Confabulations

Has anyone else noticed the desperation creeping into the voice of radio advertisers recently? I was listening to local radio the other day whilst doing the ironing (glamorous I know) and there was an advert for new kitchens – come to our kitchen showroom and all that stuff. The woman kept telling me how I shouldn’t wait until next year to buy my new kitchen, just because I don’t think I can afford it. I should buy it now, because I can afford it. They give free credit. Remember, don’t wait until next year, because I deserve luxury surroundings right this second!

The rather obvious meaning was that if I wait until next year, they won’t be selling new kitchens anymore. Those granite worktops I always dreamed about will vanish in a puff of smoke and that silky-voiced woman will have to go and work on another advert. So goes the credit crunch.

Has anyone seen that drawing of a spider email going round? Well, it seems that someone has sold the original drawing on eBay. How he can prove it’s the original is beyond me, but there you go. You can view the auction here (for 90 days I reckon).

For a spider that was originally worth just over £200 it’s certainly seen a huge appreciation. Spiders are the new oil – let’s all invest!

OK. So the sun roof fell off my car the other day. On the motorway. This looks like an expensive, insurance-type job. The car’s only worth about 40p, yet a series of mishaps has seen us forking out upwards of 400 notes  a year to insure it. Fixing it again will only add to that burden.

But buying a new car’s going to cost money. And in this desperate economic times who wants to take the chance? All I know is that if I happen to bob somewhere to buy a car (even tax free car) then the staff are going to all over me like lice, because if there’s one set of people faring worse in the credit crunch than internet marketers, it’s car salesmen.

Yin and yang!

Basically, I need one of these. Some fellow called Gopinath Prasana has designed this as the future of the music player. It’s an aluminium bracelet with a trackpad that you touch to flip between songs. There’s some sort of cushioning on the inside so that it fits snugly against your wrist and presumably doesn’t fall off when you’re cleaning the toilet, flushing away some £X00 of hard-earned cash.

It looks like something out of Star Trek which can only be a good thing. In fact, I hope they make it into a phone too so we can all talk into our wrists like on sci-fi.

What the hell? The classic “I love NY” logo, seen on such legends as John Lennon has been ‘updated’ to include a squirrel, a clipart butterfly and the impression of some grass. The cost of this malarkey? A cool $17million. Even at today’s exchange rates that’s a lot of kerblingy to blow on some graphics.

Is is worth it? I’m siding firmly with the “hell no” camp on this one. The original was witty, cool and iconic. The new one looks faddish and redundant. Allegedly this has been done to show that’s more to New York than just the city (it is actually a state that includes mountains, greenery and blah). But seriously, who cares?

New York remains the very definition of ‘city’. It is famed for its urban landscape and – Central Park notwithstanding – is synonomous with exciting grime, low-life glamour and metropolitan buzz. Trust me: no-one visits New York on the off-chance of seeing a squirrel. I can see one of those in Roundhay Park any old day of the fucking week and it won’t cost me a month’s salary for the plane fare either.

Faffing with iconic brands is a dangerous game, but luckily New York remains as cool as hell, regardless of how silly its marketing board are.

Having just moaned on about 3’s data charges, they’ve sent me an email (literally within minutes, and clearly by accident) announcing their new ‘INQ’ phone. It’s your basic mobile phone on a £15 a month contract but with unlimited internet access and is especially geared up for social media. It boasts a “carousel” interfa

ce (which you can’t fucking move for these days since Amazon introduced them) that lets you flip between facebook status updates, Windows messenger and so on.

Could be interesting! And at least it’s one way to get some attention away from the iPhone or the Android.

One question though: what in the name of Merry Hell is ‘INQ’ supposed to stand for/mean.

I have both my home internet connection and phone with 3. After trying 3 different providers over the course of 2 years to get broadband at home following my move, I plumped for the dongle option and it’s pretty sweet. So sweet that I recently upgraded to a 5gb download limit each month for just £7.50. The connection might be occasionally shunky, but it works and is plenty fast enough for what I use it for (email, facebook etc, some tiny freelance projects, banking and – ahem – ‘other’). So – for a nominal fee I get pretty decent internet use.

The technology behind a ‘dongle’ is, in case you don’t know, the 3G network. It’s a telephony protocol that also can carry data. That’s the stuff behind the whole “catch up with your work emails on your phone” thing that everyone’s so thrilled with the prospect of. Anyway, inside your dongle you’ve got a SIM card, like a normal phone and this is what handles your data connection stuff.

Great.

So riddle me this, 3: if the technology in my dongle is the same as the technology in my phone, and I can have 5gb for £7.50 on my PC, why will that same £7.50 get me about 4 Facebook status updates and a quick peruse of the news on my mobile. It’s pisstaking on a grand scale. I’d use my phone for internet waaayy more than I do were the prices even slightly more in kilter. The stupid thing is that 3 are constantly trying to get me to use it more – every time I login there’s a new application, video thing or Whatever they’d like me to try. At £48 per gig, they can cram it, frankly.

Ever wonder about how you can be so sure that your medicines or medical equipment used by doctors and surgeons are safe to use? The answer lies in an all-pervasive set of rules and guidelines drawn up by the EU and the Federal Drugs Agency in the USA. These strictures lay out comprehensive rules to govern both the manucture and testing of medical products and involve processes and standards with which any product that comes to market must comply.

Naturally, there are those in the industry who would complain about such matters as being overly-restrictive. it is true that complying with regulations is one of the reasons that medical equipment cost more than, say, South Africa.

Of course, the legislation never stands still. In response to any health crisis or scientific advance, a new swathe of regulations descends upon the industry. This makes running a pharmaceutical company a real headache. You can’t simply stay still while things change around you. Not only will the competition quickly outgun you, but you’ll end up breaking some law or other and be forced out of business.

It’s no surprise that this is one field where consultancy still has enormous currency. In fields where knowledge is general and slowly changing, people are taking expertise in-house. Where the legal requirements are so stringent, people still look to agencies and consulting firms to hold their hands through any changes they need to make. Of course, these aren’t cheap services either. All of which adds to the cost of medical equipment even more!

It’s a wonder we can afford paracetamol, but next time you’re knocking them back after a headache, remember the pharmaceutical consultants who make it all possible!

So Mitch Mitchell has joined the ranks of the dearly departed – finally kicking the bucket in a hotel room on tour, as Rock etiquette demands.

When I was a kid of 15/16, The Jimi Hendrix Experience were one of the bands that got passed down from the slightly older kids via third generation copied tapes. I’ve still got a tape of Hendrix playing Hear My Train a-Comin’ on 12 string acoustic (his only recorded performance on acoustic) and it brings back all kind of memories. The lad that passed it on had the single finest set of burners seen in Yorkshire – great big, well-defined pointy ones that ended about half an inch from the corners of his lips.

But that’s the thing with classic rock – it engenders hair.