Recently I was standing at the whiteboard in a small airless meeting room (meaning we were all losing braincells while trying to resolve business issues) when the discussion veered to the whiteboard markers instead of the database being diagrammed. Namely that the standard smell of whiteboard marker (high acetone) is boring, redundant and wasn’t helping the creativity of anyone involved.

The problem is that while scented whiteboard markers exist, namely these Expo ones (it’s an affiliate link because you might have been hunting for these for years and want nothing more than an apple-scented dry erase marker…) they’re the same scents as every other scented thing made for kids from scratch stickers to chap stick. I didn’t like them when I was eight and I don’t like them now. Unless grape scent can grow up to be Bordeaux I’m not interested.

Clearly what we need is bacon-scented dry erase markers. The smell alone would motivate productive thought. People would vie with each other to stand at the whiteboard and contribute.  Why can’t someone invent these now? There’s bacon-scented everything else out there.

I’ve never met anyone that actually liked learning to spell or practices it as a hobby. It is, simply, a necessary evil. Something that was brought home by a tiny news item this week regarding a cookbook with a recipe recommending ‘freshly ground black people’. People vs pepper is in fact only a two character difference (they share two p’s and two e’s) but oh, what a world of social statement.  Which is precisely what Ben Franklin was trying to create (in a slightly more positive way) by advocating different spelling for Americans versus the British – Esperanto hadn’t yet been created or perhaps he’d have steered us towards a different language altogether.

With Daniel Webster’s help it happened and all it really takes is a careful look at how one spells color or colour, honor or honour and you will know where the writer’s allegiance lies – even if you’re  a native Italian speaker living in Portugal; you’re brief lapses into English will put you into one of two camps.

Spell check is not always your friend, particularly if it leaves you with a false sense of confidence that only spices are being ground. Proof read – you’ll save a lot on legal fees!

What would happen if advertising told you what you could really expect from the product?  How much weight you could expect to lose, how likely the dating service will lead to a wedding? Sit back and find out…

In the spirit of this post, I should point out that I am not a lawyer or expert and everything below not in italics as quoted from FTC 16 CFR Part 255 represents idle speculation – I am certainly not being paid for my views!

Unless you are a blogger or advertising professional keeping a careful eye out for regulations in the U.S. you probably haven’t heard about the new FTC guidelines taking effect tomorrow, Dec. 1, 2009.  Unlike most such regulations this one one promises to be pretty entertaining to watch and I expect the lawsuits will start flying in short order (could be the most effective economic stimulus out there.)

The new guidelines concern endorsements and testimonials in advertising – read the actual text here.  There’s some heightened regulation of declaring affiliate relationships (like when I promote a product on Amazon) but the juicy stuff has to do with endorsements and testimonials across all media platforms, not just the web:

• Celebrities endorsing a product or service as one they really use have to actually being using it in their own lives when the advertising is created and if they stop using it, the advertising has to be pulled (hmmmm!) I don’t know who gets the job of seeing if famous people are wearing the underwear they’ve endorsed, just glad it’s not me. When the advertisement represents that the endorser uses the endorsed product, the endorser must have been a bona fide user of it at the time the endorsement was given. Additionally, the advertiser may continue to run the advertisement only so long as it has good reason to believe that the endorser remains a bona fide user of the product.

• And my personal favorite, the FTC has determined via their own testing that those ‘results not typical’ disclaimers in the fine print on the bottom don’t work. I don’t know why it took them so long to figure it out, but they finally did.  So now, if the advertiser does not have substantiation that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve, the advertisement should clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances,… Endorsers in this case could be celebrities or ‘average’ people as seen on weight loss and dating advertisements.  Soooo…  those incredibly irritating eHarmony ads with the blissful ‘real’ couples will now need to tell us the typical experience of their other customers “clearly and conspicuously” which I’m guessing doesn’t mean in the fine print at the bottom.

I’m thinking there are going to be a lot of new advertisements debuting on American tv this December; whole new campaigns and creative wiggling going on.  For once this could be more entertaining than the shows they interrupt.

Did you know there are Census coffee cups, baseball caps, bumper stickers and other hot government swag out there?

I just got off the phone after 25 minutes of pretty much useless questions about the upcoming census.  Questions like “How many conversations have you had about the Census with friends and family in the last 30 days?”  Gee, I’m surprised it really hasn’t come up.  And I didn’t even get a coffee cup to thank me for my time.  I’m not sure what you have to do to rate the swag, but it must be pretty big.

I took the phone call because they’ve called twice before and sent a letter, all funded with tax dollars so I figured they’d never give up.  There were also about ten questions as to whether I’d seen the various bits of Census swag. Not only had I not seen it, I didn’t even know there was any.  Like so many things in life, now that I know it exists but is not in my possession I feel deprived.  A lucky guy named Mike (below) appears to be the only person in Google images powerful enough to have snagged swag and proud enough to post a picture – quite a rare combination.

linked from AmericaJR.com

Remember back to July 8th, 2009? Every news reporter on TV and half of the rest of the people were saying “hey, it’s 7,8,9 today!”  Which turned out to have absolutely no significance other than being mildly entertaining for 24 hours.  by 7/9/09 everyone had forgotten all about it.

So how come we notice 7/8/09 but not 11/10/09 (which happened to be yesterday)?  I didn’t hear a single reporter talk about it or bump into anyone that was as excited by this freak occurrence of the calendar.  Surely descending numbers are just as uncommon as ascending -after all we won’t get another one until 12/11/10 and that’s the last one until 3/2/2101.  I don’t know about you but I’ll don’t expect to be here for that last one.  Even a quick web search shows that the only people that really care about this date are Robert and Maria who cared enough to claim the domain for their wedding site, although I doubt they had much competition for it.

So are we just bad at counting backwards or are we somehow wired to prefer numbers that increase moving from left to right?

You would have to really love something to recreate it using original parts in your garage.  I don’t quite see the appeal in the upper deck of the Pan-Am 747 but clearly this guy does and people should pursue their passions.  I can’t say as I’m surprised to read that he’s single but maybe he just hasn’t met the right flight attendant yet.

While I had no personal experience with PanAm prior to 1988 went I went to Europe as a student and lost a classmate on Flight 103, the story did get me thinking back to the decade before that. Growing up in Jet City (i.e. Seattle) meant pre-school field trips to Alaska Airlines and getting to run my doll thr0ough the airport scanner so I could see her ‘heart’.  Why can’t we have bright yellow airplanes with smiley faces painted on the nose cone anymore? ok, it was a bit much but it did make the airport a more interesting place to wait.

Nurdle.Net hasn’t even been live for a full year but already the spam filter has fished out over 1500 junk comments.  So no wonder that I’ve been reflecting on the amazing resilience of spam to survive just about anything (sort of like cockroaches…)  but aside from the usual complaints I’ve decided I have a certain fondness for the Romanian side of the industry (in a twisted, Stockholm-syndrome kind of way):

1.  It’s very easy to scan, and since I’m writing entirely in English I can safely assume that anyone reading will make the effort to post legitimate comments in the same language

2.  It’s almost always in Cyrillic so I’m not being enticed to modify body parts that I don’t have

3. They are so enamored with comment spam that nobody is trying to steal my email address anymore

4.They don’t allow cookies so the spammers aren’t falsely inflating my readership – although I admit there are days when that would be a nice ego boost

5.They like to include smiley face emoticons which are the only part I understand – I like cheerful, friendly spammers, don’t you?

Much of the world seems to think that the United States is just a little too greedy and ought to share more – that’s everything from Hollywood to baseball and dental care, not to mention the recession.  I’m not going to debate that because there are plenty of people out there that do and they have a lot more fun with it.  It’s just that as I’ve been taking my metal detector out and contemplating that any potential treasure would be less than 100 years old, I started to feel a little resentful.  I don’t want to move to Europe but it seems only fair that some of the things they have an overabundance of could be shared around a little better:

1.  Bank holidays – I still don’t know what they are but I know they come around with amazing regularity and since the U.S. has plenty of banks we ought to get our share.

2. Quaint villages – the ones with cobblestone streets that lead past bakeries and jewelry shops on the way to some equally quaint village square.  Outside of a reproduction in the Disney dynasty I haven’t heard of one in North America

3. I’m not envious of royalty but a little of the pomp and circumstance could be shared without losing the impact.  A few tassled horses and a gleaming carriage (not to mention some 18th century music) would make a great improvement on an army green helicopter and “Hail to the Chief” – which while it may be traditional is not really all that great a tune.

4. Castles – similar to the quaint villages but even more noticeably lacking on this continent.  Germany has an abundance and France has plenty of hunting chateaus that would do in a pinch. I’ve no doubt that American society is where it is today because of a lack of castles.

5.  Gold hoards – this is what got me thinking about this list -the huge Anglo-Saxon hoard found in a field. It’s unfair that no prior society of the United States or Canada felt the need to create and leave behind large amounts of gold and jewels for us to find.  Mexico got lucky.  There’s not even a chance of walking out into a wheat field and finding a hoard. There are some really nice pots and old walls in the Southwest but that’s not really the same thing from a treasure-hunting perspective, now is it?

There are business theories out there that every every new thing moves on a time line from practical applications to finally pure entertainment which is where the real money comes in.  So something like a computer starts with highly academic and military applications then becomes a mainstream work tool and then you get video games.  What is odd is when the few things that start out or already achieved the fun end of the spectrum try to go back the other way, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn.

For example the world famous fishmongers in Seattle who throw fish for tourists then turned to corporate consulting with the book, When Fish Fly: Lessons For Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace From the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market.There are of course related coaching and seminars.

There must have been something in the water in the early part of the decade because LEGO got the same idea.  If you’ve ever had a corporate job you’ve probably encountered a team building workshop where supposedly everyone is equal and everything will stay in the room as you work to forge new and better and more effective partnerships (sound familiar?)  If you’re a believer you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog anyway but you might be interested in LEGO Serious Play where for an unspecified cost you can have team building with LEGO bricks but with a difference  “You will be building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios…”  Doesn’t that sound like it could suck the very fun from the little bricks?

At least since C-Span entered the picture, American politicians have been known for their monotone, and rather boring speaking style.  Perhaps because there is so often no one else in the room when they present their bills. They seem to get more civil and less interesting with every passing session. Here’s a typical Congressional Debate clip from last year, actually fairly impassioned as these things go. By comparison, the British House of Commons has a more, um, raucous style.

If you missed President Obama’s health care speech, I’m guessing you didn’t miss the replay of Joe Wilson’s interjection, at least not if you live within reach of American television. Regardless of where your politics fall or your opinion of what should happen to health care,  that was probably the most exciting part of the speech. It wasn’t the most polite thing to say, but the reaction to it did get me thinking that we have become a very passive audience; both members of Congress and television viewers. We wait our turn and raise our hands like we were taught in grade school, for the most part. Then we wait to be called on, or just talk back to the TV.  While I’m not advocating that people go around calling each other liars, maybe it’s time we re-assessed politeness and Congressional etiquette in general. We could stand to be a little less civil if there was a corresponding increase in getting something done.

The British Parliament has quite well documented rules of conduct.  Here’s the applicable part on language:

Unparliamentary language
Language and expressions used in the Chamber must conform to a number of rules. Erskine May
states “good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language”. Objection
has been taken both to individual words and to sentences and constructions ‐ in the case of the
former, to insulting, coarse, or abusive language (particularly as applied to other Members); and of
the latter, to charges of lying or being drunk and misrepresentation of the words of another. Among
the words to which Speakers have objected over the years have been blackguard, coward, git,
guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon and traitor. The context in which a word is used is, of
course, very important.

The Speaker will direct a Member who has used an unparliamentary word or phrase to withdraw it.
Members sometimes use considerable ingenuity to circumvent these rules (as when, for instance,
Winston Churchill substituted the phrase “terminological inexactitude” for “lie”) but they must be
careful to obey the Speaker’s directions, as a Member who refuses to retract an offending
expression may be named (see below) or required to withdraw from the Chamber.

Although we definitely made some changes along the way, The U.S. government is a direct descendant of the British parliamentary system and in fact those states that were originally British colonies can have case law that goes back to British rulings. (this is why there are different rules about public beach access on the west and the east coasts.) So why did we also deviate from the debating style? It would make for more interesting TV and since it would be impossible to script and release to the media in advance, more people might watch to see what would happen. If we adopted some similar rules on language, Representative Wilson would still be ‘out’ for what he said, but he could have gotten the point across with a more creative phrase. TV news would get that much more interesting too!