Archive for October, 2009

Ok this is pretty miff…

Check out these toilet paper dispensers… I honestly don’t have much to say about them apart from WTF! and OMG!

I mean come on….seriously? this is rank and just so wrong on so many levels…. hahaha

I guess the question that you’ve got to ask yourself is…..

If the toilet paper snaps inside, do you stick your finger in to get it? Would you really? hahaha

[Thanks Justin you siff bastard haha]

- Marky Mark

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Thurs 15th Oct – Wed 21st Oct 2009

Well guys the event lineup for this week is:

Friday 16th October 2009:

Soul Shakers at The LightBox

Do yourself a favour if you haven’t been to The LightBox before, search for ‘The LightBox’ on YouTube and check how this place is done out, the walls and ceiling of this jol are covered with LED’s which turns out to be pretty frickin schweet.
Soul Shakers frequently do sessions at Bar Sia in Wimbledon and everytime they always go all out.
For more info check out: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=141648873800&ref=mf

L.U.S.H @ ARTESIAN WELL (Clapham)

Residents Dj’s:

♫ Lady Duracell (Push Fm / Get Lifted / Queen of Funk / Koko’s)
♫ Huckleberry Finn (Passion / Promised Land / SeOne)
♫ Nippa (Space, Playroom, Pussycat, Abstract, THAT,)
♫ Lewi FiveO (Ministry of Sound, Gifted, Egg)
♫ Sleazy G (Dirtydubbin / We Are London / Scala / Amnesia )
♫ Little Leigh (Audio Angels / Lush Funk / Pacha / Eden)
& friends

This is all going down Friday night at Artesian Well in Clapham
For more info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=151114788778

Not much happening on Saturday by the looks of things…

Bar and Club Specials

Bar Sia

(Wimbledon Broadway)

2 for 1 Cocktails from 5pm to 8pm on Friday

Suburban

(Hartfield Road, Wimbledon)

FRI – SUN 5pm till 8pm
2 4 1 cocktails, £8 Bottle House wine.
4 Selected Beers for £10 all night.

Down South

(Inner Park Road, Wimbledon)

Fridays and Saturday’s – Happy Hour 8pm – 9pm

2L Cane and Creme Soda jugs – £10
2 for 1 Dbl Cane and Creme Soda’s – £5
2 for 1 Dbl Klippies and coke – £5
Savannah, Castle Lager, Hunter’s Dry – £2
Selected Shooters – £1

Every Wednesday night is Durban Curry night at Down South, £5 for a curry and a dop, but make sure you call and book to make sure you get, because sadlyI went up tonight at around 8pm and the okes had already chowed all the curry klaar, as apparently its real good shit so I’ll try again next week.

Well thats your debauchery info for this week, have a wicked weekend and keep London rocking!
Lots of Halloween Parties coming up soon so get ready for madness

If you know of something going down and you want people to know about it, let me know with the link near the top left of the page and I’ll include it.

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

Wimbledon club comes clean on their promotion issues

If you aren’t up to speed with yesterdays rant please read this post before reading this story because if you don’t you’ll be left rather confused. It’ll be like watching the last two movies of Lord of the Rings without watching the first to know what on earth or middle earth should I say is going on…

As some of you may have noticed, yesterday I had a bit of a rant about a certain business harassing people on FaceBook spamming friend requests and hijacking peoples friends lists including my own in order to increase their popularity in the area. You may have noticed later on in the day that the management of the club in Wimbledon released a sincere public apology for what had been going on. This was the apology…

Managment says:

October 13, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Good afternoon all,
Firstly I would like to apologise profusely to all who feel that their facebook accounts have been abused or ‘hacked’.
Although I don’t wish to pass the buck, or shift blame I would like to inform you all that we made the HUGE error of out sourcing our promotion and FBook accounts. This will not happen again.
This gross misconduct has only been brought to our attention in the last week.
As far as sending out events are concerned, I apologise for any over use of this too and on the one occasion that I can think of where a few mails where sent out for the same event, this was, unfortunately my fault for not knowing exactly how to do this in one go, and thought I was sending a few at a time.
Once again, our sincerest apologies, and rest assures the person employed to do our promotions and profiles is no longer.
If anyone would like to respond with any further issues please feel free to email us concernedfbusers@live.co.uk

Now I’ve got to say this and like I said yesterday, that took some balls, I must say I quite respect that.
For them to come straight out into the open from under the hale of gunfire to stand up in front of a large portion of their potential clientele and say, you know what? We did cock up and we cocked up badly, we are sorry and this is what we have done to correct this massive cock up, is something that needs to be appreciated. When I saw that come up yesterday I thought, there we go, that is exactly what everyone who has been hassled needed to hear and a degree of respect is due for that. They could have launched an endless chain of ridiculous excuses blaming this and that or not apologising at all but I think its fair to say what they said was right and the apology is accepted in my books. Mistakes have been realised and justice has been served and the problem eradicated.

Although other promoters must not think that they are in the clear, as part of this rant was also directed at promoters with what I mentioned yesterday, spamming people with loads of messages for the same event. I hope this has given you a bit of an insight to the negative effect that you are having on yourselves, because at the end of the day the more you hassle people with the same thing, the more they aren’t gonna wanna listen to your shit in the future… simples   so keep it tidy and you’ll find people will respect that and actually take note of what you have to offer next time without heading straight for the ‘Delete’ or ‘Mark as Read’ function before opening as I tend to have to do on a daily basis. The successful ones are the ones that do things right and I hope Gareth doesn’t mind me using his crew as an example, but DirtyDubbin tend to do things properly (“But I receive loads of stuff from them Marky Mark” I hear you say) the truth of the matter is that they have quite a shitload going on so its quite obvious that you will, but what you will notice is that you may get an event invitation for an event but then get a reminder closer to the time for that event which is still within reason… not 10! So for existing promoters and up and coming promoters this should give you an idea as to how people feel about being harassed all the time on FaceBook, people are getting really tired of it. So do it properly, do it smartly and don’t be shneaky shneaky about anything because as much as the amazing promo gurus that you may think you are, people are not stupid.

So guys, problem solved, hope everyone is happy now. I just want to say a big thanks to the club for taking the criticism so well and I’m sure some of the gunfire yesterday has sparked off a few ideas where things can be improved, which is good in a way because most clubs never get to hear it themselves, yet everyone else does.

Might even pop a few of your weekend specials in tonights “Whats Going Down in London Town” post for being good okes about it, so email me details

- Marky Mark

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Local companies want to cash in on your FaceBook friend lists… Every Saffa in Wimbledon in particular should read this…

Incase you’re not all there or completely oblivious to what goes on around you,  you may have noticed that FaceBook has fast become an absolute marketing goldmine for companies around the world.

Companies are moving away from buying large lists of out of date email addresses to spam the world trying to get people to buy their products and services and they have moved full force into social networking. Now this is pretty much a global overview and you wonder just how local it can be to you, well its already going on around you whether you know its happening or not. However there are certain people who blatantly abuse this priviledge and don’t use it responsibly without quite thinking of the consequences that may be waiting for them and quite unbelievably can’t see it until its smacking them right in the face. Now what they don’t realise is that abusing the social networking scene can ruin you faster than you tried to abuse it. FaceBook for one is quite a dangerous tool that needs to be treated with respect and used responsibly, because it can either make you and it can very surely break you, you can quite easily become a social outcast quicker than you can blink because remember, just about everyone that you have some sort of relationship with in the real world is reading your every move like an up close and in your face book… excuse the pun

So why am I speaking about this? Well I have a pure example, there is a certain club here in Wimbledon that seems to be abusing the benefits of Facebook and really and truly seems like they are doing this blindly with no plan; no thought process and no idea what is going on in the background, in the sense of what the people who they feed off in the area are discussing both online and offline, because for alot of people I’ve spoken to, it is seriously pissing them off. I won’t name the place, purely for the fact that hopefully they may read this and realise exactly who they are (which shouldn’t be too difficult) and for most of the people who have been harrassed with multitudes of friend requests already will know exactly who I’m speaking about. This at least gives them a bit of leeway to cut back; rethink their strategy on it and salvage their increasingly tarnished name amongst the local social scene.  Now I wouldn’t cause such a fuss about a club sending a friend request and if you wish, accepting it or ignoring it knowing that from past experience, depending on how aggresive they are with their advertising, there is a possibilty that your inbox in just a few days, will be filled with nothing but promo after promo, just from the one club. Now I do believe there is a fine line between advertising your jol and being a damn right nuisance causing the reader to scurry for the ‘Leave Group’ or  ‘Delete Friend’ links and there are very few promoters that stay within reason but it is true that some do and those are the successful ones, why? Because they didn’t drive you mad with loads of spam, meaning 20 messages for the same flipping event, party or drinks special.  The problem comes in when after you’ve ignored the friend request, literally minutes or if you are lucky, hours later you get another damn friend request from the same frickin place, so you ignore it and the same thing happens again. You then block it but then a few days later you get the same blerrie friend request again.  Eventually you realise that the way you got this one is because they have now signed up for another profile for who knows what reason, probably cause the previous one got deleted by FaceBook because of people reporting the spamming of friend requests. After checking my FaceBook blocked list, I now have 3 profiles blocked after getting spammed and all three are from the same club in Wimbledon. Now this is where it gets interesting…. as if getting loads of requests wasn’t enough, for those of us who have a large number of friends on our friends list this becomes quite a target for these types as in my case, I had my mates at work (in Canary Wharf) asking me why the hell they are getting loads of friend requests from a club in Wimbledon when they live no where near Wimbledon… I soon realised that they had gone through my entire friends list and added everyone I know because they didn’t need to be my friend to see the list in the first place. This behaviour really hacked me off and I’d be in my right mind to name and shame them but I won’t for now, well at least until I get one more frickin friend request from them and then its going up in black and white, but I have now blocked off my friends list from non-friends because quite honestly my friends are not there to be exploited and even if  money was offered, I’m certainly not gonna sell out my mates or even my own mother since she’s on FaceBook too (hey! anyone who FaceBooks my mom will get dealt hahaha ) But seriously, do we need to start protecting our friends lists in the future to protect our own integrity and to not feel embarrased when our friends are being harrassed by people who have no idea what they are doing and where we are the only probable link between the two? There are alot more subtle and affective ways to marketing or advertising on FaceBook without stepping on people’s toes, it really doesn’t need to be blatantly abused

I’d seriously like to see a few comments about this… so get cracking, I’ve had my rant so start commenting below and get your point across.

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

Sowetan bring and braai…. you doing it wrong

What can I say… only in SA

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

And it seems Bar Sia is the only Wimbledon club that Watershed targets

Do a search on Google for ‘Bar Sia’ and you’ll notice the results for Bar Sia come up, however look to the right of the page for the Google paid keyword placement ads and you’ll notice The Watershed hijacking keyword searches for Bar Sia. I went a step further and did searches for other local clubs in Wimbledon such as the Walkie; Ponana etc. And it seems that Bar Sia is the only club that Watershed target, whats up with that? Is it because Bar Sia is one of the only privately owned clubs on the Broadway as if it would be pointless to target bars and clubs such as the Walkabout; Ponana; Henry J Beans owned by parent companies that own chains of bars. I’ve got nothing against The Watershed at all, it used to be my second home at one stage and the manager Richard is an absolute legend, but it puzzles me why they’d waste their money on Google Adwords when to be quite honest, the clientele that visit the two clubs are completely different crowds. With all due respect to both clubs, Bar Sia does pull a slightly older and prodomenintly Saffa crowd where as The Watershed tends to have a younger more English crowd which seems to cater more for students. The music styles vary somewhat in the sense that Watershed can be more focused on the rock/ commercial club tracks side of things whereas Bar Sia is more your House/Electro side with different DJ’s booking sets every week. I think Watershed would have better luck using marketing tactics on the other place in Wimbledon which seems to be pissing off alot of people lately particulary on FaceBook which I’ll cover in a later post as from what I hear, quite alot of people in the area are getting just a bit cheesed off about it.

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

Yes that is an entire case of Green Ambulances!

Creme Soda to a Saffa in London is what cat food is to a prawn in District 9… I doubt anyone would disagree

Now being an avid Natal Sharks fan, I thought I would show a bit of good sportsmanship to the “other” supporters and give them a bit of a pat on the shoulder.. particulary to our main traditional rivals, Western Province; the Gauteng Lions and the Blue Bulls since we are nearing the end of this years Currie Cup Tournament… cause at the end of the day, its all just “a game” isn’t it?

Click the image below to check if you get a case of thirst quenching; hangover curing; delicious Creme Soda…

(Sorry my fellow Sharks Supporters, you’ll have to sit this one out but I’ve got a little something up my sleeve for you, don’t you worry )

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

We’ve all seen our dogs dream, like when they move their back paws as if they are riding a bicycle in their sleep, and don’t lie, we’ve all seen our girlfriends/boyfriends do it with the odd sound effect too. As The Jen will tell you, you’ll hear full words even sentences coming from me haha

However in the video below, you’d swear this poor dog seems absolutely deranged or exercising the demons in his sleep, to the extent that I don’t know whether to feel disturbed or feel sorry for him from the look on his poor face when he wakes up haha

I’ve always thought Boxer’s are a bit weird though… haha

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVrjA1eAtI8

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

Its not a mystery what people search for on Google anymore

During my morning session of being a London Public Transport Peasant, I had my train angle sorted (that way you stand when trying to read your book/paper over and under people in a crowded train… whilst also banging the tunes on your iPod of course) and was browsing through what the good people at the Metro had conjured up for me and my fellow LPTP’s for the morning, I noticed something quite odd yet somewhat interesting, so I decided to give it a go when I got to the office.

Meet Mystery Google, the way this works is that you type in what you want to search for into the Google seach, but instead of providing you with the results of your search, it provides you with the results and search phrase that the person before you used, now to some this may be completely useless, however it does give you an idea of just what the hell some people search for on Google…. Trust me, you’ll probably find some pretty disturbing stuff haha

Check it out here

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards

Thurs 8th Oct – Wed 14th Oct 2009

Friday 9th October 2009:

DirtyDubbin Presents MIMI KESARIS Exclusive in London

This is all going down Friday night at Artesian Well in Clapham, a night of Tilted Funk
For more info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=136671116889

THE SHOTGUNS and PLUSH UNPLUGGED

Rory Eliot playing a nice catalogue of Plush songs unplugged and The Shotguns following up with tracks that they have just recently recorded down at Abbey Road Studios (scuse us haha) This is kicking off down at The Halfmoon in Putney at 8pm, for more info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=116585199057

2 for 1 Cocktails at Bar Sia in Wimbledon from 5pm to 8pm

trust me, the rest of your night is SORTED after that haha

Saturday 10th October 2009:

Happy Hour at Down South, Wimbledon

Happy Hour from 8pm-9pm (also on Fridays) loads of specials like 2 for 1 dbl Klippies and coke only 5 pont! EISH! Bargain!
2L Jugs of John Deer (I really wish people didn’t call Cane and Creme Soda that) for 10 pont! Plus loads more.

	Tel: 020 878 82363
	90 Inner Park Road, SW19 6DA

Sunday 11th October 2009:

Dirty Ego presents DIRTY HABIT – Free Party

Check this free party out on Sunday with Filthy Rich and co, banging it at GIGALUM in Clapham Common
For more info:  http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=168342740168

Monday 12th October 2009:

WHAT NOW Live @ The Dublin Castle, Camden

My good friends WHAT NOW are rocking up the Dublin Castle in Camden on Monday evening from 9pm. Trust me these guys are awesome and seem to be getting quite a bit of airplay on Kerrang Radio lately with their track, “Run”.
For more info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=173129465644

Wednesday 14th October 2009:

Durban Curry Night Every Wednesday at Down South, Wimbledon

5 pont for a curry and a dop and all right, special price for you cause today is today right, right

Booking is essential so give them a shout beforehand

Tel: 020 878 82363

90 Inner Park Road, SW19 6DA

Well thats that for this weekend, check back next Thursday for my next serving suggestion of activities

Just a little heads up, Prime Circle are playing in London soon, rumour has it that its on the 24th Oct at the Shepherds Bush Walkie, I will confirm as soon as I have the info

- Marky Mark

If you digged this post, Vote for PharSide in the 2010 SA Blog Awards