FourBux

G’day guvnah.

I love to drive. I’m a driver’s driver. I’ll volunteer to drive to any event, almost any distance. I had actually volunteered to drive from Phoenix to Ohio on Saturday because a friend and his family are moving and had no way to get the second car out there. They eventually found someone in their family who would make the trip, but I was planning on it!

As with all cars, sometimes my car needs to go into the shop. When it does, I mourn for a little bit, then ride the bus to work, or to the garage, or wherever. I could find someone to give me a ride, sure, but I feel using public transportation keeps me connected to the community. Or something.
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I don’t remember that being in the brochure

People for whom I have an ever-increasing amount of, for lack of a better word, respect for, are marketers.

Not tele-marketers. But real marketers. The spin doctors. The damage control masters. The type of gurus who can sell me overpriced coffee when it’s 113 degrees out. And they do.

The city of Phoenix has been touting the re-energizing of the South Phoenix area for a long time, and there are some parts that are quite nice. There are also some parts that are still scary. Same as in all cities, I suppose.

So we moved in. Call me a naive, but I still expect the neighborhood to at least resemble the pictures in the sales brochure and on the commercials. Granted, our cars haven’t been broken into yet (fingers crossed!), although we have been egged and paintballed. I can live with that. At least those wash off in the rain. And we get rain like, twice a year. Score!

So when it’s 11:30 at night, and one gets the craving for that midnight grease bomb, or FourthMeal as the Marketing Team and Hobbits refer to it, Taco Bell is just around the corner. When you head out into the night in search of that elusive “Fire” sauce fix, you just don’t expect to get attacked by a car alarm.

“Attacked?” you ask. “Don’t you mean just annoyed?”

Well, one can be annoyed by the simple car alarm, with the idiotic horn honking an the seizure-inducing flashing lights, but when it comes to SoPho, there’s a new breed of car alarm in town: the GhettoGuard 3000. It comes in different colors and sizes, with the “Labrador” one of the most popular. See poor camera-phone example at the right. No, that’s not a bear behind that car - it’s the GG3000!

Although the drawbacks to this type of alarm include urine-scented wheels and a paintless hood, the benefits to these kinds of alarms are numerous. It’s rumored that they have a “learn” function, although that is unsubstantiated. They won’t run down the car’s battery. They can be set to any number of sensitivity levels. The one pictured was actually set on “proactive”, so as I slowed down to gawk from a distance, the GG3000 armed and came after me. Fortunately I could snap this quick picture before the alarm completely discharged, launched from the hood of the Oldsmobile and chased my car through the Fry’s parking lot.

Driving home, I racked my brain, going over it in my mind. I’m pretty sure I would remember that part of the experience.

I guess that means this wasn’t in the brochure.

Mo’ time than I know what to do with, obviously

In my quest to further distance myself from any kind of productive activity or paying work, I decided to create a character for the Mojizu web site, which bills itself as a “Contemporary Character Design Community.”

I have no idea what that means. There is a pretty cool Chewie character, though, so that’s fun.

Here’s the crux of it: you create (draw) a character of some sort, give said creature a name and some personality traits, then send him out into the character world. At some point, there may be a battle. Which means what, exactly, I don’t know. I guess people vote for your “Moji”, as they’re called, and in American Idol-ish fashion, one is declared the winner.

I can’t find anyplace on the site what you actually win.

A complicated design competition with no prize at the end? Sign me up!

Based on some input from a coworker, I created the character below, and with a few finishing touches, I will unleash the Legosaurus (Reptilicus Rectangulus) into the cartoon world - chaos will rain down!

Or, nothing will happen. It’s kind of a toss up at this point.

Either way, I’m okay with that.

By way of an update, the Legosaurus is now considered a “Hot Moji” - not sure what that means, but all right!

This is what I spent my day doing?

So I wandered across the Startling Moniker web site the other day, and daveX, the author of the site, posted some pictures that his wife took the day before.

Of nature. Geez. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Once he downloaded the photos off the camera, he found something interesting - the Superman shield in the clouds! In an effort to have them, I guess, authenticated, somehow the images were sent to the Photoshop teacher at UNLV (by a member of the Superman HomepageI’m going to go out on a limb here and say “overkill”), who promptly declared them fake and daveX a liar.

If it were a fake, the big question to me would be “Why create such an ambiguous image?” With no decent motive, I just don’t think there’s a crime.

Now, not being one to sit idly by and actually do work I would get paid for, I thought “How hard could it be? Why not see what a faked photo looks like?” So, I put in waaaay more time than I had anticipated on the image below.

Although I think mine is obviously a fake, it turns out that it’s hard to make a logo out of clouds.

The moral of this little story?

Seek out professional help for your obsessive-compulsive tendencies before they impair your ability to make a living.

How I learned to play cricket

Way back when I was in High School, my church youth group went on a “missions” trip to Jamaica. Some missions marketing genius finally figured out that if you want people to pony up a ton of their own money to fly around the world with you to build houses in the jungle, there had better be some perks included. Hence, Jamaica. Two weeks of work, with time off for touristy stuff. Count me in!

Now, despite the fact that this was, as I said, a church group, it was, more importantly, a group of high schoolers. High schoolers with raging hormones, senses piqued in anticipation, going to be further away from our families than any of us had ever been before. Yes, some good would come out of this trip, but, ah, not the kind you can print in the brochure.
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If I lived in Springfield…

That is too fun. Great implementation of the new Flash technology, as well as a terrific marketing plan.

Heck, I’ll plug it: go turn yourself into a Simpsons character.

And then go buy yourself a Squishie.