Get Your Own Bierbitzch

“This unique and attractive tin sign for Bierbitzch Pilsner would make the perfect dorm room or frat house decoration.” Not everyone’s taste.

How To Wrap Last-Minute Gifts

Well, it’s Christmas eve and we’re scrambling to wrap last-minute gifts for hard-to-shop-for friends and relatives. It’s tempting just to have the elves at the mall take care of gift wrapping; so professional, with fancy paper, glue-gunned pine cones, and perfect bows. But it’s obvious you couldn’t be bothered wrapping it yourself. Don’t be embarrassed by perfectly wrapped gifts this year. CrapWrap shows you cared enough to put in the extra effort and wrapped the special gift yourself.

Merry Christmahanukwanzmadan and see y’all in the New Year.

Finger Lickin’ Good

Germany’s strange brand of reality T.V. has inadvertently answered two of the most vexing philosophical questions regarding poultry in all of human history:

1. Why did the chicken cross the road?

2. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The definitive answers to both questions reside here.

Hokey-Pokey

This year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards go to:

John Updike’s sex scenes — including a romp with a “Widows of Eastwick” witch in a beachside motel room — won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, captured the 16th annual Bad Sex Award itself for a scene in “Shire Hell” that begins with moans and nibbles and works up to screaming and other animal noises.

Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

More, via Bloomberg

Smart & Final

For those of us who toil in a nerdly field, the presence of a maverick who stomps on the terra, chokes every bead of bile from life’s clogged ducts, and then vaporizes in a defiant, atavistic lunge, elevates us all. In the Name Game, that man was John Smart of Interbrand.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Agent Smart’s death, and consequently the ninth anniversary of when “schwing” stopped being associated with namers. He was our Austin Powers, our Keith Richards, our Richard Branson. Most of the official record seems to have disappeared from the Web. We found only a brief account of his death:

John Smart, unarmed, shot to death on Oct. 6, 1998 when police fired at least 13 rounds into his Mercedes convertible.

That was a late model Mercedes convertible. According to published reports at the time, he was stopped in San Francisco (our fair city) for suspicion of either soliciting a prostitute or drugs or both. Police said that Smart tried to run them down, at which point his legend was eternalized. For a full, rollicking year afterwards, namers of every ilk had to add extra memory to their Palm Pilots just to handle the overflow from their social calendars.

But that equity has faded, and it’s time for another high-ranking naming superstar from a big San Francisco shop to go out in a blaze of glory. We’d happily volunteer, if we thought Igor would rate better than a small mention on page eight of the San Francisco Chronicle. No, it must be someone from a page one agency, an agency like Landor. Any takers? Anthony?

Deconstructing the “Twitter” name

You can’t go Xohm again

Sprint and Clearwire closed their $14.5 billion WiMax joint venture last Friday. Sprint is contributing wireless airwaves to the venture, but not the impossible to say brand name they previously came up with: Xohm.

The new name for this next-generation (4G) nationwide mobile broadband network, aka WiMax, is much clearer and to the point than Xohm: Clear. The company behind it will retain the Clearwire name.

Apparently, Xohm is NOT where the heart is.

Via Reuters.

Birdsong

Nokia’s Bruce Lee Phone Goes Viral With YouTube Video

Igor’s work with Nokia can be perused here, here and here.

I’m a moofer?

Hypermiling is the Oxford Universtiy Press “Word of the Year” and “moofer” is a runner-up amongst these finalists:

frugalista – person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing own produce, etc.

moofer – a mobile out of office worker – ie. someone who works away from a fixed workplace, via Blackberry/laptop/wi-fi etc. (also verbal noun, moofing)

topless meeting – a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries, cellphones, etc.

toxic debt – mainly sub-prime debts that are now proving so disastrous to banks. They were parceled up and sent around the global financial system like toxic waste, hence the allusion.

I prefer to think of myself as one of a new breed of digital nomads.

A Magazine Named Sue

Introducing a brand new publication designed specifically for women professionals in the litigation practice specialty. “The legal community has been dominated by men since the establishment of the United States and Sue will be a valuable asset in helping women in litigation to equalize that dominance and further develop their position in the legal community,” says Christie LaBarca in a review of the new magazine named Sue.

Wang v. Poon

The Canadian trial judge commented on the unusual nature of the parties’ marriage at para. 31 of her reasons for judgment:

Marriages are as varied as the people in them, but the courts have recognized certain common types of marriages when considering entitlements upon their dissolution.  This marriage does not fit any standard pattern. There is a 30-year age difference between the plaintiff and the defendant, and their expectations upon marriage were respectively unrealistic and completely at odds.  The plaintiff married because she wanted to have a child; the defendant married because he wanted a companion for the coming years.  Their respective financial, educational, and employment experiences and backgrounds are completely different.  Although both are of Chinese extraction, they come from different economic and political cultures – the plaintiff from northern China, and the defendant from Hong Kong.  While the defendant immigrated to Canada many years ago, speaks English well, and has lived a cosmopolitan lifestyle, the plaintiff has spent her entire life in China, has never travelled, and speaks minimal English.

If only he were Mr. Wang and she Ms. Poon, but no marriage is perfect.


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