Category: WTF?

Sweet home Clamabama was never sung like this

I was twittering with Sam Flemming at CIC (Chinese buzz/WOM monitoring consultancy) a couple weeks ago. He was singing karaoke someplace in China, and posted the tweet that he just sang “Sweet Home Alabama” — which sounded like enough of a cultural disconnect that I had to reply that here in Cotuit, I have heard “Sweet Home Clamabama” sung at drunken boatshop parties. Then John Dodge, former colleague from PC Week, send along this beauty.

The Russian Red Army Men’s Choir doing their best Lynryd cover: with the well coiffed Leningrad Cowboys

Magazine Cover of the Year (and it’s only April)

Jumping eagle ray kills boater off Florida Keys | U.S. | Reuters

Jumping eagle ray kills boater off Florida Keys | U.S. | Reuters
Wild. But this happens more often than you’d think A barracuda killed a lady by flying through the air and into her sternum a few years ago. And the houndfish is another people killer.

Bluetoothed Borg — how to share one headset with two devices

So, if you were here at Churbuck Central this morning, you’d be giving me grief for being a geek with not one of those mark-of-a-loser wireless headsets stuck in one ear … but two — stereo headsets, one in the left and one in the right.

The one in the left talks to the BlackBerry phone. It is a BlueAnt Z9 and I like it because it goes in my ear, not over it, like the Motorola H700 on my right ear which talks to my X61 Tablet and Skype and rests on top of my ear.

The BlueAnt is great for noisy situations. The Motorola … I’ve had it for sometime.

So why two? Well, I can’t figure out how to easily divide one head set between two apps — cell phone and Skype. Any suggestions?

The scandal of the apostrophe

Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy London put it best, in all of the Spitzer scandal, there was some element of the population, myself included, who were first struck and outraged by the lack of an apostrophe in the word “Emperors Club.”

Shocking. All the copyeditors and proofreaders of the world were aghast.

Apparently the New York Times feels the same way, for as of this morning they are referring to the high-priced escort service as the “Emperor’s Club.”

One could argue it was a club for Emperors (of whom there are few), or, as many of us word geeks inferred, it was the club belonging to the Emperor, and therefore needed an apostrophe to designate its possessive condition.

As for Client 9, I think of Patrick McGoohan — “Number Six” — running for his life in The Prisoner, chased by the evil beach ball.

“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

Customer email of the day (or year)

Subject: Your company …

“said it would be 2-3 weeks to get my computer and yet it arrived in LESS THAN ONE WEEK!. I intend to tell all my friends about this, so consider yourself warned.”

Enough is enough — social media fatigue

I was clicking through and found this wonderful column of “add-to” tags on someone’s blog.

You have got to be kidding me.

Dot.com Stupidities

Has the dumbness of the late 90s come back to plague the interactive world? Is the ghost of the Pets.com sockpuppet haunting Silicon Alley? Are the days of Flooz and Beanz and tightpants.com back as indicators of Bubble 2.0?

Here’s one found by Constantine von Hoffman at Collateral Damage. A video site with the unfortunate name of CashTomato.com took to the streets of New York’s Union Square to hand out tomatos and envelopes containing $29. A melee ensued.
He missed the YouTube video:

Google reader annoyances

Google Reader won’t display my subscriptions — hasn’t done so for the past few days. I’ve logged off and on, flushed my cache, and still, I get the page, the header, but none of my stuff. My feeds are appearing inside of the iGoogle reader gadget, so the subs haven’t disappeared. Annoying. None of my other google accounts display in reader either.