Charles on… anything that comes along

Here’s what my inbox looks like just now:

This Gut Week, why not take a fun journey through your digestive system - from the mouth all the way to the large intestine! - with the Good Gut Game. Finish a level and you can enter our competition to win fantastic prizes. The competition closes on 31 August 2005, but you can still play for fun after that date.

Wow, thanks. (I’ve omitted the link - do let me know in comments if you want to explore a virtual gut. Obviously, as you’ve presumably got a real one yourself, you might find this unnecessary..) Sponsored and set up of course by a yogurt company.

Gut Week? I know that somewhere out there is a list of “Week Weeks” and “Day Days”. Jeremy Laurance on The Independent used to get deluged with calls from desperate PRs who hoped that the intersection of “[insert body part/disorder] Week” with their client’s interest would make him leap up with delight and shout “It’s a story, I tell you, a corker of a story!”

Nope - never happened. He focusses on such relentlessly non-commercial stuff as the epicentre of SARS (PDDF, of Medical Journalism Winners) and the antibiotic-resistant disease outbreak at Stoke Mandeville instead. Tchuh. Doesn’t he know there’s a Gut Week on?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Not required on voyage: an understanding of journalists (24 September 2004; score: 21.29%)
• Chapters in podcasts: OK, that's smart (30 June 2005; score: 21.01%)
• These things I found interesting.. 4 September 2005 (5 September 2005; score: 20.17%)

I’ve written two pieces in similar vein, so I’ll link to them here..

The first: Make music industry poverty history at The Register (I don’t write the headlines, but I’d be proud to have written that one).

The second: Music pirates don’t like laws - but nor do customers at Netimperative.

Fascinating stat: in Paraguay, 99 per cent of CDs sold are pirated (going by the IFPI); and the IFPI claimed, in the phone-in launching its latest report, that there’s no music business in Africa, outside South Africa. I found the latter hard to credit. Perhaps others can disabuse me. (Save the abuse for the G4 fans, please.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• IFPI drafts 'code of conduct' for ISPs (and guess who it favours?) (12 April 2005; score: 33.02%)
• The Baby Einstein piracy swizz (11 July 2007; score: 32.98%)
• Tony Glover, white courtesy cluephone please... (11 October 2005; score: 32.2%)