You should, perhaps, be concerned if

- the bar you've walked into has karaoke advertised as starting at 9 am.
- you work for an organisation who've just posted a loss of £225 million.
- you work for HMV. 
- the burger you are about to eat is a tie in with a summer blockbuster.
- it claims to be something "flavour".
- your only hope of rescue is a deal with a Chinese car manufacturer.
- it costs you more than £2 a minute to answer the question you've been asked.
- their answer to 4 minus 2 isn't "2"
- it's a free scratch card with a peak rate telephone "winners hotline".
- it's damaged repaired. 
- it's reconditioned.
- the brand name isn't spelt quite the way you remember. 
- the unsolicited pop-up on the website says "trusted download".
- the healthy option has more fat and salt than the unhealthy option.
- your Orange juice has had colouring added from something that isn't an Orange.
- your fruit flavour drink contains vegetable fat. 
- it has "modified starch" listed amongst the ingredients. Unless it is wallpaper paste.
- they associate sporting prowess with drinking fermented vegetable juice.
- they associate "extreme" sports with their chemical tasting energy drink.
- it's an "extreme" sport. 
- they use a local radio DJ to advertise their products. 
- Jools Holland likes them. 
- their latest album consists of cover versions and contains the word "Songbook"  
- what they do is prefixed with the word "celebrity."
- it is referred to as a "house spirit."
- they refer to Carlsberg as a "premium lager". 

Welcome To Fear. Part XII

Death by music festival

Vaguer than Eric "Vague" McVague. The least specific person in Ambiguous-ville

Long term readers (both of you) will have probably gathered that I'm fairly direct about things. A spade is always a spade, never a non-autonomous personal excavation contrivance. Yet here I am, just about to do the very thing I don't do. Indeed as this is all I'm going to post (at this point at least) it renders whatever it is I'm referring to completely meaningless. Or rather it would be meaningless if I wasn't flagging up the fact that it isn't. 

See? 

And all I'm prepared to offer up as way of an explanation is a quote I found a while ago, which rather neatly sums things up.

"Idealism is what precedes experience, cynicism is what follows." 

Or rather it almost sums things up.   

We used to sell music.

Just to mention this in passing but HMV (remember them?) have been granted a two year stay of execution by their creditors. This comes the day after I visited my local branch and noticed that they have reduced their CDs down to two half aisles. Or, to put this into context, roughly a sixth of the space they devote to DVDs and half the space they waste on Ipod accessories. 

Them lasting another two years seems hopelessly optimistic.