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.
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.
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
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?
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.
