Except they don’t call it Niketown anymore. It’s now “NIKE iD” but you can still design your own sneakers. I still get compliments on the kicks I designed a couple of years ago but, every now and again someone will ask “…but why’d you get the old person style?”
So I tried for a little more “street” this time around. I’m gonna strap these babies on with my Tactical 5.11’s, buy me a case of Krylon and go nuts.
Barb always gets better pix than I and brought back some nice ones from her recent trip to Destin. This is my favorite. Somewhere out on the web there’s a photo of Barb taking this picture of the man taking the photo of the family on the beach.
I do love a Lucas Davenport novel. Nothing heavy, fun read. The latest —Invisible Prey— includes a brief exchange between Lucas and his boss, Rose Marie, on the difference between Republicans and Democrats:
“Wonder why with Republicans, it’s usually fucking somebody that get them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it’s usually stealing?”
“Republicans have money. Most of them don’t need more. But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off. Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they’re desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating all the good restaurants, and buying three thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some.”
— Invisible Prey, John Sandford (page 141)
Roger points us to this New York Times story on the success of Apple’s retail stores:
“Mr. Jobs understood, however, that his stores would sell not merely products but also gratification. He told the trade magazine Chain Store Age Executive in 2001: “When I bring something home to the kids, I want to get the smile. I don’t want the U.P.S. guy to get the smile.”
Customer response is told in the numbers. Last month, Apple released results for the quarter ended March 31. More than 21.5 million people visited its stores, which now number more than 180. Store sales were $855 million, up 34 percent from the quarter a year earlier, and they contributed more than $200 million in profits.”
If you decide it’s time to buy your first Mac, take the time… make the drive… visit an Apple store. It is a unique retail experience.
PS: Received this little reminder while posting this from the home office Dell.
Last week I stumbled across an interesting (and lengthy) 2006 Rolling Stone article by Janet Reitman (“Inside Scientology”) that takes a peek behind the curtain of “America’s most mysterious religion.”
I’m not sure how someone could read this and not be convinced L. Ron Hubbard (the guy that came up with Scientology) was a wacko con man. Try to imagine convincing a new convert of the following:
“…75 million years ago, an evil galactic warlord named Xenu controlled seventy-six planets in this corner of the galaxy, each of which was severely overpopulated. To solve this problem, Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings and then flew them to Earth, where they were dumped into volcanoes around the globe and vaporized with bombs. This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, until they were caught in electronic traps set up around the atmosphere and “implanted” with a number of false ideas — including the concepts of God, Christ and organized religion. Scientologists later learn that many of these entities attached themselves to human beings, where they remain to this day, creating not just the root of all of our emotional and physical problems but the root of all problems of the modern world.”
Let me say once again, this sounds like a load of horse shit. But why am I more skeptical of these “teachings” than the miracles of the Christian faith? The Bible is the literal Word of God and Dianetics is science fiction? That works for a lot of people.
Not sure where this post came from, maybe all the killing and dying in the name of religion.
Speaking of Holy Wars, maybe we should send the members of our most fanatical faiths (Scientologists, The Jonestown Brigade, The 101st Branch Davidians, etc) to mix it up with the extremists of other religions. If the other team is playing 12 year old suicide bombers… we send in some grandmothers willing to drink poison Cool-Aide. Let’s out-crazy them.
Former Missourinet (one of the news networks operated by the company I work for) anchor/reporter Laura McNamara left us recently to pursue other interests. That’s often a cliche but not in this instance. Laura is young and wants to travel and do about a hundred things and decided to take some time to figure it all out.
In the meantime, she has hooked up with Chuck and Cindy at AgWired. Chuck’s business has grown to the point he can’t keep up and he’s been on the prowl for people who know what to do with a camera and microphone.
I think we’ll see a lot of MSM reporters migrating into New Media gigs like this.
The Missouri Lottery is blogging. According to the release, you can "ask questions about games and promotions, watch videos from the new Reel Lottery video series, get updates on Lottery winners, and read posts from Lottery employees and players."
Chief Blogger in Residence is John Wells. He’s been with the Missouri Lottery for some time as Videographer/Satellite Coordinator. John has been wading in the blog pond since October of 2005 and has managed to turn it into his day job. Good for him. From time to time, John does part-time work for The Missourinet (a Learfield company).
The lottery should have been blogging years ago, but for many (most? all?) state entities, the blogosphere is a mysterious and scary place. I have to believe that John lobbied long and hard to help make this happen. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the Power of the Blog. Good luck, John.
I still have several hours of work to resurrect The Basement Diaries, but have the site back online (5 min slideshow: Basement Diaries . It has been something of a nostalgic deep dive in that I created the site in 1998 (almost ten years ago) about events that took place in 1968 (almost 40 years ago).
Most of the work involved rescanning images. We had really crappy cameras in those days and I did little to optimize the scanned images back in ’98. So I rescanned about 100 photos, but this time I parked them on flickr. I still have a good bit of caption’ing and tagging to do. Basement Diaries alums might enjoy the slideshow of our Halloween party pix.
This rehab has moved me a little closer to my goal of 1,000 images on flickr. A target I’l easily reach when I get around to KBOA830.com.
Okay, make of this what you will. A few days ago I posted a couple of lines about having a problem with the “Share” feature in Google Reader. I did not report the problem to Google. But within about 24 hours, I received the following email:
“Hi Steve, if you send me your email address I’d be happy to take a look at your account to see what’s going on.
Justin Haugh
Google Reader Engineer”
Justin subscribes to a search feed for “google reader” at blogsearch.google.com, saw my post, and reached out to see if he could help. (The issue had already resolved itself.)
Think about it. There must be a bazillion people using Google Reader. I didn’t ask for help, but someone at Google took watch for users needing help and take time to offer. Does your company go that far? Does mine? Do the Google Fan Boy T-shirts come in medium?
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will team on-screen for just the second time in “Righteous Kill,” a $60 million indie production in which they play cops chasing a serial killer. The script is by Russell Gewirtz, the guy that wrote “Inside Man.” De Niro and Pacino had just two scenes together in “Heat” but will be on-screen together pretty much throughout this new flick. With that budget… and these two movie greats… I have to wonder how you could make a shitty movie. Let’s hope they don’t.