Welcome Home, Vowels

Here's a funny thing. In August 2021 the giant investment group Aberdeen Standard Life ditched nearly all of its name and presented a glittering, down-with-the-kids, cool, resonant and exhilarating new name - abrdn. That's right, out went the much respected Standard Life bit, the vowels were stripped away from the rest and they saved thousands of caps lock keys from jamming by binning the capital letter as well. 

This attracted much contumely from around the financial world but, most notably, in these very columns. The company became a laughing stock. My warnings went unheeded and the outcome all too predictable - employees of the unpronounceable enterprise found themselves publicly sneered at in the streets of the City, cat-called in coffee bars and satirised in the squash courts.  Matters reached breaking strain when the Chief Investment Officer declared that the risibility and jeers were "Corporate bullying". But he failed to draw the obvious conclusion and just doubled-down on the original, stupid, renaming decision.

All has changed. Today in a stunning U-turn, the company has gone rummaging through its waste bins, retrieved those long-lost 'Es' and resinstated them in their rightful place.

Source: AJ Bell

 

Should we let the church bells ring out and pop the corks in celebration of a victory for the English language? Perhaps. They omitted to find the capital 'A' and are stuck with the lower case. However they have added the word "group" to the name. Now this is going to increase the cost of typing and wear out more letters on their word processing keyboards [Do they still use those? Ed] and I would expect the markets to mark their shares down quite heftily once the implications sink in. Should I risk the Ramblings Retirement Fund on a quick flutter by selling their shares short, or should I leave it safely in the big blue-and-white striped jug on the mantlepiece?

That's What I Call History

 "Daddy, daddy, today in school we learned all about Queen Victoria"

"And what did you learn, my dear?"

"She was played by Judy Dench in a film called Mrs Brown or something, showing her joyfully regaining her humanity after her husband died, and also by Anna Neagle in 1937 in a little known film called Victoria the Great. And there was a depiction of her as a young woman by Emily Blunt, which was jolly good"

"Very good. That new history teacher certainly knows her stuff".

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Well, what else are we to make of this ludicrous story featuring a man, the delightfully-named Barton Bendish, who unearthed some Roman silver coins recently.

source: BBC

 

Actually the story is not at all ludicrous. It is the strapline to the picture that commands our attention and deserves all the derision that we may summon up this chilly night in March.  For someone, hopefully for the sake of her career not the reporter Ms Katy Prickett of BBC Norfolk, but an anonymous droid deep in the bowels of Broadcasting House, has determined that nobody looking at the picture could possibly have a clue who Marcus Aurelius was unless he had been depicted in a film by an actor sufficiently well-known that no further bio details were needed. We learn that Richard Harris (Camelot, A Man Called Horse, Harry Potter) played Marcus in Gladiator and now we know all we need to know.

Had a bit-part extra taken the role in some obscure film, then the strapline would perhaps have been something like this:

Four of the coins date to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who was played by Carrington Crankshaft in the long-forgotten 1953 Ealing comedy "Gor Blimey, Mr Caesar", starring Sid James, Margaret Lockwood, Bob Monkhouse and AE Matthews, with Sam Kydd as Cassius; Crankshaft also featured as First Corpse in Murder in Mayfair (1959), man in bus queue in Any More Fares, Please (1961) and man in football crowd in Everton vs West Ham, Match of the Day (1967), with the earliest dating from AD166.

 I have not seen Gladiator, apart from the "Are you not entertained?" clip and I have never been sure if Marcus, played by Harris, was or not. Perhaps the link is that he threw Spartacus or whoever he was [played by Mel Gibson: Ed] a bag of silver denarii and it was those very coins that were safely squirreled away in far-away Britannia. Could he ever have imagined that Barton Bendish (played by unknown child-star B. Bendish in A Xmas Video for Grandma, 1995, private distribution only) would unearth them nearly 2,000 years later. I imagine not.

Meanwhile, at the Large Mammal Collider...

 I have long been fascinated by physics. The concepts of quarks and gluons, quantum entanglement, photons streaking across the universe for billions of years, time going backwards...it's great fun even though I don't really understand it and can't follow the maths. It's even more fun when scientists try to explain what they are doing, using easy-to-understand similes that boggle the mind even more than the original ideas. 

 And, if it's mind boggling you are after (and why not, it's perfectly legal and you don't need to spend a penny to enjoy it) then cast your mince pies over this beautiful specimen:

source: Interesting Engineering

 

 Scientists have long known that a seriously big force holds protons together, because they have spent about 100 years trying to break them apart. Indeed, so hugely massive is this power that it is known as the Strong Nuclear Force (distinct from its wimpy, little, bespectacled cousin the Weak Nuclear Force). The force holds three quarks inside each proton and it needs to be bloody enormous because these things are basically compressed energy formed during the very start of the Big Bang.

But just how bloody enormous, I am sure you will be thinking [I certainly was: Ed].  Up till now we had no obvious way to make sense of it. Not any more. We use Olympic sized swimming pools to measure bodies of water, Wales to measure land masses and a piece of string always comes in handy for most other things. I can now present to you the gold standard in measurement - the compressed elephant. 

One is not enough, though, for the proton. It takes ten of them. Okay, I get that. But so many questions inevitably follow. Top of the list has to be - how did the compressed elephants get in here in the first place?, closely followed by African or Indian?, and where would a woolly mammoth fit in on this scale? I hope we are talking adults here, by the way, because the thought of some endearing baby, still scampering around its mother as the herd progress majestically across the savannah, being taken away by cruel men in white coats who then ...no, I can't go on. Compressing an adult at the end of its life when the hyenas are licking their lips and the lions polishing up the cutlery, yes, fine, it's doing them a service really, they can die knowing they have lived a long and useful life demolishing vegetation and wallowing in mud and are now enriching scientific knowledge. Let's hope it stops there. I do not want to read about someone establishing that the pion [a light elementary particle composed of two quarks:Ed] is the mass of three compressed baby elephants, that would really put me off my morning muesli and yoghurt.

But to return to the main question. I suppose there is only one way to find out ...

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Scene: A lab somewhere below ground with loads of whizzy high-tech machines whirring away. Enter Dr. A. Einstein (no relation) and Dr. J.C. Maxwell (also no relation), who, fresh from proving that aliens are definitely here, honest, it's just that they are really, really good at hiding, have inexplicably been loose at CERN.

Einstein: I'm really worried, JC. That damn proton - it's sitting in that atom-smashing machine laughing at us. Just laughing. We put on a weight. Nothing. We put on a lot of weights. Zilch. I put a couple of old textbooks on top, just in case. Waste of time. I don't know where we go from here, and that research grant will run out in a couple of day.

Maxwell: I know, I know. I've been trying to find something heavier, but everything is so bulky. Just falls off the top of the machine. We have to get something bigger but yet smaller. It's a paradox.

Einstein: A bloody impossibility, if you ask me. Let's get back to aliens. You know where you are with aliens. You don't have to keep doing stupid experiments and writing down findings and all that peer-review business, it does my head in, you know? You just say that you did a thought experiment and everyone applauds.

Maxwell: Don't give up, Al. We need to look at this another way. Listen, call me crazy but suppose we get something pretty damn heavy and ...somehow make it shrink. 

Einstein: Can't be done. My shirts shrink. My bank account shrinks. Heavy stuff stays big and heavy, we all know that. 

Maxwell: But if we compressed it. Get it smaller. Denser. Then it would fit on top of the machine and we could put something on top. Maybe several heavy but compressed things. You see? There is a way!

Einstein. Yes, yes, but this is a proton we are dealing with. You know the sort of energy in that thing - it must be as big as ...as big as...

Maxwell: An elephant?

Einstein: Don't be so ridic...ok, let me think about that. An elephant...No, still not enough. Only about a tenth of the energy.

Maxwell: So ten elephants?

Einstein: Mein Gott! Ten elephants! Of course. But yet - so big.  So big and floppy and lumbering and those huge tusks .. we could never get them in the building, JC. You're a smart man but you know, a little bit crazy perhaps

Maxwell: But ten compressed elephants?

pause

Einstein picks up the phone  Hallo, yes, put me through to the zoo!

 

 

 

Brands, Out With The Old, In With The Same

source: ABC Australia

 Regular readers [Huh?: Ed] will know of my deep and undying respect for those who deploy the noble arts of advertising and public relations. They never let me down when I am scratching my head searching for inspiration for one of these little whimsies. I think this is the first one from Down Under to catch my attention and, judging by the standard, not only of the change in the brand  but the conviction behind the justification for it from the PR people, I need to pay more attention to goings-on Ozwise than has hitherto been the case.

 Australia has long been a major sporting nation but clearly their weakness has been their athletes, always falling short of greatness. Let an athlete pick up a javelin and they would drop it on their foot, with the lacklustre old "Athletics Australia" weakening their grip. High jumpers wobbled on the take-off, baffled by their inability to grasp the nature of the organisation that managed them; runners dropped off the pace, gasping for breath while sprinters from countries with better brands and meaner slogans forged ahead; the hurdlers would have done better trying to vault over a few salt-water crocs with their mouths open [the crocs' mouths, not the hurdlers: Ed ] compared to the depressing effect of the millstone from the past.

No more of that! Australian athletes can rejoice that at last they have a bold, new identity that connects to its storied legacy and sets its sights on an exciting future. No more must they put up with hackneyed, boring old initials"AA". Now they can pin the brand new "AA" plates on their shirts with pride. If anyone should ask what it stands for, it is going to be so easy in future. "AA, mate?" They will shrug nonchalantly "That's Australian Athletics. So much better than that old logo, fair dinkum to the chief executive, they've certainly kicked off a golden era"

I suppose a quick, mozzie-on-the-wall flashback visit to the offices of Bozo and Dunny, Practioners in PR, Sydney is in order....

Scene: A few months ago.  A backroom on the fourth floor. The blinds are drawn. Whiteboards covered in scrawls at one end, a table seating a few sweating executives  at the other. Enter Taz¹, a pommy intern who has somehow landed himself an internship though nobody knows how.

Taz: Sorry to interupt,  but Athletics Australia have phoned about whether we've got the new name yet.

 Rupert: No worries, mate, but damn, they've gotta cut us a bit more slack here. Jeez, you drongos, five hours and we still haven't got a name. They're counting on us. We've got to get away from boring old Athletics Australia.

Kylie: Taz, why dontcha read us out some of those suggestions. Might stir up some brain cells.

Taz: Oh, yes, gosh, er here goes. Athlete Australia. Athletes Australia. Athletes in Australia. Athletes Oz. Athletes Ozzy. Athletes'R'Aussies.

Rupert: Is that it? Stone the wallabies. Let's have a few tinnies and really focus on this, people.

Bazza: Athletics...Australia...it's so close. Australia..Athletics...Australia...

Kylie: Hold it, hold it. I think I may have something.  Rupert, can the budget stretch an extra letter?

Rupert: Dunno, maybe, but you're pushing way over the edge here. 

Bazza : Australia's Athletics? 

Rupert: Close, so damn close. Anything else?

Kylie: Australian Athletics?

Pause

Bazza: I think it's good. It is good. I like it!

Rupert: Good? That is effing brilliant! That is the answer! Well done, team. 

Kylie: Jeez, finally. And it was so simple, so bloody simple, we just couldn't see it.

Rupert: Taz, why don't you fill in the copy. Chuck in a few standard phrases from our blurb handbook. "Forward looking", "bold", "venture", "exciting", that sort of crap.

Taz: Something about "identity"?

Bazza: Yup. And "legacy"

Kylie: Make that "Storied legacy ", they'll lap that up. Worth another million on the fee. What do we think, guys? Five million?

Bazza: Been at it a whole morning. I say maybe six. 

Rupert: With that extra letter? I reckon they'll swallow seven point five. Invoice that, would you, Tazza.

Taz: Shall I round it up to ten?

Pause. Sharp intakes of breath. Smiles break out.

Rupert: You're a natural, kid. There's a place for you in this firm. You have the true instinct of a great PR man.

Footnote

1. Yes, it's our old friend, last spotted in these columns here

Going into Details

 

I do not live in Wales nor am I female nor am I a regular shopper at Marks & Spencer; however Google has seen fit to feature this blurb in the background page on my tablet (if you swipe right on the desktop). I doubt if a real person wrote this (clue: "It sees shoppers can save ..." is gibberish). As there is no actual content other than the price drop on a dress, the fact gets repeated and regurgitated in such a way that the entire article appears to be about nothing else. I did not bother to click on it to find out more but let my imagination fill in some of the rest (and if you are reading, "Branwen Jones", you can have them entirely for free for your next scoop.

• The saving on this dress is more than twice £12.50
• The price has been reduced by 43%, that's nearly half and a lot more than a third
• The mysterious difference between the £30 drop in the headline and the £28 saving mentioned in the copy is, no doubt, due to the machinations of a sinister force
• Shoppers who buy two dresses can save £56, nearly enough for another dress at the old price
• The dress sold for £65 before the cut, that's 75% more.
• If the dress had been on sale for £250 then shoppers could have saved £213. But it wasn't.
• Clothes often are sold at reduced prices during a clearance sale, savings of at least £28 on elegant yet practical clothing may be experienced, it sees.
• Is anybody really reading this stuff?
• No, didn't think so, I'm off to watch Wales getting thrashed at rugby again.