Shades of Grey

Corporate Presenter asks how we will be celebrating St Georges day.

I’ll be at work. Although we do have a part-time Viking joining us for tea tonight.

(Not him, he is a Pub landlord with a liking of Mail & Plate).

Companies enjoy giving away low cost freebies like pens, T shirts and gadgets. It is good business sense: the prospective customer feels like they have got themselves something for nothing, the business gets their name spread around and their brand as well.

It is a thin line between a gift and a bribe of course, but unless you are a Company Director then the monetary value is generally low.

However, branding plays a role in the desirability. In 1988, I joined CCT Theatre Lighting, a good brand (number 2 in the market), well respected in the professional sector and thought of as a cool company. Shortly after I joined, they acquired Furse Theatre Products, a company well respected in the educational sector but with a poor image on the pro side, due to some rather duff ranges of products in the 60s & 70s.

Consequently, we did a big promotion at Riverside Studios (actually in a Pub down the road from the trade show) and had loads of T shirts made which proved very popular. I was visiting a theatre a few weeks later and the electrician asked if we had any left. “Sorry”, I said, “We’ve run out of CCT ones, but we have plenty of Furse ones left.” Pause. “Oh-kay.” he said. “I could always wear it for get-ins, or maybe when I’m cleaning out the Pit or the Roof Void.”

We often get giveaway stuff from our suppliers at work, particularly if we’ve bought something from them. The creativity waxes and wanes (the oddest item I received was a dolls house size office furniture set and the most useful was a monitor mirror). I was given a T shirt during the week, on condition that it appeared on Shades. It looked huge on David, unstylish on Karen and downright unpleasant on me.

However, there was a solution… the dog.

(No dogs were harmed in the production of this blog entry).

Well, the weather (mostly) held for the St. Georges annual Parade and Festival. It was well attended and the parade was bigger than ever.

Two bits of camera video footage below. The first is the parade passing the town hall.

The second is of the dragon slaying, which didn’t go quite as planned, but pretty much as I expected. (Kids will be kids).

(The mayhem begins when the count down reaches about fourty seconds).

PS The commentator is Charlie Chuckles from Chorley FM

I use Google as my Firefox startup page, mainly to show that the broadband is up & the wireless is working when I turn on the computer. Google take pleasure in tweaking their logo to align with events (shamrocks on St. David’s day etc.) and I was surprised to see icebergs this morning.

Curious, I thought. These icebergs break the rule of ninths: most of them should be underwater. What are they celebrating, I wondered? the shock news that the snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro aren’t melting despite the wolf-like cries of the enviro-facists? It couldn’t be the sinking of the Titanic, that was April 15th.
Being curious, I clicked the image and it brought up searches for Earth Day.

It seems that earth day is a religious holiday, the day that the high priests of the cult of environmentalism lambast us for breathing. The faithful fast by unplugging their appliances then go out in their Toyota Hybrids and hug trees.

Am I bovvered?

Well, like most normal, non-extreme people who want to get on with their lives without government interference, I want my Son to grow up in a world that provides all the opportunities (& more) that I had. However, the enviro-fascist movement is unpleasantly authoritarian, judgemental and regressive. Having to live in a Yurt and travelling everywhere on a milk float doesn’t meet my idea of progress.

I’m extremely skeptical about much of the hot air spouted by the Al Gores of the world, it is a bandwagon that politicians, control freaks and sandal wearers seem delighted to jump onto. Hopefully the wheels are going to come off big-time in a popular backlash some time soon.

We do need to solve some serious energy challenges, of course, as dependency on petro-chemicals is a bad idea for two reasons- pollution and having to pay the despots who have most of the oil. However the answer will be solved by technology rather than returning to the dark ages advocated by the watermelons.

Last week, to my surprise, I was invited to represent our IT department on a senior working group related to green issues and corporate responsibility. My first response was that as I was an envirosceptic, I was probably the least suitable person as I wouldn’t buy in to anything that was simply posturing without sound reasons to do it. The reply gave me hope, however. I was advised that such views actually made me the most suitable person, being both pragmatic, sceptic and realistic. We shall see!