Swine – Page 2 – CanooterValve

Pakled Design Works Initiative

Aug 152012

It’s become pretty popular to hate on pampered underachievers–the kids being praised for C- grades and an ability to reach age fourteen without a serious drug problem. Feigning indignation at privileged kids who’re fed a constant stream of positive reinforcement is nearly as popular as vampires and photoshopping stupid shit into the first photos of the Mars rover.

Also popular: wondering where this mindset came from, as if it’s some new social construct, a by-product of high fructose corn syrup and violent video games. My own admittedly simplistic explanation involves apples and trees. From what I can tell, that mediocre kid’s undeserved sense of entitlement got passed down directly from Mom and Dad.

I run into The Gifted Mediocre pretty much daily among the 35 and older crowd, and I’m not even including web designers in there–a group filled with people who routinely turn “on the job training” into careers.

No, I’m talking about the Joe Dumbass Six-pack you traditionally see in the position of upper management, running a company, or starting one. Case in point, I have this friend who works as a phone tech for a major component manufacturer. Let’s call him “Kyle.” Kyle was kind enough to share snippets of a conversation he had today from a gentleman building his own full-suspension mountain bike. They went like this:

“Hi, I’m designing a full suspension mountain bike frame. What type of rear suspension would you recommend.”

Mind you, “Kyle” does not work for a company that manufactures frames, meaning Mr. Asshat isn’t just searching for someone smart to sort his shit; he’s searching in the wrong place, too.

Asshat goes on to ask if the eye-to-eye and stroke of a rear shock is “the diameter” and ask if the different types of suspensions are patented before uttering arguably the best two sentences ever spoken to tech support:

“What width should I make the mounting brackets? I’m getting it molded out of carbon fiber so I can’t machine out pieces afterwards.”

Clearly Mr. Asshat chose to move directly to carbon fiber for his project shortly after mastering the phrase “carbon fiber.” Go big or go home.

Here’s the thing: I know guys running companies who could be this guy. And I admire all of them, all of these incredibly, flamboyantly, stupid people. I wish–sincerely I mean–that I had the sac to ask someone what suspension I should use on my bike.

Why? Because those are the fuckers who Go Somewhere in Life. They have a vision for what they want out of life–grainy, with misspellings and plans drawn in crayon, but a vision nonetheless, and they’re not afraid to use other people to do the shit necessary to realize that half-ass vision.

Any sense of entitlement found in Little Lord Fauntleroy’s self-esteem have nothing on these people–grown-ups, all of them–whose one true gift, really, is sucking other people dry.

Who am I to tell them they’re wrong? It always seems to work for them, this “asking stupid and embarrassing questions” technique. They do seem to end up running companies and helping to bring horrifying shit into the world and figuring out a way to prosper off of it.

I, for one, am not fighting it any longer. Starting immediately, I’m letting it be known that Canootervalve’s launching the Pakled Design Works Initiative, dedicated to helping these mega-successful underachievers–particularly when they want to build full-suspension bikes but don’t know their ass from instant center.

And I’m not just talking. I plan to periodically offer free, innovative and “rad” full-suspension designs to the world. Open source. Shareware, bitches. You want go flat-brim hat and hang out with guys who get paid to drink Redbull even though you drive a Lexus? I’m your ticket.

Are you sitting down, Mr. Asshat? I hope you are, because I am about to drop the knowledge on you–and let you walk away with it completely free, as in without having to “know anything” or “do anything,” just like you like it. Win!

You know how bicycles have to have seatpost collars? What am I thinking? Of course you don’t know that. Well, they do, and seatpost collars have to have bolts in them. They tighten and keep your seatpost up, but in the history of bicycles no one has ever thought to use that shit as a pivot.

That’s right: you want lightweight long travel, you have to get your system integrated. Check it: the world’s first “seatpost pivoting full-suspension system.”

Here’s what to tell your marketing people for the catalog: travel? We don’t think so much in terms of how much travel it has. Rather, we prefer to think in terms of cubic inches of displacement. If the whole thing were submerged and then pushed through it’s travel, it’d displace a “perfect” metric pint of displacement fluid. No other design can say that. Oh, and the big gear is “pedal-driven” and “ultra-stiff,” and–get this shit–it doubles as a bash guard! How? That jumbo chain is fixed, so it’s always protecting the ring. And I mean protecting. It’s a larger chain for maximum durability, but for real performance it can be upgraded to a competiton-grade chainsaw chain! Trail mainenance, riding? Fuck it: you’re doing both. Put that you recommend wearing a protective cup when riding in the small print.

Someday, I’ll even tell you the width of the shock mounting brackets.

The Troll Police

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Aug 142012

I’m at this stage where writing about developing my suspension system is getting in the way of actually developing my suspension system. So I’m shutting the hell up about it for a while. For the three guys out there who care, don’t worry: if something interesting happens, I’ll let you know. And I’ll still be moving dots and lines around on a computer screen and obsessing about every quarter millimeter. I just won’t be bothering to screen capture that crap to post it here constantly. Dots are being moved though.

All the focus on suspension designs has reminded me of an NPR article my wife forwarded to me a few weeks ago. Basically, a few companies–most notably IBM and Halliburton–are trying to patent the act of being a patent troll. Here’s an excerpt from IBM’s troll application, as reported by NPR:

A system and methods for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, for example a patent portfolio, are described. By granting floating privileges described herein, a portfolio owner can extend an opportunity for obtaining an interest in selected assets from the portfolio to a client who lacks the resources to accumulate and maintain such a portfolio, in return for an annuity stream to the portfolio owner.”

I have little love for IBM, and Halliburton seems about as close to the Devil’s official corporation as I can imagine, but clearly someone in each of their legal departments has a useless creative writing degree (like me), and I applaud their initiative. In case you don’t know, the M.O. of a patent trolls is to patent a bunch of imaginary products and then charge anyone who decides to genuinely make one of those things. In a special piece of mind-blowing meta-legal kung fu, these companies are seeking to patent the patent troll process. That’s fucking evil genius.

So when someone with no working prototype and only some vague-ass drawings (like me, right now) of a product tries to sue IBM for, say, inventing that product, IBM could conceivably counter-sue them for violating their patent–the one on being a troll.

Doesn’t look like these attempts are going anywhere, but, I’ve experienced the “work” of a patent troll once upon a time (we had to remove all products from our retail web site that bore the phrase “stealth”–including some WTB saddles at the time–because some douchenozzle claimed to have ownership of that word). Having seen one at work, sitting a pile of his own filth under the bridge of someone else’s idea, I wouldn’t mind seeing their asses crushed under the diabolical weight of some giant legal departments and their professionally trained assholes.

The question, of course–should one of these happen to get through–is could I then patent the act of patenting the act of patent trolling? Might be easier at that point to just patent the act of applying for patents, though that one might be a little tough to get approved.

All Ears

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Jun 252012

There’s a great article over at Fast Company describing the new “social media command centers” some companies are using to “capture, monitor, and utilize social media conversations.” Certainly sounds cool, but I can’t help but think all this talk of “response strategies,” “feedback internalization,” and “two-way conversations” is just the latest version of “this call may be monitored for training purposes”?

Dell, for instance, is cited as a specific example in the article:

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.”

But everyone knows what sucks so bad about Dell. They subsidize the cost of everything by filling your computer with bloatware programs that make it run like ass. They also skin their vendors alive on pricing until the hardware in your PC makes the back aisles at RadioShack look pretty advanced. Will hearing that change their business model? Of course not.

Oddly, it seems like a lot of the companies investing so heavily in monitoring social media would be much better to allocate funds toward simply not being dicks. According to Manish Mehta, Dell’s VP of social media and community,”Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad . . . . It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Right.

When it comes to large corporations, social media is all about pretending to give a shit, but the upside is that it requires actual human beings not just to give that shit, but even to pretend to give it. That’s the social media trap many companies are finding themselves in these days: they thought they could bullshit their way through it like they have so many other things involving customers, but the whole idea that social media is a two-way conversation ruins the whole automated bone-tossing bit. You have to engage with people.

The monstrous industry that’s evolved to support circumventing direct communication with people is certainly impressive. Effective, though? Difficult to say. Other than some game theory time-wasting, it’s tough to say what consumers actually get out of the new communication channels, clogged as they are with “command center” specialists listening and reacting, while still insulating the actual corporate decision-makers. Dell, I’m afraid to reveal, does not actually love you and want to have coffee with you. Even Apple thinks you’re kind of a pain in the ass, frankly.

A few bicycle frame manufacturers, in contrast are in touch with their consumers. Why, because they engage in the same activity as the consumers. That’s why the sight of something like this Kirklee Bikerumor posted recently makes many people who ride bicycles happy.

If you ride a bike, you stand a better chance of understanding what people who ride bikes want. That way, you don’t even have “like” them in order to make the products they want.

A Different Drummer

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May 162012

Week’s off to a fast start. I spent the past few nights studying marketing software and trying to get my head around some web development puzzles (including what turned out to be a rogue Twitter feed–who knew the Fail Whale sometimes visits?). Meanwhile, I’ve stepped work on the new e-comm project up to nine hours a day to learn some system processes and get a jump on major site prep work (pretty excited about where that project is right now). Somewhere in there I found a copy of Dirt Rag in the office break room and was happy to see the Manic Mechanic’s most recent response almost made sense. All the while, emails and phone calls have been coming in on Project Danzig, and I might have to make some decisions and hunker down for a few weekends with Solidworks, Pandora and some Deschutes Black Butte Porter.

Getting some time away from bicycles is difficult right now.

I’m TV-less again for the second time in as many years, which means my window to the world of things “non-work-related” consists of relentless auto-spam from those tools at Zillow (seriously guys, I’ve found a home, thanks, and I’ve unsubscribed from everything and tried to delete my account, but there’s just no escaping you, eh? Is it possible to hire Anonymous for contract work?). The only other happy distractions are the little news articles appear on my phone from time to time.

Last night one of those articles informed me that Bill Ward, the original and only drummer for Black Sabbath, won’t be playing with the band in upcoming reunion shows, due to some contractual stuff (band “management,” for one thing, wanted him to play the first few shows for free with no guarantee he’d be included on the rest of the tour). You should read the entire letter Ward penned to Sabbath fans, and ask yourself whatever happened to musicians like that. Or people like that in general.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I could stomach a Black Sabbath reunion tour anyway. Not for lack of interest, but because I’m old and just barely musically inclined enough to know how they’re supposed to sound, and I don’t drink myself into blind acceptance at shows.

I don’t have anything against old bands. I’m teaching my kids to be good little prog rock elitist nerds who appreciate bizarre virtuosity, so the whole unkempt lot of us will be seeing what could be one of Rush’s last tours this year, but there aren’t many bands that can play like Rush, even at age 60. Who doesn’t love Ozzy, but what little patches of live recordings I heard of various “Ozzfest” Sabbath reunion shows over the past ten years suggest there comes a time when you just have to call it a day. I’d sell a kidney to sit in a room and listen to the original members of Sabbath play “Warning” (OK, kidney and one other redundant organ, but that’s my final offer). Listening to them warble over that big generic stadium rock sound that obliterates almost everything that made the band so great, though? That doesn’t really do either of us any good.

Sabbath will always be a jazz band to me. Nothing against violent, drunken Slipknot fans, but I would’t want to try to actually listen to music with most of them. Worse yet, I wouldn’t want to witness Sabbath in that kind of scenario, struggling to play music around millions of dollars of overprocessed, canned-metal-product nonsense and spendy pyrotechnics that make what’s left of the band even paler shadows of what they used to be. If I want that I’ll go see McTallica.

Maybe there’s a way to visit Bill Ward instead, have some cranberry juice and listen to some old records or something, maybe some piano from Ward One: Along the Way. I think that’d be more my speed these days.

Fresh Pairs

E-commerce, Swine Comments Off

May 032012

What are you trying to tell me, underwear stalkers?

The march of interweb technology definitely seems to be detouring through some dark alleys these days.

Given the twenty or so odd hours I spend immersed in the bike industry, my various browsers roll past an endless string of e-commerce bike sites, which these days means I have something like ten thousand ads for cranksets and carbon 29er frames perpetually following me around. Since the whole Backcountry acquisition, Competitive Cyclist is particularly intense. They have some funky-ass ad functionality that compiles lists of anything you’ve looked at on their sites (applies to all the Backcountry properties) and keeps pushing it in front of you. It makes for a weirdly invasive and pushy vibe compared to the graceful homage to product and “come hither” bit that got them where there are today, and even the image quality on the little ads that follow you around everywhere you go seems out of place and below their standards. But if you need Amazon-like reminders that you looked at shit your life won’t be complete until you purchase, these ads are probably very effective.

Still, they creep me out.

They’re light years better, however, than the mysterious ads that cause you to question your life.

Case in point: why are ads for underwear from a company called “Fresh Pair” now following me everywhere I go? Yes, I’m living in a basement right now, and yes, there’s a bit of an ant problem, but I’m pretty anal retentive (literally) about keeping my clothes clean, thanks. And while I refuse on principle to visit their site, I have the impression that Fresh Pairs is marketed to a group of ultra-achieving males so busy reshaping the corporate world in their chiseled image that they need to schedule replenishment supplies of high-fashion, overpriced underwear.

Anyway, whatever system targeted me as an ideal candidate for underwear replenishment must have been using a complex underwear-condition-sensing algorithm that considers factors like:

Phone GPS – He’s a long way from home and has been there more than two weeks.
Purchase history – He seems to have purchased underwear at some point in the past.
Complex text crawling and processing – He’s living in a basement and rides bikes and stuff.
Government records – He appears to have at least one and possibly more jobs right now–likely ones that involve interacting with other people.
Demographic analysis – Based on age and gender, we suspect he is unable to take care of his own basic apparel needs without assistance.

So thanks, Fresh Pair. I appreciate all the attention, really, but the thing is, I would never spend on designer underwear. Nice try and all, but your data set is fatally incomplete. In addition to all those criteria causing your evil perma-cookies to annoy the hell out of me, I am also married, have children, and long ago gave up on impressing anybody–least of all myself. You are stalking the wrong cowboy, guys, and it’s doing neither of us any good.

If a company offering Subaru body shop work where to start stalking me with ads, then we might be getting somewhere.

Goodwill House Hunting

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Apr 172012

It turns out that searching for a house is not nearly as cool as that TV show “House Hunters” makes it out to be. If it’s really true that independently wealthy people just can’t find anything that makes them happy, I’d like to recommend following me around for a while, looking at house after house that’s either priced like a lost Van Gogh, or can’t contain my sprawling brood–twins are the Gift from God that also happens to wreck your financial planning, but you can never figure out which one to blame, so you have to just love both of them.

But that’s not really the bad part. The truly bad part about buying a new home, when you’re not independently wealthy, is that you have to wade through endless houses, each with weird fatal flaws and strange compromises. In contrast to this, the independently wealthy have the ability to live in a state of near constant wonder and enchantment.

Take this eleven million dollar home in Lake Oswego, for instance.

The nice thing about being able to buy a home that’s worth more than the operating budget for the city of Detroit is that you get to be thrilled and delighted, without any of that unseemly disappointment and compromise. Prefer a master bath large enough to let you play slap and giggle tackle football with the trophy wife? Check. Personally, I would find it impossible not to fill this bathtub with gasoline and fly a radio controlled airplane into it, just to see what would happen, but then I say that about every bathtub I see.

His and Hers separate wings are the new dual-vanities.

Whereas everyone I know who’s currently house hunting is primarily concerned with finding good schools for their kids, anyone capable of owning this home could take the obvious further step of just starting a school somewhere within the home.

In fact, I’m pretty sure this home already includes one of those heavily upholstered and woodgrained schools for foppy English mutant children who’re a little frightened and unsure of their laser beam eyes and metallic skin.

In fact, why are there so many tripods in this home? That, in and of itself, seems highly suspicious, and further evidence that the truly wealthy have no idea what they’re supposed to buy.

What, no tripod in the bathroom?

But imagine how happy you’d be to be able to buy a house that had at least the basic stuff you were looking for? You know, like solid schools, a roof that won’t need replaced in the next few years, and a bathroom that doesn’t look like it was used for cooking meth. To find something like that–something that just covered the basics–would probably make the average person much happier than an $11-million home could ever make someone who can afford it.

That’s why I’m starting the Christopher S. Currie Foundation for Meaning in Wealth, an organization designed to help match wealthy but unhappy people with people who can show them how to appreciate stuff. And maybe build a go cart track in the atrium. That would be so rad.

Fence Painting 101

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Apr 032012

Bike shops all around America are sitting on a potentially huge money making opportunity, and it’s something they’re actually paying for right now. Following news that the U.S. government’s GSA agency spent over $820,000 in tax-payer funds on a lavish conference in Las Vegas that included a mind-reader, a clown and a $75,000 team building exercise assembling bicycles, I was left wondering two things.

First, what the hell is the GSA? From what I can gather, the General Services Administration is the division of the U.S. government that helps other agencies make smart purchases–particularly when it comes to things like conferences. Well, that makes sense then. Apparently the GSA clips coupons on office chairs and teaches less frugal agencies money saving tips, like hiring outside contractors to help plan your party in Vegas, even though your agency has people who do that sort of thing for a living. As a quick reminder, this is what it looks like when Ron Paul laughs:

Gruesome. Thanks a lot, GSA.

Second, and more relevant to my point, who sold these tools unassembled bicycles for $75,000? Some further research suggested 24 bicycles were involved (which were later donated to the Boys and Girls Club). My calculator says that’s $3125 per bike for bikes that were apparently suitable to then donate to children. This would either suggest there are kids at one or two Boys and Girls Club locations currently doing some playground derby on a carbon frame with Ultegra components, or that the clowns at the GSA spent over $3k on bikes with a street value of less than $500 (probably less than $300) and they had to do the assembly.

Bike shops of America: why the hell haven’t we thought of this sooner? Instead of paying for bike techs to properly build the bikes you sell to customers, in today’s DIY culture, why not charge ten times more for the customer to have the honor of actually assembling his or her own bike?

Imagine what else we could do with this! The money making opportunities you’d been sitting on all along could make you a fortune–with the right marketing. Some possible window signs.

For only $500–today only–we’ll let you clean our bathroom! (Please don’t touch the magazines. Seriously.)

All this week, buy one bike and we’ll let you pay for a second bike for one of the shop guys!

Get one free baseball bat test shot to the head by each member of our staff with the purchase of any helmet over $80 and $1 off full price on your next helmet!

Free lifetime service of our bikes in our shop by you, with the purchase of any bike valued at over $750, and half off the cost of maintenance supplies you use while building our bikes!

Endless possibilities, really.

The Asshat Effect

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Apr 022012

I’m about to put an idea in your head. Seriously. Like all ideas, it’s a little scary, and it does suggest you start paying attention to the world around you and stuff, but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, it’s probably a very good idea. Still, I know ideas really upset some people, so I figured a heads up was in order in case you want to just skip the next few paragraph. OK, here’s the idea:

People have become things. I meant this literally. Pay attention to nearly everything you read, and I promise you’ll notice. The word “who” has been almost entirely replaced by the word “that.”

I don’t know what this means, or who’s to blame–though I suspect it’s a side-effect of reality television and “Me First!” culture on the skids. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though, that this new grammatical quirk is happening at the same time mixed martial arts is more popular than ever and at least some part of America thinks hospitals should let some people die. Check out the “fuck you” face on Alpha Male Model up top there. He and his swooning girl can be found on the Kohl’s site, where once famous cycling industry maverick Michael Ball’s bankrupt company crash landed. Do you think that man regards you as a person? Be serious. He doesn’t even regard “his girl” as a person, let alone your sorry Levis-wearing ass. While it’s not the model’s fault his photographer kept yelling, “Look like a nasty asshole, yeah! Like a mean thoughtless prick! Nice!” the fact remains that dickishness is in, and it’s hip to regard others with a mix of disgust, contempt, and obliviousness–as “those people that we don’t know.” We’ve stopped seeing people as people, and it’s showing up in our speech and our writing. Grammatically, we’re walking around in a near permanent state of asshattery when it comes to our fellow man.

If you skipped those last few paragraphs, skip this one, too, because I’m not done yet–or read it with no context, which might make it almost fun. Offering examples is ridiculous because they’re everywhere, but I’ve noticed the problem is particularly rampant in business web articles, suggesting that as corporations became people, people became things. Here’s an article, for instance, that offers productivity tips for “People That Hate GTD (Getting Things Done)”. Well sure, you’re thinking, cold hard business tracts about ruthless shit sometimes read even better when humans are debased, but that’s just business. But explain “Those That Believe,” a sweet little web article that argues salvation will be granted to everybody, not just some of us, while grammatically disposing of each and every one of our souls.

Maybe we have the word “whom” to blame, a simple word that’s as mysteriously unknowable as Ahab’s white whale and as terrifyingly unfriendly as Ridley Scott’s aliens, all at once. Did the fear of “who vs. whom” lead us to stop regarding each other as human beings? Who knows?

One thing I know, however, is that the new Santa Cruz Tallboy LTc is one badass looking bicycle.

See, and you didn’t think I was going to mention bicycles at all today.

Zombie Apocalypse Dating

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Mar 292012

Results continue to come in from the questionnaire I posted yesterday, but the general consensus is that I should keep prattling on about random stuff here as long as the writing remains at least slightly entertaining, or at least until everybody switches to my daughter’s daily cartoon site.

As a kind of punishment for all of you then, I found myself once again pondering America’s ever-growing love affair with doomsday. Have previous empires developed a fascination with zombies and the end times a decade or so before getting their asses handed to them by the second and third-place world superpowers and fading into obscurity? I ask, because it seems like a lot of the same red-blooded “love it or leave it” types are the first ones abandoning ship. What the Ted Nugents of the world don’t understand (I mean, in addition to science and books without pictures) is that canning meat and living underground means you’ve abandoned your country.

Oh, that’s right: I keep forgetting that once the zombies attack, you’re going to find that virtuous but inexplicably scantily-clad fellow crusader and get down to repopulating the country with true patriots. Is there a tipping point, you think, where enough disenfranchised people give up on their chances of happiness in the world as we know it, and start cheering on apocalypse? I mean, was there that tipping point? Seems it might’ve already happened.

Gambling on your lot improving once the streets run with blood is nothing new. I grew up Catholic, and “You’ll Be Happy Some Day, While Those Happy Now Won’t Be” has been one of the Church’s greatest hits for a few thousand years running. These days, though, it’s never been easier to root for the undead to rise and tear down this life that just isn’t working for you.

Consider Survivalist Singles, the new dating site for “preppers” I just learned about from, naturally, CNN Money. According to CNN’s article:

Survivalist Singles, which officially launched in 2010, boasts the slogan, ‘Don’t face the future alone.’ Its ranks are growing — quadrupling to about 1,640 members from around 400 at the end of 2010.”

As one might perhaps expect, “For female preppers interested in finding a man, the site is a dating goldmine.” CNN tells us the site was founded by Andrea Burke, “a 45-year-old middle school art teacher from Montana,” which feels instinctively right for this, though it’s a fun exercise to imagine how large it would have to grow before some brilliant and cosmopolitan Silicon Valley tech billionaire/venture capitalist would decide to hold his nose and make an offer. Is it possible to purchase a tech company ironically? I do think a site based on end-times dating in bunkers in Montana would best be operated as a joint venture between Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, Andy Samberg, and MC Hammer.

Lady Gaga stands to make a fortune off a zombie apocalypse.

Still, it’s not all canned meat, chainsaws and repopulatin’. There could be bad things about a zombie apocalypse, too. The expense, for one thing. As CNN Money reports, “Burke is planning to charge a $5 monthly membership fee so she can generate income from her project. She is considering using a slogan like, ‘Find love for less than the price of a box of bullets’ to draw in paying members.” Really? Membership fees are so Y2K apocalypse. Where’s Eric Schmidt as an investor when you need him? Can you imagine the granular specificity ad placement potential for a voluntarily captive audience? Goldmine.

Human interaction, though, will prove to be the biggest hurdle. It would seem preppers, many of whom were late to the whole “Internet” thing, are only now realizing how wonderful on-line anonymity can be, relative to having to actually meet someone in person. Having invested a lot of energy primarily into survivalist skills–developing the highly refined sense of smell necessary to determine when a possibly-bitten Uncle Larry is about to “turn,” for instance, or knowing with mathematical precision exactly when the family dog becomes less of an asset and more of a food source–the one thing many preppers find themselves completely unprepared to face is life with another human being. CNN Money describes the case of one SurvivalistSingles.com user pretty poignantly:

Because he lives in the mountains of Montana, distance has been a problem. He has met only one woman face-to-face out of more than 20 he has corresponded with on the site. After she visited him in Montana, they decided to just remain friends.”

She’ll be back, Mtexplorer2. One day she’ll need you, and she’ll come back running.

Forgiveness Marketing

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Mar 262012

That’s the “Ferrari” of electric bike maker EH Line’s current lineup, the unimaginatively named “Street Racer.” According to Gizmag, it weighs about 35-pounds, has a top speed of 28mph under its own power, and costs just under $10,000. I mention it here only because some of you heavy embrocators out there may one day find a new High Tech Fred bridging up to you aboard one of these, and I’m sure he’ll want to talk. Sure as robots taking over the world and yearly Spiderman movies, the clash between whatever it is we consider “cycling culture” and motorized bicycles is coming, so you might want to start sorting out your opinions.

Speaking of hot new commuting rides and robots taking over the world, I’m pretty sure that if I ever caved to the joys of electric assist, I’d go all in.

As Seen on TV

Anything good enough for Carrie Brownstein is good enough for me. As marketing goes, the best thing about Portlandia product placements is that the show itself goes out and looks for weird Portland-made stuff–though it still pales in comparison to the best product placement ever seen in a TV show.

But the latest trend in marketing has yet to show up in the bike industry. Mostly, it’s still in beta testing by companies like Belvedere Vodka, that recently posted the image of a smiling man grabbing a panicked woman from behind with the title, “Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly,” on the company’s Facebook page.

Yes, that really happened, and–as is the way with this hot new guerrilla marketing technique–Belvedere then issued an immediate apology, donated some money to a related charity, and sent out the obligatory bullshit “well, I never” letter from President Charles Gibb, which went like this:

It should never have happened. I am currently investigating the matter to determine how this happened and to be sure it never does so again. The content is contrary to our values and we deeply regret this lapse.”

While Mr. Gibb investigates–a process he certainly makes sound more laborious than the President of the company picking up a phone and saying, “I want the fucking idiot who posted a rape scene on our Facebook page in my office by this time tomorrow holding a box of all the shit in his cubicle”–the public apology has certainly made the rounds.

At least in the new viral marketing landscape, charities stand to do pretty well, positioned as they happen to be to receive considerable mea culpa money. As the saying goes, better to ask forgiveness than permission–especially when it comes to brand exposure. Once the next marketing hotness goes mainstream, I suspect we’ll see all sorts of crimevertisement hybrids, from date rape video product feature condemnations from Budweiser and Abercrombie and Fitch, to McDonald’s wild viral success, “World Vomit Day!” and the record-setting “Cannibalism Apology” following a new Pizza Hut topping rollout.

It’s going to be an exciting time to be a consumer.

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