Firetop

So other than telling Suzie_Q to meet us at the ‘Pig and Whistle’ (don’t know where I got that from) last night’s Thanksgiving celebration for an American colleague went smoothly. The Whistle and Flute in Putney did their usual Thanksgiving meal of turkey, beans, mash and yams with mini-marshmallows, and pumpkin pie for dessert. In addition they showed the NFL on the TVs and gave us a quiz to name the 43 presidents of America to win a bottle of house wine. Luckily, despite only naming 28 presidents (we didn’t cheat with WAP this year), I realised on the way home that the final bill was unexpectedly low… they forgot to charge us for two bottles of Pinot Grigio saving us £30! A welcome Thanksgiving present, and due entirely to their inefficient waiting staff I suspect.

(more…)

This week having read a review in the ever thinner ‘Free London Paper’ I bought and watched the League of Gentlemen’s latest release ‘The League of Gentlemen… Are Behind You’. I thought it was pretty funny, and certainly well put together, but not as funny as their Drury Lane DVD… worth buying (or borrowing from me) all the same though. The League’s depressing potholing character ‘Mick Macnamara‘ did remind me of something I hear from time to time in every day life when he said to the Hammersmith audience “If you hear an instruction on loud speaker please be calm, it might take the shape of a non alarming statement such as “Mr Flames is rushing through the building”. It made me think - once in a while at Victoria or King’s Cross stations I hear the announcement “Would Inspector Sands please come to the control room immediately”

(more…)

Remember ‘Ulysses 31′ or the ‘Mysterious Cities of Gold’? Tonight I discovered that most of my favourite cartoons from the 1980s have had their theme tunes (and of course opening credits) uploaded to YouTube. When you haven’t watched the Thundercats or Bravestarr introductions for almost twenty years, doing so brings a warm reminder of care-free days gone by, sat in front of the TV waiting for dinner. I’ve linked to ten of my preferred cartoon introductions… have fun and sing along! (more…)

On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis. (more…)

After a few hours spent in Waxy’s Little Sister my fellow drinkers and I moved on to O’Neill’s on the opposite side of Wardour street. Gaining entrance (beneath a large and confusing Ladbrokes sign) proved bizarre. As we all trooped in one of the doorman stopped the last three of us and said “you can’t go inâ€?. “Why notâ€? came our obvious reply, “You ain’t with them, I’ve seen you three hanging around here for ten minutesâ€?… I think my response of “OK sure no problem, let me just call the ten people who just went in and we’ll all leaveâ€? seemed to prove a point as doorman number two said “Go on inâ€? to which I laughed. “This ain’t no laughing matter sonny this is serious businessâ€? said the original looney doorman. I’m not sure what he’d been smoking, perhaps his wife had given him a beating before he left for work and he needed to reassert his ‘authority’. (more…)

On Saturday evening Suzie_Q and I went out for drinks in London to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The chosen venue was Waxy’s Little Sister on Wardour Street in Soho. This is a small bar opposite Waxy O’Connor’s (a much larger bar of the same chain in which we later tried to get a drink… but gave up due to the sheer weight of people inside). Waxy’s Little Sister isn’t particularly large, but upstairs they do at least have a comfy seating area which we invaded and occupied. I don’t remember there being any music played in the bar, conversation was easy. If anything musical should have been played I’d have recommended whale songs; the ceiling décor reminded me very much of Weymouth Sea Life Centre. (more…)

This afternoon I had an online demonstration of Nielsen’s AdRelevance tool, an online reporting interface which enables the subscriber to see which advertisers are running banners across the major media websites. AdRelevance reports show where banners are running, flight durations and stores examples of the creative. From an online ad sales perspective this is wonderful stuff. Auto-triggered email alerts can dispatch emails displaying the latest campaign details from competing websites, enabling a sales person to contact the relevant marketing manager about running a similar campaign on their own network. However, one thing was pretty clear - AdRelevance is generating false clicks on banners when it retrieves creative and URL information, not good news for advertisers. (more…)

When we breath we produce Carbon Dioxide (CO2), the more exercise we do the more we produce, so I thought I’d investigate how much CO2 could be saved if everybody in the world breathed half as much for a year. Al Gore has been having the same thoughts too: “We breathe out carbon dioxide, and this in turn causes global warming.  I’m going to start holding my breath for two minutes, thirty times per day, in order to combat global warming.  I would suggest everyone follow my lead and hold your breath every day.  It will prevent the earth from being destroyed.” By my own calculations if we all breathed half as frequently we could reduce CO2 emissions by over 1 billion tonnes per year - or around 4% of total global output (25 billion tonnes). (more…)

On Friday I went for lunch with a colleague to Canal 125 on Caledonian Road, it’s another bar/restaurant I’ve been frequenting for a number of years - since it was known as Babushka’s. Usually I go there for the amazing starter dish - chicken ‘bang bang’ - which comes with cucumber and peanut chilli sauce, unfortunately it has been discontinued which was disappointing; the waitress said it wasn’t very popular (which I find surprising). However, the butternut squash soup I had instead was a nice alternative, the lamb shank with parsnip mash and crisps was cooked to perfection and delicious. (more…)

Somehow I managed to reach the ripe old age of 29 without ever having seen Bladerunner before now – a film based on a screen play by Hampton Fancher which asks the fundamental question – when does the life experience of a super computer (or in this case an android) become as valuable as a human’s? In the case of Bladerunner the answer is that it has occurred – emphasised in Rutger Hauer’s final pre-death statement ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … and now all those experiences are lost forever like tears’. (more…)