Churbuck.com

You know the theory that if you are in a plunging elevator you should jump into the air at the last moment before impact? First of all — take a physics class. Second of all, don’t try it in a Turkish elevator because it doesn’t work in one of those either.

Here’s the setup. Turkish elevators are pretty small by American standards. Four people are cozy. Six intimate. Four of us climbed into one on the Asian side for an appointment on the sixth floor with an agency. It was the style with the door that swings — not slides — open. We climbed aboard, I made my obligatory “little Turkish elevator”  remark and pressed “6″.

We go up three floors, watching them roll by the doorway which I am standing against. Then we stop. We are not there yet. Have I pressed the wrong button?

We start to descend. More like: we start to slip. Then the lights go out.

Then we plunge.

[insert whistling sound here]

We hit. Major bang. I keep my feet but that sucked and we land three feet under the first floor. Pitch black darkness.

I declare: “I have a flashlight” and I unzip my most awesome Patagonia bag and pull out the Qualcomm combo-laser pointer LED flashlight.

My colleagues are very upset. Thank heavens no one broke wind or worse. I turn on the laser dot and that gets a laugh. then the light. Light is good. Then I find the alarm button and I push it a couple times.

I hear muffled Turkish sounds like “copchik?” I don’t even try to reply. I hit the alarm again for good measure.

And then the claustrophobia strikes. Will we be there for 30 seconds? 30 minutes? 30 hours?  A couple minutes go by, we make little jokes but none of us are excited. Then the door opens and up we climb to fresh air and I immediately think about those poor souls stuck under collapsed buildings in Haiti.

I guess the guy on the roof with the crank was tired. If we were in North Carolina Cherie Berry, the lady who’s face is on the elevator inspection certificate would have saved us. There’s even a song about her.

Thanks to CNET and Technically Incorrect. Just too much weirdness to do anything but admire.

Thanks to Nano

I’m a food snob with the best of them — but I am not necessarily an organo-phobe who demands to know whether my steak died happy and fed on grass. I am also a customer of D’Artagnan, the specialty butcher supply house that can provide everything from armagnac duck sausage to wild boar. Being an occasional customer I receive their email offers.

I just had to ask, who would pay $178 for a turkey? I mean, turkey unto itself is not up there with Kobe beef and Bluefin tuna as one of life’s essential delicacies. What’an equivalent Butterball cost? $40?

I’d expect this thing to play the accordion and entertain me.

“Enjoy the natural goodness and delicious flavor of a traditional Heritage Turkey at your holiday meal.”

via Thanksgiving Turkeys, Buy Fresh and Natural Turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner Online.

“I will tell you this about iLiver 2.0: It’s nanoengineered, and it kicks ass. I wake up every morning feeling like Shaft, Superfly, James Bond and Kung Fu all put together. I’m bench-pressing twice my body weight”

Life is better again. Dan Lyons brought back Steve Jobs, this time with half of David Pogue’s liver.

via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

College roommate and professor of pre-columbian archaeology at the University of Kansas, John Hoopes, writes me on Facebook about the mounting online lunacy of the end-of-the-world movement that is based on some Aztec Mayan calendar saying 2012 is when it all goes down.

Professor Hoopes sent me a link to a profile of a new age end of world visionary named Pinchbeck — the new Timothy Leary — who in a Rolling Stone article was described as preparing for a forthcoming drug trip thusly:

Pinchbeck wore Depends and a blindfold, and kept a plastic vomit bucket by his head.

Classic! Reminds me of a college drinking game called “The 100″ — where the aim was to drink four cases of Budweiser (and four singles) between 6 pm on Friday and 6 pm on Sunday. This looks easy on paper, but is nearly impossible as it requres two beers per hour (assuming zero sleep). Whatever, I was never in the same league as Pinchbeck, though I did know some guys who donned hockey helmets before opening a bottle of surgical ether in their room in the event of unconsciousness and head injuries.

Update: It is midnight Thursday to midnight Sunday according to drinkwap.com. I recall it was 48 hours, not 72.

Good luck John with dispelling the end of world stuff. We’re all counting on you.

Okay, I won’t talk about the last month’s nasal experience. Let’s just say the septoplasty thing is pretty much over — I still don’t have any feeling in the tip of my nose, aliens come out of my nostrils every morning, and the black eyes have sort of faded away.  I would not recommend contracting a cold in the week following a nose job. No.

Anyway, in nasal distress, I decided to buy a “neti pot” — a teapot one sticks in one’s nose and then pours saline solution into one’s nasal cavity, which floods and drains out the opposite nostril. Very holistic. Just the ticket. It sort of works. It sort of doesn’t. Well, it mostly doesn’t, but it does loosen up the aforementioned “aliens” and produces some jetsam that brings to mind ancient honeycombs.

Then I found this wonderful demonstration of what to do and what not to do courtesy of toothpastefordinner.com

On the Southpark website today, while searching for a dimly remembered episode, I failed and received this encouragement

via Entropy Gradient Reversals – Would You Like Fries With That?.

So Facebook changes its terms of service to basically say “all your base belong to us” and the mob goes mental, so Facebook backs off.

Basically they tried to pull a Burger King and claim anything put on their service belonged to them and not the author.

Hit the rewind button to Rageboy, aka “Chris Locke” — who took Burger King’s early “Have It Your Way” web site to a fine-print extreme by uploading all of Project Gutenberg into their text entry box. I suggest someone do the same to Zuckerberg if his lawyers regain the upper hand.

“Sure we like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Who doesn’t? But to get our vital juices really flowing, there’s still nothing quite like a hot lick from Foreigner. And it seems that Dave@Burger_King.com feels much the same way. Although the band’s hit single Double Vision was initially an ode to psychedelic drugs (“I never do more than I really need…”), BK must figure that the generation who intrinsically understood this message must have long ago either OD’d or gone into advertising themselves. Thus their use of the Double Vision sound clip to hawk their double cheeseburger. Are we talking blinding marketing brilliance here or what? But never mind what we think. Thanks to the Miracle of Interactivity, you can let Burger King know what you think directly by clicking on their tasteful animated graphic.

Having suggested such feedback, however, we feel duty-bound to pass along the following notice. It’s at http://www.burgerking.com:80/legal.htm, but you know, sometimes a link just isn’t the same as the Real Thing.

All remarks, suggestions, ideas, graphics, data, questions or other information communicated to Burger King Corporation through this site or through electronic mail (together, the “Submission”) will forever be the property of Burger King Corporation. Burger King Corporation will not treat any Submission as confidential, or proprietary and will not be liable for the use of any ideas for its business (including without limitation, product or advertising ideas) and will not incur any liability as a result of any similarities that may appear in future Burger King Corporation operations. Without limitation, Burger King Corporation will have exclusive ownership of all present and future existing rights to the Submission of every kind and nature everywhere. Burger King Corporation will be entitled to use the Submission for any commercial or other purpose whatsoever, without compensation to you or any other person sending the Submission. You acknowledge that you are responsible for whatever material you submit, and you, not Burger King Corporation, have full responsibility for the message, including its legality, reliability, appropriateness, originality, and copyright.

Fill my eyes with that Double Indemnity. When you get right down to it, isn’t this what the Web is really all about? (Our own contribution to the furtherance of responsible Copyright Protection consisted in feeding the entire collected corpora of Project Gutenberg through the Burger King form, thus ending Literature As We Know It.)”

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit | vanityfair.com.

Last weekend, in Seattle, the topic turned to McKinsey and did I know the story of Clark Rockefeller and his wife, a McKinsey partner and Seattle native ….

I had lunch with Clark Rockefeller in the fall of 2000 in a little outdoor cafe on Park Avenue. We talked about the perils of raccoons nesting in fireplaces.

Now he is in jail.

“While the alleged kidnapper’s prints were being analyzed, the bureau, in hopes that someone might recognize him, released pictures to the media, and soon a lifetime of carefully constructed identities began emerging. Some people knew him as Chris Gerhart, a University of Wisconsin film student. Others said he was Christopher Chichester, a descendant of British royalty, who had charmed the residents of a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in the 1980s, only to vanish after being sought for questioning in the disappearance of a California couple and their possible murder. Still others remembered him as Christopher C. Crowe, a TV producer, who had worked for at least three Wall Street investment firms in the late 1980s before suddenly vanishing. Scores of people knew him as Clark Rockefeller, a Boston Brahmin and scion of industry whose friends included important artists, writers, producers, physicians, financiers, and members of prestigious private clubs.”

Freaky. There’s talk of him being tried in a court on Cape Cod.

I use TweetDeck to follow mentions of ThinkPad and Lenovo on Twitter.  For the past few weeks a new phenomenon has popped up, one that confuses me to no end.

So we have a user @moon, who tweets, fairly frequently, variations on the following message:

” On Monday Groundhog Day I’m giving away a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 RT @moon 3 times and be the first to RT a selected Tweet on GHD”

Then he posts variations of that promotion by inserting the name of a well known “A-list” blogger or Twitterer — like @chrisbrogan or @scoble.

1. I don’t know what GHD is. [duh: GHD=Ground Hog Day]

2. I have no clue who Paul Mooney is. He has a website http://www.neuronspark.com but I can’t figure out what the business is. There are tons of affiliate marketing links on the right sidebar.

3. Why would he give away a $400 netbook? Is this an example of a grassroots promotion and by running his own contest he hopes to get more attention to his twitter ID and hence more followers?

4. Why is he inserting the names of @twitter celebrities?

It is very effective — @moon has dominated the Lenovo brand name in Twitter for a month, has induced tons of people to “RT” his giveaway, and in the end, got my attention, for I am writing this blog post, and sent him a direct ping asking “what is compelling you to give away the S10″ and observing:  “moon: Why do you retweet your giveaway to every social media person like chrisheuer, jowyang, etc? Seems like spam at this point”

He replied: “I know chrisheuer and jowyang so I was hoping they would reTweet the giveaway.”

And I said:  “moon: just concerned because of Dec. KMART incident with XXXXXX and Izea/Payperpost people. Don’t want lenovo associated with that”

To which he replied he wanted to do the promo with Lenovo.

So here’s the observation. If you manage a brand online, get ready for people to leverage it — both professional and personal — for their own gain.The big question is whether to grease the skids and enable it, stand by and watch it happen, or send in the clowns and get all legal.

The question is this: should I be giving product to bloggers and twitter users to activate this sort of self-managed promotion/contest or am I on shaky legal/ethical ground? I did rip into the “Blog Slut” phenomenon and don’t want to demean the Lenovo brand name by getting into any kind of payola arrangements. That aside, @moon has pounded the word Lenovo and gotten other people to Tweet it far more than the usual organic flow of the conversation would have. So should I shut up and be happy for the free branding?

Brands run into this with affiliate marketing programs all the time. If you give people an incentive to market on your behalf you may not be happy with their techniques they use to do it. This one just has me perplexed.

As one twitter user just said to my ardeht Lenovo promoter: “@moon This is a very clever promotion you’re running. Bet you’ll get lots of new followers and interest in what you do.”

Randall Stross writes today in the Sunday New York Times about the fine line between camp and hell when it comes to corporate video.

In it he calls attention to the wonderful internal video made by some Microsoft researchers for a product technology called Songsmith — apparently a “song generator” that one sings into and which then infers from the lyrics what the electro-synth soundtrack should be.  It is indeed awesome in its awfulness. Watch the first 30 seconds, get the idea, and skip to the video at the end of this post for its real contribution to society.

The payoff on Stross’ story is the pointer to what some clever souls have done with the Songsmith technology, feeding into it well known head bangers such as Metallica, and my personal favorite, Van Halen. This has made my day, almost as much as the discovery earlier this week of what the acronyms SIaS and FIaT mean in conjunction with Yankee’s owner, George Steinbrenner.

Fake Barack is in operation. Sample:

“For example, last night, in bed, I let out a little sheet creeper, totally silent but absolutely deadly. Then I waited. Took a while but finally Michelle goes, Goddammit, Barack, please tell me you didn’t just lay down a fart in my bed. And I said, Actually, I prefer to call it a “hope bomb.” She said I can call it whatever I want but I’ll be calling it that to myself because she’s going to the guest room and if I really think I can start pulling stuff like this just because I’m president then it’s going to be a long, long eight years.”

Obama Journal.

Why can’t project codenames be more awesome? Corporate and organizational code names — the granddaddy would be the Manhattan Project — are usually generated to cloak some secret project under an innocent sounding name to throw off spies.

There is a codename generator: http://www.codenamegenerator.com but none of the examples are very funny. I mean, there’s a certain genius who came up with “Shock and Awe”, or, my personal favorite from “Fight Club” — Project Mayhem.

Projects I would like to work on:

• Project Bohica
• Project Meconium
• Deathstar

Keep in mind during a “name the conference room” contest at a former employer, I lobbied hard for a theme related to cannibalism: The Donner Party Room, The Essex Whaleboat Room, Andes Soccer Teamroom, etc.. I lost.

Sorry publishers, but a sure sign that you suck is when you start running those deceptive double-underlined Vibrant Media/IntelliText ads on your articles. Forbes.com had the wisdom to crush these long ago (after an tribute to slain Moscow bureau chief Paul Klebnikov carried a double underlined link to a life insurance advertiser). I just went to PC Magazine to read a perfectly decently article about PC vendors and crapware/bloatware, and lo, hover over the wrong thing and this black hole sort of appears (like the second coming of the popup from hell) and obscures the text. Do I really need to see the word “laptop” emphasized and see this black chasm until the unit renders?

Want to know why Engadget and Gizmodo and TechCrunch and GigaOm are eating the lunch of the tech press? Because of crappy shenanigans like Vibrant’s. Or rather, lack of. update: and kudos to sites like CNET that also forego the linky-badness.

Geez PC Mag. Maintain your dignity. I have told our teams NOT to run these types of intrusive tactics out of respect to our customers and readers. I may have to do the same with our agency when it comes to running on sites that permit this stuff.

Nestor, who I met at the Wall and at the USA House, and who is a digital dude, had this on his agency bio.

It was too good not to share. Meet “Speak: The Hungarian Rapper”

Check it out. Thanks to Tim S. for the pointer.

Meet Tech Star – Dave Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing for Lenovo | @Bar
More about my favorite person.

Me.

“Who are you and what do you do?

I’m David Churbuck and I am the Vice President of Global Web Marketing for Lenovo”

The Secret Diary of [Steve Jobs] Jerry Yang: Advice from Scoble
Fake Steve Jerry gets a note from Scoble:

“You’ve started blogging. That’s a GREAT start. You should be PODCASTING too. Have you considered that? I’d be happy to help you. I’ve got cameras, editing software, etc., and could be at your place in an hour. Also if you need help writing scripts or whatever. Though honestly I think you’re better off just doing what I do and saying whatever comes into your head, just speak the way you naturally do. Yes it’s disjointed and rambling and even incoherent but it rings true and comes across as honest and transparent when when it’s totally not.”