Bet you can’t wait!

Abercrombie and Fitch today announced that they are going to be closing all of their Ruehl stores by the end of the year.

Ruehl was an attempt by the company to target an older, post-college customer than their younger Abercrombie or Hollister brands. This meant extremely dark, but funky stores, selling extremely similar lines to Abercrombie and Hollister but with a hefty price premium attached. For example a t-shirt marked at perhaps $25 in Hollister would retail for $40 in Ruehl.

Ruehl was always pretty empty when I vistied, but I liked it because it remained the one place I could get that kind of clothing that not many people at home would have. Now Abercrombie and Hollister are across here, I guess I’m just going to have to put up with wearing the same stuff everyone else is wearing.

You can read the investor release here

A brilliant ad from Irn-Bru which sums up Scottishness perfectly.

Interesting side fact: Scotland’s the only country in the world where Coke isn’t the top-selling soft drink. That honour goes to Irn-Bru!

Yeah, a massive flagship Hollister is due to open its doors in New York on July 16th this year. Situated on Broadway and Houston, it’s being described by the company as the Epic Hollister Store.

Epic it probably will be, it sucks I’ve no plans to go to NYC anytime soon though! You can check out a website about the new store at hcoridethewave.com

© BBC

So Northern Exposure starts filming next week. You have one more week to suggest where Gary & Danielle can visit on their trip to Northern Ireland!

To be honest, I can’t wait for filming, I feel like I haven’t been out on the road in ages, and although it’s really long hours, it is fun. We’re filming two episodes next week, and then having a two week break, and then out for a couple of weekends after that. If you see us out and about, grab a photo, and upload it at our new Flickr group. We’ll be taking the best images and putting them on the new Northern Exposure website which will launch the week after next. You can also get updates on how filming’s going from our Twitter feed.

With the worst timing possible, I’m off to Dallas on Thursday – the day after we finish our first shoot. So I’m kinda stressed this weekend, getting everything ready to go for filming, and a five day trip to the US. It’s bad timing to take leave, but with a new series commissioned for the autumn, if I don’t start taking some leave, I’m not gonna get any taken before the end of the holiday year!

Come and say hi if you see us filming – it’ll be manic as always but I’m excited about it!

I use AA.com all the time – booking flights, checking my AAdvantage miles, and checking seat availability, requesting upgrades bla de bla.

Their site honestly sucks big time. It looks awful, is clumsy, and is a nightmare to navigate. So hats off to Dustin Curtis for sending an open letter to AA about their site design, posting a possible redesign, and getting a response.

It doesn’t sound like AA.com’s gonna get a redesign anytime soon, but if only!

I can’t really say anything about it yet, but we start going into pre-production in September. All I’ll say is I’m hoping it will be wildly popular, and it is a kind of drama, something I’ve never done before.

Anyways, one of my appraisal objectives this year was to get two series commissioned. I’m only have way through the year and have done it. Shame we’re not going to get any bonuses at all this year GRRRRR!

Look at de cute robotron made of cardboard! The idea behind Tweenbots is to explore is to see if a human-like object could traverse the streets of New York.

Basically the Tweenbots have a destination on their flag, and are left alone to see if people will help them get to their destination. Neat! It would be cool if there were instructions on the site as to how to build your own, and then they could travel all over the world!

Via blankbaby

On a trip to London probably about a month ago now, me and the famille ended up in Lacock. It is a really olde worlde looking village with loads of thatched cottages, and is used loads in filming historical television series and so on. Probably the funniest thing about the trip was when we had a cup of coffee and Mum started getting all jittery around a cat that was prowling about. She hates those cats! So obviously we had to pretend every two minutes it was about to jump on her shoulder. Ha ha!

Anyway, slightly drawing away from the historical look of the village, when we visited, they had this weird treasure hunt going on where you had to try and identify various very disturbing looking pop star models. They were creepy cos they had paper mache faces. Or peeling plastic faces. Anyway, here are two of them, can you guess who they are?

That’s number one, here’s number two….

That one’s a bit of a give-away!