Posts Tagged ‘big business’
Compendium of quirky calendars for non-conformists
December 9th, 2009 | 
Author: I’d like to apologise to our readers and my blogging colleagues for the unannounced and prolonged downtime experienced over the last couple of weeks. I have resigned from the finance department and a chimp equipped with basic numeracy and organisation skills has been found to usurp me.
Ostentatious debutantes eviscerated for your year-round delectation
Somehow we have entered December, after what feels like only a few months into 2009.
Tesco and all the despotic UK retailers have been ready for Christmas since minutes after Halloween fizzled out, merchandising decorations and the like everywhere you turn.
Marketers love spinning sales off the back of the seasonal festivities that pepper the calendar year. September is the ideal time to buy back-to-school home and contents cover. DFS love to drive home the importance of getting a brand new sofa every December, “the ideal family Christmas present”. (That of course relies on you having not already bought one every bank holiday so far this year. But make sure to leave room under the stairs for just one more settee which you’ll inevitably rush out to get at 12:01am on Boxing Day!)
One thing you’ll find in nearly every shop around now is 2010 calendars. There’s a calendar for the usual tastes out there, from cute West Yorkshire terriers to marine life photography. Yay! Dolphins frolicking about in enclosures in the Dominican Republic, secretly plotting our demise…
For all the hormonally addled teenster there’s calendars of Hollyoaks hunks or The Bill babes. Mm, Roberta Taylor in a negligee in January.
But that’s all a bit run of the mill. For more select tastes, you can gawp at goats that’ve climbed trees to gain a better picture of the surrounding pastures.
Or, if you’re a loathsome sadist, there are 12 captivating photographs of non-descript beasts with their viscera caulked all over the highways of America.
Have you got a hilarious idea for a calendar? Are you set to appear in one, in a reputation-shattering compromising situation? Let us know!
Ding dong! The fight begins for the Xmas No. 1 single
Rage against the X-Factor
The latest batch of manufactured X-Factor pop-a-nonnies are trundling inevitably closer to the turgid, overcooked and overhyped grande finale. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid a lot of television recently, so have escaped the show’s grasping and vampiric embrace of my brain. Yes. I have not been sucked in.
I thought I might expound on my disbelief at the 2009 crop of finalists – seriously, I just don’t get Jedward, but I’ve realised it’s useless. Anybody who has not joined the cult cannot understand its inner workings. It’s probably like how, to Scientologists, it’s completely awesome that they have little aliens living inside them but to anybody else, it’s insane.
You can over-capitalise…
They say money can’t buy happiness, but really it can if you have any imagination. However, money can’t, and never will be able to, buy class: the more money you throw around trying to surround yourself with pricey wares, the worse everything starts to look.
Middle Eastern interior design doesn’t follow trends. Instead the attitude appears to be “write a cheque and get one of everything, and then get a couple of spares, and then buy the companies that made them”.
Have you been contemplating converting your diesel motor, so that it runs on Crisp’n'Dry? This will help you come to a decision.
Stupid ways to earn a living #4: top-flight footballer
“He could turn on a sixpence” goes an old and remarkably unrealistic football-related maxim. A more contemporary interpretation would go something like “he could turn on fifty grand”.
It all but knocks me out cold that Ben Haim of financially struggling Portsmouth earned something in the region of the abovementioned figure to benchwarm at Manchester City with his Nike Pro+ sweats. Meanwhile, NHS nurses fight over bean sprouts.
Mission accomplished! iPhone apps in the Air Force
Flying a fighter jet: there's an app for that.
Ever been on a top secret mission for the US Air Force and wondered, “is there an app for this?” Well, now there is: Northrup Grumman have confirmed that they will be releasing a variety of ‘apps’ on iTunes in an effort to broaden their market.
“The combat aeronautics market has definitely had a difficult year,” Mike Hock, Northrup Grumman VP, told IWDTFM this morning, “Five years ago, we would have sold five jets already today. But now no one wants to spend money because of the recession, no matter how many signed pictures of Val Kilmer we throw in.”
Tags: big business, iphone, marketing, media, military, music, northrup grumman, us air force | 
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Bottom line: working for a living, and why it sucks
The IWDTFM team during office hours
It will come as a shock to absolutely no one to find out that, every once in a while, when the moon is full and the leylines are aligned, I complain about my job.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. We spend a third of every day at work. Eight hours out of twenty-four. Apparently, the UK workforce is one of the hardest working populations in the world, putting in an average of £5,129-worth of overtime every year. I don’t really put in much extra time, although to my credit I’ve been known to stay late if something needs finishing. Most days, however, I’m out the office sometime between five-thirty and six o’clock with a spring in my step and my evening ahead of me.
So what do I complain about? The usual, really. Being tired, being busy, being bored, being hungry, wanting to go and play outside, wanting to stay and play inside. Wanting to be anywhere but cooped up in an office working for a living.
Stupid ways to earn a living #3: the fashion industry
Karl Lagerfeld: the definition of ego
We on the IWDTFM team are often asked, “Why don’t you all become models?”. It’s a valid question, given how good looking we all are. But I have a secret: I don’t understand the fashion industry. What it is, what it does, and why the hell anyone would want to be a part of it.
I’m writing this because I read Kate’s article about the New Zealand fashion week, and – like Kate – I was impressed that a country that has yet to pave its streets even has a fashion week. Wales doesn’t, although this could be due to the fact that large numbers of the Welsh population have yet to be introduced to clothes.
Not that the fashion industry is particularly concerned with clothes. They don’t produce things that you can wear. They produce monstrosities of design, much like a five-year-old with access to a large supply of Play-Doh might.
What really confuses me about the fashion industry is that so many people seem to want to break into it. Models, fashion designers, stylists, hairdressers… never mind that the industry seems to be a mix of sweat shops and the Third Reich, it’s honestly an industry that people marry footballers to get into. On your average thirteen-year-old girl’s list of “Things I Want To Be When I Grow Up”, the desirability of jobs in the fashion industry is probably only second to whatever the hell it is Tara Parker-Tomkinson did to get famous.
Sartorial splendor in the southern hemisphere: NZ Fashion Week
Pamela tries her best to make butt crack fashionable. Fail.
It was New Zealand Fashion Week last week. Wait, I hear you ask. NZ has a fashion week? We sure do. And it’s not all gumboots, swandris and black singlets. There’s like, actual non-farmery type gear on display.
But you’re right in thinking that the event is not a big deal. The fact it was scheduled for the same time as London Fashion Week proves that NZ Fashion Week isn’t even a blip on the global sartorial radar — there were no journalists, socialites, or buyers out there going, ohmygosh what am I to do? over the scheduling conflict in their calendars.
What happens if you look up Pixie Lott in the thesaurus?
As everyone knows my favourite genre of music is blond female vocalist. I just can’t get enough! Growing up my mother would always listen to Debbie Harry and the odd breathy rendition by Marilyn Monroe.
In my formative years Christina, Britney and Shakira owned the charts. This all contributed to my fervent hankering for the recent onslaught of pseudo-modest soulsters.
But in the last year I’ve become so overwhelmed with mid-20’s female breakthrough artists with blond hair that I can’t tell them apart! Can you help me sort Pixie Boots from Lady Duffy? What sets Duffy apart from Hilary Duff, apart from the former being a diminutive of the latter?
Ticketnovice, or how to completely avoid ever going to a single gig
I want to go to a gig, but I can’t because TicketMaster is intent on keeping me at arm’s length from any ticket at all times.
Browse to Ticketmaster.co.uk and try to book something. It needn’t be anything particularly popular. Try getting the unreserved standing tickets. Proceed through loads of pointless questions that could definitely wait until I’ve committed to a couple of tickets. Decipher the faux-typewriter Captcha words and reproduce them in the text field provided. Find out that the tickets aren’t available. Repeat.
Despite that I choose the “just find me a fucking seat, I don’t care where” option, infuriatingly it states that my anally stringent gig-attending criteria are preventing it from finding any tickets to sell me, so I have to go back and try looking for tickets to see the same band in Dusseldorf or Montreal.
Guys, look – I’m a big boy, if the damn thing is sold out, just tell me – I can take it!
