Swedish discount warehouse chain Coop Forum is running an advertising campaign claiming "New Lower Prices!", but how can you tell? Apparently you're not supposed to (shocking!) compare current prices against what they were before the ad campaign. Raymond's bad translation follows. Coops "new" price reduction not new A major new price reduct...
The U.S. cable network TLC is putting on a special episode of What Not to Wear devoted to identifying the worst-dressed couple in America. It so happens that one of my friends knows one of the finalists, so we'll be rooting for them. Or is it against them? Are you supposed to hope that your favorite is in fact the worst-dressed? Or should you be...
NPR interviewed John Reeves, the artist behind a 160-foot-tall mountain of ice in Alaska. The man has a down-home aw-shucks kind of demeanor that I found quite charming. I'm a middle-aged guy that has a lot of time in the winter and a little bit of extra money to play with, so my hobby was to see how big an ice hill I could grow. I started last ...
The Seattle Times ran an excellent series last week on the rise and fall of InfoSpace and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, who at one point even used the phrase "cult leader" to refer to himself. To set the tone, and perhaps to serve as a reference while you read the series, here's a list of reported Infospace earnings per share (EPS), b...
The weekend of March 12th and 13th, Vegetarians of Washington is hosting VegFest 2005, a festival of vegetarian food. This reminds me of a Time Magazine cover story from July 2002, wherein it was revealed that... In a survey of 11,000 individuals, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in the previous 24 hours t...
My random walk began at Svenska Dagbladet and the article Svensk designer upprör skottar, about Swedish designer Johanna Larson whose T-shirt depicting the traffic-cone-wearing Duke of Wellington has sparked a debate in the city. The article mentions that the tradition of placing a traffic cone on the head of the Duke is twenty years old, an...
NPR reports on an amazing last-rock shot at the Canadian women's curling championship (includes link to CBC video). It's odd hearing Melissa Block discussing curling in decidedly non-curling terms (for the benefit of the decidedly non-curling US listenership). One of the advantages of living in the Seattle area is that you can get all the curlin...
Over at Slate, Timothy Noah notes how much money from so-called "awareness bracelets" actually go to the causes they purport to champion. In summary, I find it ironic that the "Support our troops" bracelet doesn't actually support our troops. And is yellow really the right color to use to demonstrate support for the military?
I was riding in a car with a friend when a Chinese pop album spun up on the CD. I made a remark about the song, and my friend, knowing that I was studying Mandarin, asked me, "Do you know what she's singing about?" I immediately replied, "She's singing about love." "Wow," my friend responded. "Your Chinese is quite good." "Nope," I said. "But a...
Right on schedule, Alton Brown appeared at the Elliot Bay Book Company bookstore in downtown Seattle. One of my friends wondered aloud, "Wait a second, he's promoting his cookbook. How do you do a reading from a cookbook?" He didn't read from his cookbook. To an overflow crowd that probably violated a few fire codes, Alton Brown discussed what...
