Now I worship the well-crafted phrase. It’s not enough to get your message across. Great copy can also entertain, and I prefer humor.

On the other hand there’s no faster path to sloppy copy than Gin, but that’s another story.

I don’t bike much at all, but this piece on biking in Boston is absolutely brilliant. Not only is the Boston attitude spot on, it sets up a turn of phrase that stands at the peak of perfection:  “thus alerting the wizard, who alerts the monkey”. This is the comedy I hold in highest regard, it has no need to resort to vulgarity, and is as funny as anything out there. I get the feeling Clarence has done some stand up in the past, or in his future.

This week I found the first tie to Professional Wrestling, John Wall, the husband of Gladys “Killem” Gillem. It’s actually a great short read, a bombastic story of a pioneer Lady of Wresting, Lion Taming, Alligator Wrestling, The Fabulous Moolah, and a guy getting crushed by 500 pound crate.

I was also glad to see that the $70 gallon of milk on Amazon now has well over 1,000 reviews, great reading.

Have a great weekend!

Last week I was in the supermarket and saw this cake that someone had gone to the trouble of having decorated, then for some unknown reason decided to “hide” it in the Doritos rack. Trying to come up with the story behind it made me laugh – what, they decided that they really weren’t going to miss  Kelly that much? Or maybe it came down to choosing between Kelly’s Cake and a bag of Tacos at Midnight Doritos (sorry Kelly, how about a Dorito?).

I laughed all the more because a co-worker told me about Cake Wrecks about a month ago and it’s the funniest thing in my feed reader. My personal faves:

The one that started it all

Vader baby cake

Getting the digital picture on the cake

Big Budget Wedding Cake

Enjoy!

As Vice President of Systems Engineering, Ian Wilkes is responsible for all aspects of IT infrastructure at Linden Lab.

LSL – Linden Scripting Language (they have their own….)

Grey Goo (This was sort of a virus that threatened to consume the island until it was stopped).

956 square KM, 8x San Francisco, 100TB of user-created content, 30 million concurrent scripts

Monolithic C++ App
Linux
Closed Source

Started selling in 2003

Unfortunately there is no Apple Store out in Western Massachusetts, not surprising given the falling population density and the loss of many large employers in the area. When Best Buy rolled out an Apple center within their store here in Natick I thought that the one out west would be similar.

Alas, it was not.

I talked my dad out of mail order so we could head over on Black Friday and see what they had. Unlike the Natick store there was no dedicated store section, just two lone machines on the long rack of laptops. Jobs’ fanboys are groaning now at the sight of a Macbook and Macbook Pro on the same asile as Acers and HPs.

The clincher was that after watching 3 sales people talk to folks checking out the Macs, we got our turn in line. Instead of just listening to the pitch (the same one other 2 customers got) about how cool they were, I hit them with the heat – “Yeah, we’ll take one of those.” This required going off to check the stock and talk to a manager, used-car lot style.

The punchline is that there are none to sell in the store, we were told we could go BestBuy.com and get one on line, complete with (wait for it…) Free Shipping! The guy also said that when checking out we could take the customer survey at the end and tell them it would be great if they would stock the stuff in the store.

Of course, rather than do that we went straight to Apple.com, ordered it there and got a special $50 off price with… (you guessed it) Free Shipping! And I didn’t have to spend 5 minutes digging through a survey to tell Best Buy not to over promise and under deliver. And it’s not just for the customers, you don’t have to have sales reps giving up valuable time on Black Friday telling people how great Macs are and that you don’t really sell them.

So I had a widget for Extreme Home Makeover here, but it broke the formatting for the page so it’s gone.

Again a garbage process: asking me what year my Honda is. Right now we own two Hondas, and they are not the same year. At least it gave me a second chance to guess the other one.

“Verified By Visa”, which I will now refer to as “Vilified by Visa” is the latest bonehead move. I tried to purchase an airline ticket this weekend and I was pulled away from the Northwest Reservations system to go to a special Visa site to prove that I’m not using a card that’s been stolen. As if confirming my address, the card authorization code, and my frequent flyer number weren’t proof enough.

I thought I had an account set up, but I couldn’t tell if the Vilified site is the same as the Visa site or not. After 3 tries I decided it was just much easier to give American Express the business, and they didn’t make me go through any additional stupidity.

My favorite part is how Visa has a whole campaign set up about how this is protecting you, the customer. Even though Federal Law limits the penalty to $50 per card, they try to make it sound like this is all for your sake, when in reality they are trying to protect themselves from the exposure, even if it makes it harder for you to do business with them.

Did I mention how much I love American Express?

Robot Renegade Cop

Click here to view the embedded video.

Five Guys in a Limo

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have a good weekend!