Tuesday, September 25, 2007, 11:36 PM
I'd like to pretend that I grew this moustache entirely reluctantly, and under duress, but I have grown rather fond of it now. It is like a pet labrador, loyal, hairy and well-groomed. I have not yet given it a name, as I am having it put down at the end of the month.
Anyway, I am proud to present it here, and would be even more obliged if you clicked on this link here in order to support the charity Everyman that we are supporting with this hairy operation. You will see sixteen other co-workers who have dodged the Gillette this month...
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Sunday, September 16, 2007, 11:29 AM
If you have found yourself in a business situation where you have met someone particularly unpleasant, I have worked out a delicious tactic you can use:Get through/tolerate the meeting with them, and then at the end, make sure that you get their business card (you will generally find that annoying types tend to produce their business card at the slightest whiff of an opportunity).
Put their business card in your wallet and carry it around with you.
The next stage comes when you encounter someone similarly repugnant. This person will insist that you both 'do lunch' when you both have a 'window' to do so. Rather than evasively talk about being incredibly flat out at the moment, and other such stuff, you can gleefully produce a business card, and suggest going somewhere pricey like Nobu or The Ivy. "It'll be on me", you say, full of confidence. Don't worry that the business card doesn't have your name on it - these people tend to get names wrong anyway, and call you 'Tim' if they are not sure.
The final stage is regrettably one you can't really see for yourself - you just have to delight in the fact that you have just brought together two like-minded souls, and that they will sit down together for dinner, absolutely baffled as to why they are sitting opposite the other person. They may even hit it off...
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Monday, September 10, 2007, 11:25 PM
Brilliant.[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Sunday, September 2, 2007, 11:56 PM
Did you know that there are over 3 million Americans who weigh over 21 stone? (Whoever specified the weight of 21 stone clearly had a dislike of round numbers as well as round people) Anyway, such a biomass weighs at least four hundred million tonnes - that's the equivalent of 5,600 QE2 cruise liners. In shorts, socks and trainers. Besides the fatties, there are over 300 million other US citizens, who have mouths to feed, whether their preference be Big Macs, Whoppers, muffins, pastrami, Golden Grahams, Twinkies, surf 'n turf, pizza, chicken wings, waldorf salad, spare ribs, dunkin donuts or chicken nuggets.
In order to produce the grain that feeds the cow that turns into the burger, or the create the rye that appears in the New York deli sandwich, you need a staggering area of agricultural land. Each cow alone will eat twenty kilos of grain a day (2-3% of body weight in case you are interested), and so - oh sod it, I didn't care much for maths anyway. Just picture vast, unimaginable piles of beef cows and grain.
No... bigger.
That's it.
I took this photo about half an hour after taking off from San Francisco airport - I think it was somewhere in the vicinity of Sacramento - anyway, for me it sort of illustrates the frightening power of America's appetite; the batteries behind the diners and drive-ins.The power of this photo lies in the fact that you can just see it turning into big people called Donald and Betty from Texas...
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Thursday, August 30, 2007, 11:39 PM
It's hard to define tell-tale signs of a civilisation on the brink of oblivion, but this certainly fits the bill.The USA is an enormous country with unimaginable resources of everything. Everything that is, apart from a wider sense of how to look after their planet, perhaps. One of the things that America has a lot of, is water - they sprinkle it with gay abandon over Californian crops, they indluge in pointless wet T-shirt competitions, with pneumatic women provocatively rubbing sponges over cars, they do films where cars speed headlong into fire hydrants and they don't just have lakes - they have Great lakes.
So it was with some concern that I bought a bottle of water in a San Francisco sandwich shop, and saw that it had been transported from Fiji over 6000 miles to San Francisco, which is actually further than the 5350 miles that I had travelled from London for my business trip. Water is a commodity, yet somehow consumers can be convinced to buy something totally banal just because it comes from an exotic location.
People who are merely thirsty get told that they are receiving a dose of something altogether more sophisticated - a healthy dose of silica, which gives an all important 'soft mouth feel'. One day, when we are deep within a severe environmental catastrophe, I am sure that there are some drinkers of Fiji Water, who will shrug, let themselves drift away from the bubbling wastescape of our planet, and cast their minds back to what really mattered to them - a soft mouth feel...
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