Skip to main content

A little almsless fun.

There is a strange emergence of begging on the Internet. I'm not talking about Nigerian email scams.

Panhandling plain and simple.

Check out payourmortgage.co.nz. A Christchurch couple have put up a site inviting you to donate spare cash to them for no other reason than to pay their house mortgage. There's no benefit to you. They don't offer any reasons why you might want to give them anything.

I'm bemused.

It's not the first time this has happened - or that the national broadcaster has given it airtime. (Watch the segment on CloseUp) Perhaps you remember Jacqui Thomas - the Millionaire Mummy. She wants, unashamedly, to make a million dollars by telling you about how she is making a million dollars. Why a million bucks? Why not? At least Jacqui (whom I know personally and actually like) is offering something of value in return for your subscription.

Here's my take on the idea.

I'm inviting you to give me a thousand dollars (NZD). I offer and expect nothing in return.















Click the button to use PayPal.

Go on, you know you want to...

S'a funny old world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer