Saw another road called “Dead End Road” today. This one was in reality a dead end road.

Also, I used to think that advertisers wrote and rewrote their ads, then rewrote them again. I thought they really scoured them for mistakes, made sure everything was perfect. This morning I heard an ad that had these two sentences in it: “…you probably thought that beauty, affordability, and quality was impossible to attain.” “…[so and so] Builders is ready for you.” So much for my assumptions. The very next ad contained this sentence “…now we have over X Ford Focuses in stock.”

I have two complaints about LCD flat screen monitors:

1. You can’t slap the sides of them in frustration.

2. You can’t look at the reflections in them to see who’s walking up behind you.

Have you all heard that I’m single-handedly bringing back the nickname? I’m on a campaign!

It has become my opinion that for whatever reason you wish to choose — a downturn in creativity is my favourite — the nickname has largely fallen out of usage. So I’m bringing it back. And to start with I’ve posited 3 rules of thumb. (A lot of this may have been disseminated on Seinfeld as well but this is what I find in my own experience):

1. You can’t make up your own nickname. (Pretty obvious, I know)

2. You have to dislike it at first. (But it can grow on you)

3. It has to somehow be descriptive of your person (pretty obvious too)

Do you find it troublesome when you hear a radio advertisement and the audio is digitally compressed to what sounds like 10bps? It hurts my ears.

I was remarking to others recently about how our digital devices have saved us a lot of money but their audio quality is way down. My cordless phone demands that I turn the volume up if there is any sort of background noise because it’s so difficult to understand the digital audio. However, my 30 year old, avacado, roto-dial phone is easy to understand, even pleasant to use.

Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity: I know it’s a few years old (2000), but I just bought it a few months ago and I reckon I have played this album over and over more times than any other album I own. Even more than Bleed American (Jimmy Eat World-2002?) or Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head, although I probably like those more.

Due to the high gas prices, it’s time for a repeat of my view of “monopolies” or “trusts”. My view: there is no such creature. I may explain with a contemporary example. Some may attempt to blame high gas prices on price fixing. People also tend to think there is no alternative to using gasoline. But of course, think a little more and you’ll realize there are alternatives — but they cost more. Example: the horse and buggy, the electric car, walking, car-pooling.

So if gas prices got up to a certain level you’d start looking more seriously at those alternatives. Maybe at $2 a gallon, you’ll start car-pooling more, at $5 a gallon you’ll buy an electric car. When electricity gets too expensive, you’ll buy a horse. When you can’t buy oats at a reasonable price you’ll start walking.

In reality, petroleum vendors have plenty of competition and that competition keeps prices below a certain level. Consumers just haven’t felt the need to switch to the alternatives yet.