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

A new 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 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.

A run of bad bento days forces a mother-child confrontation. The standard child complaint will be that so-and-so’s bento was so much more sexier than theirs, such as the coveted omuletsu (omelet) adorned with the kid’s name, written out in ketchup. Why is it that my bento is always so boring and . . . brown? The mother will then retaliate by pointing out that though she was obligated to make the bento, she will be damned if she has to wash out the box as well: having to wash the soiled box drains her of the creative energies needed to make a good bento. Indeed, the unwritten Japanese societal rule is that whoever eats the bento must wash out the box afterward.

That said, the bento remains one of the things Japanese love best about their country. And often, it constitutes one of the strongest links between families and lovers. A woman I know makes obento every weekend to bring to her boyfriend, no matter how tired or pressed for time. “Obento sae tsukureba kimochi wa tsutawaru (As long as I make the obento, he will understand how I feel about him).” Lucky guy.

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 military-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 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.

Tags: exploitation, jessica lynch, public speaking, zig ziglar

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.