I heard the worst commercial I’ve ever heard on the radio this afternoon. The thing that made it so terrible was the fact that it was clearly written by someone who knew something about marketing, just not very much. It went approximately like this:
Do you know what the longest book in the Library of Congress is? I’ll tell you in just a moment, but first, I want to tell you about our 2008 cars and trucks… [insert 25 seconds of talking about some brand of cars] …Still wondering what that book is? It’s John James Audobon’s Birds of North America.
Yes, starting with a curiosity lead did grab my attention. But I tuned out the moment he segued into a completely unrelated topic.
I don’t even remember what brand of car was being advertised. I’m pretty sure it was GM, and I remember at one point the announcer said, “I’m not going to DODGE the issue of high gas prices,” which may have been a pun if he was advertising for Dodge. But I sort of think it might have been a local Chevrolet dealership.
But I did tune back in when he started talking about the book again, which is apparently 39 inches thick. That’s a big book. Cool fact.
I’m on book four (libro cuatro) of the Harry Potter series in Spanish. I might actually finish all six books before I have to head back to Seattle. We’ll see, though. They’re getting pretty long.
I tried Winnie the Pooh (“Winny de Puh”) as well, but I just like Harry Potter more. (Side note: the Spanish translation of “heffalump” is “pelifante”.)
French is going a bit slower. I’m working my way through Pimsleur French, an oral program. It’s tough – I’m definitely a visual learner.
Since I discovered while learning Italian that I learn better if I’m doing something else at the same time, I’m also teaching myself guitar. I like it. It’s hard to motivate myself to do a french lesson everyday, but since I’m also playing guitar, I feel like I’m making twice as much progress. Awesome.
Five weeks straight is a bit much to spend with the family, so a week in New York to catch up with old friends seemed in order. Last week was great. DC’s first snowfall of the year nearly made me miss my bus, but I arrived safely to see a snowy New York.
Snow in New York makes a trip to Rockefeller Center mandatory, but since I was dropped off right next to Macy’s, how could I resist visiting the epitome of Santadom?
I left Macy’s and headed to Rockefeller Center to see the tree but got sidetracked by the Charmin Public Toilets. It was like a bathroom-oriented theme park, and to be honest, it was more fun than Macy’s Santaland.
After the toilets, I headed to Rockefeller Center, thereby completing my tourist requirements for the week. The rest of my time was spent catching up with New York friends, San Francisco friends, and Seattle friends. I stayed eight nights, two nights each with four different friends, neatly cycling through almost everyone I knew in New York.
And my week couldn’t have ended any better when, on my last night, we happened to walk past a bar just in time to catch Happyfunsmile’s last performance of the year. How lucky can you get?
I’m back in DC now, and it’s just not the same…
I was sitting here, enjoying my hot chocolate with whipped cream, when I happened to look over it. I expected the whipped cream to melt, but I presumed it would happen slowly, from the bottom up. Instead, I saw the whipped cream rapidly collapsing on itself after several minutes of maintaining its structural integrity.
I think what happened is that the whipped cream was melting at the whipped cream/hot chocolate interface, but the ceiling of the whipped cream layer stayed intact, leading to a large air bubble (composed of the air originally whipped into the cream) growing just above my chocolate milk. I looked over at just the right time to see the escape of the bubble and the demise of my whipped cream mountain.
Clearly a topic for further research.
This week in New York has actually been one of the most productive for me in a long time. Staying with friends who have real jobs forces me out of the house, so whenever I’m not catching up with old friends, I’ve been working on my laptop in a coffeeshop.
After a week of market research, I’ve got four or five niches that look really promising. Unfortunately, the one that has far and away the most potential is also the one that far and away contributes the least to the world, to the point where I really don’t believe at all in what I’d be selling.
Talking to a friend about this today, he told me the story of Adult Friend Finder, whose founder apparently started it with the intention of helping people meet each other for random hobbies – fishing, reading, whatever. After months of painstakingly deleting naked photos, he finally realized that the market was looking for something else, and with 20 million members, AFF is one of the most popular sites on the internet.
For what it’s worth, I’m not selling porn, but I almost wish I was.
