4April
Bang off Target
We said:
Dear Target Express UK,
At about 8.20 on the morning of 4 April, the driver of your vehicle VU02UXD stopped on zig-zag lines by a pelican crossing on a road, on the crest of a hill. I was walking past the driver, and hollered at him to move along as he was parked in an illegal and dangerous position. The driver indicated by gestures that he would not move.
Could you please remind this driver that he must not park in such a selfish manner.
Yours, as ever, Weaver
They said:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01ad'
ActiveX component can't create object: 'CDONTS.NewMail'
/script/ContactEmail.asp, line 8
We said:
OK, we'll stick it up on our blog and expose the bad driving of Target Express UK's drivers for the world to see. And the pisspoor coding and rubbish website management of Target Express UK, too. Really, they have no standards at all
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Consumer
30March
From airport to station
Getting to and from London's airports with a large and heavy suitcase is difficult. Here's our recommendations for getting from (and, by extension, to) the leading two airports. As ever, readers who have personal experience may wish to leave a comment.
(More: From Gatwick, and from Heathrow - 819 words)
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Consumer
20March
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
Monocle magazine, then. Five pounds (ouch!) for about 300 pages. Perfect binding, none of this staples lark, and printed on matt paper - not the glossy stuff of most magazines, but neither the cheap print of newspapers.
We like the concept. The magazine shows its European roots through and through, to the extent of converting all prices to euro, rather than pounds or dollars. And we like the idea of looking at something different, eschewing the lure of cheap celebrity in favour of something different. The cover story in issue 1 was on Japan's Maritime Self-Defence Force, the closest thing the country gets to a navy. We also liked an interview with the head of Lego, and a chat with an Afghan disk jockey.
However, that's about as far as our praise goes. Many of the articles, especially the briefs, are written in a very flat tone, conveying precious little enthusiasm. To accuse the magazine of coming out with shed-loads of "Will this do?" copy is rather unfair, but all the writers' zip and verve looks like it's fallen into the cracks somewhere between the style-guide and the copy-editors. This must be a down-side of appealing to an audience for whom English is not a first language.
The other criticism we have is with the magazine's size - at 300 pages, it's weighs in at something over 250g. Far too heavy to carry around on a daily basis, and perhaps lending itself to be left on a coffee table to gather dust. Maybe the mag would do better to split itself into half, and go for twice as many 150-page editions.
We like the idea, we like the magazine's design. The content is too voluminous, and too tedious, for the high price-tag to be worth our while. Address one of these criticisms and we'll look again; address both, and we might switch our intellectual pursuit away from Prospect and the LRB.
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Consumer
11January
Roddick for her own back
Anita Roddick has lost it.
Q: If The Body Shop does spectacularly well, doesn't Nestlé still get some money?
I guess they would...
Q: There was talk of a boycott, did that happen?
It didn't happen.
Q: Were sales affected?
There was protest but it was more headlines. Sales didn't drop.
Then, Mrs. Roddick, please explain why my personal spend at (what was) your store dropped from approximately £40 per year to the grand non-total of £0. From my sample of one, sales have dropped by precisely 100%. The boycott continues, of all products substantially owned by those who would kill babies for profit.
Consumer
