Sideswipe

The Australian "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign was a little ripper and stirred up a shed load of controversy. Britain was iffy, Canada banned it and it could not be translated into Japanese. It even inspired a parody which changed the jingle to "Where the f ... hell are you?" and used some not-so-pleasant images of Australian life (the parody was viewed about 30,000 times on youtube.com and is well worth a look). Unfortunately, this didn't prevent Tourism Coromandel being a sheep.

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Putting the Games in perspective: Colin Moore reports that the Calgary Herald had a very small piece in its Sports Monday section headlined "Canada closes with 86 medals". "I had to read the section twice to find it. Like who cares about the Commonwealth Games. Certainly not Canadians - and they got 86 medals."

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Crime wavelet: The Timaru police notebook for Tuesday, printed in the local paper: "A Ranui Ave letterbox was damaged."

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A reader writes: "Yesterday morning two senior lady collectors for Child Cancer's fight the monster appeal week campaign set up digs outside the ASB Titirangi, as they had done for years. They had barely started rattling their donation buckets when a staff member asked them if they had permission to be in front of the bank. Gobsmacked, the collectors said it was arranged by the collection organiser. He returned saying that they didn't have permission, and could they move along. He then picked up one end of the table and insisted they move along a bit."

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A pig of an ad: Don't you hate teaser ad campaigns? That's when those with too much money splurge on ads without saying who they are. Okay, it sometimes works; like the "Party at Kelly Browne's" billboards from yonks ago. But the BNZ's onslaught of piggy banks seems just an over-indulgent branding exercise.