Recently I’ve been enjoying the genre of popular psychology books. I realized that what I most enjoyed about my college psychology courses were reading about the experiments and studies, especially the ones with seemingly counter-intuitive irrational results. So far in this genre I’ve consumed Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, Outliers and Stumbling on Happiness, which no one took my hint to buy me. One of them, funnily, doesn’t fit that neatly into the genre.
Several weeks ago, I was contacted by a representative of Proporta.com, a manufacturer of cases and accessories for mobile phones, asking if I would be willing to review three of their products on my blog. I’m always up for new internet experiences, so I agreed. I scanned their website to find the most expensive products that might benefit me. I found nothing over £30. I ended up choosing an Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G, a Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case, and a Handy Travel Bundle. I chose the travel bundle because the week before I had lost my airline audio jack and I also needed a new wallet.
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The other day I received an email asking me to link one word in one of my posts to a website. In exchange, they offered me $50 per year. Now, my ad revenue from Google AdSense is about $7/month or $84/year. If someone (not you, Mr. SEO Marketer!) offered me $50/year to put a large bold ad on every page, I might consider it. But one ad hyperlink on one word on one post? No problem!
To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.
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Yesterday, as I was digging through my coins to pay for a cool European lager, I happened to glance at the artwork on the heads (Or tails? Who can tell anymore?) side of the coin. At first I thought it was some kind of joke currency or bizarre token that someone had slipped me in mistake or trickery. So I saved it, pretty sure it couldn’t be real. But lo and behold, it’s a special 2009 commemorative 2€ coin. To quote the Official Journal of the European Union (PDF):
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Two weeks ago, I was contacted by someone claiming to be a contributing editor to a book that is about to be published, asking if I would accept money in exchange for permission to republish a blog post of mine in their book that may or may not sell millions of copies in over thirty languages. Here’s the email I received (hyperlinking mine):
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The marketing slogan for the Heineken in Spain is “Piensa en verde“. This translates to “Think about green”, since the word “en“, which normally means “in” or “on” is how you say to think “about” something, in Spanish. It’s just another one of those weird quirks that confuses language learners going in both directions.
My brain, however, always reads the Heineken slogan as “Think in green”, which is not necessarily an incorrect translation. I like how it sounds better. It really wouldn’t make a bad slogan for them in English. It captures momentum from the “Go green!” environmental movement without actually promising any environmental efforts and works well to help you pick out the color of the product packaging when you see it.
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My wife went to the grocery store today and was given, as a promotional gift from Kellogg’s, two XBOX video game systems. These video games might have held my attention as a 6-year-old in 1984, although they are worse than a simple space invaders game I had on my watch at the time. The instructions seem to be in German, French, Italian, and perhaps Dutch, so, with my understanding of English and Spanish, I can more or less get the gist of what the games are about. The Spaceship Blaster game is a horrible, horrible, horrible attempt at the Asteroids genre, with a simple spin wheel and a trigger. The Disco Mania game is a lame, lame, lame implementation of the Dance Dance Revolution genre, in which you must match your virtual dancer’s moves to that of another on the screen. The graphics are that old type where they aren’t even pixels drawn on the screen, but they are various immovable sprites that are lit up in sequence to simulate a moving object.
I am completely awestruck that anyone would be putting a good battery into such a piece of shit in 2009. There is absolutely no way that any child born since 1980 would find these things the least bit amusing. And the XBOX branding?? WTF?? (more…)
