marketing landslide

i remember back, way back, a little, rather stubby player joined the field of console mayhem and a price war ensued. the tubby little sucker thought it could walk onto the shelves and demand a selling price twice the demand of the other players and its dreams of accurate market research were short lived.

history seems to be repeating itself... i realise that this may be old news to some but i was mindboggled to see that in London sony saw it necessary, to ensure that the purchaser to reporter ratio was enhanced, to sucker people in with a 'free' high def, flat screen tv. clearly the insecurity is mounting on the home front, which has me worried.

forever i have chanted the praises of the sleek back box and dissed the stubbyness that is microsoft but i fear that sony has overstepped the mark. i understand that they are hoping to gain enmass access to households worldwide in a bid to achieve suprememcy in their dvd launch but has someone in the marketing department forgotten the betamax/vhs landslide victory or that the xbox had to slash its ambition and come down to the price at which it has stayed.

the exercise of choice is now on. do you shell out double what any other consol is going to cost or do you act reasonable and spend that difference on games... a tough choice.... i think not.

featuring woohoo

there is a certain tune getting a lot of air play at present which has got me thinking, what does it take to be considered a featured artist?

it seems of late that to lend any amount of credibility as a female artist to your current release there needs to be a reasonable amount of featured artists on a track. obviously not the entire album, that would then be a collaboration and you want it to appear that you did this whole thing on your own...

surely to count as a featured artist you should have to give a little more than standing on the sidelines of some music video looking hard and you should have more lines on the track than a featured extra in a movie?

how then does a simple 15 words that run much shorter than the chorus, woohoo, yeewoo, woohoo, count as anything more than a backup singer? it is simply to easy these days to gain credibility as nothing more than a name and then make the featured artist on a track list...

perspective

a friend of a friend has gone re-born, actually it happened a while ago but it is now official, she's attending faith chats on wednesdays....

last week they decided to explore other faiths and get people they knew from these religions to come and participate in a Q & A.

TJ got to participate as the token muslim. when he arrived under the guise that this would be a tri-religious debate he discovered that he was the only non-re-born at the table, the'd forgotten to invite a jew.....

how can you have a tri-faith discussion with only 2 parties at the table, seems a little unbalanced and opinionated?
surely if you were curious about the inner workings of another peoples god system you would go through the trouble of getting in someone from all sides and it isn't like the collection of 3 people from different perspectives is an impossible task! could have asked a number of people that spring to my mind, but anyway....

so TJ got to sit through a how can you, why do you, shouldn't you rather deabte only to find that these folk were so scant on their own religion there was the possibility no-one had read their own book and was merely following along with the pastor's perspective on things...
seems pretty ignorant to me.....

extreme

this is a place to be, everyone firmly set in their own trend and a section of the place to suit every niche...

the toilets are something else... personally, temptation exceeded the long drop and stage fright didn't really do it for me.

every section i walked past was a 'i have to have something or the other', whether it be the gorgeous lounging deck chairs, or the arm chair coasters, or the beautiful black i have no back chairs that could be beds.... then there are the dining on throne like seats while i eat my R80 hamburger that has got to be a must do at some stage and to top it the must have sound and gag room....

the climbing wall on the outside looks very important and as a boutique establishment in the city some urban know how definitely got this place spot on!

some come and go

today i met a pretty entertaining, relatively wealthy. now bachelor. when we met there was a mrs and nuptials had been exchanged but 2 hours, irreconcilable differences and lack of communication later he was single again.

this was no laughing matter, it is his third time to the divorce court and his opinion of relationships is slightly jaded. he is hysterical recalling the first two and now this one and then taking to pieces every sorry sap that was to stand up before him and denounce their wedding vows.

today is a celebratory day much like the day that they walked down the isle or into the court and tied the knot. just like everyone was standing around oooing and ahhhing today i got the feeling he was bouncing off the wall thinking woohooo free at last....

i have been to a few weddings usually against my better judgment and they are long, some make you go through the entire day whilst they swear this is it, the one, gonna last forever and what not, on the flip side the ending is brief.... a simple there aint no way this is gonna work out and presto it is as if it never was.... strange to think in the past this wasn't tollerated or you actually had to go and prove that it wasn't meant to be, or you could be sent back and be made to try and work it out...

no more, just a simple no yes no thanks and its over.... swiftly!

SUPPORT

this is fundamentally an infringement of Zimbabwean womens dignity and should not be tolerated, much less allowed!
i have no other words. this is simply wrong.

Torture and Violence in Zimbabwe

this echoes the actions of past governments, who today through 'quiet diplomacy' are not yet breaking the grounds and making the movements to set these people free...

when in doubt....

the chat i was looking forward to happened without my attendance. it appears that the venue was other than where advertised and being that i am not in the al-aqsa fundamentalist support group i didn't get the memo in venue change. i did however get to hear one of the attendees on the radio proclaiming that it was unfortunate not many of our youth turned up to show their solidarity and learn from those youth's in 'palestine' who have taken up arms, throw stones when they can..... praise be to allah that that ain't the case over here is all i can say...

i took a meander around the 'company gardens' where 'black noise' was giving a concert and others were raising awareness for human rights and then stumbled into the national gallery to look at an exhibition titled 'invoice'. a few incredible images and some that although they weren't amazing to look at captured a time gone by that made the images astounding to look at purely for there historical importance. there was one of a group of police officers who had barricaded a street holding shamboks looking like thy meant business, and this african man, the photographer, stood in front of them all and snapped it, pushed the button and closed the shutter...

then we left, i called a friend and whilst on the mobile a gang of wolves tried to mugg us...
one pulled a certain someone one way to show him his knife and another grabbed me to get hold of my bag, certain someone yelled at the menace and asked him what the hell he was thinking with that knife, i spun and screamed like a banshee........ my screaming and his yelling clearly caught them off balance and the pack backed off leaving us to regroup and exercise the power of our vocal cords....and all of this while still on the phone.

while i would have thought in such a situation i would have gone all ninja and spanked some ass it appeared that our rather vocal diplomacy was what got us out of what could have been a bloody penniless situation rather quickly.
go team!
i have seen others go manic and bash in heads and i can say that while there is some residual angst left over in the blood stream that can be worked and sweated out later i am happier that we ghandi'd the situation.

happy human rights day!

MARCH 21

Happy Human Rights Day to all those out there who even know what today is all about, rather than thinking it is merely another day off work...

i am off to a chat which hopefully will not be a propogandesque anti-zionist bashing shindig.... and rather an enlightened debate on possible solutions..... thou i doubt it, which is really the reason that probably motivates me to go along to these chats, brainwashing is entertaining...

i will report back on how it all turns out

enjoy the day celebrating your right to vote, free speech, food in your tummy, houses to live in, work to go to, ability to marry across the race and sex barriers of the past and all the other stuff that makes us happy to be on holiday..... spare a thought for those living without the above...

work it out

so, today i did the unthinkable, well, rather the imaginative

as my boss doesn't seem to give me a lunch break, right around the time before one would take one, i decided that i just needed to go and check on some court file to make sure that the clerk had filed everything where it needed to be....

que, dash to the uni to pay for a book that i have ordered.... yip, i will be a litigation expert even if i have to read to get there, dropped off some dry cleaning, got my suit trousers hemmed at the tailor and presto was back in the office in less than the time it takes most to do lunch...

snot head

i did a rather dumb thing about a week ago...

a certain someone was feeling slightly abnormal and in need of help due to an unexpected bout of illness. stupidly i went running in for the rescue thinking myself invincible. i came bearing all concoctions known to man to cast out the unknown bug and free CS from the pain being endured....i ran down to the local thai venue and got the best tom tum and hottest rat-shit pepper filled jungle curry to scare any unwanted foreign inhabitants from the body.

the thanks i got was a mutation jumping and taking me down with it. this little sucker was furious at my audacity to come and strike it from its mighty perch, so it multiplied, morphed and knocked me out.

this entire week and maybe longer as there is no sign of freeing my body from the demon, i have been wondering around in a soggy haze, pained neck, no sleep coma wondering what the hell i did to deserve this - help thats what i did...

the lesson here is that when someone is struck down with a furious vengeance by some foreign crittor, send a get well card and hope the all night chem does deliveries...