How to Make Lots of Money: A Hypothetical Scenario

Not quite sure what inspires me to write this, but here’s a hypothetical way for you to make a small fortune: Suppose a hugely popular international rock band, lets call them WWII Submarine, had just announced a word tour that was set to play around 110 dates, most of which would be in huge sports stadia and arenas with capacities in 5 figures, but guaranteed to sell out quickly. Now suppose you ran a ticket…

Continue reading

So what are you doing on June 24-26 (and April 3)?

Oh, the usual, of course. I must say I am slightly baffled why the “news” story here, as reported by all corners of the media, is “No Glasto in 2006”. Why not “Glasto license approved for 2005”? How things have changed from a few years ago. It’s not even really news anyway: 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001… you don’t have to be a genius to spot a pattern there. In fact, all this really does is…

Continue reading

Links

Two fantastic links from this week’s b3ta newsletter: – Some fantastic sketches off Armando Iannucci’s 2004 end of year show, particularly the wonderfully surreal iPod one and the BBC1 Ident. These made me laugh. A lot. – Supper With The Stars. Dinner with Syd Little, Jim Bowen (“Special Requirements. Darts and a dartboard.”) and Stan Bordman, anyone? Or how about Keith Harris? (“Keith likes to appears on his own, but for an additional fee, will…

Continue reading

Merchant Bankers

Paying in a cheque to my account at lunchtime, I noticed that the HSBC in London Bridge has a funky new paying-in machine. It scans your cheque in and then uses some kind of OCR to work out the amount written on the cheque. You even get a little mini copy of the cheque on your receipt to take away. Sorry, but I’m a geek, and I think that’s pretty cool. Now, if they could…

Continue reading

This is My Youth, Show Me Yours

Oh dear. I’m not sure how it’s become Thursday already without me finding the time to write about last Friday, but I can’t let any more time pass without mentioning last Friday night, when Sal and I joined Rob and Claire at the Islington Academy for XFM’s club night: First Friday. We spent most of the evening in the upstairs bar, listening to Chris “News” Smith play what was initially a set of baggy classics…

Continue reading

New Year Fun

Well, it’s a new year, and it looks as if my long-running feud with London Energy may finally be drawing to a close, after I finally managed to convince them to charge me for the correct meter, only a year after moving into the flat. Funnily enough, all it actually took to solve the problem was one quick email to Energywatch, the independent energy regulator, which achieved what 9 months of phone calls to London…

Continue reading