Whose Faulty Vision

Link: “My cone is melting in the sun”

Sorry about the lack of posts. I’ve been super-busy with social activities, something going on every night. Which is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t leave me a lot of time or energy to blog about it.

When I was a kid, I loved the cartoon “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” For some unknown reason, there was a particular line that my brother and I latched on to as being incredibly hilarious. It was Shredder, the main villain, asking his lackey Baxter to do something, and Baxter replied, in a whiny voice, “but my cone is melting in the sun!” Anyway, I finally tracked down a copy of the line on Youtube. It’s in this episode of the show, at 4:55.

Link: Onion on Sports and Obama

I don’t normally like the Onion’s sports articles, because I don’t follow sports enough to get any of the jokes. But this one is really cute–a writer who’s supposed to be writing about some basketball game, but so excited about Obama’s victory that he can’t keep his mind on it.

Link: Marketing Lessons from the Election

An insightful post about marketing lessons to be learned from this election. Best bit:

Attack ads don’t always work. There’s a reason most product marketers don’t use attack ads. All they do is suppress sales of your opponent, they don’t help you. Since TV ads began, voter turnout has progressively decreased. That’s because the goal of attack ads is to keep your opponent’s voters from showing up. Both sides work to whittle down the other. In a winner-take-all game like a political election, this strategy is fine if it works.

So why didn’t the ads work this time?

The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. This is the lucky situation Apple finds itself in as well. Attacking an Apple product is like attacking an Apple user.

Link: Ohio State Rock Song

The bill declaring “Hang On Sloopy” to be the official rock song of Ohio made me laugh out loud. I particularly like this part:

WHEREAS, If fans of jazz, country-and-western, classical, Hawaiian and polka music think those styles also should be recognized by the state, then by golly, they can push their own resolution just like we’re doing.

Link: Video Game Myths

An excellent PBS story debunking popular myths about video games.

Link: Not Here to Make Friends

So apparently people don’t go on reality shows to make friends. I feel bad for whoever had to watch all of those to assemble that set of clips–it’s a pretty impressive feat.

(And now I’m morbidly curious about what on earth “Flavor of Love” is. Based on what I see in those clips, it looks like it’s something like “The Bachelor”, except that the women are vying for the love of an aging former star whose 15 minutes were up ages ago. Am I close?)

Link: Great Googly Moogly

Wow, there is seriously a Wikipedia page for absolutely everything.