Prague escort agencies

Dear me - been idly checking out things to do in Prague, and the number one nocturnal activity seems to be escort agencies. What's wrong with architecture and restaurants? (On second thoughts, having eaten in the Czech Republic several times, let's forget the restaurants.) But surfing around some of these establishments turned out to be hilarious. These are actual names of some Prague escort agencies:

Anal Servis - somehow reminded me of a hire car company
Blow Job Escorts (does what it says on the tin?)
Virgin Escort (run by Branson perhaps?! If not, I suspect it violates trade descriptions laws)
Barbie Escorts (maybe something to do with inflatable sex dolls)
Mercedes Escort Agency (big and solid and you can't get the top off when you want to?)
Golden Girls (are they over 50 or something?)

And my personal favourite...

Escort Go Home

(It presumably means the escort girl visits your home, but...)

Digging deeper (I was hooked by then), the actual descriptions of agencies and girls are hilarious 'Engliszh.' Eg.

"Try to spend some time with her - you will be surprised!" (What, does she not turn up or something?)
"Weight 52kg, Breast Number: 2" (I'd have thought having two breasts was a minimum requirement, not a selling point)
"Do you want to spend night with slim lady with big breast?" (Ok, so they DO offer one-breasted girls)
"Here is a lady who offer nothing but sleep!" (well. I'm used to them dozing off, but still...)
"beautiful ladies who entertain you at your hotel, or even at your private!"
"our girls speak to you in all languages!" (great, I enjoy hearing ancient Assyrian)

Jeez, and I was only heading there for the 12th century architecture.

Tories hit 39%, Labour drops to 29%

The Cameron effect is working: support for New Labour is at its lowest since it was Old Labour. Gordon Brown retorts support will return "When they see the economy is doing well and the health service and schools are getting better."

Hey Gordon - you've had TEN YEARS to do that, okay?

USA sounds the retreat

OK... so today was the day the USA decided to pull out of Iraq.

Just check out the language used by the White House and Republicans in a test-the-waters kind of way in the last 7 days. Seeing no great enthusiasm for keeping its troops in Iraq, the soundbites have now been stage-managed into unanimity: "Stay the course" is now an un-policy, and everything coming across the Reuters wire is sung from the same hymn sheet.

The words used - about Iraq "accepting it must do more for itself", being "nearly ready", "wanting to take the reins sooner rather than later" - is terrific copywriting: persuasive with the ring of truth, while gently manipulating its audience into believing it's based on an actual assessment of Iraqi readiness.

(Instead of - as will be the case - a list of approved stances and phraseology guidance written in the west wing.)

"Iraq Agrees to new Security Timetable" (New York Times) - as if they had a choice.
"US could hand over Iraq security in 18 months" (M & C) - meaning it will.
"US promises significant progress in Iraq" (FT) - not any kind of result, just progress towards it.
"Success in Iraq still possible" - subtext: if the Iraqis continue what we've started and the insurgency magically fizzles out!

It's a use of language that tugs at the one thread of American opinion that lets the country kid itself it did the best it could. A position that we're decent folks doing the decent thing by letting the country take back its own responsibilities, and a presupposition that the decision has already been made by the White House. It'll play great in the red states, and okay in the blue ones.

Nothing like elections coming up to focus the governing party's minds on perceived opinions of its biggest problems. Pure brilliance, and it can only be 'Bush's Brain' Karl Rove (undoubtedly the most brilliant copywriter never to have held an advertising job) behind it all.

The enterprise SME

I love Google Adwords. Buying a few dozen keywords, writing a few headlines, a day's monthly monitoring and optimising, and a monthly budget around £1000 brings in as much business as I can handle. Combined with business networking sites like Ecademy, I've got a list of great, interesting clients that have expanded my experience and kept me solvent since the day I arrived in London.

But Adwords is symptomatic of a much larger trend: the availability of enterprise-level solutions to tiny businesses like mine. Used smartly, these solutions let an individual execute work you'd have needed ten times the manpower for just a decade ago.

It starts with the web itself, of course; my work site brings in business from across Europe. PayPal is almost as good as taking credit cards; online banking gives me instant statements and a payments in/out mechanism, while the UK's government portal - one of this government's few well-executed ideas - lets me pay off VAT and taxes with ease, if not with enthusiasm. Still, it beats waiting at the post office.

Adwords gives me a footprint across the UK; I'm not limited to people passing by my front door. And I can analyse, chop and change those campaigns based on management information available instantly - marketing tools that few companies outside the fmcg sector use effectively.

Even desktop apps make a difference. Outlook and gmail let me schedule meetings and keep them scheduled, across the entire calendar; hundreds of little contracts between contacts that keep the sales pipeline stuffed and life connected and rewarding.

When working for clients (rather, the larger clients I'm attracting these days, instead of day-rated copy chasing) all I need to execute marketing plans like this is a CRM app like Salesforce.com. My 'ideal' client, an SME with a budget under £250K, gets a proper, quantified marketing cycle that's concrete enough to make financial projections with.

Collaboration tools like basecamphq or the Corrobbo project I designed years ago let me manage a team without needing employees; the only gaps are in the relationships between people. (Almost any collabware will work if people just use it; the breakdowns in virtual teams are all due to poor co-operation between people who don't have enough of a stake in each other.)

As a result of these enterprise tools being available to my one-man company, I've decided to change my business model.

Right now all my income comes from straight fees, a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Making me philosophically no different from the union man in the works canteen. I haven't expanded because I don't want employees, for reasons explained elsewhere. But it's meant that - this financial year, which ends this month - I've hit the ceiling of what it's reasonably possible to earn. Which means my next year's target will be missed.

All's not lost, because between my client roster and the freedoms of the web, a third way has opened up.

Here's the lightbulb-over-the-head idea: my answer to the 'people gaps' - the delivery requirement that isn't met by technology and is usually met by employing people - is to use my existing clients to deliver.

Within my client roster I've got all the resources of a full-service pan-media marketing agency: strategy, planning, design/write/code, even a call centre. People I know and trust, and who know and trust me. Some I've worked with for years. The sense of shared responsibility among these people is at least as great as in a team of employees. Everyone has a stake in the outcome - because we've got a stake in each other.

That's not to say it's easy. It'll take project management. And some hard rules. To make a profit this way I can't tolerate wayward thinking, so all the outsourced tasks will need to be minutely-briefed and the expected outcomes crystal-clear. But that's what I'm good at. Concepting, outlining, writing things up: all my core skills. But without the red tape of employment legislation to deal with.

So, the new business model. Starting Nov 1, I'm throwing out the day rate and executing an agreed marketing plan for a set annual budget. The goal: 5 clients with budgets around £100K. I've got the first and am talking to the second.

Onward.

Official: UK now a high-tax jurisdiction

The Sunday Times reports it best: with an average tax take of 37.2%, Britain is now way above the OECD average and one of the highest taxed regimes in Europe.

Take an American. (Please!) A US citizen on my income has TEN THOUSAND POUNDS extra in his pocket, every year, to spend as he pleases. And that's without counting the much lower costs of living in the USA.

You can't even take the better healthcare and social care systems in the UK as offsetting: with private health insurance and a private pension, like every sensible person I know, I'm not actually GETTING anything for that vast extra treasury grab. Despite the huge gorge and gush of public funds into places like the NHS, hospitals are still showing deficits and the health minister gets booed by nurses; the money hasn't been spent wisely. All those billions, simply wasted.

There's been no real problem-solving throughout the last decade of Labour: rather, there's been legislation, in the mistaken belief it can substitute for actually getting things done. From diversity to ageism to sacking people, the only government response has been to write new laws, irrespective of the drag they create.

I have in front of me a government tender request for completion. Approximately 30% of its 46 pages deal with some aspect of law or policy: ministers covering their own asses by moving all responsibility for compliance with the thinnest laws to the private sector. Linkage to other government projects, diversity policies and health and safety laws, etc etc etc ad infinitum. It will take 75% of the time taken to write the tender request to deal with these box-ticks alone. It will then take a civil servant another 75% of his time to pass the tender for approval. A minimum of 2 people, taken up for the best part of two weeks, creating stuff that never gets looked at or adds value. I estimate £4000 in economic activity that could be adding to the UK's GDP, instead just wasted in a mass of red tape. And that's before anyone even writes the fucking tender. Before they even consider whether the proposal being made will actually deliver the fucking results. Of course, with this mass of red tape, by definition it won't deliver. It just can't.

Any UK employer is now basically an unpaid government servant, responsible for implementing its laws, collecting its taxes, and paying an ever-increasing array of fines and fees if they get it wrong. The people writing this legislation just aren't taking responsibility for it; they're forever shifting the blame (and the costs) onto others. Did the tax code really need to double in shelf space in the last 10 years, Gordon? You are the worst Chancellor in British history. You inherited a huge surplus and a growing economy, yet - somehow - despite turning surplus into deficit and raising taxes every year - our public services aren't funded properly. Britain's public services are the least cost-effective in the world.

The ones cleaning up, of course, are the civil servants getting paid to sort out this mess and somehow make things work. A British public servant - in addition to his index-linked pension and non-market job security - now enjoys a higher salary compared with equivalent work in the private sector. And there are so many public servants these days. Essentially, the private sector half of the population is paying taxes so that the other half in the public sector can earn a higher wage than them. (Who says British citizens aren't charitable?)

I used to be a fair taxpayer. Paying my share, no dodges or loopholes, just signing the cheques every month, even paying the Revenue before drawing my own salary. And yes, sometimes, going hungry because of it. Well, that's history. I AM FED UP.

From now on, I'm exploiting every loophole, every tax wheeze I can find. I'll be taking a potential customer along every time I go out and keeping every last receipt to expense away profit. If I earn overseas income, it's staying overseas.

From today onwards, Treasury, you and I are enemies.

300m Americans

So there are now officially three hundred million Americans. Rather a frightening thought. Bear in mind, though, that's still less than 5% of the world's population.

France is a police state, too

A worrying development. France's government passes a bill to make denying the Armenian genocide illegal.

The fact that the genocide undoubtedly happened isn't the point. Once governments start passing laws deciding what people may say or write - however misguided - you're in a police state. And once you pass laws about it you're creating a class of people who can make money out of it, which means ambulance-chasers aren't far behind.

Britain's 'hate speech' law is bad enough. And of course, we're used to this sort of thing happening in the USA, where a President writes laws on a single individual's right to die - effectively ruling by decree - and where universities have speech codes so politically correct their academics can't even question basic biological differences between men and women. In Germany, too, it's illegal to read Mein Kampf or wear a swastika. (To anyone who thinks that's reasonable: the crooked cross was a Hindu peace symbol for thousands of years before Hitler got hold of it.)

But I didn't expect it from France. And nor, it seems, did France's political class. At least the politicians themselves are unhappy, too.

At least it makes one thing clear. Turkey will not join the EU. It was clear from the moment the cartoon story went global earlier this year: there is a dividing line between what's 'European' and what's not, and however fuzzy it is, Turkey is on the wrong side of it.

The vanity of Vayner

They've taken it down from YouTube, but the web's mob have planted it elsewhere: this month's mediafuck. And it's possible - just possible - that it beats the amazing Amir saga. A Yale student sends his unbelievably self-aggrandising video CV to a series of merchant banks, who understandably think it's worth forwarding. Commentary from Yalies here.

The interesting thing will be if the banker who originally forwarded it outside his immediate circle gets hauled up before his bosses. After all, aren't all CVs supposed to be confidential, even when it robs the world of a laugh?

Freudian flights

Last night I dreamed I was flying an underpowered helicopter.

Somehow pulling back on the joystick didn't increase power to the rotors (that's how this helicopter worked - there was no collective or cyclic or whatever the pull-back thing is that gives you lift.) So I was reduced to swooping low over the heads of people below, enjoying the freedom of the skies but frustrated by the effort it took to climb just a little higher.

A strange metaphor.

South wins!

Ha ha, South London won! Actually, there could never have been much in it - the crowds ensured everyone had to run at roughly the same pace in the pack, and my time was almost exactly the average finishing time. Still, victory is always sweet...

Pounding parks

The Nike 10K!

I love this race, a ten-klom mass road race organised by the world's greatest sports brand. And I love the whole twisted philosophy behind it: hey, look at me! I love this brand so much I paid the company £25 for the privilege of running around a public park advertising its products!

The staging is perfect. Big screens, loud music, Hyde Park. Seb Coe and Paula Radcliffe are mascots. Ex-Olympian Seb may be in his 50s, but Marathon champ Paula is six months' pregnant, which sort of evens things up. The warm-up contains the usual impossibly agile movements, and once again I'm humbled by just how unco-ordinated my body is. I'm no dancer. So here we are: 30,000 people strengthening the Nike brand.

Of course, I'm not affected by branding. So when the chips are down, I'm off across Hyde Park feeling enpowered through sport. Swoosh. I'm going to Just Do It.

The race, as usual, is fun. This year's theme is North (London) vs. South, Northerners in green, us Southerners in Orange. It's crowded but good natured. There's no loneliness en route: too many people; few can run at race pace due to the sea of ankles. Which doesn't matter. We're here for fun.

While these events are stupid, simple, mindless - nothing more than the thrill of the mob - they still leave you feeling great, I muse as I cross the finishing line slightly short of an hour later. I Tube home, endorphins spilling from every pore, and prepare myself for another week in the trenches of commercial prose.

Foley's follies

I only mention this story again because of the tonguetwister that just occurred to me: "The underpants sex text messages sent by Congressional sex pest to underage page".

A troubled night, full of strange dreams

Wow, The Dreaming contained some serious weirdness when I drifted off again between 6 and 7 this morning.

Some people were delivering an aircraft to my door. I didn't see the box it was in or hear it land or anything, but I knew it was an aircraft. I was asleep on the sofa, not in my own house, but in the house I grew up in. And the delivery person was a little Japanese girl, who came in without knocking. Outside, I was on the drive of my own house again, except someone had put half a yellow Reliant Robin (the back half, half size and upended) next to my wheelie bin.

I assume the triggers for this dream were: feeling really comfortable in bed this morning, my Mum visiting last weekend, and watching 'Memoirs of a Geisha' the other evening. No IDEA where that Reliant Robin came into it though.

Ramadan rocks

Day 2 of the annual alcohol-free month.

It would've been easy to cheat this year, since spending August in Egypt cut my intake drastically... but my body would have known. And when your clients are divided between City consultancies and marketing agencies, booze is less a habit than a background buzz. It's just always there, at any client dinner or friend's party, and you don't feel it eating away at your liver and lifespan. So mindful of the creeping damage wine can do to the body over decades, I try to have one complete week a month and one complete month a year without alcohol. This year it's October.

In the coming days, I'll notice a leap in energy levels and my awareness of the surroundings will be sharper. I'll jump out of bed rather than stumble blindly to the shower each morning, and people will comment on the glow of my hair and skin as if I were a prizewinning Afghan hound. My 10km and 1500m times will drop by whole minutes. Dry throats and throbbing heads in the mornings will become a memory, and at work I'll get through half as much again as in any 'normal' day with a glass or three at the end of it. I might even be functional before 10am.

All this virtuousness. It's enough to drive you to drink.

How to get 1200 customers in the next year

Since I find myself writing basically the same proposal time after time for new clients, I thought I'd make it boilerplate.

Topping from the bottom

Cool expression of the day. I was discussing the film "Secretary" with a colleague. The film's about a self-harming woman who stops self-harming when her boss starts spanking her for making typos. Soon she learns to 'control' him, so she only gets spanked at a time and in a manner of her choosing.

Apparently, this is known as 'Topping from the bottom'.