La pensée du jour

This is brilliant.

The link above leads to what I would describe as one of the greatest inventions of the modern world. It describes how a ticket dispensing machine in a Birmingham car park gives instructions in English until the car park becomes full - then it switches to German.

Genius.

Imagine the impact this could have on everyday life. Every time a kid spends too long glued to the box after school, the programmes would change to Italian documentaries. If someone tried to make more than 3 microwave meals a week instead of a decent home-cooked dinner, the microwave would start shouting at you in German. Students who wasted time on Facebook instead of doing work would be faced with something like:
нарусскомрезультатовзакрыть

That's Russian for.. I don't actually know. But, see, that's the point.

We would be forced to learn another language, which is clearly a valuable life skill, or else just stop spending so much time on pointless things.

Although, I suppose this blog could count as a pointless thing. Maybe at some point it'll start making me parlez le Francais.

Oh, merde!

University of Facebook

Anybody who has been on Facebook in the last few days cannot have failed to notice the massive increase in groups desperate for new members, eager to increase their numbers.

This is not simply due to the number of sad, shy, anti-social teenagers who long to have their life acknowledged via the power of social-networking, but can actually be related to graduates attempting to 'win' themselves an internship.

Saatchi & Saatchi have decided to award successful candiates with a summer scholarship, through a series of challenges described on the group page as 'The Apprentice meets Big Brother' (although I think we all know nothing could even compare to the current BB). The first of these challenges was to create a Facebook group, and then get lots of people to join it. The highest 50% of the groups made are allowed to take part in the second challenge.

Whilst this is all very interesting and oh-so-modern, it's also darned annoying. My entire Facebook news feed is filled with 'John Smith has joined the group 'If this group gets to 1,000,000,000 members then I will sky dive from a helicopter made from the fingernails of A-List celebrities, without a parachute, with at least three members of the Royal Family", and so on and so forth.

And where does it end? Will CVs only be accepted if they are recited (oh so beautifully) by Stephen Fry, with a million hits on YouTube? Will all job interviews take place on Stickam? Will degrees be given out via Twitter?

Who knows? All I can say is, thank God I have Broadband.