Tickling my irony bone

I received some junk mail from a wine service today. I like the idea of someone selecting wines I might enjoy and put them in a bundle for me to buy. There is a service in Ottawa that already does this: Savvy Company.


This place was not from around here, though. Nor was it from Niagara-on-the-Lake, another of my favourite places. It is called Wines For Home and hails from Guildford, Surrey, England. I am curious as to how I got on their list. Maybe my email address got sold to them by one of the many companies I contacted when planning our trip to England in 2008.

I had a brief thought that maybe they would be a lead for the Global Business Project. Alas, not everyone on my team enjoys a good glass of wine so I scrapped the idea. (Although wouldn’t it be great to go to some country like Australia or Chile or Argentina and do wine tastings to help them select product to distribute? Or maybe there is a winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake or Prince Edward County that wants to get into the English market.)

With all these ideas dancing in my head, I wanted to have a reference for the town’s approximation to London. It’s not that far. In zooming out, though, the name of another town on the other side of London caught my eye: Milton Keynes. I guess it stood out because it was two words and not hyphenated.  It was the town name of "Milton Keynes" that tickled my irony bone. It was the perfect blend of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman – one of the biggest critics of Keynesian economics.