Coke buys off buskers, sky-bound sandwich shop, the truth behind sexy wine labels

Coke buys off buskers, sky-bound sandwich shop, the truth behind sexy wine labels

(Photo by Annie Mole)

• Would-be John Lennons will now be singing a different tune while being ignored by commuters on the London tube. Coca-Cola has sponsored the crooners to sing its classic festive jingle “Holidays Are Coming” to the 3.5 million travellers who use the transit system every day.  The song consists mainly of the refrain “holidays are coming,” repeated several times before closing with the Yuletide sendoff “Always Coca-Cola.” [L.A. Times]

• Is beer becoming more effete in an attempt to go after the wine market? Less for the nacho-munching, layabout everyman and more for those who want their brew to have “a gooseberry nose and a lemon meringue pie fruitiness”?  With studies showing that wine drinkers earn more money and are in better health than their suds-sipping counterparts, the National Post’s Nicholas Pashley asks whether it is nobler to burp or to spit. [National Post]

• Rising with New York City’s new Freedom Tower will be a Subway in the sky: a vertically mobile outlet of the sandwich shop attached to a crane will service hungry construction workers as they build the new building. The restaurant, which will have windows and a bathroom, will be inside a shipping container–like structure along with a construction office for the project managers, and will ascend gradually until the tower tops out at 105 floors. [New York Post]

• In 2006, the Highlands Companies started buying up farmland in the rolling hills of Dufferin County under the guise of wanting to grow potatoes. The sellers, however, recently found out the truth: the farms are being plowed over for a limestone quarry that would more than cover the size of Toronto’s financial district. Although Highlands claims the quarry will be environmentally sustainable, the farmers are particularly worried that it is a threat to the area’s remaining farms. [Torontoist]

• In an effort to help ladies everywhere overcome their “supposed fear of buying wine,” vintners are going femme with such names as Strut, Bitch and Pink, and making their labels less macho with “images of stilettos, vamp red lips, long limbs and sexy cocktail parties.” But is this marketing ploy an effective way to get women interested in wine or a sexist way of passing off “alcoholic grape juice” as anything but schlock?  After all, unless you consider the brand Big Guy or Sogno Uno’s label featuring back-arching porn star Savanna Samson, where is the male marketing equivalent? [National Post]