Posts tagged “marketing”

Pat Patriot

  • The legacy New England Patriots logo of a minuteman center about to hike a football (that looks suspiciously like an eggplant) is officially known as Pat Patriot. 1 When I was at Super Bowl XLII in Arizona as a guest of the NFL, I was gifted an awesome distressed / vintage white Reebok retro t-shirt featuring Pat Patriot. It was my favorite t-shirt. It was accidentally incinerated in an industrial furnace several years ago — it’s a long story — and I’ve never been able to find another one exactly like it. I’ve looked far and wide, Googled and eBayed repeatedly, set alerts, but no luck. I’ve seen a red version a few times on eBay, but never the same white one I had and loved. I can’t even find an image of the same shirt anywhere online!
  • Questlove created a trailer for the 50 Years of SNL Music documentary and it is completely mind-blowing. You have got to see it.
  • When our TV enters screensaver mode, it shows images from Google, including the artist’s credit. One cute photo prompted me to search for Aravind Krishnaswamy and we were delighted to discover he has a plethora of pleasing penguin pictures.
  • The latest issue of Culture of Sport (from David Skilling) examines why paying $7M for a 30-second Super Bowl ad is, incredibly, still a good deal.
  • The entire global cosmetic Botox industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams of botulism toxin. Pure toxin would cost ~$100 trillion per kilogram. – via Tom Whitwell
  • TV & Movies
    • We watched Mr. Popper’s Penguins recently and it was a big hit. It’s a great kid movie, especially if your kids are infatuated with penguins. (And it’s Jim Carrey acting like a [mostly] normal human being, which is my favorite version of him.)
    • We have finally started watching Skeleton Crew, the latest Star Wars series. I read somewhere last year that the concept was supposed to be The Goonies, but Star Wars, and they nailed it. So far I think it’s phenomenal and I regret not having started it sooner.
    • Fly Me to the Moon (Apple TV+) was a pretty fun family movie, but should have been at least a half hour shorter. It was campy and painfully predictable, but the kids liked it. Woody Harrelson was great.
1 I would guess that the “new” logo (that looks suspiciously like a windswept Elvis) is probably officially known as Pat Patriot, too, but that’s a different issue.
  • Everyone should be following Nike Running Coach Bennett on Threads and/or Bluesky.
  • bartender.liveDespite some choad that’s selling a nearly-identical knock-off of my app (that is somehow ranked #1 in the Food & Drink category in the App Store), the 48 hours surrounding Thanksgiving was a banner sales day for bartender.live, which was nice to see. If you haven’t yet, please rate and review my little side project. It really helps!
  • We have several lighted Christmas decorations that burn through AA batteries. I’ve been buying rechargeable batteries for years and love them, but it still bugs me and I kept thinking there must be a way to convert these things to use AC power. I was ready to start researching amps and volts and power adapters and break out my soldering iron, but then found these cool dummy battery plugs that appear to do exactly what I need!
  • Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke are national treasures that should be on money. This scene is incredible.
  • Did you like Agatha All Along enough to listen to a ten-hour lo-fi remix of The Witches Road? – via @agentm
  • Most of us are famously terrible at comprehending very large numbers, but I find it much easier to wrap my head around the idea that around two and a half billion T. Rex roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous Period than the fact that their reign lasted nearly two and a half million years. That is a long, long, long time to rule the planet. (Humans have been around, at most, for only about 300,000 years. Sharks have been around for something like 400 million years, by the way, which means they’ve been around just a bit longer than trees and probably twice as long as Saturn has had rings.)
  • Tania Rascia just redesigned her blog (again) and added light/dark theming, which is something I’ve been meaning to do here for a long time. She also created a nice web developer starter pack on Bluesky.
  • I’m a big fan of moo.com’s mini business cards, and they’re having a significant sale through Dec 5: 30% off and free shipping with promo code CYBERYAY
  • Bryson DeChambeau’s Viral Golf Challenge: A Marketing Masterclass, How a Simple Idea Captivated Millions and Delivered Big Results – via Culture of Sport

Zima: RIP

To Coors’ horror, Zima proved most popular among young women — a demographic that, while generally fond of getting tanked, just doesn’t have the same thirst for hooch as its male counterpart. And once the ladies took a shine to the stuff, the guys avoided Zima as if it were laced with estrogen. from The

A Rant about Keywords and URLs

A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.