Rosie the Red Robot

You would all be forgiven for assuming that bar , pie and queue line are favourite pastimes of the British .  Yet, in fact – yes, we did learn this back in GCSE maths – they are also mechanisms through which meaningless, mundane data of suspect origin can be given a Gok Wan -grade makeover, with the prime objective of padding out biblical 187-page PowerPoint presentations and 871-page Word reports (*other Microsoft productivity tools are available).  In other words, documents that nobody has the intention of ever reading.  But it becomes apparent over the years; this is perhaps the one skill which serves you well for a lifetime in certain careers.  In sales.  Consultancy.  Politics.  Or any other profession in which the only known entry requirement is the ability to chat loudly over a whizzy graph of dubious quality and value, preferably while frantically waving your arms around. Nevertheless, we are acutely conscious of the fact that w...

The most significant moment of human enlightenment since the discovery of Penicillin back in 1928, was quite possibly the invention of the Tamagotchi in 1996.  To date, this battery-powered, beeping handheld key chain thingummy has apparently sold more units than there are people currently living in Thailand.  In fact, according to a seminal study by the respected WTO - the World Tamagotchi Organisation - if all of these digital pets were allowed to form its own sovereign nation, and permitted to trade on WTO terms, it would be the world's 20th most populous country, only slightly behind the land of the Playmobil .  And rather impressively, it would also have the highest Graphically Distorted Pet (GDP) per Capita figure of any nation in the history of nations.  Ever.  And that is despite the rise of Minecraft . Yet, even though more than two decades have passed since the era that allowed Macarena to top the chart for 14 weeks , the precise binomial nomen...