to the crux of a client's problem and create a different solution to the ordinary that we need from time to time.

If you think we could work together, send a couple of scamps of the work you're most proud of along with details of your rates to hello@pigsandbees.com.

Friday afternoon nonsense

2008-09-05T16:10:00.002+01:00

Doom and gloom? Could be great news for your business

2008-09-03T17:28:00.003+01:00

The end of the world is nigh. Or at least the dreaded economic R-word is, if you read the papers. Whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty type of person, there’s no escaping the fact that many people are beginning to panic. Belts are being tightened and wallets are staying closed, ensuring the self-fulfilling prophecy of recession will probably be announced just in time for Christmas. Depressed? Don’t be. Pessimism can actually be good for you.

Psychologist Julie Norem has spent years researching why some people always seem to take the pessimistic view. What she found was that people who tend to dwell on potential problems are no less effective than people who see every event as a golden opportunity. Pessimism actually helps some people come up with strategies to avoid problems and achieve a more positive outcome. Norem calls this defensive pessimism. Another insight from her work is that when, in experiments, defensive pessimists were prevented from following their usual pessimistic strategy they were shown to be far less effective. It seems some people simply work better focusing on the problems (real or imagined) than focusing on the positive.

Research like that carried out by Norem has also shown that people of all dispositions manifest a greater attention to detail when the glass is half empty. In fact some scientists argue that without a pre-programmed state of dissatisfaction, evolution would never have happened. Our ancestors would have set up camp at the first comfy cave, confident that some food will turn up eventually and that hungry Brachiasaurus would never find them. So what does all this have to do with your business?

Use the mood of pessimism to look for opportunities. When everything is rosy it’s all too easy to overlook opportunities for change. We’re happy, why would we want to change anything? But now that everyone has one eye on the worst case scenario ask your staff for ideas. Ask them how their own spending habits have changed (if at all), what their immediate worries are, what the deciding factor is when they’re spending their own money. Your staff, family and friends are your very own free market research team. Take an interest in how the threat of recession is affecting them and you might just spot a competitive advantage.

Angry customers? Tell them to take a good look at themselves

2008-09-03T13:48:00.004+01:00

New research in the Netherlands demonstrated that people exhibit less prejudice when they are in the presence of a mirror. Researchers manipulated participants' private awareness of themselves by having them scan a passage of text for pronouns such as 'I', 'me' or 'mine'. The presence of a mirror that the participants could see themselves in achieved the same self awareness but also raised their public self awareness, resulting in more appropriate behaviour than if the mirror where not present.

So, would having a mirrored 'complaints department' help pacify irate customers? We've no idea. But it would be interesting to find out.

Shock horror - A Level pass rate rises for 26th year in a row!

2008-08-14T09:25:00.006+01:00

It's A Level results day and the number of yoofs passing them is predicted to reach 97%, an increase for the 26th year in a row. Naturally some cynics will say that the exams are too easy. Piffle! will come the indignant retort of pedagogs and politicians of the Government. Already the BBC are reporting the following:

Anthony McClaran, chief executive of Ucas, the body which handles undergraduate applications to UK universities, said: "As with every year, some people will inevitably claim that A-levels are getting easier but we shouldn't really take away from the hard work of those students who have done well in their results today.

"It is difficult to compare the A-levels of today with those of 40 years ago as the world is quite a different place.

Indeed the world is a very different place but unless I missed the email that announced that the laws of algebra and physics had changed then surely the students should be solving the same problems as their parents were back in the 70s. Of course 40 years ago we didn't have subjects like media studies and women's studies. As an advisor at a well known academic institution said to me a few months ago, if the course has the word studies in the title then it's really the light version of the subject. Anthony McClaran continues:

"Many world records are being broken at the Olympics but that doesn't make the feat easier or the distances shorter."

Apples and oranges, old chap. The stop watch and tape measure don't lie. Does he really believe that the subjective evaluation of an essay is a good comparison?

Of course the debate will rage on until next Thursday when the GCSE results are announced and both will be forgotten over the bank holiday weekend as we rightly redirect our ire towards the Government's failure to provide us with a decent summer yet again. So I've come up with my own A Level. Let's call it Youth Studies. When the moderator tells you to begin you have 2 hours to answer the following questions:

1. If A Level pass rates are rising, the people passing the exams must be smarter. Explain in no more than 500 words why nobody under the age of 35 who works in a shop, bar, or restaurant can add up the cost of fewer than 6 items without the assistance of an electronic cash register.

2. If youths r getting smrtr xpln in no mre thn 500 words y a lrge mjority ov thm cnt use vowels in wrds that hve had vowels since the yr dot (when A Levels were invented).

3. If young people are genuinely more intelligent than their ancestors 40 years ago, why is Big Brother in its 9th season?

4. If young people are genuinely more intelligent than their ancestors 40 years ago, why did Big Brother ever make it onto the telly?

5. If young people are genuinely more intelligent, why are they making the same mistakes that their ancestors did 40 years ago?

things that bother me no. 14

2008-08-07T15:29:00.006+01:00

That bloody graphic (above) on web pages that are 'under construction'. It bothers me for many reasons. First, it's a crap idea. It was crap idea ten or more years ago when I first set eyes on it and it hasn't changed. Second, I can't see the link between a roadworks sign and the construction of a web page. Yes, I know it's supposed to be a play on 'construction' but there's no lateral leap or logical hindsight. If we are going to be that facile then maybe I should surround my desk with cones and don a hard hat and safety tabard as I construct this sentence. Ridiculous? Yes, it is. Third, how bloody hard is it to build a webpage? Well for me sat upon the throne of creative governance it's quite easy. I simply scribble some instructions on a scrap of paper and a team of people younger and brighter than I turn it into a web page. I don't ask how, I simply enjoy the magic. But even not being versed in XML, ASP, Flash and all that other technical stuff I know that the bright young things can go from a state of wide eyed 'I hope he isn't looking to...' to a state of exuberant 'Have a look at this!' in days rather than weeks or months. A complete award winning website with animation and lots of database driven content and data capture took less than a month. The sites that are 'under construction' are rarely that complicated. Perhaps this is the thing that really bothers me. They are always (ALWAYS) dreadful websites either put together with a software package designed for people with hooves or they are based on some free template from the same diabolical source that inflicted clip art on the world.

If you have a website and you haven't got the time or knowledge to create all those wonderful pages that are still under construction years after your website went live then please click here. Buy the 3 page off the shelf website and we'll throw in a fourth page for free. Just take down that under construction sign. Please.

Misery is not miserly

2008-08-06T12:10:00.005+01:00

New research has found that sadness increases the amount of money people are prepared to pay for a commodity. In an experiment carried out by a team from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities volunteers were subjected to a short piece of video about either the death of a boy's mentor or the Great Barrier Reef. Both videos had been validated to induce either a state of sadness or no emotional response. After watching the videos the participants were then asked to buy or not buy a bottle of water at various prices.

The people who had watched the video about the death of the boy's mentor paid more for the same bottle of water than the people who had watched the Great Barrier Reef video. The researchers concluded that people's emotional state has a direct influence on how much they are willing to spend.

For years sales people have been taught to greet customers with a smile. Most people automatically smile back, and by smiling their brains assume they are happy and run their 'happy program'. The new research above suggests there may be an alternative. I'm not suggesting alienating or berating customers as they enter your premises like a retail Basil Fawlty but perhaps some low key melancholic classical music rather than Gobby Williams blaring out might put shoppers into a more self-reflective state making them more likely to pay higher prices.

Ethics aside, it's a fascinating area to be explored.

Things that bother me no. 2

2008-08-06T11:36:00.003+01:00

Wind.

Surprisingly I'm not talking about flatus. I'm talking about Billy Wind.

A cross wind is worse than a head wind.

We are sworn enemies.

2008-08-06T10:16:00.001+01:00

Sign by Danasoft - Myspace Layouts, Forum Signatures

things that bother me no. 8674

2008-08-05T12:56:00.002+01:00

The word 'winningest'.

Google adwords strikes again

2008-08-04T16:55:00.006+01:00

We seem to now have a new selection of ads on this page along the following lines:

Gut & Bowel Troubles?

Sometimes Going Can Be Difficult Ease The Pain, Visit Our Site Today

www.PassItOnNow.co.uk

and

Bloating

I Cured My Irritable Bowel Fast So Can You - Read My Story

www.ThisCureWorks.com/IBS

and even better...

Problems with your bowel?

Stop worrying about your bowel Have a virtual colonoscopy today

www.vitalimaging.co.uk

I can only assume that Google, in it's ineffable wisdom, has picked up on the fact that Satan has a face on his bottom and it makes him rather irritable.

Makes you wonder what else we could make it come up with. Hmm. I'd rather like to go Llama trekking in the Appalachia. While I'm there i might decide to make my own jam. I might get a cheap luxury watch to bring home with me. (on a low budget airline of course)

Certainly don't want to mention prescription medicines - that'd give Google a field day...

Which came first, orange or the orange?

2008-08-04T12:55:00.003+01:00

Do you suppose an orange is so named due to its orangey hue, or was the colour orange given its name in recognition of the fruit to which it bears such a striking resemblance?

'tis a most perplexing mystery.

An orange.

Some orange.

The subject of orange foodstuffs brings me cunningly on to the humble carrot. Which shouldn't be orange. It should be, and originally was, black, yellow, red, purple and a veritable plethora of other weird and wonderful colours.

Our now sadly depleted carrot choice is thanks alone to 16th century Dutch farmers, who took it upon themselves to honour their monarchy, the house of Orange, by selectively breeding the yellow and red varieties of carrot commonly available at the time. Little did they know that by presenting their king with an appropriately coloured tuber they would sound the death-knell for worldwide carrot diversity.

It's a lucky thing the colour orange wasn't named after carrots or the whole world would be plunged into confusion.

Things that bother me no. 3

2008-08-04T11:35:00.000+01:00

Rain.

things that bother me no. 9762

2008-08-01T15:06:00.001+01:00

Has an actress ever really made a double entendre to a bishop?

FABULOUS FREE GIFT!

2008-08-01T11:52:00.002+01:00

I ordered some keyrings for a client. The courier has just delivered them. I opened the package to find a small box with 'Mystery free gift' stamped in red letters on it. A slight tumescence began to surge through my happy glands. A free gift. What could it be? It's only a small box but...eagerly I reached for a scalpel. Like a battlefield surgeon I trembled with adrenaline but my cutting hand was steady as a rock. Don't want to damage my free gift. What could it be? Got to get the box open...

...and here, ladies and gentlemen, is my free gift:

A BT ADSL filter. I had hoped for an apple core. But hey! a free gift's a free gift. Thank you, keyring people. I'm touched.

They think of everything.

2008-08-01T09:44:00.003+01:00

This...

...is a left-handed fish slice.

Apparently the difference is in the shape of the blade.

If you don't believe me, have a look here.

Things that bother me No. 5632

2008-07-30T12:55:00.003+01:00

Do the personal culinary preferences of the sandwich maker influence the quality of sandwich you receive?

If they don't like onions am I going to get too many onions on my sandwich, no onions at all, or just the right amount?

Well fancy that.

2008-07-29T12:38:00.005+01:00

Apparently, according to Michael Pacher (c. 1435 - 1498), the Devil had a face on his bottom.

One can only assume this made sitting down rather uncomfortable. Which I suppose, after several thousand years, would account for an irritable attitude and this in turn will have gone some way to contribute to the not inconsiderable amount of bad press The Beast has received of late.

Perhaps a faith that teaches understanding and acceptance should feel more sympathy towards one who has suffered at the hands of such a disability, rather than overtly displaying the worrying traits of Arsefaceophobia.

Still more worrying however, is the apparent fundamental lack of ... well... fundament.

Presumably a digestive tract which works from both ends towards the middle and evidently, like George W Bush's Iraq campaign, has no exit strategy, would cause a certain amount of digestive discomfort. It is evident from the picture that this is the case as old Satan appears to also be suffering from a quite a severe case of Anorexia.

I'd recommend surgery, counseling, and a pot of Activia every day.

The offending posterior.

not very cuil

2008-07-28T15:14:00.004+01:00

Cuil (pronounced cool) is the latest search engine to announce it is going to open a can of whupass on Google. Being raised on a diet of Rocky films I just can't help but side with the underdog so I cyber trotted off to see how exactly they planned to do this. Typing in 'pigs and bees' had us there in the first 3, or top right on the top row since Cuil doesn't do a list but a magazine style page layout. Nice idea. I clicked some more and I got lots of 'oops we couldn't find that page - please check the URL' messages. Nothing wrong with this except I hadn't typed any URLs, I had clicked on a link on the Cuil website. Oh dear.

Still, one of the founders is an ex-IBM person so maybe it's just Mac users that it doesn't work for. The creative industries will, I'm sure, realise their mistake one day and switch to Microsoft Paint or Corel Draw. Until then we'll probably stick with Google. The search engine which, despite Cuil's strapline, is universally regarded as being the biggest one out there.

Update: a second visit to Cuil and once again I type in 'pigs and bees'. This time, instead of appearing on the front page I'm told 'We didn’t find any results for pigs and bees'.

I bet they'll be ordering extra toilet roll at Google HQ.

Bob's gone camping

2008-07-23T17:24:00.004+01:00

No, not Graham Norton style. Living in a field for two weeks. Here's his tent.

a philosophy joke

2008-07-09T15:54:00.003+01:00

Is the glass half full or half empty?

2008-07-03T16:48:00.002+01:00

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Traditional wisdom says that if you declare the glass half empty then you are a pessimist. But what if you were on your 5th glass of water in an effort to hit the magic 8 glasses a day and you don't like water? Surely the glass being half empty then would be a good thing, making you an optimist.

Aphorisms.

They ain't what they used to be.

twenty questions

2008-06-26T10:32:00.000+01:00

http://www.20q.net/

Artificial intelligence program that 'guesses' what you're thinking about.

We're on the telly

2008-06-23T12:19:00.004+01:00

Well not us, but an ad we created for one of our clients.

The English language is wrong. Sorry chaps.

2008-06-12T11:35:00.004+01:00

After writing something on here earlier this morning I was accosted by the apostrophe police (who incidentally don't seem to consider themselves important enough to merit capitalisation). After re-reading my turgid drivel on the subject of milk I can only assume that my heinous grammatical crime was the placement of an apostrophe in the word "Its".

Now this is a bone of contention for me. The apostrophe police, and your English teacher will tell you that the phrase "It is" may be shortened to "It's" with an apostrophe placed to represent the ommited letter i.

For instance:

"It is raining today" and "It's raining today" are both grammatically correct.

The problem comes when the word "Its" is used in the possessive sense.

"The milk took its downward journey to the floor" is correct, while "The milk took it's downward journey to the floor" is not.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the whole plethora of uses to which the apostrophe can be applied is to denote possession. The position of the apostrophe is based upon whether the possessor is singular or multiple, for instance:

"The horse's tail" describes the tail of one horse, while "The horses' tails" refers to the appendages located above the bottoms of multiple animals.

Using this rule, if our milk in the previous example was referred to by name, it would carry an apostrophe:

"the milk's downward journey to the floor"

This is correct because the milk is singular and the downward journey belongs to the milk. No-one else.

If we were to apply another name to our milk the rule would still apply. For instance, if we were to hypothetically assume our milk is called Dave, then the following would be correct:

"Dave's downward journey to the floor"

Now I quite often refer to my milk as "it". The word "it" is a fine word that can be used to describe many other things in the world besides milk, but it does the job rather nicely in this circumstance.

Used in this context, the word "it" replaces the noun - proper or otherwise - of the object to which we are referring.

"Pour the milk in my tea",
"Pour Dave in my tea"
and
"Pour it in my tea"

are all correct, providing the recipient of the instruction knows my milk is called Dave, and that the milk is what is being referred to by the term "It".

Following this rule, then it should be perfectly acceptable to substitute the noun in "the milk's downward journey" or "Dave's downward journey" with the word "it", giving:

"It's downward journey to the floor"

The downward journey belongs to "it" and is represented as such by the use of a possessive apostrophe.

The English language, however, does not allow me to do this. And thus, with the use of this perfectly reasonable and logical argument i deduce that the English language is wrong.

Q.E.D.

Britain's got talent but the tone deaf electrician working next door certainly has not got any

2008-06-12T10:46:00.006+01:00

Maybe they teach it at trade schools: here's your plaster, here's your trowel, now whistle like a demented bird with a wing trapped in barbed wire and intersperse it with out of tune warbling of some song that you only know one line to and no one else has ever heard.

Plasterers, electricians, plumbers (I once had the misfortune to have a plumber arrive with what at first appeared to be a huge tool chest but was, in fact, a sound system big enough to host a party in the average urban park) and of course brick layers.

Maybe he's fallen down a hole in the floor and is actually crying out in pain. It's hard to tell above my own screams of Munchian anguish.

Whatever happened to Milk-in-a-Bag?

2008-06-12T10:06:00.007+01:00

Some milk. In a bag.
Still popular in Canada apparently.

I was having a beer-fueled discussion the other day and we decided the point of differentiation between being old and young was whether or not you remember when milk came in bags. The teenaged-studenty types who work behind the bar thought the whole concept was ridiculous, but us potential-summer-wine-cast-members remember the sopping wet mass of leaking milk bags you used to get in supermarkets and corner shops which had a tendency to completely lose their structural integrity as soon as you snipped a corner off. If you were lucky, and you strategically positioned your cup of tea and cereal bowl you could catch at least some of the milk on it's inevitable downward journey to the floor.

Spar. Guilty as charged.

I seem to remember this fantastic example of packaging technology was particularly prevalent in Spar shops in Wales and Ambleside and other such places where you'd be buying the milk for camping purposes. Which somehow made the whole thing even more inappropriate.

Along then, came the evil Tetra-Pak, and milk in a bag was no more.

RIP Milk in a Bag.

Or is it?

Because while pootling around on t'interweb the other day I stumbled upon this fascinating bit of footage on the BBC's website.

It seems Milk-in-a-bag is to have it's renaissance, and shall grow to be known and loved by a whole new generation. Unfortunately however, it seems the current manufacturers have not quite grasped the concept and have tried to create a boring plastic jug system to enable easy pouring and mess-free opening. Certainly no fun in that.

Kids, ditch the jug, wrestle with the polythene-clad-liquid and enjoy Milk-in-a-Bag for it's sheer pointlessness. This is the stuff memories are made of.

so good they posted it twice

2008-06-11T16:54:00.001+01:00

Something to ponder

2008-06-11T09:53:00.003+01:00

Do grass and road side leaves taste as good to a sheep as a bacon and egg sandwich does to me?

You know you're middle aged when...

2008-06-10T15:25:00.003+01:00

...you don't lust after a Porsche or M3 BMW, your desire is for a push along German lawnmower.

Another fly in my statistical soup

2008-05-30T15:21:00.005+01:00

While I'm on one about misleading statistics let me congratulate yell.com on a job well done. Your mailer landed on my desk today. Once I'd figured out where the copy was I saw that the average new business enquiries for businesses in our category of Yellow Pages is over 85 per month. Now we all know that over 85 means 86 but hey! 85 new biz enquiries is bloody good. So I read on. It seems the average of 85 was based on a survey of 3,000 UK adults per month (I'm starting to think we need a bigger ad in Yellow Pages)...over a ten year period. Excuse me? Why do I care how many new business enquiries people were getting in 1996? In a week that has been filled with shysters and snake oil salesmen, Yell you are a shining example of why Bill Hicks told anyone who works in marketing to go kill themselves.

It's a small world (or so some people think)

2008-05-30T09:43:00.005+01:00

Above: A Post Office Telecoms researcher giving it large

Post Office Telecoms have found the perfect voice. This may come as a surprise if you consider yourself to have a good voice and weren't approached to be part of their rigorous study but they decided that they only needed to listen to 50 voices to find perfection. Since they were searching for the perfect male and female voices they hopefully listened to 25 of each though being the Post Office they probably told the researchers that 1 woman and 49 men or any combination between 1 of one and 49 of the other would suffice.

Given the world's population is around 6.7 billion, even allowing for mutes and babies, a sample of 50 doesn't quite seem enough to qualify your findings as the perfect voice.

Arse Cherry

2008-05-16T14:24:00.003+01:00

Oh, the immature-schoolboy humour that can be derived from rudely shaped fruit...

I shall keep it on my desk until it goes green and furry.

April Tomfoolery

2008-04-01T13:11:00.005+01:00

And so it comes around every year. The day when the national media emblazon some cunningly-disguised spoof article across their collective front pages and entertain us all with the wit that only men with the power of Rupert Murdoch can muster.

This year the BBC showed some imagination with footage of flying penguins migrating to South America. The Telegraph on the other hand, showed none by pinching the same story. The Express had us rolling on the floor with a picture of Big Ben as a digital clock. Oh the mirth. Still, rather surprisingly they didn't try to claim that this was in any way at all related to the death of Princess Diana. Apparently in their eyes, everything else in the world is.

BMW kept up their tradition of posting a spoof advert in all the national papers - this time extolling the virtues of a new piece of technology available on forthcoming Beemers; namely Canine Repellant Alloy Protection. A device designed to incapacitate any weak-bladdered dog who cared to pass water upon your shiny wheels by the delivery of a modest electric current.

The Daily Mail, however, seemed to think we'd all find it amusing to know that Alistair Darling buys National Lottery tickets at his local newsagents. The big joke, apparently, being that he doesn't.

I can't be the only person to think that the Mail hasn't quite grasped the concept of a spoof news article here. Given their political standpoint and usual readership, it would be far more amusing to see something along these lines:

Perhaps they were concerned that if they were to run such a headline, 80% of their readers would cancel their subscriptions. (Given that most of the other 20% are those who would prefer to read a broadsheet, but don't have long enough arms.)

Following this, I suppose they would have to rectify their position by publishing this explanatory headline the next day:

Having done that, they would have lost two-days worth of headline space that could have been devoted to maligning people who weren't born in the Home Counties, leaving their readers with the impression that they'd turned into a bunch of soft Lefties.

Given such grave circumstances it must be with considered foresight that they chose instead to insinuate that that Chancellor of the Exchequer enjoys gambling.

Don't you just hate it when politics stands in the way of comedy.

Global warming and global cooling

2008-04-01T12:18:00.002+01:00

Eggs come out of a hen's warm body and lay in the thermal insulation of a straw nest for days until the farmer or his wife collect and eat them. Apples grow in the warmth of the summer sun, basking in its life giving rays for 12 or more hours a day. The local Co-operative stores apples and eggs in the chiller cabinet. Hang on a minute, what do they know that Mother Nature doesn't?

Good with food? I don't think so. Just the same as the other supermarkets only they don't pretend to be the saviour of wholesome food and fair play.

Oh and the Co-op's beer is always warm. Not enough room in the chiller cabinet.

When a brain scientist suffers a stroke

2008-03-14T11:02:00.002Z

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist. 12 years ago she suffered a stroke and got to experience her brain from the inside out. The New York Times has a story and a fascinating video of Dr Taylor talking about her experience. Watch it here.

Daily Mail headline watch Day 1

2008-03-11T12:32:00.007Z

Have you ever uttered the words 'the world's gone mad' as you read about the latest outbreak of political correctness assaulting the sensibilities of every right-minded person? Thankfully we have the Daily Mail to restore the balance. The Mail's headline writers regularly restore our faith in human nature with their ability to get to the nub of the problem in half a dozen words. Even more impressive is their ability to include reference to any women or foreigners in their headlines whatever the story. Let's take a look at a selection from today's Daily Mail. We've put some of our own into the list just to see if we could cut it as a Daily Mail sub-editor. Try and spot the real ones from the fakes. The answer is at the bottom.

1.) Top female lawyer destroyed by City bullies could get record £13 million pay out

2.) British wildlife student dies in front of girlfriend minutes after being bitten by black mamba snake

3.) Pupils to swear oath of allegiance to the Queen or face exclusion

4.) Britain braced for more storms from across the Channel

5.) House prices fall for the first time in 10 years - many blame immigrants for difficulty selling their homes

6.) The primary school where pupils speak 41 different languages

The real headlines are 1, 2, and 6.

Interesting animation

2008-02-26T12:11:00.001Z

The power of words

2008-02-26T12:02:00.001Z

Nice article in the Washington Post about the power of words in politics. Read it here.