Tuesday, August 29, 2006, 11:51 PM
A moment of unrestricted joy in the supermarket today. Those clever people at Gillette have only gone and made my year. As any man who has summoned the willpower and concentration for a morning shave knows, more blades is better. When Gillette brought out the Mach 3 all those years ago, my initial reaction was one of disgust. I mean, they'd let us hack away for so long with our two-bladed playthings, hiding the blatant truth that shaving is really only worthwhile once you've got a three-bladed razor. I mean, for a start, there are three blades, doing the job at the same time. And it's pretty difficult to argue with pure fact when it's put to you like that. Plus there was that advertising with the jet fighter and all those chicks.
Anyway, not to be outdone, those crafty schemers at Wilkinson Sword recently went and trumped it with a four-bladed design. That put a whole new complexion on things, and Gillette must have been rocked to their very foundations to see their arch-rivals pull off such a masterstroke.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in their boardroom as the chisel-jawed Gillette executives paced the room and gnawed on their MontBlancs. You had your three, and someone's gone and raised you to four - what are you going to do about it?
I would have personally feared for the wellbeing of the company if Gillette could not pick themselves off the canvas and deliver a manly reply with their latest product. They not only managed to come out with five, but with eloquent mastery of the two-fingered gesture at the Wilkinson Swordsmen, they also whacked an extra blade on the back of the razor. This acts as a spare. I think, but it may also be there to deter any competitor from taking it apart for analysis.
Now the spotlight is on Wilkinson again. This time, it is serious business, and they need to keep their heads. They will be reeling and presumably looking to trump Gillette's five with their own six-blader, but my valuable advice would be to toally wrongfoot their foes and deliver a knockout blow with a seven-blader. Gillette would have pre-emptively started work on a seven-bladed model (intended as an answer to Wilkinson's expected 6-blader), and it is doubtful whether Gillette could still recover from a dent in its pride like that.
We truly live in fascinating times, and I for one will be watching aisle 16 of my Sainsburys with the same attentiveness as a seasoned boxing commentator.
Last one to ten's a pussy.
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Monday, August 28, 2006, 11:42 PM
If ever there were a contest for cretinous acts of building design, this one would top the 'entrances and exits' category. Located a full fifteen feet above a concrete pavement in the Hamburg suburb of Barmbek, anyone unfortunate enough to leave the building via this exit is likely to end up in hospital. Whether by accident or design, the hospital is actually only 150m away. Great way of drumming up business.
With wonderful irony, there is an official sticker on this door that says "Mind the step". Whoever said that the Germans have no humour was clearly having a laugh.
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Sunday, August 27, 2006, 11:30 PM
Tucked away in the corner of a large Hamburg hairdressing wholesaler, I encountered these three stunners. Before you ask out loud what business I had being in a large Hamburg hairdressing wholesaler, you should perhaps first ask yourself whether you were in a more interesting outlet at the same time.
Exactly. You were in Clintons Cards, weren't you?
Anyway, these ladies didn't seem too talkative, but they had huddled together to protect themselves from the gaze of rather dodgy-looking male dummies with excessively long pornstar moustaches. It appears that German trainee hairdressers learn their craft on dummies, rather than people, which makes perfect sense to me. Once you get back to Britain and walk down the street, you'll start to wonder why we don't have the same rule. I am now kicking myself for not having photographed the irate-faced dummy model of a bloke with a moustache that hung down to where his collar would have been, as if he had just woken from a botched hair operation. Still, these three seemed to have a more serene, purposeful look about them, so they make pic of the day.
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006, 08:26 PM
This man was photographed in Belsize Road at about 1 o'clock this afternoon. He is suspected of grievous sartorial harm, including gross misuse of mittens, braces and brand new brogues. We also suspect illegal possession of a pair of England football socks. He was last spotted indulging in a fag and a packet of crisps on the corner of Harben and Belsize Roads. The public are warned not to approach him, as it is understood that these clothes were not being worn for a bet. 
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Monday, August 21, 2006, 01:51 AM
The weekend consisted of a truly exhausting stag weekend for a good friend. Like true anglo saxon males, dedicated to showing alcoholic and physical prowess we do not have, we drank, climbed Mt. Snowdon, drank, watched the rain whip across the slate roofs of the little Welsh village and then got another round in, just to be sure. Cameras are wonderful things to take out on an evening like this. On one hand, I believe there should be a legal limit for them, but then again, it is a truly humbling experience to take a record of images and movie clips of things that you will later have no memory of whatsoever. Beer goes in, and complete and utter drivel comes back out. Grown men adopt thousand-yard stares as they slump from side to side in their seats, trying to move in time with the ceiling.
I feel duty bound to attach the one pub picture that has any artistic merit, and that's being generous - every single other image on my memory card appears to have an image of a youngish male attempting to look as phyiscally unappealing as possible. It's a good job there weren't any women around, as they would have been wasted on us.
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