Why has BMW made a Honda ad?

Bizarre. Oh, and I know I'm just a lone voice in the wilderness, but that end line? That should of course be 'Fewer emissions'. Tut.

What's your Question Mark Inside?

I've just come from tea and cakes at the Chapter House of St Paul's Cathedral. This is not the sort of thing I do every day, as you might imagine. In fact, I've never done it before and probably won't again. So I should thank Martin Firrell for inviting me.

Martin is a public artist, known for projecting often provocative messages onto public buildings. (He's also a branding consultant and writer, off and on, which is how I met him.)

He's been commissioned to create a work to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of the topping-out of St Paul's. His response is The Question Mark Inside: an attempt to explore that part of ourselves that leads people to religion or other forms of spirituality. The part that wrestles with all the big questions - why are we here? What's the meaning of life? What's the secret of happiness? All that stuff.

The project blog invites people to contribute their own thoughts on the subject, and has become an archive of deep thoughts from around the world (and some not so deep). Martin's plan, as he told the assembled throng at the Chapter House today, is to 'put all these thoughts into the hugest blender in the world, and press pulse, and create a Question Mark smoothie. Then I'll spread some of that smoothie onto the dome of St Paul's'. Well, there's a thought.

It's an ambitious plan, and an exciting one. The first sneak preview will be on 8 November, to coincide with the Lord Mayor's Show, and then there will be a full, three-week run of the project later that month. Martin and the Cathedral are busily fundraising for the project, so if you feel like helping - either in cash or in kind - you can email emma at martinfirrell dot com with offers.

Why it's important to capitalise proper nouns

From the BBC website this morning. Enough said, I think.

A little bit of genius for World AIDS Day

Adverblog has alerted me to this brilliant little idea for World AIDS Day by the Cape Argus in South Africa. You can't really see on this image, but they've made each page number of the paper extend into a statistic about AIDS. (For a much bigger version of the image, click here.)

This is the kind of idea I love: simple, enormously impactful and totally original - ideas that make you think, Why hasn't someone done that before?