A wee bit of inside baseball, but still...

I'm not one to throw stones or hold grudges, but there are a few people who have rubbed me the wrong way in my professional life. And it's an incredibly short list.

The recurring theme with the folks I just cannot like is that they are willing to do almost anything to make themselves look good or to help themselves succeed. And there's just something uniquely frustrating about watching this person prosper while you tell yourself: "In the end, there's nothing more important than your ethics. It's worth being less successful if it means being a better human being."

Why do I bring this up? Well, in my old newspaper chain, there was this one editor who seemed to be an ever-brightening star within the industry. I felt like I was the only one seeing (or at least caring about) his reprehensible ethics.

Well, you can't outrun that forever.

No good conversation starts with, "Sorry we had to meet this way..."

So work's been kicking my ass this week (and last week), and I was quite excited about a relaxing night at home yesterday. Maybe some podcasting, some TV, some of Karen's leftover birthday cookie cake.

Sadly, no. I walked in the door and Karen said, "Oh good, you're home! I'm worried about Jonas."

Turns out, while she was taking him on his daily walk, Jonas got jumped by a golden retriever-looking dog that usually just barks at him from behind a fence. Luckily, the owner and another neighbor were there to pull the dog off quickly, and Jonas seemed unfazed.

But at home, Karen saw that the wound on Jonas' leg was pretty deep. That was when I came in. I agreed it was pretty serious, and we were able to catch the vet at 5:55 and beg them to stay open.

The vet said the bite had gone down to the bone and nearly separated a tendon in his ankle. She had to put him under, sew him up with nine stitches and give him the stylish bandage you see in the photo above.

The anesthesia was pretty disorienting for Jonas, so he spent much of the night crying. All in all, though, he was a trooper.

As for me, I got to go have a fun conversation with our neighbor. I had never met him, and here I was showing up with a $350 receipt in hand. But he was extremely apologetic and promised to "take care of it." He seems like an earnestly good guy, so hopefully we'll get that money back. If the attack had been just a few minutes later, he might have owed us $1,000 or so for the emergency vet.

Anyway, just had to share our fun evening. To be honest, I still squeezed in some cookie cake and TV. Karen's cousin's girlfriend is in the new series The Black Donnellys, but sadly (we realized halfway through the show) she doesn't appear until the second episode. So keep an eye out next week!

UPDATE: Before I could even hit the "publish" button, I got a call from the other dog's owner. He's working with the vet to reverse the charges on our credit card and switch it over to his. Says he'll call when he's gotten confirmation about it. So huzzah for being neighborly.

UPDATE 2: Karen says the vet bill has been resolved. Woohoo!

'Do you have any plans to make the PS3 not suck so much?'

I have to admit, I was one of the most pessimistic about the Nintendo Wii. It just sounded like a novelty gimmick with its nunchuck-style controller. But now that I've played it, I understand why it's become such a phenomenon. It's, you know...fun.

At the same time, I've been amazed by the spectacular collapse of the Sony PS3, which follows two generations of incredible success. How did Sony lose out to an unloved corporate megalith like Microsoft (whose 360 is both fun and powerful) and a perennially uncool brand like Nintendo, which didn't even bother to upgrade its graphics technology for the Wii?

I think this guy does a pretty good summary of the whole situation, set to the tune of "How to Save a Life" by The Fray:



Hat tip to Adfreak.

What can nerd do for you today?

No real deep message here...just a series of coincidences:

On Slate.com today, the main story is illustrated thusly:




Then, a few paragraphs down, there's this headline:



Finally, their "Explainer" piece on real-life tomb raiders begins with this:

Video-game maker Eidos will soon release the 10th-anniversary edition of its classic game Tomb Raider, starring nerd temptress Lara Croft.

So what have we learned? Nerds are dangerous. Nerds are auteurs. Nerds are tempted by cleavage.

I was surprised about the auteurs part.

Dive! Dive! Dive! Now run!

Check out this British TV spot. The surprise is not the visual trick they pull off, but the fact that they didn't use any digital effects. It's all done with frantically running and diving actors.



You can see how they pulled it off by watching these behind-the-scenes clips.

Tim over at AdFreak wonders why they bothered, when digital effects would be so much easier.

The answer, in my opinion, is found in the fact that I'm writing about this ad, Tim's writing about this ad, etc. I think someone recognized that a trick like this would get good buzz. But does that translate into customers for...um...whatever this product is?

Well, it's one-third right. I am hot.

Random stat thrown out on the Mental Floss blogs today...

If you’re turning 30 this year, you’re probably good-looking and might have marital problems, because you’re so fickle.

Since Karen and I are both turning 30 this year (she'll hit the landmark in just a few days, while I have a good six months left), this seems doubly pertinent.

But maybe it's that double dose of beauty and fickleness that is offsetting the potential for marital problems. Woo...hoo?

Let's all help out my man Miles.

New-media guru Joseph Jaffe is having a contest to select his next book cover, and one of the candidates is Miles, a designer I work with here at the agency. He was winning clearly, though one of the other candidates "magically" shot up about 150 votes.

I refuse to play dirty and exploit the admitted frailties in Joseph's voting system, so instead I'm just grubbing for extra votes. Miles' design is included here, and I'm sure he'd appreciate your support.

But as I am a man of principle, I encourage you to vote for the design you feel deserves it most.

Start here and follow the link to the vote. There's no confirmation or anything after you vote, but his blog post includes a link to the current vote tally.

So many Ethiopians, so little room in my inbox.

Today's Mental Floss blogs included a mention of Spamusement.com, a site where a guy makes cartoons based on the subject lines of spam e-mails he's gotten. It's worth checking out.

The one shown here is called "Your dog will love it!"

But be sure to check out "You were wrong cabinet Sanchez" and "Who will know?"

What's the best subject line in your spam folder right now?

I'd have to say mine is "Over the past year, you have received letters from a number of Ethiopian politicians, academics and citizens backing our claim."

Yes, that's literally just the subject line.

I wonder if they have beer there?

Well, we've finally booked our long-awaited trip to Prague. If you've known me a while, you know this trip has been a dream of mine for a decade or more. So I'm obviously quite a bit excited.

The plan, roughly, is to fly into Paris this May, pick up our friend Alexia, and take a train to Prague. (It's a 10-day trip.) We then fly back from Prague to Paris, then back home. If you've ever tried something like this, any advice would be appreciated. Our last international trip that didn't involve Canada or Mexico was our honeymoon in Greece, which was pretty easy, since we basically just sat around eating and drinking.

Not much else to say right now, but I did want to share. Please commence the advice, warnings, etc., for long-distance travel in the comments section.

I might be lying to you right now.

Thanks to the power of Google Alerts, which lets me know when a new Web site or blog post mentions my name, I stumbled across this recent newspaper column mention by my longtime mentor Rich Somerville:

Another regularly visited site is that of a friend, Griner*, who is in his late 20s and has an eclectic (some might say warped) creative side that is manifested through his blog as well as his job as an advertising copywriter.

It's flattering to be mentioned in Rich's column, even if said column does end with the line, "And next time you're reading a blog and think you're getting the gospel truth -- think again."

I assure you, there are quite a few points between A and B. Be sure to check it out. It's an interesting read and a nice insight into the the daily struggles of being a modern newspaper editor.



(*He actually used my full name, but I try to keep references to that at a minimum on this blog. Not for any real reason, though. I know better than to write things on here I would seriously regret.)

Yeah, we actually did fast-forward through parts of the game.

I really have nothing of interest to say about Super Bowl advertisements. I watched them, I made a drinking game for them...you know, the usual stuff. But probably because of all the industry buzz before and after, I'm just too burned out on the topic to say anything of interest.

But hey look, The Birmingham News interviewed my boss about it! (It's hard to tell, but that article's supposed to be a Q&A.)

Other than that, nothing else to say.





Oh fine, Goulet was my favorite.

Remind me not to be a Russian in the 1800s.

Picked up a copy of The Idiot by Dostoevsky last night, and I'll probably start in on it in earnest once I finish Rebel Angels. (I'm also reading world history stuff for the impending podcast and two books for work...my readin' brain is spread a little thin.)

Anyway, The Idiot starts off with the usual six or seven prefaces. I was shocked not to find a family tree of major characters and the 17 names for each person.

But it did have a timeline of Dostoevsky's life and a lengthy bio explaining what was going on while he was writing The Idiot and his other stuff.

So what was happening to him? The answer was almost always "bad things."

Here are a few highlights of the big man's life:

• 1821 - Fyodor Dostoevsky is born in a "hospital for the poor" in the worst part of Moscow. His father is both a "violent alcoholic" and a doctor! What a combo! Check out this line from Wikipedia:

There are many stories of Dostoevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children. After returning home from work, he would take a nap and his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood silently by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted flies around his head.

• 1837 - His mom dies from tuberculosis, and Fyodor is sent off to military school.

• 1839 - His dad is murdered, most likely by the serfs he oversaw. And he sounded like such a good guy. Wikipedia says that the peasants drowned him by pouring vodka down his throat while they restrained him. How quaintly Russian!

• 1849 - He's arrested for being a liberal agitator and is sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, as he's standing in the rain and waiting for the firing squad to kill him, he's told that the tsar has commuted the sentence to four years in Siberian exile. Tsar Nicholas I intentionally waited until the last second to maximize the psychological torture of Dostoevsky.

• 1850 - While in a prison camp, he has the first of many epileptic seizures.

• 1854 - He's released from prison -- and promptly forced to enlist in the Siberian Regiment.

• 1864 - His wife dies. And his brother.

• 1860s-70s - He squanders his book advances on his gambling addiction.

• 1881 - He dies of an emphysemic lung hemorrhage/epileptic seizure.

Of course, scattered in there are some of the most incredible books ever written, but still. The one thing that did surprise me is that he kinda sounds like he was a jerk. Slept around quite a bit, gambled his life away, etc.

The only reason that seems strange to me is because the good guys in his books are just so good. I was talking about that with Open(s) Book(s) today at lunch, and she pointed out that it probably tormented him all his life that he could recognize what it takes to be a great person, but he couldn't actually be that person. Heavy.

'That's also not a hair question.'

Just had to share the footage of the "press conference" held by two men arrested for threatening Boston with terrorism from the moon. My favorite part is how disgusted the reporters sound that the two guys only use their time at the mics to discuss haircuts of the 1970s.



What would you have talked about -- other than Boston's overreaction to Lite-Brites that had been on display for weeks?

Memo to journalists: When you find yourself telling a guy in dreadlocks that he needs to take things seriously, you are officially an ass.

Tim Gunn has left the building.

The Parsons building, that is. You have to wonder how many of these offers he's turned down since becoming a late-in-life TV superstar.

I'm thinking it's a sign...

Two interesting things about a new UPS ad campaign, which features a guy doodling things on a white background as he explains the benefits of blah blah blah.

1. The guy is actually the creative director who pitched the idea. This would be like me being hired to do a voice-over for something I've written. It's not unheard of, but it's obscenely rare. AdFreak has some details on how this came about.

2. Check out the music playing on the campaign's Web site. That was just a nice surprise. If you've checked it out and don't recognize it, then you obviously aren't spending enough time listening to me and my brother-in-law playing music in his basement. Oh, and you can watch the video here.