From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
1. ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ by Tony Orlando and Dawn
2. ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks.
3. ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ courtesy of the Disney folks.
4. ‘Macarena’ by Los del Rio.
5. ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ by Dan Hill.
6. ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin.
7. ‘Baby I’m-A Want You’ by Bread.
8. ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’ by the Baha Men.
9. ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow.
10. ‘The Night Chicago Died’ by Paper Lace.

Movieoke – a twist on karaoke, where the participants act along with scenes from famous movies

Brian Ulrich takes dramatically “real” photos of consumers, consumption, and the built environment. Pretty great stuff.

Tags: brian ulrich, commercial, consumption, notifbutwhen, photo, photography, retail

Supersize your movie collection. 50 movies for $26.99 $11.99.

I bet we all know someone that went to Japan to teach English at some point in their life, perhaps right after graduating. Here’s where the industry is at these days.
“They have guys whose job is it to go to the airports just to pick up new teachers. And that’s because the teachers have a grueling schedule of eight lessons a day, with a 10-minute break between each. It’s worse than a factory.”

My upcoming talk at the PDMA in Irvine, CA is posted here.

You can now buy Chagall prints and other artwork at Costco. There’s an Elvis Costello lyric in here somewhere.

A graduate computer science class at University of San Francisco is preparing for the first flash mob supercomputer

Pretty interesting and informative series of audio interviews with Lomo photographers here.

From the most recent issue of the IDSA’s always-quality publication design perspectives
The Corporate Design Foundation’s publication, @issue featured some IDSA members in its fall issue…Also, there’s a small history of the Eames Chair, designed by IDSA honorary member Ray Eames, and his brother Charles. For more information, visit www.cdf.org.

(In fact, Ray was a woman, and Charles was her husband. Kudos to both IDSA and CDF. And, uhhh, paging Meg and Jack White?)

AOLiza is brilliant. It’s a few years old, but I’d never seen it before. This genius took the classic ELIZA program and threw it out there to get involved in chats and instant messaging with people who didn’t realize it was a piece of (frustrating) software.

It is vaguely cruel since the frustration is palpable, and familiar (if you’ve ever tried ELIZA), but it is definitely funny.

This is a brilliant piece of marketing and productizing – the 790 Dollar Website – it’s somewhere between a template that you could download and a full-blown customization. Not for everyone, but they may have identified a really interesting niche, an approach that could be applied elsewhere.

Lately there’s been a lot of inaccuracies in the digital cable info on our TV that tells us what program is on. Today the little box said “Just Shoot Me” but it was actually an episode of COPS.

Dodge

The Dog

After last night’s episode of E.R., they had the usual “Next week, on an all-new E.R.” promo. Lurid and graphic as always, but this one made reference to “…as the body count rises…” which I thought was rather off-message for E.R. Do we watch it for the same reasons we watch a horror movie? For gross-out catharsis? Or is it for weepy stomach-hurting misery catharsis? If the latter, then a reference to the “body count” seems very inappropriate.