Category Archives: Society

Jubilee Britain, Outdoors, Society

The Greatest Marketing Opportunity on Earth

English: Commemorative stamp of Greece, The Fi...

English: Commemorative stamp of Greece, The First Olympic Games (1896), 2 lepta. Русский: Марка Греции. Первые Олимпийские игры, 1896, 2 лепты (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone once said “the revolution will be televised”, in that case it will almost certainly also be heavily sponsored.  In Britain as “London 2012” looms large on the horizon it’s jagged magenta shards casting a great shadow upon our capital.  Ahem, sorry.  As the games draw close our commercial TV channels are increasingly packed with adverts from the official sponsors/supporters/partners.  British Airways encourages people to not use their services to fly abroad but to stay at home instead and support Team GB (by all means use BAs internal flights of course).  The athletes will be able to have a pre-event snack on the official cereal bar of the olympic games though Nature Valley’s adverts are the most light hearted and least sentimentalized of the lot.  According to their ads P&G have the competitors every need seen to from keeping their kit pristine with washing powder, their hair clean,  right down to essential “feminine hygiene products” to keep Mother Nature at bay.  If they eat at the Official Restaurant of the games, Maccy D’s, then they won’t need the Fairy washing up liquid much though.  If consolation is needed then a losing javelin thrower can skewer a Dairy Milk from the official treat supplier of the games.  They can pay on their olympic Visa cards.

Joking aside the games sponsorship has received criticism in many areas including the heavy levels of sponsorship from fast food and drink companies; the fact that spectators are not allowed to use any device that is capable of recording video (must watch the footage on Sky/BBC coverage of course); and the fact that their terms for the torch relay advised that runners should wear “comfortable, unbranded or Adidas shoes.”  One commenter suggested simply running barefoot.  Apparently one mum in Kent was told she couldn’t wear a Help for Heroes wristband.

Then there’s the food and we return to the Official Restaurant, mine’s a Big Mac, thanks.  In McDonalds’ sponsorship deal it is specified that they can have the monopoly on selling chips or french fries unless sellers jump through the loophole of them being part of a Fish and Chips package and even then LOCOG had to ask McDonalds for permission to allow our traditional combo.  In the same article The New Statesman reminds us that T-shirts with logos of companies that aren’t official sponsors have been banned from the Olympic Park.  Some credit though goes to the LOCOG catering team who are trying to provide an interesting selection of food for visitors.

Companies and organisations not officially linked to the games have been referring to “the events this summer” for fear of getting into trouble for mentioning the word “Olympics” due to restrictions to control “unauthorised association” with the games – a concept which has even been enshrined in law especially for the games.  If you do say anything about LOCOG that they consider is in a “derogatory and objectionable manner” then you can’t link to the Olympics site, Mike Masnick at Techdirt linked anyway here.

I’m far from alone in my view of the Olympics sponsorship, while preparing this entry The Independent also launched a debate on the subject as have the BBC whose piece includes the story of a butcher who was told to remove a 2012 themed display of sausages, an old lady who couldn’t sell a £1 knitted doll in a olympic kit, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet who were forced to change the name of a production from “Faster, Higher, Stronger – the Olympic motto – to Faster”.

I’m not a fan of the Olympics as such but as it’s in our country I do hope that the sports will take centre stage from next friday and it’ll be an event to remember for the right reasons.

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Science, Society

Stress and Depression

English: Manipulation of a stress ball, laptop...

English: Manipulation of a stress ball, laptop in background. Taken and released into the public domain by User:Kallemax. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our lives today are often more stressful than ever; longer working hours, less leisure time, pressure to achieve targets, less tolerance of mistakes and fear of losing your job, or difficulty in finding a job in the first place all contribute.  Some people claim stress is “all in the mind” some people claim to never get stressed yet probably do (me included).  It is already agreed that stress can cause fatigue, affect your personal life and has numerous psychological effects including depression.

New research from Yale University now supports this hypothesis showing that it causes changes in the brain at a genetic level.  In tests on rats subjected to chronic stress it was found that the gene that controls production of neuritin was less active and the rats showed symptoms of what would be called depression in humans.  Stimulation of neuritin production triggered an improvement greater than the use of conventional anti-depressants.  This also protected the rats from changes in the brain structure too such as shrinking of the hippocampus.

As well as further demonstrating that stress is a major problem this research also provides hope for new and more effective anti-depressants.

[via Gizmodo UK]

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Science, Society, Tech

Cataloguing The World

English: A Google Street View Camera Car (2008...

English: A Google Street View Camera Car (2008 Subaru Impreza Five Door) showcased on Google campus in Mountain View, CA, USA. taken by myself [User:Kowloonese] using a Canon digital camera. The picture was taken on Google Campus in Mountain View, CA, USA. Release for Public Domain. Kowloonese (talk) 04:53, 18 November 2010 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is big, lots of land, rivers, seas.  Our history is vast too.  The internet contains ever growing volumes of information about both.  And videos of kittens.

Search engines help with finding things on the internet of course, and even the history part as more historical documents are digitized and more history is recorded digitally, whether it be art, music, myth and legend or epic tales.

Google though continues to go beyond its core business, using search ad revenues to actually benefit people – providing free services such as YouTube (which it bought in 2006), Google Translate, Google Docs, Google Maps and so on – which are also available from Microsoft and other providers too – as well as the Android operating system which in its Ice Cream Sandwich version (4.0) is maturing into a very nice OS.  Then there’s the suite of desktop apps including Sketchup, Google Earth,  Picasa and more.  The company even looked skyward, producing Sky Map which is now an open source product.

One wonderfully useful thing Google gave us, via their fleets of cars with Johnny Five wannabees strapped to the roofs, is Street View.  It’s so useful to be able to actually see what the place you’re going to looks like, to see your route, turn by turn at street level because using our visual memory is far better that trying to remember an abstract set of directions on a top-down map alone. They even added traffic information to their Maps product recently.

Even this though was not the end as they’ve Street Viewed railway journeys, cycle routes, footpaths and walking trails and now they’re going to be photographing towpaths along rivers and canals in the UK too.  There will no doubt be privacy complaints again and parts of riversides across the country will become strangely hazy when viewed online but it will also give us more strange and funny discoveries in the images as we’ve had from the roadgoing cameras.

Another new Google project revealed this week sees the search behemoth collecting and documenting languages from around the world that are on the verge of extinction via videos, audio recordings and other documentation. The result will be presented via an interactive website.

Some people however won’t like their other announcement – a service that allows companies to track their employees’ movements via their work phones.  Well, two out of three’s not bad.

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Society, Tech

A Worldwide Audience

If you’d told me sixteen years ago that the photo above that I was about to take of the river through the park in Retford would have been viewed in 2012 by 55 complete strangers from various countries across the world via the internet I’d have thought you were barking.

If you’d then said that views of my photo collection would be nearly totalling 1,000 I’d have probably have just laughed.  Hysterically. Who would want to look at my pictures?

Our connected society allows creativity to be expressed as never before, new music, new books, many gems that might never have seen the light of day are unveiled and even if the audience turns out to be small for someone creating the work for the love of it, as a hobby, then just knowing that someone has appreciated it is an achievement and gives you a warm feeling inside.  I still get a buzz from seeing a spike in my Flickr views or likes on this blog.

In computing’s premillennial days the only people freely sharing things were programmers, now people upload over 72 hours of video to YouTube alone every minute.  And despite some commenters declaration that Flickr is dead in the water because it’s not a social network of the scale of Facebook it still receives thousands of uploads (2,950 in the last minute) – many of which are professionals and many are posted on camera manufacturers or magazine groups where like minded photographers can appreciate and compare each others work.

In this big yet small world there always seems to be an audience for whatever you want to say and whatever you want to show to people – whether it informs, entertains, makes them laugh, cry, scream, think or just go eurgh.

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Funny, Society

A Week of Dodgy Phone Calls

My Real Facepalm

My Real Facepalm (Photo credit: joelogon)

I regularly take phone calls that have me rolling my eyes, sighing, facepalming or just LOLling.  These are just a few of these stories.

Caller:  “Can I speak to Paul please?”
Me:  “He’s not in at the moment.”
Caller:  “Do you know when he’ll be in?”
Me:  “I’m sorry, I don’t know at the moment.”
Caller:  “Well, if I call back this afternoon will he be in?”
Facepalm.  Erm, I don’t know…

Caller, having been given a quote:  “Oh, no, you’ve got that wrong.”
Me:  “No, I haven’t, it’s worked out on the computer.”
Caller:  “Well, you’ve definately got that wrong, you need to go away and work it out again.”
Who are you, a schoolteacher?

I rang a customer to let him know that the surveyor was running late, it was about half an hour after the booked time already when I was asked to call him.  “He’ll be about fifteen minutes” I told the customer.  “What, fifteen minutes from now?” he asked.  No, from next tuesday, I thought.

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Society, Tech

Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet

I’m not on Twitter so I don’t really know what people say apart from the odd comment reported here and there but I do know, thanks to Gizmodo UK and Cnet, that worldwide people are sending over 400 million tweets per day, 4,500 per hour.  Though apparently you can now tailor trends based on who you follow too.

Still, that’s a lot of twittering.

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Jubilee Britain, Outdoors, Society

British Traditions Roll On

The MC holding the cheese.

The MC holding the cheese. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Even in the 21st Century some English traditions are still clinging on thanks to the dedication of individuals.  One of them, the annual cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill was run, rolled and somersaulted yesterday.

The tradition was officially ended in 2010 but has been continued by enthusiasts even though last year’s contest was controversially cancelled over plans to charge for taking part.

The four races down the 200m hill were run in conditions described as damp and the Jubilee Cheese was won by Craig Fairley of Brockworth.

See fuller coverage and photos over at Metro.

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Society, Tech

Pay Attention People

Heads up

Heads up (Photo credit: Brett Jordan)

A couple of years ago I was on my way home from work, it was December, raining, cold and I’d just walked two miles.  I was just approaching my street when a loud group of youths came walking the other way down the narrow path which was separated from the road by a railing.  Most of the group passed by me except one lad who was busy texting on his phone, not looking where he was going.  I walked as close to the wall as I could and he passed by.

The next thing I know this lad is shouting at me about how I should look where I’m going and that I nearly knocked his phone out of his hand, I carried on walking while he continued to rant, apparently about how important and the centre of the universe he was and that I should have moved for his lordship.

Having had a really lousy day I turned, walked back and firmly told him that it was him not looking where he was going and was only looking at his phone – “yeah, cos I’m busy” he replied – working on a multi-million pound equity deal no doubt – while his friend held on to him and his girlfriend crowed “it’s not wurf it mate” to me.

I agreed with that at least so turned and carried on walking.

It turns out that this condition afflicts many people these days – the inability to move from one place to another without tweeting or updating facebook – so much so that in New York signs have been put up to try to prevent collisions in future.

The signs are actually the work of street artist Jay Shells who campaigns for better social etiquette and whose previous works have included signs about not flicking cigarette butts on the ground.  Of course it’s not just pedestrian collisions that happen because of people not watching where they’re going, people have actually been hit by vehicles too so the message is serious.

So mind where you’re walking out there and if you’re reading this on the move for goodness sake LOOK UP!

[Metro]

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Society

NOTICE ME!

Man's face screaming/shouting. Stubbly wearing...

Man’s face screaming/shouting. Stubbly wearing glasses. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was just outside on the balcony, watching the rain, listening to the gentle drumming of each drop on the timber beside me and the car roof below me; listening to the birds twittering, the gentle rustling of the early spring leaves in the breeze; listening to the… THUMP THUMP THUMP of music from a nearby house, so loud I could hear it outside and down the street.

FFS, as they say.  I muttered to myself how they should go take their music, in their cars with the loud exhausts, and go play in the shopping centre car park.  I’m all for having fun, I play music loud sometimes but if my neighbour wanted to listen to it I’d lend her the CD.

This is part of the obsession with being noticed, of desire to be the centre of attention that leads some to crave fame via TV “talent” shows and others to make their presence known not by making or doing something creatively, significantly, interestingly, or even the age-old way of being stylish or glamorous but by effectively shouting LOOK AT ME!!!

Some ways they do this are amusing, you hear a loud, rasping exhaust note outside and when you look the car isn’t a throbbing V8 muscle car or a grunting V12 Ferrari, but then you didn’t expect it to be, it’s a 1.2 litre Fiesta, Corsa or Saxo being thrashed to within an inch of its life and trundling by at about 15 MPH.  It’s driver thinks it sounds powerful, he thinks everyone’s impressed, he thinks his girlfriend in the passenger seat is impressed.  Nobody’s impressed.

Others stand outside pubs, conversations escalating in volume as though the switch on the TV remote’s got stuck, all needing to be the loudest and probably paying little attention to what everyone else is saying, ironically.

The same extends to work, Facebook, Twitter – people saying anything to be seen, to be recognised.

Is anyone reading this.  Hello.  HELLO!

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Architecture, Art, Psychology, Society

The Dream Palais

Palais Idéal, Hauterives, Drôme, France.

Palais Idéal, Hauterives, Drôme, France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Built over thirty-five years by one man, The Palais idéal in the French town of Hauterives is an architectural wonder that is at the same time regarded by art critics as merely a folly and an example of so-called naive art.

Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval was born in 1836 and suffered an unsettled early life including the death of both his parents before he was 18, the deaths of two wives and several children, and many poorly paid jobs.  In 1867 he began work as a postman and the story of the Palais began.

As he walked on his rounds in the French countryside he began to construct in his mind what he called “a fairy palace of my dreams” in order to combat the boredom he had begun to feel.  His vision became so vivid as to be almost real in his mind but then he lost confidence in his internal vision and found himself simply wandering through the real world that had none of the wonders of his Palais and had only brought him pain in the past.

His spirit was awakened by tripping over a stone in his path that seemed to him to have been sculpted by nature and he realised that if creativity is inherent in nature then it could be within himself too and at that moment he found what he had been missing.  He realised that he could bring his dream castles into the real world and so he began to collect stones and build his Palais.

Once completed The Palais demonstrated his vision of creative reality, merging styles from across the world and across time.  Cheval said that creativity is life and in finding creativity he began a new life and was enriched by its energy.

The Palais was, from its unveiling, intended to be seen and was open to the public so that they too could be inspired to create and live rather than simply, passively be entertained.  Cheval hoped that his Palais would be part of a wider transformation of the world as people found their own creativity after seeing his work.  The Fortean Times article I read ended by talking about this aspect and its author said it was offered as a pebble for use in building that global palace and as I’d now come into contact with the Palais so I was inspired to discover my own kind of creativity and share it.  Today you don’t need stones and we can build a Palais online if we want, in some ways 21st Century Lunch is part of mine.

Fortean Times #286 p74-76 / Interesting Thing of The Day / Wikipedia

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