Can’t Connect To the Network

If you visit a celebrity-owned restaurant and the food sucks - at a minimum you can walk away from the experience knowing you visited a celebrity-owned restaurant.

If you visit a restaurant endorsed by any one of the Food Network denizens, the food will definitely suck and at a minimum you’ll walk away from the experience knowing you visited a desperate restaurant not worthy of your business.

In which case there isn’t much hope for those places but there is hope for you.

Excuse me, would you mind doing our marketing?

In the early days of the Web, corporate sites were little more than electronic brochures. Today, many savvy corporations are inviting consumers to share their stories.

That important evolution has finally made staying up until three in the morning to watch convincing infomercial testimonials seem like a silly waste of time. Now, stay up until three in the morning sharing life-changing experiences about Castrol Tectron Extra motor oil, Rosetta Stone foreign language CDs, WIN sports detergent, American Express, Coca-Cola, eHarmony, and today's-shoemaker-gone-tomorrow, Crocs.

Even Haliburton invites the world to share oilfield technology success stories: "Your team is tops for analyzing drill data across domains. We were able to establish ad hoc query capabilities and gain rapid access to all our drilling data. Thanks, Haliburton!"

There's something democratic about allowing consumers to share their motor oil adventures,
but this feels like lazy marketers asking customers to do all the hard work.

If I doubled my donation, would you leave your clothes on?

At one time, it must have been novel for moderately overweight, less-than-attractive people to pose naked for charity calendars.

But once a genius idea like this is released from the bottle, a flurry of wrinkly pink genies are bound to escape. Now there are naked calendars dedicated to saving cats, aiding breast cancer survivors,raising cash for ambulance services, encouraging women to pursue technology careers, and funding rural elementary schools.

There is even a calendar featuring naked clowns to raise money for MS victims. And all twelve got in that car, sadly.

Everyone connected to these things loses. The unfortunate few saps that actually buy them, the charities that go unfunded, and increasingly the participants themselves lose (part of) their ass.

The Spanish moms trying to raise money for the rural school got lost in the nudie charity calendar glut, losing $16,000 and finding themselves stuck with thousands of extra copies.

"The sad part for us," said one of the naked Spanish mommies, "is figuring out what to do with them."

Bachman Turner Overdriven

Taking Care Of Business, Bachman Turner Overdrive

No More Bad Dreams

In what might have been the final act of cultural appropriation against Native American people, dream catchers found their way into the car windows and homes of New Age and/or Hippie aunts everywhere.

Now that there’s nothing left of their culture to destroy or pilfer, lets move on.  We’re thinking Inuits (part-of-Todd Palin-notwithstanding) are an underutilized resource and nearly virgin territory.

Just When We Were About To Buy Another Bracelet

Lance Armstrong says he's not coming back to professional cycling to silence his critics. That must be why he hired anti-doping expert Dr. Don Catlin to personally test his blood/urine/other secretions to prove his cleanliness.

Because nothing says "unbiased source" like the guy you're paying to test you.

The two leaders on Armstrong's new team aren't exactly thrilled. And the Tour de France has certainly had its fill.

Hey, we like to piss off the French press as much as anyone. But we think it's time for Lance to hop on his bike with Kate Hudson, Sheryl Crow, or whoever he's dating this week and pedal off into the sunset.

The Band Shall Remain Nameless

It’s the charge of any group starting out. Everyone needs to come up with a name. Sometimes what they arrive at is clever and catchy. Sometimes it’s “Mudcrutch”.

But it’s their prerogative; at least they’ve formed a group - unlike people who wantonly fling band names around for their own amusement. And most often it’s strictly their amusement.

We have to take the good with the bad but let’s leave the generation of new band names to those actually doing the playing.