Footwear for Superusers

I took one last stroll up Mass. Ave. before heading back to D.C., and noticed a new store in Porter Square:

Finally, a shoe store for Unix nerds.

Cash for Warhols

Nothing like a little street art to raise awareness about the Rose Art Museum legal situation. Care of the very excellent Wooster Collective.

Back in DC

Sorry for the unannounced hibernation here over the past few weeks.  I was finishing my work, taking a vacation, and moving my life back down to DC for my 2L year.  I don’t have much time to write, but I wanted to post this sign up a little memento from my summer in Cambridge:

“Violators will be towed perfunctorily.”  Only in Cambridge would you see an SAT word on a parking sign.  I’m going to miss the place.

Thursday morning humor

Care of Dan Piraro’s Bizzaro comic strip and Blondes Not Bombs.

John Hodgman on Obama’s nerd cred

This video has been percolating around the net for a few days, but bears reposting due to its namecheck of my almost hometown Fitchburg, its reference to the Spock endorsement story (see my post on that subject here), and for general Hodgman awesomeness. Enjoy!

Tim Hwang on Internet Memes

As part of the Ignite show (a bureau within the O’Reilly media franchise), Berkman Center compatriot Tim Hwang did a 5-minute, 20-slide talk on the spread of Internet memes. He’s one of the only academic minds seriously studying the RickRoll, LOLCats, Three Wolf Moon, Keyboard Cat, Xzibit, or any of the other strange Internet phenomena. The structure of the talk prevented deep, quantitative analysis, but Tim still manages to throw in a little bit of data, cut with a whole lot of e-mirth. Check it out:

Be sure to read/see more from Tim in the U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches, Broseph Stalin, or the Tim and Diana Show.

The Walgreens Nationals

Humor blog TotallyLooksLike.com made a quality observation today:

The Washington Nationals logo totally looks like the Walgreens logo. Considering my nearest convenience store is a Walgreens, well stocked in Nationals gear, I’m a little surprised I never picked up on this before. Are we preparing for a major brand takeover a la The New York/New Jersey Metrostars Red Bull New York?

NBC Research’s first blush at “Friends.”

I know I promised people a nice treatment on the Constitutional questions implicated by the DC Congressional voting rights act (as well as some sad amendments, where it stands on approval, and the curious alternative options for representation [the word of the day is "retrocession"]), and I’ll get to that if I have time tonight, but I wanted to post this from The Smoking Gun first.

Apparently, in 1994, the pilot of a new TV show called Friends was put forth to an NBC focus group, to see if it has legs for production. The report gave the show a 41/100 (which, to be fair, doesn’t tell us too much; it could be that they always give the shows a bad raw score), and provided the following comments:

Overall reactions to this pilot were not very favorable. Interest in the show was very narrow. […] Most viewers felt the show was not very entertaining, clever, or original. […] Stated viewing intentions for a series based on this pilot were not encouraging.

They add some critical feedback from each character, as well as a list of “recommendations” for improvement. (My favorite: “Use Chandler’s dreams as a running bit on the show.” Can anyone who actually watched Friends tell me if they did this?)

I think somewhere in that list should have to add an in-your-face-talking-dog to the show.

Read the whole report here.

Bush gets jazzed on his final press conference.

This is starting to spread all over the Internet:

I think Bush speeches will always sound better as free jazz. Reminds me of a Burroughs-style “cut-up” I did of his 2005 State of the Union as part of a modern music class.

“Breathtaking” Pepsi logo redesign

Being a nerd about copyright means I’m also a little bit of a nerd about trademark laws. One of my favorite trademark/design sites is Brand New, which dedicates its life to studying companies that redesign their logos from an IP and design perspective. Today they struck solid gold over the redesign of the Pepsi logo. Somehow, somewhere, someone leaked the Arnell Group’s marketing pitch to redesign the Pepsi logo. It’s amazing.

The report puts Pepsi on an equal plane with the advent of the golden ratio, Feng Shui, and the möbius strip. They claim that the new Pepsi logo draws on the same creative steps that DaVinci used when doing his golden ratio analysis. They claim that there’s “natural gravity” that pulls people to Pepsi in a shopping aisle with the new logo by bending light through space and time.

It reminds me of all the things I hated about my business minor (love the analysis, hate the market-speak). Enjoy!