Chris Hansen’s blog

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Every so often the UK-based magazine the Economist publishes a partially tongue-in-cheek economic “statistic” called the Big Mac index. This measures the ratio of a country’s currency to the US dollar vs. the ratio between price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in the country and the price of a Big Mac in the United States. The percentage difference between the two ratios is reported and, assuming that costs in each country are stable, indicates whether the country’s currency is undervalued or overvalued against the US dollar. Whew!

The Economist published its latest Big Mac index on July 24th. This week, they published a correction, the last sentence of which is particularly recommended for consumption by the discerning reader:

Correction: Burger-lovers in Argentina were enjoying a special discount on Big Macs when we collected data for our index (July 24, 2010). At normal prices the peso is undervalued by 5%, not 52%. Sorry for the whopper.

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After Sogen Kato’s body, mummified after 30 years, was discovered in his son’s flat when civic officials called on him to congratulate him on being Tokyo’s oldest man, we now hear that Tokyo’s oldest listed person is missing and can’t be found.

So the real reason that Japan has so many centenarians seems to be that their children are hiding their bodies away to continue receiving the Social Security payments due them. I suppose that the mercury in the raw fish sushi is what’s doing them all in…

From Risks Digest comes a story of a promotion for Omo detergent in Brasil. The scary part is that, when you pick a special box of Omo off the shelf and take it home, a GPS unit hidden in the box starts transmitting your location to the company. Once you’ve gotten home, a team comes to your door, rings your doorbell, and presents you with a pocket video camera. So you live in an apartment complex? No problem! From the article:

Once there, the teams have portable equipment that lets them go floor by floor in apartment buildings until they find the correct unit…

You can therefore run, but you can’t hide.

The scariest part of this is what happens if you don’t open the door to someone you don’t recognise. The team can remotely activate a beeper in the box of detergent to prove their bona fides!

Another quote from the marketing company flack: “Anything can happen,” Mr. Figueiredo said. “We have to be innovative, but we don’t know what reaction to expect from consumers.”

In a country where there is a lot of gun crime and a high level of violence in some places, I can see a situation where someone from the City of God brings home a box of Omo, the team tracks them down and knocks at their door and then activates the beeper in the box. The person inside decides that he’s going to be blown up and comes to the door, guns blazing.

Thus it is appropriate that the marketing and promotions agency that thought all this up is called Bullet.

Douglas Adams had the right idea about marketing departments:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”

It is my sad duty to report that Mr. Cheez Doodles, Morrie Yohai, has died at the age of 90. Snack food junkies all over North America will be in mourning today. I would suggest lurid fluorescent orange armbands in tribute to his signature snack, which he invented in the late 1950’s.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.