Richmond, my home borough, most copied town name

Innovate, don't duplicate they say.


Unless you live in my home borough. Richmond is statistically the town name most others have copied. 55 different Richmonds in the world. It's just no big enough any more! Just try searching "Richmond" and you get returns from websites in America in the state of Virginia. Agh!

Interestingly, London is second place in the list - 46 in total. Next time someone accuses London of being one of the worst cities, blame it on its other 45 cousins!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1102645/All-roads-lead-Richmond-British-place-copied-world.html?ITO=1490

"Fat" engines

Oh dear me, it's all so very Fight Club, is it not?

A cosmetic surgeon in Los Angeles has managed to harness the power of his patient's excess fat to run his 4x4 (which is not the greenest of cars)!

Strangely enough, it's also illegal to run your motor off human waste... hmm! But with enough liposuction being performed in LA, that's an awful lot of juice for your motor!


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1101005/The-liposuction-fatmobile-How-cosmetic-surgeon-fills-car-patients-excess-flab.html?ITO=1490

Bush shoes 'projected' to sell well

This one's from the Guardian. Turns out if your product is used to overthrow (or just throw), the orders will flood in. But why?


Stampede for 'Bush shoe' creates 100 jobs
By Robert Tait for the Guardian

Their deployment as a makeshift missile robbed President George Bush of his dignity and landed their owner in jail. But the world's most notorious pair of shoes have yielded an unexpected bonanza for a Turkish shoemaker.

Ramazan Baydan, owner of the Istanbul-based Baydan Shoe Company, has been swamped with orders from across the world, after insisting that his company produced the black leather shoes which the Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi threw at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last Sunday.

Baydan has recruited an extra 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of Model 271 - more than four times the shoe's normal annual sale - following an outpouring of support for Zaidi's act, which was intended as a protest, but led to his arrest by Iraqi security forces.

Orders have come mainly from the US and Britain, and from neighbouring Muslim countries, he said.

Around 120,000 pairs have been ordered from Iraq, while a US company has placed a request for 18,000. A British firm is understood to have offered to serve as European distributor for the shoes, which have been on the market since 1999 and sell at around £28 in Turkey. A sharp rise in orders has been recorded in Syria, Egypt and Iran, where the main shoemaker's federation has offered to provide Zaidi and his family with a lifetime's supply of shoes.

To meet the mood of the marketplace, Baydan is planning to rename the model "the Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush".

"We've been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy. We've even hired an agency to look at television advertising," he said.

Zaidi has been in custody since the shoe-throwing incident, amid claims that he has been badly beaten. He faces a possible jail sentence for insulting a foreign leader, but has reportedly apologised and requested a pardon from Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/22/turkey-george-bush-shoe

Steal the Empire State? You can in deed!

A newspaper in New York managed to steal the Empire State Building to expose a huge legal gap in the city's legal system. Because the city register clerks aren't required to verify the information, they were able to do it in under 90 minutes!

It was reported here in the Independent, but I managed to hunt down the original from the New York Daily Post, here.

Whatever next?

You don't need to swear to be funny or get your point across

Something everyone should learn is from an article that caught my eye on the BBC website this evening by Clive James, where he talk about... the removal of swearing?

Indeed, because we're all a bit partial to slipping a curse word in to emphasise our point, even from managers to kids with no manners to grandmothers swear (when they do I make the sign of the cross for the very sin of letting one slip), what if we just took them out.

Frank Skinner did so at one of his stand up gigs once. No one noticed. Maybe we should cut it out too, and not stain our childrens' souls with language that would turn the air blue.

Read what Clive James had to say here

"I could have 300 siblings" and new credit crunched cars

An emotional piece in the Guardian today about a woman speaking on siblings of donated sperm. While adoption is something people are more familiar with. I guess you never think about children of donated sperm because the biological father doesn't have to be on the birth certificate. It's interesting medium-length reading.

It turns out if you fancy bartering on a new car, dealers are willing to bend backwards to any offer you make according to this article in the Mail.

The origins of text speak (txt spk)

Ah to be going through stacked copies of newspaper supplements I never got round to reading.
As it so happens, txt spk has been around far longer than you may have thought. That's right. Even Dickens used it!

If you thought txt spk is "dsgstng" due to it's lack of vowels and punctuation, check out this article I found in the Guardian Review earlier:

2b or not 2b

It's an extract from the writer's book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. I'm sure he appreciates my plugging of his product :)