Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

NYC minus Manhattan

This magazine cover always made me laugh. Even though it was done in the 70s the central thought still resonates.

To New Yorkers there is not much of real value across the waters of the Hudson or the East River. Once you leave the island of Manhattan the world becomes a bit blurry, a bit irrelevant. It's a type of social snobbery really.

When I lived in New York I actually spent most of the time living in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. In retrospect I think that one of the many things that I loved about Brooklyn was the real sense of community, family and longevity.

Anyway, over the years that I was there I built up a list of brilliant things to do with friends who came to stay that did not involve setting foot on Manhattan.

The tiny fishing and sailing community of City Island, although it's actually just off The Bronx it feels more like New England or Maine; the real Little Italy, Arthur Avenue where menus are disregarded - you simply ask the chef what he recommends eating that night and at the end of the (delicious) meal your waiter decides what you pay; the elegant brownstones of Fort Greene...

Anyway, I had a Travel piece published in The Spectator this week on just this topic. Hope that you enjoy it.

Spike Lee meets Johnny Vukan thanks to Steve Jobs

Johnny Vulkan constantly impresses and inspires me and I am really proud to count him as a friend.

I'm sure that you've read about his iPhone experience is all over the blogosphere as well as in the mainstream media. Not only did he get to meet and shop with Spike Lee...

But he also hugely raised the profile of (and I hope money for) Keep A Child Alive thanks to the fact that he was auctioning off the iPhone on eBay.

The other thing that I found interesting was that in all the reports of Johnny's great iPhone adventure his agency, Anomaly, was always mentioned:

PR News: Johnny Vulkan, representative of Keep A Child Alive and partner at Anomaly is first in line at Apple's SoHo store - Manhattan

Valleywag The man on the right, Johnny Vulkan, is a creative type, with Anomaly, a hip web agency

I think that it's just brilliant: Johnny gets to be one of the first people in the world to own an iPhone and become a minor, temporary celebrity in the process and meet loads of interesting people; Keep a Child Alive gets enormous amounts of hugely valuable free publicity (and money) and Anomaly who were smart enough to give Johnny a week off work gets a lot of kudos as do their clients (see the logos on JV's t-shirt and his Jawbone ear-piece) It does more for the reputation of Anomaly as a smart, creative and principled agency that any advertisement that they could have developed and run.