Month: January 2002

You may have seen the clever PowerPoint presentation titled “Yours is a Very Bad Hotel” about Houston’s Doubletree Club. USAToday published a wonderful follow up to it, “Online complaint about hotel service scores“. They quote their realization that “service matters — and hand-to-hand e-mail has power.” E-mail? What about the blogs? I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t e-mail anything these days. The whole point of the Well, Slap Me Silly! site is to send jokes along without flooding the inboxes of the world. So I think we deserve some credit too. I also think that PowerPoint presentation was amazing – and it just goes to show that complaints are sometimes heard. (Link to USAToday article from Dave Winer.)

I forgot all about Furniture Porn. Yep, that latest spread on “Charlie’s Angels” is great. Check it out! (Thanks to Brad for the link!)

Do you remember Madge and the “You’re soaking in it!” commercials? They may have come out in the 60’s, but I remember them from the 70’s. Along with “I bring home the bacon … and fry it up in pan …” Enjolie! Then there was the “And so on… and so on…” commercials, where word of mouth about the latest shampoo made little pictures of this woman multiply on the screen. Those were the days of the great commercials. Mr. Whipple. Aunt Jemima, when the syrup bottle talks. And the Kool-aid man breaking all barriers. Commercials these days are so boring in comparision. I wonder if 25 years from now we will look back and find the commercials of today as amusing? I am sure we will.

I am a child of the ’80s and have done all of those really ’80s things, but I have never seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Can you believe it? It came out in 1982, so I was still in 7th or 8th grade. But even in all the years on video, all the years I have had movie channels on cable – I have never seen it. Pretty strange that I missed that somehow. Well, I have seen all of the John Hughes films about 1000 times each and have most of the lines to “Sixteen Candles”, “Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” memorized to this day. The Donger need food!

We got back from our camping trip at Brazos Bend State Park with the Webelos of our Cub Scout troop. We had a really great time. I could have done without the 38 degree temps in the middle of the night, but fortunately it was snuggly warm in my sleeping bag. As I said before I left, one of the perks to Texas is being able to camp in the winter time, where you can wear jeans and a shirt with a turtleneck underneath and be nice and cozy during the day – and the additions of a few layers make it comfy at night. We went for a nice nature hike in the morning, where we had a guide who pointed out many interesting things about the habitat. After lunch, we went for another hike to look for the alligators, but we didn’t see any. We cooked dinner in a Dutch Oven, and then after dark headed over to the George Observatory to check out the night sky. It was *gorgeous* – it’s so easy to forget how many stars there are when you live in a big city. We got to see Saturn through the large telescope there, and there are lots of amatuers who come and set up their scopes too and they will let you look through them plus teach you interesting information about the night sky. We got to see Jupiter too through one of those telescopes. It was pretty cool to see the planets. After we got back we had a campfire and then headed off to bed. My neck is sore & stiff and my throat is all icky feeling thanks to allergy drainage – but I still got a good’s night sleep. A good time was had by all!