Several problems with your marketing approach, Asus.

We all love spam, especially when bored at work and trying to internet shop our way out of madness the 'economic growth slowdown'. Particularly I am a fan of targeted marketing, based on my web preferences (porn and mobile phones mainly), and often fall fowl to entering competitions and whatnot and getting associated spam, thankfully its normally for products I'm actually interested in. Until now:

Asus got it so, so, very wrong with this - the asus@vibe 2nd anniversary web event. Problems, I will provide for you in a simple list:

1. asus@vibe makes it seem like one of the worlds largest manufactures of consumer electronics has finally branched out into vibrating dildos. Note to self: If Apple did this perhaps their fangirls would be less stuck up about everything???
2. I had to read to the bottom of the email just to work out WHERE THE HELL YOU BUY THESE BOOKS! It's appears they are adorning their eeeeeepads with a bookshop! Would have been nice to have told me that before, also, leads to point - 
3. WHY DO THEY ONLY SELL CRAPPY TRASH FICTION FOR PRE-MENOPAUSAL WOMEN! Read any one of these blurbs for a shiver down your spine:

"Sara B. is losing her cool. Not just in the momentary-meltdown kind of way—though there's that, too. At the helm of must-read Snap magazine, veteran style guru Sara B. has had the job—and joy—for the past fifteen years of eviscerating the city's fashion victims in her legendary DOs and DON'Ts photo spread. But now on the unhip edge of forty, with ambitious hipster kids reinventing the style world, Sara's being spit out like an old Polaroid picture: blurry, undeveloped and obsolete. Fueled by alcohol, nicotine and self-loathing, Sara launches into a cringeworthy but often comic series of blowups—personal, professional and private—that culminate in an epiphany. That she, the arbiter of taste, has made her living by cutting people down…and somehow she's got to make amends."

ARRRRRHGHBHBHBHBHEBHE!

AS TRUE TODAY AS IT WAS WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN...

I've been listening to old CD's that I keep underneath the seats and mats in car, the result, loads of old school lyrics that really 'speak to me'. Any way, this one got me this morning:

Oh yeah! 

just a little somethin' to break the monotony
of all that hardcore dance that has gotten to be
a little bit out of control it's cool to dance
but what about the groove that soothes that moves romance
give me a soft subtle mix
and if ain't broke then don't try to fix it
and think of the summers of the past
adjust the base and let the alpine blast
pop in my CD and let me run a rhyme
and put your car on cruise and lay back cause this is summertime

Definitely as true today as it was when it was written!

Jehovah's Witness at the Bus Stop

While I was waiting for the bus yesterday morning (on what was a rather nice, sunny day) I was approached by a woman in large sunglasses smiling an unnaturally wide smile.

"Good morning." she said, "How're you today?"

I couldn't tell whether she was crazy or just being polite -- maybe she too was waiting for a bus, and wanted some company -- so I replied and we got chatting about the weather.

But suddenly, her attention shifted.

"Are you a Bible reader?"

That's when I realised I'd been cornered by a Jehovah's Witness -- for the first time in my life. I wasn't sure what to do, and didn't want to be rude, so decided to be honest: "No."

She pulled out a stack of Watchtower magazines and started telling me that the Bible isn't just about God; that we can learn a lot more through interpretation of the Bible's teachings, like how to be better people.

I must have looked uninterested, because she decided to change tactic.

"There's an interesting article about cork?"

Wait So?

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with 'studies' showing us how to live our lives, more over is the fact that said studies get reported as news before any conclusion is actually reached. It does raise a question over the nature of the institutions that release them and the journals that send out press releases, is it just the news papers bigging things up or are academics getting to keen on tooting their own trumpets in the pursuit of a few comlumb inches. Below we see how salt is simultaneously killing us and not making any difference to our lives.

Make your fucking minds up! Case in point comes from a third print you can read here at the Torygraph. Turns out that:

Prof Rod Taylor of Exeter University said the results of his team’s study published in the American Journal of Hypertension two weeks ago had been misinterpreted.
“We do not believe our results necessarily mean that asking people to reduce their intake of salt is not a good thing”, he said.

Someone here is dropping the ball, good and bad might be terms of moral ambiguity but life and death I feel has a little more certainty to it. Seems the crux is that Salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is bad. Salt itself doesn't really matter at all. I propose the headline:

A HEALTHY AND BALANCED DIET & LIFE WITH NOT TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING IS DEFINITELY THE BEST WAY TO GO

And I didn't even have to do a study for that!