unusual uses for technology - no.1

I've got a mouth ulcer (which may explain why I'm not my usual happy go lucky self this morning) so went to the chemist for something to treat it. The problem is there are no mirrors in the office and I need to apply the treatment directly to the ulcer. The solution is to use the web cam on my MacBook with the preview feature on iChat. Fantastic. Bet you can't do that on a Dell.

singing with dead people

Katie Melua is number one in the hit parade. Singing a duet with Eva Cassidy no less. Yes, the same Eva Cassidy who died in 1996. Perhaps I've missed something, but I always thought a duet was about more than two people taking turns to sing verses of the same song. There has to be some chemistry for a duet to work. Think of The Pogues and Kirsty McColl. Think of Brian Adams and Tina Turner. Like them or loathe them, they were singing in the same room together and working off each other. Of course Miss Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing isn't the first to profit from a 'collaboration' with a dead person (I'll get to the fact that this single is for charity mate in a minute). David Bowie and Bing Crosby, Luciano Pavarotti and Frank Sinatra.  Fine songs, fine performances, but duets? Hardly.

Dear Miss Melua, the number one selling British artiste around the world (I wouldn't make that up, I promise you), is donating all the profits to the British Red Cross. One would surmise that this is Katie's charity of choice. But what about Eva's charity of choice? I suspect someone robbed of life at the age of 33 might have preferred the profits go to cancer charities. Of course I'm only guessing here. The dead can't talk for themselves. They only sing.

The experiment - part II

The second installment in our experiment to see what ads appear on the right once Google Bot has 'read' this post...

Malachy Leprechaun opened his eyes with a start.  He looked around the room to see who else was left, or awake, or alive, or undecided. Sartre was slumped over the grand piano, a bunch of keys held down by his face but making no sound. Now that’s what I call music, thought Malachy Leprechaun. Not like the racket he’d subjected us to earlier. Sartre had a party piece: Neil young sings nursery rhymes. It would begin well enough. ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ to the tune of ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. Then a few more from ‘Harvest’. Maybe a rendition of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ to the tune of ‘Rocking in the Free World’ - that always got the party singing - or maybe a duet with Bob Dylan joining Young at the piano. It wasn’t X- Factor but it was entertaining enough. The problem was that Jean Paul was on the absinthe rather than his usual discount wines delivered direct to his door. As the absinthe worked its way into his very being he’d slowly changed the set list until his performance had become more Crazy Horse than Neil Young. The leprechauns hadn’t minded. They were warm and reducing their home heating bills without switching their gas and electricity accounts to one supplier. Sartre liked a warm house. Thick carpets. No roll ends or off-cuts and definitely none of that wood  laminate flooring that had become so popular. This was an energy efficient home of the highest order. All was grand until Jean Paul had begun to think he was being heckled by a fairy sat on top of his piano. A green fairy. The green fairy that looked like Pierre reciting Yeats...

Malachy Leprechaun’s stomach rumbled. He looked around the room for some party nibbles. Even an Iceland prawn platter would do. It wasn’t Heston Blumenthal but for five pounds you couldn’t complain. Drinking always gave him an appetite. Too much of an appetite. He knew he needed to lose a few pounds but thoughts of joining a slimming club he just wouldn’t entertain. Malachy spotted Kierkegard talking to himself across the room, his mumbled words falling into an empty glass, his foppish quiff capitulated to the weight of its own existence and now dangling before his eyes, full of self-loathing. Kierkegard was probably boring himself with tales of his new celebrity. He’d gotten a mention in a TV ad for a Welsh vodka and had made sure everyone knew about it, telling them, texting them, even emailing on his Blackberry. Hume sat beside Kierkegard. Drinking tea as always and never saying anything - just watching you, studying you. Why did he come to these affairs if he was only going to drink tea? Not even Yorkshire tea but that french piss that Sartre insisted on buying.

The Man with the Nuclear Button

Last night i stumbled across something frightening on the internet. Obviously the most powerful man in the world is feeling left out, and has decided to produce his own Jihad video just like Osama Bin Laden. Only this is scary on a whole different level.

If you've yet to see this cinematic masterpiece, you can watch it here courtesy of the BBC:

Barney's Christmas Message
(people of a nervous disposition may find some scenes distressing)

While you're watching, hold this thought; This man is in control of an estimated 9,938 nuclear weapons. And just when you thought it couldnt get any worse, you see this:



That's Bush's Lap Dog. Ironically playing second fiddle to Bush's real Lap Dog.

I can't actually think of anything more to say on this subject, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. I'm just off to paint myself white, brick up the windows and nail the doors up against the wall.

An experiment - part 1

Given the impressive accuracy of Google Bot in matching the ads on the right of this page with the content of the blog entries we thought we'd try a little experiment. I am going to sound a little confused in a moment. Some might even venture, like a lunatic. But there be method in this madness. We want to see what sort of ads pop up on the page if we include some unusual phrases in the body copy. The leprechauns who live at the bottom of the garden pressed their noses to the glass and began cooing over the Christmas tree. Sartre sat smoking, wondering if Pierre had ever turned up at the cafe and, if he was honest with himself, ruing the day that the fecker had left Jean Paul waiting and set him off on his whole being and nothingness trip. He'd smoked three packets of cigarettes that day. His chest hurt at the memory. His mouth was dry.  His head hurt. The pain was worse than when he bit into ice cream. Though not having brushed his teeth for who knows how long  was taking care of that. And the mescaline of course. Those beautiful mescaline moments. Antique horse brasses. Sailing holidays. Carbon fibre racing bikes at discount prices. He'd had many a strange and beautiful experience with Madame Mescaline. The leprechauns had steamed the glass with their hot breath. Sartre poured himself another brandy and held the glass halfway between the table and his mouth, halfway between being and nothingness. He stared into the empty space in front of him. Space like an empty office block available on a short term lease and ideal for a small or medium size enterprise. The phone rang. Pierre? Apologising for not turning up at the cafe, after all these years? He let it ring. The silence. The ringing still echoing in his ears. Present through its absence. Being and nothingness. L'etre et Nuit. Outside snow began to fall. Christmas card snow, thick and fluffy. The leprechauns stood upright and tugged on collars, pulled down hats and blew into tiny frozen hands. Sartre stood up without looking in their direction. He walked over to the bureau and picked up the green bottle that sat half empty on top of it, extending his arm to turn the key in the patio doors before he pulled the cork from the bottle.

"It would seem Pierre cannot make it today," Said Sartre, arranging several glasses in a row now. "Will you not come in from the cold and celebrate Christmas with me? One should never drink absinthe alone."

Now that's impressive

You may have noticed the ads on the right of the page. Google bot 'reads' all the posts on this blog and places ads that it thinks will be of interest to the readers (there is more than one of you, isn't there?). I mentioned Kwik Fit in the last post and within 6 minutes there's an ad for Kwik Fit. That's impressive.

The trouble with old people

We were recently invited to offer an opinion on a number of options available to an organisation as it planned for the future. Sorry to be so cryptic but I don’t want subjectivity to get in the way of my argument. It seems that upon reaching a certain age some people loose or choose the ability to think beyond their own purlieu. It doesn’t feel right to me so I’m not going to entertain it, is their position. Logic doesn’t enter the proceedings; ad hominem argument always does. Unable or unwilling to consider any position other than their own, they usually attack the person opposing the status quo. It doesn’t feel right; if you are someone who feels you’d feel the same way. Codswallop. With the exception of psychopaths and tax inspectors everybody feels. It’s just that some of us can put our feelings aside for the greater good. Oops! I appear to have turned into an old person attacking the arguer rather than the argument. Let me try again. Many years ago I worked on the account of a national tyre and exhaust retailer. They were a big fish but were a long way behind Kwik Fit and so tasked their agency to come up with a strategy to address this. Considerable research led to the findings that people didn’t really trusts fast fit centres and what the market place really needed was someone trustworthy - like Marks and Spencer.

Now there were a couple things that didn’t sit right with me, green horn though I was. Firstly, if people genuinely didn’t trust fast fit centres how were Kwik Fit making such a success of their business? And secondly, this was around the time that Marks and Spencer was nose diving into irrelevance and major losses.

The fact that people didn’t trust fast fit centres I don’t find surprising. There are some immutable facts about visiting these places: it’s going to cost you money; the coffee is awful; the tea is not really tea; mechanics can out-sneer a teenage girl and most of us wouldn’t know if our tyres were legal or not, let alone whether our brake disks met the manufacturers recommended minimum thickness. We have no idea if we are being ripped off but we still part with our hard earned. The same way that many of us put up with a poor meal in a restaurant and complain about it in private after we’ve paid the bill in full. Being asked if we trust fast-fit centres by a clipboard wielding ‘official’ is our chance to get back at them, let them know how we really feel.

The fact that people (the account and planning directors in particular) had declared a Marks and Spencer of fast-fit centres to be the way forward was genuinely surprising. It took Marks & Sparks quite a few years to turn their fortunes. (Of course any red blooded male could have told them that having a French supermodel in her underwear appear in all of your TV ads was the way to go.) What people were really harking after was a time gone by. Marks & Spencer were no longer relevant. The buying public had gone elsewhere; maybe reluctantly, but there was no turning back. Despite what they might declare in questionnaires. And perhaps there in lies the problem: to truly glean our attitudes and feelings from a questionnaire is a costly and time consuming process. few companies have the budget and few people in the street have the inclination to be psychometrically analaysed in the interest of market research.

So how does an organisation deal with change? Undoubtedly the opinions of the ‘doesn’t feel right’ brigade are just as valid as mine. So do we just wait for them to die and then move our organisation forward? I’m not a fan of waiting for anything. I am an advocate of strong leadership. Change and be damned. Around 5% of us are totally opposed to change, 10% embrace revolutionary change, while 20% of us welcome a combination of revolution and evolution. Most of us (the remaining 65%) accept small changes as long as they are referenced to the status quo. So what does this all mean? Well you can’t please all the people all the time. In fact one of the two ‘all or nothing’ groups will always be aggrieved. So change and be damned. Of course your stakeholder base might have a higher than average number of luddites, but statistically speaking most of us are going to go with the flow as long as the flow is nice and steady. Of course once things begin to change for the better you have a frame of reference for bolder changes.

So what happened to that fast-fit company? They’ve bounced from agency to agency over the past 10 years, doubtless briefing them all that they want to be the Marks & Spencer of fast-fit. Meanwhile M&S is once again a success story so the original market research might finally prove to be correct. I await the ad with baited breath: Noemie Lenoir wiggling beneath a Ford Mondeo wearing nothing but a basque and a mechanic’s sneer. Marvelous.