149scam

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There’s a young woman sleeping rough against the bagel house’s outside wall. She’s sloped off against its face, like the small hand of a watch at two o’clock, and wrapped in an uncertain number of layers against the cold. At her feet she has an upturned hat with approximately nothing at all in it. As we get close, a companion, the scruffy type with a dog, walks across Brick Lane toward her, then jangles her awake by picking up the hat and peering hopefully into it.

“Fancy a smoked salmon one?” she asks him drowsily as he sits down next to her, “I’ve got two here and I can’t stand the fucking stuff.”

It’s pushing midnight on a Friday evening, and its cold. The clientele’s the same all year round – bewildered adults and apparently comfortable hipsters. As my fellow reviewer and I wait in line we pass the time by discussing whether it’d be worse for the world to end by nukes, militant communism or resurgent swine flu. The smell of baking bagels is overpowering.

Outside, a seamless flow of kids in their early twenties goes by; their individual features erased in the smoke from roll-ups and the cold, whetted air that forms on their breath. Guys clutch cans of Polish beer (it’s effectively BYOB, this place, though you may need to hide the hooch up your hoodie’s wizard sleeve) and chat themselves around into happy little knots by the door.

When our time at the counter came my companion ordered the classic; two plain bagels with butter. I did the same. The dish lacked the attention-grabbing, rousing quality that some readers may expect in a bagel, but don’t let that fool you into ordering anything different – the chefs here understand that a warm, plain bagel should make the customer feel like a ginger stepchild receiving its first hug from the man they’re learning to call daddy.

That’s the supremacy of their food.

Dinner for two came to £1.20.

Photos by Matt.

There’s nothing worse than hitting 2am and realising that 1) you’re out of hooch and 2) you’re too drunk / bone-idle to walk to the booze shop yourself.

Next time you find yourself in this rut, pull over your weakest friend. Fill their sweaty palm with a tenner and an iPhone loaded with this handy map. Then let him or her bumble out into the darkness, safe in the knowledge that they’ll probably be ok.

Map made by 149scam from Freedom of Information requests and Google Fusion Tables.

UPDANG: Took the natural step of expanding out to all 24 hour offies in London. Boom.

When, Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of Sao Paulo, passed Lei Cidade Limpa (the Clean City Law) in 2006, advertisers were no longer allowed to blot out the city’s sky with billboards or hoist neon signs above their shops.

Brazil’s advertising industry boisterously argued that the law would cost marketers their jobs, and that the public would be deprived of the information they needed in order to make informed purchasing decisions.

The pretext to the later of the two concerns is the assumption that there’s something inherently useful in adverts and the brands they create; that they allow people to discern the value of one product against another. (Perish the thought that without them people may start to make fewer purchases, or begin to preference products from companies that haven’t invested in sassy marketing companies and the budgets needed to plan and buy over entire cityscapes.)

Kassab’s supporters certainly didn’t have much truck with the ad industry’s complaints. The author Robert Pompeu de Toledo, quoted in the New York Times, described the law as “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash,” and went on to say that, “For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

Sao Paulo’s experiment in readjusting the ways and means in which privately created brands are allowed to interfere with public space has found a curious echo in this playful, and downright cool, installation by the Bureau de Mesarchitecture, in which the artists and architects have created a giant swing from a disused billboard.

Forget the obvious health and safety implications of such a device for one moment, and ask yourself;  if I had the choice between more sky-sized adverts for lagers, johnnies and cars, or rickety, huge swing sets, what would I choose for my city?

Cool. That’s that, then.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a young and often apparently fearful industry, which relies on the life-giving warmth of Google for sustenance.

As such, there’s now a well-established core of tiresome new media people, and SEOs, who take the opportunity to claim the sun’s falling from the sky each time Google make even the most cosmetic of changes. Despite all the yapping, none of these changes have bought about the SEO industry’s armageddon . Yet. (Though  this gent thinks it’s likely fairly soon, others disagree).

Today, the company appeared to be testing paid search results within the search engine’s suggest bar, thereby encroaching their paid search platform (which they like) into the realm of the SEO folk (who are nothing, absolutely nothing, to them).

The dimmly-lit blue results took us straight to the advertiser’s landing page from the search bar.

No doubt this will, if rolled out as a standard feature, be useful for confusing the average user into clicking those costly links delivered by the company’s increasingly diffuse AdWords platform (as well as making any Mechanical Turk based manipulation even more irrelevant).

In 2009/2010 there were just over three and a half thousand people sleeping rough in London, as seen by the charity Broadway London. Of these, 46% were encountered just once, whilst a core of 10% were seen more than ten times over the year. It is this smaller group who ‘live on the streets’ in the sense that most of us probably understand the term.

Broadway have recently published the findings from a fascinating pilot project that’s specifically targeted fifteen people from within this group, each of whom had been living on the streets for between 4 and 45 years. (If you’ve time to read the full report, it’s here. This post mindlessly parrots it, and will take simple seconds to get through.)

Rather than continue to encourage these people into hostels, the charity’s project provided each with control over a budget of up to £3,000 each, along with mentoring support.

Typical purchases included televisions and furnishings for rented accommodation and the payment of utility bills (the average spend was £860 per person during the project’s first year).

After 13 months, the majority of folks (7) have moved into accommodation, whilst another 2 have made plans to do so – results that far exceeded even the charity’s expectations from the study, which is now being extended into 2011.

The charity concludes that, “even long-term rough sleepers who say that they do not want to go into accommodation can choose to do so when they feel that they are in control of the conditions for making such a move”.

This scheme gently suggests that the provision of services to this at-risk group (48% of homeless people abuse alcohol, 30% have mental health issues, 33% are dependent on drugs) are more engaging and effective when they allow the individual to pick from an array of choices that they themselves have helped to put together.

We’ve written about the dangers of user generated content before (to recap, it baits the angry and confused into investing in brands that aren’t) and Private Eye’s message board column does a pretty accurate parady of the type of innane crap that quickly fills up poorly moderated shared spaces on the internet.

The recently rejected Labour party’s ‘Your Better Way’ website gives people the chance to let the new (unelected) government know exactly what they think about how the country should be run, through the revolutionary use of a google maps. Power to the people!

Errr… exept that the website owners seem to be exerting no editorial control over the content that’s going up there, which makes the thing appear…well, shit, really.

Safe to Comrade Woolfrey for the nudge.

Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ is a daunting and perplexing place, both quietly dignified and utterly eerie – a set of concrete pillars placed on an uneven, undulating floor, which visitors walk around and try to find sense in.

When EasyJet went with a Germanic theme for their latest in-flight magazine thing, the guys responsible for the fashion section decided that the centrally-located Holocaust memorial would be the perfect backdrop for their pictures (well, with Hitler’s bunker still underground and the Fritzl basement technically in “self-governing” Austria you name a setting that speaks so immediately of the German culture).

Photo from EasyJet's magazine

Unfortunately certain rogue elements and unidentified leftist fractions have taken offence to this, and Easyjet have felt the sudden obligation to remove, and pulp, all copies of the magazine that ran the piece.

To save EasyJet the time, the 149scam has decided to put together a locations list for the scampish Airline’s next fashion and pictures thing. Boom.

1) Chic Paris

Photo from Wikipedia

Ah, stylish Paris, does this earth hold a better backdrop for placing coked up models up against? And what easier location for the Easyjet crew to get to than the Pont de l’Alma – the city’s most celebrated tunnel, and one time host to the pregnant Princess Diana and the trailing pack of CIA/M15 agents who crushed her to death in its already magnificent interior.

2) Trendy Belgium

Photo from Wikipedia

Up and coming Ypres – MGMT and the whole of the Kitsuné stable have been seen on Methadrone round here in recent months, which means it must be pretty hot right now.

Unfortunately, the door policy of the Ypres Salient can be lacking – just look at all those uggers strolling around – however, we suggest juxtaposing some skinny, angular jawed models dressed in black against the white stones and unattractive people.

3) Quaint, Post-Industrial Chernobyl

Photo from Wikipedia

Fashionistas will tell you that Chernobyl is very much the new Cannes.

Ideas for shoot: boating shoes and distressed denims.

4) Rwanda

Photo from wikipedia

Check Twitter – Africa really is trending at the moment, and looks set to be the defining trope of  Spring/Summer 2010. Fashion twats see Rwanda as the Hoxton of Africa – shabby around the edges, sure, but with ace DJs you can just see out eating Dim Sum or whatever.

The title ‘Lord’ once carried with it illusions of genuine nobility; the Barbour wearing, well healed chaps who abounded in both cash and decency, guardians of the countryside and generous patrons of both charities and the tax man.

Unfortunately, it seems Lords are actually just as unstable and untrustworthy as the rest of us wanking wretches – just fix your viewing holes on this walking scrotum, Lord Pearson, for evidence.

With UKIP seriously up the shitter for all that dirty money they ate up, Pearson’ll be looking for a new home soon enough (even if he does think he’s up for the leadership), and so too, one assumes, will the party’s twenty thousand-ish supporters.

I wonder where they will go – obviously not to the BNP, whom the good Lord dismisses as actually ‘perhaps somewhat fascist’ (well fuck me sideways, I hadn’t noticed).

So….any other takers?