Week 47: Go Live

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…
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Week 44: Season’s Solicitations

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…
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Week 42: A Maze Ing

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…
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Week 41: Freaky Friday

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…
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Week 40: Holiday #8

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.…
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Week 39: Lorem Ipsum

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…
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Week 37: Brand Power

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…
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Week 36: The Coming Storm

250 years ago, September, 1773, there was a Category 5 storm headed for the North Atlantic. But it wasn’t meteorological, it was monetary. It had to do with one of the most valuable substances known to man, which was whale oil. In the days before petroleum products, whale oil provided…
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Week 35: Labor’s Day

You can travel in style, but eventually you have to pay the bill. History remembers George Pullman as the inventor of the railroad sleeping car which is synonymous with his name. It was the perfect idea for the time, when the American railroad system was exploding after the Civil War,…
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