Imagine you’re in charge of the TSA’s new “registered traveler” program. How would you market it? You’d want to walk a fine line between emphasizing security and sacrificing privacy. You might play up the time savings from providing the government key pieces of personal information, while working to soothe fears of a Big Brother-ish situation.

You might do those things. Or you could just find the creepiest “we take your fingerprints” image you could, slap that on your Web page and call it a day:

From a church a few blocks from me:

What a refreshing change for the parishoners!

I love how everyone gets so serious about being the “second” or whatever. Although of course the banks really get out of hand…

(Also, I came back home from the Fourth — and the reunion — to discover the source of my “borrowed” wireless had apparently moved out at the end of the month. So now my Internet usage is severely curtailed until I get something working…)

There’s a Home Depot on one of the streets I walk pretty frequently, and there are signs on the exit doors that amuse and puzzle me:

The signs are amusing because I find it hard to believe there are many jobs at Home Depot for which being stoned would be a huge impediment. How much of your faculties are really required to haul shit around, anyway?

Granted, I say that as someone who’s never been properly stoned, so let’s move on to the next point: why there? Why is it so important to have this message known that a huge, bold signs are placed on the exterior doors? Wouldn’t a message on the application itself be just as effective?

Also, is this just a Lincoln Park thing, or do they do this at every store? I could almost believe it was national more — seems more like a marketing message, then. (”Hey, shoppers — check out our zero tolerance!”)

In any event: curious.

Now I feel alert. If I only knew why…

I was doing some searches related to the whole strategic petroleum issue on CNN yesterday, and got some unexpected results.

For the words Bush gasoline, CNN displayed the following:

I love how it’s not just gas, it’s bulk gas. You really can get anything on eBay! (Or not.)

Well, here are a few random things I’ve come across in the past week or so that don’t individually merit their own posts, yet amuse me all the same.

This is from SlickDeals. Good thing I saw it — you never know when you need a good banana costume. (And at that price, you should buy two!)

This is from a TechCrunch article about Google Payments (coming soon.) It’s super small, but the last line reads “‘GOOGLE * BLING BLING’ will appear by the charge on your credit card.” I so hope that’s not the store name. I want Google to write that on customer bills…

This is a “captcha” thrown up by Craigslist when I posted an (item wanted) ad yesterday. Can you read the word? If so, your eyes are better than mine. I had to hit the audio hint to figure it out. (It’s “weedy.”)

Saw this one on the NYT yesterday. I was seriously confused by the concept of water sponsoring anything, much less a newspaper article. Had to click it to find out it’s a film (from the director of Earth and Fire — any guesses on her next title?)

Finally, there’s nothing I “love” like misplaced quotation marks. Really inspires confidence in the legality of the product, doesn’t it? (Via Slate.)

This afternoon I went for a walk in the park with Debs. As we walked, we noticed a big burly guy “walking” his dog by skating along behind the mutt on inline skates. Though I’ve always found that practice to be unwise, it’s not exactly uncommon. Still, what held our glance was the man’s decision to wear a scarf — an unusual choice given the warm weather (he was in shorts.)

As he came closer, we realized it wasn’t a scarf at all — it was a boa constrictor. Dude was blading around with a dog and a big fat freakin’ snake around his neck.

As if being on wheels when your dog spots a squirrel isn’t challenge enough?

You can’t tell me the fine folks at Loews weren’t having a bit of fun when they created this sign:

Also, funny story: about 30 seconds after I took this picture this afternoon, Dennis Farina walked by. Pretty sure. I didn’t take his snap because a) I’m not all starfucker and b) I’d already put the camera away.

Mostly b).

I’ve been reading Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick in fits and starts, and yesterday on the train I settled down to get in a few pages. I think I surprised a few people with a quiet “holy shit!” when I hit this passage (p.240, emphasis added):

A new [Brazilian] president, Fernando Collor de Mello, assumed office and appointed a young economist, Zélia Cardoso de Mello (no relation to the president), as finance minister. She proceeded to test some new theories, including one that held that there was too much money in ciculation, that it belonged to too few people, and that they were doing too much speculating with it. Because of this, her theory went, not enough money was being invested in industry. This was generating inflation and stagnation.

So, she thought, let’s take some of that money and give it to the government (which doesn’t have enough, right?). On a sunny spring day in 1990 she went on television to declare a bank holiday and seize 80 percent of the cash in the country. The government laid hold of savings accounts, checking accounts, certificates of deposit, company funds, the works. Every Brazilian, no matter what his assets, was left with $800 or 20 percent of his holdings, whichever was less. If someone had, say, $1,000 in a checking account, he now could spend $200. The lady said she’d give the money back, corrected for inflation by an official index, in twelve monthly installments, starting in a year and a half.

Chaos doesn’t being to describe the reaction.

Wikipedia says Brazil had inflation “exceeding 2,700% in the period of 1989 to 1990.”

Last year, I saw an ad using a (hairy) shirtless man to sell mortgages to gay men.

Last night, I saw this banner ad using a similar approach for het men (imagine it in Flash, with the chick dancing around):

My question: is this the most effective appeal they could create? What was the thinking: “Hey look, it’s a dancing girl in a bikini top — that’ll attract the re-fi market!”

On Thursday, I was awakened by a noise so loud I immediately slid out of bed to investigate. As soon as I parted the blinds, I knew whatever had happened was just across the street, a fact confirmed by the subsequent arrival of members of the fire and police departments. Intrigued, I grabbed my camera and went to see what the fuss was about.

As I strolled closer, it soon became clear that a car had hit one of the shops. The damage was extensive, mangling the front door and knocking over bricks. I raised my camera to my eye to get a shot (mostly to assist in telling my brother the story later.) Just then, a uniformed store employee spotted my camera and jumped in front of me, waving his arms and shouting “No pictures!” I cocked my head at him and said “Oh? And why is that?” Then I stepped around him to take a few frames, including this one (the employee is not shown):

What I find most interesting about this event is not the photo and not even the crash, but that man’s instinct. Why did he think it was necessary to try to stop a member of the public from taking photographs? Why did he think he had the right to do so? Was it just an overzealous response by an amped-up hourly worker eager to do something? Did he think I was media? What was he afraid of?

I have to say, my view is that when it comes to crime, the more eyes the better.

Remember my Big Print Bank idea? I’ve just learned there’s big print search at, appropriately enough, Big.com.

And they mean big. Check out the search button:

I’ve only just heard of it, but I have to give it, well, big props because right now a search for “jsp” gives you me as the first result:

Shown at 40% size.

That’s huge!

Anyone who’s ever been to an American movie theater knows the green screen that precedes each preview, famously proclaiming the ad’s suitability for “ALL AUDIENCES” as judged by the motion picture industry’s rating board.

I wonder, though, how many people have seen the much-less-common “restricted” variant, with its arresting background:

I see plenty of movies, but I only remember a few times, mostly in art houses or independent theaters, where I’ve seen restricted trailers (and of course, only before R-rated pictures.) And then, what did that distinctive red* glow signal? In my experience, it basically meant “standby for breasts.” Sure, sometimes a little violence, perhaps some profanity, but mostly you could count on some nakedness.

Or so I thought until I saw the trailer for Temporada de patos (”Duck Season“), soon to be released by Warner Independent in this country. In that case, the trailer was restricted because it showed… um, a quarter-second of a guy (sunk low, showing nothing) in a bathtub? A pellet gun? A flash of a violent video game?

No, I have no idea why this trailer is restricted. I’ve watched it three times, and I’m still at a loss. The film’s in black and white, and the trailer has no spoken dialogue (probably because Warner would just as soon you forget it’s actually in Spanish.) The boys shoot a vase with a pellet gun, but it’s pretty clear it’s not a real gun. There’s a somewhat weird-looking (I had flashes of Austin Powers) pizza delivery guy who has the aforementioned bathtub moment plus another when we see his bare back, so maybe we’re supposed to be worried he’s around these kids, but it doesn’t seem the least bit sexual.

Seriously: what the hell? I don’t know what these people are worried about. But maybe y’all are bigger prudes than I am and you can tell me. Watch the trailer and let me know what you think. (And yes, as far as I’m concerned, it’s totally safe for work. Hell, call your boss over and have him/her join the hunt.)

* “The color is to alert the projectionist against mismatching trailers with the film being shown on the theater screen,” sayeth the MPA. You know, back when they had a projectionist stay in the booth…

I just got home, dumped my bags, then opened iTunes to play a few tracks while I sorted through some stuff on the computer. There, I saw this:

Excuse me, but what the hell is a “vingle”? Has this word been around and I just haven’t noticed? If so, I want to return to my blissful state of ignorance… because, frankly, like this dude’s overly-Photoshopped upper face, or the “word” Vlogging, something just seems off.

This is what I get for using the downstairs (Windows) computer:

…note they chose to use the demur “this update required an automatic restart” rather than the more accurate “we didn’t like that, though you chose to manually run an update, you didn’t click the ‘Restart Now’ button fast enough, so — despite the fact you had your customary 46 browser tabs open — when you left to watch The Big Lebowski we took the opportunity to just reboot the computer without your approval. So fuck you, fuck your open documents, fuck your browser windows. We’ve got holes to plug!”