Darwin

The chances are that you've heard of the Darwin Awards. One of the cruellest and yet funniest corners of the Internet, the Darwin Awards are given to people who have done the world a service by removing themselves from the gene pool. It's a celebration of the many pointless, stupid and utterly dumb ways in which people choose to die. And it's very funny indeed.

The most wonderful thing about the Darwins is that they're real. Each award is sourced and must be backed up by a 'proper' print reference from a known medium. A couple of examples from this month's batch for you follow. And yes, I did say this month's. You can subscribe to the Darwin Awards newsletter (as I, in fact, do) and get a monthly update of clownish carnage. The fact that there enough utterly stupid deaths going on to keep this thing going on a monthly basis is in itself something of a worry.

I do hope you enjoy these. You can go to the website here.

NEW YORK: Joe, 20, was drunkenly driving through Wayne County farmland in upstate New York. With the utmost of inebriated care, he steered his car directly into a ditch and knocked over a powerline. Oops! How could he rescue his car from the ditch without getting a DUI?

The only way out was to steal a nearby farm tractor, and winch the car out himself. So he aproached the nearest farmhouse, managed to start a tractor, and motored over to the scene of the accident. He then proceeded to drive several tons of metal into the downed power lines.

Goodbye Joe. Hello Darwin Award.

CZECH REPUBLIC: Steel is valuable, especially the high grade alloy used in steel cable. Scrap metal dealers do not ask questions. They pay in cash. And a good supply of cables can be found in elevator shafts.

This particular goldmine was a towering shaft inside an empty grainery near Zatec, 40 miles northwest of Prague. The cable was tightly fastened, and the far end of it disappeared into the shadowy distance above.

After substantial wear and tear on a hacksaw, our man finally cut through the strong steel cable. At that instant, the counterbalance, no longer held in check, started to move silently downwards, accelerating until it reached the bottom of the shaft.

Result: one proud winner of a "terminal velocity" Darwin Award.

VIETNAM: A rolling stone is not all that gathers no moss. Three Vietnam men scavenging for scrap metal found an unexploded 500-pound bomb perched atop a hill near Hanoi, and decided to retrieve it with a little help from Sir Isaac Newton. After all, gravity is free. As they rolled the bomb down the hillside, it detonated, blasting a four-meter crater and sending all three entrepreneurs to a face to face meeting with their deceased hero.

Launch

Went on the radio this morning to witter on about The National, the new Abu Dhabi based newspaper. It was an interesting segment as I hadn't actually seen the paper - ADNOC might be selling cheap diesel (Gulf News finally picked up on that story!) but they weren't selling The National this morning when I dropped by.

I got a copy later. Congratulations are in order. It's stunning.

Conference

On June 1st in Amman, the iblogimedia conference will take place. This is the Middle East's first social media conference. I'm sort of mixing work and pleasure by posting about it here, because we're involved with supporting the event but, hey, rules are made to be broken, no?

Whether it'll do anyone any good to talk about Web 2.0 for a day is yet to be seen, but I am personally hopeful that the event will help to bring greater awareness of consumer generated media in the Middle East to a wider audience, share experience and ideas and also help organisations to define ways of gaining benefit from working with social media. There are some really cool speakers and panellists lined up already.

I look forward to seeing you there... :)

National

There's a certain excitement in the air this week as the media luvvies that populate Dubai's 'scene' all wait for the new Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National, to hit the streets.

The first issue's due out this Thursday: a big and heavyweight team of journalists headed by ex-Telegraph editor Martin Newland has been ramping up for months.

It's going to be interesting. Gulf News has already significantly increased its local news coverage and everyone seems to think it's GN that will take the hit, if there is going to be any hit to be taken. However, the commercial powerhouse that is driving that daily 1KG hunk of paper isn't going to be too worried, one suspects, at least not in the short term.

We're certainly going to see a huge increase in journalistic activity generally. There are going to be a lot of people chasing those stories and looking for differentiated coverage - Newland's team will add something like 45 UAE reporters and 30 international reporters. And they're looking at a business section comprising something like 20 pages according to business editor Bill Spindle, who spoke at the monthly MEPRA klatch earlier this week.

So can we expect better journalism, more competitive journalism and more investigative journalism? I think we can. Quite how long the effect will last and how deep it will go remains to be seen. And, for me at least, that's the interesting bit.

Stuck

Have been meaning to share this minor amusement for some time now. Got my regular (and expensive) treat, Q Magazine and scurried home for a read. Imagine my surprise to find two of the pages stuck together. Yes! Magic Menon and his team of stoned, magic marker sniffing censors had been at work!

It takes quite a lot of magic marker to remove 100 bare breasted girls on bicycles. Not a single cheeky little nipple remains peeping through the dense sea of black...

Flacks

The UK has a brilliant online technology publication called The Register. It's been going for quite some time now and has built up a massive and loyal base of readers - it's very influential indeed in technology circles. El Reg, as it likes to style itself, is also pretty hard-hitting - it's cynical, sarcastic and irreverent in the extreme. It's also very good at breaking news and very good indeed at taking a long, hard look at the dynamics of an industry in which it is not only specialised, but entrenched.

Which is why it's such a great read.

So when two, presumably slightly flustered, PR people from British telephone company O2 had a conference call to discuss quite how to deal with the Register's treatment of some issues they've been having with bandwidth allocation, the last thing they'd probably want to do is patch in Register reporter Bill Ray to listen to them discussing how they were going to manage him.

That would be stupidity beyond belief, wouldn't it? That would be Darwin Award class stuff.

Perish the very thought...

SNAFU*

I posted about my awful bank, HSBC, and at how happy I was to make the move to Lloyds. Lloyds then proceeded to make an awful hash of setting up the account. They issued my debit card with the wrong name on it twice, managed to lose Sarah’s application for a Visa card and generally screwed up the Internet banking side of things by sending me an email to complete the process that was only distinguishable from a phishing email by the fact that it wasn’t as professionally presented as the phishing mails. I still can’t believe that a bank could be stupid enough to send its customers emails with live links to online forms that ask for secure information. It’s taken them over two months to fail to open an account properly. In the meantime, people have been walking up to me in the street, incredulous that I’ve moved to Lloyds and telling me how much they hate them. So we’ve decided to sue for peace and stay with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Blitheringfools Club.

Then I posted about the furniture cleaning company man being impressive. So impressive that when it came to the day of the actual cleaning, they didn’t turn up. They had decided they didn’t want to do the job. Their parent company, meanwhile, managed to lose a silk throw that was sent into them for dry cleaning, with much attendant unpleasantness and a week’s worth of hysterical phone calls from a ranting Sarah. The upholstery team eventually did turn up, just at the wrong time, and destroyed the afternoon although, and let us be thankful for small mercies, not the sofa.

So when Axa insurance sent me an SMS reminder to renew my car insurance, with my policy number in the message and their call centre number so’s I could call then and there to renew, I vowed not to post anything about being impressed. When the call centre took the call, dealt with it effectively and efficiently and renewed my policy on the spot, I promised myself that I would preserve the silence of the confessional. When the documents turned up on my desk, delivered by courier the next day as promised by the girl in the call centre, in order and perfect in every respect, I finally snapped.

It’s safe to post now.

*SNAFU is a great acronym, BTW. Just in case you didn’t know, it stands for Situation Normal All Fcuked Up.

Earthwards

I didn't see any announcements in the papers about this one. And I don't think Emirates announced it. Getting to the airport today, I notice a leaflet that says Silver Skywards members can no longer invite a colleague or other person to join them in the business lounge. The 'privilege' will be 'temporarily suspended'.

Why? Because "given the exceptional growth of Emirates Airline, our existing lounge facilities are not able to accommodate the current volume of visitors."

Well, it's nice to see EK confirming what most of us have known for months already - that the current lounge is totally unable to cope with the volume of users, particularly at busy times like the 7-8am rush - being confirmed. Wiser heads know to nip next door and use the DCA lounge.

But the answer, surely, is to expand the facility, by hook or by crook - not to simply fail to provide people with something that you have undertaken to give them. That's just reneging on the deal. That's really bad for the brand - particularly given a frequent flyer programme asks people to make a significant investment in their relationship to that brand.

And to first tell them at the check-in? That's just poor communications.

Swatch

Nothing to do with watches. I mean like colour swatch. I would like to propose a new colour for the world's paint makers. Dubai Beige.

Dubai beige is the colour of Emirates uniforms - of shopping malls, hotels, residences and logos. It is the colour of the taxis and souks, embassies and free zones. It is the colour of Arabian Ranches and Emirates Hills and Dare To Dream Villas and Falcon Heights or whatever else you're dreaming up to sell to the rubes flying in on EK001 to buy up a slice of Dubai Dream.

C5 M35 Y65. Dubai beige.

Deadly

Three of the landlord’s maintenance team, all Keralite bandits who had taken up building maintenance as light relief after their previous careers as Indian Ocean pirates, were gathered in my kitchen hacking at a lump of asbestos which they wanted to use to back a fuse they were repairing. They were completely flummoxed at the fuss I made, were rather put out to be thrown out of the kitchen, asbestos chunk and all, and even more confounded at my point blank refusal to let them use the material in the house at any price. To them, this stuff was the most brilliant construction material of all time: easy to cut, strong, light, fire-proof and infinitely flexible. I was being utterly unreasonable, obviously. And the very thought that it could cause disease had them rolling their eyes and giggling at me: I'd obviously been pegged as the local English eccentric.

We’d arrived at a major cultural disconnect. In the UK, even the word asbestos is enough to bring in teams of environmental health officers dressed in biochemical hazard suits, carrying canaries in cages and shouting 'Stand clear!' into high powered bullhorns. And yet asbestos is still not only manufactured but used widely as a construction material in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, it is also still widely promoted – even if we have substituted the word ‘asbestos’ for ‘fibre cement roofing sheet’.

You can start to see why the landlord’s guys were so puzzled at my horrified reaction. Amazingly, it is still a subject of debate in India – with an active lobby calling for a ban in the manufacture and use of the material – and seeming to have something of an uphill struggle, too. Meanwhile, in the States, asbestos litigations have been estimated to have reached an overall value of $250 billion, involving in excess of 750,000 litigants. That’s a lot of sick people.

I suppose the question I was left with was how the hell they were importing the stuff into the Emirates. You know, with the world class strict building regulations and standards we enjoy and all that. How much of this very nasty material is being used in the houses we’re living in? Take a close look at any grey corrugated roofing you see around you – but don’t take too deep a sniff! As of 2006, asbestos was one of the top five imports to the UAE from the Czech Republic, one of the many places around the world where the material is still made – for export to developing markets, obviously, not for domestic use. It's far too dangerous for domestic use, after all!

It is, when you think of it, just a little bit evil, isn’t it? European countries selling materials that are known to be highly toxic (and that are banned in the EU) to ignorant, eager consumers in developing world markets. Including this one.