So when you think of issues that the government should be worried about, things like the recession, interest rates, global warming, swine flu pop to mind right? Thankfully all of those issues must be solved in the UK because the government has turned their efforts to…wait for it…. creating a safer beer glass. Because that, unlike nuclear warfare, is what I lie awake at night worrying about.
(click the image for the full story)
The hubby and I were on the tube the other day and I was reading over the hubby’s shoulder (which I KNOW he loved) and saw a picture of this fake tube safety sticker. Being a huge fan of sarcasm I instantly loved them. You have to give credit to someone for poking fun at something so mundane. The tube is littered with stickers warning you to mind the gap, not get stuck in the doors, give up your seat to the elderly or pregnant that it’s about time someone poked fun at them.
I pointed out the article to the hubby and mentioned that we are so desensitised to the real stickers that I am sure neither of us would even notice if we came across a fake tube sticker…at which point I looked up and saw this.
Brilliant, I am now scouring every tube carriage that I am sitting in for the fake stickers…better still, I am looking for the tourists who try and sit on someones lap during rush hour.
I missed the original announcement but apparently Marks and Spencer decided that they would charge £2 more for any bras they sold over a size D due to the fact they take more material to make than smaller sized ones. Not surprisingly this caused an uproar and they have since retracted said decision. I have to give them credit however as I love that less than 24 hours after reversing their decision they had a cheeky (or rather, boob-y) ad campaign in all of the free newspapers apologising for it.
Maybe Oprah can steal this ad and just change the copy at the bottom to apologise for her KFC free lunch fiasco….
So I scoured the Metro today suspicious of all of their stories but this year it seems instead of printing a fake story like they did last year, they wanted you to choose which story was fake out of four…not as fun but whatever.
Then I came across this great Waitrose ad for Pinanas and found that a few of the advertisers had jumped on the old April Fools bandwagon…
As well as Mercedes with their new ‘Magnetic Tow’ feature that allows you to lock to the car in front of you using an magnetic beam thus using less fuel (my favourite bit was the ufellforit@mercedes.co.uk email address).
I then became incredibly suspicious of all of the ads in today’s edition and am not entirely sure if there really is a lunch sale on at Marks & Spencer for £2, if BT really was named the most trusted internet provider or if Starbucks drinkers really do prefer Costa…I don’t know who to believe.
I know that I am not going to believe one of my favourite gadget sites who is trying to sell Satnav Shoes or a Dream Recorder…although I would find both very handy!
I read an article this morning about a survey Ask.com conducted that highlighted the fact traditional skills that in the past, got passed down from generation to generation are seemingly dying out. Apparently, more people knowing how to collect benefits than darn socks and half of those surveyed couldn’t change a car tyre (yes they spell it tyre here, not tire!! Crazy eh) but 7 out of 10 could open a facebook account.
I can attest to this as I can’t even sew on a button (well I can but not very well). Right now, all but one of the buttons on the hubby’s winter coat have fallen off. The best bit is that the one remaining button is the one right at his neck so he is essentially wearing a cape (hahahah) and I am not sure how to fix it because the buttons aren’t’ sewn right to the coat they look like they are at the end of a short string. I am sure it is not for lack of trying that these skills are dying out as my mom has shown me how to sew on a button, hem trousers etc etc, it is just that I would rather learn about the newest online craze than do any of that.
Although traditional skills may not be being passed down, new skills are being passed back up to the previous generation. For example, last night, I spent an hour on a skype video call with my Mom teaching her how to use her new blackberry. She offered to teach me how to darn socks when we were done but my internet connection mysteriously cut out and I was never able to reconnect…darn it! (hahahahah I kill me).
I think I might be part of a more needs based generation in that I will learn those things when I need to. When I am am on the side of the road with a flat tyre I will get my blackberry out and google how to change a tyre. When the hubby’s top button falls off and his cape turns to a housecoat I will get on skype and get my mom to show me how to sew on a button. Until then, I will live blissfully unaware of how to do domestic things until I absolutely need to learn them….at which point I will google them.
So we survived the snow but now the city of London is getting ridiculed for how they handled it. Frankly, I think they should get over it…so what people couldn’t get in to work for 1 day…for the love of god it only happens every 20 years give everyone a day off!
Anyway I did happen to love this though in the Metro paper today as apparently they are urging the Mayor of London to have to hold meetings with the mayors of other cities who are used to dealing with snow….
I am interested to see how they get on calling the mayor of the CITY of Ontario.
PS for those of you who don’t get it, Ontario is a Province not a City…a Province is like a State but the Canadian version (and we only have 10 not 50 like the US) .
Okay back to non snow related stuff tomorrow….
Sorry have been on a bit of a blog holiday as one of my best friends from Canada flew over Thursday night to surprise me for my 30th. The hubby also arranged for me to have Friday off of work so we went to Westfield to shop (what else are girls to do on a day off). Anyhoo I have had a fab weekend and am enjoying my last day in my twenties.
Not surprisingly my very organised Mom had the paper from the day I was born so sent it to me to have a look at. It was a bit of a slow news day but there were some interesting bits…like the exchange rates, not sure we will see a $2.34 to £1 again for a while.
Anyone for a record player…doesn’t $700 sound expensive?…it was 30 years ago. Kids, records were like DVD’s but with grooves in them that when you spun it music played…neat eh!
Check out this rather odd ad…at the top hockey skates for sale and at the bottom a gun clearance. Nothing says Christmas like a semi automatic…I didn’t think you could buy guns in Canada…we have to buy them off our American neighbours and sneak them across the border.
Want to party like it’s 1979? Randy’s Chalet Cabaret is just the place…
Happy Sunday…
I have noticed when watching TV here that the commercial breaks are significantly shorter here than they are at home…so much so that they even cut out breaks when they re-broadcast American shows…ie if you happen to catch Friends on TV here (frankly it’s hard not to as it is on 24/7) you will see where a break is meant to be for a commercial but it continues on. This does actually mean however that a half hour show ends short of a half hour but leaves you more time between the end of say Friends, and the beginning of…let’s say another Friends episode (to make popcorn). I did hear that they are thinking of shortening UK shows to the same length as US ones to increase ad revenue….or they can come up with silly ideas like this one below.
Ads that pop up during shows! Apparently there is a new computer technology (an algorithm to be exact) that can detect blank areas in a scene (ie a blue sky or blank wall) where a logo or message could appear! ITV is currently testing it out with their online broadcasts but promise that the logos wouldn’t pop up at a crucial point in the show…..riiiight just like Yell was told that their logo would pop up during relevant news articles (thanks to a fancy algorithm) as it did below.
(if you cant see it there was a story about a chick that had adopted a cat as a friend and they mention that the cat and chick ’share’ a house…this word share was clickable and an advertisement for Yell.com cleverly popped up with the search field filled out for an Investment Banker…um no, not that kind of share)
…anyway not too sure I love the idea of plastering logos in the middle of my shows (I find the pop ups in news articles annoying enough and I can close them myself) ….I do love though that in the ITV story they have mocked up a photo of this advertising in a scene from Coronation Street and used a McDonalds logo…sounds like a perfect night in to me!!
So on top of the three free papers I read each day (Metro, Lite and London paper) there are a few days a week where you get additional free magazines…Thursday’s is called Short List and Friday is Sport. I love the ShortList and there is a point every Thursday morning when I cross the street on my walk to the tube and see the Short List distributor and am lifted from my morning walk-to-work-funk remembering that its almost the end of the week and I get to read ShortList on my way to work.
The ShortList is definitely a publication for men…it says so on the front – For men with more than one thing on their minds… doesn’t really sound like it is written for a married broad approaching 30 like me but it does remind me of a marketing theory I learned in university (yes, amazing I know, I learned something in uni…hold on though I only remember bits of it). The gist of this theory is that generally women are more responsive to/interested in stuff that is typically deemed ‘male’ (gadgets, cars) than men are of women stuff (makeup, shoes – although if this guyliner and man-scara takes off you never know) so in order to reach the widest audience, marketers (in certain situations) should take a more male slant to their communications. Basically if Short List magazine was pink featuring a hot guy on the front with makeup tips and the sexiest new shoes this season ,they would probably have a far smaller circulation than the current one full of swish cars, neat gadgets, luxury holidays and sporting figures which has a wider appeal.
Regardless I love it…even more than the hubby who is a real live actual man to whom it is targeted at. Their gadget section is great as are their random articles about what other countries eat when they go to the cinema (Japan opts for octopus balls or fried squid pancakes) or how many animals it actual took to depict one in a movie (Babe was played by 47 piglets) to their resident funny man Danny Wallace whom on a weekly basis writes funny stories about something humiliating that had happened to him – schadenfreude at its best (I learned that word from the Avenue Q musical it is defined as enjoyment taken from the misfortune of others…hmm seemed funnier in the play).
Anyhoo one final thing on the topic of papers…this ad below has been driving me nuts the past few days as it has been appearing in the tube and today in my morning metro. Each ad appears on a different page…I was thinking it was some kind of word puzzle kid-Obama-superconductor but I am not sure what that would mean…then I thought it might be numbers the kid is 1 then Obama is standing outside of number 10 then that CERN generator thing looks like a 0 but 1100 doesn’t mean much either. Any suggestions?
I hate it when marketing-speak takes over the news headlines. Phrases like ‘war on terror’ and ’carbon footprint’ are created to essentially dumb down the news and make it more palatable for the average Joe…which is all fine until they hit the point (which all of them do) that they are repeated so much that they become meaningless and annoying…the most recent victim (at least in the UK)…credit crunch.
I can’t turn on the TV or read a newspaper without hearing how the credit crunch has affected poor Mary living on income support, how bad the credit crunch is/will be and what we can do to safeguard ourselves against the credit crunch. The latter tends to include an interview with an overenthusiastic chap telling you to pay off your credit card, turn down your heat and buy store brand beer and shampoo to save money.
I don’t think my jaw clenchingly annoying phrase has crossed international borders yet but for those who haven’t heard it, credit crunch is defined as the sudden increase in the cost of obtaining a loan. In the UK it that loan refers to a mortgage as lenders are not willing to give you 100% mortgages (or in some cases 125% mortgages) anymore (um,…nor should they EVER, it’s ridiculous to think that you could buy a house with NO money down…I digress). This means to buy a house you need substantially higher down payments and those re-mortgaging need to come up with some cash as they may not be able to borrow as much as they have in the past. This has an overall impact as people are paying more for their home leaving them less money for thinks like food and heat (which is also increased in price)….or whatever…that’s the gist of the credit crunch.
Anyway the term is driving me nuts and I can’t wait till it gets replaced by some other annoying phrase…my truly optimistic financially minded hubby keeps telling me we are approaching a Financial Armageddon which is a pretty crappy phrase but I did like the movie and keep picturing Ben Affleck (as he was hotter back then) so that phrase is marginally better.
Finally since its Friday I leave you with a funny picture I got via email yesterday depicting how the credit crunch will affect Britain…it is not only priceless but something to look forward to…I would totally order a Big Mac from her…bring on Financial Armageddon!
Philip, I said hold the pickles and they want fries with that. Tell Charles his break is over!
