the manifold faces of......diet coke.

reading coca-cola's brand statement for diet coke officially made the longtime favorite verboten. to wit:

"Diet Coke is your style, it's your sass, it's doing what makes you happy. . . . So flirt, laugh, dance, prance, giggle, wiggle -- do what feels good."

(via a fastcompany article on the proliferation of diet cokes)

regards,
a non-wiggling jhc.

Technorati Tags: marketing, branding, diet, coke, soda, pop, beverages

effective marketing

i was reading up on marmite (which i have become addicted to down here) and came across this fantastic piece of marketing lore:

A 2004 UK TV advert, which parodied the 1958 Steve McQueen film The Blob, substituting Marmite for the original alien space menace, and including frightening scenes of fleeing people, was dropped after being screened on children's television: concerned parents reported that the advert had traumatised their children into having nightmares and vowing never to watch TV again.

this was also pretty good:

"The first thing he had done after arriving home was to eat some Marmite on toast. 'It was pretty good. It's just one of those things - you get out of the country and it's all you can think about.' "

From an interview with Paul Ridout, a British backpacker kidnapped in India by Kashmiri separatists. The Guardian, 1994.

all the best,
an increasingly-expatriated jhc.

caste, immigration, genes

check out the abstract of this article studying gene distribution within indian castes:

Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes.
[...]
For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%-30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans.

regards,
a low caste jhc.

Cheese, Glorious Cheese

I saw this from NPR's website. Apparently curing disease isn't in the interests of the British. Instead they have a British Cheese Board who recently discovered that different cheeses will elicit different types of dreams.

Unfortunately for me, such dreams would end with me crying a little, and cleaning up a lot.

one in seven!!!

sweet!! [via jwz]:

More women — particularly those in their late teens and 20s — are experimenting with bisexuality or at least feel more comfortable reporting same-sex encounters, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[...]
For women in their late teens and 20s, the percentage rose to 14 percent in the more recent survey. About 6 percent of men in their teens and 20s said they'd had at least one same-sex encounter.

The Ultimate Post-Bacc

This guy is my hero. He just broke the world record for watching TV, previously at 50 hours 7 minutes, by watching 69 hours 48 mintues. The only drawback was that he could only watch ABC shows, since where he was watching must have been an affiliate. He literally had to keep his eyes on the screen at all times. Could have been worse though, could have been the WB.

Apparently, he also holds other records including longest duration balancing on one foot and number of hours bowling. He claims that he does this to "...raise awareness of suffering children." What children? One legged kids without TVs? WTF?!

My guess is that he does this to get free bowling and TV. The balancing thing, however, is just weird.

There was an old SNL skit which appeared after Gillette's Mach3 razor came out with marketed a razor with 10 blades--The best shave you could possibly get : it took your skin right off... Now, I use a Mach3 (average price for 4 blades is about 15 bucks- this price appeared after a decision by Gillette to have 4 blades in a pack instead of five a few years ago, maybe that was with the Sensor or the Sensor excel)... Well, ready? Here it is, the Gillette FUSION - a razor with five blades, trumping even the Schick Quattro... [Article 1 - Has a Picture] [Article 2]

Do we really need five blades to shave? An honest appeal: will we really be able to tell the difference? What do you guys use? Have you tried the Mach 3? At some point I really wanted to go back to a straight razor, just because the blades cost so damn much...

tablet pc, gestures, microsoft word

loren heiny's gesture plugin for ms word on the tabletpc gives me a full boner. (via scob.)

Technorati Tags: tablet, tabletpc, gestures, hci, word, microsoft, computing

egyptian elections

via the csm:

Omar Fatah, in a fresh T-shirt with Mubarak's beaming face on it, a gift for coming to the polls this morning, is typical of the folks struggling in Dar El-Salam. The 22-year-old - whose nose is marred by fresh scars from a recent street fight - is part of a small gaggle of young men in the same T-shirts hanging around the voting booths.

"Mubarak is my father,'' Mr. Fatah practically shouts, exuberantly explaining his presence. But his demeanor changes as he explains his situation, and his view of politics in general. "If we bring in another president, he'll rob us. With Mubarak, he's already robbed us so hopefully he's satisfied."

ha.

i want one of those tshirts.

jhc.

Technorati Tags: egypt, elections, mubarak, politics, middle, east

Some people need to chill the fuck out

Here's an article about how a guy got fired for eating some leftover pizza from a business meeting. His co-workers ratted him out. What fucking petty shit.

You know, if we were all lactose intolerant senseless crime like this would never happen. How sad.

caffeine

via an old gladwell article on caffeine:

Paul Hoffman, in "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers," writes of the legendary twentieth-century mathematician Paul Erdös that "he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso and caffeine tablets. 'A mathematician,' Erdös was fond of saying, 'is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.'"