For these troubled times, a little medicine. There is only one sport played by people that wasn’t invented by humans. That sport is called Tewaaraton, and the people who play it are called the Haudenosaunee. You may know these things better by their Europeanized labels: the sport is lacrosse and…

OK, now that we’re all completely engorged, we’re allowed to talk about Christmas. Let’s start with something iconic. It’s 80 feet tall and weighs over 10 tons. It came from Vestal, NY, and was trucked 200 miles down to Manhattan. (Getting it into the city was probably pretty interesting, considering…

OK, we’re past Halloween and into November, so NOW you’re allowed to start thinking about the holidays. And you’re probably short of gifting ideas. So I’m here to help. But before I get to that, allow me a short prologue of things I’m truly grateful for that are all slightly…

One of the great things about the Internet is that marketing claims don’t have to be defensible. For example, just google up the phrase, “world’s largest corn maze.” It is definitely right outside St. Cloud, Minnesota, at the Stoney Brook Farm. Says so right on the website. Their maze spreads…

Attention paraskevidekatriaphobiacs: it’s worse than you think… As I alluded to last week, the Gregorian calendar was first rolled out in 1582, and was fully adopted by Europe in 1752. In order to make the calendar align almost perfectly with the orbit of the earth around the sun, the Gregorian…

Welcome to the most conflicted holiday on the calendar. The trouble starts with the very name of the thing, to wit, there never was an explorer named Christopher Columbus. He may have been called Christoffa Corombo in his native Genoa, or Cristóvão Colombo in Portugal, or Cristóbal Colón by the Spanish.…

This blog isn’t finished, it’s just a draft. If it were final, it wouldn’t contain the well-known phrase, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. Say what? Let me explain. In the advertising world, when graphic designers create a draft of a layout, they often use placeholder text for…

Okay, listen up, cupcakes, here’s a case study on the power of branding. Way back in 1849, a small bakery opened on Broome Street in New York, operated by a family of Belfast immigrants named Ward. They were so successful that they eventually bought up multiple competitors and became the…