At a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan, even the dog prays. Mimicking his master, priest Joei Yoshikuni, a 1 1/2-year-old black-and-white Chihuahua named Conan joins in the daily prayers at Naha's Shuri Kannondo temple, sitting up on his hind legs and putting his front paws together before the altar. [...]
"I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it, too," Yoshikuni said.
The priest is now trying to teach him how to meditate.
Well, sort of.
"Basically, I am just trying to get him to sit still while I meditate," he explained. "It's not like we can make him cross his legs."
What do you think the dog is praying for? Link (Photo: Itsuo Inouye / AP) - Thanks Geekazoid!
Carl Huber of theWAREHOUSE blog talked to a chicken farmer who was selling organic (though not "certified organic" - apparently, getting certified is an expensive process), free-range eggs in a farmer's market. Naturally, the guy was touting all of the benefits of his eggs as compared to regular eggs from the grocery store.
So Carl did the next logical step: he performed a scientific test to compare the two.
We each had half of each egg. The tastes were totally different! I honestly did not think there would be much of a difference, especially since I don't have the world's most developed sense of taste, but in a side by side comparison: there is no comparison. The grocery store brand seemed watered down, flimsy and pale. The robust taste of the public market eggs was immediately noticeable. I really thought it might be something only noticeable by, say, testing nutrient levels in a lab. But everyone involved in the taste test (er, my wife and I) clearly preferred the public market eggs.
I'd never have guessed that free range eggs are yummier than supermarket eggs. Maybe it's time to give 'em a try: Link - Thanks Carl!
BTW, theWAREHOUSE blog is running a "fan sign" contest. You can win a prize simply by taking a picture of yourself holding a sign that says "I love theWAREHOUSE" and emailing it to him. Details here: Link - Sorry this didn't get posted before Carl, I got a little swamped!
Selling to kids is big business - children directly control and spend $24.4 billion worth of goods every year, and they influence parents to spend upwards of $300 billion. Naturally, corporations are very interested. Here are some of the tricks of the trade businesses use to get your kids (and their parents) to spend the big bucks. (From a Mothering Magazine piece by Gary Ruskin).
NAG, NAG, NAG
Cheryl Idell knows a lot about nagging. She's written reports for major corporations with such titles as "The Nag Factor" and "The Art of Fine Whining." She tells her clients that nagging spurs about a third of a family's trips to a fast-food restaurant, to buy children's clothing, or to rent a video. Idell, chief strategic officer for a major market-research firm, speaks with the cold precision of a physicist. "Nagging falls into two categories," she explains. "There is 'persistent nagging,' the fall-on-the-floor kind, and there is 'importance nagging,' where a kid can talk about it." [She considers] either a good first step. But alone they're not enough. Idell advises Chuck E. Cheese and numerous other corporations that getting kids to whine is even better. Better yet is to give them "a specific reason to ask for the product." In other words, Idell's job is to make your life miserable. She even rates brands according to their "nag factor" - that is, their capacity to make your children badger you - and companies toil mightily to rate high on her list. Some of the most successful are McDonald's, Levi's, Discovery Zone, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Disney, and OshKosh. (Like we couldn't have guessed.)
WANTED: YOUR KID
Now meet George Broussard. He is co-founder of 3D Realms, a company that makes a video game called Duke Nukem. A violent "first-person shooter" game, Duke Nukem comes complete with strip bars, porno theaters, and lots of gore. Even with the "mature" rating, and all the violence and sexual imagery, Broussard wants to sell this game to your kids. "Duke is a mass-market character that can sell two million games," Broussard says." It'd be suicide to make the game unplayable by younger people." Idell and Broussard are typical of something endemic in America today. Thousands of the brightest minds in the country devote their great talents, and use sophisticated psychological techniques, to influence your children to purchase products - o rather, to want products - regardless of whether or not they are good for your kids. Name something you don't want your kids to have, and chances are, people are trying to entice your kids into wanting it.
WHAT ARE CHILDREN ANYWAY?
James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M, is perhaps the foremost expert on selling to children. He is the elder statesman advocating a shift in our thinking from viewing children as trusting, impressionable humans to be protected to seeing children "as economic resources to be mined." His emotional response to this contrast isn't the same as yours. McNeal sees the money in your kids and helps corporations get access to it: "Children are the brightest star in the consumer constellation," he writes. McNeal divides the booming kiddie market into three parts: There's the "primary" market - the $24.4 billion each year that kids directly control and spend. There's the "influence" market, perhaps as high as $300 billion, the amount of parental spending that children can directly or indirectly influence. And there's the "future" market, which is the purchasing that children will do for the rest of their lives.
BUY-BUY BABY
"Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids," McNeal enthuses. Johann Wachs, the vice president of Saatchi and Saatchi's Kid Connection unit, agrees: "Marketers are just waking up to the enormous possibility of kid-targeted products," he says. "As kids become more powerful as consumers, they are being targeted more directly." Children aren't hard to take advantage of. They tend to trust adults even when they shouldn't - sometimes especially when they shouldn't. Marketers know this, while most children don't grasp the motives behind advertising or realize that the products advertised may not be good for them. However, none of this is troubling to the new breed of advertisers and marketers. If they have any qualm, they do a good job of repressing them. Like investors in prime real estate, they see children's mind as kind of cash cow. "If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come," explained Mike Searles, president of Kids-R-Us, a major children's clothing store. Companies are saying, 'Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.'" Wayne Chilicki, a General Mills executive, agrees: "When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Proctor & Gamble model of 'cradle to grave,'" he says. "We believe in getting them early and having them for life."
BE COOL
Advertisers infuse their pitches with messages that target the weaknesses and insecurities of children. "Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you're a loser," explained Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency. "Kids are very sensitive to that. If you tell them to buy something, they are resistant. But if you tell them that they'll be a dork if they don't, you've got their attention. You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it's very easy to do with kids because they're the most emotionally vulnerable." Moreover, some marketers try to sell by tapping into destructive and antisocial urges. According to Rick Litman, a partner at Kid 2 Kid Market Research, the goal is "to use youth rebellion to more effectively target a product and sell a product." More than anything, they want your children's minds. "Kids marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated," says Julie Halpin, CEO of Gepetto Group, which specializes in marketing to kids. It is a competition for what she calls "share of mind." Corporations claim this "share of mind" from every possible angle. They seek to engulf your children with ads. "Imagine a child sitting in the middle of a large circle of train tracks," one market researcher explains. "Tracks, like the tentacles of an octopus, radiate to the child from the outside circle of tracks. The child can be reached from every angle. This is how the [corporate] marketing world is connected to the child's world."
MARKETERS GO TO SCHOOL
Marketers are resorting to extreme measures to gain access to our children. They're invading sanctums that were previously off-limits, such as schools. For example, Channel One is a marketing company that uses TV "news" shows as a come-on. Its daily broadcast shows 10 minutes of "news" and 2 minutes of ads to captive audiences of 8 million children in 12,000 schools across the country. While promoted as "education," the real appeal is to advertisers. "The biggest selling point to advertisers," says Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, lies in "forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials." The atmosphere of the school is an advertiser's dream, Babbit says. "The advertisers get a group of kids who can't go to the bathroom, who can't change the station, who can't listen to their mother yell in the background, who can't be playing Nintendo, who can't have their headsets on." A new company called ZapMe! has extended this strategy to computers. Like Channel One, ZapMe! offers free equipment to schools - computers and Internet browsers. In return, it advertises to kids, plus it gets a market-research gold mine. The company snoops on schoolchildren as they browse the Internet and then delivers the information to advertisers and marketers. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! "breaks down the data by age, sex, Zip Code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laserlike precision."
THE LESSON IN THE ADS
Kids are eager learners. "Advertising targeted at elementary school children," Professor McNeal says, "on programs just for them works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products." Further, it is well known that RJR Nabisco's Joe Camel ads hooked hundreds of thousands of children into smoking. And Anheuser-Busch created Budweiser ads so captivating - with frogs, penguins, and lizards - that they were kid's favorite ads in 1999. This is great news for ad agencies and for the corporations they work for. Business is booming. Some win kudos from their corporate peers. The owner of McFarlane Toys, Todd McFarlane, was recently given an award by Ernst & Young for creating a bestselling line of grotesque and violent "Spawn" toys and comic books. Would McFarlane let his own daughters have these toys or comic books? "Are you kidding?" he says. "I'm still a dad after five o'clock."
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader, which was published in 2000. Note: Channel One has continued financial loss until it was sold in 2007 whereas ZapMe! has gone bankrupt, but I'm sure the message is still relevant today.
The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader's Institute has 504-all new pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Neatorama author and super nice gal Miss Cellania is having a bit of a computer problem:
My word processor takes fits. I will type a sentence (and I’m not the world’s fastest typist) and then sit back and wait while one by one the letters appear on the screen. It may take thirty seconds or so for my words to appear. No one can figure this out. No matter what browser I use, I cannot paste URLs into a link field at Blogger or Moveable Type. At Wordpress, I can paste in using rich text, but not html mode. I can at Squarespace in Foxfire versions 1.4 and 3, but not version 2. I can't have Safari ever again because I for some reason don't have Safari now. I always manage to come up with problems no one has heard of before.
I don't have a Mac, so I have no idea what's wrong. If it were a PC, I'd say a virus/malware, but isn't Mac supposed to be resistant to that kind of shenanigans? Anyhoo, if any of you could help her, we'd appreciate it: Link (or you can email her at radiofox AT gmail DOT com)
Talkin' bout computer errors, we've been tinkering with Neatorama's caching system and some of you have emailed me about a weird redirection error.
If you can't see Neatorama's post permalinks or comments (you get redirected to the home page instead) or if you have trouble with the feed (starting from now), please let me know.
Since you obviously can't write a comment if you see this error, please email alex AT neatorama DOT com.
For those of you unaffected, I'd like to hear if you think Neatorama is loading any faster from where you're at. Thanks!
CNN reporter David Mattingly is doing a story on Asian carp invasion of the Illinois River and the rest of the Mississippi river system. The carp are unusual that they actually leap out of the water into the boat!
See what happen to poor David - they should give him hazard pay for this story. Link (embedded YouTube)
Note: And yes, there was tragic story last week about a ray that leaped out of the water and killed a woman ... fortunately, there's no fatality in this story.
For its annual issues in 1997, DC Comics put pulp magazine (or pulp fiction) style illustrations as covers. They called the series "Pulp Heroes." (Sadly, this seems to be a one time only thing).
Super Punch blog has a neat collection of the various covers: Link
This one to the left is the Shadow of the Bat Annual No. 5, cover by Glen Orbik.
StacyBee snapped this photo of a strange weight loss technique of yore: tape worms! The labels on the jars said: "Sanitized Tape Worms, Jar Packed, "Friends for a Fair Form", and Easy to Swallow.
The poster on the back had a comforting label that said "NO DANGER, guaranteed harmless" and beckons you to "Eat! Eat! EAT! & Always stay Thin! FAT the enemy that is shortening your life BANISHED!"
Found at i met a possum, part of her ongoing rant against the creepiness that is the House on the Rock: Link
Growing up, I've always wanted a lightsaber and one day, my parents bought one for me and my brother and I was disappointed that it was such a horrible, cheap plastic piece of crap!
But this one promises to be different: Star Wars DIY Force FX Lightsaber Kit.
All the parts are based on actual screen-seen components, so your saber will look like an awesome mashup from the movies. And the coolest part is, you don’t have to choose between the Jedi and the Sith - because you can switch back and forth with the flip of a ... well, switch.
The Black Button is a short film by Lucas Crandles. It's premise is simple yet intriguing: if you couldn't get caught, would you kill a stranger for $10 million?
Mr Roberts finds himself awoken inexplicably in a white room. A man sits before him at a desk and in between them stands a black button. If Mr Roberts pushes it, he will receive a briefcase filled with millions of dollars. Or he can take the key to the door and leave penniless. The catch? Pushing the button will result in the death of a human being. What would you do?
One of the finalist of the YouTube Award 2007 for Best Short Film: Link [embedded YouTube]
//How about if I push it twice for $20 million? ;)
For me, buying a car is about as enjoyable as a root canal. And a story like this one just reinforces the low opinion I have of dealerships in general.
In a nut shell, a guy bid on eBay auction for a brand new BMW. The auction had no reserve and a minimum bid for $60k. The guy bid at that price, and the auction closed with a single winning bid: his at $60k. Later, the dealer called him and reneged on the deal, saying that the auction was "a mistake". The guy countered that they had entered into a legal contract through eBay, that the dealership had adjusted their Buy It Now price twice (meaning they were watching the auction), that this wasn't their first auction (they're not novices), and that they've reneged before (a different car in a prior auction).
The guy, obviously, felt cheated. He posted on in a car forum, and his thread got picked up by autoblog (with 300+ diggs, but no front page yet ... hmmm ...) and reddit (and I suppose, now on Neatorama).
While I'm not big on Net vendettas, I can't help but wonder at the new megaphone consumers now have. Big blogs like The Consumerist are filled with irate consumers with damning stories. Even the little guys can have their say (see the story of nissan.com and starbucked.com)
Obviously, there are two sides to the story and we haven't (and probably won't) hear from the dealership. So I'll let you guys decide on who's at fault and so on.
But what I'd like to ask you is this: what's the thinking of big corporations on PR disasters like this one? Do they even care about Net protests? Or do they think Net protests will blow over in a matter of days and then it's back to business as usual? If you work in a large company, I'd love to hear what you think.
Update 3/25/08: Apparently complaining on the Net worked this time around. Here's the update of the dealership agreeing to sell the car at the bid price: Link
We all know the old advertising adage of "sex sells," but this strange juxtaposition of a scantily clothed woman (with a scary facial expression, IMHO) next to a can of sliced mushroom brings only one thought to my mind: "huh?"
Paul Brians is a Professor of English at the Washington State University. His website, "Common Errors in English," has been around for a while but I've only discovered it recently.
Paul has compiled a huge list of errors in (American) English usage, listed alphabetically. If you don't know the differences between apiece / a piece, in to / into, and whether / whether or not, his website is worth a visit: Link
An equally fascinating, albeit a little hidden, part of his website is the list of Non-Errors. These are usages people keep on telling you are wrong, but which are actually standard in English. For example:
You shouldn’t pronounce the “e” in “not my forte.”
Some people insist that it’s an error to pronounce the word “forte” in the expression “not my forte” as if French-derived “forte” were the same as the Italian musical term for “loud”: “for-tay.” But the original French expression is pas mon fort, which not only has no “e” on the end to pronounce—it has a silent “t” as well. It’s too bad that when we imported this phrase we mangled it so badly, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. If you go around saying what sounds like ”that’s not my fort,” people won’t understand what you mean.
However, those who use the phrase to mean “not to my taste” (“Wagnerian opera is not my forte”) are definitely mistaken. Your forte is what you’re good at, not just stuff you like.
To celebrate the 120th Anniversary of the Eiffel Tower next year, Paris will "mod" the iconic landmark by extending the 3rd floor of the Eiffel Tower!
The design was created by Serero Architects, who won a design competition. The "ruffles" will be built from carbon Kevlar to give visitors an improved 360° view of Paris and double the capacity of the platform. If you're a purist, don't fret: the structure is only temporary.
