More Amazon failures - not mine, this time.

The new Cimarron Comfort Height toilet by Kohler, with Class Five technology, is engineered for extraordinary bulk flushing performance. With names inspired by the raw power of whitewater rapids, this powerhouse features an industry-leading 31/4-inch flush valve, combined with an efficient, direct-fed jet, to maximize water flow and allow for an eco-friendly, 1.4-gallon flush setting option. For toilets that get pushed to the extreme, Cimarron is the perfect choice.

Now, I have yet to see it, but supposedly there is a print ad that shows three “girthy” guys going to town on three substantial sub sandwiches. The implication seems unsubtle but rather unusual - if you are a big guy who eats a lot of food, you’re going to generate more stool than usual, so you better have a toilet that is ready to handle it? Chalk this one up under the changes to products, services, and messaging than acknowledge the new standard for obsesity.

If anyone has that print ad, I need to see it!

Update: I got it!

Geek taxonomy from a great article about subcultures in Akihabara

“Self-confessed ’super otaku’ Tetsuto Fujiyama says, ‘There are five different kinds of geeks in Akihabara. The oldest denizens are the electric appliance geeks, who come to purchase electronic parts and other equipment. Next are the PC geeks, who like to build their own original computers that run as fast as possible. Third are TV animation geeks whose brains can’t distinguish between reality and the animation. The fourth group are the magazine geeks who have made original animation fantasy stories influenced from TV and game animation and publish them in small magazines circulated among themselves. The last group are those geeks who love to play video games in which erotic animation is used.’”

The Guardian does an in-depth piece on IKEA.

It had never occurred to you, presumably, that you might want to hang up magazines in your bathroom. But Ikea had already decided that you would. And the brilliant but scary part is this: once you’ve seen a row of magazines hanging up in one of Ikea’s showroom bathrooms, each neatly suspended at 45 degrees from a M�llen clip, it takes a will of steel not to find the magazines in your own bathroom, now you come to think of it, almost offensively disorganised. And so you think about purchasing the Mullen clip. At which point another Ikea sales tactic kicks in: the clips only cost 90p for three - so cheap that it’s hardly worth not buying them, just in case, especially if you’ve travelled a long way to get to the store. (In internal documents, Ikea calls such products “hot dogs”, because they cost the same as or less than the frankfurters available after the checkout.)

I have yet to see any rants about the horrible Pepto-Bismol ad that has been running for a few weeks. The thrust of the ad is the range of digestive discomfort that the product can address. It shows a range of people in an office with various complaints, and then morphs into a dance number where the people stand in a line and chant/sing the different symptoms, with each one in turn “owning” one of the symptoms.

There’s just no point during the day when I want to hear people shouting out a sequence of phrases like “nausea, vomiting, excess gas, diarrhea, bloating, burping” over and over again. I’m not sure that’s the exact sequence, but you get the idea. The ad makes me recoil, and that can’t possibly be good for the product? Are they trying to induce the horror of the complaints so you’ll want to have their relief?

What makes it a thousand times worse is that the office workers do a little dance while chanting these symptoms, the dance itself being heavily inspired by mime. The lowest point is when the diarrhea sufferer uses her hands to press her butt-cheeks together, further indicating the urgency of her diarrhea, that she is attempting to stem the impending tide of feces that will flow out of her.

And really, when is the time of day you want to see that image on your television set? For most of us, never.

Here’s a page from drugstore.com with info about ahem digestion aid products. But check out the window title (at least in IE) when you click on it.

Pardon?

Slate rips on the “girthy” ad because of the homoerotic undertones, but he never mentions the unpleasant self-indulgent hedonistic overtones, the aspect that I am most offended by.

What planet is Interbrand living on? This recent column celebrates a customer-service experience with Amazon that is from the long-gone days - nothing like this happens in 2004. Back in 2000, absolutely. But this is ridiculous.

brandchannel story on Amazon.com: “After filing a complaint with Amazon’s customer support department, a courteous response came within hours: ‘Thanks for writing to Amazon.com to bring this to our attention. Please accept our sincere apologies for the late delivery of the shipment. We do take full responsibility for any delays that result from errors made during shipping. In an effort to compensate you for this inconvenience, I’ve requested a partial refund of the shipping charges you paid for this package.”

I’m in the midst of moving servers for portigal.com. All within the same ISP, but it means changing the name servers (DNS). Yeah, whatever, Steve! I know most people who haven’t set up their own website (and many who have) have no clue what that means.

The thing about it is, you go to a central place and update the listing of where portigal.com should point to. And that machine tells the next machine and so on, and it takes up to 36 hours to propogate the message throughout the Internet, depending on when the various machines down the paths choose to update themselves.

So, it can take some time and at various times different sites will see the old or the new sites (which are nearly identical anyway).

Mostly I’m concerned about email, but I think it should work out okay. Let’s hope so, anyway!

Santana concert review: “Subtract roughly 89 minutes of guitar wankery, 37 minutes of preaching (he could have just said, ‘Bush sucks!’), all references to the ’70s, 12 percent of the mustache, plus that last cover song and, all in all, it was quite a great show. ”

Dylan gets honorary doctorate

I love this picture

Orkut is just getting pretty darn slow, isn’t it? Yikes.

Pizza Jewelry

parody ad from 1932

Stevia - all about the herb that is sweeter than sugar…

The New York Times , in (a very good) article about reality tv validates the thesis of my recent FreshMeat.

‘Technology has taken down boundaries between the ones producing and the ones receiving,’ said Betsy Frank, executive vice president for research and planning at MTV Networks. ‘Young people have an incredible need to use the media to connect with their peers, to validate their choices. After every episode of `Real World,’ they’re on the Internet talking about what happened.’

full NYT story (reg req’d or according to bugmenot login with mooos/47000)

After trying for almost nine years to help find and arrest the region’s most wanted war crimes suspect, NATO paid for a billboard advertising campaign to coincide with Radovan Karadzic’s birthday last Saturday. The advertisements offer him a free one-way plane ticket to The Hague, the home of the United Nations war crimes tribunal. Dr. Karadzic is accused of genocide by the tribunal, a charge that includes the accusation that he ordered the killings of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica near the end of the 1992 to 1995 war. ‘Radovan, we didn’t forget,’ reads the advertisement, which was also placed in the country’s two leading newspapers, above a picture of an airline ticket with Dr. Karadzic’s name written on it. The billboard campaign is the latest in a series of media advertisements designed to convince Dr. Karadzic that his time on the run is limited.
Previous billboards have said, “The noose is tightening.”

Gizmodo offers advice on customer service interactions.

Basically, you’re screwed. It’s best to start any interaction with your carrier’s customer service department keeping this simple mantra in mind: I am worth nothing to my carrier, and I’m lucky they’ll have me.

Wired News delves into the phenom of designers creating their own fantasy iPod products. I can’t imagine where they got the idea for that story!

Interview with Howard Lester, chairman of Williams-Sonoma
We’ve done a lot with color and style in the kitchen. How else would we have sold all those toasters for $300 apiece? It certainly wasn’t just about toasting bread.

The Art Deco Exhibit in SF closes soon, so you might want to check it out if you’re around.

It was a pretty thorough roundup of historical influences on the Deco thing (a term that wasn’t coined until the 60s), with examples from the movement in posters, fashion, product, textiles, furniture, and beyond. Neat to see stuff that you think is new actually turn out to be old - Teague’s “Beau Brownie” camera from the 30s came in 5 colors, including a version called the “Coquette” with a matching compact and lipstick.

Create your own South Park character

This story documents the strange Yahoo error that obviously many other people got last night. Somehow I feel validated that it’s not just me…

The explanation for that stupid error message - they were obviously shifting things over to give more capacity to the messages. Too bad they couldn’t do it without automatically generating error messages telling their users that their accounts were being suspended!

Notice: Change of service to your Yahoo! Mail account

Dear Yahoo! Mail User,

Thanks for using Yahoo! Mail. It’s our goal to offer you an email experience that makes it easy and enjoyable to stay in touch. Periodically, we make service changes to enhance that experience for our users. As of June 15, 2004, you’ll enjoy the following benefits:
Increased storage capacity � from your current level to 100MB
Increase in total message size to 10MB
A streamlined interface that’s even easier to use
You will continue to access your Yahoo! Mail account as usual. No further action is required, and there will be no interruption of your service.

We hope you enjoy the new features and benefits. If you have any questions, please visit our Help page. Thanks again for using Yahoo! Mail.

Sincerely,
The Yahoo! Mail Team

Stuart Elliot’s advertising newsletter today: (doncha just love that agency-speak crap “consumers told us that” that someone manages to be buck-passing, mealy-mouthed, and faux-user-centered at the same time)

A Reader Asks: I was surprised at the new “Be frank” television and radio spots for Ball Park Grill Master hot dogs. The ads feature a large man grilling his meatier, “girthier” Ball Park Grill Master franks. I understand wanting to appear edgy and appealing to the masculine grilling audience. The term “girthy,” which the man almost growls several times, is one that I tend to see in my spam e-mails concerning male “enlargement.”

While my friends and co-workers are now very familiar with the brand and name, is it due more to laughter and the questioning of why a hot dog would be advertised as “girthy”?

Stuart Elliott: The “Be frank” campaign is the first work from the Ball Park brand’s new agency, the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group. The campaign, intended to support the introduction of the Grill Master product, is centered on a character described by Julie Ketay, a spokeswoman at the Ball Park parent, the Sara Lee Corporation in Chicago, as “a straight-talking, all-American hot dog enthusiast named Frank.”

“Our consumer research told us that adult hot-dog lovers were looking for a hearty frank that appealed to their grown-up taste buds,” she adds, “and that’s what Ball Park has delivered.”

“Our adult consumers said they wanted a larger frank that wasn’t overwhelmed by the bun, yet still had plenty of room for their condiments of choice,” Ms. Ketay says. “In fact, consumers told us they were looking for more girth in their hot dog.”

“Frank, as his name suggests, is a ‘tell it like it is’ kind of guy,” she adds, “and in the ‘Girthy’ commercial he’s sharing with hot-dog lovers everywhere that the Ball Park Grill Master frank is not a kid’s hot dog. Rather, it’s made for real-meat lovers like Frank.”

“It’s ‘girthy,’” Ms. Ketay says, “and according to Frank, ‘Girthy is good.’”

“The ad campaign tested quite well with our target consumers, adults who enjoy eating meat and meat products, like eating socially with friends and, in particular, enjoy grilling,” she adds. “Consumers liked Frank’s direct nature, his candidness, his humor and his passion. So far, we have not received feedback similar to your reader. Quite frankly, it was a first for us.”

Pun of course intended.

Hello steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net,
You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.1MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
The easiest way to continue receiving your important email is to expand your mailbox. Yahoo! Mail offers 10, 25, 50 and 100MB of storage space starting at just $9.99/year. Click here now to order Extra Storage.

Nice.

Check out the photos! from my recent Licensing tradeshow experience.

Photos from my trip to NYC are here

We’re adopting a dog, Brody. He comes to his new home tomorrow. He’s a Golden Retriever (though if you are in the “scene” you call them Goldens ), he’s 3-years old, and umm, what else - he’s pretty small, he’s obviously not full-blooded kennel certified, whatever. He seems really nice and it’ll be fun to have him around. Certainly a big change!

A truly amazing collection of breakup stories

The Globe and Mail does a “Lives Lived” about my childhood ear doctor, an amazing man who helped our family through chronic and frightening ear infection problems for many many years. I’ll never forget the last “real” ear infection I got where he picked me up at home and drove me to the emergency room, cranking “Let’s Dance” on his car stereo (his kids had made him a tape) and banging along to the song on the steering wheel. I’m not sure if that’s where I picked up the habit myself, it very well might have been.