14.7.2012

Olympic silliness and fish finger recycling

The London Olympic games have become quite a farce, ahead of the games. Not just the general security paranoia and fuss, but now the organising committee is saying that you may only link to their site if you're saying nice things about them:
a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner.
I wonder how anybody can be this clueless? Particularly, some lawyer who presumably reviews and approves these policies? How are you going to enforce it? I, for one, will here say some objectionable things. The LOCOG is ignorant, and to confirm that, I link to their site in a graphic format - their policy is from this place: (Y) 

Note that my intention is to portray Olympic sponsors, such as Coca-Cola, GE, P&G and Samsung, in a derogatory manner. They have voluntarily associated themselves with a bunch of greedy fools.

But perhaps the silliest thing in London is that McDonald's has a monopoly for selling fries. This would be understandable inside the venues, to prevent outside vendors from taking in unfair profits when McDonald's has entered a sponsorship deal with the organisers. But: even existing, established businesses in the neighbourhoods have been harrassed and intimidated. That's not in line with the Olympic spirit as I learned it - admittedly, some decades ago.

So, now restaurants have been banned from selling fries or chips, except if sold with fish.

I have been defending McDonald's against various stupid boycott campaigns, but this time I think it is reasonable that I'll actually quit eating at McDonald's (and more importantly, sponsoring my kids and their friends with lunches there), until another, even more stupid (probably leftist anti-corporate) campaign gets my attention so that I have to reverse.


Advice to London restaurants: if you really have to serve fish in order to sell chips in London, I suggest you take the same strategy as we had in my country back in the bad old days of more regulated alcohol policy. Those days, it was forbidden to sell beer in a restaurant most of the day, except with food.

To counter this silly requirement, restaurants had special sandwiches made to be delivered with beer. No one actually said it anywhere in writing, of course, but the idea was that beer is served with a sandwich (in a wrapper) so that the restaurant meets the legal requirement of only serving beer with food. You never ate this sandwich. It was returned with the empty beer glass, to be served with the next beer to next customer. At the end of the day, the recycled sandwiches were thrown away as pig food (alas, no longer possible due to EU regulations).

Of course, every now and then a stupid foreigner would come and eat the sandwich (and possibly even complain about poor quality). Then someone would have to explain that this is just a way to get around stupid regulators.

Now, you Englishmen, formerly free, can do the same. Just deliver a fish finger, wrapped in plastic, with every portion of chips. The happy customer can then return it to be used with the chips of the next customer.

This, or just serve Freedom Fries instead of chips.