This guy decided to film his son David coming out of dental surgery. Is this cruelty? You decide. I can’t imagine this kid thanking his dad for exposing him to the world like this. But it’s pretty funny.
“Will this be forever?”
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Cafe economics
Hands up if you’ve ever thought “opening a cafe would be fun”. This little article was just about enough for me to put my hand down to that question. Here’s a failed cafe owner elaborating on the costs of pursuing your cafe dream.
“A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you’ve found that guy, you’re already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You’re also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let’s say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.”
“Coffee was a different story—thanks to the trail blazed by Starbucks, the world of coffee retail is now a rogue’s playground of jaw-dropping markups. An espresso that required about 18 cents worth of beans (and we used very good beans) was sold for $2.50 with nary an eyebrow raised on either side of the counter. A dab of milk froth or a splash of hot water transformed the drink into a macchiato or an Americano, respectively, and raised the price to $3. The house brew too cold to be sold for $1 a cup was chilled further and reborn at $2.50 a cup as iced coffee, a drink whose appeal I do not even pretend to grasp.”
“But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.”
It seems the real cost was almost to the couple’s marriage – which the writer said was saved by a “well timed bankruptcy.
Today’s linkage February 6th
Best of the interweb
- Coffee – My coffee page.
- Tarzan Turnbull swings into a jungle full of trouble – Annabel Crabb on Turnbull#039;s fiscal stimulus opposition:
quot;Swinging through the trees, Tarzan Turnbull alighted before the dispatch box and, giving his chest a vigorous, if figurative thump, performed his most dazzling feat of machismo yet.quot;quot;His colleagues quickly caught the crazy-brave spirit.
quot;When somebody holds a gun to your head, maybe it#039;s a bit silly, but I say – #039;Well mate, pull the trigger#039;,quot; offered Joe Hockey, always a man for frankness in a crisis.
The Prime Minister won#039;t hesitate to pull the trigger, either.
The genius of his $42 billion gambit is that it is a sophisticated quot;Vote Yes, Or The Puppy Gets Itquot; device.
Anyone voting against it will need to explain to forlorn local kiddies why they don#039;t get a school library, or to sad-eyed single parents why $950 won#039;t be coming their way after all.quot;
Bandaid solution
Bandaids, on the whole, are pretty disgusting. I can’t think of anything grosser than going for a swim in a public pool and coming up with someone’s grotty second hand bandaid stuck somewhere to my body.
You’ll be happy to know then, that there’s a company out there taking bandaids to a whole new level of disgustingness (it’s now a word).
Scabs Bandages claim to have the world’s grossest bandaids. I can’t see anyone out there trying to claim that title.
Green cloud has silver lining
Roof insulation companies around the country are rejoicing. Proving once and for all that the best way to come out of climate change ahead is to invest wisely in companies seeking to mitigate the effects of rising temperatures and hysteria.
These Brisbane insulators say they’ll make millions after K-Rudd included free installation of insulation in the stimulus package.
The silver lining at the moment is for green businesses – but I reckon at the end of the day it’ll be the people producing air conditioners, freezers, icecream and cold drinks that will really reap the rewards of climate change.
Street Art: Square peg in narrow alley
This Tetris inspired street art (in Sydney, from Flickr) is awesome. I would like all my belongings to be Tetris inspired. Moving would be a breeze. Robyn would have to be chief moving consultant though – her Facebook Tetris score is still the best of my 600+ friends.
Studying the classics
Ever wondered what the cover of your favourite movies would like as a classic novel. Well, here you go and here’s the Flickr set.
And here’s the visual homage to the movie I based the title of my blog on. Sad really.
Shirt of the Day: That’s how I roll
This shirt is in keeping with my segway obsession. This is, I think, the third seqway related post I’ve made. I’d link the others if I could be bothered.
Runners up from the same site:
Open the bloodgates
Mosquitoes are nasty little bloodsuckers. Not to mention carriers of dangerous disease. So how should we educate the public on the danger? Cartoon infomercials? How bout unleashing a swarm on unsuspecting conference delegates?
The Queensland Government is spending a bit of money educating the general public on the perils of Dengue fever. The longer TV ads feature warnings not to wear dark clothes. Apparently dark clothes attrack the little Aussie mozzie. Who’d have thought. Perhaps a resurrection of Don Spencer’s “Little Aussie Mozzie” song would have been an appropriate piece of educational propaganda:
What may not be the most politically correct piece of anti-mozzie propaganda – but was no doubt more effective – was a decision by Bill Gates to release a swarm of mosquitoes on an unsuspecting audience at a Technology and Design conference in California.
F&Fs the chocolate for asymmetrical people
If like me you believe M&Ms are the superior candied chocolate snack you’ll be delighted to know you can now order your very own customised M&M. Maybe you’ve always been put off by your problem with symmetrical letters? Don’t like the “m” try F&Fs. Or a photo. Or a nice little chocolate candied sized message. Discovered thanks to Boing Boing.
UPDATE: It appears you have to phone them to get shipping to Australia rather than order online.
The best bits – February 5, 2009
Here's what has excited me from the blogosphere today.
- Deck out your iPod Video with a 240GB hard drive upgrade
- Twittering A29: Mark Driscoll#39;s Session
- Inter-Faith Relations
- 50 Tricks To Save Big Around The House [Home]
- Did you know? The transformation of the coffee bean
- Colors In Corporate Branding And Design
- 404 Error Pages, One More Time
- 35 Examples Of Beautiful City Photography
- Some thoughts on friendship
Driscoll talk gets twittered. Social networking and ministry converge.
Walking steak
This is apparently what a cow looks like after surviving a lightning strike. Incredibull.
Today’s linkage February 5th
Best of the interweb
- 10 Killer WordPress Hacks – Smashing Magazine gives a great rundown of cool stuff you can do with WordPress.
Stimulating discussion
There’s a bunch of interesting commentary on the current stimulus package and associated bickering. It’s stimulating, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The Libs are taking the high “unpopular road” looking to block it. Claiming they’re doing the right thing, while the Labor Party is politicking “like a scared soldier firing all their ammo at once” – not a bad quote there from Turnbull.
It’s a dangerous game keeping money from voters while calling for lower taxes. Looks a bit like protecting the wealthy. Trickle down economics. I know I’ll be annoyed if they block it.
If Rudd wanted to score maximum points out of this politically he should have gone with a much bigger figure than $950. Say $3000. Something the coalition would have to block, rather than just grandstanding. Then when they blocked it and triggered a double dissolution the coalition would have to try dislodging a popular PM, having just robbed the voters of $3000. Political suicide. How much is a vote worth I wonder…
Articles from the SMH are written by, or quote, the following people:
“Rudd, the fiscal conservative of last year, was attacking the Coalition government because it hadn’t cut spending enough. He promised to do more. He wasn’t worried about all those “neo-liberal” ideas on careful spending, balanced budgets and low debt. He was complaining it hadn’t gone far enough.”
Costello Re: the last stimulus package…
“If the purpose of the payment was to boost sales at Woolworths, the Government should have bought the goods and distributed them to pensioners and families. But it is a low-quality use of $10 billion.”
And more commentary from Annabel Crabb… on parliament yesterday…
“Hilarious nerd insults were exchanged.Rudd accused Turnbull of fancying Milton Friedman, and Turnbull retaliated by calling Rudd “Whitlamite”, the nastiest word in the Liberal nerd insult dictionary.
Then Lindsay Tanner accused Julie Bishop of having a soft spot for the Reagan-era economist Arthur Laffer.
Really, they all sounded like back row hecklers at a second-year economics open mike night.
Debate was then suspended for several minutes while a noisy band of protesters shrieked: “Human rights for all. Stop the intervention.”
In case you were wondering, they were not talking about the socialist state’s intervention in the free market.”
Even Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson, out here on an Australian tour, weighed in with this sterling commentary:
“”He (Rudd) genuinely looked terrified. The poor man, he’s actually seen the books.“[In the UK] we’ve got this one-eyed Scottish idiot, he keeps telling us everything’s fine and he’s saved the world and we know he’s lying, but he’s smooth at telling us.”
The last word goes to Economics columnist Ross Gittins – who explains that this stimulus is unusual but might work.
“But it will be the most anticipated recession we’ve had. Normally we get the recession and then the response to it. This time we’re getting the cure before we’ve seen all the symptoms.
Why? Because so much of the global recession we are caught up in emanates from the Wall Street debacle. Since the crisis reached its peak in October we’ve been able to see its consequences coming, like a slow-motion tsunami rolling across the Pacific.”
Best job in the world
It has been remiss of me not to post about the best job in the world earlier. We had an embargoed briefing on the campaign from Tourism Queensland a while ago and I thought “this would be fun to blog about”… except we signed confidentiality agreements.
Tourism Queensland had to jump through massive HR hoops to run this campaign so they deserve all the coverage they’re getting. Even if they did have the little mishap with fake applications at the start. The message is reaching all corners of the globe. Osama Bin Laden has applied. But his application was rejected. Here’s the video: