50 years to the day after orbiting the earth for 89 minutes in a tiny capsule jettisoned from the mighty Vostok 2 rocket, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was awarded another gong. A plastic table lamp constructed in his honour has been inducted into ThusMagazine’s Quality Hall of Fame. The event, widely leaked on [...]
Category Archives: retail
Sindhi truck art tin trunks win Thus Quality Award
March 21, 2011 – 10:06 am
With feeble and insincere apologies for the interruption in the awards process, I am delighted to announce that The Robot Shop’s Sindhi truckers’ tin trunks have passed all the tests and blasted into the Thus Quality Hall of Fame. Only a loony or a Hounyhym (Thus passim) could find any fault with these life-affirming and unique [...]
Great Frog skull ring wins prestigious inaugural ThusMagazine Quality Award
January 12, 2011 – 12:49 pm
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to shape up, smarten up, put on a serious face and get back into the corporate world. But then I woke up. The benchmark test involved redeeming my daughter’s credit note from The Great Frog and buying a suit in the sales. I am now the owner of [...]
Sex and Terror in the Robot Shop
January 8, 2011 – 6:38 pm
If my previous post gave the impression that any fool with an unhealthy knowledge of vintage robots and space toys, brightly coloured tin, Mexican death symbolism, a penchant for loud, obscure, smoking rhythm and blues, religious kitsch and clockwork automata could become a retail czar, then I apologise. Robot shopkeeping is no sinecure. I recall [...]
A year among the robots
January 3, 2011 – 11:48 am
Like my life, Thus broadcasts have been patchy and intermittent over the past year. One reason is that I felt I could add little to the depressing and inevitable commentary on the new UK government that I hadn’t already said long before they slunk into office. While the BBC Victor Meldrews, Guardianistas and other Hounyhyms [...]
Random facts about funhouse Britain from Thus
April 14, 2009 – 12:30 pm
In no particular order, and with no special weighting, here are a few facts gleaned from the media with help from friends of Thus at Ten. Please feel free to send in your own facts. We need them in this era of spin and errant fantasy: 68% of Britons believe that MP’s salaries are ‘too [...]
Emigrate to Leicester: you could do a lot worse
January 5, 2009 – 11:54 am
Leicester is now officially one of the most diverse towns in the UK, forecast to be the first to have a majority non-white population by 2011. Good news for everyone, argues John Keyes. My memories of being brought up in Leicester are in most ways fairly typical of anybody of my age and class. Regiments of [...]
Why you should choose your ISP with care – correction to my earlier piece
December 12, 2008 – 12:49 pm
. . . I got it wrong earlier. Subversion of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is the real threat to data privacy. In response to the excellent comments posted following my piece about browsers and spyware, I need to point out that the problem goes much deeper than browser technology. Internet Service providers (ISPs) have [...]
Cookies and cream: why you should choose your browser and ISP with care
December 7, 2008 – 6:08 pm
By John J Kelly Although I don’t necessarily think that Norman Lamont joining the board of Phorm is particularly sinister, thanks to Bad Idea for highlighting the activities of this interesting adware company. I personally have no problem with advertising-supported sites, provided they are upfront and there is a clear ‘opt-out’ option, but most adware is [...]
The Daily Mail finds an immigrant who wants to ban immigration
December 1, 2008 – 12:55 pm
. . . and his name is Sir Gulam Noon, who became a self-made multi-millionaire by popularising Indian ready meals and allegedly donating £250,000 to New Labour in the mistaken and unfounded misunderstanding that this would earn him a peerage. Sir G, a genuinely impressive self-made monument to bootstrap free enterprise, says that Britain is [...]