Badly Written
Posted: Mon 29 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, News, Weirdness 1 Comment »I guess someone at the BBC is trying to see what they can get past people on a slow week.
In this story about new British stamps for 2009, there’s the following paragraph…
Later sets will feature mythical creatures such as mermaids, post boxes, eminent Britons, Royal Naval uniforms and the fire service.
Hmmm, eminent Britons are mythical creatures?
26th
Posted: Fri 26 December, 2008 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Festering Season Leave a comment »
So, there go the adverts for Jewellery and Perfume, here come the ones for Holidays, Sales and stopping smoking.
It must be Boxing Day, and Christmas must be over and done with for another year.
Chilling a Beach
Posted: Wed 24 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »And just when you thought things couldn’t get any sillier – along comes this.
A plan to cool down the sand on the beach at a luxury hotel in Dubai.
“We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” said Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace.
“This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world…
Next Up Against The Wall
Posted: Tue 23 December, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Thoughts 4 Comments »It’s interesting to see today that supposedly Whittards of Chelsea is apparently also close to going into administration. Following on as it does from yesterday’s news where Woolworths announced the full schedule for the closing of all their shops (come Jan 8th, they’ll all be closed) it’s interesting to see which other chains are apparently due up against the wall.
Personally, I’m not really surprised by Woolworth’s demise – I’m more surprised that they’ve hung on as long as they have, to be honest. They’ve tried for a long time the “stock a bit of everything” approach, and in face of competition from other stores (and particularly online stores for CDs, DVDs and games) well, it just really wasn’t a surprise.
For myself, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WHSmiths go the same route as Woolworths during 2009 – again, they’ve got a huge amount of competition from the online stores for the great majority of their business. In fact, the only thing that you can get in WHSmiths that you can’t get online (for the most part) is magazines – and maybe greetings cards. Even most of the newspapers now carry an online version, which takes away yet more “core business”, although I guess there’ll be people who want to read papers “properly” for a while yet.
I wonder which other retailers will go to the wall in the current economic climate?
Midas Touch
Posted: Mon 22 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts 2 Comments »Is it just me who finds this story more than a little bit worrying?
The Bank of England did not understand the severity of economic problems before the current financial crisis, its deputy governor says.
Sir John Gieve told the BBC that the Bank knew “crazy borrowing” was taking place and the price of houses and other assets was rising unsustainably.
But the Bank thought this problem was less serious than it turned out to be, he said in an interview for Panorama.
Well if the Bank of England didn’t understand the problem, what fucking hope did anyone else have?
Or is it more a case that some people did understand the problem – it’s just that they weren’t the people who really should have known/understood? After all, which sane person would think “I know, I’ll invest in lending money to people who have little-to-no chance of actually paying it back”? (After all, that seems to be the basic premise of ‘sub-prime’ mortgages)
And which sane person would base their plans on “OK, so house prices have risen [x]% this year, but they’ve done that for 10 years on the trot, so we’ll keep on expecting them to go up, (and borrow extensively on that ‘profit’) rather than get to an unsustainable level and then crash”. Oh yeah, lots of people did that second one, didn’t they? My mistake.
All in all, a totally fucking ridiculous situation.
Text/Drive
Posted: Fri 19 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, News, Thoughts Leave a comment »I’m pleased to see that the woman who killed another driver while driving and sending text messages has been convicted of causing death by dangerous driving.
During the journey, travelling at 70mph+ on the M40, this woman had received and/or sent 20 text messages. She said she thought that it was perfectly possible to send text messages while driving “in certain conditions”.
Hopefully this conviction will have taken away that thought. But somehow I doubt it.