Been working on marketing a data recovery website for a while now, makes you think about how terrible it would be to lose all your data. Don’t close the door after the horse has bolted and back up now I say.
I have been adding the site to relevant search engines, optimising title tags and metadescriptions and researching keywords. All of which was a most enjoyable day.
Last summer I was lucky enough to take my kids down to hove lawns for the paddle round the pier festival on Hove lawns in East Sussex.
The summer sun shone down upon hordes of types, young and old who enjoyed two days of sea, skate, SUP and surf related run - all for charity.
My kids loved the ferris wheel ( below ) and the adults in our party sank down on the grass with beers and listened to the music.
The stalls were wild and varied with everything a wannabee surfer could wish for, food was great also.
This year the 2010 festival kicks off on July the 3rd and rolls on over the weekend with a fun packed and entertaining line up of sea events ( jet ski, paddle races, SUP lessons, kite surfing ) and land events ( skate race, skate and BMX park, music, etc).
For more information visit the paddleroundthepier website, then book the date as the festival grows from strength to strength each year and is a great community event for Brighton.
Now, I may be completely wrong, this is all conjecture of course as I am no expert in the economy for sure.
Recently I have been made aware of the awful crash of a country I loved like a lover, like a sibling or like a child I am not certain which, just it was an unconditional love - that is for sure.
Greece, it seems, had fallen on bad times, it has become debt ridden and bankrupt, it can no longer function and there is a general malaise and public discontent.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in that fair and beautiful land I have some comprehension how this has come about.
Basically, they have been rogered brutally by the Great Powers, not for the first time either. It is a pattern one can see repeated on both macro and individual scale and is a perfect example of the ongoing slave trade these days. On an individual scale the crash of the western economies over the past few years has been down to the same cynical exploitation of greed by the money lending corporations.
In the late 1950’s Karamanlis paved the way for Greece’s entry into the then EEC.
Since then the real West : America, Germany, France, England and China have convinced this poor Balkan state that it too, could and should, be living the Western dream.
Slowly this appeared possible, The Greeks, of course, knew that they were in no way inferior to the rest of the Western countries so they took the bait an waited….and spent
Sure enough it was not long before their way of life was changing, they were soon reaping the rewards of this new way of life.
In 1985 the average Greek drove 0.25 of a car which was 15 years old. By 2005 the stats had changed to 1.5 cars and 2 years old on average. The Greeks had also become accustomed to a steady increase their ’standard of living’, mobile phones were widespread, laptops, newer automobiles, new cocktails, German air conditioning, French Wine, English steel, Chinese gadgets, American clothes ….. they had made it, and all because they had answered the simple question :
“why don’t you live like us?”
well the trouble is that there is one simple answer ~
“they can’t afford to!”
You see, this lifestye we are so busy selling the world costs money, we can afford some sort of fascimilie of the lifestyle because it is actually a representation of the lifestyle we have created ourselves…our temperate climate and historical progress has allowed us to create a way of living rich in the very goods we have invented..to some extent….
Not so for the rest of the workd, not so for most of the world, all we will do to them is sucker them into chasing our dreams and saddle with a vast consumer debt…
Greece is now in financial ruin because it tried to ape some ethereal soap opera lifestyle which maybe does not even exist, and certaionlyl if it does, proffers far less in terms if humanity and joy than the languid and happy lives they had before this katanalotic idiocy started them up.
I watched Invictus the other evening. Generally I have a little gripe with Clint’s movies, they sort of shout out at me that my heart strings are being tugged at mercilessly, that the characters will do just what is expected of them and that there will be an honest and venerable ethnic minority person who shows the white man up for his oafishness. Well as a white oaf I am happy to be led in many ways and have to confess that the Invictus movie took me on a ride which I loved at every turn. It maybe my soulful and unerring love of the sport of Rugby which allowed my ducts to well up with ease throughout the film, but in essence I completely enjoyed the movie.
Well there was one problem - there was a whole scene of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa omitted from the film - we all know about it, the press kind of tried to keep it a secret but true Rugby followers have this story in their lore, deep and well understood.
Early on in the Rugby World Cup there was a secret meeting between Nelson Mandela and Will Carling. Notes taken by presidential aides confirm that Mandela asked, nay demanded that Carling’s men throw their semi-final to New Zealand and deliberately miss tackles on the useless and lumbering Lomu to make him appear good. It is well known in Rugby circles that England could have walked off with the Cup with ease - everyone knows that!!
Well Carling, under pressure from the RFU bowed to Mandela’s demands and Rugby history was made when the Boks lifted the cup.
It would have been nice if Eastwood had remembered the magnanimous gesture of the English team and recorded that for all to know.
