Lengoo Rants - views on Life and London

I love watching the 100 metre sprints as I was once dubbed the fastest kid at school when I was about 14 years of age… I’ve never really developed my natural ability to sprint however but have instead started to train myself for longer distance running to remain trim.

Anyway, when Usain Bolt ran 100 metre sprint at the Beijing Olympics and made a new World Record, I went looking for a video (as I hadn’t managed to catch it on TV)..  it was almost impossible to find due to copyright infringements on You Tube and the like.. anyway, I found one eventually but it’s not in English…

I think he could have ran it faster if he didn’t start showboating the last 10 metres or so!!

I recently came back from India where I had my engagement party, yes, I am getting married! I actually have a lot to rant about and I tried to put it all in an email which I have not finished.. I’m going to break it down and just write about it bit by bit…

Anyway, the first thing was that I noticed out there whilst wandering around the streets of Bangalore is that there was a bookseller selling books for 80 rupees.. that’s just £1. For that price, you really can’t go wrong. From the covers, I could tell that they were not original but for a laugh, I bought a few…

The pictures are below, the pages felt flimsy compared with original books.. the cover and pages inbetween. The Google book cover was at a slight angle

When I opened up the books, there were more surprises in store…

There were pages of nothing in between pages in the ‘What Got you Here Wont Get You There” book

In the ‘The Magic of Thinking Big” book, a section of the pages were put in upside down!

In all of them, the ink quality was pretty poor like very poor photocopies.

Still, I bought them as souvenirs for myself to show to friends and have a laugh… this is the first time I’ve seen pirated books and for such a small price, it was worth a look! Haha!

Over the weekend, I ran the British 10k London Run. The event is held each year and takes place in Central London. The starting point is around Hyde Park corner and it would be an ideal route for a tourist as you run down Picadilly, Pall Mall, then along the Embankment all the way up to Tower Bridge and back to Westminster Bridge. The finish point is WhiteHall.

My training had been shot to pieces over the last few weeks and I didn’t have high expectations of myself. My personal best for a 10km was 46 minutes a few years ago and I remember being absolutely knackered and close to death.

However, despite not running too quickly and not feeling dead, I did it in a respectable 48 minutes which I was dead chuffed about!

Pictures are meant to be available at this site below but alas, nothing yet…

www.marathon-photos.com/

 

There is a free concert/party on the 24th August to celebrate the official handing over of the Olympic Games to London. There are 40,000 tickets available so claim yours here:

http://www.london2012.com/tickets/

Today, I found this website called Telebid.. an auction site with a difference.

They advertise on their site how each time is a fraction of the recommended retail price (RRP) and this is no lie in that respect. The problem is that each bid costs you money.

I paid £25 for 50 bids and once you have done this, you log onto the front page and see all the countdowns for the items. I saw a 500 GB hard disk going for £5, and Nintendo Wii’s going for £30 etc…. sounds too good to be true huh?

Well, what happens is that each time you bid, the price goes up and you add 15 seconds to the lifetime of the auction.

Obviously, when people see the items going at bargain prices, people will keep on bidding and this lines to pockets of the guys at Telebid. Although they would sell an item at a loss… for example, the Wii went for £40 in the end and they would have lost out about £140 (considering the total cost of the Wii is about £180).

However, my 50 bids amounted to nothing and this cost me £25. There would have been hundreds of people who would have lost out too… say 100 people. This means that 101 (that’s the 100 people + me) people losing £25 which amounts to £2525 (101 people!)…. Telebid would have pocketted this and lost £140 on the sale of the Wii.

I must admit, the Telebid model is ingenious… I am usually rather careful of these things but I still thought I would give it a go. They have capitalised on the human psychological drive to bag a bargain and make money from it. I’m sure that the person who got the Wii at £40 is a very happy person for getting a great deal but how many bids did he or she have to purchase to have won it? I’m sure that it’s very possible for someone who could have done very well… got a fantastic price for something on their first try.

I think there’s a real element of gambling here… you need to bear caution but at the same time it is great fun and even better if you win.

If you want to have a look however, visit Telebid

I saw this picture today and just had to post it!

I was strolling through London the other day and it just occured to me that there is a big industry in free newspapers! In the morning, there was the Metro newspaper which usually sits in the entrance halls of the Tube stations. It’s a great little read for the journey into work and takes about 20 mins or so to get through.

I was also handed City AM which is a short and punchy business newspaper.. I rather like this paper as I like all things financial and it’s gives a quick low down on all the business news.. usually I can get through this in 10-15 mins.

Onsport is purely a sports paper which comes out once a week. I like this paper too, it’s a great resource for all things sport and has a calendar of the major sporting events.

Then there is ShortList which again, comes out once a week like Onsport. I have a feeling that they are made by the same company as they are of the similar size and come out the same day. I should really check now but I’ve thrown the papers away! ShortlList is your typical lads magazine (with no boobs) and features news, sports, tv, cars, movies, style, computer games etc. It’s like a cut down version of FHM.

After the typical workday, you’ll also see London Lite and The London Paper being handed out free also. There is usually very little differentiating the two but great little reads on the way back home if you’re commuting.

I’m sure there are many other newspapers out there which I’m not aware of but it just makes you think that it’s obviously a business model that works through advertising. There are hundreds of adverts in all these papers and it’s big business. The newspapers such as the Evening Standard which cost 50p used to fly off the newspaper stands as people liked something to read on the way home.. I now don’t see them selling as much as they used to… the growing tide of London’s free newspapers must be killing them off.

The competition is so fierce and eventually something must give.. I don’t know if there is a saturation point with the millions of people in London but so long as I get my free paper, I don’t care!

  Â

And there I was yesterday going on about the Derren Brown’s West End show which is showing at the Garrick and I didn’t even mention that a few weeks back, I got taken to the ‘Into the Hoods’ West End show.

To be honest, I had never heard of this one despite seeing the poster numerous times posted on the postbox just outside where I live. My initial impressions of the poster was that it was some sort of Notting Hill festival type of thing.. anyway, even when I got there (and it was a surprise until I did get there) I hadn’t associated the poster with the show.

Into the Hoods has been billed an ‘urban fairytale’ with characters Lil Red (Little Red Riding Hood), Spinderella (Cinderella), Jaxx (Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk) etc. The only way I can describe it is as a music, hip hop, body bopping extravaganza.

The story tells of two lost kids getting lost on some council estate, meeting some Fagan type character who only offers to give them money for their bus ride home if they could acquire some items for him. The journey goes through a series of acts with hip hop music, choreographed dance routines and a lot of fun.

Initially, I wondered if I had gone to some kiddies pantomine as the front few rows were all kids in their mid teens doing a lot of screaming and shouting but as the show went on, I enjoyed it more and more. The dance routines were cool and Spinderella had the most perfect abs I’d ever seen!

If you like this sort of thing, Into the Hoods is showing at the Novello Theatre… it’s great fun and younger members who enjoy hip hop will love it!

 

Â

I got really excited when I heard that Derren Brown was doing a West End show. I have posted a few articles on his amazing psychological tricks and abilities and I’ve always wondered if they could have been staged (especially if you see them on TV). Anyway, his show entitled “Derren Brown Mind Reader - An Evening of Wonders” is running until the 7th June in London at the Garrick Theatre and tickets cost from £22.50 to £40.

Initial reviews from the press have been good. I can’t wait to book my ticket and make my appearance.. watch this space!

 

Sorry I’m a bit late with the news but Boris has become London Mayor! I figured the people of London started to get sick of Ken Livingstone… there’s something quite odd about a guy who likes to breed newts. It wasn’t the newts that bothered me though, it was how he seemed to take as much money from the people who voted him in the first place.

He put forward the congestion charging in 2003 at £5. The whole idea was to stop people from driving their cars and push them onto public transport. I initially thought this was a good idea but then he put up the price to £8 after realising that it was easy money to be gained. I must admit, I do like the bendy buses which he introduced and I feel that there are more of them on the road. However, the Tube is still packed out after all these measures to stop people from using their cars… surely, if you’re going to make it inconvenient for people to take their cars, improve the public transport system that people will rely on.

If people voted Ken in again, it would have been more of the same. It is nice to see Boris as Mayor, I don’t know much about him and his credentials.. he seems like someone who is a bit eccentric but young (well, compared with Livingstone)…  certainly I think it’s good to have someone fresh at it who understands that change in our modern society is the only constant.

Visit his website to see what he is planning for us:

http://www.backboris.com/

�