I got a brochure last week for Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) 2006. I’ve had the odd conversation with people about this organization and the event, but I’m posting here in case anyone who reads this blog might have some more info.

Have you been to one of their events? Given what you do and what you were interested in learning, was it valuable?

I’m intrigued by the idea, but if I hadn’t ever heard it mentioned, I’m not sure I would give the brochure more than 30 seconds. It looks too touchy-feeling for me. I don’t need to get in touch with my inner spiritual voice. I need to keep thinking and practicing and expanding my own creative skills. That’s not a dichotomy and there is more breadth to the conference that that, but I’m having trouble finding a place to anchor.

Not to mention the usability of the program is terrible. There is a week-long event, a choice of pre-conferences, a custom program, a half-week program, a choice of several tracks – it’s very overwhelming and confusing and not really giving me a good sense of whether or not this is something I should do.

Appreciate any comments steve AT portigal DOT com – or on this blog.

Here are some recent searches that led to this blog (for whatever reason, I’m getting way more hits from Google than from Technorati right now)

Plantidote Mega-Mushroom Supplement
spleak sex
wat is lintonizing
indian film “director’s daughter”
frisbee giant carrot suit
39
tv ad
cottonelle
carrington dental
“group exercises” rebrand
TWA Terminal Flip Clock
redesign of mcdonald’s interiors
life fitness X1
sex with Skype
how to make your own wash for fruit veg
grapples
57 aol.com earthlink.net yahoo.com hotmail.com juno.com
carrington dental plans

BusinessWeek writes about a just-launching redesign of McDonald’s stores, trying to bring them up to date. This is sure to be a big design story in the business press, with lots of oohing and aahing about the furniture and so on, but the article points to some serious business challenges that the company faces here (and presumably anytime they want to do some sort of reinvention).

In a recent letter to management at the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, about 160 franchisees from North Carolina spelled out why they oppose the new plan. They say the roof change erases 40 years of brand building and that ‘there has been no business case presented which justifies the change.’ Says Frederick Huebner, who owns 11 McDonald’s in North Carolina: ‘We don’t want to lose the iconic look of what we’ve got.’ If franchisees balk, McDonald’s can refuse to renew their contract.

Check out the new designs, which seem to bring McDonald’s firmly into the 90s.

Golden Grahams specifies in small type that they are a Ridged Cereal. Umm, okay.

And then later they claim that they come with Ridges that Rock!

Really? They are going to hang their hat on a lame-ass claim like that? Golden Grahams can be said to be many things (delicious, crunchy, sugar-tastic, part of this complete breakfast) but they absolutely can not in any sense be said to “rock.” The possession of ridges, or lack thereof, does not in anyway influence the “rock”ingness of cereal.

Golden Grahams do not rock. Their ridges do not rock.

This is patently a false claim.

I love it when I’m mulling something over and an article appears that sums it up, at least partly. Don’t Blame the Web When Newspapers Die is one such example

The disappearance of the paperboy. I was a paper-boy as a kid. It was good money, and my knocking on doors seeking subscriptions or asking to be paid put a human face on the paper. Circulation grew with the population, but now newspapers must offer free subscriptions to sucker the rubes to renew. These offers come from Mumbai by phone, usually when you’re at dinner. The bean counters love it. Some middle-aged man now delivers the paper out of an old Chevy.

We are reading a lot about people getting their news from the web instead of print, or the failures of news companies (MSM – or “main stream media”) to allow sharing and get with the co-creation program, blah blah blah.

But really, these newspaper companies are messed for other reasons (such as are outlined in the article). They can’t provide their basic service very well – to get a printed piece of a paper to your door every day, and to stop getting you those printed pages when you ask them to.

Every single time I travel I have to put two papers on hold (the SF Chron and the NYT). I’ve started putting them on hold a day early, even though I’d like a paper that day, I have to ensure they actually do stop the paper when they are supposed to.

Last week we went away and I did my usual. One paper still arrived, so I called and spoke to a human who verified my hold was in the system and indicated that they would escalate a notice to some district person to get it stopped. The next day a paper arrived – and I was already in Toronto – so I called long distance (the 800 number doesn’t work outside the US, of course) and restated the situation again and told them I did not want to come home to a pile of papers. “Absolutely, we’ll let the supervisor know and get that sorted out.” The phone call, mind you, cost $8.00 from the hotel. Cheaper than my international roaming charges on Verizon? I dunno.

And we came home to find, indeed, a pile of papers. They didn’t follow the first notice, they didn’t follow the first escalation, or the second escalation, nor did they respond to the pile of papers sitting in the driveway (hey, maybe that would be a clue that they should not be delivering them).

The day after we got back, the other paper didn’t arrive. I had to call in to get that delivery problem sorted out. I’m so fed up with these papers – you can’t get anyone at the main office to take you seriously, all they can do is pass a message onto a mysterious supervisor who presumably deals with the middle-aged man in the old car who drives down my street early in the morning.

One day a few months ago neither paper arrived (and unrelated to any vacation hold, even), so I called both offices. And I actually got a followup call from the carrier, telling me to call them if I had a problem (in other words, don’t let our boss know). And – for the two papers – it was the same carrier!

Meanwhile, I’m feeling totally unresolved about last week’s unwanted deliveries. I’m not calling in and speaking to another drone again; I sent an email asking for a supervisor to call me about an unresolved problem, and I’m thinking about canceling the paper if they don’t take me seriously. The fact is, I need them more than they need me. They aren’t interested in me as a customer – the delivery mechanism is so far removed from the news gathering organization, that there’s no one who is going to respond in any fashion, let alone take any actual steps to keep this from happening. It’s just a lousy single customer for them, but it’s more than inconvenience for me, it’s about home security – there’s nothing worse than a bunch of papers to advertise that the house is prime for breaking and entering and stealing and leaving. If I can’t travel without worrying that a disinterested low-paid employee is going to put my safety and security at risk, then it’s maybe not worth it.

I still like the paper, and I like reading it cover to cover more than I could ever do online. But they don’t deserve my meager business.

I’m not sure if this consistently poor level of customer service is what’s going to further destroy the newspaper business, or if we’ll just tolerate it like we do with banks, HMOs, utilities, phone companies, Best Buy, and so on.

A few weeks ago we went to see Water at the SF International Asian American Film Festival. Truly an amazing film and absolutely to be seen in the theater, not on your little TV. I hadn’t seen any of the other films in the Elemental Trilogy (Fire, Earth), but had heard great things about this film from my family.

It tells tells the story of a community of widows in India, forced, by religion/economics to live our the rest of their lives in an unfulfilled state – in poverty, no pleasure (i.e., fried foods or sweets) permitted, no remarriage, nothing by prayer and begging. When a woman is valueless, there is no choice, and when a girl is married off at 8 for her dowry, and the much older man dies, she is basically an abandoned person for the rest of her natural life. Horrifying premise, that was and is true.

The story of the making of the film is as amazing as the film itself. Director Deepa Mehta told the story afterwards of the original production, shut down by fundamentalists in India, leaving her to fume for 4 years before shooting again in Sri Lanka. That story seems to be getting a lot of ink, appearing in the New York Times (and a several similar pieces in the SF Chron over the past few days), and documented in the story of a camera assistant as well in the just published Shooting Water, by the director’s daughter. I started the book on the trip to Toronto and it’s interesting, if a bit youthful in tone. I’ve only just started and thankful for the detail and so much explanation as to the aspects of Indian culture and environments that help my understanding of the film; mind you, I wish someone had proofread the book enough to correct her reference to the Bradbury Building as the Ray Bradbury Building.

During last week’s seminar

, I had that awkward moment between presenters, where the laptops are being swapped out and the lav mic belt packs are being detached and re-attached, and so I decided to fill. I told the attendees that I was happy to be speaking to them, and especially glad to be back in Toronto, because that’s where I grew up. I offered them some advice for fitting in (especially since they would be doing an observational research exercise later) by not calling the city TOE-RON-TOE as many Americans do. Instead, I told them, we call it Trawna, and I even spelled it out – T-R-A-W-N-A. This is an old semi-truthful joke about the name of the city.

Turned out this was the meme-of-the-day. People came up to me at the break and asked again how they should spell it. Every time someone else said Toronto they stopped and said Trawna. It was just a funny thing that spread more than I had expected.

The next morning we had a followup session to the observational research people had done (briefly – walking through some different neighborhoods in Toronto with some different lenses through which to observe. As people settled in, they were asked to share a key story with a partner. One woman at one table announced to those within earshot that she does not write stories; she hasn’t done it since high school and she doesn’t do it now. O-kay. The rest of the group went about their business and were actively talking. This same woman summons me:

“Excuse me?! Excuse me!”

I look at her.

“Where is this Trawna thing coming from? Because…uh, we’re FROM HERE and we don’t say that.”

I replied that I was from here as well, and sure we do. This didn’t satisfy her and she seemed very annoyed. I thought it was strange that she had never heard of this phenomenon. It’s widespread. http://www.trawna.ca/ is a website about Toronto. It’s everywhere. My friends told the joke three days later over brunch. And not only doesn’t she know it, but she’s pretty damn angry with me for starting everyone else saying it. I guess it’s a version of the native effect where we reject observations about our own culture, because we don’t see it that way. Meanwhile, the rest of the morning must have been torture because we got into a lot of detail about what people learned and synthesized about the city from their observations, and I’m sure some of it would have bugged the hell out of her, accurate or not.

In another example of that (without the venom, mind) I was looking at Nicolas Nova’s photos from his trip to California, and being intrigued by the things he noticed that I take for granted. They reminded me of my pictures from when I travel – stuff you see on the street and so on, but it was things that I don’t think to photograph because I see them all the time. The familiar through someone else’s eyes.

Recently we had this story from Ohio

Five teenage girls from Portage County face potential criminal charges after attempting to play a real-life version of Super Mario Bros.

The Portage County Hazardous Materials Unit and Bomb Detection Unit were called in to downtown Ravenna on Friday morning after seventeen suspicious packages — boxes wrapped in gold wrapping paper with question marks spray painted on them — had alarmed residents.

And now, a few weeks later, comes this one

A newspaper promotion for Tom Cruise’s upcoming ‘Mission: Impossible III’ got off to an explosive start when a county arson squad blew up a news rack, thinking it contained a bomb.

The confusion: the Los Angeles Times rack was fitted with a digital musical device designed to play the ‘Mission: Impossible’ theme song when the door was opened. But in some cases, the red plastic boxes with protruding wires were jarred loose and dropped onto the stack of newspapers inside, alarming customers.

Times officials said the devices were placed in 4,500 randomly selected news boxes in Los Angeles and Ventura counties in a venture with Paramount Pictures designed to turn the ‘everyday news rack experience’ into an ‘extraordinary mission.’

Thanks, Dirk!

Two years ago I blogged about a strange ad for Ball Park Franks

The Ball Park Franks ads running now feature a guy with a pretty serious gut, working on his backyard BBQ, talking in goofily intense tones about meaty, juicy, and….girthy. I guess since no English speaker has ever heard or used the word before, he says “girthy” like 8 times, each time with a silly-but-frighteningly intense growl, drawing it out….Giiiirrthy! he exclaims, with manly satisfaction. Is he talking about the food, or himself? Or what the food does to him? Either way, it’s clearly okay with him. And so it should be with us, no doubt.

I often talk about that ad in my presentations to illustrate the shifting boundaries of normal in our culture, including the different vectors for men and women in terms of health and body image.

Last week I was speaking to sensory scientists at a seminar in Toronto, and afterward, two different women who had been involved in that product came up to me – one had been involved in the user research (I only got the quick story – but it involved a shift from the product as a mom-for-kids to a Grilling Experience), and one had worked on the campaign. The actor, it seems, came up with Girrrthy himself, and the team looked at each other, wondering if they could actually use that. They did, and like it or not, the ad got a lot of attention. Seems like there’s new folks behind the product and the campaign nowadays and they’ve reverted back to their previous family-friendly positioning.

I was quite excited to meet these folks! How often do you get to give an example in a meeting and have someone tell you that they were behind that very example?

The New York Times writes

about our local Highway 1/Devil’s Slide closure.

Not that the problems, or the need to make do, are new. The highway has been closed dozens of times because of unstable geology, once in 1995 when a rock slide caused it to drop eight feet. In all, the roadway has fallen 46 feet since 1937, when the state first paved it.

It’s easy to feel abandoned out here on the coast with commute/road/traffic problems – many people in this area don’t know about the closure, don’t know what Devil’s Slide is, haven’t heard of Montara, etc. So some national coverage of our local woes at least offers a bit of validation.