Salt of the Earth

There's been panic buying of sea salt in China these past few days - in the belief that the iodine in it is some kind of magic talisman against the risk of radiation sickness or cancers from possible Fukushima fallout.

I didn't really need to buy anything myself, but I thought I'd look in at my usual supermarket, just to see how crazy things were getting. Indeed, two whole aisles had been given over to varieties of salt products, and there was a mighty throng around them, snatching up the last few remaining bags.

One old granny was hovering diffidently - or perhaps with amused indifference - at the edge of the crowd.  A younger woman noticed her, asked if she could help grab a bag of salt for her.  The old lady replied, "I think I'm all right, thank you. I've still got 10 kilograms of the stuff I bought during SARS."

[Me - I'm working on a home chemistry kit to extract the iodine, so you can ward off the thyroid cancer without fatally overdosing on salt. My next million dollar idea... if only I can get it to market quickly enough.]

An e-commerce idea for China

I feel China really ought to have an online shopping Website where you can attempt to whittle down the price demanded through protracted bargaining - a real-time haggling process, albeit probably conducted with an AI counterpart rather than a live sales assistant (even the most limited AI program could scarcely be more unintelligently obstinate than your average Silk Street stallholder here in Beijing).  I envisage an animation of a desk calculator like the one above, hovering to and fro between you and your cartoon antagonist as you exchange a long series of offers and counter-offers (the cartoon trader squawking from time to time, "How much you really want to pay?  No, really, what's your best price?  No, I can't feed my children on that.  I lose money if I sell that low!" etc.).  A randomising element in the AI could give you a widely varying, unpredictable range of final outcomes, from no sale at all to bargain of the century - thus combining the exhilaration of shopping with the even greater adrenalin rush of gambling!

I had wanted to call this site Haggle.com, or maybe Whittle.com - but, alas, these both exist already (the latter cheerily exhorts us to "Learn about wood carving now!").  However, Whittledown.com still appears to be available; maybe that'll work.  Watch this space....

Things Word won't do for you...

Over the weekend I was toiling away at yet another of those turgid and insightless foreign policy papers I occasionally have to edit.

It was a more than usually whingey one (and the ones on Sino-US relations are usually very whingey indeed), its basic thesis - so far as you could discern one at all - being, "That Obama, he acts all nice and friendly and says 'China's rise is a good thing' - but then he goes and meets with the Dalai Lama! It's SO UNFAIR!!"

I joked to a friend on Sunday evening that as my author worked himself up into a lather of self-pity and wounded pride at the climax of his paper, I had pictured him weeping tears of impotent rage on to his manuscript. In fact, I had wanted to add tearstains for him - to highlight the emotion of the passage. It seemed so appropriate.

But then I realised, of course, that Microsoft Word doesn't provide any facility for you to do that. Why not? How hard can it be??

I immediately began working on an add-on program for Word that allows you to customise your text documents in various cute ways that make them look more like the paper copies we all grew up with. I imagine the Coffee Mug Ring will be the most frequently used option. Although Dog-Ear might also prove quite popular, I think. And Whiskey Spill and Cigarette Ash Smudge may be favoured by more 'serious' writers. I'll also include a Half-Consumed By Fire option for those really angstful types who toss their manuscript on the grate in moments of despair and almost immediately repent of it. Naturally, there'll be a Dog Ate My Homework feature for high school and college students who want to skimp on their assignments. And, of course, the Tear Stains effect for over-emotional Chinese academics.

Any other suggestions?

Unfortunately, since I'll have to spend quite a bit of time learning programming languages, I imagine it will be at least three years before I can bring this to market. I hope someone else doesn't get in on the idea first!

Another great website idea

I just added a little post over on The Barstool about my current hobby of determining the course of my life with coin tosses.

It occurs to me that this could be another of my 'Brilliant website/business ideas', that this is something I might actually be able to make some money off.

I envisage a giant coin dominating a plain, dark screen (a British gold sovereign, I fancy; or perhaps a guinea). You click to proceed, and the coin flips in an impressive animation. A randomizing function in the webpage program ensures that you will always be suitably in doubt as to whether it will end up showing heads or tails.

I think, to add to the intensity and 'realism' of the experience, you should be required - or at least have the option - to enter into a data field what your action options for each coin-toss outcome are. If you register on the site and provide an e-mail address, you can receive automated follow-ups reminding you of your 'choice', asking if you followed through on it (reminding you of the dire consequences of disobeying THE COIN), wishing you well if you did (or chiding you if you didn't).

Oh yes, I can see that becoming one of the major online fads of the new decade. Lots of money to be made from this!!

[My friend The Weeble has disparagingly pointed out in the comments below that there is already a website that does something of the sort - Random.org, established a dozen years ago by a computer geek from Trinity College, Dublin, and priding itself on being a rare provider of genuinely random numbers rather than those 'pseudo-random' ones we usually have to put up with. This is doubtless a valuable resource for anyone who craves more randomness in their life, but I don't see it as much of an obstacle or competitor to my idea here for a commercial coin-flipping website. Random.org is a terribly earnest and impressively wide-ranging site, but it's also desperately dull - no wit, no pzazz to it at all.]

Bricks

China surely has the scrappiest pointing in the world. Quite remarkable. This is a particularly egregious, but by no means unique example.

I find this endlessly fascinating. In fact, I have long pondered the possibility of creating a coffee table book called The Big Book Of Beijing Brickwork. Another million-dollar idea?

Money to burn

I read a few years ago of an upscale 'country club' which was being set up in Changping, just to the north of Beijing. The man behind this project claimed that he had set the joining fee at some unimaginably high level (I think it might well have been half a million yuan!) to establish his club's exclusivity, to keep out the riff-raff. And he boasted that he was still turning people away because he had so many prospective members clamouring to enrol at that exorbitant price.

I was a bit sceptical about this story, because it wasn't apparent that this chap was actually providing any kind of service or facility that might be remotely worth this sort of money, Changping is a deeply unlovely suburb, and I think even Chinese multi-millionaires might baulk at dropping that kind of money for nothing.

But it got me thinking......

You know, maybe some people in this country really do have more money than they know what to do with, maybe they really would welcome any opportunity to get rid of some of it. Money to burn.

And, as we know, the Chinese love gambling.

And thus I came up with an idea for an exclusive little club of my own (well, not that we'd necessarily need our own premises, but it would add to the ambience and the ritual, I think). I was thinking I might call it The 111 Club.

The idea is eminently straightforward. Fat cats pay me 111,000 RMB for their entertainment.

I divide the money and put it into three identical velvet sacks: 100,000 in one, 10,000 in another, and 1,000 in the last. The sacks are shuffled behind a screen, so we no longer know which sack is which. Each sack is given a mark of some kind, a number, letter, or character. And then lots are drawn to decide the fates of these three money bags.

The punter has one of the bags returned to him.

I get to keep one bag.

And one bag we set fire to.

Beautifully simple.

And I think I could ensure that I always got the bag with the 100,000 in it.... while the poor punter was happily (or not so happily) convinced that his 100,000 had gone up in smoke.

What larks! I can see some people would be coming back to 'play' every night.

Of course, I'd need a little start-up capital for something like this. Security, I fear, would be quite a big expense. Anybody interested in joining me?

Call me Ponzi

In the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal, I have been doing some reading up on Carlo Ponzi, the early 20th Century Italian conman who pioneered the kind of sham investment scheme that now bears his name.

I have been suggesting to friends that I might try something of the sort here in China.

I am being facetious, of course. I merely throw the idea out there as a provocation to discussion.

The trouble is, I'm finding it harder and harder not to take the idea seriously now. I had expected that my friends would all remonstrate with me, and remind me of all the moral objections to such deceptions. But they haven't. Every single one of them has greeted the idea enthusiastically and encouraged me to start making earnest plans for executing such a scheme.

Anyone rich enough to drop a few hundred thousand RMB on an investment scheme probably isn't going to be that badly impacted by the loss of the money. And after all, any investment can fail: you shouldn't gamble if you can't afford to lose the money.

Anyone greedy enough and dumb enough to give his money to a stranger to invest, without carefully checking his credentials, pretty much deserves to have his wealth redistributed in my direction, I would say (or rather, my friends have been saying it, and they're starting to win me over to their way of thinking). And Chinese fat cats are a particularly objectionable bunch, for the most part; it's hard to have any sympathy at all for people who've become obscenely wealthy running mines or brick kilns or chemical factories in this country. Some might say there's actually a moral imperative to relieve such people of some of their ill-gotten gains.

Yes, I'm giving it some thought.

The next huge bestseller

Part of this week's Moonrat lovefest was a competition to write an outline for a book that she - as an editor for a small New York-based publisher - would choose to pick up for publication. This was my entry. (I suppress my usual modesty for a moment to point out that I won. I am very much looking forward to receiving my prize, an advance copy of an about-to-be-published debut crime novel, The Ghosts Of Belfast by Stuart Neville, another of the Moonrat fan club.)

I don't want to start a category for 'My Brilliant Book Ideas' (although I do have a few of them....), so I'll tag this as as 'Books' and 'My brilliant website/business ideas'. I really do think this one's got legs. I mean, all those titles like Salt and Cod and Meat and Potatoes have done staggeringly well in recent years, haven't they - and there's nothing very sexy about them! I can't believe someone hasn't done this already!!

I confess I do feel a twinge of guilt about this victory, though: it was perhaps just a little bit mean of me to exploit Moonie's known weaknesses so.....

I had to edit down my proposal a bit for the competition entry, to meet the (rather tight!) word-limit of 150 words - at some cost to the elegance, if not to the grammar of the original. So, this is the slightly fuller version. The extended preamble, of course, is merely a set-up for the concluding punchline about Moonrat's favourite tipple. Some Saturday frivol.

Gin

A gin & tonic is the most popular alcoholic mixed drink in the world today, and an estimated 1 billion bottles of the spirit are consumed each year. As we enjoy the simple perfection of this refreshing beverage, we seldom pause to consider how it came into existence. The story of the development and popularization of gin, and its later blissful marriage with tonic water, is a rich and surprising one. Following this compelling tale from the unlikely experiments of pioneering German biochemist Franciscus Sylvius in the mid-1600s and the early success of his strong-flavoured liquor as a medicine against gallstones and gout, through the proliferation of gin-shops that plagued England in the 1700s and the essential contribution of gin as a protection against malaria for the colonialists of the 1800s, through to the craze for "bathtub gin" in 1920s America and the subsequent rise of 'cocktail culture', we reach a better understanding of gin's present eminence as the sedative of choice for the stylish literati of Noughties New York.

SOAP!

I enjoyed a post-work gargle with some journalist friends the other evening (hmm, perhaps this should be a Barstool Blues post? no, I've started on here now, so I'll carry on). At first, we were the only people in the small and somewhat remote bar (the Stone Boat, essentially an outdoor venue, will soon be forced into hibernation); but suddenly the place started filling up rather quickly. The crowd was almost all foreigners, mostly very young, and all terribly, terribly earnest. Realisation gradually dawned that we had been overrun by an NGO networking event. Everyone else was there to save the world, one self-congratulatory backslap at a time. Whereas my companions and I were just there to get drunk and trade off-colour jokes.

We could soon feel ourselves wilting under the relentless radiation of righteousness from those surrounding us. With not a single 'corporate social responsibility' brownie point between the lot of us, we felt awkward, self-conscious, out of place. We decided that we really needed a worthy project of our own to redress the shaming virtue-deficit.

It only took us a moment to hit upon one. Just before the world-savers arrived, we had been indulging in some laddish banter about video clips that are 'too hot' for YouTube, and in particular, about some recently much-discussed-on-the-Internet Darwin Awards-type episodes involving bestiality (I do hope these stories were apocryphal!). And that was where we found our inspiration.

Stamp Out Animal Pornography!

S.O.A.P.

Keep it clean

If you believe that pornography should be for humans and with humans only, please join this important crusade.

This piece of whimsy was a group production. In fact, I should acknowledge that the masterstroke - the acronym and the 'Keep it clean!' slogan (I can see that becoming a catchphrase amongst the cognoscenti) - came from the sozzled genius of a mucker called Will. I wouldn't want to claim the credit for myself.

I think this idea has legs. It's just a pity that our website address is being squatted by a manufacturer of industrial lubricants and cleansers from Atlanta, Ga.

Now, what tag should I give this? I suppose it fits best under My brilliant website/business ideas - although, to date, the entries in this category have all been strictly commercial rather than charitable or campaigning. Ah, what the heck!

(And oh dear me, I suppose this post could attract all sorts of undesirables to my humble little blog. It will be interesting to see what my traffic analysis looks like in a week's time.)

A missed opportunity: The Cornetto Torch

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that the distinctive shape and decoration of this year's Lenovo-designed Olympic torch really would have made a superb novelty Cornetto...... perhaps with a huge, swirly peak of strawberry & mango syrup encrusted cream on top to represent the flame.

Maybe the London organizing committee can take this idea forward?

Alas, I fear, it is probably the least lucrative (for me) of any of my 'great business ideas' - what are the chances of my being able to co-ordinate the development of the ice cream with obtaining the necessary licensing from the torch designers and the IOC, and still being able to keep a piece of the 'idea' to earn something for myself?? Just about zero, I think.

But I did work with the guys at Wall's here a few years ago. Possible guanxi? Maybe I should make a few calls.....

Shame-O-Gram

An American friend I was at dinner with yesterday was complaining that her wastrel twenty-something son back home appeared likely to fail to acknowledge Mother's Day (American-style; the UK version, of course, falls on the third Sunday in March rather than the second in May).

I suggested that she could avenge herself by sending a singing telegram around to his place of work today, to humiliate him in front of his co-workers with a chorus of something like "You broke your Mother's heart again."

I think this is a fine and potentially very lucrative concept. No doubt somewhere in the world (probably somewhere in America) such a creatively spiteful variation on the singing telegram service already exists. But then again perhaps not....... Maybe this could be my 'million dollar idea'?!

Of course, there's no absolute necessity to run a business like this over the Internet, but..... such is the fashion of the times. And I haven't added to my 'Brilliant Website Ideas' series for a while.

And I'm still waiting for my tee-shirt......

The Daily Llama

Honestly, I have thought very seriously about starting up another Blogspot blog called The Daily Llama - so that you could all enjoy cute pictures of these impressive animals every day..... and, if you were so minded, you could use the site as a forum for discussing the political situation in the western areas of "China" (something I have been wary of doing too openly on here, for fear of bringing the censors - or the visa office! - down on my neck again), and perhaps even express your support - or otherwise - for the Daily Llama himself.

My thanks to my old friend Snopes for suggesting this punning circumvention of our censorship woes on the Possible Band Names thread the other day (other suggestions on this theme have included Delhi Lamarr and Dolly Lemur).

Alas, I fear I really don't have the time or the energy to try to post a new "llama" picture every day.

And guess what?? The Kafka Boys are alert to the subversive potential of the llama (you just can't be too careful about dyslexic "splittists"!!) and are putting a block on Google image searches for the innocent creature. Really. How petty can you get?!

Well, this is China. They can get very petty indeed.

Another money-spinning website idea

If you are a laowai (foreigner) at large in China, you tend to get treated as if you were a celebrity most places you go. Really. Chinese tourists will queue up to have their picture taken with you.... or just to take your picture. It's not quite as outlandishly over-the-top and ubiquitous as it was a few years ago, but it still happens a lot.

It happens to you even more if you are a woman, especially an attractive woman. And if you are as uncommonly tall and as uncompromisingly blonde as my artist pal, H, then you get asked for a picture all the time - mostly by goofy young men who are obviously looking for an opportunity to kid their pals back home that they managed to pull a foreign chick.

Many of us foreigners in China have joked from time to time about how we ought to try to charge a fee for consenting to these photo ops. But it's usually just idle chatter - or, at most, we're only thinking in terms of trying to discourage the constant intrusiveness of such requests.

But I really do think there could be some serious moolah to be made from this phenomenon. Most of these goofy young men are only thinking about a snapshot they can carry around in their wallet, or a low-res digital pic they can display on their mobile phone. But how many people can you impress that way??? How does that even begin to compare to the grand ego festival that is displaying your prestigious 'conquest' to the world at large via the Internet?!

And so, I give you - www.myforeigngirlfriend.com, a website where dopey Chinese boys can try to convince the great web-surfing public (and delude themselves) that they really do have a glamorous foreign lover.

I think women like H could make a tidy living off something like this.

Any far-sighted venture capitalists reading out there??

My brilliant website ideas

Every once in a while I come up with an idea for a website that could, I think, really take off and become a substantial money-spinner.

Of course, these are usually bar conversations, the creative fire fuelled by alchohol - and the crucial details have often become lost the next morning. Even if they haven't, I'm never likely to get around to doing anything about them. So, if you are a budding Internet entrepreneur, please feel free to steal my concepts and turn them into cash.

I've already mentioned on here www.touchthemonolith.com, my 2001-inspired life-changing maxims site.

I also commend to you www.stickinthemud.com, a site for fogeyish technophobes like me to use as a shelter from the explosion of online socialising. Leah has suggested the catchy tagline "Where curmudgeons meet" for this - although that makes it sound dangerously like a kind of social networking site itself. My concept was more that you could program it to intercept all your invitations to join bloody Facebook (and WAYN and Hi5 and Friends Reunited and whatever) and send out an automatic 'decline' notice saying something like -

"Get a life, you sad git!"

And that's just for starters. Oh yes, there are more.......

Anyone else want to play this game??

Touch the monolith

I have long had a notion to try to establish a website called something like www.touchthemonolith.com - referencing the sinister, totemic black gravestone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I hope nobody's snagged the domain name already.)

I'm not sure if it should be an entirely black page, or a depiction of the monolith from the film (surrounded by screeching prehistoric primates) - but the idea would be that you click on the black mass somewhere, and are treated to a succinct burst of life-changing, civilization-evolving wisdom.

Something like.....

"Bang the rocks together."

Or.....

"Eat the tapirs."

Or.....

"Marry outside your immediate family."

Or.....

"Use an alphabetic script."

Or.....

"Press 'Control-Alt-Delete'."

Or.....

"Never give a sucker an even break."

I should work on this more seriously. The advertising revenues could be huge.