Multi-national conglomerate theme bars

Whilst having a night on the town last night, we apparently ended up in a theme bar although I must say, the theme was somewhat lost on me.






Walkabout is allegedly an "Australian" theme bar, in the Northern Quarter of Leeds City Centre and whilst it might just be me, the "theme" doesn't really come across.

Here are the factors that make Walkabout think that they are Australian:

• They pretend that beers, brewed 20 miles up the road in Tadcaster, are actually Australian beers.
• They have a surfboard on the ceiling.

That was about it. I'm not Australian so I can't really comment on what an "Australian bar" should look like, but the place comes across as more "B&Q" than Brisbane.

Theme bars don't really seem to work. The only one that ever did was probably Big Lil's in Bramley's Yard. The theme their was "So you have given up on life and you want to kill yourself." It was that effective, they shut it down.

Fun with Photoshop

Time for a change of style I think. Instead of writing a piece on whatever happens to be in the news on any particular day, I'm going to use my completely novice Photoshop skills. This may, or may not turn out to be a series.



After Snoop Dogg's latest run-in with immigration officials and the cancellation of the UK leg of his latest tour, it was only good and proper that we took the mick a little......





Tee hee hee!

Technology & the elderly

There are a few things in life the simply do not mix. Water and electricity, fuel and fire and technology and the elderly.





Yesterday I managed to explain to my grandmother about the digital switchover in which by 2012, any un-upgraded TV set will cease to work. After which, I managed to get her a Freeview box so that she'd be ready by the time Emley Moor's analogue transmitter gets switched off in 2011.

That's still four years away yet but given the huge supply of cheap digital tuners that my firm have managed to get hold of, and the previous track-record of the electrical industry to be able to anticipate demand a key periods, I decided to take advantage of the current over-supply of Freeview recievers.

And yesterday I set it all up, explained how it worked and explained how it would make her life better, mainly because all those god-awful soaps are repeated ad-finatum on ITV2, 3 and 4.

She managed to get the jist of it fairly well, but the morning was more focused on how she should turn the thing off, rather than actually using it.

"Well I'll turn it off for now and use my normal tele, just until I get used to it."
"But you won't get used to it if you don't use it."
"I'll manage but I stick to my normal telly now, how do I turn it off again?"
"Just make sure that red light is on"
"So the red light is good then?"
"No, the red light means it's switched off"
"Yes, I know"
"But if it's switched off, you can't use it"
"Oh........"

I know full-well she won't use it, but at least I tried.

Political campaigning getting harder?

With the 2007 Budget been and gone, the political parties are now trying to muscle in on the fact that Labour are getting a bit of bad press. I never thought though, that they would stoop to this.


Just check out the following e-mail I managed to fish out, amongst all the other garbage for improved sexual potency, stock opportunities and barely legal teens (you might have to click the image to make it readable):


Tory viagra eh? You have to wonder if that sort of manifesto will help them rise to the top once more.

Temptation

My biscuit barrell has been somewhat fuller in recent weeks, thanks mainly to a decision to change my biscuit buying choice.





It's quite an ingenious money-saving scheme actually. Instead of buying those fancy pre-wrapped things in the supermarket, I've taken to buying Fox's "broken biscuits".

Essentially, it's a box of Batley's finest but those that were deemed not of high enough quality to make it past the production line. Instead, the men at Fox's throw them all in a box and sell them off cheap - dirt cheap. Half of the time they look in pretty good nick as well.

That though, creates a problem. You see, whilst the biscuit tin, brimming to the top is sat their staring at me, I haven't got the will-power to resist. The Jammie Didgers have already gone, what will be next?

I'd better hold back, maybe I can get someone to hide it from me.

Welcome to Wakefield

When Peter Kay wrote 'Phoenix Nights', he wanted to characterise a shabby, ramshackle, badly-run, social club in the North of England (Bolton to be precise). What he probably didn't realise is that is writings would just so aptly depict an entire city.

Head south from Leeds and you'll eventually reach a signpost for Wakefield although, unlike Phoenix Nights, it isn't wired into the lamp-post and won't tell you to "pull up into paradise".

Many people have questioned the merits of Wakefield's city status, and Friday night's visit to the city for Leeds' game with the Wildcats hasn't converted me into thinking otherwise either.

Firstly, the city centre completely closes at 5pm and given that have of the retail units have the words "Closing Down" white-washed on them, I don't imagine that it's the hive of activity before that time either. If you want a under-cooked kebab, items costing £1 or a (possibly) stolen mobile phone, then it's probably the place for you but if you actually want something useful, non-poisonous or legal, it's probably best go somewhere else.

Some of those problems can be put down to the neighboring city of Leeds. Many of the locals work in Leeds, a city which has built a heavy proportion of it's economy on retail and the city centre. There has even been talk of Wakefield becoming part of a 'Greater Leeds' district, which would be a bad thing for all involved. Bad for Wakefield, because it would cease to exist and bad for Leeds because it will be the geographic equivalent of growing a hemorrhoid.

Anyway, onto the rugby ground itself. It's a shit hole.
There is literally no other word to describe the venue and when you actually see Belle Vue for the first time, it's no surprise that Wakefield is officially the "worst city for sport" in the UK.
It's crumbling, pot-hole ridden terraces and dangerous exit system make you wonder how the ground gets a safety certificate in the first place and it's missing a few of the 'mod-cons' you might expect to find at any mid-table Unibond North League football ground such as roofs, draught beers and a scoreboard (although one helpful chap does put numbered cards onto a hook if you happen to lose count.)

Throughout the game, the PA operator couldn't get the hang of making the music system play at the right time to perform some pathetic jingle for Wildcats player Jamie Rooney and the constant yelling of "MAKE SOME NOIIIIIIIIISE!" over the tannoy soon got irritating.
Needless to say, the 'Belle Vue experience' is one that is endured rather than enjoyed.

So after that experience, onwards to sample some of that Wakefield night-life that we'd heard so much about and yet again, it proved to be an anti-climax.

Walking along the famous 'Westgate run', we encountered nothing but half-empty chain bars, seedy heroin houses and boarded up boozers. The 'place to be' on a Friday night in Wakefield appeared to be Flares, which tells you more or less everything else you need to know.

One person on the trip described the town as a "poor man's Bradford", I'm not sure if a more derogatory statement has ever been made.

The Atlantic is not wide enough

After buying out the Salford Quays Buccaneers, the Birmingham Villans and the Liverpool Stealers, the American's are plotting their next move in the mission to takeover British Soccerball.




The Football League will meet to discuss the proposal of abolishing "draws" from the Football League.

Instead of having a 1-1 stalemate with the points being shared, the proposal is to hold a penalty shoot-out should the teams be deadlocked after 90 minutes. Both teams would still be guaranteed the point, just as they are now, but the winners of the penalty shoot-out will take home an extra point.

You don't need me to tell you which country this crackpot theory has come from.

The supporters of the idea claim that such a system would make games more open and exciting, which would be no bad thing, had this not been the most senseless way of going about it.

Take the current system. At the moment it's not uncommon for teams to play out for a point against better opposition. It's not nice to watch but it's a necessary evil of the modern game. Now take the new idea, which is essentially encouraging these same tactics by potentially doubling the points on offer to the side using negative tactics.

And it gets worse when you here noises that this scheme would involve the "American style" shoot-out. Under the Yank's arse-backwards system, the action doesn't take place with a single strike from the infamous 12-yard spot, but way back to the half-way line. Said player than has 10 seconds to dribble unopposed to the goalmouth and attempt to score. It's a stupid system and the man who invented it should locked away in a dark room in the interests of public safety.

Remember those Budweiser adverts that were doing the rounds a few years back....

..how much of a joke did you think they actually were?

Do Virgin know something that I don't?

Sir Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin group, is no stranger to interesting marketing campaigns - it's how he's built his entire fortune.




His mobile phone company - just a name. His coke - the same. His cable television network - just ntl:telewest in drag. OK, so he might own a few record shops, gyms and Boeing 747's, but essentially he has built the Virgin name into something that people instantly recognise.

But today he's got me a bit puzzled, with this thing dropping on my door mat this morning:


Apparently, my street is getting sexier. I have to disagree with him.

Given that most of the residents around here are of middle-age upwards and given that the nice bird down the road has just moved out, I just understand Mr Branson's logic.

Or perhaps there's more to Virgin's 'on demand' service than I first thought? ;)

Clocking-off

With my credit card about to expire, those lovable folk at HSBC made sure that there was no delay in making sure that my replacement card was popped in the post, arriving more than a month before my current one expires.


As a security measure, these days you can't just open the envelope and start using your card at your whim. Instead, you have to "activate" it. This is done, according to the sticker on the front, by calling a phone number.

Now with almost any banking system these days, the phone is answered by a computer. The robotic voice tells you to press a variety of numeric combinations, some of which I've probably guessed, and within a few minutes, your card is ready to increase the profits of one of the biggest banking organisations in the world.

That would all be absolutely fine and normally, I wouldn't have thought twice, but what caught my attention was the small print under the phone number.

"Lines open between 8:00am and 10:00pm"

May I suggest to HSBC that they change their IT supplier if they have a series of computers that are unable to answer telephones overnight. No doubt they'll probably tell me that using "environmentally friendly computer systems" that clock-off daily is another one of their "initiatives aimed at improving customer service", just like withdrawing their monthly statement service.

A futile exercise

The police spotlight has recently fallen on the issue of 'on-the-spot' penalty notices and the fact that they don't really work.






Before, if you were caught shop-lifting or smashing up a bus shelter, the police (if they could be bothered) would haul you into the back of a transit van, keep you in the cells overnight and then parade you before the magistrates the next morning.

The problem with such a policy is that firstly, it's an expensive procedure for what is commonly regarded as a 'minor' crime and secondly, it wasn't very effective. Shoplifting has for a long time held the dubious title of having the highest re-offending rate of any crime.

A common mis-conception is that shop-lifters are all "kids doing it for a dare" a surprisingly large amount of visitors to the store I work at are actually shocked when you tell them that 'professional' shoplifters work in Leeds, or any major town or city for that matter. Most are fuelling a drug habit, others actually do it as a lucrative career, where the chances of being caught are slim and the rewards are potentially very handsome.

So anyway, instead of dragging these scroates in court, the police now have the power to issue a fixed penalty of £80 to any offenders caught committing these misdemeanors. The problem is that these tickets aren't providing the 'deterrent' that our elected leaders thought they would. In 2004, just over 2,000 fiunes were handed out to shoplifters. In 2005, that figure rocketed to almost 22,000 and for the first six months of 2006, almost 17,000 tickets hand been issued - that figure doesn't yet factor in the "busy" shoplifting period of December.

Now you could say that those figures merely mean that more people are getting caught rather than the number of shoplifters actually rising. Either way though, it's hardly good reading if your bonuses are getting eaten into because of it.

For retailers, it's a thankless task. Security systems are limited, the effectiveness of CCTV is diminishing, cuts in staff budgets mean that the human presence is barely off-putting and human rights legislation mean that getting a known criminal 'banned' from a store is a futile exercise. All we as retailers can hope for is that legislation makes it more and more difficult for the thieves. With that unlikely to happen anytime soon, it's you and I that will end up paying for it.

Stop laughing, it's not funny.

Some of you (not those of you on Virgin Media) may watch that Football soap-opera "Dream Team" on the TV, which attempts to completely fabricate and sensationalise the going's on inside a professional football club.


In just one episode of the said programme, you could expect to find the club to be constantly in debt, have players getting arrested, managers getting sacked, a revolving door to the chairman's office, crap players coming on loan from far-off countries, a relegation or two, several heavy defeats, players giving away team details to the opposition, a chairman publicising an ex directors name and address and a captain that doesn't want to play for the club anymore.

Now, you would all dismiss that story plot as ridiculous. No football club is that badly run. Well, almost no club is that badly run.

It was only May 8th 2001 when Leeds United were knocked out of the Champions League semi-final by Juan Sanchez's hand of god. Since then, bad planning by a chairman with the world's largest overdraft, players in the dock and a destructive book written by an inexperienced manager have led to debts mounting up, relegation from the Premier League, with the club now biding their time on the Championship's death row.

All of that would make a fantsatic television programme in itself but after Saturday's defeat to Sheffield Wednesday it emerges that captain Kevin Nicholls, the man who said in Saturday's programme notes “We are all in this together and we believe we’ll get out of this. I’m not just saying it for the sake of it,” wants to dive head first into the lifeboat.

The future is certainly bleak for the club. Even when next season comes around and the wage bill drops dramatically, the club will still have to look behind the sofa and raid the kids piggy banks if they are going to assemble anything resembling a squad for next season. The club have used a staggering 41 players, many of them loan signings and even with the players that are contracted to the club, the overall financial valuation is minimal.

You could say that relegation would be a blessing in disguise. Manchester City suffered a similar fate not too long ago, used the opportunity to rebuilt the club from the foundations upwards and have now cemented themselves as a Premiership club once more.

At Elland Road however, it may be more complex than that. With crowds further dwindling and the financial viability of the club becoming even more questionable, the future looks exceedingly bleak.