The Ultimate Impulse Purchase

I saw this at the Byerly's grocery store in Roseville, Minn. In the checkout lane, of all places -- which means somebody thought it would make a likely impulse purchase.

I'm not sure if that says more about the merchandiser or their idea of who the Byerly's shopper is...

What Would Elrond Do?

I was driving down the highway a few days ago, and saw a sign for a self-storage business named Simply Self Storage. Didn't have time to take a picture of the sign, though, being too busy driving.

Well, it turns out it's a national chain, so they've got a website and everything, and I got a copy of the logo there.

As regular readers know, I have a hangup about logos that try to share one large letter between two (or more) words. To their credit, the designers of the Simply Self Storage logo didn't do that. If they had, it would have looked like this:


And we would all have known who to call when we needed a place to tuck away our little pointy-eared friends for safe-keeping. And maybe an imp or two, just to be sure.

But even with just one word attempting to make a visual connection with the large initial capital, it still doesn't really read clearly. The big white S in a blue block is just too far away and too different from the smaller black letters of "imply."

Why not just put in all the Ss, and let the big S stand alone, like this? It's still not a great logo, but at least it's easily readable.

I Am...

If you type those words into Google, it will suggest some possible sentence completions for you, based on one of its magic algorithms.

For some reason, the one that comes up first is "I am extremely terrified of Chinese people."


Wondering why in the world Google would have hooked onto such a phrase (as opposed to the oh-so-normal "I am omega" or "I am sasha fierce track list," whatever that means), I followed the path to see what types of sites were using the phrase.

This led me to AngryAsianMan who posited it had come from either PostSecret or ChristWire.org, which used the image from PostSecret in combination with a disturbing rant against the Chinese. (However, the dates on the various posts would seem to make it impossible for the ChristWire post to be the original source, since it is dated February 5, 2009, while the original AngryAsianMan post was from December 3, 2008. So the PostSecret entry was clearly first.)

AngryAsianMan noted that it's possible the ChristWire site is a parody. So I started Googling the term ChristWire to see what people were saying about it, and saw several pages that were sure it was a parody, and just as many that were sure it wasn't.

Then I came across a forum discussing ChristWire on atheistnexus.org, referring to something called Poe's Law, and linking to this page on the Wikipedia. The basic idea of Poe's law is:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist [or other fundamentalist] in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

It reminds me of something I read on the Huffington Post a month or so ago: when the anti-gay-marriage ads done by the National Organization for Marriage were shown on The Colbert Report, and then satirized pretty extremely by Colbert, the NOM people were overjoyed and didn't even realize they were being satirized.

A recent study quantified this type of unexpected outcome (quoting the Wikipedia entry on Poe's Law):

Investigators at The Ohio State University School of Communication found evidence supporting Poe's Law in a study published in 2009. They measured the relative political conservatism and liberalism of 332 individuals. The study participants then viewed clips from The Colbert Report, a television show that is a parody of conservative news commentary shows such as The O'Reilly Factor and broadcast on the Comedy Central cable network. The researchers found that the relatively conservative people in their study reported that the star of the show, Stephen Colbert, was actually showing disregard for liberals and his true conservative attitude about the matter at hand. Liberals viewing the show tended to recognize the parody and not view Mr. Colbert as presenting his true political views. Curiously, the liberal and conservative viewers in the study found Mr. Colbert similarly humorous (a non-statistically significant difference). While not a direct or intentional test of Poe's Law, the results fit well the predictions it makes.

This is well-known in the field of communication research (where I learned about it as the Archie Bunker Effect) -- I guess now we'll have to update its name to the Colbert Effect.

I've just returned to the ChristWire site, and I'm starting to think that, yes, it is a parody site. Several sites I found via Google said the site is done by The Onion, and in looking at the home page, it could be true. Check out this empty feed area from the bottom of the page:


That's too over-the-top even for a bunch of fundamentalists.

Then there's this post from a site called impoliteconversation, which quotes the ChristWire 404/page not found message: "Our holy servers are currently experiencing miraculous amounts of high traffic and atheistic evils." Again, that's just too much hyperbole to be serious.

I guess I am trapped in an Internet meme. Oh dear.

No Thank You, Kanye

A friend sent me a link to this article on Reuters, telling us that rapper Kanye West has a new book out -- despite the fact that he doesn't read books, doesn't like them, and is on record as saying "I would never want a book's autograph." (No duh.)

Much has been written about the book already, so I won't add to it much. But I will point out one thing I haven't seen mentioned in other posts on the subject: Did West really need to work with a co-author (J. Sakiya Sandifer) to create this brief volume?

After all, according to Reuters, the book is:

52 pages -- some blank, others with just a few words -- and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, "Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!" Another page reads "I hate the word hate!"

Wow, it sure seems like a guy who's written some fairly compelling lyrics could have come up with those nuggets on his own.

CSI: Children, Stay Indoors!

I believe I've mentioned my decade-or-so-long addiction to the Law & Order franchise, which I kicked a few years ago when I finally convinced myself it was a net negative in my life.

Here's Lenore Skenazy, writing on her blog, Free Range Kids, about the CSI television show (and Law & Order and all their ilk):

In a report titled, “CSI: Mayo Clinic,” Mayo psychiatrist Timothy Lineberry and his team studied two sets of data: One, a list of crimes, victims and circumstances as seen on CSI and CSI: Miami over the course of two years. The other: a list of crimes, victims and circumstances in real life, as compiled by the Centers for Disease Control over the course of two years.

You may think the stories on crime shows are “ripped from the headlines,” but Lineberry found that the shows usually forget to rip the ones involving minorities, for starters. (For that matter, so does TV news. But if the victim is young and white, you will soon see more of her family than your own.)

Meanwhile, TV crime shows also forget to mention how often alcohol is involved, probably because a drunk guy with a gun is not nearly as compelling as, say, a charming psychopath....

So when we’re trying to figure out, “Is it safe for me to take a little walk tonight?” we end up flashing on a pile of maggot-covered bodies, courtesy of CSI. Bodies of people murdered by strangers. Result? ”Maybe I’ll just stay in.”

Parents are even more affected. Never mind that while there are about 50 children kidnapped and killed by strangers every year (according to numbers from the Crimes Against Children Research Center), there are about 1,000 killed by family members or acquaintances. Since most of us aren’t exposed to crime in our real lives very much (thank goodness), all we have to go on is what we see on TV.

And so we think, “It’s a jungle out there! Strangers are hiding everywhere, with duct tape. I will not let them kill my kid!”

In we yank our offspring. (And dare I suggest that at least a few of the older ones will end up watching CSI because they’re not out playing kickball?)

Breakfast at Tiffany's Hard to Swallow

Last night I watched the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. I confess I knew just about nothing of it... other than that it starred Audrey Hepburn, was based on a story by Truman Capote, and had something to do with the Tiffany's store in New York City.

So I was completely taken aback by the extremely racist portrayal of a Japanese character named Yunioshi (Mickey Rooney). This was the the archetypally racist Asian stereotype, played for humor -- a bumbler with buck teeth, highly inflected English and a lecherous heart for the pretty white girl downstairs (Ms. Hepburn).

A quick Google search turned up thousands of pages describing how racist the film is, and various protests that have occurred about it. But I had no idea. It's one of those films that never quite reached me -- maybe because it came out just after I was born. I was too young for it, and then later I thought of it as part of a fuddy-duddy era (what time period can ever be so antediluvian as the one when you came into the world?).

I couldn't help wondering if the stereotype came from the original story or not, and so I dug up an online copy of the Capote's published text.

Yunioshi is in the story, but his part is much smaller, and only at the beginning. Some of his dialog in the film is lifted right from the text, but the painful comedic spin and all the ugly mannerisms are missing. And the person who repeatedly calls the police is not Yunioshi at all, but a woman who lives downstairs, and who has evaporated completely from the film version.

The story does have its share of casually racist elements about a range of different types of peoples, but Mr. Yunioshi isn't really one of them (he is referred to as a "Jap" twice, but given the story's setting during World War II that doesn't seem too surprising).

A few other key things that are entirely different between the film and story versions:

• The narrator (George Peppard in the film) is not a "kept man" -- in fact, the rich woman played by Patricia Neal was created out of whole cloth for the film.
  
• There's no romance between Holly Golightly and the narrator. Assuming the original narrator has more in common with Truman Capote than George Peppard, it's not hard to imagine why.
• Given the lack of a romantic angle, it wasn't much of a surprise that the ending was completely different -- Holly leaves, and the narrator is the one who rescues the cat.
  

Another example of Hollywood making a story more "commercial." Sigh.

Amazon Environmental Spins Waste into Gold (Paint)

Today's Star Tribune business section included a great story by freelancer Todd Nelson about a business named Amazon Environmental. Located in the northern suburb of Fridley, the company takes all the leftover paint that's turned in at the county hazardous waste sites and remixes it into perfectly usable paint.

Their product comes in 12 standard colors, and, according to the story, is popular with contractors and people who own rental properties, since they know they'll be able to get the same color whenever they need more. Plus, it's cheaper than regular paint.

In 2008, Amazon recycled 2 million gallons of paint in Minnesota and their second location in Riverside, Calif. They also recycled 200 tons of metal from the cans the paint came in.

And what's almost cooler than the recycled paint? They've created a use for the paint that can't be reused as paint. (About half of what they receive comes "prebulked" in 55-gallon drums, which means the color is basically mud.)

Founder Lorraine Segala had a background in waste-collection, while her husband, Dave Long, worked in the cement industry. Between the two of them, they invented several patented processes for taking the unusable paint and turning it into something they call processed latex pigment (PLP). According to the Amazon Environmental site:

cement companies use PLP as a raw material in place of shale, clay, limestone, and other materials that would need to be mined in order to manufacture cement. Amazon is the nation's only paint recycler which recycles 100% of the paint it collects.

Joined by Lorraine's brother John about 10 years ago, the three have built the company to $4 million in sales per year, with 24 employees.

I hope they manage to keep growing and recycling more paint. I wonder how many states have hazardous waste drop-off sites, as in Minnesota and California? That centralized drop-off is a key part of making this business model work for Amazon Environmental.
_______

The paint can be purchased at Amazon Environmental's Fridley headquarters, 7180 West Commerce Circle, 763-572-0800 (map), or at Paint Liquidators, 3869 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis, 612-310-1302 (map).

Chris Monroe and the Escaping Monkey

As I wrote earlier, Duluth cartoonist Chris Monroe last year wrote and illustrated Monkey with a Tool Belt, a picture book about an escaping primate. She recently used her weekly Violet Days strip in the Star Tribune to bring us a three-part series about a real monkey that may have been the inspiration for Chico Bon Bon.

Click on the images to see them at a readable size.






I wonder if Oliver's exploits will increase tourism in Tupelo?

Richard Cuffari, Illustrator

Contrary to the old saying "you can't judge a book by its cover," I often have judged books by their covers, at least in making the decision to read them or not. When I was thinking of starting a blog, one of the things I really wanted to do was post covers of books I had read as a young teen because they featured artwork by my favorite illustrators.

Well, it's finally time to start.

One such illustrator is Richard Cuffari, whose pen and ink drawings stand out in my mind as a signature style not duplicated by any other illustrator. I wrote about his work briefly before, when discussing Sylvia Louise Engdahl's This Star Shall Abide series.

Cuffari was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1925. His parents were immigrants, and the family didn't have money to support Cuffari's artistic talents, but he won numerous awards for his art during high school. At 18, he entered the army and served in World War II, then studied at Pratt Institute, graduating in 1949. He married and had four children. Aside from raising a family, nothing is mentioned in the short biographies I've seen about what he did between 1949 and 1966, when he began freelancing as a children's book illustrator with a new edition of The Wind in the Willows.

Over the next 12 years, until his much-too-early death in 1978 at the age of 53, he illustrated over 200 books for children (that's almost 20 books a year). He won the Citation of Merit from the New York Society of Children's Illustrators in 1969 and 1970 and the Christopher Award in 1973.

The Cuffari work I always think of first is for The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope. I'm not sure if it's because it was a Newbery Honor book, or because it has a strong female protagonist, or because it's a retelling of the Tam Lin legend, but this has always been my favorite in terms of both its text and image content.


Unlike most of the books in my collection that feature Cuffari covers, The Perilous Gard also has illustrations inside.


Cuffari's most famous cover is probably Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, the sequel to the Newbery-winning A Wrinkle in Time (whose cover was designed by another all-time favorite of mine, Ellen Raskin). Ironically, I've owned a copy of this book for years but never realized the art was by Cuffari... probably because of the way it uses color and also the fact that it has no human figures in it.


Cuffari did at least one other cover for a L'Engle book, which I confess I haven't read:


I picked up the next book, The Testing of Tertius, because it had a Cuffari cover, and in spite of its unintelligible title. I quickly found out it was a sequel to a book called Merlin's Mistake (which didn't have a Cuffari cover), so I read that, too.


The stories are about three teenagers in the time of King Arthur and Merlin. One of the boys, named Tertius (his older brothers' names are Primus and Secundus, get it now?) is Merlin's godson, and, it turns out, protege.

There are some nifty inside illustrations in Tertius, particularly this one of Merlin being cast under a spell by the evil enchanter Urlik.


Another book I read just because of its cover...


I only read it once, though, so I must not have thought too much of it. But I remembered it enough to buy it when I found a used hard cover.

Then there are the books I've acquired as an adult, but never read when I was a teen.


This one came out in 1978, after I was in college, so that explains why I didn't see it.

I also recently stumbled across Robin Palmer's A Dictionary of Mythical Places while at a book sale, and snapped it up because of the Cuffari illustations.



There are some pretty fantastic drawings, including this one labeled the Lands of Monstrous Peoples.


When I looked up Cuffari on the web, I discovered that the University of Southern Mississippi's de Grummond Collection has the cover artwork for A Wind in the Door, as well as covers and inside art from Rosemary Sutcliff's The Capricorn Bracelet and Ester Wier's The Hunting Trail, and some pieces from Cuffari's 1966 version of The Wind in the Willows.

The Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota has the original art for The Perilous Gard cover. Another item I'll have to go see some day!

Finally, I have to report that writing this post led to a small spate of purchases on Alibris and AbeBooks.com (The Capricorn Bracelet, The Wind in the Willows and The Hunting Trail). I'll post those covers when they arrive.
______

Note: The biographical material is from the University of Southern Mississippi's page about its Cuffari collection. They cited the Fifth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators, pp. 90-91; Major Authors and Illustrators, pp. 605-608; and Something about the Author, vol. 6, pp. 55-57.

Do I Dare Say "Ben Suarez" in the Title?

Sorry for being so obsessed with this Canton, Ohio/Universal Media Syndicate/false advertising jag I've been on lately, but I just discovered a few more things.

Believe it or not, I found someone who admires the work of the Universal Media Syndicate and its ilk in a discussion thread from a site called The Copywriting Board. The original post asked other writers to share good examples of advertorial writing. After a while, a person going by the name "gjabiz," based in Canton, Ohio, brought up the work of UMS in reply #23. Quoting gjabiz heavily here:

Greater Canton IS a hotbed of [direct marketing]. 3 major players in SCI [Suarez Corporation Industries], Arthur Middleton (holding company for Universal Syndications) and FitnessQuest. All three employ hundreds of people each. Several smaller companies... have emerged in the area. They all link back in some manner to Benjamin D. Suarez [head of SCI].

If someone spends a few years at SCI, they become well equipped to start their own "small potatoes" companies. NOT everyone wants to build a big company, and there are many former copywriters who cut their teeth under John White, Ben Suarez, Rod Napier [head of Arthur Middleton] and other top executives who mastered the art of selling products via direct response....

Akron U. is also supplying many of the established and younger companies with interns from the Direct Marketing Laboratory...the only state of the art college campus facility that teaches Direct Marketing from people who are successful doing it. So, this means we will continue to grow and remain a HOTBED for direct response marketing methods.

With the new Suarez Business Institute coming on line in April (scheduled) we hope to expand the "borders" of Akron-Canton and find talented people throughout the country who can create products and or promotions that work.

Wow, there are some frightening facts in there:

• First, Arthur Middleton's Rodney Napier isn't the original source of all this dreck, but only the latest incarnation. The originator is one Benjamin Suarez, who may have been Napier's father-in-law (that info is based on a crazy site I found called stopbensuarez.com, so take it for what it's worth).
  
• Second, Ben Suarez has funded the Applied Marketing Research Laboratories at the University of Akron (see the description of the funding on the SCI site and on the University of Akron site). It sure makes me feel good to know academics are using modern science to help these scammers do their jobs better.
  
• Third, Suarez has just started something called the Suarez Business Institute to teach his methods. You can sign up for it on the RPPurchase site (a subsidiary of SCI), as long as you're willing to give them your Social Security number and $35.

According to a page on interesting-people.org (posted in 1994), Ben Suarez has a long history of scams and run-ins with attorneys general in several states. Among many other things, he's well-known for offering a "free" cubic zirconium stone with the purchase of a non-free setting. The types of products offered by SCI's divisions are a mirror of those offered by the Arthur Middleton subsidiaries: coin collections, air purifiers, collectibles, and quack medicines.

Suarez is infamous for using his acquired wealth to go after politicians he doesn't like, such as former Congressman Jack Brooks (D-Texas), according to onlinemarketingtoday.com. According to the same article, he's sued critics (including the guy who wrote the piece on interesting-people.org, cited above) for "tortuous business interference" and "defamation." And I found a crazy rant he wrote as a memo to his employees back in October 2008, telling them why they shouldn't vote for Barack Obama (if you go to the link, search the name Suarez in your browser and you'll find the rant).

Sounds like Rodney Napier represents the more reasonable branch of the family.

Now all I have to do is wait for an email from Suarez's lawyer.

Sad But True

As seen on the back door of the Bean Factory coffee shop, Randolph Avenue, St. Paul.

Cool Surge -- Another Scam from Canton, Ohio

Here in Minnesota, we went from heating to cooling season in about 12 hours this week, and what do you know? Instantly we have a Star Tribune ad from the Universal Media Syndicate scammers selling something called "Cool Surge."

Recycling the same layout they used for the Universal Health Card, Amish Heaters, Trigosamine, "free" safes, and a multitude of coin collections, now the dishonest marketers at Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings, parent company of UMS, are selling a mobile box that contains a fan and "two sets of reusable glacier ice blocks" -- basically containers that you fill with water, freeze in your freezer, and then put inside the box so the fan blows over them.

As Dan at Regruntled.com says, the net effect will be to warm your house, given the laws of thermodynamics. In the lengthy comments on Dan's post, at least one person pointed out that it's basically the same as blowing a fan over a bowl of ice. And last time I checked, a fan cost maybe twenty bucks.

Aside from the obvious dishonesty of the whole Universal Media Syndicate enterprise (they dare to describe the Cool Surge as "eco-friendly"!), the thing that irks me the most about them is the insane prices they attach to their junk. $298 for one of these Cool Surges! (You get the second one "free," except the cost of shipping, which -- according to one of the commenters on Regruntled -- was almost $100. So even at best, $200 per unit.)

I can just hear the meeting where they set their prices. Like anyone who's taken Marketing 101, they know that some consumers associate higher prices with higher quality. So jacking up the price reinforces the wishful thinking of the gullible.

I wonder if the people of Canton, Ohio, are ashamed of the way this company drags their town's name through the mud. I sure would be.
________

If you want to contact the Star Tribune to complain about the ad, try their main number (612-673-4000) or use the web feedback form to the advertising department.

Double Deal

I've been reading both newspapers of the Twin Cities for the last 16 years, and I don't think there's ever been a time when their front pages were so close to identical: not only the headline choice but even the same moment captured photographically -- as if there were only one member of the Minnesota legislature working on the state's final budget. (I guess a one-member legislature probably would have been able to make a deal, huh?)

It's interesting to note how the PiPress's version is pithier and more tightly cropped -- all around, much bolder and more in-your-face.

Or in Rep. Dean Urdahl's face, to be completely accurate.

Flip Phones

During my freshman year in college, I remember learning that it was 1920 when the U.S. population went from a majority-rural nation to a majority-urban one. (See the U.S. Census data here.)

Interestingly, the definition of "urban" was a municipality with a population of 2,000 or more. Not exactly what most of us would think of as a city these days -- more like a small town. But definitely not rural either, at least in the sense of a single isolated house surrounded by farmland.

I was reminded of this factoid recently when I read that the number of households that only use cell phones is now higher than the number of households that only use a land line. (See the AP story by Alan Fram in the Star Tribune.)

• Clearly, most households have both types of phones. (20 percent have only cell phones; 17 percent have only a land line.)
• It only took five years for those numbers to change from 3 and 43 percent, respectively.
• On top of the overall numbers, it's interesting to note that 40% of 25- to 29-year-olds have only cells; 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds.

I wonder if, in the long run, this flip in the numbers will be the same kind of watershed event as the one in 1920?

Adventures in Babysitting Memories

My memories of childhood are spotty and don't represent what happened very well. The activities I did all the time have little place in my mind, while things I did only a few time stand out with clarity.

For instance, I didn't do a lot of babysitting as a teen -- just twice, yet I remember each experience pretty clearly. I was thinking about one of the two today, from when I was 15.

My aunt and uncle were visiting, and they invited some friends of theirs from college who lived in our area to go out with them and my parents. So I was volunteered to babysit for this couple's children.

We lived in the country, while this family lived in one of the small cities about 20 miles away, in what I perceived to be a well-to-do suburbanish area. The house was a split level, and generally more elegant than I was used to. I recall that the man of this couple was an executive at Sears Roebuck, and had married late, so he was probably around 50, with a substantially younger wife and young kids.

I don't remember much about the kids or what we did while the adults were gone, but I clearly remember something that happened after the adults returned.

The kids were in bed, and I had been watching the Grammy Awards on television when the adults arrived. Harry Chapin was on, playing and singing his hit from the past year, "Cats in the Cradle." And the man of the house said, after listening to the song for a while, "Why does music these days always have to be about something? Why can't it just be fun to listen to?" I'm sure I haven't quoted him verbatim, but I remember the gist of his words, and his tone, which sounded angry.

I was taken aback. I think I tried to explain why it was a good song, but I'm not really sure.

Why has this moment stuck with me so clearly for so long? Maybe because an adult I didn't know was showing anger about something that seemed both trivial and important to me. I believe it struck me as an example of the "generation gap," too. He seemed square and out of touch with music.

In hindsight, it's easy to think this man was overly sensitive to the song's message because it resonated with his own family life. But I don't know that, and can never know it. I don't even remember his name.

It's just one of those little memories that periodically pokes its head up out of the flat plain of my everyday recollections.

A Boy Maimed: Sue?

Here's a scenario:

1. Your 3-year-old is in the home of family friends, accompanied by his mother.
   
2. While mom and the other mom visit in the kitchen, your son plays with the host family's kids nearby.
   
3. The host family has only recently moved into the house, and is still unpacking.
   
4. Your son climbs an empty bookcase, which falls on him.
5. He suffers severe injuries, which require multiple surgeries.

What would you do? Gee, I don't know... but suing the friends would not be one of my action items.

But that's just what the child's dad, David Foss, did in this case, despite the fact that the child's own mother was right there and fully responsible for his behavior, if anyone could be held responsible in a situation that was clearly an accident.

I can't tell from the media coverage, such as this story in the Pioneer Press, whether the Fosses' marriage is intact or if they are divorced or separated. Perhaps that could explain David Foss's lack of civility and sheer common sense in suing the other family.

The courts made short shrift of his case, though -- first, it was dismissed by summary judgment, and then, upon appeal to the Minnesota state Supreme Court, the dismissal was upheld. (Read the decision here.)

A key point in the decision was this:

Imposing duties on homeowners to protect child visitors of all ages and personalities from these hazards would be tantamount to mandating childproofing requirements for private residences.

And requiring that childproofing whether the child's parent is present or not, another key factor in the decision.

Chalk one up for a good decision by the courts. Now if only they would finish up with the U.S. Senate case.

(Off topic, but here's a link to Johnny Cash singing A Boy Named Sue. I grew up listening to a 45 of the song, and can still recite the lyrics.)

Die, Logo, Die!

Knowing how I love to hate logos that attempt to make multiple uses of the same letter, a friend in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis sent me this photo.

Whooee, this is a bad one! Evolution Die. I'm having trouble deciding between my favorite oppositional readings:

1. They wish evolution would die, or
   
2. Your pet will devolve and die from eating the food.

(Also, it's good to know about the 50% less poop and odor. Thanks.)

Interestingly, the version of the logo that's on the Evolution Diet pet food website is not quite as bad, because they increased the weight of the T so it's more noticeable. Also, because there isn't as much clutter right at the base of the T, the bottom serifs are more visible and it just reads more clearly as one extra-large T.


It's still not good, but not quite as much of a disaster.

(Sign originally seen on Upton Avenue, Minneapolis.)

Jargon Alert

Quoting USA Today here, but I actually heard it first on NPR this evening:

After struggling for years to trim its dealer network, [Chrysler president Jim] Press says, the automaker is taking advantage of the fact that being in bankruptcy court frees it from state franchise protection laws. "The bankruptcy process does allow us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to accomplish a right-sized, realigned dealer body," he says.

I can't help but think jargon like that is a sign of a company that's too busy talking to itself to listen to customers.

Considering a Scanner Darkly

When I went to the Unitarian church book sale back in March, I shot this admittedly bad photo of a man who was using a barcode scanner as he went through the books.

I took the photo because I had no idea what he was doing. I thought perhaps he was an obsessive-compulsive book collector who was cataloging his purchases as he went.

Well, it turns out that it's de rigueur for used-book-sellers to wield scanners to determine the value of books before buying them. Sunday's Star Tribune contained this story about how some local library book sales are starting to ban the scanners as a matter of fairness to the nonprofessional shoppers (better known as "the public"). Many other libraries still allow the devices.

From reading the article and some other sources online, what everyone seems to agree on is that scanner users should scan at the table of books as they go, rather than grab a pile of books and take them off to a corner to scan, which not only takes the books out of view of other shoppers, it also creates a pile of work for the sale's volunteers to reshelve the books.

Not hoarding books seems like common sense and common courtesy. It really annoys me that people take advantage of volunteer-run events like book sales for their own selfish purposes, without regard to the common good, and end up forcing the organizations to establish rules to deal with a small number of abusers.

Water Colors

From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report Climate Change and Water, this map showing the projected change in annual water runoff in the last decade of this century (compared with runoff in the last 20 years of the 20th century). Runoff is a primary indication of water availability.

There will be wars fought over water in all those red and orange areas.

Catcher-22

Here is an excerpt from Eric Hanson's wonderful A Book of Ages, in which he recounts facts about famous and infamous people at specific ages, from the chapter titled Twenty-Two:

J. D. Salinger is dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of the famous playwright, 1941. For a time he and a friend named Holden are employed as entertainers aboard the Caribbean cruise ship MS Kungsholm. Among their duties: arranging deck tennis competitions and being available to dance with unescorted ladies. In November, he sells his first story to The New Yorker magazine. It's a sad little Christmas story about a kid named Holden Caufield. The magazine plans to run "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" in late December, but when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, the story suddenly seems trivial. Salinger is drafted into the army. Oona O'Neil breaks up with him and begins dating Charlie Chaplin.

Quite an eventful year for J. D. Sounds like enough to make a man into a recluse!

When Lawyers Meet Copy Writers

As seen at the Rosedale AMC Theater.

Canning Your Own

I just picked up the Fresh Girl's Guide to Easy Canning by Ana Micka, which looks to be a really helpful intro to something I may be on the verge of doing.

(I'm thinking of canning spaghetti sauce from all the tomatoes I am theoretically growing.)

FGG to EC includes a DVD showing how to do this mysterious thing that I know my dad's mother used to do. The book is a miniature three-ring binder, so you can lay it open on the counter easily.

And, of course, I have to admit that part of the reason I like it so much at first blush is the overall design and the wonderful graphics throughout, courtesy of Aleksandra Stancevic of Entropy Design Lab. It's a very thoughtful piece of work.

I love how the younger generation (especially the women, it seems) is rediscovering craft knowledge, from knitting to canning, and making it their own. (See elenabella's posts on her experiences with Etsy for an idea of the range that's out there.)

Dial 911 for the News

Am I the only one in town who didn't realize that Minnesota Public Radio's KNOW station was obviously playing up the similarity with 911?

I didn't see it until I picked up this sticker at the Living Green Expo.

Hair Today

Sometimes I feel like the English language is leaving me behind.

When I saw this sign in front of a beauty salon last week, I was confounded for a minute. UPDOS ... some version of MS-DOS, perhaps? Maybe something from Hindu?

Then I realized it was UP + DO + S, like when a woman with long hair piles it up on top of her head. Hairdo - hair + up = Updo. Of course. I've heard it said, but never seen it written, let alone considered what its plural form would look like.

"Party Hair" helped me out a bit by providing context, although I have to say that party hair seems like an odd construction all its own -- as if it wasn't really your hair, but some special hair you rent just for going to parties. Perhaps it comes attached to the lower edge of a lampshade, and all you have to do is put it on your head, climb up on a table and start dancing.

(Sign seen on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minn.)

Another Logo that Doesn't "Read" ... Or Does It?

As seen on a fellow Blogger site... Zichi Lorentz Artosphere.

See my earlier posts one and two on logos that don't "read."

(Thanks to my own daughter number one for spotting this!)

See You Later, Escalator

From Yes! magazine, spring 2009:

Number of escalators in the United States: 30,000

Number of homes the energy from 30,000 escalators can power: 375,000

Calories burned by a 150-pound person walking up a flight of stairs: approximately 9

Yet I think of the places where elevators are common -- in subways, airports, department stores -- and they are often multi-story access systems in places that have too much traffic for elevators. Also, they are frequently found in places where people are carrying things or pulling luggage.

I'm sure there are many places where escalators may not be necessary (two-story shopping malls, for instance, and maybe some hotel lobbies), but it seems a bit simplistic to assume they are all just complete energy wasters.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that taking escalators out of subway stations like the Dupont Circle station shown above would cause an increase in car traffic.

Don't Pee on Me, Calvarino

Driving down a street the other day, I saw something that is commonplace on the streets of the U S of A, but it got me wondering: What is the deal with the peeing Calvin ripoff graphics?

And why are these things always on trucks?

Yet another subject for a popular culture dissertation.

Update: David Steinlicht sent in a link to his All Small comic on the same topic from 2004. I knew I wasn't the first to note the phenomena, but when you Google this topic (think about those search words!) you get such a mix of pages... many of which are people trying to sell you window clings so you can have your very own version of Calvin relieving himself. Finding the quality social commentary, such as David's, is not so easy.

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate

I was excited to read that Britain has just named its first female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Aside from being the first woman, she is also the first Scot and the first (at least openly) non-heterosexual.

Since I am an American who -- despite years of writing so-called poetry in my teens -- has not read contemporary poetry for almost 30 years, I had not heard of Duffy until I read the AP story about her in the Star Tribune yesterday.

But I loved the poem included with the story:

Syntax

I want to call you thou,
the sound
of the shape at the start
of a kiss -- like this -- thou --
and to say, after, I love,
thou, I love, thou I love, not
I love you.

Because I so do --
as we say now -- I wanted to say
thee, I adore, I adore thee
and to know in my lips
the syntax of love resides,
and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love's language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or
clotting in the heart.

It's wonderful to read aloud, and I love how it makes all those words that usually seem archaic and pretentious instead sound natural and sensuous. The poem is sibilant and soothing until you get to that word clotting, which sounds harsh and abrupt, just like a clot.

From what I read in the rest of the story, Duffy's work in general sounds like something I would want to read -- one collection is called The World's Wife, in which the poems "adopt the voices of female historical figures and the wives of famous men. It includes the poem 'Mrs. Darwin': '7 April 1852/Went to the Zoo/I said to him -- Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.' "

Something else to add to my Future Favorites list!

Tortured Logic

You've got to love the Pew Trust and all its progeny, in this case the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

CNN (via the Huffington Post) reports that a recent Pew Research Center's survey found protestant evangelicals were the most likely to say that torture is often or sometimes justified. Over 60 percent of evangelicals agreed with one or the other of those two choices.

Specifically, the survey asked, "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?"

Who was most likely to say torture is never justified? Mainline Protestants -- Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians (30 percent), followed by the religiously unaffiliated (25 percent).

Shirky Debunks Wall Street Journal Story

I almost choked when I heard about the Wall Street Journal story that said over 450,000 Americans are making a decent living by blogging. Then it went on to say "It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year."

Riiiiiight, I thought. 450,000 bloggers have stats like that.

But it took my hero Clay Shirky, writing for boingboing, to dissect the utter stupidity of the WSJ story. It's a basic misunderstanding of the power law distribution he explained so well in his book Here Comes Everybody: A very few people are making a bunch of money, and when you combine them with the many others who aren't, the average (or mean) of their incomes is thrown off. What you want to look at instead, in the case of a power law distribution, is the median (or midpoint). And even then it will be distorted. Like the average income of people in a bar if Bill Gates is one of the people.

Shirky gives us the real numbers:

Average revenue for bloggers in the top 10% of revenue is even lower than the 100K median, and the median income for all bloggers running ad-supported weblogs is (wait for it)...

...$200. A year.

He then concludes:

There was no way to rescue this [article], since the argument rests on incorrect extrapolations from selective readings of suspect data; the Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed to have published it.