Many times companies just stretch for any idea in order to keep things new or make things appear new. These are some of the worst examples of product updates that I have seen in a while.
Continue reading “Stupid Product Enhancements”Stupid Product Enhancements
Many times companies just stretch for any idea in order to keep things new or make things appear new. These are some of the worst examples of product updates that I have seen in a while.
Beer Can Vents
“How can we get people to throw our beer down their gullets faster? We’ll put vents on the can.” It really isn’t that tough to drink from a regular can. Maybe if I drank I would find out how impared my drinking skills could get. Maybe I just don’t understand it. Were that many people complaining about not being able to drink fast enough? The next natural progression of this idea is to put a potato gun on the bottom of the can so you can blast it down your throat.
Portable Pop Tarts
Finally a Pop Tart I can take with me. Sometimes I am on the go and don’t have time to sit down with a fork and knife to eat a whole Pop Tart. So I am excited to see that there are now Go Tarts. That must have been a fantastic board meeting to be in, to watch everybody get excited for a really dumb idea.
New and Improved
When I was a youngster I remember that Trix cereal had little colored spheres. Then one magical day the rabbit did something to make them shaped like fruit. Fast forward to modern times when I hear about a “New” shape. Oh sweetness, is it cubes, pyramids or little rabbit heads? No it’s………….Spheres??? Hey great “New” shape guys. You know it is the old shape too right? This ploy has been used by a lot of different companies to try to generate some buzz around something “New” which is actually something old.
Color Changing Beer
The people at Coors are making it too easy. They have little mountains on their beer that turn
blue when it is cold. Once again, maybe your sensitivity to temperature is impared when you are drunk so I wouldn’t know, but this seems stupid. I just picture some drunk idiot opening his fridge every 10 seconds and tasting his beer to find out if it is cold yet. He then stops and thinks, “If only the sweet rocky mountains could tell me when my beer is cold.” First of all, if your drinks were warm when you put them in the fridge and it has been less than 30 minutes they probably aren’t cold yet. If you are so drunk that you can’t tell time you probably don’t need another beer. Secondly, you can touch the bottle or can to tell if it is cold, if you are too lazy to do that then one more cold one should be at the bottom of your priority list. This product enhancement is almost as stupid as the oxymoronic slogan “Drink Responsibly”.
Location Location Location
I was talking the other day with a friend about some pictures of funny stuff I had taken and thought I would put them up.
Continue reading “Location Location Location”Location Location Location
I was talking the other day with a friend about some pictures of funny stuff I had taken and thought I would put them up.
This first one is of a symbiotic business relationship I found in Las Vegas. I imagined the animal hospital thinking, “What are we gonna do with all these dead animals?” And the Chinese fast food place wondered, “Where are we gonna get more dead animals?” Relax it’s a joke.
This one from Farmington New Mexico was too good to not pull over and snap a shot of. The catholic churches of San Juan county are fighting the good fight.
Some people can look at something and see what they can craft out of it. This person in Las Vegas was just such an artisan.
I was recently at a restarant and spotted the real-life incarnation of one of my heroes. If you can’t figure this one out you should “try another castle”.
Hamburger Heart Bear
Meet one of the “Apathy Bears”. He is “Hamburger Heart Bear”. His will to live was stolen by the Hamburglar a long time ago and the only joy he gets in life is when he sinks his teeth into a greasy triple stack. Diabetes and a few bypass surgeries are certainly in his future, but this is one 12 year old who doesn’t mind much, as long as he gets it “his way”.
Hamburger Heart Bear
Meet one of the “Apathy Bears”. He is “Hamburger Heart Bear”. His will to live was stolen by the Hamburglar a long time ago and the only joy he gets in life is when he sinks his teeth into a greasy triple stack. Diabetes and a few bypass surgeries are certainly in his future, but this is one 12 year old who doesn’t mind much, as long as he gets it “his way”.
Schwamerican
I have attended English classes for a majority of my life and have been studying the language my whole life. English is a language that can be very difficult to learn. There are many rules and tricks to the language that take years to perfect. These are some of my proposed changes to make it easier.
1. Spelling
There should be no such thing as a spelling bee. English is filled with silent pronunciations and exceptions to rules such as “knife” or “numb”. The words need to be spelled at a very basic level so a small child could sound them out and spell them. In fact, the word phonetically will be spelled phonetically (fənetikəlee). The words with silent k’s will have the k’s removed, as with other silent letters. Doing such things will save us all the time we spend trying to spell difficult words correctly. Thus making the average student or worker more efficient.
2. Alphabet
English contains several useless letters and letter combinations that waste time and paper. The letter C can easily be replaced by K or S being inserted where the C once was and the letter Q can be replaced in all cases by K. The letter X is a waste of a cool looking letter, it is not used with enough frequency. We will remedy this as well. Since the letter C has been replaced, we will no longer have the combination of CH. Thus the symbol of X will now make the “CH” sound and will be replaced by the combination of KS. The word BOX will be spelled “BOKS” and CHILD will be spelled “XILD”. We will also add the schwa (ə) to aid in spelling fənetikəlee. In doing this the alphabet will be easier to learn and more effective for its own purposes.
3. Rules for Jerks
There are many different rules of English that waste our time, such as the rule that states that you must say, “He and I” or “Her and I”. One could also say “Me and him” or “Me and her” and have the same meaning sent to the listener or reader. Another rule that I have heard is the rule of numbers in writing. It is currently unacceptable to write the number three in a paper as “3”. It must be spelled out as “three”. To do such one must put in four (4) more digits than if the person just put “3”. Also relating to numbers, is the use of numbers to replace all or part of a word. For this I say, “Congratulations, you found a loophole through which you can save some space and still have the same meaning.” Most people confuse the proper times to use “to” and “too” anyway. Why not just let everyone use “2” and we can figure out if they are saying, “I had 2 much”(too) or “I am going 2 the store”(to) ? Easing off on these rules will give us more time to spend on more pressing matters and solve important problems, instead of stopping someone to correct them when they say, “Me and Jane just found the cure for cancer.”
4. Punctuation
Punctuation should not be required and regulated, but should be optional. What kind of moron cannot tell when a sentence is a question or a command? If a person desires a pause in a sentence, they should be able to put a few spaces between words as opposed to using a comma.
Now dont get me rong I am not kalling for totəl anarkee and removəl əf all strəkture and regulatən. I have tryd 2 reed manee paypers that wer ritten by horribl ryters hoo did not hav anee ideə how 2 put səmthing 2 payper. That is no fən and waysts tym as well I am simplee kolling 4 a new strəkture that will b mor effishənt. I think it is gr8 that kids r using tekst messaj 4mat 2 ryt paypers 4 skool. Hopefəllee thay kan still mayk sens and no how 2 komunikayt effektivlee.
As you can see it will take some getting used to but can work. We may need to get rid of words that sound the same and mean different things so we don’t have to spell “know” as “no” and be confused. We can just make up new words. This post could have contained more information had it been written with the improved English which should be called “Schwamerican”. Communication is a very basic need and should be very basic in nature. If our language didn’t require so much time and effort to master we could improve many things in this world. Or we could save the time that it would take to implement and get used to such a system and go with what we got.
Schwamerican
I have attended English classes for a majority of my life and have been studying the language my whole life. English is a language that can be very difficult to learn. There are many rules and tricks to the language that take years to master. These are some of my proposed changes to make it easier.
Continue reading “Schwamerican”Best Second Ever
A friend of mine and his wife were expecting a new baby and thought that it might come today on 7/8/9. I told them that they should have the kid at exactly 12:34.56 so the the child could have the coolest birth time ever. They had the baby earlier though. But I still celebrated today at 12:34.56.
A Day at the Lake pt.1
I had pretty low expectations for the day as I climbed into my friends beefed up mustang. It was red with a big spoiler and some ground effects panels. My friend Blake had a nice sound system in there and a very powerful engine. We were headed with a big group to Lake Colorado City in Texas to go water skiing, tubing and such. Just riding to the lake in Blake’s car was enough fun for me and could only be improved upon if he let me sit on his lap like a 4 year old and move the steering wheel back and forth while driving. We got to the lake and a group of friends loaded into the boat and went out water skiing. Those of us that rode in Blake’s car just stayed and waded out in the water a little, just hanging out.
When the boat came back my friend Clint told us a bummer of a story. He was on the other side of the lake all set up in the water with skis, holding onto the rope, when he realized that he still had his keys in his pocket. He yelled to a friend on the boat and told him to catch his keys when he threw them to him. The driver of the boat did not hear him. Clint reared back and threw the keys just as the boat took off. Our friend on the boat watched as the keys, which were headed toward him, sank into the lake. Clint found a phone and asked his mom to drive an hour and a half or so to bring him some spare keys. As Blake heard this story, he reached in his pocket for his keys but they were gone. He retraced his steps and figured that his keys swam out of his pocket while he was just wading around a little in just past waist deep water. A bunch of us lined up to search the bottom of the lake in the spot where Blake had been when he lost his keys. As we got out where the water was waist deep some guys started to give up Blake kept searching until the water was at face level. I was taller than everyone else and went a little farther. No one found anything at all. I decided to give up too.
Now what happened next is a big reason for my belief in God, as it was a miracle. As I began to walk back to the edge of the lake where Blake was I felt like someone had slapped my brain. I suddenly knew that I was going to find those keys and I turned around. I swam out well past where the water was above my head and in an instant I felt that I should dive down at the spot where I was. As I went down in the brown, snake filled lake I reached out my hand. With my hand stretched out it felt like I was diving for a minute, but it was really a couple of seconds as the water was only eight or nine feet. When my hand hit the dirt at the bottom I felt something around my middle finger that felt like, oh I don’t know, maybe a key chain. I realized that I actually had Blake’s keys and I think I yelled out for joy under the water. I pushed off of the bottom at an angle towards shore and emerged from the murky water with my arm extended over my head holding the keys yelling like a lunatic. As I was running and yelling I saw Blake on the edge of the water. He turned toward me and when he realized what was going on he ran out into the water. He jumped up and I caught him. We then jumped around like Rocky and Apollo at the end of a training montage. (By the way Carl Weathers rules so he will represent me in the video.)