How about making bubble-wrap filled with helium, so that the more diligently you wrap your parcels, the lighter they become, and thus the cheaper they are to post…
You’d only need, say, fifty metres of bubble-wrap make the sending of a modestly sized cupcake to a long-distance birthday-endowed chum absolutely free.
I’ll take that million in Zimbabwean dollars please.
I can’t be the first to think of this, but in the nothing-is-sacred world of commerce – this Bible brought to you by McDonald’s and why not try our new Happy Clappy Meal including two loaves, a filet-o-fish and regular fries – Wikipedia should surely be open season for the insidious and brightly coloured tentacles of marketeers. The whole site’s just begging for some serious product placement. Who cares about paying a million for Will Smith to wear your trainers as he fires hot lead into the faces of a thousand baddies when you could get a picture of your sweatshop’s finest output in front of everyone who searches for the history of footwear on the world’s favourite made-up internet encyclopedia.
You’d have to be a bit subtle though, which is not always the advertising industry’s strong point. I’m not talking about slapping a big can of Stella in the lager entry; that’s so obvious it’d be ripped down by the community in the time it takes to drink twelve of the aforementioned cans, start a fight, and copiously vomit kebab-meat down your shirt. I’m not even talking about a history professor sneakily adding his own book into the ‘Further reading’ appendix on the Battle of Agincourt.
For example, take a look at the ‘Battery‘ entry. That’s just itching for a good quality cutaway diagram of a domestic battery. Now, there wouldn’t be any suggestion of a logo or a brand name but, should the battery in that drawing just happen to be coloured black at the bottom and copper at the top like a certain well-known make, there’s arguably at the very least a low-level psychological tweak going to happen.
Some products are easier than others - Guinness and St Patrick’s Day are already intertwined so it’s easy to get away with mentioning the black stuff in the relevant entry. But did you know that in Japan, Kentucky Fried Chicken is associated with Christmas, to the extent that some families apparently make advance reservations to guarantee their bucket of miscellaneous bird bits? I’m sure there’s someone at chicken-central with the responsibility to ensure that particular nugget of information doesn’t get removed from KFC’s Wikipedia entry.
Sport is an easy one - have a look at how detailed the equipment lists are for the top tennis players. I’d be surprised if those weren’t carefully massaged by marketing departments. But they’re missing a trick on the generic sport pages; an artfully not-too-professional-looking photo of an attractive sportsperson clad in Nike might well slip through the net to influence those looking up their chosen activity.
There’s opportunity for some carefully orchestrated and underhand counter-marketing too. Car manufacturers - is your competitor’s well-built but ugly car selling rather more than you’d hoped? How about uploading a picture of that car on their entry, making sure that your own better-looking smug-wagon is clearly visible in the background for comparison. Fashion labels could dig out photos of their rivals’ occasional disastrous mistakes to sabotage the relevant pages. It’d be like the effect Jeremy Clarkson had on the sales of denim.
Eventually the situation will degenerate into a cold war of marketing, as PR firms retain a host of scattered agents to perform surgical strikes of secretly inserted information which conspire to promote ally companies and undermine the opposition. Or maybe that hidden conflict is already upon us and there’s a reason why Wikipedia’s Renault page is stuffed full of terrible pictures of ugly cars or that the handbag/purse entry is headed up by Burberry.
This is very sobering. Go and have a look before reading any further.
It’s difficult to think of a more stark way to demonstrate one side of the costs of the Iraq war/occupation/screw-up. If you’ve got sound on your computer, you’ll hear the gentle clicks that signify each death, like a manual typewriter putting a full-stop on the end of a person’s life. I’m a little disturbed that what this most reminds me of is the game Defcon, where similar points and expanding circles on a stylized map signify the impact of nuclear missiles.
Can you imagine, however, what this map would be like if it also included the deaths of Iraqi people? We’re talking estimates of between 600,000 and over a million so far. A proportion of these are ‘indirect’ (but no less important) deaths - if a hospital is destroyed, someone who might have lived will not now be able to get the necessary treatment, or if fresh water supplies are disrupted then diseases become prevalent.
Include these on the map, and that irregular tick of each death would become a cacophony: the sound of a swarm of insidious locusts. If you’ve ever seen time-lapse film of mould spores growing, I imagine that’s what the dots on the map would become like, growing and spreading until all the major cities and villages became clearly defined by the human cost of this war.
I don’t know what should be done about the situation in Iraq. I’m horrified by how people were mislead and lied to by the government as to the reasons for the war - that whole mess over the WMD claims. But the invasion cannot now be taken back. The Western world can’t just swoop in, oust a dictator and dismantle a corrupt government, and then disappear off again into the sunset expecting everything to revert to a happy ending - those are the actions of a superhero in a cheap child’s comic. Instead, this is something that is going to take years, decades, or more to resolve, whatever happens. And that map is going to keep on ticking away until that special consensual hallucination we call ’stability’ begins to develop.
“Millionaire” is a pretty generic idiom in the UK for a rich person, since a million quid will get you a pretty wide range of happiness substitutes. But I’ve often wondered what are the equivalent terms in other countries with different currencies.
A million yen works out at about £4,800 at present, so in Japan millionaires are ten a penny, if you’ll excuse the mixed monetary metaphor. And the winner of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in Somali shillings would come out with the grand total of £380. From a purely linguistic point of view I’d be interested to know some of the international jargon referring to the rich - it presumably isn’t as blunt and numerically specific as “millionaire”.
Plus, even in the UK a million smackers doesn’t buy nearly as much as it used to – a modest country house in the less desirable of the home counties, or a wee-stained closet in central London. We’re going to need some kind of replacement word since becoming a millionaire will soon be unremarkable.
Billionaire is too big a step – there’s only about a thousand of those in the world at the moment, and even with inflation it’s going to be unattainable by most for some time. Multi-millionaire is, well, a cop-out. It’s too dull and not nearly specific enough; you could have two million or a hundred million. We need an intermediate number to cater for the comfortably rich, rather than the mind-blowingly wealthy.
Of course, I speak as a former millionaire myself. Yes, I once had a million and splurged it all in an orgy of consumerism. Unfortunately, mine was more towards the Somali shilling end of the scale – these were Beenz, a kind of short-lived internet currency/loyalty point that emerged in the heady days of the dot-com boom when I was at university.
While friends monopolised the linguistics department computer rooms late at night, using multiple computers to continuously visit websites and earn a couple of points at a time, I took the easy route and won a competition with a prize of a million beenz. As the world’s first – and probably only – beenz millionaire, fame and fortune stretched out before me like a straightened helter-skelter. Which would make it a slide, I guess. I was interviewed in the Sunday Times, got my picture on the front cover (of the thrilling business section), and…that’s it really.
I blew all my not-so-hard-earned beenz on a load of entertainment kit to stuff into my tiny Uni bedroom: TV, minidisc, DVD player (when DVDs were brand new, and the players weren’t so cheap that you find them in boxes of cereal), and lots more. In all it came to about two and a half grand’s worth of power-hungry appliances - somewhat short of the million figure I started with, and a healthy lesson about exchange rates there.
Not long afterwards the whole Beenz system crashed and burnt in style. I’d like to hope that this was due to reasons other than a certain someone devaluing the currency by suddenly dumping a million of them on the market at once…
I recently watched the BBC’s Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press in which the peerless Mr Fry took us through a rebuilding of the daddy of all printing presses, the machine that started it all. Quite aside from the fact that the presence of Stephen Fry instantly elevates any programme to a higher level, the producers admirably resisted the urge to raid the wardrobe department and glue muttonchops to the pimpled cheeks of unemployed actors in the name of ‘period reconstruction’, a curse that affects too many historical documentaries. Instead, we were taken on a gentle but information-packed journey on which the enthusiasm of Fry and the experts building the press was evident.
Gutenberg wasn’t the first to use movable type for printing; as with so much technology it was the Chinese who got there first with letters made from either clay or wood, rather than the lead, tin and antimony alloy pioneered by Johannes. It was his press, though, that made print possible on industrial levels. Before Gutenberg, individual printing plates would be carved from wood, with a separate whole plate needed for every page of a book – an incredibly labour-intensive process. Movable type allowed pages to be assembled much faster and more cheaply, and then simply disassembled into the constituent letters once a print-run was complete, ready for the next job.
On a totally self-regarding level, I wouldn’t be a graphic designer today without the developments and innovations branching from the Gutenberg Press. Yet despite the massive impact that the Gutenberg Press had, one of its main principles has become almost obsolete. These days, using automation rather than by hand, we have the ability to once again produce whole plates for each page of a print job, albeit a separate plate for each colour used. Movable type is rarely seen except in specialist letterpress printers, and is likely to disappear altogether in the next decade or so. It may well be that even the inky goodness of printing itself will decline over the next fifty to a hundred years, overtaken by computer and electronic technologies and harried by the environmental concerns raised over the chemicals and paper required.
The principles behind movable type might have more longevity. To take music as an example, I can see remixing and sampling as being somewhat analogous – taking the building blocks of one or many songs and recombining them into something new. It is the concept of having reusable, generic units in a limited selection of forms that can be unified and integrated into almost limitless variety. As nanotechnology advances, I’m sure we will see similar techniques come into use. Already, molecular manipulation of carbon into basic forms such as nanotubes and buckyballs shows how this building block approach is useful.
Nevertheless, the sheer world-changing importance of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention cannot be overstated. It’s the revolutionary alteration to the flow of knowledge within society that is the Gutenberg legacy. Writing allowed humankind to record information; printing allowed that information to be spread. Books are a vector for change – they bridge gaps between diverse societies and spur development on a whole different scale.
The documentary is available for a short while on the BBC’s own iPlayer here (do a search for Gutenberg), and also separated into parts on YouTube starting here, where I’m sure it will shortly be quietly disappeared by the powers that be.
What exactly does Andie MacDowell do now, apart from appear in adverts for wrinkle cream? She certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much acting, the very thing that presumably got her the job as L’Oréal’s facial fold reduction spokesperson.
Perhaps the constant application of cosmetics has decreased her many wrinkles and creases so much that she’s now become two dimensional, a flat sheet that can only be seen from two sides, like a cardboard cutout. The next step will be for L’Oréal to introduce a kind of facial mangle that you can run your head through to achieve absolute flatness, a Euclidean plane in which your wrinkles are not only reduced – they’re a mathematical impossibility. The CrushaLux Ultra: Because you’re worth it.
Th only problem though, if I’ve got my geometry right, is that if you reduce a three dimensional object with mass to a mathematical plane, that plane becomes infinitely large, although only in two dimensions. The thought of an infinite Andie MacDowell flogging cosmetics is just too much to bear, and she wouldn’t fit on my TV screen.
…when a headline like this can exist:
When I’m bored there are times when the mind wanders in strange directions. And one of those directions has thrown up the following list of imaginary animals.
Please, dear readers, feel free to join in if you have any of your own.
Elepant: A large animal with a shiny skin ideal for making capacious trousers for popular beat artists such as MC Hammer.
Masking Shark: A vicious fish that won’t hesitate to bite, but luckily can be pulled off rather easily. Is somewhat resistant to paint.
Boeing Constrictor: Perhaps the most dangerous snake in the world – death from above at 500mph. Not to be confused with the harmless Feather Boa.
Marrowhawk: The universe’s only known airborne carnivorous vegetable.
Glue tit: Collects berries and seeds on its body by flying at speed through bushes. Mates for life, mainly because it has no choice in the matter.
Gimpanzee: A very submissive, rubbery ape. Waterproof and, should it fall out of a tree, simply bounces.
Komodo Wagon: A rather tragic reptile that – if it can’t find a slope – can only get around by lying in wait for other animals, biting one when it gets close, and hoping that it’ll be dragged somewhere new.
Tasmanian Breville: Australian marsupial which toasts its own food in a specially adapted pouch.
Chocolate Moose: Almost extinct due to hunting. Not found in warm climates.
Ford Puma: Small feline that looks as though it should have a good turn of speed, but in reality is disappointingly sluggish.
Solar Bear: Arctic bear that needs no food whatsoever. Popular with conservationists for its very low environmental impact. Has an unfortunate tendency to drown when it tries to go swimming at night.
Sporkbill: Close relative of the Spoonbill, only more adaptable.
Ray Mearskat: Gregarious rodent that can find food anywhere, and can make a shelter, four-course meal and a canoe out of a single twig and a pawful of nettles.
Armadildo: That’s quite enough of that.
A thought, of the kind that crosses my mind when I’m trying to find excuses not to go to sleep:
If we had perfect memories, would nostalgia still exist?
Is the hankering for the “good old days” just the automatic self-editing of our minds to filter out the banal, humdrum, and even unhappy side of the past – leaving or enhancing the stronger, pleasant feelings? The good things seem to become better, the bad things become just a little less bad. Does the brain have a little optician’s shop just behind the amygdala to supply its own custom pair of rose tinted spectacles?
If we didn’t forget or alter these events in our mind, retaining a perfect record of our experiences, would we be denied the ability to look back so fondly on things? “Schooldays are the happiest days of your lives” is a phrase that is so often trotted out it has become a cliché, but with our brain’s tendency to modify the truth, who can really tell?
As technology advances, we’re likely to gain ways to record our experiences more accurately. It’ll start in the military and particularly police forces where head-mounted cameras and logging systems are already being trialled, making it possible to accurately keep track of evidence. Over time, this will move into consumer use, and most likely eventually to be integrated into our bodies and accessible on a whim.
It will be the ultimate diary, faithfully tracking every experience. But it won’t automatically do what the brain does – it won’t enhance some memories and suppress others. It will be full and complete; the good, the bad, and a whole lot of the absolutely dull routine rigamarole of life. Ninety percent of it will be memories of brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating, or watching television.
Nostalgia isn’t reality, so will it be lost? And with perfect recall of the best, most enjoyable things we have done, will we be forlorn to look through our memories and see how little of the time we have actually spent doing those excellent things against the time we’ve spent hanging around, working, sleeping, eating?
So then, plans are afoot to reintroduce beavers to Scotland around 400 years after they died out, with the primary reasoning being to promote so-called ‘beaver-tourism’ – a popular activity in Amsterdam, I hear. Wolves and wildcats are also candidates to bypass the immigrant detention centres and be let loose on the highlands.
The concept is quite beguiling – I’ve always felt that Britain was disappointingly lacking in serious wildlife. The USA has alligators, wolves, bears, mountain lions and more. We just get badgers – only dangerous if you’re a fan of mashed potato and called Bodger – and foxes, which are basically ginger dogs that have found a way to get food without the need for tin-opener-operating humans. We could do with a giant feral hedgehog or something to instill some respect for nature and pick off the occasional drunken chav late at night. Particularly the one having an argument at the top of his voice on his mobile outside my window at three in the morning last week – a vicious six-foot ball of spines and teeth rolling out of the darkness would have sorted that one a treat.
It’d add a bit more of a challenge to hunters too. There’d be the chance that as you stare through your high-power scope at a distant stag munching on the moor and generally minding his own business, there could be a pack of wolves behind you about to turn you into pedigree chum. That’d even up the odds a little.
But seriously, I do worry that we humans as a species never seem to learn. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a human-driven introduction of a species that has actually gone well. They seem to have been almost universally disastrous in environmental and frequently economic terms – rabbits in Australia, killer bees, zebra mussels, cane toads (in Australia again, a country which has been comprehensively decimated by many, many species introduced by humans). Even seaweed has gone horribly wrong.
The usual pattern is that once an unfamiliar species is introduced, it enters an environment where nothing is equipped to keep its numbers down. Subsequently, it’ll breed like…er…rabbits, take over, and destroy populations of whatever it feeds on plus out-perform any competitors and, if you’re super unlucky as is the case with cane toads, the introduced species will be poisonous and kill half the animals that do try to eat it. Habitats are networks of evolved relationships, and sticking a new creature in there leapfrogs (no pun intended) evolution to frequently detrimental effects.
So yeah, the idea of beavers is nice in principle, but let’s hope that those responsible are pretty damn sure that they know what they’re doing. I’m not that hopeful myself.
Something that crossed my mind a while back, and has been bugging me ever since, is this: what rationale is there for continuing to supply gas to domestic homes? Think about it…it’s an invisible, intangible, yet highly volatile substance that we have to pump to our houses through expensive and relatively fragile pipelines whereby it ends up perfectly ready to escape through the tiniest of holes and explode unexpectedly, distributing you and your house over much of the surrounding area. If you do manage to keep it confined to quarters, best be sure that your central heating system is up to scratch lest the carbon monoxide snuffs you out in your sleep with the silent hands of an assassin.
If someone asked you to keep a couple of buckets of petrol or a crate of TNT in your house, you’d probably have to think twice before agreeing. But no-one raises an eyebrow at paying to pipe in an explosive gas which presents a serious threat to that very unraised eyebrow.
It’s not just a safety thing; surely it’s extremely uneconomical? There’s a whole infrastructure of pipework, pumping and processing stations dedicated to supplying millions of houses which must cost enormous amounts to install and maintain. Then all we do is set light to it to warm up a bit of water for our radiators and boil some potatoes for supper, all the while hoping our dinner isn’t going to be curtailed by a massive fireball and the sudden rearrangement of our homes into a neat circle of bricks around a crater.
There’s nothing here that couldn’t be achieved with electricity. Sure, the chefs amongst us might say that gas hobs are slightly better to cook on than electric, but it’s not that much of a sacrifice for a safer life. If baked beans could only be cooked by inserting a stick of dynamite in the pot, I think I could just about manage to cope without them.
In the meantime, if we must continue to burn all that natural gas – which at least will get rid of the nasty stuff – send it to gas power stations and convert it into electricity. That’s got to be more efficient than sticking it through the four tiny little burners on your kitchen hob, with half the heat warming your kitchen rather than the saucepan full of Smash.
And if it stops us having to pay an extortionate amount of money to a man from Corgi every time the boiler needs servicing, then all the better. Just what do dogs know about gas that makes their training so expensive anyway?
Thanks for the image from David Forward’s website.
This is fascinating to me on multiple levels:
Yes, yes, it’s just dolphins playing with bubbles – so far, so hippy-dippy. But it’s the capacity for play in animals that interests me. The dolphins are creating these purely for fun, for the sheer hell of spinning them around, nosing off ever-smaller rings of air to swim through. There’s no useful purpose to them here except entertainment. It’s a very human-like trait to exhibit, although that’s a terrifically arrogant statement – we could just as well say that humans exhibit dolphin-like or ape-like traits.
On top of that, the other thing that grabs my attention is the actual bubbles being created – shimmering hoops that manage to retain their shape even when split apart. A bubble should be round or something close to it, goddammit, not this bizarre toroidal shape! A bit of research showed that quite a few species of dolphin and whale make these – something I never knew until now. And, were I inclined to take up swimming seriously, I’d be able to create similar, but less impressive rings. Although given that I swim like a particularly suicidal brick, any feelings of achievement I might obtain by successfully doing that would be somewhat tempered by my impending watery death.
Of course, being the ever-reliable internet, the same research turned up the usual nutters who seem to think that this is tied in to extra-terrestrial activity. Love the ‘computer-enhanced’ images on that page – nice of them to let us know the huge and obviously fake white blobs that have been painted in might not actually be real.
I don’t know why some people can’t accept that the natural world can be fascinating and amazing enough in itself without having to ascribe it to some nebulous alien or spiritual force. I imagine it’s the ongoing influence of creationism, simply reinterpreted into another form. And that’s a dangerous force when it prevents people from thinking about things critically. Luckily though, I happen to know for a fact that dolphins have other beliefs entirely.