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Never come across that before? After watching the hassle and grief my folks have had recently selling their place, and the hassle our man Clive has had, I shall be staying put for the foreseeable!

Back to the OP, we have a xmas shop in Stratford which the kids love going to, and is aimed at Amercian tourists. Open all year round and very surreal, but the down side is they have a big sign on the door counting down how many sleeps to xmas  Something the kids always like to keep me informed about, and xmas lists have been long written...

Halloween, Bonfire night, then two months of being bombarded with xmas propaganda, it's that time of year again...

The wife is a devout follower of the church of Argos, no idea what she sees in the place.

Whenever I see Argos, I always think of the Michael McIntyre sketch, "the laminated book of dreams with a theatre for the poor for the sh**** show on earth"  Although with it's new high tech makeover (or at least our branch) the laminated book is going, while the row of seats and watching the conveyor belt has now all gone

Instead it's some convoluted confusing semi self service system, with lots of staff trying to show you how it works because everyone seems to be baffled.

Well it's interesting to see the tobacco industry is far from extinct. According to the beeb, British American Tobacco (BAT) is set to merge with it's US partner Reynolds for a £38bn deal.

Must admit, I didn't realise BAT was actually British owned. So it is now a huge company and has made a major US acquisition in a post Brexit world. 

It's a shame we have to be such good fag makers, although interesting to see (or at least according to Wikipedia) that until 1998 BAT owned Argos, before selling it off to what become the Home Retail Group. So looks like BAT are good at diversifying which will be inevitable as hopefully cigarettes will one day become a thing of the past.

Also just noticed that Sainsburys have now fully taken over the Home Retail Group, and are re-branding as Sainsburys Argos, which will see some standalone Argos stores closing as they are merged into Sainsburys stores.

I saw last night on the news that Australian Cattle farmers are keen for a new Anglo Australian trade deal as they see the UK as a huge growth market, one which has shrunk over the last 20 or 30 years.

Nissan is set to make a decision next month about whether it will produce new models at it Sunderland plant, which after Nissans CEO recently met with the PM, seems to be more reassured.

So there is some optimism and big business deals are being done in this post brexit world. Interesting times ahead!

Sorry Jan, one idea from Andy, one facebook suggestion for Trump, but looks like ideas are thin on the ground  

Although plenty of likes and shares!

Whats happened this week? Any ideas?

Ok geek check, had to investigate  What an amazing site. www.flightradar24.com

So you can see all the aircraft, airspeed tracks and everything. Fascinating zooming into Heathrow, you can see one landing while ones taking off. 

Quite scary when you zoom out a bit and see how congested it is up there 

Thanks Julia, can see me wasting hours of my life on here 

It's a really tough one anticipating search requests for a complex niche area.

One good avenue to test popularity or viability of promoting a particular keyword or search phrase is Google Trends (formerly known as insights)

eg: 

business travel security advice - no data, ie no ones searching or interested in it.

travel security advice - some interest, but a slow decline over 5 years albeit with brief spikes.

travel risk assessments - no data

risk assessments - more woolly search term, but lots of search data, but a lot is general H&S.

travel policies - lots of data, but looks like searches are more insurance based.

There is oodles of data out there, it's a case of analysing it to see if there is a viable market. Always easier to go the Virgin approach by exploiting a ready made market, rather than the Apple route of creating a brand new one. Although the latter is eventually more lucrative

Another trick I do when trying to anticipate search behaviour, is to play with small Google PPC campaigns. Similar to Trends, the keyword data will tell you how much interest there is in particular phrases, and no data will tell you there is no current market or interest.

Hope that helps.

Powerful stuff John, I rally feel your pain. How long ago did you send it? Did you get a response?

I'm with Barney with my cynical radar on full strength.

Few people will argue that no one should be publicly named and shamed before being convicted.

But we have a whole industry devoted to naming and shaming, it sells newspapers, generates publicity for organisations, and keeps the legal system and shyster lawyers in business.

Stop buying the daily fail and currant bun, and ignore people that crawl out of the woodwork 30, 40 years later with tales of woe for promises of cash.

I can't imagine the distress to being wrongly convicted, because in the eyes of most of us, there's no smoke without fire. Which means in real terms, your life is left in tatters, regardless of being proven innocent.

If squeaky clean Sir Cliff isn't immune, then I'm just waiting for the Terry Wogan allegations to start surfacing. "I got fondled with a blankety blank cheque book and pen" 

Back in June, commander in chief of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburgs laptop was spotted in a photo with tape over the webcam and microphone.

I suppose to keep things in perspective, you need to have something of value to make it worth while for hackers to choose you versus 100 million+ other computer users. 

IMHO I suspect taping up webcams will become a modern day Tinfoil Hat syndrome.

I'll stick with decent security products and common sense versus gaffer tape

Our resident cartoonist Jan is open to any ideas for our weekly Friday Funny cartoon.

It's nice to keep it topical and current if possible, but pretty much anything goes (as long as it's family friendly ).

So if you have any ideas, feel free to add them in the thread below. Jan normally draws up the cartoon on a Thursday, so it's ready for Friday morning. So we need any ideas by Thursday morning latest.

If you fancy a nice souvenir for the downstairs toilet and your idea is chosen, for a small(ish) fee Jan will put the original artwork in a frame and send it to you.

So are the creative juices flowing? Any comic genius's out there?

Cartoons can be about absolutely anything, but preferably newsworthy so people understand it.