Friday 30 January 2009

Following thousands of complaints the new Cornish Unitary Authority, which is due to take office in April, has decided to ditch plans to introduce a new logo. Complainants said it looked like Don King’s hair.


Apparently it would have cost in the region of nearly £500k to place images of Don King’s hair on vans, stationery, uniforms and websites, although estimates were later lowered to £65k. Bit of a difference – perhaps they drew the line at emblazoning it across the Cornish Reichstag Building and wearing it on armbands. I wonder how much Don King was going to charge for the use of his trade mark? If you ask me, it looks vaguely Aboriginal – the logo that is, not Don King.

This is the old Cornish crest.



I can’t for the life of me see the relevance to Cornwall of one of the Village People or Darth Vader captured in an unguarded moment with his visor lowered. The upturned inflatable dinghy that they’re hanging on to is quite apt, however.

In The People’s Republic of Birmingham councillors have decided to ban possessive apostrophes from street name signs. In light of illiteracy rates I’m not sure of the wisdom of this. The reason given is saving money, but does saving on apostrophes actually produce much of a saving, especially when you consider the effort involved in removing them in the first place. In fact, what with satnavs I’d posit that road names are now redundant and postcodes rule, so how about getting rid of them completely? Can’t remember when I last used a street name to get somewhere. How about dropping possessives completely? St Paul’s St, for example, could become St Paul St. Think of all those saved Ss – they could be saved up and used by a consultant to produce a new logo for Brum comprised completely of Ss. Didn’t someone else do that some 70 years ago?

The French have been engaging in their national recreational activity of striking. I head some of the complaints on the radio last night; rising unemployment, rising prices, salaries staying the same. Welcome to the real world! What effect striking is going to have when we’re in the midst of a global economic crisis is beyond me. Ask any of the strikers what the solution is and they simply don’t know, but they do know that it ain’t what Sarkozy is doing. To quote Greg Lake, C’est la vie. Any offers of solutions from readers in France?

I was listening to Farming Today on the way into work and heard that the organic bubble might have been pricked at last. Organic farmers are struggling to sell their highly priced produce in today’s economic climate and a bit of realpolitik is entering the farming community. Farmers are apparently queuing up to revert to non-organic status, but doing it in such a manner as to easily revert back to organic at some later stage. Consumers simply refuse to pay the extra it costs to produce organic food, seeing it as an unnecessary luxury better suited to more affluent times.

Getting some hits from rather disconcerting Google searches, such as;

  • ‘can bailiff bring locksmith on 1st call for speeding fine’ and
  • ‘alternative therapies for depression blogspot’, not to mention
  • ‘going to sleep permanently’ and
  • ‘wedding dresses from durban-yellow & caramel colour’.

How the hell that last one managed to alight on my blog is a mystery, although I can quite understand criminals, depressives and suicides reading my posts.

What attracts you to this site? I'm interested to know.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My brother told me about your eBay ad and I've been reading ever since then, though mainly in a quiet lurky way having never commented before. I have actually been meaning to say thank you for a while as you prove a good example for a frequent point of argument/discussion, mainly how do you define a blog. Often ppl try to define it by platform, so that fact that you blogged on an ad really confuses them.

And yes I know that being paid to have those kind of discussions is rather sad ..:)

A Woman Of No Importance said...

Ch Bill - I could not help myself responding to your comments on Paris versus London yesterday, so if you care to see my response to you it is back over at mine - Warning, it's lengthy as I struggle with short!

Your writing is ever thought-provoking, Sir - Have a wonderful weekend,

Fhina the Pink x