A combine harvester

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas

A combine harvester

Inventions that combine things such as chicken fries and Posh and Beck have Peter Vegas in a spin. It’s the holy grail of unions, he says.

The sound of one-handed backslapping

Apologies for banging our own drum, but we did rather well at the Magazine Publishers’ Association Awards last Friday. Idealog picked up the Best Business Magazine of the Year, and our very own Matt Cooney was named Business Editor of the Year.

Business Designer of the Year went to smiling assassin Adrian Clapperton, and the besequinned Su Yin Khoo picked up custom Cover of the Year for her work on Inspire magazine and business Highly Commended for the Idealog website. Was it worth losing the monkey for though?

All Good

This week, HB Media (yes, that’s us) launched Good magazine. It’s all about sustainable living, and err, being good. In fact, Good is so good that it’s Totally Cool according to Greenland New Zealand, which has certified the magazine as carbon neutral.

Good hit the stands and letterboxes around the country this week.

Rapt you’re still here?

Think what you like about religious people, but they do have that certain je-ne-sais-quoi attitude towards matters entrepreneurial. How, for instance, would you build on the concept of selling after-life insurance to people?

By charging US$40 a year to provide an email service for those who have bought the after-life insurance, of course. Called Youvebeenleftbehind.com, the site lets you email up to 62 people six days after Rapture, to say “Sorry you can’t be here in heaven with us. Seven days of Tribulation under the global government of Antichrist can’t be much fun.”

Yeah, it’s for real apparently. Been going since 1999, and has paying customers.

NZ Lomak served up at MoMA

Big congrats to Peter Haythornthwaite. His innovative light-operated mouse and keyboard, or LOMAK, that lets people with severe physical impairments such as cerebral palsy operate a computer—without special software or other modifications—will be on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from now on.

Peter joins modern design greats such as Apple, Dyson and Volkswagen at the MoMA. Here he is, helping to judge our Ten for Tomorrow and talking about how to protect his ideas in Idealog.

(This item comes with apologies to any Ah Bengs/Lians and Mat Rempits for the atrocious food pun.)

Our man in Menton

Jason Smith is tripping through Europe and the US, blogging for Idealog as he goes. in Menton, France, he encountered “potentially the finest New Zealand fiction writer of his generation”, Damien Wilkins.

Listen to Jason’s podcast in which he talks to Wilkins, and read his blog on our website.

Hawkeye hawks hydrogen hopes

Well, not quite, but Hawkeye did take a trip to Iceland last year, aghast at the sky-rocketing per-gallon petrol prices to check out Snorre and mates making Vettn or hydrogen.

Icelanders, faced with dwindling and ever-costlier oil supplies, reckon they can use the volcanic ground they tread on to create an alternative fuel for cars, trucks and fishing boats.

Ignoring the rather scary Graf von Hindenburg hiccup in the thirties, hydrogen has been mooted as the fuel of the future. As Iceland has an abundant supply of renewable energy (yep, those hot volcanos poking through the ground), they’re thinking of using it to make hydrogen to replace petrol and diesel.

In theory, hydrogen is a lovely, clean-burning fuel that will solve all sorts of energy issues in one fell swoop. In practice, however, hydrogen seems to introduce more problems than it solves, including producing more greenhouse gases than petrol cars.

Would you like prostitutes and a cavity search with that?

There’s no holding back those wacky .start creatives in Munich working on the BK account. “Pickle in? Pickle out? Only you decide how you want your burger.” Charming. Boing-Boing was tipped off about another instalment in the Burger King tray liner series, called “An ordinary day at VEG CITY Airport: a well-trained team of pickles make sure that only the freshest vegetables enter the city” that really isn’t what any normal parent would like to see underneath’s their kid’s meal. (Actually, who would be nasty enough to feed their children BK?)

Goes to show that it’s not only DraftFCB ad-peeps who are guilty of lapses in judging what constitutes a good idea, I suppose.

Semi-designed

It may be on pretty well into the year, but Semi Permanent will help you design the rest of it very well. New Zealand’s largest design event is for people in graphics, illustration, branding, advertising, motion graphics, fashion, film production, animation and more—so unless you drive a rubbish truck, you should get your tickets now.

Quote of the week

“I’m struck by the genius of melding two popular food items to form a while new snack category. I bet the guy or girl who came up with Chicken Fries isn’t working in front of the deep fat fryer. Straight off to a senior lecturer’s position at Fast Food University, I’m guessing”

—Peter Vegas visits dodgy burger bars late at night.

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, Idealog IP, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

  Juha Saarinen
  Politruk at Idealog

Idealog Weekly is sent to friends, subscribers and registered website users of Idealog magazine.