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How to advertise a pole dancing club

How do you advertise a pole dancing club on TV? Just be straight with people. Or at least that's the philosophy that seems to have been adopted by the Valley Ball club of America. Check out their ad below(via the Consumerist):

Meet Spy Ted

More madness on the baby monitoring front... This Ted has a video camera hidden in his nose so you can spy on even the brightest of tots without them realising.

Says the manufacturer TeddyCam: "It may look like an ordinary toy at first glance, but don't be fooled; the TeddyCam is smarter than the average bear. Despite his cuddly appearance, this bear is outfitted with an advanced baby monitoring system that lets you watch your child on your own TV, without running wires throughout your home. AC adapters are included." Via boing boing

Don't Kill the goose that laid the golden egg

Much hysteria this week over Google and the information it holds on us.

It's true that if search is to become ever more bespoke, Google and others like it will have to carry on building their databanks. It's a tension that could define the information age: a growing thirst for highly personalised or relevant knowledge on the one hand and concern about privacy on the other.

But images of Google as Big Brother are over-blown. No company in history has ever given consumers so much for so little. Gmail, Analytics, Blogger, Documents, Maps ... the list is long, full of innovation and growing every day. What's more, it's all free. 

More important, perhaps, Google is also changing the corporate ethos. The "greed is good" culture of the 1980s and 1990s has given way to a new altruism - in Google's case a desire to better organise the world's information.

Of course in the long term it could all go tits up. Google could fall into the wrong corporate hands (there are many) or America could go the way of dozens of democracies before it and become a police state. But that's a different proposition entirely and not one that should stop the company in its current, largely benign, incarnation pursing the ultimate in search.

For the moment at least, it seems to me that Google remains a force for consumer good.   

Bolox to Hips

Can someone please tell me why the government is torturing itself so mercilessly over Home Information Packs (Hips)?

Labour came up with the idiotic scheme in opposition in 1995 as a way of embarrassing the Tories over one of the popular obsessions of the time - gazumping. By making sellers produce an information pack about their home before putting it on the market, argued Nick Raynsford MP, the whole sales process would be speeded up and gazumping made less likely.

The idea was fatally flawed from the start. At the heart of the home buying ....

Big Mother is Watching You

In the wake of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, interest in hi-tech monitoring equipment for children is booming. Some of it is down right spooky: There are cell phone spies that allow parents to read their children's texts; Jame Bond style trackers for cars that email you if your teen' starts speeding; alcohol and drugs testers that can be secretly fitted on the loo at home...

My colleague Richard Woods put an excellent piece together for last Sunday's paper on the subject, running through some of the products available and concluding that a lot of them are likely to do more harm than good. After all, kids won't learn to mitigate risks unless they take some in the first place. There is also the broader issue of trust to consider.

But one product that might be worth a look at is the Loc8tor (above), a British made device that can pick up a signal from a tag about the size of your thumbnail from as far as 600 feet away and then guide you straight to it. It can track up to 24 tags at once (great for large families!) and if you don't have quite that many kids you might want to attach the spare tags to your handbag, key ring or pets.

The device (which costs £99 for a top of the range set) can also be set so it sounds an alarm if one of your tags wanders outside a pre-defined distance. We've not tested one yet but plan to in the next few weeks. Let us know your thoughts on the practicalities and ethics of the subject...

Object of Desire N06

We love this book. In fact we think it's one of the sexiest coffee table browsers ever put together. Called Ice Cream, it contains more than 1,000 stunning images from 100 contemporary artists picked by 10 curators. It's been put together by the art publishing house Phaidon and showcases the work of emerging artists from around the world.

To be included, artists must have had solo shows but not yet shown large-scale works in a major museum. Each one gets a double page spread and a short essay explaining what they're about. British names to watch out for include, Phil Collins, Ryan Gander,  Anthony McCall, Momus, Eva Rothschild, Tino Sehgal, Doron Solomons and Donald Urquhart.

Ice Cream is out at the end of the month, packaged in a spectacular blue-silver hardback which shimmers and costs £39.95. Worried about the price? Well, we've got one to give away - we'll mail it to the first person to send us a half decent consumer tip which leads to a post on this blog. Get hacking!

New site 'sifts' good products from bad

Let me declare an interest here, the mother of my children owns a chunk of this site. But if you don't want to pay a subscription to Which? magazine or similar and don't trust user-generated product reviews, then try ProductSifter.com, a new website that uses specialist consumer journalists from around the world to 'sift' good products from bad. The site (motto: we hunt down the best so you don't have to) is free to use and covers everything from digital cameras to surfboards to London restaurants. In each case, the journo writing the review picks the best five options in each area so you don't have to spend hours trawling the web to do the same.

"Why trust our judgement?", asks ProductSifter on its home page. "Because ....

Bad Week for Veggies

It's not been a good week for vegetarians. First it was announced that Mars bars are to have the animal product rennet added to the mix, then it transpires that loads of other apparently veggie-safe foods are also contaminated with animal bits and bobs. The Guardian has put together a great list of nine products to avoid. Here are the highlights:

* Kellogg's Frosted Wheats - unless you want a beefy breakfast avoid these as they contain gelatine

* Tango Orange - not bad on the mammalian front but watch out for the fish gelatine

* Sacla Classic Pesto - chock full of Parmesan which in turn contains rennet made from calves' stomachs

* Guinness - lots of Isinglass, a form of collagen which hails from the swim bladders of fish apparently

* Muller Light yoghurts - yet more yummy gelatine

* Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce - contains anchovies

* Smarties - contains E120 cochineal "produced by extracting the red body material from pregnant scale insects of the species Dactilopius coccus", says the Guardian

* Snickers - more rennet

* Bovril - went veggie a year ago but is now back on the beef extract

And that's all for now folks. I'm off home stopping only very briefly to pick up a nice big kebab.   

Does Bank Charges Loss Mean Anything?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

According to a report on BBC News a district judge has ruled against allowing someone to reclaim bank charges.   As discussed here before, the campaign to reclaim charges is something I've been heavily involve in, in fact this morning I put out a press release that over 3,000,000 template letters have now been downloaded from my bank charges reclaiming guide.

This result was a bit of a shock, but there’s no cause for panic. This is not a precedent setting case (in other words no other court has to look at this decision and follow it). Across the country the banks are still paying out many tens of thousands a day see bank charges success reports.

My strong suspicion is ....

Starbucks Latest TV Advert (Not)

Satire, irony or just very bad taste? I'm not sure but it raises some important questions and is certain to spark debate. Take a look and let us know what you think...

Should I recycle the waste from carbon off-setting?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I'm off on holiday for a week.  As part of my new, slightly greener lifestyle, I now carbon off-set when I fly; after-all, as I'm using the right methods to get the flight as cheaply as possible I am prepared to do a little towards the environment.  Of course, I'm aware carbon offsetting doesn't really wipe out the damage done, but it is a step in the right direction and as I've also now eschewed UK flights for filming over the last year instead of the train, I'm at least trying.

This time round, I went through the list of companies offering the service, which I list in my Cheap Flights article to find ....

New Study Shows Food is Getting Sweeter

FOOD companies have doubled the amount of sugar they add to some of their most popular products — including soups and cereals — according to an excellent article by my colleague Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas in tomorrow's Sunday Times.

"Some of the biggest increases in sugar have been in breakfast cereals, and even wholemeal bread has become far sweeter", he reports. "It now routinely contains nearly a teaspoonful of sugar in every three slices."

Experts warn that ....

Five Books Jane Austen definitely did not write

Ahhh! Another day, another bloody Jane Austen adaptation! The woman snuffed it 200 years ago but still there is no escaping her mushy, cocooned take on Regency Britain. Not only do my partner and au pair seem to have the TV permanently tuned into the latest Austen tosh but last night they left me with the kids to go and see Becoming Jane (left), a Hollywood biopic on the woman. Anyway, out of spite and bitterness, here's a list of five novels Jane Austen definitely did not write. Feel free to write in with a few of your own...

1/ American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (below)
2/ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
3/Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh 
4/ The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
5/ Les 120 Journées de Sodome by the Marquis de Sade

Object of Desire No5

If you are one of those people who, like me, occasionally think about upgrading their happy snapper only to be put off by the complexity and bulk of proper SLR cameras, think again. The new generation of digital SLR cameras is family friendly in terms of not only of size and ease of use but also in terms of price. According to this excellent review and buyers guide by Natalie Hitchins of What Digital Camera, the super compact Olympus E-400 (pictured) is best for families, coming as it does with two lenses. The Canon EOS 400D is best for entry-level users. Both great objects of desire....

Gain £100 from your old mortgage lender in a phone call.

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I saw a welcome stampede to get cashback from mortgage lenders last week. Normally I don't like having my inbox swamped, yet this was a welcome triumph.  It's all to do with to mortgage exit fees. I did my usual weekly slot on LK-Today (the post 9pm part of GMTV) about the fact that ...