Our office manager usually keeps individually wrapped wintergreen Life Savers in the candy dish on the reception desk. But last week, she put out a Halloween bucket filled with chocolate. As I was eating more of the chocolate than I should have, I realized that they chocolates all had ‘Fun Size’ on the package. This got me thinking about the marketing team at Mars sitting around discussing this new product.
Marketing drone #1: OK, we’ve got this new product: bags of small mixed chocolates. How do we market them? We can’t market them on using our usual parameters: an increase in something–size, flavor, etc.
Marketing drone #2: I know! How about ‘Fun size!’ It’s devoid of any actual meaning, but it conveys excitement for a product that really has nothing going for it except that you can bag them up.

Kyle Lake, pastor at Universtiy Baptist Church in Waco, was electrocuted while performing a baptism yesterday. According to the AP story:

The Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was stepping into the baptistery as he reached out for the microphone, which produced an electric shock . . . Water in a baptistery usually reaches above the waist, said Byron Weathersbee, interim university chaplain at Baylor University.

From my Monday morning commute:

NOTE: Jesus seemed to be a courteous driver. As you can see, he uses his turn signals.

I did not know this: the standard unit of inductance is the henry.

This is hystical. This (apparently straight) guy bought the most outrageous clothing from International Male, wore it in pubilc and documented the reactions.

While waiting at the supermarket checkout line a couple of days ago, I noticed that three of the celebrity news magazines (a.k.a. tabloids) featured the very same photo of Ashton and Demi on the cover (by using just their first names, I sound like I have some actual interest in their wedding or other celebrity ‘news’). I would think that each magazine would want a distinct photo. I would be interested in the learning about the processes that resulted in such amazing homogeneity.

When we are at the grocery store, the kids occasionally get me to agree to play the grab-a-plush-toy game. Man, our grocery store looks boring now. If we lived in Japan, we could try out hand at catching our dinner:

I’ve been a geek for too long. When I was writing the previous blog post, my fingers kept want to type ‘Perl’ instead of ‘Pearl’. I had to backspace and correct it two times.

While scanning my spam folder this morning before deleting the 64 messages that came in overnight, this one caught my eye:

By the way, Gmail’s spam filter is great: of the 150-200 spam messages that I receive each day, only about half a dozen don’t get filtered into my spam folder, and the false positive rate (good email that gets incorrectly identified as spam) is very low, maybe one message every few weeks.

Our neighbors named their children Faith, Hope and… Paul, Jr. For some odd reason I find this endlessly humorous. I wonder if they were planning on their third child being a girl.