The rabbit hole is open for business. Via The Washington Post:

Many tech companies tend to follow two naming strategies these days, says Anthony Shore, global director of naming and writing at Landor Associates, a San Francisco design company: the “nonsense” name (Joost) and names that use familiar-but-misspelled words (Flickr).

Shore, for one, likes neither strategy: “It just feels like they’re throwing in the towel. It’s easy to find an existing word and drop out a letter. It’s easy to come up with arbitrary sounds, or to just add an ‘oo.’ It’s far more difficult to come up with names with real words that have meanings and connections with people.”

Yup, that’s Landor, as in the creators of names like Uniqa and Solutia. I write this post with a heavy heart, as Anthony Shore is a good friend of mine. All right, was a good friend of mine. And okay, I have no heart.

Introducing the Nokia Arte and the Arte Sapphire, both named by Igor.

Just in time for Christmas, the entry level Arte makes the perfect stocking stuffer and will only set you back $1475.00 U.S.

Via dialaphone:

The 8800 ‘Arte’ and the 8800 ‘Arte Sapphire’ are the two new models in question, easily differentiated by colour, the ‘Arte’ is black and the ‘Arte Sapphire’ is brown and by the whole sapphire mounted in the centre of the ‘Arte Sapphire’s’ D-pad. Both are 3G phones and have 3-megapixel auto-focus cameras and a massive 1GB of internal memory! Their elegant slider design helps maintain a fuss-free front panel, broken only by the D-pad control and inside the flashy box, a linen-lined pouch to keep your phone safe and warm and a Bluetooth headset can be found.

As always, it’s the special touches that make the duo stand out. For example, a couple of taps on the steel fascia wakes the clock up on the display, which also has something called ‘living wallpaper’, first seen on the Nokia 7900 Prism (pictured below), which changes and adapts to time, battery power and signal strength. The coolest new feature has to be the ability to silence you ringing phone simply by turning it face down on the table! To further set these two apart from Nokia’s more run-of-the-mill phones, they feature exclusively created videos, sounds and ringtones.

As with the previous Nokia 8800 phones, the ‘Arte’ pair are constructed using the highest quality materials and have a special fingerprint retardant coating on the panels, with the ‘Arte Sapphire’ going one better by having a soft-touch Indian Goat-hide covering too! One can never accuse Nokia of not thinking differently!

Some of Igor’s previous work with Nokia can be seen here.

A popular restaurant in Tapei, named “Modern Toilet” serves up hot and steamy food in a unique kind of bowl. Via IgoUgo:

Eating here was a very unique dining experience to say the least. You are seated at a bathtub (your table) surrounded by toilets (your seats). Your food comes in your own sizzling toilet bowl with a little “poop” on the side. I had curry chicken which came with a side of vegetables, soup, and rice. Dessert of ice-cream comes in a squat toilet. Very fun place to eat and food was good for all less than $10!

The alternative title for this post was “Eat Shit”, but we don’t use potty talk on this blog.

In related culinary news, Landor is keeping with its tradition of going into hiding until the day after Thanksgiving. Can’t blame them for trying to save their necks.

Further reading about poop

Or perhaps reading this blog has created in you a powerful hunger for words that read good.

Either way, our OLD, OLD friend Yannick Murphy will be reading from her latest novel, SIGNED, MATA HARI, this coming Wednesday night. The particulars:

Wednesday, November 14th 8:15 pm
Columbia University
Rm 413 Dodge Hall

Of special interest is that she will be reading with Diane Williams.

Last time these two shared the stage a really cool cat fight ensued.

Fingers crossed.