Monday, December 19, 2011

Places to avoid during Christmas

If you are looking for a good place to go for Christmas you can start by knowing the places to avoid during the holiday season:

1) Paris - scientists have discovered that during the holiday season the whole perfume industry descends on the town along with a large number of famous people (although I am not sure who they are). If you have alergies to famous people, cliched adverts or perfumes it's a good place to avoid.

2) Victorian London - it has long been known that Christmas time is when there's heavy snow in Victorian London followed by mean-ness, poverty and tall, black hats. 

These are at least two places to desperately avoid during the holidays. If you can avoid these places it may improve your chances of a decent holiday. 

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Remembering Things

Yesterday I brought some cheese from a really expensive cheese shop in London. We are lucky in London as we have really expensive shops for many things. Even the reasonably priced shops become ridiculously priced shops when they open in London. 

Anyway, that is progress and not the purpose of this note.

I put the cheese into the fridge at work and then promptly forgot to bring it home in the evening. I have now written a note to myself and put it on my computer to remind myself. However, I have written many notes in the past to myself (things like 'fix the economy' and 'print more bank notes'), but I always tend to forget what they were about after maybe 10 mins. So, I am looking for ways to remind myself such that I know what I am meant to do. 

Once I figure that out I will be able to look at fixing the economy and putting the country back on an even keel.

Now, this sticky note says 'investigate deplorable jobless figures' I wonder what I was meant to do about this one...

Monday, October 31, 2011

Chat With a Giant

I recently had a chat with Flatt Sales who is a giant in the media and marketing world. We were waiting for the next train and had roughly 5hours to kill. I am interested in media and marketing and how it works so I asked him a few beginners questions regarding the industry. His responses were quite insightful. Fortunately, I was able to record the entire conversation on my cell phone and am able to report the high points here after paying Flatt a small fee of three thousand pounds for the privledge of using his intellectual property.

Me: So what is marketing then?

Flatt: Well it's all about taking an organisations product that is already on the market and selling well and putting it on the market and getting it to sell well.

Me: But, if it's in the market why does it need to me marketed?

Flatt: There you show your stupidity. If you market your product you probably will do very well indeed without the services of a marketing firm. But, you will not appear in the marketing world because you will not use any of the marketing terms that are currently in vogue. So, to the marketing world you will be invisible.

Me: Does that matter? I mean I will be selling my product won't I?

Flatt: Yes, but you will be doing it without marketing. You need marketing to tell other marketeers that you are selling a product quite well. They can then take your ideas and reuse them to market their products.

Me: Ok. What about products that don't sell well. Does marketing help there?

Flatt: Of course. We can take a product that doesn't sell well and through careful planning (it's not cheap) run the product into the ground. If we're careful enough we can actually take down the whole business by marketing in the right areas.

Me: Do you market other things? Like people?

Flatt: Marketing is always expanding and consuming. Marketing people is old hat. We market many things: people, animals, the weather. We're currently looking at a new hush-hush product that's being pushed by the utility companies.

Me: Do tell. What is it?

Flatt: Well, I think it's ok to say since the devils in the details and if people know the product they won't know the correct marketing terms to use to market the product so I think I'm safe. The product is air. 

Me: Air?? The utility companies want to sell air??

Flatt: Yes, well not any old air, but air that we can breathe. Air that's harmful to us is of course free, but you will have to buy from the utility companies a special filter that will magically transform the air into breathable air.

Me: Will that work? I mean air is free isn't it?

Flatt: Technically yes. But, breathable air needs to be processed which is not free. Just look at what we did with water. 30 years ago people would have thought you mad if you brought bottled water, but through careful marketing we've managed to convince people that the water they pay for from their utility company is no better than sewage and they need to buy bottled water to survive. And, they need to drink lots of it. Typically 10-20pounds worth per week.

Me: I see your point. Well, thank you. I see that our train's arriving. Ah. No. It's going backwards. Well, it's getting late now and I'd better get home. It's been very interested Flatt.

Monday, October 03, 2011

Public Transport - the way to fitness

Have you been to a Gym? They are expensive aren't they? And, they tend to keep 'bank hours' where they are only open between 10am and 3pm Mon to Fri and closed at any other time. This is in order to keep the equipment in pristine condition for further promotional material to attract more people to join the gym.

Now, I have noticied that our enterprising public transport system has discovered a new way to increase revenue to pay for the desperately needed rail improvement works. By closing stations, turning off escalators and disabling lifts the system ensures a healthy workout for all privileged patrons of the system. With honest marketing a 50% increase in the cost of the fare is justified. They have installed saunas, step-aerobic systems, weight training rooms and general cross-training environments. 

Saturday, September 24, 2011

A New Voting System

I have been thinking about the voting system. Currently, it's terrible. The poor politicians every few years go out to the country to show how popular and well known they are and how good their teeth are and every few years only 5-10 people and a few dogs vote for them. This is very distressing.

I believe that a much better and fairer voting system would entail putting the candidates in a big hall (just like the hall you sat in when you did your exams) and give them a large stack of voting paper. Then, they must fill in as many voting papers and vote for the best candidate for the position (which could be themselves). They must fill in as many votes as possible in 5hours.

The one that fills in the most votes wins. 

Of course, it's important that the voting be representative which means that every hour the environment in which the candidate is sitting must change. One hour a sun-lamp is brought in and the candidate toils under the glare of the sun-lamp. The next hour a person pours buckets of water over the candidate, another would be placing the candidate in a refrigerator, a penultimate would see the candidate working under the force of a wind generator and the last would see the candidate voting in total darkness.

This system would be fair and we would know that our candidate can not only write a lot, but is hardy to all weather climates.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Phone me. Please!

I fly a bit and have noticed a strange pattern. As soon as we land and have driven up to our gate and the seat-belt sign has gone off almost everyone gets their cell phone out and starts to text or call someone.

Why? Who are they calling? 

In order to answer these questions I have taken lots of flights on many different airlines and have come to the following logical conclusions:

1) The airlines with the worst record for anything have the largest number of people calling. It seems that most people are notifying their next-of-kin or their lawyers that they have arrived, thanks be to God, and it looks like the right location and please can they not inform the police that they have expired. 

2) The airlines with the best record for anything have the smallest number of people calling. This is usually because the people fly these fantastic airlines in order to escape. They don't want to inform people they have arrived just yet so they can have a little more time away from more pressing matters.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

What is a city?

I live in London which is technically not a city as they haven't finished building it yet. It's what one could term a 'c' as the rest is under construction. I do hope that they manage to finish building the 'ity' part of London soon. 

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Rush Hour

We all know that rush hour is a phenomenon that happens because the sun rises and sets at well defined times in the day, various television programs (such as the max-factor or some other reality-soap-drama-game-show) start and end at well defined times with well defined scripts and we all panic at well defined times.

It has set me thinking that this is probably not restricted to people, but also to animals of all types. It may even apply to ants. It's very possible that ants have a rush hour. I have spent the past week in careful study of ants nests and have not observed any rush hour. Which leads me to the logical conclusion that since there must be a rush hour they are using a mode of transport that I cannot see. The only correct inference that can be drawn is that the ants are using standard underground subway systems during their rush hour. Since I have not seen them at peak times on the subway my correct conclusion is that the ants rush hour must be on the Northern line and happens roughly between 9:23 and 10:00 in the morning and 19:45 and 20:30 in the evening. It's clear that they have very long days.

I am not sure if birds have a rush hour.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Optimum Route

Are you in a rush? Do you need to get from place A to B in the most efficient and optimal manner possible? Scientists have improved the current satellite navigation systems and journey planners to optimise our route and give us more valuable time to watch reality programs.

Scientists have observed that ants tend to find the shortest distance between their nest and a bowl of sugar. They have attached the smallest GPS enabled cell phones to ants and have placed nests and bowls of suger at strategic locations (for example a nest at a train station and a bowl of sugar at a place of interest). They have then been able to map the ants optimum location thanks to the magic of GPS and have been able to update the journey planners with the best route. 

It works. Although sometimes the optimum route requires passes through cracks in walls and occasionally ends up in the wrong place if there is a larger bowl of sugar available.

The new routes are becoming available on various journey planners soon.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

How to Generate More Wealth

We are in a bad way. The fund managers that we have given all our money to have run out of insane and incredibly risky things to invest in. This is a bad thing. Without these risky and insane things for our fund managers to invest in we are not going to be able to generate the wealth that they have become accustomed to. What we need to do is to think outside the box. We need to come up with new investment schemes.
This is what our government is doing. They are generating a critical mass of depression and misery such that it can be sold as a commodity and compared with other countries. At this point we can have trading in misery and depression between countries which will generate investment opportunities and will allow our fund managers the chance to make more insane and risky investments.

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Better Train Travel

I have figured out a way to make long train journeys (which constitutes all journeys - even to the next stop) more enjoyable. The carriages should be split up according to conversation type: dull and uninteresting, business and executive, spies, opionated, arguments. We can then get rid of First Class etc and just have these categories.

It could mean more revenue for the train companies (who I think are really organised crime) who would have more gradings of ticket type and they could fine people heavily for starting up the wrong type of conversation in a carriage. They could also fine people if they don't start a conversation suited for that carriage during the journey.

The approach could be extended to all modes of transport: buses, planes, boats, national health, etc.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

When is the best time to make New Year resolutions?

A new year is full of exciting disasters and potential calamities and is a great time to make resolutions. But, you need to be careful just as you want to avoid making promises that you cannot keep to your customers (unless you are an elected body, or a financial institution, or any type of service organisation) you want to avoid making bold resolutions that are doomed to fail.

With this piece of information in mind the best time to make a resolution is when you have all the facts in hand. Since the New Year is full of the unknown it is best to make the resolutions at the end of the year. Which of course leads to the dilemma how can you keep your resolutions if you only make them at the end of the year?

So, with this in mind it's ok to make resolutions at the beginning of the year, but  since we are dealing with the unknown it's best to make them vague. Here's a list of suggestions for New Year resolutions:

  1. I will do something this year.
  2. I will stop doing something this year.
  3. I will think about doing something this year.
  4. I will stop thinking about doing something this year.

Governments over time have adopted these four cornerstones of successful resolutions (albeit with slightly more embellished words).