THE CULTURAL JACKDAW

Art Vinyl

I think this is a cracking idea.

These are frames in which you can display your favourite vinyl cover art. It's a great way of bringing all your vinyl covers to life instead of them gathering dust on the floor or on a shelf.

I also think it's a hightly emotive art form. When do you look at any other works of art and think "that reminds me of that summer when I was 18". It just doesn't happen. But with these on the wall it's like looking at the soundtrack to your life.

We bought 4 frames and we'll be rotating our favourite album covers.

Check their website out here:

http://www.artvinyl.com/

You can get inspiration for which covers to display from this book by Taschen (the best publishers in the world):

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/books/popculture/all/facts/01851.htm

The Over Claim

One of my pet hates is when brands over promise.

Typical claims include things like "a revolution in driving".

This ad for the new Rav 4 claims that their vehicle is "recreation redefined".

You what?

How is just another SUV recreation redefined. If they could make it fly as well as drive I'd believe them, but their claim gives me no reason to believe what they're saying is true.

If the government advertised the introduction of a four day working week, now that would be recreation redefined.

Cultural Nuances

Listened to the fascinating Word of Mouth programme on Radio 4 last night - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/wordofmouth.shtml - which had an interesting part on what the @ sign is called in different countries.

In the Netherlands or Romania it's a monkey's tail. Poland, Slovenia and Germany it's a monkey. In France, Italy, Korea and Turkey it's called a snail and in modern Hebrew it's a struddle.

These insights were delivered by Nick Rawlinson - editor of Mac User magazine - who thought the @ sign looks like a swiss roll.

The # sign is also called an octothorpe.

Exclamation marks (!!!) are apparantly called bangs by bloggers and publishers call them screamers.

Brilliant.

Lost your keys?

The best ideas are the simplest ones.

How often do you forget where your keys are?

For all of us out there that do it quite often, a new service offers a solution: a company you can trust to keep hold of a spare set of keys for your house, car, office or whatever and they'lll deliver them to you, within an hour, 24/7 - http://www.sparekeys.com/.

I saw this idea in a Time Out booklet, they said "Let's face it, in our great metropolis, you can't always trust your neighbour, and you certainly can't leave anything under the mat!".

I think this is sad but true. We're lucky that we know our neighbours and can leave a spare set with them but for many other people they simply can't.

I think there's a bigger point here about people's lack of involvement with their local community. Civic interest seems to be at an all time low and our society seems to be fragmenting more and more, especially in the cities.

I think this disconnection with real world communities has fuelled online social communities that fill that connection gap. New social networking websites like Bebo, Friendster and MySpace.

The figures speak for themselves:

Bebo now has 21.4 million registered users worldwide and MySpace a massive 57 million registered users.