Live from Austin!

I feel like I ought to explain the whole Wii thing. Yes, it’s puerile, but that’s incidental. Anusol and Flatulex aren’t particularly funny because the brands reflect what the product is really about; but when you name a video game system after something from the bathroom, then it’s funny. Context. That’s what makes Mike Meyers’ jokes about Preparation-H funny; it’s in an inappropriate context.

I love mocking stupid corporate branding. I found it funny when we were sitting in a bagel shop in Cambridge and saw an Internet terminal branded “NetPecker“; the company went bust, surprise surprise. Otis Spunkmeyer describe their name as “fun and memorable”. Well, yes, sniggering at Spunkmeyer iced brownies is fun, I guess.

Branding disasters don’t have to be bathroom-related to be funny, though. It was stupid for the UK Post Office to rename themselves Consignia; they renamed themselves back a year later. Dumber was the UK railway company that had the stupid idea of naming themselves “One”. Station announcements for the 9:30 One train to London caused confusion, and they had to rename themselves again. Both companies were mocked, deservedly. Childish?

I’m pretty sure renaming PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting wasn’t a bad idea, but picking “Monday” as the new name was. The only thing that saved them from professional ridicule was being bought by IBM, who immediately killed the whole “Monday” thing.

Would you believe that a company is trying to sell dog and cat food under the brand name BARF? (Do they sell Kitten BARF and Puppy BARF?) Who at Coca-Cola thought that naming their new drink “Zero” was a good idea? “BlaK” was bad enough, especially at the start when they put a line over the ‘a’ suggesting that it was pronounced “Blake”. (They’ve now changed it to a Coke swoosh.)

Internet branding is full of stupidity. Remember when Palm renamed themselves pa1mOne? (Hint: any brand that’s 1337sp34k is stupid.) I can’t see Samsung’s WiBro taking off, fo’shizzle. And on a more trivial note, what possessed C|net to make all their URLs look like alt.cnet.swedish-chef.bork.bork.bork? And the less said about Oui Oui Bebe the better.

Of course, it wasn’t Yeslam Bin Ladin’s fault that his plans for Bin Ladin branded perfume and clothing were ruined, but would you buy a Studebaker Dictator? I guess dictators were all the rage a hundred years ago, and you can still buy Autocrat coffee, though the Aryan supermarket chain Purity Supreme is no longer with us, having been bought by the shrewd but dull brand Stop’n'Shop.

Would you rub Nad’s on your body? Even with the apostrophe, it’s still a terrible brand name. Every time I see Nasalcrom I think of Conan the Barbarian; what do you think Zim’s Crack Creme is for? Worse still is POOLIFE®. Terrible. I can’t believe they went as far as registering it, let alone writing it in all caps.

Magazines pick silly names too. Self, the magazine about the person you love the most. Heeb, the magazine for Jews, current issue “The money issue”. Back in the 80s, Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky joked about a magazine for conspiracy theorists called Popular Paranoia, and now it exists. And at least Crochet Fantasy didn’t decide to call themselves Crochet Rocket.

So is it childish to laugh at such things? Perhaps, but people do it all the time. Childish jokes about sucking on a Fisherman’s Friend have been around for decades. Foreign Engrish remains a source of amusement to thousands. Yes, English isn’t their first language; but even if you’re Japanese or Spanish, you ought to check what your company name might mean in English.

Unfortunately, Nintendo fanboys get all bent out of shape and puritanical when you start mocking their favorite video game company’s products. Perhaps it has something to do with the way the GameCube has been dismissed as a “kiddy game” console for years?

Anyhow, the Nintendo Wiinies are now theorizing that it’s all a cunning publicity stunt, and that the real name for Wii will be revealed next week. Maybe Wii is intentionally awful, like Dogfish Head Golden Shower beer.

I’m doubtful; Japanese companies have a knack for bad product names. Even video game companies—consider Irritating Stick and Radiata Stories. (”I was bleeding the valve one time when scalding water shot out over the carpet…”)

I hope for Nintendo’s sake that that the publicity stunt theory is true. I mean, really, I have nothing against Nintendo—I own a GameCube—and the last thing they need is to attach a childishly silly name to their new console.

And if you want to flame me or call me childish, first tell me you didn’t laugh at any of the above. I’ll tell you that you need a sense of humor.

Douglas Adams expressed it as: No matter how fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Megacamel. I’ve had some sleep now, and no longer feel zoned out. However, my brain definitely doesn’t really understand that this is now home, that we won’t be returning to Cambridge MA.

So, here I am in Austin, TX, where the voting machines are set to default your vote to Bush if you just press enter, and there’s no paper trail whatsoever. The machines were chosen after a secret meeting between politicians and voting machine manufacturers, at a closed session in which no minutes were taken. Hmmm.

Sara’s watching the Weather Channel. Today’s forecast is 84F, 28 celcius. Seems like a nice peak temperature to me, but she is clearly not convinced.

I have two zits under my left eye. Actual zits, with pustules and everything. Not sure why. I hope they go away. My hair is a mess and will need cutting soon. Now begins the process of learning where to go for haircuts, where to find cheap CDs, and so on.

I feel like I ought to have stuff to write about our journey, but I didn’t take any notes and nothing really occurred to me. Maybe the words will come later.

I was just listening to The Sunday Format on Radio 4 when I heard a name I recognized in the credits: DA Barham.

I used to chat to Debbie Barham via IRC. She’d moved to London and gotten a regular gig writing for the Rory Bremner show, and would often while away time on IRC at odd hours as she came down from a writing binge. I think we got chatting because there was a discussion of Bond movies, and we both thought On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would have been the best Bond movie ever, if it wasn’t for George Lazenby. We’d mostly chat about radio and comedy, and try to make each other laugh, though she was also interested in geekier topics. I particularly remember her telling me how incredibly thrilled she was when they had The Stranglers guest on the Bremner show, and she got to meet them. I always felt bad that I didn’t get to meet her in person before I left for the US. Another time we got the whole channel swapping ideas for ridiculous phobias after she’d just finished an article on the subject.

Since I consider The Sunday Format to be the best radio comedy I’ve heard in years, I thought I’d see if I could find Dabs’ current e-mail address and send her a note of congratulation. As I recall, the last time I wrote to her was to compliment her on her BBC radio show celebrating The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which she showed her amazing skill by nailing Douglas Adams’ writing style precisely.

A quick search on Google revealed the horrific truth: she’s dead. She died a little over a year ago, aged 26.

Worse, she died of heart failure, from literally starving herself to death through anorexia. The Guardian has an obituary and a feature article about her. The obituary has a photo of her, in which she looks fragile, yet with a somehow piercing gaze. There’s an Evening Standard article with a color photo. Again, the same penetrating gaze. It’s not how I’d imagined she might look, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

She could be sharp, yes. To be funny, you often have to be. But at the same time, she was a good person, and always friendly to me. She seemed to need to write the way other people need to breathe; she wrote for everyone on every subject, yet never wanted to be in the spotlight, in spite of how much she deserved it. I’ll be seeing her name in unexpected places for years. I just wish I could hope to see it more and more.

I jumped back in time on a Quantum Leap style mission to retrieve some information, and I was back in Cambridge in the 1970s. I suddenly realized I had a chance to save Douglas Adams—all I had to do was find him at John’s, and convince him not to exercise so hard.

The problem was, it turned out that college Porters were actually Timelord agents, and they were onto me. They were determined to prevent me from interfering with Douglas Adams’ time stream, perhaps because it would result in Shada being completed and secret details about them being revealed to the world.

In case anyone’s slightly interested, my new Birkenstocks are Richmond in Cordura. I think I’m going to have to order a second pair and stash them away.

See, when I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series season 2, I didn’t feel that the whole Dolmansaxlil sub-plot was excessive at all. Like Douglas Adams, I had had the experience of walking the length of Oxford Street, visiting every wretched shoe shop, in the futile hope that one of them might have a pair that would actually fit my feet.

The strange thing is, I knew so many people in England with the same problem. Go to America, they’d say. Or Germany. You can get shoes that actually fit your feet there. Only in England could an entire industry ignore the fairly basic requirements of its customers.

Which is not to say that it’s easy to find shoes that fit in America; however, it’s possible. Whereas I only once recall finding well-fitting shoes that didn’t need insoles in the UK.

God, what a pointless and trivial journal entry.

Douglas Adams has died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 49.

I don’t generally get upset when the death of a celebrity is announced—after all, it’s not like I know them or anything. Sure, in some abstract sense I’m sad, but I don’t really feel like I’ve lost a friend. But this is different. I’ve spent so much time immersed in the various Adams worlds—from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Starship Titanic—that I feel like I know him.

The last time I was this upset by the death of someone famous was when Willie Rushton died. I doubt anyone in the US has heard of him, but he was well known in the UK. He was a cartoonist, satirist, author, children’s TV presenter, and regular guest on “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” on Radio 4. To me, he felt like an uncle. After all, he’d read stories to me when I was a kid.