Of course it might have to be explained to someone like your granny, but how many shirts do you honestly own that she doesn’t get anyhow?
Awesome t-shirt over at Preshrunk. I’m glad the bitter guy who runs that site came back from his little hiatus. I actually read three t-shirt/clothing blogs regularly now. Is there something wrong with me?
I hope you find my blog to be well…average! If it’s too good, expectations emerge. If it’s not good enough, I’ll be the only one reading it. So I figure: “Average”.
I got a comment from this guy the other day, and I checked out his blog. He and I have a lot in common, I think, but maybe I’m better at creative rationalization, so I haven’t had to come to terms with my place in the world yet. Maybe that makes me worse.
Anyway, I’ve been reading his stuff, and it’s interesting. He is a Yankees fan, so that’s minus two points, but he said good things about Cal Ripken when he got into the Hall, so I guess I can give the two points back.
Woman Crashes Car Into 7-11 Store – News
The woman, driving a Honda Accord, said she thought she was going into reverse when the accident happened.
We passed this on our way home last night at about 8:15PM – the store is two blocks from our house – and this morning at 7:05AM the store was open for business with boards covering the hole in the window/wall.
I’m curious how she managed to get that far. She would have had to go up over the curb, across three feet of sidewalk, and through a brick wall to do the damage she did.
Maybe I’m not a good driver, but I usually notice which direction I’m going pretty quickly.
This is a good argument to outlaw automatic transmissions. They’re just not safe. You never know which direction you’re going to go until you’re in the candy aisle at 7-11.
VentBox â„¢ » VentBox is coming… real soon (beta invite)
My co-complainer over at VentBox is releasing a beta version of his complaint (vent) submission site. It’s way more web 2.0 than mine, and much more involved and well-done. Anyway, go get a beta invitation and check it out.
ESPN.com – MLB – Bonds denies receiving amphetamines from Sweeney
“He is both my teammate and my friend,” Bonds said in a statement. “He did not give me anything whatsoever and has nothing to do with this matter, contrary to recent reports.”I want to express my deepest apologies especially to Mark and his family as well as my other teammates, the San Francisco Giants organization and the fans,” he said.
After my recent post bashing Barry Bonds, I feel some obligation to show the other side, as well – he actually said the right thing for a change. I obviously can’t attest to the sincerity of what he said, but I can at least say that this is the first time I’ve ever read a quote from him and thought, “Assuming he’s sincere, that was the right thing to say.”
Of course, you may argue that he wouldn’t have had to apologize if he had never a) taken amphetamines or b) blamed an innocent teammate for giving them to him. And you’d be absolutely right.
There’s an Olive Garden commercial that I saw four times last night that got me thinking. No, that commercial is not the perfect commercial. That commercial sucks. Although, I’m obviously not the target audience. The commercial starts off with a woman coming into the Olive Garden saying she’s looking for her date. She describes him as, “handsome, and his shoes are probably untied”. At this point, off-screen a child calls, “Mom!”, and the mom and the hostess share a syrupy moment as it becomes obvious to all that the woman is having dinner with her husband and her son, and isn’t some divorced hussy on a blind date.
So, my idea starts off similarly. It’s obviously a commercial for anti-bacterial kitchen wipes or healthy frozen dinners or something. Just as we’re getting to the syrupy punchline moment, the director walks out yelling, “Cut!”. The mom stops.
“This is the wrong commercial. We shot for the female 35-55 demographic yesterday. This is for the male 18-35!” He says.
“Oh.” Says the mom. She pauses for a moment. “Okay. Should I take off my shirt?”
“Yes, that would be great.” The director says. “Someone get these kids out of here!” He walks off screen and we see the mom start to pull her shirt over her head, and then the commercial cuts to the screen that shows the company name and website and whatnot.
The voice-over then comes on and says something like, “At blah-blah company, we know what our customers want. And we work tirelessly to give it to you.”
This commercial has it all. Syrup, humor, memorability, sex, self-referential “we joke about ourselves because we’re real people, just like you” stuff . . . It’s perfect. Someone needs to contact me about the rights to it.
SI.com – MLB – Caught speeding – Thursday January 11, 2007 3:09AM
“I can say unequivocally in my 22 years I’ve known Barry Bonds he has never blamed anyone for anything.”
So says Gene Orza. A quick Google search for “barry bonds blame” turns up this:
“I’m tired of my kids crying. You wanted me to jump off a bridge, I finally did,” Bonds told reporters Tuesday, shortly after returning to training camp. “You finally brought me and my family down. … So now go pick a different person.”
So, maybe Orza was exaggerating a little. Why do people make statements like that when they must know them to be false?
Anyway, Bonds is a jerk. I don’t care how many home runs he hits or what his career stats look like when he finally retires. He has made himself the poster child of everything that’s wrong with Major League Baseball. It would make me very happy if he doesn’t break Hank Aaron’s record because he’s in jail for perjury. That would be too awesome.
When the handler and monkey go through the WTMD and the WTMD alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening.
BoingBoing posted this today, but they didn’t quote this rule, which is quite possibly the funniest. I mean, the nerve of the American public, thinking that they can set off alarms and allow their monkey to get off scot free.
“Sir, your monkey is going to have to step over here for further screening.”
It’s worth becoming disabled and getting a helper monkey just for the airport hilarity that this could cause. Even better than wearing an “enemy combatant” t-shirt through the security line.
Wife and I are off to a fancy dinner tonight at Mendocino, booked through OpenTable. Can’t wait for some nice fish, maybe some organic wine . . .
I know you all are jealous.
Edit: Totally worth it. I’d highly recommend Mendocino. Dinner was great. Nice, small restaurant, good service, right in the heart of super-trendy Georgetown. Georgetown is actually so trendy that I don’t think it’s trendy anymore – it’s gone totally back around to only semi-cool. The wife says, “Great company. But I guess I can get that anywhere. I would recommend the goat cheese cheesecake”.
Some of you may know that I love Flickr. I have about 1800 pictures up there. Recently, I posted some pictures of Barb’s family watching a video on YouTube, and tagged it “youtube”, among other things. It currently has 107 views, up from the normal 5-10 views on most of my pictures.
That got me thinking. Is it “ethical” to drive traffic to your website by adding tags and search terms that don’t really apply? The “youtube” tag was relevant to the picture, but I could have tagged it with all sorts of popular tags that don’t really apply. Similarly, I could tag this blog post with “sex” or “hate Republicans” or whatever the kids are searching for these days, and drive more traffic.
Or, alternatively to adding tags that don’t really fit, what if I actually wrote about stuff based on current top Google searches? It wouldn’t be hard to find out what the week’s popular search terms are, and then I could write about those things.
Usually, I post about whatever I feel like posting about. Sometimes that’s current events. For example, I got some random traffic when I posted about Zidane’s head butt, and I got random traffic when I posted about the Enviga tea that some marketing guy sent me. But often it’s not, like when I post about my stupid cat.
Anyway, I have no point, here. I’m just wondering where the line is between offering content that people might find interesting and then trying to promote it, and prostituting one’s self for traffic.