Copying and pasting other people's quotes is stealing, not wisdom.

Here's a little piece of advice that I thought I'd share, directed at absolutely no one in particular. (I mean that. That's not sarcasm. Really.)

JUST BECAUSE YOU COPY AND PASTED A "MEANINGFUL, INSPIRATIONAL" QUOTE INTO THE SIGNATURE LINE OF YOUR EMAIL DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED.

Every time that I get to the end of an email and see something like this:

Sounds great. Let's touch bases on this again tomorrow.

Chaz
_________________________________________________________
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the
life you have imagined."
- Henry David Thoreau

it makes me want to get in my car, drive to wherever that person is sitting at that exact moment and shove their keyboard through their eye socket.

OK, that might be a little extreme.

But it's probably not.

Seriously, do you really think that the closing to your email is really going to inspire me to go out and change my life, Chaz? "I tell you what, man, my whole life I'd been living in ignorance until I saw that quote you pasted in that email to me that one day. I went out and sold all of my possessions and ran off to pursue my dream career in professional synchronized swimming. Look at me now! I'm the happiest boy on Earth! And it's all thanks to you and your inspirational quote!"

That brings me to the next point. It's not your quote; you can't act like it's your intellectual property. Just because you say it in every email you send out doesn't mean that you're a better person. In fact, putting your name right above some clever aphorism only highlights how much of an idiot you are in comparison. I don't care, whoever you are, you're not as brilliant a person as Thoreau, Churchill, Roosevelt, Aristotle or whoever else you're ripping off. They arrived at their moment of timeless clarity--that you so capriciously throw around--through a life of hardships, meditation and experience. Go out and alter the course of human history, and then we'll talk about the footer on your email.

In fact, that's another reason why you should be hit over the head with an Amazon box of Bartleby's. There is no way in hell that you can espouse some faux sagacious philosophy to me if you yourself haven't already achieved your own spiritual nirvana through it. If you're sending this to me I'm going to guess that you're probably the head librarian of a middle school media center or are answering phones at a local cement sales operation. Are you really living your dreams? No? Then don't tell me what to do with mine.

In fact, have you even read more than that single sentence of Thoreau's? OK, maybe you were supposed to read a few pages from Walden in ninth grade lit class. But clever you got the Cliff Notes so you wouldn't even have to read it. "Gross, reading." Point number ten: You can't use someone's quote as your mantra if you've never read anything by them or listened to a full speech of theirs or even watched a damn History Channel special about their life.

Basically, if you have to rely on someone else's wisdom as an attempt to counterbalance your own idiocy, you're probably better off just not calling attention to your vapidity in the first place. At the least, invent your own slogan that you really do strive to live by every day. But even then, I don't want to hear about it. That's because: A) I doubt you really do earnestly try to live by it in the first place, and B) if you really do, I should already know that; you shouldn't have to explicitly yell it at me in the closing line of any and all correspondences that we have.

In conclusion, get a life and stop stealing others.

Oh yeah, and this goes for pretty much all Facebook/high school yearbook quotes too.

This has been a public service announcement by me.

Apple + Apple-friendly brands = iPhone commercial

Watching the most recent iPhone commercial, I noticed something interesting. When mentioning its ability to check stocks they flash up a listing of that particular iPhone owner's stock ticker. I found what companies he had decided to invest in pretty interesting. Here's a screen shot I took.



Starbucks, Home Depot, Adobe, Nike, Google, eBay.

How's that for trendy, progressive brands? (Home Depot seems to be the one outlier perhaps.) Also, what d'ya know? They're all up!

Another thing I find rather interesting about this is that Google is not only highlighted but is up exactly 7.00 points to precisely 510.00. Two things are odd about this: 1) the evenness of the numbers which is absent in all the other stocks, and 2) Google's appearance in an iPhone ad considering that they plan to launch their own phone sometime next year.

To be honest, I'm not sure what any of this means. I just thought it was interesting.

Kitty and the Toilet

Crest Glide Floss

And thus begins the tetra-annual glut of ads and miscellania from this quarter's panel.

This campaign for Crest Glide Floss is based on the insight that everyone knows they should floss and don't. Yet, they also know that whenever they go to the dentist they know that he's going to yell at them for not flossing. The cutline is: "Floss. Because he knows when you don't."


Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), I have a dentist appointment tomorrow.

I have been flossing.

Sweet Lifesavers Spot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7BiDR4znXY

This makes me laugh every time. But it also makes me feel bad for the dude at the end.

Well Done Annual Report

Via adgoodness, here's a really fun idea for an annual report called Well Done for the Croatian food company Podravka, produced by creative agency Bruketa & Zinić.

Blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink are filled in with content after being wrapped in tin foil and baked for 25 minutes. COOL.


Maybe this technology could be used for something else? Maybe a cookbook? Frozen dinner ads?

Someone brought up the question of environmental issues--the unnecessary use of energy. Does that bother you or is the idea just so sick it doesn't matter?

Sometimes people make a war.

http://www.youtube.com/v/--Vaz9jW054&rel=1

Speak, the Hungarian rapper. He wants people to stop the war. Yeah, c'mon.

Arch/land

Big day of wins yesterday between the Student Award Show and Baddies--Gold in (of all things) Package Design for my Goya black beans and rice boxes, Best Facial Hair Superlative and another big Beer Olympics win for Four Hairy Chests. (Three out of four quarters reigning champions.)

So, this has nothing to do with that, but here are some things I shot recently.








I call the last one "Irony, Or, How I Feel Every Day." It's a billboard whose pole is actually in our parking lot at school. Right now there's nothing on it. Ironic.

[Again, these colors are so desaturated on here. It's starting to piss me off. They look like crap on here. But trust me, they are sweet.]

Shed Rain Umbrellas

Bowled Over

Bowling trip with photography class tonight. Pretty fun actually. Makes sense since we were at Funtime Bowling.

I bowled probably the best game of my life by accident--a 150. Considering that that's halfway to perfection, and I'm almost exactly halfway through school, I'm taking that as a sign that I will be a perfect copywriter/art director/designer/photography by the time I graduate next December.

Lovely.





[Also, why does Blogger dull all the colors and saturation of uploaded images? Lame.]

Oh no.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, meatfilleddumplinglolcat.


I'm going to lick you. And you're probably going to taste like soap. Gross.