After reading this month’s HWW Newsletter Friend of Haddonia Beth Yockey passed on this little Brand loving treasure from The Onion:
Three Of Man’s Closest Relationships With Brands
August 16, 2006
PASADENA, CA—Three of the five deepest emotional investments of local resident Ken Bowman are currently Apple, American Apparel, and Starbucks, sources close to the 27-year-old graphic designer said Monday. “American Apparel makes a strong debut this year, surging ahead of [Bowman's girlfriend] Missy [Levenson], Diesel and Tom’s Of Maine,” Bowman’s roommate and marketing consultant Dean Childers said. “Ken’s mother is still a solid number five, but Skechers is down to the seventh spot from number two last year, a drop which may spell wider implications.” Missing from this year’s list were Roomba, Bowman’s cat Pepsi, and Childers himself.
Thanks Beth. And thanks Onion.
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Snakes on a plane opens next week. Will it live up to the shear mountains of hype or show itself to be just another overwrought piece of uber-marketed pap?
Don’t ask the critics. They haven’t been allowed to see the film.
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I just went through and re-categorized all the HWW Blog posts. Should be a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. I also added a few categories, such as the exciting “Copy Crimes” and the fascinating and frightening “Marketing Crimes.”
Expect these to be regular features on this blog.
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If you’re looking for the right way to structure a corporate website, you could do a lot worse than obsessively studying 37signals.com.
These guys do the web right, with big bold headlines, streamlined nav and only as many pages as they know they need.
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I know it. I haven’t been there when you needed me. You’ve been sitting there at your computer, hitting the refresh button over and over and thinking “Where’s Chris? Where the heck are my Hard-Working Words? How am I supposed to get through my day here?”
And I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I promise. Just hold on. Just hold on a little bit longer. Everything’s going to be fine.
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Last Wednesday I woke up to find that my shiny and reliable 12″ Powerbook had suffered something of a heart attack in the night. It was all seized up. It wouldn’t save. It just sat there, staring at me, mocking me, saying “No, Chris, you won’t be getting any work done today after all.”
So I brought it up to the Apple store. The nice guy with the beard there said they’d box it up and send it off for repair. Probably just needed a new Hard Drive, he said. These things happen, he said. Covered by my extended warranty he said.
So I shipped it off and took a forced vacation.
Or half a forced vacation, since the projects keep coming in hard and strong these days. All of a sudden I was a mercenary, hopping from friend’s machine to coffee house trying to get my logon fix. It was horrible, but I figured it would only last a few days and then the love of my computing life would be right back here with me. I could wait. I could handle it.
Then on Friday I got an email. The email said “Yo, Chris. We got your computer, but we gots an issue man. You gotta call us.”
Only not like that at all.
So I called up Apple.
And the nice folks at Apple (they really were very nice) said “Well, it looks to us like the problem has been caused by some sort of impact. There’s a dent. A dent we say. So we aren’t going to cover the repair.”
And I say “OK, sure, well, I don’t remember any dent, but if you say so. But how much will the repair be?”
And they say “Um. A bunch of money.”
So I say “Well, damn, I’m not going to pay a bunch of money to repair a 2.5 year old computer. Send it back.”
So I went up to the Apple store again, this time with my credit card clutched firmly in my hand and I dropped an even bigger amount of money on a shiny new macbook pro. It’s shiny. It’s new. I love it. I really didn’t want to have to buy it.
But anyway, I get my shiny new Macbook Pro home, I plug it into my backup Hard drive, I hit the restore button, I go get a drink of OJ and then I come back to find out that my restore has failed; that my backup is corrupted, and that all that data that I really, really do need, well, it just ain’t here.
And then I had a nervous breakdown.
And then I called my really mac savvy friends who helped me salvage at least a few recent and really important files.
And then I continued my nervous breakdown.
My old computer should be getting back here today. As soon as I get it, I’ll be searching for someone to help me scrape the data off its platter and get it back to me. I’m about 90 percent sure I’ll get everything back, but who knows how much it’s going to cost me.
Whew. It’s been exhausting. But I’m back to work. And hopefully it’s all going to be fine.
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Some of the best modern fiction today is being co-opted by spammers. My regular dose of “C i a l i s” and “v1agro” spam came in this morning, but at the bottom of the frame one of them had this:
“you, Mr. Bourne. And care for you.
Jason looked at her in the shadows, grateful for the darkness; she
could not clearly see his eyes. Then be reasonable and use your head,
he said coldly, suddenly feeling so old, too old for such a
transparently false lack of feeling. We know Carlos is in Moscow and
Krupkin isnt far behind him. Dimitris flying us there in the morning, ”
Which is, of course, from one of the “Bourne Identity” books. You see? Spammers aren’t evil. They’re spreading good literature to the world!
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Am I the only one having a terribly hard time focusing on work (or on blogging) the last few days? It’s gorgeous out here. Terribly gorgeous. The type of gorgeous that ruins economies. Even now, typing this little tiny post and getting ready to go teach a Biznik class, my eyes keep drifting off toward the window. I want to go to the park. I want to play frisbee.
I wonder if anyone’s ever done studies on worker productivity and sunshine. Are sunnier places less productive than the dark and dreary? Or do the dark and dreary places see a giant drop in productivity when the sun comes out while shiny places like LA stay about the same all year long?
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Hey, folks.
Sorry for the radio silence there. I was buried to my nose in work and theatre stuff and then got hit by the cold to end all colds. 30 or so hours of sleep later and more ibuprofen than I can count and I’m back to my normal writer-monkey self.
I’ve also been busily posting on the Biznik Blog so if you just can’t wait for that Haddonic goodness, shoot on over there.
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