We were walking along the road one day and spied this truck. Nothing strange there.

A Truck, The Other Day

However, after we passed, I noticed that H was no longer with me. Now that was strange.
It was ok, though. She had just stopped to read the sign in the window:

A Sign

Seems like it was penned by a reasonable fellow. not.

nothing

A little while ago, a pal of mine suggested a £10 investment challenge. You start with £10 and have to invest as you see fit to make it grow as much as possible.

Well, tonight, the £zero investment challenge was born. You must start with zero pounds, you are not allowed to sell any assets you already own. We will assume you are allowed a computer, phone, email connection etc. and calls are free (lucky you!)

You must account for every single penny you make/lose, preferably in an excel (or openoffice calc) spreadsheet.

You are not allowed to use any tools that you already own (if you do someone’s ironing, you must use their iron).

No borrowing from yourself or others.

Any driving must be charged to yourself at 40p per mile.

You have six months to make zero pounds grow as large as you can. The deadline is noon on 6th January 2011. At that point only cash assets will count, you must liquidise everything before that date.

Who’s in?

As fellow classmate Tal has reminded me, one of the questions in the listening exam had every single member of the class tittering inside, with the occasional little leak to the outside world. You see, in our classes, as in language classes all over the world, cats (neko) featured quite heavily. You want an example sentence for positions? “The cat is on the table”.

So when we turned the page and were greeted with the following diagram (crudely represented) you can imagine the amusement.

猫はテーブルの上にいる

The section heading was “kaimono” (shopping) and I’m not sure why there was a plumber on the left and a businessman on the right. But that’s just how it is. Must have been cheap clip-art. The section was actually about ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘over there’ and there were three pictures, but I couldn’t be bothered to draw the cat balanced on the businessman’s hand.

It’s like hovercrafts and eels… must be one of those universally translated phrases…

English: The cat is on the table.
Japanese: 猫はテーブルの上にいる。
Finnish: Kissa on pöydällä.
French: Le chat est sur la table.

Any more…?

I was admiring my clean bottom the other day. No, it’s not what you think. My visual awareness is growing and growing with all this logo and leaflet design stuff I’ve been doing. So looking at my logo, I realised that my name has a lovely clean bottom with no descenders.

See how the baseline is nice and clean

Unfortunately, the word ‘photography’ has ascenders, and so there’s some trapped white space in the logo. Fortunately, the century gothic font has a large x-height and therefore the ascender are not huge. But still… there’s a little trapped space:

Trapped space

Were I to use a font with a small x-height like (God forbid) Papyrus, you’d see the effect even more markedly:

Trapped space AND terrible font

Now, there’s a classic solution to problems of competition in business. If you can’t possibly compete in google, for instance, with the business you run, then what do you do? You run a different business. Example: you can’t find a decent Donkey Hairdresser in the midlands. So if you were to set up a site for Donkey Hairdressing, you would have a very small audience (obviously), but every one of that audience would find you. It’s a ‘find the niche and fill it’ method.

So, using that methodolgy, if I want to avoid trapped space in my logo, I need to go for a new career path:

New career?

Problem solved!

Here’s a little video (an advert, actually) that I thought was a work of genius. I’ll let you decide. But I found I had to watch the whole thing again after the first viewing.

made by benito vasselini on b3ta.com

Members of the British Racist Idiots Party were celebrating last night as the UN ratified the 2010 Global Repatriation Convention. This agreement, signed by a 9:1 majority of member nations means that the population of the world will be repatriated to its country of origin by the end of 2015.

“We welcome the news that some 4.6 million immigrants will be sent home so that we can begin looking after our own people. It is a pity that very few of the bankers who caused the global economic crisis are immigrants – unfortunately we’ll have to keep them.”, said Pinch Wyvern – head of the BRIP.

Building firms were also on the alert, as homes will now be needed for a further 27.5 million American residents whose ancestry has been traced back to the UK. Likewise 6.3 million Australian residents, and another few million from around the globe will be relocating into the country.

A home office spokesman made a statement this morning:

“We’re not quite sure how our hospitals, schools and charities will cope with the sudden influx of population – none of whom will have jobs, homes or any visible means of support. With the population of our country now due to almost double in five years, resources will certainly be stretched.”

To coincide with the announcement, a new initiative was launched to research the building of habitable floating platforms in the sea for those of mixed race.

Right-thinking individuals of the world have six weeks to lodge a complaint with UNFUBAR, the United Nations committee responsible.

This video by Zack Arias is almost Les-Dawsonesque in its incompetence.

Love it!

As if the perviously posted* advert wasn’t bad enough. Due to a lack of responses, it seems that our ‘glamour club’ photographer has decided that SHOUTING would be the way forward…

GIRLS, I STILL HAVE VACANCIES FOR MY GLAMOUR PHOTOGRAPHY CLUB ON FRIDAY AND SATURDAYS. 2 HOUR SESSIONS FOR A GLAMOUR STYLE SHOOT, GOOD HOURLY RATES AND IMAGES ON CD FOR THE RIGHT CANDIDATES. IDEAL OPPURTUNITY TO BREAK INTO THE GLAMOUR WORLD. CONTACT [NAME REMOVED] FOR FURTHER DETAILS, THANKS.

(*accidental typo, but since it was apt, I thought I’d leave it in)

And while we’re here, how about…

Bad Job Adverts #5

Photography assistant in busy studio c.v and photo

I bet their attention to detail is unrivalled.

What more could you ask for?