Uniquely designed for rest, each Nook is a perfectly private, quiet pod with the most comfortable bed imaginable (a Casper mattress, of course). All bedding is freshly laundered for each new dreamer.
The Nook also features:
• Auto-fading lights • A pendant light for reading • Sound absorbing back wall • Ventilation for airflow • A bedside shelf with outlets
(via Uncrate) Read the rest
They're not dog bowls or flower pots, though DEVO's iconic red plastic vacuum-formed helmets, their "Energy Domes," have been mistaken for such things.
On the fan-site DEVO-OBSESSO, DEVO's co-founder and bass player Gerald ("Jerry") Casale explains their original intent (outside links mine):
It was designed according to ancient ziggurat mound proportions used in votive worship. Like the mounds it collects energy and recirculates it. In this case the Dome collects the Orgone energy that escapes from the crown of the human head and pushes it back into the Medulla Oblongata for increased mental energy. It's very important that you use the foam insert (which is included with every Dome when purchased from ClubDevo.com), or better yet, get a plastic hardhat liner, adjust it to your head size and affix it with duct tape or Super Glue to the inside of the Dome. This allows the Dome to "float" just above the cranium and thus do its job. Unfortunately, sans foam insert or hardhat liner, the recirculation of energy WILL NOT occur.
Mark Mothersbaugh, the band's co-founder, lead singer and keyboardist, shared with Fecal Face in 2008:
Read the restWe did the red energy dome, which was useful besides being an icon it was a useful icon. You probably know this very well, but your orgone energy goes out the top of your head...and it dissipates out the top, but if you wear an energy dome it recycles that energy. It comes back down and showers back down on you and, among other things, you remain manly, shall we say, for maybe another 150 years of your life, probably.
I'm no futurist but I think I've spotted the future of beverage-dispensing devices. Marin County Fair vendor Phil's Lemonade is selling lemonade-filled (philled?) jetpacks for $19.99 a pop. Phil'er up!
Previously: Deep-fried filet mignon, spaghetti donuts, and "unicorn-specific" foods debut at the San Diego County Fair
photo by Rusty Blazenhoff Read the rest
If your kid gets fined for running an unlicensed lemonade stand this summer, or has to pay to get a license to operate a stand, Country Time will pay the first $300 in expenses, to a maximum of $60,000 in fines between now and Aug 31 (sorry, Labor Day parade lemonade stands, you're SOL). It's a genius promotion, which is not something I say often. (via Kottke) Read the rest
IHOP caused quite a stir last week by claiming they are changing the restaurant chain's name to IHOb. They aren't. It's (duh) a marketing stunt and the "b" stands for "burgers." From the New York Times:
Many people said they were distressed, some because they hate the sound of the new word, others because they love pancakes. (Pancakes remain on the restaurant’s menu.) Still others pointed out that the “changed” logo, with its lowercase b, resembled that of o.b. tampons....
Brad Haley, IHOP’s chief marketing officer, said that the idea had been proposed by the marketing firm Droga5 in November. He said that only one IHOP location, on Sunset Boulevard, had undergone a design change in response to the new (fake) name, which is meant to promote a product line of Ultimate Steakburgers.
Philadelphia's WHYY radio reports that visitors to the city's hospital emergency room are blitzed for weeks with ads for personal injury lawyers, thanks to "geofenced ad" brokerages. Read the rest
In the early 1970s, Levi's ran these fantastic psychedelic TV commercials with narration by Ken Nordine, the beat creator of the pioneering Word Jazz albums of the 1950s that melded far-out poetry with hip musical accompaniment. Far fucking out.
Social rating site Klout saw where society was heading with influencer marketing, but like many bad ideas that were a little ahead of their time, Klout will not live on to see the devastation they helped usher in. Read the rest
Sioo:x Wood Protection is a boring company. That doesn't mean its products aren't important. It's just hard to jump up and down with glee over wood protection. Nevertheless, the "world's most boring billboard" that Sioo:x installed in Malmö, Sweden is pretty cool. It's a triple sided outdoor display made of wood that's been treated with preservative. The billboard will remain outdoors for 12 years as a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of Sioo:x's treatment against long term exposure to the harsh environmental insults handed out by Sweden's unforgiving weather. Read the rest
Unilever founder John Wanamaker famously said, "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. My only problem is that I don’t know which half." It's an odd testament to the power of advertising, an industry whose executives are incredibly effective at selling their services to other executives, even if they can't prove they're any good at selling their customers' products to the public. Read the rest
In an inevitable development, Giphy, which created a very handy platform for creating GIFs from existing content, is now bringing influencers into their studios to deliberately create original GIFs in hopes of getting some of that seconds-long heat for brands. Read the rest
Artist Jenny Odell created the Bureau of Suspended Objects to photographically archive and researched the manufacturing origins of 200 objects found at a San Francisco city dump; last August, she prepared a special report for Oakland's Museum of Capitalism about the bizarre world of shitty "free" watches sold through Instagram influences and heavily promoted through bottom-feeding remnant ad-buys, uncovering a twilight zone of copypasted imagery and promotional materials livened with fake stories about mysterious founders and branded tales. Read the rest
Apple's podcast feature in Itunes is probably the most successful podcatcher extant, and it's long been understood that the app gathers extensive data on listeners' habits: what they listen to, when and where, and how they listen (skipping ads, increasing playback speed, etc). Read the rest
It is routine for companies -- and even individuals -- to send emails with "beacons," transparent, tiny images that have to be fetched from a server. Through these beacons, companies can tell whether you've opened an email, whom you've forwarded it to, and even your location from moment to moment. Read the rest
There's a new form of blog post going around comprising short, single-sentence paragraphs. Mostly marketing cliché delivered in the smugly impatient tone of know-it-all men, "Broetry" is the perfect material to game LinkedIn.
“I probably average around, 4,000 engagements and 600,000 views per post,” said Fechter. He also stressed that it’s “all organic” traffic and he doesn’t spend a cent marketing the content.
Three online marketers that spoke with BuzzFeed News said that they first noticed the single-line, single-paragraph updates becoming more prevalent on LinkedIn in late September, when copycats began mimicking Fechter hoping for similar success. Since then, there’s been a broem for almost anything: hiring, failing, dating, being single, and fake news. There’s even been broems about broems, like those published by Sam Parr, the founder of business newsletter The Hustle. He published one as a joke. It racked up more than 2,000 likes in a matter of days.
BBC News' style guide calls for one-sentence paragraphs, which gives its writing a simple staccato authority. This was copied and abused by the various Facebook-gaming viral sites of the early- to mid-2010s, and now some echo of all that has found a new life on LinkedIn, the web's coldest and most desperate social network.
Many broems read as parodies of things we read last year on Medium: the same life-lessons rooted in cash-fire entrepreneurship, the same anxious performance of wisdom and authority, but in 70 words instead of 700. I figure it all comes from spending 18 hours a day performing marketing or activist roles inside social media fishtanks. Read the rest
Vegemite Blend 17 is a premium edition of the love-it-or-hate-it iconic Australian spread, packaged in a fancy box and sporting a fancy label, sold at more than twice the cost of plain-old Vegemite. Read the rest
Burger King Russia has filed a complaint with the country's anti-monopoly agency to have the film It banned because, they say, Pennywise the killer clown is free marketing for McDonald's. From Newsweek:
