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Speech of J Proctor Knott, of Kentucky, delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives on the St. Croix and Superior Land Grant, January 21, 1871.

On January 27, 1871, a forty year old congressman from Kentucky, who was little known outside of his state, sought recognition on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. In the next half hour, however, he would change that. He would take up the question of whether federal lands should be given to the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad in order to build a new line that would run from Houlton, Wisconsin, on the St. Croix River, to Superior, Wisconsin, located at the western end of Lake Superior and, as it happened, close by a scraggly Minnesota village of some three thousand people, called Duluth.

According to the Congressional Globe, Knott was interrupted by “laughter”, “great laughter”, “roars of laughter” and “shouts of laughter” a total of sixty-two times. Once he had finished, the bill for the railroad was dead as it could be, and he had made famous, by mistake, little Duluth, which the railroad had never meant to put on the map in the first place.

Continue reading ‘The Untold Delights of Duluth’

Snakes on a Plane became is an Internet phenomenon. The title inspired bloggers to create songs, apparel, poster art, pages of fan fiction, parody films, mock movie trailers.. Snakes on a Plane has also inspired the creation of graphics for fictional movies about other animals in odd settings, like “Sharks on a Roller Coaster”.

A viral video entitled “Snakes on a Plane Early Auditions” features comedian Dave Coyne doing impressions of actors Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro, and muppet Beaker, doing casting auditions for the movie. The video has been featured on Digg, iFilm, YTMND, and of course YouTube, it was also included as enhanced content on the official movie soundtrack, showing that anyone with talent and an internet connection can attract the attention of the traditional media.

There are so many parodys!

The “auditions”

The “music videos”

Continue reading ‘Snakes on a Plane’

I was recently talking with someone who was telling me that as recently as 1979, or thereabouts, there was petrol rationing in Ireland, he remembers getting a lift from a friend into the city and then walking to his office (instead of driving to his office directly and parking outside).

Of course when I talk about petrol rationing, other hydrocarbons such as Diesel were also rationed so there was no loophole!

Continue reading ‘Petrol Rationing’

It’s happened to every one you send an email but you never get a reply.

Well if you email a small-medium sized enterprise (SME) company it is likely that your email will be read, but what happens then is the problem. It will be forwarded to someone else who will take care of it, but what if that person forwards it to someone else, who might be “out of office”, and so on. You might evantually get a reply after a month, but then again you might never. To test this use “Read receipts” on your outgoing emails, and watch as you hear that 35 people have read your email, but none have bothered to reply, be amazed at the interesting surnames and variety of address formats (firstname.lastname@example.com, f.lastname@example.com, lastname@example.com, firstna@example.com)

A company worth its salt would never ignore a phone call. If you call any SME (during business hours at least) someone will answer the phone in seconds, indeed if they let it ring out too often they might be fired, because others in the office can hear it, but not so with emails, they quietly dissappear, with an ease even greater then paper letters or faxes which must be physically shred. It’s not like asking for a reply is akin to asking for a favour, you are a potential customer, you have actually expressed an interest in some product. Perhaps these companies want you to phone instead? Look at their revenue generating phone numbers (not premium rate of course) but near enough.

Let me be clear if an email asks a silly question then it should be ignored, for example an email to info@ryanair.com saying “Dear Sir/Madam please quote me your best price for two seats from AirportX to AirportY” is silly, that customer should use the online booking system, which doubtless cost alot to create.

But when a company doesn’t have any system, when they just have brochure website they should reply to emails.

Continue reading ‘Why don’t they reply to my emails?’