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I have an artist friend who’s considering getting a mechanical engineering degree. It made me think of Royal de Luxe, a French theater company that has mastered the art of gigantic puppets. You wish these guys could come out to New York’s Thanksgiving day parade.

There is plenty of shocking footage out there about the US beef industry, but it has done little to tarnish America’s love of burgers. Maybe it’s the fact that most anti-beef ’shockumentaries’ always come off as left wing propaganda, or maybe it’s just my very low attention span. Nonetheless, this video by Douggpound is a lot more effective at getting people to realize what they’re putting in their mouth than Fast Food Nation ever was — and I actually read that.

(Tip to dee dawg)

Even though they work much harder than the traditional journalist, the day has yet to arrive when bloggers get the same respect.

And that’s why blogger morale is so very very important.

Realizing this fact, a company called Shaggymac has created a handy microfiber cloth of the same name that doubles as a sleek screen protector when you’re keyboard is not in use.

But I see it more as a keyboard cover that gives your modern writing instrument as much rep as a grand piano, complete with velvet cloth covering it’s keys when not in use. In a way, maybe one day bloggers will be looked up to the way Mozart is now. Unlikely. But at least this tiny cloth keeps that dream alive.

Hollywood’s continued fascination with torture comes to a head with the release of this commercial from satellite provider Direct TV.

It’s currently known as either “strawberry frosted” or “sprinkled.” Get it together, Dunkin!

(beautiful amateur product shot by *Sakura*)

You haven’t lived until you tried this. I found this gem in a 7-11 lastnight. I’m still testing its digestive properties, but it has skyrocked to my Top1 list of snack foods. And as a snacking expert, that says a lot.

Marketers have always flock often craft a physical embodiment of a brand interally, and consumers have long-flocked to a brand due to its personal qualities.Brands are now simply becoming fictional beings.

Emma, an email marketing suite, differs from other marketers. Emma cares as much about style as it does about email campaigns and this fact is expressed through the naturally stylish, probably down-to-earth, and definitely hot, female in their ads.

While Emma makes sense since it’s geared toward the industry, Jorg & Olaf is geared toward consumers. The company sells authentic citybikes from Amsterdam for guys and girls. Its e-store uses a male and female model to express not only the brand’s identity but its product offerings as well.

I’m sure there are many more examples of this phenomenon. I wonder if it was born out of the recent success of United’s Ted Airlines.

From the above ad we find that Coleco and Atari were two players in the home gaming market with two very different strategies.

While Atari decided to launch the Atari 5200, an improvement over the 2600, Coleco sold attachments and add-ons, using the Colecovision as the core. One attachment transforms the Colecovision into an attempt at a personal computer called the Adam.

It was believed that the $725 Adam module would take a “bite” out of Apple, but it was actually a total piece of crap. Just look at this list of production problems. My favorite is, “Since Coleco made the unusual decision of using the printer to supply power to the entire Adam system, if the printer malfunctioned, none of the system worked.”

Pop music in Japan is a bit different there than it is here, and maybe they’re better off than our pop stars, who often crumble for a variety of reasons.

Just take Tomoko Kawase, a Japanese pop star who goes by the pseudonym Tommy february6. This was a character she created and with this, comes almost an acceptance of the absurdity of being a pop star in the first place: are they even real?

Do our pop stars often turn to drugs, because they have trouble separating reality from fiction, where good stories translate into dollars?

In 2003, Kawase created another character who goes by Tommy heavenly6. Unlike february, heavenly doesn’t sport glasses and has a more alternative rock sound. Both february and heavenly still put out records, forcing Kawase to compete for record sales against herself.

In the West, pop singers become these alter egos. Baby Spice is Baby Spice and Madonna really did go through a kinky bad girl phase in the Early 90s.

However, pop-country is no stranger to the alias. Though it didn’t quite work for Garth Brooks when he created Chris Gaines in 1999, Miley Cyrus has had explosive success with her Hannah Montana character, whose tickets are going for as much as $4,500 a piece on eBay.

And maybe the world’s singers need to start doing this in order to maintain their sanity. They aren’t really these larger-than-life characters, but a product.

This is what I call good marketing. With a wide range of drink options, Sonic takes a page out of the watering hole playbook and launches its own afternoon happy hour.

A new video game shows that the medium is fastly becoming a literary text in its own right, allowed in the same category as a movie or a novel.

Game Center CX for the Nintendo DS mocks the rise of the home gaming console in Japan. You play as the lucky owner of a fictional gaming system harking back to a certain wildly popular console of the Eighties.

As you progress, you’ll play all the classic games — the mario-type game, the classic shooter, etc. As you beat these retro games, you can go buy future iterations at the game store. For example, one of the first games available is a shooter reminiscent of Namco’s Galaga, while a “next-gen” shooter evokes Nintendo’s Life Force, a.k.a. that game where you fly through a giant snake.

Since the jokes deal specifically with the Japanese gaming industry, this delightful game’s satiric attributes are lost stateside, unfortunately.

However, it still makes for one of the more engaging pieces of historical fiction to date– unlike James Fennimore Cooper’s bore-a-thon, The Last of the Mohicans.

What makes gaming so potentially groundbreaking for the narrative is that every game is essentially written in second person, a significant challenge for the written word.

Related:
Shadow of Colossus, The Arthouse Video Game
France: Gaming Is an Artform