Unbalance is the celebrity restaurant owned by champion sumo wrestler Konishiki, who like his colleagues bulk up by eating chanko

Funny and brilliant cartoon about Life Before the Internet.

Amazon’s other products by Freud, including a Super Dado Set with Anti-Kickback Design.

Simon Malls shows amazing chutzpah with this Black Friday ad, placing the viewing of the Statue of Liberty in horrific context. “Very inspring. Now, where’s the mall?”

I’m intrigued by this campaign, especially because it has received little buzz. The product itself will let you “tell better stories” because the product is an experience, an experience that can be shared.

Target is selling an Anal Massage, and it’s 10% off. Presumably a pissed-off website dronemonkey is acting out. Funny, but not so good, maybe.

I blogged about our experience at the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens at Total Experience

Ralston Foods makes a cereal called Crispy Hexagons.

while the same product name is used by Flavorite

and Schnuck’s

Originally spotted here.

full story

The Amazing Kreskin, who bills himself as ‘the world’s foremost mentalist,’ wants to help his home state of New Jersey stem the tide of shady practices in government, a problem U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie has called widespread. Kreskin sent a letter to acting Gov. Richard J. Codey offering his nonpartisan services to help ferret out those who come to government with ulterior motives. Kreskin, who lives in northern New Jersey, said he would monitor government meetings with a mind’s eye toward keeping things above board.

Man - it’s just crying out for some Leno-esque punchline!

http://www.iwantmyweddingatdunkindonuts.com/ - perhaps a response to the fad for Krispy Kreme wedding cakes

Goldman & Associates is running a teeny ad in the SF Chron

Want a better life?
MOVE TO CANADA
Goldman & Associates
for help contact
blah blah blah

It’s been widely reported that Best Buy has created personas for their most profitable customers and taken steps to focus their efforts on attracting and keeping those customers and indeed rejecting other customers. Perhaps an effective strategy, but questionable PR.

Dell goes on the attack today, with a full-page ad that reads, in part

At Dell We Love All Customers. Even the Ones Best Buy Doesn’t.

On November 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Best Buy is planning to shun up to 20% of its current customer base.

You read that correctly. Shun. As in actively resist. They’ve reportedly decided that as many as 100 million of its 500 million store visits each yearr are “undesirable.” To quote a Best Buy exectutive as reported in the article: “They can wreack enormous economic havoc.” Well, we would like to officially welcome each and everyone on of those customers to Dell. All of you. Come to Dell.com right now and we’ll give you…[etc.]

Technorati: advertising, personas, negative, dell, best+buy

Here’s the greeked text page I blogged about before.

Update: looks like they fixed it. When the original poast was made, the body copy in the page was just “greek” filler.

Pauly Shore Is Dead (2003)

One user review is:
I went to this movie expecting to witness definitive and documentary evidence that the titular star, former MTV shill, freelance toady and erstwhile least funny man on the planet, had in fact met the end of his mortal coil. The disappointment I felt when I found out that this was not the case was so deep and soul wrenching that it caused thoughts of such intense vehement bitterness to ravage my brain that no Internet carny site on the web would dare publish if I were to properly describe it. In my darkest moments I was persevered by the thought that this emetic onanism fest would cause an ego bubble to expand exponentially in the head of our auteur, leading to an implosive aneurysm that would reduce his frontal lobe to the consistency of tapioca pudding. Sadly, this did not happen. But I still hold out hope that one day he, and everyone associated with this Promethean exercise in shoddy solipsism, would be relegated to doing bit parts in training videos for Popeye’s Chicken. I still believe that there is such a thing as justice in this world.

The designers of this page put the site up without bothering to turn the greek text (placeholder stuff that is meant to be replaced with copy) into something actually useful. Nice.

On Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Marge said “BFD” and they muted the “F.” Puhleeze. You can’t say F?

Composer John Balance, co-founder of Coil and member of seminal industrial music groups Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo, and Current 93 died on Saturday. Under the influence of alcohol at home, Balance fell from his first floor landing. He was rushed to the hospital and passed away soon after.
link

Ironic, non?

eBay is running this nauseating new ad campaign called The Power of All of Us (visit that link to see the print ads and the TV ads). They are pointing, somehow, towards the trust and community building that eBay has definitely created, but somehow equating their “trading platform” with more familiar good deeds (picking up trash, waving hello, bringing meals to the home-bound, moving a snow-stuck car, adopting a child) is arrogant and naive. “By out count” reads one of the ads “they’ve done the right thing more than 2.3 billion times.” So selling on eBay is doing the right thing, when the ad is defining “doing the right thing” by the examples listed above? eBay is about commerce. It’s about making money, getting shit you want cheap, and it’s about their own enormous profits. Trying to reposition it as some sort of heal-the-world effort is just complete and utter bullshit.

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Been there, done that. That’s the song I sing.

The liberal-Americans-will-move-to-Canada meme just got a notch more hyped with this SF Chron piece on the front page of the real estate section, analyzing the prices, value, and taxes of the Canadian (specifically BC) real estate market. Wild.

Elevator Pitch Essentials is a really nice resource for…elevator pitches. Nice collection of links including articles about Hollywood pitching.

Rather funny clip from an old British TV show where cheery humans, costumed creatures and puppets entertain the girls and boys, only this time what they have to say is rather, ahem, naughty. Despite the claim that this was broadcast, the truth appears to be described here, that this was created for an outtake-only thing within the industry and perhaps broadcast later in that context specifically.

Damn funny, however.

eBay US: Soiled Depends being used for shipping.. What do I do?

Every time I read the stream of Yahoo News headlines, I think of this, proving once again that life imitates comedy.

The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general lexicon.

Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television news casters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was a headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks prior to his death on November 20.

After Franco’s death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live’s comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced the dictator’s death…From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco’s expense. ‘This breaking news just in’, Chase would announce– ‘Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!’ The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that Generalisimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment.

Terry Gross interviews Gary Austin, founder of the Groundlings, and Cheryl Hines. Having done improv, and even given a recent presentation about it, it was gratifying to hear some folks at the top of this game express some of the same points that I had learned and passed along myself.

Some blogs on Blogger (where this blog is hosted - see the “blogspot”?) have a “navbar” feature along the top where you can search for other blogs, or there’s a “next blog” button you can (I turned off my navbar because hey, it’s all about the Steve).

I tried that “next blog” doodad and it seemed to indicate that about half of the blogs here on blogger are what you might call spam blogs. They aren’t real blogs run people, they are simply lists of links that I imagine are advertising. World Series Quest for example is some sort of link to collectible purchases. Here’s all the links posted on another spam blog today and yesterday.

carrington-dental-plan
dental-office-floor-plan
colorado-dental-plan
broker-dental-plan
senior-dental-plan
dental-patriot-plan
dental-michigan-plan
dental-georgia-plan
dental-indemnity-plan
dental-plan-vision
supplemental-dental-plan
national-dental-plan
dental-payment-plan
concordia-dental-plan-united
canada-dental-plan
dental-employee-federal-plan
small-business-dental-plan
louisiana-dental-plan
best-dental-plan
arizona-dental-plan
dental-plan-principal
dental-discount-plan-broker
ameriplan-dental-plan
discount-dental-plan-member
tricare-dental-plan
blue-cross-dental-plan
careington-dental-plan
dental-plan-safeguard
canadian-dental-plan
aarp-dental-plan
dental-plan-washington
dental-fortis-plan
dental-insurance-plan-provider
blue-blue-cross-dental-plan-shield
ppo-dental-plan
dental-northeast-plan
aetna-dental-plan
dental-plan-signature
dental-group-plan
dental-life-met-plan
dental-guardian-plan
cigna-dental-plan
cost-dental-low-plan

and each of those goes to a page at dentalplanquest.com.

I guess these pages are setup to generate higher rankings in Google as the blog pages are indexed?

Very weird.

The maker of cables and other electronics accessories has filed lawsuits and trademark infringement claims against dozens of companies for using ‘monster'’ in names, products or services. The TV series ‘Monster Garage'’ and the Monster Seats above Fenway Park’s left field wall have been targeted in what Monster Cable officials say is an aggressive legal strategy to protect the firm’s good name. Monster Cable legal counsel David Tognotti said it has registered more than 50 trademarks covering a wide range of products, including furniture, food and clothing. Tognotti is preparing for a trial against the Discovery Channel over the popular TV series ‘Monster Garage,'’ which he claims uses images of ‘provocative women'’ and an iron cross logo that could tarnish Monster Cable’s image.
full story

Mercury News: “Steve Portigal was on the way to the gym in his Miata, looking for an AC/DC fix on his car radio, when he drove smack into the changing face of California.
The dial was tuned to 92.3 FM, but instead of the screaming hard-rock guitars that have blared from KSJO for 36 years to the delight of Bay Area listeners, what Portigal heard were accordion-tinged Mexican oldies.
‘I was confused and surprised,’ said Portigal, 36, of Montara. ‘I could almost always press that button and an AC/DC song would be playing.’
With no notice other than its final song — Wall of Voodoo’s ‘Mexican Radio’ — radio giant Clear Channel switched KSJO to a Spanish-language format of Mexican favorites on Oct. 28, giving a nod to the region’s burgeoning Latino population and pulling the plug on a Bay Area rock institution. “