Rising Up In Darlington County

[peterbirks]

"Sex Slave Cult Discovered In Darlington".

Have you noticed how, although movies like that David Bowie/vampire flick tend to focus on the sexual deviations apparently rife in metro New York and other urban hotspots, when it comes down to it, bizarre sex cults, swingers' clubs, voluntary cannibalism (which led to a great headline from my friend "What's Eating The Germans?") and the like, all seem to take place in suburbia or the "normal" provinces?

I had no idea that there were 25,000 Goreans worldwide, people who have constructed a philosophy around the Chronicles of Gor — quite astoundingly bad science fiction written by John Norman which I thought only adolescent males read after they had gone to bed. But the Darlington cult went one better than that. These people were Kaotians, a splinter group from the Goreans.

They had a photograph of the house in which this cult was based in Darlington -- a pebble-dashed terraced house in Darlington which explains why property prices in some parts of the world will never really attain the heights of Manhattan or central London.

You have to wonder how boring the lives of these people must be for them to head off into a land of cults based on novels written solely to pad Mr Norman's burgeoning bank account. Do these people have jobs at the local DSS, or as low-level hospital administrators? Do they, indeed, have jobs at all? Did the guy who put this together just think of it one night after rereading one of the Chronicles for the 25th page-stained time? "I know, I'll turn this into reality!", he thought, in a moment of what must have seemed mind-bending clarity.

Apparently 350 of these people meet in pubs and clubs throughout the north-east over halves of shandy and two-hour pints of bitter. Just goes to show, as they say up north, there's nowt so strange as folk.

Busy this weekend, so updates may be sporadic, if at all.

Comments

More Mysteries

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Why do I keep getting junk mail from Informa? They've given up on my 3 month trial of Music Copyright Weekly or whatever it was and now I'm being sent World Accounting (ed Peter Walton isn't you under a pseudonymn is it?) offering me essential coverage of IFRS - as befits the only publication to attend IASB's standard setting meetings. A snip at £921 for 10 monthly issues. I think I'll pass.

Re: More Mysteries

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

You keep getting junk mail from Informa because we are now a company of innumerable divisions, all of which seem to be overrun with marketing people (to the extent that Editorial might have a right to claim to be an "endangered species" and then I could say "well, perhaps we deserve to be extinct") and all of which now have "list researchers".

These list researchers scour all known sources for names and addresses of people who might, just might, be interested in an Informa publication. Then you get what is known as a "forced free trial", accompanied by buckets of "last chance to subscribe at these prices!" inserts. The worst thing (for you) that you could do would be to actually subscribe to something. Then you become a real "live one" and you would get phone calls from the sales people about other publications.

Best options: Return mail with "Never at this address" or "Dead". There's then a small, very small, chance that you will get taken off the list(s).

I have argued at some length that there is a long-term negative effect on the Informa brand by too much marketing. Part of it, for example, can be that my own subscribers get my newsletter automatically filtered out, because anything from Informa is automatically assumed to be Spam.

However, marketing answers (quite reasonably) that it's all a numbers game and that they have to send out thousands of these bloody things to get the planned 1% (or whatever) response rate.

It's no use saying they should target more accurately. If they get a 50% response rate then, by their maths, they need to market to more "marginal" cases, because the ROR on these marginals is still positive for Informa. The ongoing negative effect on the brand is not considered (well, not by marketing).

Does that make sense?

And, no, I'm not Peter Walton, and I don't know where World Accounting Report comes from. It isn't Informa Professional, though. We're just banking, legal and insurance. However, if you want a quick run through on IFRS, I'm your man. Oh, no, I'm not. I hate it (and IAB, and GAAP).

The farce here is that hardly any insurers (and no life assurers) use these standards when they publish their figures, on the grounds that GAAP and IFRS don't accurately reflect the goings on in the insurance business.

So you get adjusted operating profits, "real rates of return", risk-adjusted capital, and so on.

PJ

Re: More Mysteries

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Well it claims to be Informa Professional and out of Mortimer Street.

There is a very definite Readers Digest effect to these things now. An in-depth discussion of IFRS, GAAP and the rest of the alphabet soup of high-end accountancy is not of much use when you're sorting out the petrol receipts of a violinist in Croydon and so I'm a missed target.

But there is technical stuff at lower levels that Informa just might be able to produce, but it would end up in the recycle bin now because it comes from Informa.

I'd just assume that accountingweb.co.uk do it better and faster.

Re: More Mysteries

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it comes from Mortimer House (which is over the road from us), but there's always the possibility that it's stuck onto something like the legal section. Most of our editors tend to be freelancers. I'm a rare breed, actually having a salary and pension rights (well, a "money purchase" scheme, actually).

Like you say, there's the "throw it away anyway" danger. Alliance & Leicester (and British Gas) now put so much marketing material in with their communications that I am sure there has been some internal dissent, because it's a valid excuse to say that you failed to see an important communication on the grounds that you assumed it was, like nearly everything else that they send, a piece of marketing.

Part of the problem is that, for those in the know, most stuff can be found out for free these days. So we tend to market (successfully) to larger companies where there is less tie-in between spending money and personal wealth. The chief librarian at a major accountancy is not likely to worry about the difference between £900 and £950. His or her major worry will be to make sure that he or she spends the maximum allowed, to ensure that the budget is not cut the following year.

I think that companies like Informa will head down the path of bespoke solutions for major operations, with smaller companies left to fend for themselves on the web. If this means a lot less marketing and less money wasted on junk mail, this will be all to the good.

But what does this have to do with sex slave cults in Darlington?

PJ

Re: More Mysteries

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding the sex slave cults in Darlington:

I was reading the Sun while munching fish and chips in a cafe on Kings Road today and was struck by a side-story concerning a teenage boy who's become involved in this cult. His mother had tried to reason with him and get him back, but somehow this hadn't worked.

It seemed to be a genuine shock to her that he'd rather live in a household where young women did all the work and performed anything he demanded sexually.

Hello!!??

DY

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, this article was the talk of the control room this morning, particularly among those who had commuted in from Darlington 18 miles away. There really is that little to do up here.

nowt so strange as folk

nowt so queer as folk, hence the TV show title, and I shall leave the semantics of what queer means to those who have reclaimed the word.