Get your superiority on at LOSERS dot ORG - a collection of sites that mostly do seem to suck.

Anew study suggests that people pick purebred dogs that resemble them
“When you pick a purebred, you pick it specifically because of how it’s going to look as a grown-up,’ said Nicholas Cristenfeld, a mutt owner, UCSD professor of psychology and co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Psychological Science.”

A rather distressing article, but nothing surprising, about how crappy customer service is these days.

A current snapshot of consumer satisfaction by the University of Michigan Business School reveals a large group of unhappy campers. In its most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, the average score for the specific issue of complaint handling is 57 (out of 100) for the 40 industries tracked by the index. ‘No one does a particularly good job in handling complaints,’ said David VanAmburg, managing director of the index, which measures consumer satisfaction with goods and services

The latest article to describe the way that ethnography is used in business…

Once chosen, subjects agree to allow videographers to follow them for a day or longer, documenting the minutiae of everyday life and gathering information on everything from emotional engagement with a product to environmental cues on its place in the home and the psyche of the user. After an initial awkwardness, the camera typically seems to fade away, allowing an extraordinary candor. ‘There’s something really incredible about someone asking you to tell your story for eight hours,’ says Shapira. ‘It can almost become a confessional experience for people.’

Nice pice about an outsider spending time going through bits of the stuff left behind by Stanley Kubrick
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin. This solves one mystery for me - the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realise now that it didn’t matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.

This article debunks the notion that prisoners get their choice of last meal. Not quite…

Last-meal requests were always released to the media exactly the way the state received them. But like Buxton’s filet mignon, many of the meals that prisoners wanted were replaced with less expensive or more accessible alternatives, which forced me to be creative in honoring prisoners’ wishes. The policy of the Texas Department of Corrections was that only food items kept on hand in the Walls Unit kitchen commissary and butcher shop could be used. If the condemned asked for lobster, for example, he would be served a filet of processed fish. The last real steak I prepared was in 1993. Afterward, hamburger steaks were subbed in. Most vegetables came out of cans. Requests for large quantities of food were pared down to more practical servings. David Allen Castillo requested 24 tacos in 1998 and got 4.

Doofus d’jour
Today, the worst salesman in the world called me up to try and talk me into radio advertising. Tells me he’s looking at my site at the top of our call, can’t come up with anything better than “Well, why not?” when I say I’m not interested. Tries to pitch the variety of blah blah they have but he is mumbling and pausing. He had all the bluster of those jerks that phone you, but none of the patter. He thought charm could do it? But his inarticulateness made him completely non-charming. As I am approaching the hanging-up-on-him time, he says “So, what do you do?”

Blood oranges - good
Blood diamonds - bad

I’m sure I’ve already posted the link to these Bento Pictures but it’s probably worth reposting it in the context of yesterday’s article (below) about bento boxes as maternal love. You can definitely feel the love in these creations.

Nice description of the cultural meaning of a bento meal in a Japanese family.

Princess Properties is running this ridiculous ad about mortgage foreclosure. A family is at home going about their business, little kids playing, etc. etc. and a SWAT team bursts in to foreclose - with all the violence and terror and panic that a home invasion by miltary-clad thugs would create. A disgusting fear sell, really kinda makes me sick. If you object to this type of advertising and disinformation, let them know at www.princess-properties.com or 866-779-7237…note that the info@ email address that they’ve posted bounces back as “user unknown” - very nice operation they are running.

I don’t know that I can be bothered to implement this but it sends you an IM whenever your site is visited. I get too much traffic on portigal.com to deal with that, and I read my weblogs every day (what a nerd, I know). But I have no idea at all, pretty much, who looks at this page (except my headshot above is hosted at portigal.com so I get a hit to those weblogs when someone hits this site). Anyway, it’s neat, so I’m blogging it. Whatevah!

I was going to blog something very witty about George Foreman’s new line of ?Big-and-Tall clothing, to the effect that if you had only use his fat-free grill you wouldn’t need the clothing, but then I went to his site www.georgeforeman.com and saw this new album
and that’s really the goofiest thing of all.

Now George brings inspirational messages of faith to the masses in a double CD package. Disc one contains eleven original songs…ideas, lyrics and spoken word performance by GEORGE FOREMAN, music composed, arrange and conducted by Roland Baumgartner, performed by the Vienna Festival Symphony Orchestra, featuring the Vienna Boys Choir, Ramon Vargus (tenor), Sathya Bartko (soprano) and Domino Blue (mezz soprano).

Disc two contains eleven great songs of faith performed by favorite artists…

Jeez. Zig Ziglar’s latest “Get Motivated” seminar includes Jessica Lynch. For some reason, I felt bad for her around the time of the made-for-TV movie, all the distortion and obvious hero-making by the media. This choice makes me kinda twitch, however.

Details of my upcoming presentation to the SF chapter of the American Marketing Association can be found here.

Torvac’s site masquerades as innocent promotion for their vaccum components but in fact they are clearly involved in some strange plot to subliminally fill our brains with Star Trek.

Or is this some Google-gaming gambit?

I’m very curious.

I’ve had the most ridiculous time over the last 60 days or so, which ended with their basically telling me to leave them alone in rather direct terms.

Here’s their last email

Greetings from Amazon.com.

Erik T.
Amazon.com Customer Service

The back story is this - bought two items using a gift certificate, they weren’t as described, Amazon said send ‘em back and we’ll refund you the purchase, plus the cost of shipping. The cost of shipping was enormous, as much as the items. They acknowledge receipt of one item, and not the other. I inquire, they did get ‘em both. They promise a refund to my credit card by my next billing cycle.

Many weeks pass, I check and nothing was ever credited to my credit card. I inquire. Note that this is a multi-step process, with the usual customer service experience of the person not really paying attention to your email. It turned out that they think they refunded one amount and not they other, but they keep switching back and forth as to how many amounts they think they should be refunding. It’s like they don’t keep track of the web-messages (the only way I am able to contact them, since they don’t accept email responses, but they send ‘em out).

Eventually they indicate that they will refund my gift certificate account since I paid with gift certicates, or that they had already done so, it’s not clear, and in one message they say they will refund my gift certificate so watch for my credit card statement - in one paragraph they can’t even keep the story straight. This is the limitation of whatever cut-and-paste system they are using over there.

So I finally gather that they have refunded the purchase price, but not the out-of-pocket postage costs. It goes back and forth with the worst communication ever coming from Amazon - just that robotic “If you check your gift certificate account…” crap but no actual information or substantive response. It seemed to me that they should pay me back in $$ for the amount I had to put out of pocket to send the item back. The communication burden is clearly falling on the customer, me, to get some clarity - they don’t tell you what they have done, why they haven’t done what I expected, or what their policy is. Just terrible. And a different person every time, with terrible lack of consistency in what they are actually telling me. Culminating with this message above, do not write us again, they say, we won’t help you any more. At least this jerkoff was able to clarify (after my 3rd desperate inquiry) that they won’t refund cash for any part of an order that was paid for with gift certificates.

It’s all very annoying and really kind of disappointing - didn’t we expect better from these goofballs?

Stockstock is a film festival consisting of short films made entirely from stock footage. We select a limited amount of stock footage and give it to you - your job is to make it into some kind of short video presentation.

Registration begins on Mar. 22!

Dear Mick LaSalle: Your review (of ‘The Passion,’ Feb. 25) startled me in its negativity. My guess is that as a ‘believer’ I saw God in the person of Christ. I was stunned, and you were not.
Ed Gleason, San Francisco

Dear Ed Gleason: Whether you like the movie or not, it might be useful for all of us to remember one thing: The movie is not from God. It’s from Mel Gibson. (There’s a difference, really.) And what you saw onscreen was not Jesus incarnate but James Caviezel under about 10 pounds of ketchup. The point is, the movie is an artwork, subject to critical assessment, not a profound moral document that renders critical scrutiny irrelevant or off limits. It may be based on a profound moral document that renders critical scrutiny irrelevant or off limits, but that’s not the same thing. There are plenty of people who are just as religious as you are who think Gibson’s movie is a piece of garbage. I don’t. I actually think it’s better than that, but this notion that you’re walking in light if you love the movie and you’re some kind of secular neo-centurion if you hate the movie is a joke. One could just as well argue the other way and say that when Caviezel was struck by lightning during the making of ‘The Passion,’ that constituted the review from on high.

link to SF Chron column

Archive of 133 pieces written by Cameron Crowe.

Veg-O-Matic, Dial-O-Matic, Peel-O-Matic, Kitchen Magician, Chop-O-Matic, Mr. Microphone, Pocket Fisherman - 150 handy gadgets, dating from 1946 to 2002, advertised on TV are showcased in Isn’t That Amazing!, a new exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Another winning entry from last summer’s StockStock festival is posted here, another is here, a third can be seen from here, and a fourth is here.

Someday I’ll figure out how to get ours down to a 9M file or something so we can post it somewhere. Hmm….

Who is the information architect that creation the hell that is Northwest Airlines.com? It takes 10 clicks to get to this page, and then you still can’t get any info that is readable by humans.

(we decided to call, but they were experiencing higher than normal than call volumes, so they disconnected our call after suggesting we visit their website).

I hate NWA.

(and I’m sooo looking forward to the travel experience)

Just saw a TV ad for these things tonight. Stock up soon because there’s no way they will be around in a few months. What a messed up idea - how did they get these past test-marketing?

Pleix films are beautiful, disturbing jams of consumer culture and technology. (as seen on BoingBoing)

Wrecked Exotics features a fairly broad catalog of photo of wrecks of exotic cars.

Info about the Licensing Show panel I’m organzing has been posted here