Let’s allow The Bobby Hughes Experience start things off for us today with a little writing music that will evoke the James Bond-like style and swank of the 4th of July parties we’ll all be enjoying this weekend. Shall we? We shall.
The Bobby Hughes Experience – Seasons
Yeah, you know me!
The New York Times, my favorite gray lady of all time, often has some killer writing, but their recent article on Jon & Kate Plus Eight (yes, yes, I know) was a MASTERPIECE. It’s a tour de force that will have the bloggers checking themselves before they go wrecking themselves. And I say that with 100% sincerity. Intelligent, snarky, well-reported, and full of burn, it is easily the best thing I have read all week.
Here is but a sampling of artfully worded and bitingly funny quotes from the article entitled A Marriage Crumbles in the Media Glare by Ginia Bellafante via the NYT:
“Kate explained that she had sobbed and hyperventilated for half a day when she realized that her marriage was over. (After a decade of marriage, really, why not a whole 24 hours?)”
“Jon, displaying all the emotion of a bottle of Drano, described his failings in terms of passivity and ineptitude as a communicator.”
“…bikers from “American Chopper”…showed up to make Jon, who does not work, realize how emasculated he had become.”
Last autumn-ish, a group of my friends got into a heated and passionate debate over grammar, thanks to a popular song by hipster darlings Vampire Weekend. It began with comma use, then escalated to an argument over how many spaces should be used after each period. Like a 24 hour cable news channel, voices were raised, positions were laid out, struck down and reiterated, and everyone left with the same opinions with which they came.
Turns out, once you get away from diagramming sentences (something they never taught us in public school) and start focusing on the way grammar should be rather than how it actually is, suddenly everyone’s got an opinion. All of which is to say that I’m going to be guest blogging from time to time at Little Red Bird, wherein I will let the world, the internets, the AP Style Guide, MLA Style Guide and Chicago Manual of Style know the way it ought to be.
My first post is already on the site, and let it be known, I take no prisoners.
Pizza Hut is officially dropping the “pizza” from their name and from now on will simply be known as “The Hut.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: not the best idea ever. In fact, a potentially terrible idea.
I know Pizza Hut just recently discovered that the Italians are also famous for their pasta, and perhaps their foray into this exciting new genre is not garnering the attention they feel it deserves. Everyone’s trying new things during the recession, fair enough. Still, somehow I don’t think this is quite the image you want to conjure when attempting to entice people to patronize your restaurant.
Though I was on several sports teams throughout high school, I am sure that both I and my fellow schoolmates would all agree I was most definitely a card-carrying member of the “nerd herd.” This past weekend, fellow nerd, John Hodgman, gave a delightful speech on “the cultural war of our time: jocks vs. nerds” at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner. You might remember Mr. Hodgman from such hipster-havens as The Daily Show, McSweeneys and This American life.
Those of you would would like to do some extra credit reading (overachievers), are encouraged to check out American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent. While not the greatest book in the history of mankind, it’s amusing enough and the cover is gorgeous.
So my pal Jason over at Little Red Bird, just did a blog post about how he spent an entire afternoon coming up with the perfect shade of blue for a client. Nerd alert! Although, this is coming from the girl who was the ONLY person on our entire branding team to choose the wrong shade of red in a vote on color selection (and apparently among designers there is a “wrong” shade) so take that assessment with a grain of salt. Perhaps this is why I feel a special kinship with the Tiny Art Director, a four-year old who has been providing her father with art assignments and insight for fully half of her life.
To wit, the piece entitled “Duck Biting Dinosaur,” found here:
The Brief: A dinosaur eating a baby, like last time
Artist Negotiation: How about something other than a dinosaur?
The Brief, Revised: A duck. A duck biting a dinosaur’s tail.
The Critique: I want a goat and a piggie
Job Status: Rejected
In related news, My Kid Could Paint That is an amazing documentary that you should immediately rent from your local library or nearest Netflix shipping facility. It features a pre-k artist and her meteoric rise to fame…or does it? Dum dum DUM! Mystery artist theater! It’s also a fascinating study in psychology, family relationships and the sunk-cost fallacy. Psychology, art and dramz! Oh, my!
I’ve been a huge fan of The Go! Team for a few years now, and in addition to having an awesome band name, they put out some amazing music to write by. Some of their stuff has a more laid back ’60s vibe, and then there are tunes like Junior Kickstart. If I was running the show over at NBC, I would have thrown money hand over fist at these guys until they were forced to sell-out and let me use this very song to put together the greatest commercial for the summer Olympics of all time. For now, it suffices as a caffeine-free pick-me-up for the 3pm sleepies.
The Go! Team’s modern-day, live-action Mrs. Pacman video for Junior Kickstart will blow your mind with its mute humor. Truly, truly inspired stuff. It might be an overstatement to call it “the greatest thing ever,” but it basically is.
The Go! Team – Junior Kickstart, from their debut 2004 album Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Public Library, no! No you did not just hang up a banner with improperly used quotation marks to advertise your summer reading program. This is not right! You are a place of learning and knowledge! Step it up!
Any vacation plans this summer? Oh, you better believe it! I’m taking two whole days off every week! Yep, every Saturday and Sunday I’m heading outside to discover exciting Charlotte, North Carolina! Home to such famous tourist attractions such as the farmer’s market, Aldi’s and Target. So yeah, big vacation plans. Big, big plans. Your postcard is in the mail!
This year, while my passport collects dusts instead of stamps, I’ll be taking a fantasy trip to the UK in half-hour increments courtesy of iTunes. I just discovered The Bugle podcast from the Times Online. It’s a satirical news-ish program from John Oliver of the Daily Show and Andy Zaltzman who, more than likely, is someone people have actually heard of in England.
The real charm of this podcast is that Briton John Oliver currently lives in New York, and brings just enough Americana (from the UK perspective) to keep us crazy kids over here in the colonies from getting lost in the quagmire of football (soccer) and parliamentary references.
It’s an excellent chance to find out what everyone is totally saying about America behind its back and to pick up on the latest British slang. Plus, it’s a lot less depressing than listening to one of those “Walk London” audio tours while stuck in traffic.
The podcasts are NSFW so headphones are a necessity. For those who don’t know what NSFW means, you probably shouldn’t be listening to the podcasts anyway. Assuming you even know what a podcast is in the first place.
The collapse of the economy has left a lot of people wondering things like, “how did this happen?” and “what the crap?”. Perhaps it’s this air of uncertainty that has prompted Glad odor shield trash bags and Excedrin to run two eerily similar ad campaigns. Yes, I know. Trash bags and headaches, they go hand-in-hand really.
The most likely scenario in my mind is that the two ad teams were sitting in separate offices wondering how on earth they were going to get people to buy their products when the economy was busy turning fancy trash bags and fancy aspirin into extravagant indulgences, and ultimately decided, why bother coming up with an answer when a question is just as exciting?
I award the point here to Glad, as I saw their commercials months before Excedrin started their own campaign of rhetorical questioning, and because, thanks to the odor shield bags, I can take my trash out less often. Hooray!
Here’s the Glad ad, which asks us “What’s that smell?”, and then proceeds to answer their question with a question (bonus points!), wondering “What smell?”.
And here’s Excedrin, who ponders to the abyss: “What ache?”.
