Gruts

I took some shoes to be re-heeled this week. The receipt I was given proclaimed:

IF SHOES ARE GOOD ENOUGH TO WEAR
THEY'RE GOOD ENOUGH TO REPAIR

Not the snappiest of mottos maybe, but at least they were giving it a go.

Then I got to thinking: Richard, you're a bit of an expert when it comes to thinking up clever marketing taglines. If you owned a shoe-repair business, what tagline would you use?

An excellent and typically perceptive question, if I might say so, raising as it does the opportunity for all sorts of puns of a shoe-related nature. Here's what I came up with:

• Poorly shoes? We'll soon heel them
• Re-iss-shoes
• We'll save your sole
• We'll nail your problem
• We're at it hammer and tongues
• Professional to the last (geddit?)
• It won't awl end in tears
• Rushing in where others fear to tread
• Our competitors are all cobblers
• Dirty Harry says, "Our soles are for personnel"
• Never knowingly under-soled (Ouch! That's the one, I reckon.)

What? You think you could do any better? Suggestions in the comments section below, please.

Never one to be put off repeating a feeble joke, whenever I go out for a Chinese meal and drink some green tea, I like to claim that the two or three leaves at the bottom of the cup are actually mouse droppings—a Chinese delicacy. I once even managed to make the joke in Beijing in front of some American tourists, who, not at all appreciating my sense of humour, assumed I was being serious.

Anyway, I don't think I'll be making that particular joke any more—it's a bit too close to the mark:

BBC: 'Civet coffee' sells - despite Sars
Fears that Chinese civet cats may help to spread Sars have lead to thousands of the animals being slaughtered, but they do not seem to have affected demand for a rare coffee harvested with the animals' help in Indonesia. "Kopi Luwak" or "Civet Coffee" is made with beans that have been partially digested and then excreted by civets.

What gets me is that, at some point in the dim and distant past, some Indonesian has thought to themself (in Indonesian, no doubt), I wonder if this coffee would taste better if I ran it through a cat first. Then, to make matters worse, they actually went and tried it.

Sars via civet poo, eh? So that's how you cat-shit.

BBC: Ancient roots of cream tea discovered
Historians in Devon have unearthed evidence which they claim proves the traditional cream tea originated in the county some 1,000 years ago.

Remarkable when you consider that tea only reached Europe in the 16th Century.

I've just been analysing the access logs for the Gruts website. The mind boggles at some of the things people were searching for when they encountered this site. So I've created a new page to record some of them. I've called it Odd Searches. [Postscript: I have since got rid of the page.]

I was going to call it Strange Searches, but that took up too much space on the menu bar.

BBC: Mariah upsets Malaysian Muslims (16-Jan-04)
Malaysia's Muslim opposition party has called for Mariah Carey to be barred from performing in the country.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that these religious fundamentalists aren't quite as barking mad as they seem. (Unlike certain entertainers I could mention.)

9.0 Flesh and the Devil
Antony Thomas's feature-length documentary exploring all aspects of compulsory clerical celibacy in Catholicism…

Yeah, you try saying that after three Hail Marys and a couple of bottles of communion wine.

New Scientist: Robotic Segways play soccer with humans

Why can't they play it with a ball like everyone else?

Here is the phone number for Audi Customer Services UK: 0800 699888.

I spent 20 minutes on the Audi UK website yesterday, trying to find it. They would only reveal it to me after I registered my personal details with them. So I did so, got the number, then immediately un-registered.

It really shouldn't be that difficult to obtain a so-called Customer Services phone number, so I publish it here in the hope that someone searching for it might come across this item via Google, etc.