Shrinking Economy? Shrink your Air force

Budgets are shrinking, why not planes? I saw these little remote control jets buzzing around at an air show recently and I thought to myself, that’s the way of the future. I know the US have predator drones but they don’t look like planes. These things are miniature versions of the real thing and when they were airborne you couldn’t tell if they were miniature planes or real ones just a bit further away. It would be the same for your enemy wouldn’t it?
Small planes mean small runways, smaller hangers and smaller amounts of fuel. Those savings ad up. And your Naval air force can build much smaller aircraft carriers.
But it’s not just about money. It’s also about stealth. Would these little guys show up on enemy radar? Doubt it. And imagine if you were in a dogfight with a plane this small. It would be hard to see?
Everything cool is getting smaller. ipods, Kate Winslet, why not air forces?
Because these planes are remote controlled you don’t need pilots. So no more testosterone laden blokes high fiving each other on the runway after they’ve buzzed the tower. But speaking of Top Gun, Tom Cruise is a little guy. He might actually fit in one of these planes. Maybe for air forces that still want that personal touch they could put tiny pilots in the planes. Midgets perhaps. Or monkeys. Maybe all those monkeys that went up into space in the 60’s. They’re probably all sitting around getting fat trying to work out how to recapture the thrills of their glory days. Bet they would work for next to nothing just for the chance to get airborne again.

It takes balls to survive the credit crunch.

Article I wrote for ME Media Week.


If ever we needed evidence that the economic downturn is hitting the UAE, cast your eyes over this picture. The old toss the ball in the milk can and win a stupid stuffed animal game. Looks so easy doesn’t it? Well it does to my 6 year-old daughter. ‘Go on Daddy. Win me one.’ I hear the unspoken message in those words – ‘All the other dads can do it. If you really love me you’ll get me that giant stuffed white thing which is based loosely on a lion, that I have been madly in love with for the past 25 seconds.’
This game is a scam, as any father who has given in to his child’s pleading and eyelid fluttering will tell you. For a start, the balls are way bigger than the little white one we see popping into the milk can in this picture. Much bigger. So big in fact I suspect even if you do manage to get it over the hole, it wont fit in. I haven’t been able to confirm this yet because the rims of these milk cans were designed by NASA scientists. You know how they used to calculate the angles so a spaceship would catch the gravity of the moon and slingshot back to earth? They’ve applied the same theory to the rims of the milk cans. The ball catches the rim, spins round and flies off into some distant Emirate.
See the little i? That stands for IDIOT. They can get away with that, because they know you’ll try anyway. The guys who work these stalls have degrees in child psychology. Notice how after each miss, they smile nicely and say ‘Try again sir?’ This is subtly aimed at your kid and their reaction is always ‘Oh yes daddy. Please. Please.’
What is that white four-legged thing you can win? White lion? Polar bear? Or some hideous genetically modified mixture of the two. Are we helping to fund gruesome genetic experiments by playing this game? Is that the sick twisted truth? I suggested that to my daughter. She just pointed longingly at the mountain of white fluff and fluttered her eyelids again. They always have loads of those mutant animals stacked up. As if to say, ‘We know all you super skilled men will be talking loads of these home so we have to stock up.’
But times are changing. Things are tougher now. Not the game thankfully. I guess if they wanted to take it to the next level they could introduce basketballs. Or hook you up to a car battery, so you get an electric shock each time you miss.
What’s different is there aren’t so many suckers lining up to part with their cash. The milk can boys know why. Not only are the smiling financial assassins in those booths trained in child psychology, they also watch the world’s financial markets with falcon like intensity. Fair enough. Apart running around picking up all the oversized balls, and taking your money, there isn’t a lot to do is there? Their tweaking of the token to ball ratio is in direct response to what’s happening around the world. Wondering when this financial rollercoaster of doom is going to bottom out?
Forget watching the markets or wading through the endless predictions from business boffins around the globe. Keep an eye on your local milk can stand. When the prices go back to normal, that’s the time to jump back into the share market.

The human stock market

We all know one humnan life isn’t worth the same as another. The media remind us of that all the time. For instance, last year 40 people died in Afganistan courtesy of a suicide bomber. 40 is the number of Afganis that need to die in one go to make front page news. If it had only been 20 it wouldn’t have got the same coverage. But if there had been just 5 Americans in that market. Boom! The story would have blown up.
I wonder if there is a ranking system set up somewhere where mathematicians and media experts work together to rank the most valuable of us in terms of centimeters of newspapers space and seconds of TV coverage?
Grim thought I know. But say it did exist, then I bet ya it wouldn’t be long before people worked out how to make money off it by betting on different nationalities moving up and down the ladder.

How do you sell a country?

I worked on the NZ Tourism pitch at M&C Saatchi in 99. The winning work was pretty predictable. Postcard style shots of pretty scenery. Ironically the pitch started with the client saying that’s what they didn’t want, but a look around the world shows it’s the standard creative solution when you’re selling a country. If you have castles or temples you can wack a few of them in as well and ideally you finish it off with a short snappy line like ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’.
I know the Australian campaign ‘Where the bloody hell are ya?’ got a rough reception when it came out. It was viewed as crass and not appropriate to air in some places, but I liked it. It worked within the same framework as the standard tourism advertising, but they managed to inject a real dose of Aussie personality. For my money, the new Baz Lurhman work lives in that predictable ‘lets make the destination high brow and sexy.’ But it really only sells rich people on the idea they need to get out of the city and go for a swim. The huge amounts of money and flash DOP have washed out any real Australian character. And no, I don’t count a half naked barefoot aboriginal girl as Australian character.
As the fight for tourist dollars intensifies, nations are going to have to dig a bit deeper for a unique voice and a way to get noticed in the ‘come and visit us’ clutter.
The challenges facing the UAE are interesting. Rather than a national brand, Abu Dhabi and Dubai have been blazing separate paths. I understand a national campaign is planned and I am sure it will be laden with camels, coffee pots and falcons, but lets be honest, that is not what a holiday in the UAE is about now, and the developments happening around the country mean the Arabian nights angle will be even less relevant in the years to come. This is perhaps one of the only holiday destinations in the world where a tourist can spend a whole week and not even interact with a local. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s just the reality, but what the UAE is working hard to create is a place that will be a must visit destination. A few years from now a holidaymaker’s itinerary could read something like this. A visit to recreated French town, a pyramid, the world’s largest indoor ski field, the first Ferrari theme park, a water park, the Guggenheim, the tallest building in the world and tons of shopping centers. UAEverything. How about that for a positioning.
Here are a few thoughts that might work for some other places.
Sex sells so I don’t think Brazil need to look further than, ‘Visit the country that gave us the Brazilian.
People are becoming increasingly weight conscious, so maybe France should go with – ‘French bread, French fries. There’s so more to us than carbs.’
Afghanistan – You’ve tried the biscuit you’ve seen the hound, now visit the country.
Or. We’ve been fighting over this place for hundreds of years. Come and see what all the fuss is about.
Nigeria. Visit and we’ll stop sending you emails.
Cambodia. We got rid of Gary Glitter and we’re working on the landmines.
America. We got rid of George Bush.

Dubai’s great cross conspiracy

A while ago, a guy I know told me that the reason you never see the Burj Al Arab photographed from front on, out at sea, is because the design features the largest cross in the Middle East. That’s why I was surprised to see this shot on the front page of The National, Abu Dhabi’s main newspaper. You can see for yourself, it does look like a cross. But it also looks like the mast of a ship, which is the theme of the design. According to my ‘source’ he reckons it was done on purpose by the architect. Some kind of subversive Christian plan…. Not so sure. For my money the greatest crime perpetrated by the Burj Al Arab is the interior decorating. Imagine Lenny Kravitz and Hugh Hefner set up an interior decorating company. That’s the look they have captured so well. That might be why they don’t let the general public do walk in’s.

Somalian Pirates. A brand that’s off course

You gotta feel for those guys. Lets start with the obvious aesthetics. Skinny guys, (and a lot of Somalians are) just don’t look good holding AK47’s. It is not a skinny man’s gun. The Mujahideen got away with it because they wear a lot of bulky clothing to fill out their figures. But those Somalians look kind of awkward. If I was in charge of styling them I’d suggest something like the Heckler & Koch HK MP5. Small and compact it makes the guy holding it look bigger than he is, and when you’re are centimeters above sea level in a fishing canoe with an outboard, trying to talk to a sailor 15 meters above you in a 500,000 ton oil tanker, you need all the presence you can muster .
But the Somalians have bigger problems that cut to the very essence of their brand and that’s the fact they call themselves pirates. The pirate brand that has been around for centuries and instantly conjures up images with the consumer. Thanks to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series, the brand has had resurgence among youngsters and so often happens in conflicts around the globe, it is the children who are suffering in Somalia. Imagine a little kid in a Somalian school who proudly tells his classmates that his dad is a pirate. ‘Does he know Johnny Depp?’ would be one of the first questions. ‘What kind of hat does he wear? Does he let you hold his sword? Does his captain have an octopus for a face? Do you buy your lunch with pieces of gold that your mum gets out of a chest buried in the backyard?’ Sadly, the answers to all these questions is no. Then the kid pulls out a picture of a skinny guy struggling to hold a rusty old AK47. The class burst out laughing and the damage is done.
There is an obvious gap between the pirate brand as the consumer knows it and the Somalian version and if they are not careful the next generation of young Somalians will not want to take up their fathers sea faring profession. A few eye patches some skull and cross bone flags and a captain who looks like Geoffrey Rush aint gonna fix this problem. Somalian pirates need to sit down with a branding agency, probably a really flash one from London because they seem to be all the rage, and work out how to put their stamp on this famous brand. With the worldwide economic crisis growing it wont be long before the Somalian pirates are facing competition from other nations. Take the Japanese for example. You just know that if they decided to get into the pirating business they are going to do it right with all the cool gear. If the Somalians don’t act now their brand risks being sunk on the high seas.

A wee bit more

As well as installing the new bathroom I read that on the last mission to the space station they were testing the urine recycling plant.
How do you test a urine recycling plant?
sip sip – ‘Yuck’
sip sip – No, still tastes like piss
sip sip – Not quite so bad.
sip sip – Yeah, not great still a bit wee weeish
sip sip – Fuck it, that’s close enough.

The waste of space station

So I was reading about the latest trip to the space station. They went up to install a bathroom among other things. A bathroom… Must be hard to attach tap fitting wearing those chunky astronaut gloves. It got me thinking about project men start. “’Honey I’m going to redo the bathroom’
‘But Dan. You’re an astronaut. You don’t know anything about plumbing.’
‘How hard can it be Shirley? Your brother is a plumber. Besides, it’s a weekend project. I’ll just do a little bit at a time.’
And there in lies the problem. The job just goes on and on. And the tension in the house builds as Shirley points out that the weekend project has been going on for 2 years!
That’s why the space station is so perfect. It’s in space. Shirley and the rest of the planet cant see it.
Mission Control ‘Hey guys, how's that bathroom looking?’
Astronaut – ‘Oh yeah, pretty good Houston. Ah, we should have it done in a few more weekends.
Mission Control – ‘You guys know it costs about 15 million to get you up there for a weekend.’
(long pause)
Astronaut – Listen. Do you guys want this job done quick or properly?
Mission Control – Can we at least see a picture of how it is looking?
(long pause)
Astronaut – You know the picture in the catalogue? It’s going to look like that.
Mission Control – Going to?
Astronaut –YEAH. IN A FEW MORE WEEKENDS!

The mother of all prime numbers

Apparently some maths nerds just found a 13 billion digit prime number. Good timing. The US government will probably need that to calculate the cost of the war in Iraq in a year or so.
Lost Vegas hint - If you meet one of the maths nerd who made the discovery and he starts telling you the story about this new mega prime number, don't let him draw it for you.

What the deep fried banana said to the pineapple.

So me - a Kiwi slash Aussie is at a South American Restaurant in Abu Dhabi with some poms and a French chick and a Scottish bloke.
How fercken international is that? .. but that’s not what this dribble is about.
I wanna talk about fruit. Talking fruit. Well not actually talking. For the fruit to talk there would really have needed to be a vegetable in the mix… I’m thinking mushrooms. Small harmless looking ones boiled in a bit of water…
But I digress. Where was I?
Oh, that’s right talking fruit. Or, more accurately. What the fruit would have said if it could talk. Because we all know fruit can’t talk. Although, if there is anywhere in the world where they could afford to hire the scientists and linguists to devote the time and study to get fruit to talk, it’s here in Abu Dhabi. Richest city in the world don’t ya know. That’s why I’m here by the way. Whoring myself as an advertising slapper.
But I digress. Again. Sorry
So. We’re at this South American BarBQ restaurant where they bring you all this meat on big blades and if you want some they slice it off. Now it’s not only meat. There’s a salad bar and they bring you little bowls with your dose of carbs. Deep-fried polenta, hash browns… by the way, that’s weird eh. I always thought of hash browns as a breakfast food.
But it gets weirder. Also lurking in the bowl are these sections of banana. Deep-fried with a breadcrumb coating. Banana? With meat? What the hell?
I know. I was thinking that too. But it works.
So I got thinking about the concept of fruit with your main. The idea of promoting the food group from the back of the menu just before the special coffee. That’s when a guy turned up with a grilled pineapple on his giant blade and I realized that pineapple is a fruit that has always partied in the main section. Albeit as a partner to ham. So there you go, banana wasn’t the first, and that was comforting for the banana I thought, because you can imagine it out in the kitchen, lying there amongst the meat and veg. It’s a bit nervous, worrying about how it will be accepted by the punters. After all, it has only really ever featured in tandem with ice cream and cherries or on a platter with some of its relations and suddenly here it is. Going out with the first wave. Nice then that the pineapple is there to give some helpful words of encouragement. I imagine it would say something like, 'Don’t worry mate. They ‘re going to love you. I’ve been doing this since the 70’s. Cherries come with me sometimes, but to be honest I do most of the work. You’ll do fine kid. Just be the best banana you can be.’
What the pineapple is actually thinking is ‘Look at you with your breadcrumb covering for added appeal. I go out au natural. Just me. No dressing up. You’ve got props.’ But the pineapple wouldn’t say that. Not to the banana because he can see the little guy is shitting himself.

A kick in the arse for order.

As a society we need rules. It’s just how we’re programmed. Rules and order bring stability to our lives and help us function. From the beginning of time we have felt the urge to bring order to our lives. For example. Cave men built walls of small pebbles at the entrances of their caves to mark in and out paths. This was so the guys dragging women back home by their hair to satisfy another urge, wouldn’t bump into the men dragging the woolly mammoth bones out to the trailer to take to the tip on clean up day (usually a Thursday, because there were no weekends in prehistoric times, so they could do chores like going to the tip and mowing the lawns whenever they wanted. Not mowing lawns so much because there wasn't much grass and what grass there was got eaten by the Wooly Mammoths. That was a bonus, but the downside was the Wooly Mammoths shit all over the place and so while the cavemen didn't have to mow lawns they did spend a lot of time cleaning up huge plies of shit. After a couple of thousand years of this the cavemen decided they would rather mow lawns than spend hours up to their elbows in poo, so they hunted the Wooly Mammoths to extinction.)
In the modern world some of our urges have to be suppressed. For example, we don’t drag women around by the hair anymore. That urge has been tucked away in the 'inactive projects' section of our brain, but the need for order in all things is still as strong as ever. It permeates every facet of our lives which is why it will come as no surprise that I saw large ripples across the normally still waters of the pond of order the other day, when I spied this very unorthodox footwear.
Is it a shoe? A quick glance may seed that impression with you. But look again…yes, those sides are disturbingly open. There are small holes that allow a view of the toes (in this case the white sock from the owners ’25 pairs of socks for 50 cents’ pack is covering them)
So our natural conclusion is to class this as a sandal yes? But no. There’s way too much fake leather for this to be classed as a sandal. How much is too much? I've sent one of these... things... to the Sandal Affairs Directorate headquarters in Guam for precise measurement by a team of Norwegian scientists using lasers and one of those rulers with the slidey things on it. But even to the untrained eye (by untrained I mean an eye that hasn’t been in the head of a person that has attended the Sandal Affairs 5 year Sandal Identification course) it is clear that this item of footwear exceeds the amount of covering that enables it to exist under the classification of sandal.
My friend Raphael, who has very little going on in his life, took the time most people would spend having a life, to consider the monstrosity you see before you and he came up with name SCHWANDAL.
Not a shoe, not a sandal. A freak. An outcast destined to inhabit that desolate wasteland between the two official and approved types of footwear. This is the child playing in the minefield out in no mans land people. This is unacceptable. This brings chaos where there was order and it goes against everything our forefathers set in motion when those first rocks were arranged like little stony motorway lane barriers at the entrance to their caves.
Slip on a shoe, pull on a sandal, but there is no room in our modern civilized society for a SCHWANDAL. They must be stamped out. The owner of this particular pair got a beating, caveman style and then we burned his Schwandals on a ceremonial funeral pyre. He’ll thank us later and I am pretty sure he’s going to tell the police that he doesn’t want to go ahead and press charges.

Obama's running mate

Running mate. Sounds very olympian so what a good time to announce his choice. And smart move to go for the white old guy. Their theme song should be that paula abdul classic 'We come together because opposites attract.'
I gotta say, the guy looks the part.
personally I thought my idea to get the guy who invented survivor to create a show called 'Americas next vice president' and hosted by Donald Trump was the way to go. Maybe next time.

But I feel sorry for the other contenders who Obama was considering for the role who have gone home empty handed.

David Hasselhoff
Danny Devito
Tom Cruise's chef
Donald Trump's hair
The guy who liked the razoor so much he bought the company
Hulk Hogan
The incredible Hulk
Ben & Jerry
The keyboard player from Hootie and the blowfish
Gladys Knight
one of the pips
The hamburgler

All great candidates and Obama was at pains to explain to them all, individually, that it was a really close thing. He was especially careful when he spoke to the incredible hulk. You don't want to piss that guy off. No matter how many secret service agents you got watching your back.