Personal info for GNatural
Name: Gina Charow
Notes: Chris kept nagging me to join up here. I think it'll be fun.
Recent diary entries for GNatural:
...duluth is on fire... we don't need no water, let the mutha <censored> burn!(sorry, had to be done)
All I'm sayin' is... for the love, can't the White Sox get some attention already?!fr#$%#^$ing national media.
So UPS is now shipping Ground packages to Alaska.What, are they going through Canada? I don't understand that. Don't you have to declare when you're bringing packages in and out of Canada?
I don't know, I feel like I should have gotten some sort of press release or email blurb or something. Something along the lines of "UPS Now Offering Ground Service to Alaska!"
Because when something is formerly unavailable like that and then suddenly it mysteriously shows up as a viable option in my WorldShip software, it seems like either a glitch in the system, or an unusually lame ruse.
I'm halfway expecting Wallace Shawn to pop up and say, "Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never try to send a Ground package to Alaska when your job is on the line!'"
10 Jun 2005 (updated 10 Jun 2005) »
Here's something else a little wild.
Okay, wild is an overstatement. It's more like mildly curious, bordering on creepy.
I was sitting in a sports bar with a friend of mine, enjoying my 10-cent wings, not feeling guilty at all about not having beer, and watching the NBA Finals.
Almost.
We accidentally came an hour early before the Finals were scheduled to start, and spent the hour talking about relationships with women, marriage and singleness while being treated to the ubiquitous visuals of both ESPN's broadcast of "All The Right Moves" (featuring a practically prepubescent Tom Cruise and Lea Thompson) and ESPN2 carrying the Oakland A's vs. Washington Nationals.
Anyway, during the broadcast I caught my first view of the Nationals, the franchise that used to be known as the Montreal Expos, and it hit me -- the 'w' logo on all their ballcaps look EXACTLY like the 'w' in the 'w' in the Walgreens logo.
So much so, in fact, that it's eerie. You sit and wonder whether or not it's another example of the continuous and ubiquitous invasion of commerce and advertising upon modern professional athletics. Because let's face it -- even if this is a huge coincidence, it would be a marketing coup if Walgreens somehow could jump on the bandwagon..
Of course, it also could end up being terribly depressing.
The renaming of major-league ballparks and other sporting facilities is a necessary evil because of the need of corporate sponsorship dollars and other economic realities of the business of sports. Nevertheless, I can't imagine how disillusioning it must have been for L.A. Laker fans to go from their mighty franchise competing in a place called The Great Western Forum to The STAPLES Center. You might as well be playing basketball in a K-Mart.
Anyway, it's a little creepy. Especially because if you go to the team website, the typeface for the "NATIONALS" part of their overall team logo is very large and masculine looking, with big blocky type. Not only that, but there is also an interlocking "DC" cap-type logo on the page, and it looks like the type of thing that would be on their hats.
So what's with the italicized W instead?
Who knows. I smell a conspiracy theory on the horizon.
The irony of all this? It's a good looking hat.
And I wouldn't mind having one, if for no other reason than to wear it with something else red, and have people ask me if I work for Walgreens. It would be a great conversation starter.
9 Jun 2005 (updated 9 Jun 2005) »
pedro: Thanks for the relic. A P.I.D. LP from 1988. Bee-yutiful.
In other news, here's another little pet peeve of mine -- toll-free numbers listed alphabetically with words that are more than seven letters.
Case in point:
Dialing 1-800-MICROSOFT.
Their phone number is 1-800-642-7676. That, technically, would be 1-800-MICROSO. The "FT" is 38, which probably isn't an actual extension for anyone since their extensions are probably either three or four digits long.
This, of course, while annoying to perfectionists like I, is still probably the best course of action, I begrudgingly admit. Because the alternatives are lame.
You could,
A) Rename the company "MICROSO," which sounds like the typical response to a the latest miniaturely-engineered hybrid PDA/laptop/cellphone: "It's micro... so... ???"
B) Pull the vanity-plate routine where you get rid of extraneous letters to create a hybrid string of characters that generally resembles the word in question. So like, if I had a nice little hoopty-whip that I wasn't sharing with my wife, and had the money to spring for an actual vanity plate, Then "G-Natural" would probably become "G NATRL" or "GNATURL."
The problem with that option is, in this case, it's hard to know which letters to get rid of. You could get rid of vowels, and make it 1-800-MICRSFT. But that might be hard to remember., and it does violence to the general aesthetic of the word.
Maybe you could think phonetically, and since most people don't normally pronounce the "T' Microsoft, you could go with 1-800-MICROSF... but that looks like it could be a hotline for a support group for Micro Machine-collecting addicts in San Francisco.
which leaves the only other option...
C) You just list it as 1-800-642-7676. But then if you're any kind of reputable company with any sort of branded image whatsoever, you look like you've got zero imagination. I mean, I can just see Bill Walton giving the halftime critique...
"We're talking about MICROSOFT here... the crown jewel of the Pacific Northwest, right up there with Intel and Boeing. The company that has revolutionized home computing and created a reputation for innovation and domination.... and all they could come up with was to just leave the number AS IS... ?!!?!
WHERE'S THE DEDICATION?!? This is an EMBARRASMENT. In 40 years, Bill Gates will be spinning in his GRAVE over this. Just TERRIBLE.
* * *
So, as it turns out, I'm wrong.
But it was fun to rant for awhile.
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