Gratuitous Fridayage

I’ve added a couple of silly pictures to enliven your last few miserable hours of workly toil.

Gratuitous cuteness:

Gratuitous rhymage:

(Parappa the Rapper in a crapper with a slapper in Aiya Napa, since you asked)

(Both from B3ta; second created by Neth)

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Start spreading the news

I’m leaving tomorrow; yes, I’m going to be a part of it in old New York. Which should make for an entertaining week, even though I’m going to be working.

Hopefully some posting and no explosions will happen (you can probably rank the alternative options in order of preference without any particularly great difficulty). To be honest, I’m far more worried about spending a week not able to smoke in pubs.

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Great moments in advertising

I’m not a big fan of Subway’s pseudo-deli sandwiches. However, I doff my cap at them for their exceptionally interesting German advertising campaign.

Only an utter dickhead would have been offended by the main corporate campaign, which was based around the concept that Americans are lardy slobs. Coming from an American company, this is an impressive and laudable piece of self-mockery.

Of course, it’s never hard to find an utter dickhead: the one in this particular saga was the Center for Individual Freedom (that’s ‘for’ in the sense of ‘against’, presumably), which stirred up a ridiculous hate campaign against Subway and got the campaign pulled.

Some of their local franchisees took the campaign a little further. I’m awed, disturbed and amused by this picture from a promotional pack:

There’s a fairly hard-to-refute argument that US cultural imperialism and Middle Eastern policy have been a major factor in creating the environment where Al-Qaida and its co-ideologues flourish. I’m not sure, however, that cartoons in deli stores are the best place to make the case.

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School of International Relations

I’ve found a diplomatic solution to the Gibraltar problem: we tell the Spanish that we’d be happy to return the rock to its rightful owners. Its rightful owners, of course, are the people who controlled it for 700 years, and agreed to give it up only under duress: the Moors.

This would leave us only with the task of finding the modern day successors to the Caliphate. I think Al-Qaida have a strong case, since their aim is to establish a new one; Gibraltar would be an excellent base for such an endeavour.

As a next step, Spain ought to cede control of Andalusia, which was stolen from the Moors at the same time (perhaps Al-Qaida could somehow persuade the Spanish people that this would be a good idea). With the Gibraltan and Andalusian problems solved, southern Europe could enter a new era of peace and prosperity.

This also seems like an opportunity to mention my plan that we give the Malvinas back to Argentina, on the condition that the Argentinians all move there and give the mainland back to the four remaining Indians that their ancestors forgot to slaughter. I had a similar plan for dealing with Hong Kong, but it fell down on the (in my opinion minor) grounds that it would have led to global nuclear war and the death of everyone in the UK.

To summarise, I’d be marginally better than the current US administration at running foreign policy.

(thanks to libertarian lunatics Francis Turner and Ed Thomas for facts and inspiration).

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Oooh, get *her*

If hard-left catfighting is your bag, then this comments section is the place to go. SWP ‘wankers’ take on SIAW ‘preschoolers’, before a baying crowd… can someone produce a special edition of Celebrity Death Match to celebrate?

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Hari obsession

Much as I enjoy mocking Johann Hari (how could you not?), I’m something of a fan of his writings. However, you can take such things too far – and clicking through 20 Google pages searching for “johann hari” is definitely a bit much. Even if it does bring you here, which is an excellent place to be.

Perhaps it was the man himself vanity-surfing? Inquiring minds want to know…

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Essential training

It’s possible that I’ve gone mad. I seem to agree more or less completely with Patrick Crozier’s ideas on what to do with the UK railways – pretty much, deregulate them completely.

The only change I’d make would be to keep TfL and the regional Passenger Transport Executives: local is good…

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Demob

I guess claiming you’re addicted to the Internet is easier than shooting yourself in the foot, as far as ways of getting sent home from military service go.

Although the real question the story raises is what the hell Finland’s doing with a conscript army – are they going to hold off the Russians with sheer manpower?

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Good bias

If the press is going to come up with dubious statistics covering economics and the EU, I guess it’s slightly better if they’re pro- rather than anti-Euro.

But in the realms of sensible argument, we seem to be beyond the phase of using economics to sway the Euro case. From the economic research, it appears that the likely positive or negative economic impact of joining is smaller than the margin of error in forecasters’ figures – respectable economists are entirely split on the cost/benefit analysis.

This means we need to make our Euro decision based entirely on personal prejudice and conjecture, which has the pleasant side-effect of making life much more fun. Since it would make travelling in Europe easier, would save my employers forex and hedging costs, would mean we had an exciting set of foreign coins to look at, would make it much harder for swivel-eyed loons to pull us out of the EU, and more generally woud annoy the swivel-eyed loons a lot, I support the Euro.

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