 Greenwich Park under threat from Olympic madnessUrban biters, unite! It’s green, it’s beautiful and it’s a haven of peace. But not for much longer. Greenwich Park in South East London, the oldest Royal park in London, a magnet to tourists from around the world, a marvel to all those who tread its paths regularly, is now facing its most serious threat in recent history.That’s because the organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have decided to hold some events there. Doubtless the money on offer has made this an attractive proposition for some people. As a result, the park, which is several hundred years old, and was where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I spent a lot of their youth, is likely to suffer its worst damage since it was first walled off in 1433. Huge sections of the park will be fenced off, countless trees will be cut, temporary buildings will be put up to house hundreds of horses and organisers, enormous stands will be built for spectators, massed ranks of CCTV cameras will watch anyone coming in or out, and traffic all around the area will be restricted. The park will be largely out of bounds to locals for years, and it is thought that it may never return to its current, pristine state. And all this to have a few horses prancing up and down over decorative barriers over a period of just two weeks. Truly, from where we stand, in the offices of Urbanbite, it beggars belief. Recent studies have shown that ordering takeaway online is bad for the environment. Apparently the moped drivers who deliver takeaway meals release something known as CO2 and this, added to the methane emitted by many customers in front of the telly after eating a takeaway meal, can contribute towards the destruction of the environment. However, as you ponder over that extra spicy curry, that pizza with every topping imaginable or that stylish sushi you are about to bite into, you really have to wonder how it can compare in terms of damage with what our elders and betters are planning for Greenwich Park. So Urban biters, unite, and see whether you can petition somebody to stop this madness – we are rather pessimistic about the outcome, but who knows? Your unhealthy eating habits could be helping African children!“So, if I get this right, when I order a massive takeaway pizza with an extra spicy curry and loads of fizzy drinks, online on your web site, and I scoff it all down while watching the footie live on TV, I’m helping to put some African children through school? Well, that’s bloody wonderful, ain’t it?”It is! Every time one of our customers orders takeaway on our web site, they have the option to contribute a small amount to charity, between 25p and £1.50. And at the end of the year, the shareholders of Urbanbite get to buy themselves a big red Ferrari! Well, that last sentence is a bit inaccurate. The shareholders would love to buy themselves a Ferrari. But for the time being, they can’t get their greedy hands on this particular kitty. Instead, the money that is contributed by our customers is paid in full to a charity based in Belgium. The charity is run by people in their spare time. They pay all of their own costs – food, travel, accommodation, administration. So, as far as we can tell, every penny goes to Mikembo, a school project in Congo. Last year, Urbanbite raised more than £5000, which is 40% of the budget of the entire project. And since nobody skims any cash off for fundraising, marketing, holding conferences, new laptops, expenses-paid trips to Africa or gifts for their mistress, the effectiveness of that money is multiplied. All wages and any bribes are paid to locals. So: you eat masses of unhealthy food, we spend years developing a web site that enables you to order it in the least annoying way possible, we all feel we could be dong something better with our lives, and yet a group of Congolese kids and their families are being given a chance for a better life as a result. You know what? Our mothers might actually approve. ------- If you, our customers, are interested, we will provide you with further updates about this. Some things you may like to know about snowIt’s covered in ice, it’s freezing cold and its people have 31 different words to describe snow. So why do they call it Greenland?They call it so, because apparently, when it was discovered by the Vikings in the early Middle-Ages, it was much warmer than today, and it was in fact green all over, in the summertime. So people settled there and in those days they presumably only had a handful of words for snow. A few centuries later, the weather turned much colder, and the people had to leave Greenland. It was simply too cold! When they came back some years later, they brought warmer boots with them and they spent most of their time trying to work out what type of snow they were trudging through, in order not to give it the wrong name and be embarrassed in front of all the other Viking thugs in the village. As a result, they didn’t have much time to feel cold. And so they stayed. Snow that is so light that you can blow it away (snoorr), snow that gets into your face in the blizzard (snarrf), snow that crunches nicely underfoot (snorffa), snow that is just the right texture to make snowballs with (sniurffi), snow that sticks to your beard (scruffi)…would it not have been simpler if they’d just stayed in Copenhagen, the home of one of one of Urbanbite’s mightiest and most ruthless competitors, and ordered takeaway online? Or could it be that the service they provided wasn’t good enough? Admittedly, we at Urbanbite don’t know much about Greenland or even Copenhagen, but we would naturally have preferred it if our competitor had stayed there and let us get on with the business of letting you order your takeaway sushi, your curry, your chicken korma and your Peking Duck from the restaurants on OUR web site. But such is life! Apple: what do they have up their sleeve for 27 January?Over the past 2 years, the competition has been scrambling desperately to come up with something that is vaguely comparable to Apple’s iPhone. By taking such a huge leap forward whenever they release a major product, Apple appears to have reduced the rest of the consumer electronics industry to the role of mere followers. They seem blinkered, working like mad to come up with endless unwieldy products, having sacrificed all true creativity to concentrate on trying to get a bite of the Apple.Their lack of lateral thinking has in turn enabled Apple to tease its customers with a number of minor updates to its product, drawing a massive customer following each time, and milking the market. Now however, the competition appear to be catching up, finally. But after releasing so many ground-breaking products, everybody expects that Apple will pull an incredible rabbit out of its hat once again. After all, they are the only ones not trying to catch up with themselves! And so, after many months of rumours and waiting, it would appear that something big is in the offing, and it is due to be released in a week’s time, on 27 January. What will it be? We at Urbanbite haven’t got a clue. After all, we are into takeaway meals online, not consumer electronics. We provide you with Tikka Massala, curry, pizzas, and all kinds of foods that your mother would disapprove of. It’s not healthier, it’s not better done, it’s exactly the same, only ordered on a web site instead of the phone. To make things easier for you. As though takeaway needed to be any easier! Eleven years ago, when we launched Europe’s first online takeaway service – unbeknown to us there was already a company doing this in the USA – we had just 2 customers and a couple of competitors who were even more clueless about business than we were. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, which many have copied since. So we wish Apple and its competitors good luck, and we hope you enjoy your takeaway meal! The oldest living thing in the world could be a million years old!Some scientists believe that there is a grove of Aspen trees in Utah that is in fact a single plant with many shoots and could be the oldest living thing in the world! Although the trees that we see above the ground only live for around 300 years on average, the roots are thought to be up to a million years old. They keep growing and throwing up new shoots, which develop into trees. They cover an area of 80 acres, and the total weight of all the trees that they’ve thrown up plus the roots is around 6,000 tons!To give you an idea of how impressive that is, the pizza as we know it is believed to date back to 1889. that’s only 120 years ago. Although strictly speaking that is an inappropriate comparison, since pizzas are not really living things, it leads us onto our next amazing fact: Urbanbite is over 10 years old, which for a web site is on a par with being a fossilised dinosaur. But the age of the food that our customers order through our web site tends to be measured in minutes rather than years, or even hours. And it’s just as well. Imagine having to wait for more than an hour for the takeaway meal you’ve just ordered, and trying to resist the temptation to curse our staff over our own unique real-time chat system… Now contrast that with the tube worms which grow for 170 years at the bottom of the ocean around underwater volcanic vents, without ever batting an eyelid or moving a limb. They too rely on takeaway delivery, but they are much less demanding than our customers. They don’t keep moaning about how their Chinese Duck or extra spicy curry has arrived cold, or why there’s not enough wasabi in their origami. Oh, if only our customers were tube worms…On the other hand, no, we prefer them just as they are. President Obama to nominate Urbanbite for golden takeaway award!It’s a fact. We don’t know why. But suddenly, we all love President Obama, and even America. What’s not to love about the most cuddly president ever? He’s so sweet, he’s so clever, he’s so humane. Gone are the bad old days of President Bush, the nasty, stupid face of America. Welcome to the new era of openness, freedom, democracy and enlightenment.President Obama has already won a Nobel Prize. But that’s just a beginning –he will surely win many more over the next few years! There are rumours that he could be in line for a Booker Prize, and other organisations are thinking – nay, gagging – to offer him their famous prizes. The man is clearly on a roll. And when we say man, we say this in the most respectful possible way, lest any reader think that we are being disrespectful. For there are some who believe this is no mere man, but truly the Chosen One. Accordingly, Urbanbite, which is considerably less famous than President Obama, but provides a reasonably decent service to its customers, wrote to the President asking him whether he would consider sharing some of his success with us. We did not request a Nobel prize. Nor a Booker prize. But we asked whether he might let us have some kind of award, like a golden burger or a golden pizza, to reward us for our services in the field of online takeaway ordering. We are still awaiting a reply from the President, but we are very hopeful for a positive outcome. In the meantime we urge you to support our bid for this award by ordering lots and lots of takeaway food from our web site. Hundreds of restaurants are waiting right now for you to order their delicious, if not always very healthy food! Go for it. Help us share in the Obama factor! President Obama to be awarded Booker Prize – official rumours surfaceAccording to rumours doing the rounds this morning, President Obama [of the United States, for the avoidance of doubt] has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This is the most prestigious prize in English literature, and the fact that President Obama is being considered for it, and will as a result most likely be awarded it, bears witness to the amazing work done by the man in furthering English literature.Ever since he received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing or not doing something or another, a lot of people have been clamouring for his literary genius to be rewarded, in England in particular. President Obama may not have written a book as yet, but on the basis of the certainty of how great and awe-inspiring such a book would doubtless be, were he to write it, it is clear that he deserves the Booker Prize. It is also imperative to get in before anyone else does. For instance, another slightly less noted organisation, Urbanbite, is said to be considering sending President Obama a prize of its own. Known as the Universal Free Online Takeaway Voucher, this is a prize which until now was only rumoured to exist in the real world. This voucher would entitle President Obama, in light of his undeniable greatness and imperviousness to criticism, to order takeaway online whenever he was in the UK, free of charge, from any restaurant of his choosing, be it Chinese, Lebanese, Sushi, Indian, Pizza or Burger, forever. Does Obama feel confused? We suggest he try ##FengSushi for starters. Shocking: Osama B. Laden is the man behind new airport scanners!At first, people thought that it was just a silly name. But according to a high-ranking intelligent source known as Jimmy [not his real name], nedaL nib amasO, the company that is supplying the controversial new body scanners to airports around the world, including London, is just Osama bin Laden spelt back to front! It was the use of capital letters AT THE END of each word, instead of at the beginning, that gave the game away.According to Jimmy, there has been a lot of concern in England about the fact that the new body scanners soon coming to an airport near you can peek under your clothes. A lot of people, especially women, have been asking – do we really need a scanner that can look into our panties? But by an amazing coincidence, a man claiming to have been sent by Osama bin Laden’s other part-time hobby, Al Quaida, recently tried to explode a bomb that was hidden in his underpants on a plane. So it turns out that all of these people were in fact wrong, we do need to look into their panties after all. In other news, Urbanbite today denied that it was in any way connected with airport scanners or any other kind of scanners. “We are not into scanning people. We merely allow our customers to order takeaways online via a web site which is more convenient than using the phone” said one of its employees, who preferred to remain anonymous. Whatever you’re after, be it Chinese food, Indian takeaway, pizzas, burgers, sushi—in fact anything except steamed Brussels sprouts—you can get it today on Urbanbite! So forget about scanners and airport officials trying to look up your trousers/skirt, and order a nice, steaming takeaway on our web site! Global warming v global warmongering: why ordering a takeaway at Urbanbite can helpThe United Nations yesterday did not release a press release calling for every responsible world citizen to take part in a global takeaway eating campaign in order to defeat global warming. This would after all be total nonsense. Also, since when does a company like Urbanbite have anything to do with global warming or even global warmongering? The UN therefore issued a denial but admitted that you would be better off ordering Chinese, Indian, Pizza or Burgers online rather than reading articles about such drivel. |
