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Tim Flach knows how to take a nice picture. Wow! via indigoblur

Marketing Sherpa put out a call for lessons learned in 2002 and got back replies from over 600 marketers. Collected here as a free PDF download. 136 pages that I haven’t even glanced at yet, but it looks like a solid resource.

Yeah, that seems about right. Maybe we could get the boys in Washington to play themselves in a couple hands of Tic Tac Toe for a bit. It’s the only game not in the list, so it has to be the way into a solution right? If only.

Holy crap — MC Hammer looks exactly like Jimmie JJ Walker. When did that happen?

Yes, it’s true, I’m watching The Surreal Life A show with 7 minor celbrities living together reality TV style. It’s pretty lame. I can’t see myself watching this again.

If you’re in Southern California (or probably anywhere in California), the local PBS stations carry this show California’s Gold. It’s a little goofy, and the host, Huell Howser, just falls all over himself to fawn over the most mundane kinds of things like interestingly colored rocks or poison ivy or whatever.

Still, there is something about this show that I can’t seem to get enough of. It’s not the kind of thing I’d actively watch, but just to have it on in the background on a lazy weekend day before I get ready, it’s really fantastic. I was watching it this morning and they went to visit the Roy and Dale Evans museum.

This museum is filled with just all kinds of crap, and then they cut to one of the kids who is standing next to these mannequins that had been created by taking latex castings of Roy and Dale. It was supremely creepy because I was thinking you know the guy had his horse stuffed, and here is the family stuffing the mom and dad and making a few bucks taking gawkers through to look at it.

Then, they actually cut to Roy and Dale themselves who were, at least at the time of taping (and maybe even currently) surprisingly still alive and kicking. At least they were alive. I’m not 100% sure about the kicking part. They either had on a lot of make up or they’d had a lot of work done because they looked even more artificial and creepy than the rubber mannequins. Naturally they took Huell back to look at the stuffed horses and talk about what a great horse trigger had been. I’m not sure why, but the whole thing just left me with an indescribably icky feeling. I think I need to go take a shower now.

Try looking at the world around you in a new way each day. Willing To Try

I finished Good Omens the other night. Good Omens is basically the story of the apocalypse. As you might expect from that brief description, it’s a comedy.

I had some trouble getting through this one. I found the humor to be something less than funny. It’s very british, very much in the spirit of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. But, where Adams books were able to pull off that isn’t bureaucracy universal and obnoxious? kind of vibe, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, who co-authored Good Omens can’t quite deliver.

Generally I found myself more annoyed and bored than amused by the attempts at dry, officious humor. In particular, I hated the footnotes. This book has so many footnotes. I’d keep reading them, because I kept thinking that’s where the really good jokes are going to be. After a while though, I learned to just ignore them since they were always distracting and never funny.

After reading American Gods, I thought that I was going to be a big Gaiman fan. But I wasn’t thrilled with Neverwhere - which felt a bit like a novelization of a Dr. Who episode to me for some reason. It was OK, but not what I was hoping for. I don’t know how much of Good Omens was Gaiman and how much was pratchett, but I’m just about ready to give up on Gaiman. I’m sure that puts me in a very small minority since everybody I talk to seems to love his stuff, and I did really, really like American Gods, but … I don’t know.

I am now reading Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I’m only a few chapters in, but it’s looking good.

I stumbled across The Entourage Help Page yesterday, and I almost blogged it. I didn’t because I figured I could probably google it up if I needed to. Went to find it again today, and Google failed (at least on an initial search for Entourage FAQ). Fortunately, I found it in my history, but now I’m blogging it just in case.

On a related note, I now have all of my contacts in my iPod. I can’t imagine ever needing my contacts in my iPod, but they’re there now - just because it was so easy to do. Ha!

This:

Others said the explosion of new music — partly driven by digital music production technology and the Internet — has made it easy for bad music to proliferate throughout cyberspace.

“There’s an incredible amount of mediocrity,” said musician/songwriter Eric Bazilian, formerly of the rock group The Hooters.

…has got to be one of the most most ironic things I’ve ever read in my life. The Hooters complaining about the proliferation of bad music. Wow.

At least some of the artists quoted seem to get it. Now if we could just get the labels to die and get out of the way of the artists and their fans all would be right in the world.

I’ll think about this later.