Tag The Brands You Love.......

Ever wanted to spout off about brands you love..... (or brands you hate)??

Now's your chance.

Brand Tags: Is presented as a "collective experiment in brand perceptions". All tags for most popular brands are generated by regular Joe's and Jane's and take no particular path or process. Brand Tags is a NoahBrier.com project ...you can even ask him to add a brand for tagging. Check out the press page to see what others have said about brand tags. Oh, and of course, now there's even a brand tags blog.

Start tagging now.

http://www.brandtags.net/

Will Clarke Can Write.

Lord Vishnu's Love Handles is the story of a man who is teetering on the edge of financial ruin and insanity until a couple of secret agents teach him what it really means to lose his mind.
Travis Anderson has a psychic gift. Or so he thinks. So far he's milked his premonitions only to acquire an upper-middle-class lifestyle--pretty wife, big house, and a shiny Range Rover--without having to make any real effort. But recent visions threaten his yuppie contentment. Haunted by omens of impending cancers, stillborn babies, and personal train wrecks, he is compelled to make a series of inaccurate and horrifying prophecies that humiliate him in front of his fellow country club members. The IRS gets Travis's number, too, demanding an audit of his sloppy bookkeeping.

Drowning in mounting financial problems and apparent mental illness, Travis tries booze, pills, even golf to stay afloat, but nothing works. His wife and friends are forced to stage an intervention. Travis is in danger of losing his family, his career, and ultimately, his sanity. That is, until he meets a Hindu holy man in rehab who claims to be the final incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Suddenly, the tragically shallow Travis is saddled with the responsibility of bettering mankind and saving the world.
http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Vishnus-Love-Handles-Novel/dp/B000KHXBUE/ref=pd_sim_b_title_1

Clarke's novel, subtitled "A Ghost's Story," is a winning comedy of collegiate (bad) manners, set at Louisiana State University. The narrator, an affluent frat boy named Conrad Avery Sutton III, tells us right off that he's dead, murdered by fellow Gamma Chi Ryan Hutchins, a psychotic hiding behind a charming Big-Man-on-Campus veneer. Conrad makes it his afterlife's work to bring cocky Ryan down, with the help of the frat house's salty cook, "crazy" Miss Etta. She knows Conrad is still on Earth to protect hapless fraternity pledge Tucker Graham, who, like most of the world, sees Ryan as "a big, bright, rising star." It sounds a little like a sitcom, albeit an edgy one, but Clarke fashions a hilariously addictive yarn, with crackling prose and sharp observations that consistently entertain and surprise. He drives the plot over the top with portraits of hypocritical religious fanatics and unrestrained party animals, and into baby Grand Guignol territory with a swath of outlandish killings—but it all works as black farce of a high degree.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743273168/%20middlefingerp-20

You Cannot Make This Stuff Up.......

There must be a full moon...............

"Fat, drunk and naked is no way to go through life Son"
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2008/07/08/news/local/doc487386a5560e9843354250.txt

"Damn kids, get out of my yard!"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1033266/Yobs-threw-rocks-house-years-But-father-fought-arrested.html

"Just what exactly are you afraid of?"
http://www.cracked.com/article_16472_6-absurd-phobias-people-who-actually-have-them.html

Beers and Busses -- they just go together
http://www.abc2news.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3033e4bd-8dea-45d7-a0db-c5fa61ddaef3


"You Smell Somethin?"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2274995/Cow-farts-collected-in-plastic-tank-for-global-warming-study.html

Work is Killing Me.....

Taken from the New York Times:

Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to work out why no one notice that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for five days before anyone asked if he was feeling okay. George Turlebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proof-reader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack I in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers. He quietly passed away on Monday, but nobody noticed until Saturday moring when an office cleaner asked why he was working during the weekend. His boss, Elliot Wachiaski, said: "George was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself." A post mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.

That story is NOT true. Look it ip on www.snopes.com. My point is that people are gullible and will believe most anything, especially if you embellish details and weave in a good story.

Every Body Needs a Vacation.

(with a shout out to Hugh MacLeod and http://www.gapingvoid.com/)

It's good to get away from it all for awhile. Every body needs it. Unplug. Unwind. Recharge. Relax. Go off the grid. It's amazing how long it takes, once away, just to get relaxed and set for days away from the daily grind.

And while I don't ever seem to get away as much as I should.............. I always come back better for it. In very describable ways...........

New persepctives, new way of seeing things, new attitude, new senses.

Too Many Lawyers? Too Many Chimps?

While the specialty area of "animal protection law" is one of the fastest-growing areas of the legal profession, it may have gotten out of hand. There is an Attorney in San Francisco (surprised?) by the name of Bruce Wagman who now has a complete law practice devoted exclusively to this specialty. He even co-authored a book, entitled: Animal Law, now in its third edition — the first casebook for animal law courses in law schools. But wait.........it gets better. He took it a step further and has recently announced that his practice will now be confined solely to legal issues focused on chimpanzees and apes. I cannot make this stuff up.

http://www.schiffhardin.com/BruceAWagman.htm

Can You Take It With You ?

Do you know who Frederic J. Baur of Cincinnati is? Chances are you have enjoyed one of his simplest and noble inventions. Something he was proud of, and an invention well ahead of it's time. It literally changed the way snacks were packaged, marketed and sold.

Baur died in May 2007, after a battle with Alzheimers, he passed away quietly in a Cincinnati hospice at age 89. While his life and his life's work was not mourned much outside of his hometown, his professional life was a microcosm of breakthrough marketing (good and bad).

On the good side, he showed just how you can turn a really simple idea into a wildly successful product by innovating and marketing it creatively.

Pringles potato chips in a can was his baby. He designed it in 1966, it was patented in 1970, and chips have never been the same. In later years they even sold advertising screened on to each individual chip!

On the down side, Pringles lowers the bar for everyone else. All of the chips are exactly the same. (Where do they keep the mold chip by which all others are formed?). And other chips soon copied his invention.

And on the really weird side, Baur put in his will that he wanted to be cremated and buried in a Pringles can. His family chose the "Original" can.

You can't take it with you.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1811730,00.html