Loved this long story from Seattle’s The Stranger on the giant Pacific octopus:
Sexy Beast — The Mysteries of the Giant Pacific Octopus
Brendan Kiley captures the octopus in such a wonderful way it’s hard to not want to see one soon in my Pacific freedives.
When we snorkeled in the Mediterranean we often saw octopuses. I pointed one out to Monique one time and as soon as I pointed it saw us and turned a bright red colour. Zounds!
The video:
The excerpts:
- Moose Trained by
- Special Moose Effects
- Moose Costumes
- Moose choreographed by
- Miss Taylor’s Mooses by
- Moose trained to mix concrete and sign complicated insurance forms by
- Mooses noses wiped by
- Large moose on the left hand side of the screen in the third scene from the end, given a thorough grounding in Latin, French, and ‘O’ Level Geography by
- Suggestive poses for the moose suggested by
- Antler-care by
No! Realli! She was Karving her initanals on the moose with the sharpened end of a interspace toothbrush givin to her by Svenge-Her brother-in-law-An oslo dentist and the star of many norwegin movies: “The hot hands of a Oslo Dentist”,”Fillings of passion”,”The huge molars of Horst Nordfink”
Mynd you! Moose bites can be pritti nasti….
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.
Just in case you ever needed motivation to start doing the most important things in your life right now.
From Gravity and Levity.
The Rules of Fight Club
As elucidated by Tyler Durden (AKA Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes):
Right. Forgot to post about a new article I wrote for Foodists called Meeting Our Lambs at Cutter Ranch. Baa!
All the story and photos you could want are on the Foodists site, where you want to click through to right now.
For the past week and half I’ve been travelling. On the road.
Starting in Vancouver, we drove to Calgary for a cousin’s wedding. Then we drove to Winnipeg to visit family.
Our family has a camp on Lake of the Woods, just east of Kenora. We drove out there for a few nights. We fished and swam and lazed about.
Then we returned to Winnipeg and Monique flew home. I stayed another few days then set out in the car, back west.
I drove to Calgary my first day and stayed with friends.
The next morning I drove south to Missoula, Montana, up and down the Road to the Sun in Glacier National Park. I stayed at a bed and breakfast on the shore of the South Fork river. I open all the windows in my room and slept to the constant sound of rushing water.
I met with a business contact the following morning, then headed west. I passed through the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, which is pronouced Coor Delane, without a hint of French.
I cross the border again back to Canada and drove up the Kootenay valley. I swam at a beach in Kootenay Lake. I rode the ferry across Kootenay Lake as the sun touched the tops of the mountains and tinted the world golden.
I now sit in The White House hostel in Nelson, BC.
The last leg of my journey is tomorrow, back to home in Vancouver along highway #3.
I created the map at the top of this post to guide me and thought it might be fun to share to show my route. Google Maps also tells me that by journey’s end tomorrow I will have travelled roughly 5,894 KMs.
A few recent photos are in my flickr photostream. I’ll add new ones once I’m back home and settled.
I use Google Analytics for many sites and I use it pretty much every day. I’m not the world’s best user but I’m reasonably competent. I speak from some experience.
And here’s the single thing that would make the product waaay better: Annotations on the activity timeline.
Because you make changes on an ongoing basis to the reporting. So how about show those changes in a nice little annotation on the timeline. Where possible, make the annotations automatically added, especially if the changes are system defined or parameters.
Then let users add notes to the annotations. Create a logbook of those annotations so you can see the change you made over time in stream outside of the timeline. But also make them available in the timeline, because that’s where you want to see them, because that’s where you see the correlative results of the changes.
If you’re interested, I’d like to see if you have what it takes to write copy for our branding den/ad grotto − and our progressive, independent-minded clients. We need a postcard written for a little neighborhood grill that just opened. It’s called Applebee’s®. They want to promote their Carside to Go™ service. Go crazy with it. Have fun. Push the envelope − and get some papercuts doing it. Ha-ha. But seriously, just make sure you adhere to “The Applebee’s®. Corporate Guidelines and Branding Policies,” which is a huge document. I’ll email you a PDF instead of printing it so I don’t have to write a post-Earth Earth posting on my blog. Damn, I’m clever.
Wonderful satire from the enduring McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Welcome to Our Branding House.
Surprised then didn’t go with BrandingHaus.
When Cyrus Hassankola moved to Dallas a couple of years ago, after successfully going out of business in several locales, he decided to settle down and go out of business permanently.
“The response was good from day one,” the carpet salesman says.
Customers rooting through the stacks of oriental rugs in the store he opened on a busy road in North Dallas would sometimes say how sorry they were that he was going out of business. “We’re not,” Mr. Hassankola told them. “It’s just the name of the store.”
Love the little insights into consumer behaviour, pricing tactics and salesmanship.
From the Wall Street Journal: In Texas, There’s No Business Like ‘Going Out of Business’.
Learn to do by doing. 