Plot summary
The setting of e is the very beginning of the new millennium inside the London office of Miller Shanks, a prominent (fictitious) international advertising agency. When the novel opens two major projects are under way: the shooting, on location in Mauritius, of a commercial for a porn channel; and preparations for a sales pitch, with Coca-Cola as the company's prospective client.
While the Coca-Cola advertising campaign is supposed to be kept confidential, David Crutton, the chief executive officer, is astonishingly computer illiterate and inadvertently sends carbon copies of every single one of his e-mails to the Helsinki office of Miller Shanks. Simon Horne, the creative director, has stolen the "original" idea on which the Coca-Cola campaign is based from two recent college graduates who are looking for work and does not believe that the past will ever catch up with him. In the end it does, but although the campaign can be patched up in the last minute with the help of the Helsinki office, Coca-Cola finally decide not to award their advertising account to Miller Shanks after one of their female top level managers has watched a secretly filmed video on the Internet showing Horne in his office having sex with a ladyboy, uploaded thanks to the efforts of Liam O'Keefe, who filmed it all taking place, and his friend Brett Topowlski.
The shooting in Mauritius goes terribly wrong already during the flight to the island when the breast implants of one of the four models hired to appear in the video explode. Shortly afterwards, yet another model drops out due to hyperthermia, facts which force the creative team to continually rewrite the script. Bad weather makes filming impossible for a couple of days, but the last straw is an alleged sexual attack by the company's male client ("a fat lech") on television presenter Gloria Hunniford, who happens to be staying at the same hotel together with a BBC crew to film a holiday show. Miller Shanks encounter further complications when loose talk at the hotel bar by Topowlski and Vince Douglas, the two art directors for the commercial, triggers a headline in The Sun about the "Hunniford Affair".
Subplots revolve around the frantic attempts of Ken Perry, the Office Administrator, at upholding order in the building; the ongoing love affair between O'Keefe and Lorraine Pallister; a not even half-hearted suicide attempt by Susi Judge-Davis, devoted PA to Simon Horne and Simon Horne alone; and Nigel 'Nige' Godley's failed endeavours to be recognized as both a good chum and a loyal workaholic.
Pepsi is a carbonated soft drink with a cola flavor, manufactured by PepsiCo. As of 2023, Pepsi is the second most valuable soft drink brand worldwide behind Coca-Cola; the two share a long-standing rivalry in what has been called the "cola wars".
Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical with music by Georges Bizet and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II which was performed at The Broadway Theatre. Conceptually, it is Bizet's opera Carmen updated to a World War II-era, African-American setting. Bizet's opera was, in turn, based on the 1846 novella by Prosper Mérimée. The Broadway musical was produced by Billy Rose, using an all-black cast, and directed by Hassard Short. Robert Shaw prepared the choral portions of the show.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a 1965 animated television special. It is the first TV special based on the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, and features the voices of Peter Robbins, Christopher Shea, Kathy Steinberg, Tracy Stratford, and Bill Melendez. Produced by Lee Mendelson and directed by Melendez, the program made its debut on the CBS television network on December 9, 1965. In the special, Charlie Brown (Robbins) finds himself depressed despite the onset of the cheerful holiday season. After Lucy van Pelt (Stratford) suggests he direct a neighborhood Christmas play, his best efforts are ignored and mocked by his peers when he chooses a puny Christmas tree as a centerpiece.
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a 1988 humorous fantasy detective novel by Douglas Adams. It is the second book by Adams featuring private detective Dirk Gently, the first being Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Adams had intended to follow it with a third such novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but he died before completing it; an unfinished draft is included in a posthumously published collection of the same name.
The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational corporation founded in 1892. It produces Coca-Cola. The drink industry company also manufactures, sells, and markets other non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups, and alcoholic beverages. The company's stock is listed on the NYSE and is part of the DJIA and the S&P 500 and S&P 100 indexes.
My Name Is Joe is a 1998 British romantic drama film directed by Ken Loach. The film stars Peter Mullan as Joe Kavanagh, an unemployed recovering alcoholic in Glasgow, Scotland who meets and falls in love with a health visitor, played by Louise Goodall. David McKay plays his troubled friend Liam. The film's title is a reference to the ritualised greeting performed in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, as portrayed in the film's opening scene.
The Glass Key is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. First published as a serial in Black Mask magazine in 1930, it then was collected in 1931. It tells the story of a gambler and racketeer, Ned Beaumont, whose devotion to Paul Madvig, a crooked political boss, leads him to investigate the murder of a local senator's son as a potential gang war brews. Hammett dedicated the novel to his onetime lover Nell Martin.
Caroline Pafford Miller was an American novelist. She gathered the folktales, stories, and archaic dialects of the rural communities she visited in her home state of Georgia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and wove them into her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934, and the French literary award, the Prix Femina Americain in 1935. Her success as the first Georgian winner of the fiction prize inspired Macmillan Publishers to seek out more southern writers, resulting in the discovery of Margaret Mitchell, whose first novel, Gone with the Wind, also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Miller's story about the struggles of nineteenth-century south Georgia pioneers found a new readership in 1993 when Lamb in His Bosom was reprinted, one year after her death. In 2007, Miller was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
A House Like a Lotus (ISBN 0-374-33385-8) is a 1984 young adult novel by Madeleine L'Engle. Its protagonist is sixteen-year-old Polly O'Keefe, whose friend and mentor, Maximiliana Horne, has sent her on a trip to Greece and Cyprus. As she travels, Polly must come to terms with a recent traumatic event involving Max. The history of Polly's relationship with Max is told in flashback over the course of the novel. The use of double quotes distinguishes the present, whereas single quotes indicate flashbacks from the past.
The 1997 Simon Fraser University harassment controversy was a series of events at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada. In the case at the center of the controversy, Rachel Marsden, then a student, and Liam Donnelly, a swimming coach, accused each other of sexual harassment.
The 2007–08 Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Philippine Cup or known as the 2007–08 Smart PBA Philippine Cup for sponsorship reasons, is the first conference of the 2007–08 PBA season. The tournament was formally opened on October 14, 2007, and ended on March 2, 2008. The tournament is an All-Filipino format, which doesn't require an import or a pure-foreign player for each team.
"Green Chri$tma$" is a comedy single written and performed by Stan Freberg and released by Capitol Records in 1958. Musical arrangement and direction is made by Billy May, and it is performed by the Capitol Records house orchestra. Other vocal performances are by Daws Butler, Marvin Miller, Will Wright, and the Jud Conlon Chorale.
Scam is a 1993 television film adaptation of crime drama novel by Craig Smith titled Ladystinger. It originally aired on Showtime in May 1993.
For the Win is the second young adult science fiction novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. It was released in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper form by Tor Books.
Athey Kangal is a 1967 Indian Tamil-language mystery thriller film written and directed by A. C. Tirulokchandar. The film stars Ravichandran and Kanchana. It focuses on a girl's family being stalked by a masked murderer, and her lover's attempts to apprehend him.
Wide Open is a 1930 American pre-Code romantic comedy film directed by Archie Mayo, starring Edward Everett Horton and Patsy Ruth Miller, and featuring Louise Fazenda, T. Roy Barnes and Edna Murphy. Released by Warner Bros., it is based on the 1924 novel The Narrow Street by Edward Bateman Morris.
Not Safe for Work is a 2014 American thriller film directed by Joe Johnston and written by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason. The film stars Max Minghella, JJ Feild, Eloise Mumford, and Christian Clemenson. Minghella stars as a paralegal who witnesses an unknown man (Feild) murder a lawyer at his nearly empty workplace.
Career of Evil is a 2015 crime fiction novel written by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. It is the third novel in the Cormoran Strike series of detective novels and is followed by Lethal White in 2018 and Troubled Blood in 2020.
