Twitter user: Brilliant Ads

For those of you on Twitter I can definitely recommend @Brilliant_ads many examples of what happens when Advertising folks actually start thinking - You notice their are no ads for Perfumes there, not really a surprise!!

I definitely liked this one for a Swedish bookshop, simple and yet controversial and funny, it will get spoken about and yet would have cost peanuts to produce.

New York "Mosque" Row

There has been a lot of debate recently around the proposal for the so called Ground Zero Mosque, for those of you who do not know there is an application to build a Muslim community centre, featuring a prayer room, a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Centre, there has been quite a lot of commentators stating that they believe that this is an outrage and I have to admit when I first saw the story I did think it was slightly bizarre decision, after all New York is a big city and so perhaps you need to question the decision to build this building at ground zero, after all whilst I agree that not all Muslim’s are terrorists it is a fact that all the terrorists of September the 11th 2001 were Muslim. My view did change however when I looked into it a bit deeper and saw that in fact the community centre is a few blocks away from Ground Zero, so to call a building “Ground Zero Mosque” (The name given by the media not by the people looking to build it.) is a bit misleading for a building that is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. This seems to be a case of people hijacking a traumatic event in US history to fuel their own prejudice.

This is however a very hot political potato with perennial Republican Nutter Sarah Palin calling the entire area “Hallowed Ground”, a claim firmly beaten by evidence by New York Blogger Daryl Lang showing pictures of the area including the Hallowed “New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club.” I think however though that the real loser of this debate is going to be Barak Obama who has stated support in principal to the right to freedom to build a community building in a place that is wanted. (My extension of his comments.) This has annoyed the Anti groups as showing political support for the building and annoyed the Pro Groups as he stopped short of saying he supported it and even questioned the thought process of selecting this site. Either way with the ninth anniversary just a few weeks away and the tenth anniversary clearly looking to be very important this is an issue that will not go away quietly, and I would suggest one that any politicians should try and avoid.

Hopefully some good news for the environment (and BP)

BP, or British Petroleum as Mr. Obama likes to call them, today announced that they had succeeded in capping off the leak in the gulf of Mexico. This will hopefully be a great bit of news for what is a very important eco-system and for the UK's premier company. it will take a couple of days to know if it has worked but hopefully we are on the way to a solution. It appears that as the leak is around a mile deep (deeper than any human can operate.) they had to use small remote control robots to do the work, which leads to the question, was this inevitable? we have increased our demand to such a high extent and exhausted all easily retrievable supplies that we are forcing these countries to operate at the very limits of scientific possibility, maybe in fact it the consumers fault.

I have to admit however that I feel Barak Obama and other Americans have been very unfair to BP on this one, obviously this is an issue that needs prompt, swift and decisive action but I have not seen anything from Tony Haywood (CEO of BP) that suggests that they haven't provided exactly this. Mr. Haywood and his team have relocated to the US to ensure that they are on hand to deal with this disaster and BP have attempted a great deal of solutions for this problem, which seems to be at odds with the impressions the Americans want for this "greedy oil" company. I am sure this is in no way lead by America's own "caring, sharing" oil companies who donate so much each year to various politicians.

Anyway, there is a question to if this will destroy BP, personally my uninformed view is that they should be ok, It is predicted to have cost the firm £1bn so far, when you consider they had profits last year of £13bn and gave £10bn in dividends to share holders, they should be alright. A bigger risk could be from a take over bid, most likely run by the aforementioned American Oil Companies.