The beverage with a thousand faces

The Toronto Star says we are living in the Age of Vodka:

“The entrenchment of vodka comes down to one part alcohol and one part advertising. The drink itself is not a complex spirit. To make it, you simply need a material that contains starch — anything like a grain, corn, carrot, potato or molasses. Essentially, the starch ferments, the resulting alcohol is distilled, then filtered. Lastly, water is mixed in, and the concoction is ready to drink — no aging required.

“As a drink, vodka’s outstanding feature is that it has none. Accordingly, companies hype their vodkas as either “the smoothest” or “the purest.” “No taste, no smell” went one Smirnoff campaign from the 1930s, back when the spirit was billed as “Smirnoff White Whiskey.”

“But with no distinguishing features, selling vodka becomes a bit of a trick. Marketing a product that tastes like nothing requires a certain amount of imagination, whereas if you have a product that tastes like something, you market whatever that something is.”

Just like selling sugar water … um, I mean cola.

(Link via Agenda.)

Uglydolls

Talk about an emergent strategy: The creators of Uglydolls didn’t start with a plan in mind. But theirs is a case of the product selling itself. And the creators have discovered a great way to build appeal:

“Each character comes with a tag explaining the character’s back story and how they all ”know” one another and what each one is like. Wage works diligently at Super Mart, although, poignantly, no one at the store knows he works there; Jeero, meanwhile, wishes Wage and Babo wouldn’t ask him so many questions, since he ”just wants to sit on the couch with you and eat some snacks.” Hits with kids like the American Girl dolls have a similar narrative glue. To Tracy Edwards, the Barneys vice president who oversees the chain’s home and kids businesses, the Uglydoll characterizations are important: ”The stories, in the end, sell the dolls.””

The Uglydolls website is amusing, with photos and stories of the dolls, odd comics, and animated graphics. Tres quirky. I suspect the dolls are irresistable in person, but part of their appeal lies in their obscurity, so selling them is tricky: you want people to see them but you don’t want people to see them everywhere.

I’m thinking of getting Ice Bat, despite my having no discernible need for a plush toy companion. Although … my sister seems to enjoy traveling with Mr. Toast, who is similarly cute/odd. And don’t we each need a fellow traveler in Life?

(NYT link via Stephany Aulenback @ Maud Newton.)

Unexpected bonuses

I bought my house from a woman who was moving into a nursing home. I never met her; rather, I dealt entirely with her son, who was taking care of her affairs because she was incapacitated. When I moved in, I found a number of items that had been left behind because they were too much trouble for the son to deal with, and I have been using several of them. For example, the lawn mower. It is an electric mower, powered by a long and damaged cord — damaged by people running over it with the mower, I assume — that makes me feel as though I’m vacuuming my lawn rather than cutting grass. Also a couple of ugly, mid-60s lamps, a nasty green plastic trash can, a 50s-era chrome-trimmed kitchen table with pull-out leaves, and an ironing board that has seen better days but retains a hip, stylish air.

And in the basement there’s this pencil sharpener. It’s attached to the wall in the laundry/furnace area. Why this spot was chosen for a pencil sharpener I can’t imagine. Maybe it was the only available bit of exposed wood to which the homeowner didn’t mind screwing the thing. There’s a fully functional gas stove down there too, so the owners must have had different ways of using areas of their home than I would think of.

As you can see in the photo, it’s the Midget model. It features a clear plastic body that conveniently lets one see when it’s full of shavings. The shavings in it currently have, I think, been there since I bought the place. I may have used it once, but I can’t remember for sure.

I first noticed it when I was touring the house the first time. I remember thinking, “How odd.” And at the same time, I was excited about it — a little freebie.

I thought of it just now only because frizzyLogic has come in contact with what’s apparently my sharpener’s big brother, the APSCO Giant 51. An impressive specimen, for certain. How many more are still in operation?

I have no willpower

Updating my earlier post: I couldn’t wait. I started looking through the user manual, and when I saw that iTunes was on the CD and it has all the song-management stuff and hot-synching built in (yeah, I should probably have noticed that when I ordered the thing, but I just figured if it didn’t come with I’d find software somethere), anyway, when I saw it was all right there on the disk, waiting to be installed, I lost the remaining bit of self-control.

The first album I downloaded, incidentally, was The Botanic Verses by the March Violets, which I acquired only recently. The second was Sitting on the Curbstone by my friend Helen Casabona. She’s another former NeXT employee, so there was an Apple connection.

And then I went to the iTunes store and bought a bunch of stuff. It became immediately clear that I’m going to need to set and hold to a budget or I’m going to spend a fortune.

And given recent displays of my thorough lack of personal restraint, I’ll be homeless within three months.

Who says all the good men are taken?

“I am wearing my blazer and a light cologne, with my hair parted at the side, a glint in my eye, and my left hand in my coat pocket in a half-intellectual, half-sexual way. I am also smoking a cigarette, but my breath smells good because I carry mints. If it is springtime, I have a light tan. I have also been working out. I have at my disposal several disarming quotes which I have memorized to make you laugh, and one very interesting story of Raj Gaja, Elephant King of Northern India. Moreover, I am 25, and can reasonably expect to grow better and more distinguished looking for each delicious year of the next two decades.”

D-Nasty looks to the future.

(Link via TMF,TML.)

The morning routine

Confessions of a New Coffee Drinker:

“I’m thinking about getting addicted to cigarettes! I’m going to buy the patch and work my way up! Now I see why all these things are so popular. I’m totally serious. This isn’t satire. I have a lot of catching up to do! I wonder where I would be today if I had started drinking coffee earlier? It doesn’t matter, I live in the now, now!”

Stranger than fiction

Larry Ellison has married a fiction writer, and apparently people are speculating that he has a hand in writing her books.

Having worked for Mr. Ellison at Oracle, I can say that a lot of the documentation and marketing that came out of that company was fiction, and perhaps still is. He is very good at making stuff up on the spot.

It’s also interesting to me that the woman he has most recently married is about my age, was once a technical writer living in San Francisco, and is from Pittsburgh. Just like me! I was so close to marrying a billionaire! I can’t tell her hair color from the Wall Street Journal’s line drawing, but I’m betting it’s blonde. I saw him only in the company of attractive blondes. So no doubt that’s what held me back. There but for a bit of peroxide go I.

(Thanks to Maud for the link.)

Mine is on the FedEx truck on its way to my house right now!

Apple Computer Inc. said on Tuesday it has received 100,000 orders for its iPod mini digital music player, which goes on sale on Friday at Apple’s retail outlets, its online store and through resellers.

I’ve been tracking the progress of mine, which I preordered the day they were announced. (The geekist thing I’ve done in a long while, I think.) FedEx picked it up in Pan Chiao City, Taiwan, on Monday, took it to CKS International Airport, flew it to Anchorage, and then sent it to Indianapolis. There it was hung up for a few hours yesterday; the comment on FedEx said, “Regulatory Agency Clearance Delay.” This morning it was on a plane to Pittsburgh at 5:30am. At 8:14 it arrived at the FedEx sort facility in Cranberry Township, and at 8:25 it was on the truck headed to Butler.

Several thoughts:

1. FedEx has amazing information systems and is absolutely unbeatable in processing packages.

2. I was surprised that the tracking started in Taiwan. I had expected that a big bin of these mini iPods would be sent from the factory to somewhere in the middle of the US and packaged and shipped from here. Not the case. I wonder if the fact that I had mine engraved made a difference: Perhaps all the iPods destined for the retail stores and for orders placed now were sent in bulk, and this is part of why they won’t be available until tomorrow. Actually, I bet that shipments for various retail outlets were packaged and shipped directly from Taiwan as well, so it’s a modified sort of bulk shipment. All of this speaks to the efficiency and cost controls of FedEx’s systems.

3. I don’t actually know how to rip songs from CDs, so I have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me. I’ve been holding off from buying an MP3 player, trying to avoid buying too early and finding myself stuck with one I didn’t like. I assume it’s not hard to learn, but my schedule lately is so full I don’t know when I’m going to have time to come up to speed. My hope is that the interfaces are intuitive enough that there’s little learning anyway.

4. But what will I load first??

UPDATE: It’s here! I have successfully programmed the time and date. The packaging is very clean and cool and Apple-ish. A sticker on the front of the thing warned me, in four languages: “Don’t steal music.”

I am using all my willpower — which is not a lot, sadly — not to load music onto it until I get more work done today. If I can clean up the paperwork littering my office and put in two hours of web work, I’ll consider it a success.