I got so excited when Facebook showed an ad for the 2010 Olympic mascots. Especially since it showcases my favorite mascot, QUATCHI!

When I clicked on the ad, I was totally expecting to go to an Olympic mascot page. Instead they dropped me at the generic BORING Olympic page. If I see an ad for Quatchi, I'm expecting a page about Quatchi. Helloooooooo Olympic dummie heads! (and I can say that, cuz they didn't pick Chicago, but anyways)

Olympic peeps. You did a SUPER INCREDIBLE GRAND job with the mascots. Can we pleeeeeeez have an official Facebook Page for them?

In the meantime, I'll enjoy the fan-created Quatchi Page.

I would love an iPhone Atari 2600 emulator app. Right now an iTunes search for "atari" results in the following games:
-- Centipede
-- Missile Command
-- Super Breakout
-- Atari Football
-- Backyard Hockey
-- Backyard Baseball
-- Backyard Soccer

Step it up, Atari! We want more games on the iPhone.

Sitting in the garbage can at work was a cardboard package for tea. I exclaimed, "What! This can be recycled!" and fished it out of the garbage. Continuing to make my tea, I almost threw out my empty sugar packet when I realized that also can be recycled!

Please! Recycle your empty sugar packets.

Here's other recycling posts from spudart.org:

1. Why do you never see the recycle guys and the garbage men together at the same time?
2. We need more mens' colors for reusable bags
3. Would a Chicago 2016 Olympics recycle London's arena from 2012?
4. Cool inventions like a dual garbage/recycling can
5. Using alleys to fight heat, water runoff
6. How are you being environmental?
7. Recycle Hershey's Kisses foil

With Apple naming their new tablet the iPad, it makes me think someone is saying iPod with a Chicago accent. In honor of the spirit of replacing the "o" with an "a," I present to you the new lol...

lal is the new way to say lol.

I have no idea what the "a" in lal stands for, but I like how "lal" sounds. Oh i wanna lal all day long!

If I drink once a week I'll get more matches on eHarmony. That's what a customer rep told me on the phone when I wanted to cancel my subscription. Here's the story.

I was on eHarmony for four months. An email arrives in my inbox saying that my subscription has auto-renewed. What?! I don't remember auto-renewing at all. I looked to see if I got any warning emails about the auto-renewal. I did not. I called up eHarmony's toll-free customer service number at 1-800-673-3548.

A very nice eHarmony rep answered and I explained to her that my account auto-renewed, and this was news to me and I didn't want to auto-renew. Given their shocking auto-renewal procedure here, I figure this would be a common problem that people call about. And if you just ask them to not auto-renew, they will revoke the charge.

THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING.
The rep said, "I'm looking at your profile right now and I see you have answered the question of how often do you drink set to a few times a year. The majority of the users on eHarmony have this preference set to once a week. If you change your drinking preference from a few times a year to once a week, you'll get more matches."

Being rather surprised by this piece of advice, I told her, "Thank you for that insight and your advice. But I would want to stay honest and not put down that i drink once a week. To say that on my profile would be dishonest, and i thought eharmony was about getting honest matches. I would just like to cancel my account please since I do not wish to auto-renew."

In her nice voice she told me that in the signup process that eHarmony boldly states that when I sign up, I'm set to auto-renewal, and that I would have to stay with that.

I do not remember the site telling me that when I signed up.

I told her that as I was honest before with telling her that i don't want to change my drinking preference to get more matches, I will be honest here and say I do not recall the bold message that i auto-renew, because when i signed up for four months, I had in my mind clearly set that I was going to try this just for four months and I was not going to renew again.

I went on my soapbox a bit and continued, "if eHarmony was holding to the honesty that they clearly promote themselves as, they would send a notification email a day before or a week before your account renews. I'm looking at my email now, and I don't see any such email. I believe you if you say the message is bold at the signup process. I honestly don't recall it. If I saw it, I would have turned that off.

And more, "If eHarmony wants to be truly honest, they would notify people a day or a week before they just auto-renew someone for three months."

She then gave me a discount and charged me for one month. She said that if I wish I could continue using the service for one more month.

To which I replied, "Thank you for the discount. As I've come here with the honest intention of not wanting to auto-renew or use the service anymore right now, I am sticking with that intention. It's nice that you offer me to continue to use the service. But I want to be true to what I'm saying and not use the service anymore for the moment."

She honored that and said she would send me a customer feedback. To which I told her that she was very nice given the parameters she had to work in. And that how she handled the situation was very professional and nice.

Now granted, I didn't tell her this, but I don't think eHarmony's policy of telling people to lie on their profile to get more matches is professional. It's clearly dishonest. It's a clear contradiction to what their brand is. But at least the customer rep was nice in delivering the dishonsety to me.

The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers--nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers. (from alternet.org)



How are there more cars than drivers? I don't know anyone who owns two cars. I know of families of two that own two cars. But I don't know anyone that owns more cars than drivers.

The number in parenthesis is the number of hits the post got in 2009.

1. Oprah group dance on Michigan Avenue has inspiration in previous YouTube viral video
   (42,302)
   I shot a video of this performance and put it up on Youtube. It got 2.5 million views. To get that many clicks, I used some social media optimization and youtube keyword strategy. With 2.5 million views, it's no surprise that the accompanying blog post would be my number one most-viewed item in 2009.
   


2. The world's best Facebook status messages (8,505)
   I got a ton of google searches for facebook status messages in July.
   


3. FUN: Look up your initials on urbandictionary.com (3,801)
   Oddly, I got zero google traffic for searches containing the words urban dictionary. This must have just gotten some good linkage.
   


4. QUESTION: If you got a tattoo, what would you get and where would you put it? (3,506)
   The photo in this post is my 4th most viewed photo on flickr. It's crazy. I just drew on my fingers and the photo has 16,000 views now. What really drives it is that Google images has this image ranked like fifth for a search on finger tattoos.
   


5. IDEA: Facebook app of most common friends (3,110)
   People love googling facebook stuff!
   


6. World's largest working cell phone gets pranked (3,075)
   This is a funny story, I'm glad it made the most-viewed in 2009.
   


7. The 10 funniest balloon boy jokes on twitter (2,464)
   Oh boy. I kinda regret making this post.
   


8. My run-in with Ronnie Woo Woo at the Tribune Tower (1,751)
   Another funny story in the top ten! Yay!
   


9. How to save the Michigan Avenue Borders bookstore (1,609)
   This one gets Borders workers all fired out. Kinda reminiscent of the 140+ comments on the Campaign for a Papa Johns in Chicago
   


10. Philly-style pizza mystery (1,398)
    A mystery is always good.
    

Fast Food Nation, Food Inc, In Defense of Food, End of Overeating. After reading these books and seeing these movies, many people become vegetarians. Can we see the signals on a larger cultural scale?

[New note: I need to put more of my opinion in this post. I was being way too... scientific with the following graphs. The way this post came about was I heard a couple people today who said they both recently started being vegetarian and that these books/movies were an influence. We joked about how maybe Google Trends would show a connection between these books and movies and vegetarian searches. I'm disappointed that Google trends doesn't show the connection.]

Surprisingly it looks like there wasn't much impact from Fast Food Nation on vegetarian searches. But searches for vegetarian recipes did increase after Food Inc. But is that only because the trend for vegetarian is just growing larger in the past year?

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Here's a look at the search trends for Fast Food Nation, Food Inc, and vegetarian. Not much corelation here.

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Not much bump for "In Defense of Food"

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Nothing really happening for "End of Overeating"

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Conclusion:
According to Google Trends we can't really see much corelation in vegetarian searches with the release of books and movies about the horrors of our meat industry. But even though you don't see it in Google, perhaps this isn't the right test. Perhaps the volume of searches for vegetarian dishes may be such a high volume by existing vegetarians, that any new vegetarians may not show in the increase. (maybe?)

These books and films do a great service creating awareness to what evils happen in our food industry. I myself am a quasi-vegetarian. I eat meat occasionally, but try to keep it at a minimum. I was hoping that these animal abuse books would show an uptick in people's adoption of caring for our animals.

Want to know how to have death-ray vision on spiders? No more squishing the spiders with kleenex. Now you can simply eliminate the spider by looking at it. I will tell you how I was able to achieve this feat in 2010.

I'm sitting at my desk in the Tribune Tower being a productive happy employee, when all of the sudden a spider appears on my window sill. It was a decent sized spider and it took me quite by surprise. We always see spiders on the OUTSIDE of our windows. Never on the inside.

I intently stare at the spider wondering what to do. I don't want to kill it, because that's mean. I don't want to really just leave it there, cuz he looked like he could cause some serious damage.

So I stared at it.

Then the spider started to walk around like he was drunk. He was tripping all over his legs. Falling on his back. Getting back up walking a few more steps only to fall on his back again.

I continue staring intently at the spider.

He trips again and this time he doesn't get back up. Instead he pulls all his legs together towards his body, rolls on his back into a little ball.

I killed the spider by my own eyes! And I didn't even have to squish it!

Being so excited by this ability, I do what anyone else would do with this newfound superpower, I get up and exclaim to all my workers, "I have the death ray vision! to kill spiders!" Everyone was in shock. People hid behind their desks. Well, not really. But I wasn't exactly staring at anyone for fear of well... I like my coworkers a lot. I can't use death-ray vision on them.

I come back to my desk and... and! The spider was gone! What the! Do I have vaporizing power as well?

R2D2 recently tweeted this, "*doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot DEET!*"

What does he mean?

What do you think this emoticon is?
~([-_-])~

(props to Noel for tweeting his creation. That's how i found it)

I just have to share this genius question and brilliant responses from facebook:

You might be thinking, "the new millennium was in 2000, this is 2010." But! The millennium is still pretty new. 10 years old. Considering that a millennium is 1000 years long, ten years is a drop in the bucket.

2010 is a good time to go back and review the newness of the millennium. What are our plans for the year 3000? Do not lose focus on the year 3000.

Waiting for the bus in the winter can get quite cold in Chicago. Thankfully we now have these bus shelters that help block the wind. In fact, when it gets really cold you can try standing by the illuminated ad to warm up.



Although I don't think the lights behind the ad are really warm. Do fluorescents get warm? Not really.

And then when you get really cold, a good mind distraction technique is to pretend whatever is in the ad is real. In this case we have a giant bottle of beer. While I'm standing waiting for the bus, I like to pretend to pick up the bottle of beer. Or try to tip it over. Pop the cap off. Rotate the bottle. Good times.

Taking a break at Tina's Hot Dog Place on Montrose, I had a nativity in my hand freshly purchased for the second round of "Manger in an Alley" photos.

I couldn't resist photographing it on the table next to the ketchup and mustard. That's one of things about this photo series, that I was concerned about. Would my series be interpreted as being too disrepectful? Some people might have a problem with having the nativity on the dumpster. But really. Look at Christ's birth. It's very disturbing. God of the universe born. He doesn't come born to royalty. He's born to poor parents. He's not born in Jerusalem where all the high people are, but in lowly Bethlehem. Essentially Jesus was born in an alley.

So a nativity next to mustard and ketchup? I like to think of that as Christ as reaching out to the everyday person.

Now the tax collectors and "sinners" were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them." (Luke 15:1-2)

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More stories and personal interpretations will be featured on a special webpage. This photo will be included on that webpage. To be notified when these stories are released, you can:
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For now you can see Round 1 and Round 2 of the 2009 Manger in an alley.