Competition Olympics, Leg 2

Do you remember the days when tayto crisp wrappers and teabag boxes had competitions on them? You'd answer some cryptic question about cheese and onion flavours and then you'd have to come up with a really good way to finish the sentence "I love Tayto Crisps because..." or "Lyons Blend is the only one for me because..." in less than ten words. Many of us tried, and just couldn't summon up the creative genius for the project. It was our Waterloo.

Some people were really good at it. They won cars and holidays in Majorca. Their children became copywriters.

Of course, at that time, there were no copywriters in Ireland. There were competitions for slogans on the back of Cornflake boxes. The whole country was full of amateur enthusiastic copywriters hoping to get a free car or holiday in a time when Ireland was not the fourth wealthiest country on the planet.

Others, and this flavour is definitely in the general air in Ireland, wrote any old shit in blue biro and saved their tokens, sending them in with the cheery expectation that "if you're not in, you can't win". I love this aspect of Irish consciousness. It really gives the country its character. It's the same kind of spirit that will see my parents donning their wings to go and swim in the hotel pool in Majorca later this month.

My mum is in her fifties and my dad is in his sixties and there they'll be, swimming around happy as larry in their wings. They're becoming stronger swimmers with each sun holiday they take, I think. And they didn't win their holiday from a teabag box. They paid good money to get out of the rainy Irish summer for a week or so. May it shine on the island of Majorca that week.

Clearly my opening competition was too much for you, because there has been only one guess posted in the tumbleweed zone that is my comments section. Well it's just a good job I'm not crippled by a need to be popular, is all I can say.

So here's another competition. It will be combined with the first and maybe further ones, and we're gonna have winners dammit! I repeat: there's going to be three plinths, one high one in the middle with the number ONE on it, and two lower down ones saying 2 and 3, like the trains that take me out of here. There will be flower garlands, medals and I may well don a bathing suit to present the thing, should such a need arise.

Drumroll drumroll drumroll drumroll

Complete the following sentence in ten words or less:

"Lucy Takes Off is the only blog for me at the end of a hard day, because..."

Bated breath. Arched toes.

What do you do if you're a writer and you want to work professionally in this town?

You take this internship, probably. Get in at coal bunker level, then spring.

But the best bit of all is that the site is horribly badly copywritten. And this is an online marketing company's website. I feel like craigslisting them and offering to edit their site for them. It might be fun.

Listen to these words: Organic Page One Listings, Organic Search Engine Optimization Experience, True Brand Advocacy, Online audience development, Viral Marketing Concept Development.

or this paragraph:
-----, which excels in online audience advocacy development, has teamed with ---, a full-service environmental consultancy online social responsibility programs to companies involved in the supply chain of developing any structures that may have environmental impact. These include such firms as global banks, construction companies, real estate developers and sellers and more.

These people help corporations navigate their way through the mazes of environmental protection regulations in order to keep pumping toxic materials into the ocean, and get away with it.

It's the devil, I tell you. It's the devil.
Awfully designed, bizarrely enough. Horribly horribly basic site for the kind of services offered, but the language is beautiful. Beautiful in the magnificence of its dirt, like the east river. This is one guy, I know it, with a load of talented interns. The web design house doesn't even have a site up yet. This guy must be on crack.

But surfing this site is hilarious. One of his clients found itself, as a result of this man's consulting expertise, hot on the pages of remarkablewomanmag.com. This is where it gets really interesting. So I surf, amazingly enough, from remarkable woman magazine to Rosie O'Donnell's blog. Well this is new on me. My first thought was that this woman is apparently living in a post-breakdown epiphany right now. But I've just seen this .. she's raw. I like her.

Clearly she shares the obsession with Photo Booth that has been going on here since I discovered it on day one of opening this computer.

I am loving loving loving having this computer, by the way. It's gorgeous. I am currently living a life of a professional (ie. hack for hire) writer and it's interesting. I am also at this point in up to my arse in love with New York city. It's far deeper than I had ANY IDEA the last time I lived here. It's a very different life, and in many ways exactly the same. But mark my words, very different.