Had lovely lunch with lovely Suw today. She reminded me of lots of things I’ve seen in passing and not delved into for a while, but I was particularly taken with the Odeo voice messaging service which you can now see on the sidebar.
Talk to me. Leave me a message and I’ll aggregate them into a wee podcast.
E-mail is b0rked, let’s try something differenter(ly).
A bunch of us sat around in a loosely self-organised way in a tinder-dry corner of Hyde Park to start talking about what might happen in London (and the rest of Britain) in 2012 from a cultural perspective other than sport.
I had to leave just as the conversation was really warming up but what I am interested in is what intangible things would we like to be left after the games are over (as opposed to the tangible stuff of stadiums, improved travel etc.) and the way I suggested going into that was to think about what we would do today if it were 2011 and we’d just had an “oh shit!” moment that we’d forgotten to do anything in preparation.
We’d started talking about how we were going to welcome all these guests into our country – which was an interesting tack in itself, what do you do to get ready when you have guests coming? Friendly jolly internationalist stuff.
But then as I walked across to Marble Arch I couldn’t help thinking that the park was already full of guests from all over the world today – how welcome do they feel? What do we do to help them out? Do we talk to them? Do we even recognise that they’re there? And I started to feel a little more uneasy about the preparedness we have to share our culture with visitors. I think it’s going to be fun trying to turn that around.
Well the newly formed Pimlico Institute for Stormhoek Studies (PISS) is now open for business and we present our first video – Let’s Go Mento – amazing, but dangerous stuff.
Customer Safety Warning: This experiment combines ordinary products in an extraordinary way.
Do NOT try this at home, unless
a) you’re extremely rich and can afford to throw away $10 bottles of wine just like that
b) you *like* the taste of Shiraz with a hint of sugar, glucose syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil, etc…
b) you have a Stormhoek Security Licence (available for $500 from PISS) or
c) you’re stupid and you really really really want to.
Most mere mortals should stick to throwing their mentos into diet coke.
OK, so something weird happened the other day. I cut my hair myself – I know that you know this… after all it’s obvious that I’m a self-cut man. Oh god, I don’t like the way this one’s going.
Ahem.
So I had my clippers out and was using a recent copy of FT magazine to keep the shavings off my lovely carpet. Of course I was thinking about other stuff at the time – the price of lychees, how many beans make pi, when to book my next windsurfing lesson…etc.
LOOK what happened! All the tiny hairs just automagically jumped into a pattern around Senator Clinton’s mouth, that if you look at it with your eyes all scrunchy makes it look like she has a moustache and a little goatee! Weird.
And then the headline is “I know something you don’t know” – how’s that for a spooky double-entendre?
Well, the blogs back. But looking at the news this morning puts the mere missingness of my website in perspective.
Via Alex Itin I’ve been listening this morning to the music of Marcel Khalife the Lebanese Oud (lute) player. Listen and pray for peace.
I got an invite to this from Alison. Very hush hush and exclusive – secret location in W1 – cross my heart and hope to die if I tell you anything about it at all other than that about twenty effortlessly stylish (ok, one or two, not so effortless) young things from London’s fashion world squished into a private members club with some icy bottles of Ty Nant to meet, mingle and chat about their worlds, their businesses and the marketing thereof. No pictures from me, but Terry was snapping away all the way through – if pictures emerge for public consumption, I’ll let you know.
Overall learning point for me is the similarities between marketing all of these lifestyle brands and products – fashion, music, alcohol, theatre etc and the need to have talking points to get the conversation started. I’ll get on and make some ooze then.
Well, I’ve been without access to my blog (and more importantly, so have YOU!) for more than a week now. I’m not impressed by UK2’s service basically leaving a “maintenance page” up, not really responding to the service ticket I raised beyond acknowledging it. Now this morning, I got a 403 error when trying to get to perfectpath.co.uk so I’ve taken the plunge and redirected to this place for the time being. (even the redirect doesn’t work properly) This is a shame as I’ve had at least two years of uninterrupted service from them so far, but when it goes pear-shaped it turns out to be avocado. Yuk!
I took this pic on my walk to work this morning. The beauty and prosperity of those big white houses in the sunshine just hit me like a brick.
This is about half way on my 10 minute walk to work. I just love living and working in London.
Debbie just sent me this picture – she was working on a TV show yesterday and spent some time with this bling-bling guy .
Answers on a postcard please on what kind of person owns a hand like this.
On my way to get some lunch today, I came past an office on the corner of Rochester Row and Emery Hill Street that was clearing stuff out, boxes, box files, lever arch files, bits of computer kit. A guy in front of me went in and asked if the pile of stuff on the pavement was alright to take away and he was told yes. I toddled off towards Sainsbury’s on Victoria Street.
On the way back, quite a crowd had gathered, it was like a rummage sale on the pavement. I half expected in this heat for a little fight to break out over who was going to get the banana yellow lever arch file – but that sort of thing only happens inside offices. People are much more polite in the street. I already had my hands full with my lunch. But I couldn’t walk past without having a quick look and settled on this square cut tile of some sort. The colours caught my eye more than anything. It’s much prettier in real life than it looks in the picture here.
Perfect Path 