We like ‘different’ analyst reports.
They catch your eye, stick in your mind and make finance a little more interesting for just a few minutes in the day.
However, we’re not really sure what to make of the following extract from Barclays Capital’s latest Weekly Oil Data Review entitled “Elizabeth Bennett and Opec”. Is it code? Who is Elizabeth Bennett? Is it the actress? The Jane Austen character? Canada’s Supreme Court judge?
Analysts Paul Horsnell, Kevin Norrish and team begin normally enough, by discussing OECD demand, crude inventories etc.
But then go on to offer up this weird tale:
Last week we left you to play a round of “Guess which fonts a brand consultant would not name their children after”. If you are coming to this cold, this is probably not going to make a lot of sense. However, in short, we found an article about a brand consultant who just happened to have named their three children after fonts, and it was your task to work out which ones. We gave you five candidates. First, font number one was named after an early Christian martyr and featured heavily in a recent high profile political campaign. That is Perpetua, which was widely used in the Obama presidential campaign.
As for font number two, we said that it is connected to a fictional dog and helps with the branding for a North American nation. That is Baskerville, as in hound of the Baskervilles which is used in the Canadian government’s branding (for instance, see the top corner of http://canada.gc.ca/home.html). Font number three is omnipresent and had a film made about it, and that is Helvetica. Font number four is mentioned in the title of a Gladys Knight song and reputedly took its name from the location of supposed extra-terrestrial finds.
That is Georgia, allegedly named on the basis of a tabloid story about alien remains. Finally, font number five is named after a building in Oxford, and used to be the font of choice for Yosemite and Yellowstone. That is Clarendon, which used to be the font for all the National Park Service signs before they switched to something called NPS Rawlinson Roadway, which sounds more like an unsuccessful prog rock band from the late-1970s than a font.
So, in summary five font names to choose three names for children. Georgia is the obvious one, but brand consultants seem not to go for the obvious, and that is not one of the names. The other one not used was Baskerville, and so the brand consultant’s three children are named Perpetua, Helvetica and Clarendon. The combination of all that branding and the Canadian symbol somehow brought us around to national coats-of-arms for this week.
Not sure why, but it did, and it is probably a better reaction than renaming the children after fonts. Wingdings seems to be having trouble settling at school this term, it seems that the other children are teasing him for some reason. There is of course a correct way of describing coats-of-arms in heraldic terms — eg, lion rampant azure armed and langued on a chief indented gules. But none of that, for this week you simply get some of our unheraldic descriptions and have to work out which lucky nation’s symbol we are describing.
For example, if we say that it has a llama on it you might guess Peru, and sure enough Peru’s coat-of-arms does indeed have a llama on it. However, it has only has one llama, and that lone llama doesn’t even have any wings, which is a bit of a let down. Where else would you get a rumination on the disappointingly conventional approach taken by the designers of the Peruvian coat-of-arms? Anyway, number one is an unfeasibly large polar bear looking more than a tad angry. Number two is nine lions and something imaginary plus a musical instrument. Number three is more economical in the lions category in that it has seven lions and something imaginary plus a musical instrument. Number four is a complete menagerie, about three eagles, an ox or some other sort of cattle, a lion and two fishy-looking things that could at a stretch be dolphins or, at much more of a stretch, tuna. As we said, our descriptions may not always conform to the usual heraldic conventions. Finally, number five has no lions at all, but it does have an electricity pylon. Which is nice.
Have we missed something? Michael Fowke, perhaps you can offer some insight?