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    The Great Gordino Newsletter - Issue 317 - Mon 30th May 2005
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    Archive Issues online at - gordonbryan.com/archive

    Hi There,

    I hope this Monday finds you well.
    It's a Bank Holiday here in the UK, so as per usual, the shop are
    wiped out of bread.
    I must have been ill on the day at school when they had the
    lesson that was called 'It's a Bank Holiday, quick, rush out and
    buy 10 loaves of bread.'

    Last week I promised I would talk about the British marketer
    Martin Avis, and why he sprung to my mind along with the idea
    of 'thievery'.

    Martin writes a great online newsletter.
    It's called Kickstart Daily, which since he's now gone to 3 times a
    week should maybe be renamed Kickstart Thriceweekly.
    Hmm, doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?

    Anyhoo, in a recent issue, Martin talked about a department
    store executive who had seen a promotion in a rival store, and,
    er, pinched it for her own store to use.
    Unfortunately, she only saw certain aspects of the promotion,
    and had missed vital parts.
    As a result, her store lost a huge amount of money, and red
    faces abounded.

    This reminded me of a couple of things I was going to talk
    about anyway, and they tie in nicely, in my humble opinion!

    You can get Martin's newsletter at:
    Kickstart Daily

    A recent series on TV over here charted the history of the
    airship, those monsters of the sky.
    You may well be shouting at your computer that the the plane is
    in fact the monster of the sky.
    You'd be right, for the last 60 years, but for the first 40 years of
    last century it was the airship.
    As big as jumbos, they flew low to the ground, and way before
    the jet engine, they held anyone in awe who saw them.

    It was the German Graf Von Zeppelin who pioneered the early
    development of the airships, and in fact, the airships were used
    in World War 1 to cause bombing havoc across London.

    That is until the British invented exploding bullets, which
    managed to down several of the airships.
    The British and Americans poured over the wreckage of these
    downed ships, and used the technology to try and catch up with
    the German advances.

    However, because they only had wreckage, and not the
    engineering expertise, the airships they produced were flawed,
    and they continually crashed.

    After the war ended, the Allies used the war treaty to stop the
    Zeppelin company making airships, and it was only when they
    sealed a deal with Goodyear many years later, the Zeppelins
    flew again.

    US Navy airships crashed, British airships crashed, and it was still
    only the German Zeppelins which flourished, seemingly looking
    like the future of global commercial passenger travel.

    In the late 30s, it all came to an end with the Hindenburg crash,
    when the footage of the actual crash proved too much of a
    burden to overcome.

    On a slightly different tack, but still focusing on the wring people
    being credited with progress, we all assume that the Arabic
    numerals we all use, which replaced the unweildly Roman
    Numerals, were developed by the Arabs.
    In fact, they were developed in India, and it was just that the
    Arabic numeral stuck as a name.

    When the Indians first used 1-9 plus 0, it was chaos, because
    the concept of 'zero' was considered heretical, the devil's work,
    and it took ages, centuries, for it to take hold.
    Let's be grateful it did, because the computer I'm writing on
    depends on those Arabic numerals!

    I moved house at the weekend.
    I can't claim to be overburdened with muscles, but the few that I
    do have are screaming 'ENOUGH!!'
    If I had a whole house load to move, I would pay for the
    removal men to come in and do the lot, but this time I did it
    with some friends helping me.
    It's that age old decision, do it yourself, or get someone else to
    do it, and pay the price.

    So to wrap up today, don't pinch stuff from other people is
    obvious, but if you are using other people's plans or info with
    permission, even then you musn't just copy what they did, you
    need to add your own stamp of individuality.

    By the way, just to keep you up to date with the airship story,
    they are making a comeback, with both the Japanese and
    Americans developing humungous airships which will launch
    vertically, to go into the stratosphere for research projects, etc.
    Interesting, eh?

    Ok, have a good week!

    'Til Next Time,
    Health and Happiness,
    Gordon
    email me at gordon@gordonbryan.com - you'll have to copy and paste
    thanks to the idiot online spammers!



    
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