Only Dead Fish

Three Wolf Moon

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Thanks to Jaime for pointing me at this hilarious story from the BBC. The Three Wolf Moon T-shirt has become the top selling fashion item on Amazon.com, increasing sales by 2300% after a series of ironic customer reviews 'went viral'. The first review (five stars of-course) said it "Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women" but "cannot see wolves with arms crossed". Hundreds of others then piled in with reviews ranging from "When I put this T-shirt on for the first time, my wife left me! Thank you, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt," to "Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather." At time of writing there were over a thousand such gems.

It's so HERD-like it reminded me of the sasquatch music festival dancing video that got a lot of twitter coverage at the end of last week. Either way, it's got to be one of the funniest case studies on how ideas spread. You never know, as an ironic T-Shirt perhaps it will catch on...

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The Goatee Saver

Ash kindly pointed me at this priceless post over on John Dodds' blog. Something for all those dodgy goatee wearers out there. Cursing the fact that christmas has just been and gone...

Free Shirt

Marvellous news. After I responded to his What Not To Wear post by saying that I actually quite liked the shirt he was offering up as his wardrobe nightmare,  Rob left me a comment:

"You should know that after your comment on my blog, one of my business partners rang me up in the middle of the night and ORDERED ME to send it to you [and I don't think it's because he has suddenly developed a 'nice' streak]. Anyway, if you send me your address details, I'll happily post you the 'fabric of mass destruction'."

Said shirt is pictured below and I'm looking forward to getting it. Unfortunately I don't think he's going to give me the cat though. I suppose it's only fair that I post a picture of me wearing said shirt when I get it. Who says blogging doesn't bring benefits?

Me, Me, Me

Todd Andrlik has come up with the idea of doing profiles of some of the Ad Age Power 150 bloggers and I think it's a rather good one as you get some good opinion whilst finding out a bit more about the faces behind the blogs in a 8-things-you-didn't-know-about-me sort of way. His latest one is of little old me (:o)) so if you want to know what part choc-ices have played in my rise to the top, or find out what I did 5 times in one afternoon on a plane, or if you just want to see an even dodgier photo of me than the one on the left, then you can go here...

Dominique

She blinks, she smiles, she winks. Spooky.

The Worst Album Covers...Ever

I'm a big fan of Jeff Bridges. I love his work and he has an excellent website which I've mentioned before with some great stuff on it including a link to The Complete Works of Shakespeare (yes, really) and this little gem -  a collection of some of the worst album covers you are ever likely to encounter, which includes these corkers:

Blimey. Go take a look . I'd love to know your favourite (or if you have a better one?)

Skypephone Confession

I have a confession to make. Late last year I was asked to trial the new Skype phone as part of a blogger outreach programme and I agreed, partly because I love the whole concept of Skype and partly because I thought it would be interesting.

Well, I have to admit that I have hardly used the phone. Not because it's a rubbish phone. It's very good. Easy to use, nice looking, quite intuitive and all that. No, the reason I haven't used it much is simply because not enough of my friends and family are Skyped-up. So it was difficult to take advantage of it's key feature - the big fat Skype key in the middle of the phone which allows you to make Skype-to-Skype calls for free. The numbers of users of Skype services seems to be growing apace, but I'm afraid I just don't know enough of them. Sorry guys. You can have your phones back if you want. I'd feel a bit of a fraud doing a full review because I just don't think I've used it enough to justify it. But if your interested in reading some, there are plenty out there.

The blogger outreach programme itself seems to have been a bit patchy, but was generally handled OK from my experience of it. They got the tone about right, and there were quite a few ideas as to how you could get more involved (though I didn't actually take them up on any of them). And they seem to have been pretty balanced in their representation of reviews. Outreach programmes like this seem to be on the increase but I think it's a real skill to get it right and get people sufficiently engaged. I think we've still got a way to go on that score.

...Which Is Nice

Looks like I've made it into Campaign's 'Best of the Blogs' this week (for this). Alongside Jason who I'm happy to report has resumed posting after too long an absence. Welcome back Huff!

Fighting Crime With Ones and Zeros

This video is not new but I saw it for the first time yesterday (in a cab of all places) and kind of liked it. It's an IBM promo done by OgilvyOne about how data architecture and management have transformed how the NYPD fight crime. It was, according to the Commissioner, a "classic case of a big organisation not knowing what it knows" but it's also a surprisingly human story, and a great case study of how effective data flow can change the fundamentals of how an organisation works. Strangely, embed is disabled on You Tube (isn't that annoying when they do that?) so have sourced it from somewhere else...

How To Advertise To Men

An oldie but goodie.