h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nokia 3310.

Not made by Nokia.
Bigger screen.
Colour screen.
Different operating system.
Looks different

It isn't a Nokia 3310 then is it?

Mini.

Not made by Austin / Morris / British Leyland etc.
Bigger car (as it happens, some of them are bigger than my Astra).
Different engine.
Just different.

So it isn't a Mini is it?

I get that it's branding and that branding is a commodity to be bought and sold, but really?

Who's going to fall for this (other than the millions who are going to be on a nostalgia kick and reckon it's near enough.....)

Are there other examples out there? Have I been duped?

PP.

How about when Kraft changed the recipe of the Cadbury Cream Egg, shrunk it and only now sell 5 in a box of six?

<BB<

I've been amused by people that name something according to one brand name. A brother-in-law saw a motorcycle that really impressed him - a Yamaha Honda . . . because all bikes are Hondas, right?

And then later that same week, a friend was boasting of the John Deere Ski-Doo he was going to buy . . .

Lately, I've had my eye on a Nikon Kodak - 22 MegaPixel, all sorts of bells and whistles. Or maybe that cool looking Samsung iPhone.

It's not as common as when I was a kid, but in the Bible Belt of the Southern US, all fizzy drinks were called "coke". You might be asked which kind of coke you wanted and your answer could be a Mr. Pibb or 7UP.

http://popvssoda.com/

That reminds me of the time Coca Cola tried to launch 'Dasani', an expensive sperm-flavour cancer-causing bottle of tap water aimed at plonkers that cost over 300,000% more than getting the water direct from the tap.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-cola-tried-sell-bottled-tap-water-england-hilarity-ensued/

<BB<

I really wish bottled water wasn't a thing. Especially bottled tap waters like Dasani and distilled and resalted "spring" waters like "Smart Water".

The fact that humans can be so easily convinced to buy bottled water reaffirms my commitment to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT).
http://www.vhemt.org/

" tap water aimed at plonkers that cost over 300,000% more than getting the water direct from the tap." [Bluebottle]

It may be more expensive than tap water, but not by that margin. Here in Boston, water is about six or seven dollars a gallon. Let's call it six. A quart would run to about one and a half cents. If a quart of Dasani cost $1.50, it would be a hundred times as expensive, not 300,000% [which would be about 3,500 times as expensive].

But we're paying almost fifteen cents a gallon, what with sewer fees and EPA-mandated programs to separate sewer discharge from storm runoff.

As for the potential for cancer, wouldn't that tie in with voluntary extinction?

According to news sources from the time it was (briefly) sold, Dasani was on sale for 95p for a 500ml bottle while 500ml of tap water cost 0.03p:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/19/foodanddrink
Dasani took pure tap water and passed it through filters which added bromate, that increases the risk of cancer. This led to all bottles on sale being recalled.

<BB<

Did they get the tap water at UK rates, or at U.S. rates?

Not that it absolves them of blame for grossly overpricing their product.

The spring water that I buy in supermarkets costs about 90 cents a gallon, which is about 15 times as much as my tap water, but my tap water makes my stomach hurt. Seriously, it does. And I recycle the empty jugs afterwards.

Another thing that isn't a thing are Books not written by the author on the cover.
A couple of years ago I saw a book on sale clearly labelled 'The Leaky Establishment' by Terry Pratchett and David Langford. In fact the whole story was by David Langford and Terry Pratchett only wrote a forward.
I've also seen anthologies of short stories were the stories have been compiled or edited by a famous author, whose name is on the cover, but the stories themselves weren't by that author at all.

<BB<

How much of The Long Earth books did Terry Pratchett write? They certainly don't feel like Terry Pratchett stories. Maybe Stephen Baxter is like this David Langford and simply using Terry Pratchett's name to sell his books.



BTW... I once bought a book called The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld by Terry Pratchett, compiled by Stephen Briggs.

All the words are indeed Terry Pratchett's. The book is simply what this Stephen Briggs considered the funniest or most poignant lines from various Discworld books, without any context... just cut and pasted snippets, that's it.

I really need to take it to the used bookstore and get rid of the thing.

Reminds me of the phrase "tastes like chicken" where on the one hand you have a vague idea what to expect but on the other hand it may give you unrealistic expectations depending what aspect of the product you focus on.

Eg Quorn protein may taste vaguely like chicken, but it definitely has the texture of fungi, and a VW Beetle may look vaguely the same shape as the old Herbie, but the engine is in the front...

R&B

It's Rhythm and Blues. It's the music they played on The Blues Brothers. It's not some sort of warbly rap.


R&B is this:

Ray Charles - What'd I Say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPLZL4s_jtI

Dr Feelgood - Roxette: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nyeSGaBcrA


But it's *not* this:

Craig David - Rise & Fall (feat. Sting): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8aHfJV1JSA

Beyonce - Halo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnVUHWCynig

What kind of music do you usually have here?

Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.

"The Art of the Deal" has Donald Trump's name on the cover, but Tony Schwartz claims that Trump had little, if anything to do wqitht he actual writing...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

Well, you certainly cannot say that SCROTUS isn't speaking in his writing now. Quite a lot of formal scrip that by-pass any discussions of merit.

Schwartz also notably said he doesn't think Trump has read a book since grade school.

Does Trump use speechwriters now?

He absolutely did for his Congressional speech. And you can be sure every word was approved by Bannon.

I'd like to get this in perspective. There must be hundreds of thousands of career workers in the federal government. Without them, you could say goodbye to any coherent management of the country. The voters elect the guy at the top, who asks Congress to approve his cabinet officers, judges, ambassadorial picks, and probably some others that I can't think of off the top of my head. I expect that all of them promise, under oath, to uphold the Constitution to the best of their ability.

They don't exactly have carte blanche to do whatever they want. If they want to change things, the people speak through their representatives, who wrangle with each other in Congress, in public sessions that are reported by the media.

This Bannon guy may be smart and even persuasive, but c'mon, have you seen the way Trump disposes of people who assume they can tell him what to do? He's less polite about it than Reagan was, and he seems more narcissistic and less empathetic than the Geezer...I mean Gipper , but there will definitely be dealmaking in Washington, as there has been for more than two centuries.

I like it that Trump's predecessors were avid readers [how could W not be, with a librarian as his wife?], but if you goo n to graduate school, as I did, you quickly realize that skimming is indispensable if you want to survive. It's possible to be a good skimmer without being inclined to read every book through form cover to cover.

At the end of day [sorry about using that overused expression], what you do with the material you *do* have is what counts. Trump is reputed to be a fast learner. There are may different ways to effective. Maybe Trump will be a good president, and maybe he won't, but only posterity will have had the time to put him under a microscope to figure out what he was made of.....

Sorry about the rant.