The sign to the left is from a beach in China. Click on the thumbnail so you can see the picture at full size. Some of the English is pretty funny, although I can only imagine what our public parks people would do with and English-to-Chinese translation.
My favorite: "wine empress is with the body not well cannot bottom sea swimming"
Picture is here on Flickr, and I found it via Boing Boing.
I’ve always thought that the hardest thing to write is an introduction, or in my vernacular, a first paragraph. I ought to take lessons from Chris Ayres of the London Times, who recently wrote an article that opened with this:
“WHEN A BULL whale comes at you with an erect
penis, it’s nine feet long,” said Gregory Colbert, aiming a fork at his
Caesar salad. “It’s like a torpedo. And you’d better get out of the
way, fast.”
Just grabs you doesn’t it?
I saw this picture on Patrick Eakes’ blog. In my case I’d substitute our dog, Arthur, for the puppy. I’ve been looking for a way to get rid of that beast for years.
The "Alcatraz" of this post’s title is my beautiful home in which my wife and I are imprisoned with our children. The "Turd Man" is yours truly. Why, you may ask, am I the "Turd Man?" I am the "Turd Man" because I have this amazing propensity for being the one person in the house who finds stopped up toilets. Yesterday alone I discovered two.
Is there anything grosser than walking into the bathroom to relieve yourself only to flip up the toilet lid and find a coagulated glop of turd and TP stuck at the bottom of a bowl of tea-colored water? It’s doubly horrific if you’re unprepared. You’re assaulted at a moment of vulnerability (i.e. you’re about to pee your pants) and now you have to hunt down the plunger which is never in the same bathroom with the turd-wadded toilet. Then you have to plunge it vigorously enough that you make a bit of a mess and then you have to clean up. Only then can you find personal relief. (I forgot to mention that in my house you are destined to find the blocked toilet at exactly the same time that all the other restrooms are being used by the houses other occupants, one of whom has created the turd bomb with which you are dealing).
This phenomenon has increased in frequency due to two recent developments in our home. First, my children have reached the age where they actually find the idea of touching a turd, even their own, quite gross. So they wad up half a roll of toilet paper in their hand each time they take a swipe at their offending bottom. Thus you have the prime ingredient for a turd-ball: a full roll of paper entwined with what can only be described as a cannonball of personal ballast. Second you have the recent installation of the new, government-mandated, eco-friendly toilets. You have to flush these things 26 times after you pee, so it’s no wonder that my kids are so adept at flooding them.
Still, how hard is it to check to make sure that your flush has succeeded? Apparently it’s too much for the other inmates of the Lowder asylum, so upon discovery of the second turd-ball I let loose with a stream of expletives that would have made the inmates at the original Alcatraz proud. My children, drawn to the disturbance like moths to a flame, came to the bathroom door to see if their father’s head would explode this time around. Upon seeing them I said something like "When you guys take a poop why can’t you make sure it actually goes down? I mean look at the size of this turd? Who’s turd is this?"
At this point they were trying desperately not to laugh. Their not-so-cherubic-anymore faces turned bright red and their turd-laying bodies shook as they tried to hold in the giggles, but when I let loose with the first emphasized "turd" they started losing it and when I asked who’s turd it was they just started laughing hysterically. Well, damnit, I couldn’t hold my anger and I started cracking up too. I guess a word like "turd" has that effect on people.
Anyway, as a result I’m implementing a new household fine for anyone who leaves a floater for Dad to discover. I figure if I have to be the "Turd Man" I may as well get paid for the anguish.
A site called Innocent English has a list of top 10 Bushisms. The title of this post is number nine on the list and was uttered by President Bush on November 5 of this year when he was shown a map of Brazil by the Brazilian president.
A full list of Bushisms can be found here. As well as one of the best screenshot’s I’ve seen in a while:
A while back when I was the director of marketing for a small publishing company I had a boss who liked to say, "All people are motivated by two things: fear and greed. To sell them something you either scare the s*** out of them or entice them with the keys to the kingdom." This caused me some momentary consternation as I was young and still had a dash of idealism, but time has proven him more right than wrong.
Of course my boss had taken too limited a view. Most people’s third primary motivation is sex, although some academics confuse this motivation with man’s need to reproduce. That, of course, is foolishness. Our motivation for sex must be much more complex than simple reproduction, for if it were not there would be no way to explain the birth of so many fundamentalists. However, I digress.
What caused me to think that my former boss was missing a third of the motivational trifecta, was this "Old Marketing vs. New Marketing" list from the blog "Creating Passionate Users":
Take a look at the item about half way down (you can click on the picture to see a larger version), the one that says "Old Way: Ads that imply you’ll get laid if you drink/use this product and New Way: Develop and support a socially-oriented online community and/or local user groups where people might get laid for real." Exactly.
There’s a reason why the oldest profession is so old, and that’s because it addresses all three of man’s most fundamental motivations. Desire for sex, fear of not having sex and an incessant and greedy quest for ever more sex. In fact the oldest profession addresses man’s motivations so well that it has survived for millenia on word-of-mouth alone. Ooh, bad pun…sorry.
Lest you think that I’m speaking only of men when I say "man’s" motivation, then I will remind you that one of the great cultural phenomena of the past several years was "Sex and the City" which was all about four women who were constantly having sex, were worried about having sex (or something related to sex like their sagging body parts), or wanting to have more sex (or sex partners).
What this means for us marketers is that we need to find a way to address all three core motivations. Some products like sandpaper don’t readily lend themselves to fear/greed/sex marketing hooks, but I’m certain that given enough time and creativity we could come up with some. It would probably have something to do with splinters.
It’s been a while since I’ve paid homage to the first blog I ever heard of, Fark.com. Here are my favorites of today’s Fark headlines:
Need I say more?
Results of a study on human sexuality have revealed that university educated women are less likely to experience an orgasm than women with only a high-school diploma. One of the study’s co-authors then makes this silly statement:
"It may well be that highly educated women are different from
less-educated women in many respects. Maybe they have higher standards
. . . higher expectations and legitimately lower evaluations. They may
be living much busier, much more stressful lives," said William Fisher,
a professor of psychology and obstetrics and gynecology at the
University of Western Ontario who is a co-author of the paper.
Sorry pal, I don’t think it takes a degree to have high expectations when you get your freak on, and I find it hard to believe that someone without a university degree has a less stressful life than someone who does. Something about that diploma getting you better jobs, more money and all that.
The study also has some "no-duh" findings like the fact that married women have a lower sex drive than single women and having children has a certain dampening effect on the old libido, but there are a couple of other surprises in there. Go check out the article here.
You just know that you’re gonna hear something about this on Leno or Letterman.
Now I’ve seen it all: McPaper is being pilloried by the likes of Michelle Malkin for running a doctored photo of Condi Rice that made her look just a tad demonic. Here’s the doctored photo (photos are
WASHINGTON (AP)):
And here’s the less-doctored photo that replaced it on the USA Today site after the stink raised by Malkin & Co., along with the editorial note from the paper:
Editor’s note: The photo of Condoleezza Rice that originally
accompanied this story was altered in a manner that did not meet USA
TODAY’s editorial standards. The photo has been replaced by a properly
adjusted copy. Photos published online are routinely cropped for size
and adjusted for brightness and sharpness to optimize their appearance.
In this case, after sharpening the photo for clarity, the editor
brightened a portion of Rice’s face, giving her eyes an unnatural
appearance. This resulted in a distortion of the original not in
keeping with our editorial standards.
Personally I don’t think the airbrushing can do any worse damage to Condi’s image than this picture did to W’s:
Befuddled 