Virginia Postrel blogs a nice analysis of my recent entry about Target’s wire-filled ad imagery through the lenses of her work on glamour and an essay by Grant McCracken in his brand-spanking-new book, Culture and Consumption II. Cool!

My paper Projective Techniques for Projection Technologies has been accepted for the DUX05 Conference. I’ll be sure to link to the final case study when it becomes available (Update: PDF here), but I will say that it’s about the user research that informed the development of the HP Home Cinema Digital Projector. I wrote about the process in a previous issue of FreshMeat.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll also be doing a tutorial at DUX, Whose Line is it Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography and Improv.

What is on the agenda when you have an Alpaca Event?

A newly repainted house in Montara. Frighteningly bright. What were they thinking? Looks like we’ve got our own IKEA here on the coast now.

Update: turns out the homeowners are fans of UC Berkeley sports teams

An Earworm is a (usually annoying) song that gets stuck in your head. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric.

Now, I bring you the evil combination – the mondeworm.

Let’s start with an example: The Rolling Stones have been getting a lot of press as of late for their soon-to-released song Sweet Neocon, which most people haven’t heard. We’ve heard about it, just haven’t heard it for real. But it’s easy to picture how the song would go in your head if the chorus sounds like Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. or Sheryl Crow’s Sweet Rosalyn. Just say, in your head, neocon for either Car-o-liine or Ros-a-lynnn – either way, you’ve got yourself a new piece of brain candy.

I’m sure there are others!

Enjoy…

I got a kick out of this great idea for a benefit concert – Sock It To Me: a sock and underwear collection for San Francisco’s homeless program. The only clothing that can’t be given as ‘hand-me-downs’ are socks and underwear. This is where you come in. Check your sock drawer and look for anything with a tag on it, or pick something up at the store on they way.

Radar Magazine does a great piece on the growth – elsewhere in the world – of the market for premium toilet paper. Led me to Renova.

Renova Black

SURPRINSING & UNIQUE

Discover today which tissue product is more Fashionable & Unique, just right for your sensual needs.
The very best in luxury bath tissue has a name: Renova Black
Fashionable, Sensual, Sophisticated, Fun, Unique!

and Fracheur
FOR A SUPERIOR HYGIENE

Renova Fracheur is a pioneer generation of toilet paper thanks to its active softness. Tiny drops of rich cream envelop the fibres of this tissue paper, enriching its structure with moisturising compounds.
Soft fibres start off the process, by cleaning your skin, causing this contact to release a soft moisturising cream.
Renova Fracheur, for superior hygiene.

That last one sounds like a delicious chocolate surprise of some sort.

And this ad

Is she going to wipe him once she finishes getting his underpants off?

I wrote previously about how Q107 had presented a broadcast of live Rolling Stones as if it was a simulcast of a club show in Toronto, and how many of us protested and they responded. Well, they got some press out of the whole thing, too.

From this story

Bartrem maintained that Q107’s intent was never to deceive, but does concede that the station could have been a little more specific in its programming intentions.
…
“I guess the way we positioned it on the air was ‘Celebrating this night at the Phoenix, we’ve got Stones live on air at 9:30.’ People heard ‘live’ and ‘Phoenix’ and put the two together and thought ‘simulcasting,'” he said.

“In hindsight, one line would have saved all the problems: ‘While some are enjoying the show at the Phoenix, let’s go back three years and enjoy what was going on.'”

Since he was one of the lucky 1,100 people to attend the show, Bartrem said he can’t speak to what Scholes said on air, but he is taking care to absolve the station’s DJs “of any kind of responsibility in this thing” and accepts full blame for the furor.

As penance, he has volunteered to be morning host John Derringer’s “Tool of the Day” today and will publicly proclaim the whole thing “totally my fault.” He has sent a mea culpa e-mail to everyone who wrote the station.

and from this story

The station evidently never specifically told its listeners it was simulcasting the Stones show from the Phoenix, but one listener, Steve Popichak, who e-mailed the Sun said, “During their broadcast, their announcer came on between songs and made references to this performance happening right in front of him right there at the Phoenix.”

“Well, it was live Stones,” DJ John Scholes told the Sun Wednesday night.

Blair Bartrem, Q107’s program director, yesterday told the Sun that the station received 30 to 40 complaints from fans, via e-mail. He said he takes responsibility for the confusion and that, in hindsight, the e-mail should have been clearer.

“I think a few of our Q listeners felt that we were trying to deceive them, which clearly wasn’t our intent,” Bartrem said. “I mean, there’s a trust that we have with our audience, obviously, and we’re not trying to pull a fast one.”
…
Bloggers on Tuesday and Wednesday were abuzz with anticipation about the perceived simulcast. An Ottawa resident filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council [over the playing of a bootleg? — SP]. He said other fans might do the same.

From discussions online, it appears that few believe that the deception was accidental or that the apology was genuine. I guess I was glad to get any acknowledgement of a mistake from a company.

But desite their claims to have responded to all who complained – I have not heard back from them, and obviously am not going to. I feel singled out!

The NYT writes a front-page story about the growth in housing developments in the US in areas that were formerly “the middle of nowhere.” Beyond being generally interesting as a trend, I was intrigued by the (perhaps not novel but at least unique to me) teaser of how they are figuring out what to put into these homes.

One area in which KB Home takes pride is its market research. It asks things like where people want their kitchens and how much more of a commute they can stomach. And it surveys its own buyers to get a comprehensive idea of who they are and why they bought.
…
In its most recent survey of Tampa home buyers, KB asked people what they valued the most in their home and community. They wanted more space and a greater sense of security. Safety always ranks second, even in communities where there is virtually no crime.

Asked what they wanted in a home, 88 percent said a home security system, 93 percent said they preferred neighborhoods with “more streetlights” and 96 percent insisted on deadbolt locks or security doors.

So KB Home offers them all. “It’s up to us to figure out what people really want and to translate that into architecture,” said Erik Kough, KB’s vice president for architecture. And the company designs its communities with winding streets with sidewalks and cul-de-sacs to keep traffic slow, to give a sense of containment and to give an appearance distinctly unlike the urban grid that the young, middle-class families instinctively associate with crime. “I definitely feel safe here. I feel protected,” said Lisa Crawford, who moved to New River about a year ago with her husband, Steve, and their two children.

“And I can tell you that the people in Tampa are a whole lot different than the people here,” Ms. Crawford said. “In Tampa, there’s a faster pace. I like it here, that it’s more of a community, more of a small-town feel.”

originally uploaded by minusbaby.

Great column that calls out what has tickled the back of my brain but never formed into a real thought – these ads purport to acknowledge and salute the fact that real women have all sorts of body types besides what you normally see in advertising, but the product they are selling is firming cream, designed to conceal or alter the body, making it closer to the “thin” ideal. I’m sure there’s some spin Dove puts on it, but really it’s a great point. Do we (or, at least, women) love ourselves for who we are, or do we try to fix things up? Seems like Dove is doing a pretty good job at having it both ways. Brilliant, yet more than a little evil.