top 10 earworm honorees
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.

Supersize your movie collection. 50 movies for $26.99.

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?)

Tmsuk IV picks up a handbag Saturday during a test at a shopping arcade in the city of Fukuoka, part of the first robot demonstrations on public streets in Japan.

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.

Franchise Zeitgeist - Entrepreneur magazine lists the top 101 fastest-growing franchises. In the top 20, there is fast food etc. (Subway, 7-Eleven, Quizno’s, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin-Robbins), Curves (the fitness place aimed at women), Jazzercise, three different commercial cleaning chains, two tax-prep brands, as well as one each in kids education, real estate, hotels, Internet services, business coaching, hair-cutting, local city guides, and the UPS store.

An ad being filmed in east Los Angeles County is only the second commercial that 66-year-old Dustin Hoffman has appeared in, he said Wednesday. It will air in Europe only.
In the final scenes of ‘The Graduate,’ Hoffman’s breakthrough film, his character, Benjamin Braddock, pulls Katharine Ross’ character, Elaine Robinson, from the church as she’s getting married. They fight off parents and guests before riding away in a bus.
In the car commercial, directed by Michael Bay (’Pearl Harbor’), Hoffman again rescues the bride (supposeldy his daughter) but this time returns to a 2005 Audi.

Someone told me about thislast night

Pschitt Soda - The French ‘Pschitt’ is a popular brand of soda in Europe - it’s owned by Perrier, in fact. For obvious reasons the name does not play well in English-speaking countries.

Found Typography is an excellent series of photos (actually a series of galleries of photos) of text (often signs) in everyday life.

Pickle Paraphernalia includes all sorts of crap you don’t need like the Pickle License Plate Bracket, Pickle Ball Paddle Ball Set, Pickle Power golf balls, pickle chip-shaped earrings, Pickle Putter (left and right handed) and more.

Upcoming BayCHI talk is mentioned in the “Things to Do” section of the Mercury News. Amusing to see the other very techy events surrounding it.

As I described in an earlier post, the indie film Value-Added Cinema played at the SF Indie festival. Saw it, and the guy from Negativland who was responsible for helping assemble it was there. I didn’t know the whole story about them, however, and just found an excellent article with the whole story (for the 5 of us who don’t know it) - here.

My 1997 article from the SIGCHI Bulletin Design as a Cultural Activity has been turned into a Hebrew PowerPoint document here without any attribution and here with full attribution. The URLs are very similar so I can’t imagine what the purpose of the first one is.

The article appears to have translated into Hebrew, fully, here.

If you read Hebrew and can shed any light on any of this - what course this was for, how the material is being presented or used, etc. I’d be happy if you would let me know.

Thanks!