It seems as though a Carl’s Jr. online promotion for a free $2.75 “Famous Star” hamburger coupon went a little too viral.
The Carpenteria-based chain promptly stopped honoring the coupons for their franchise burger after what seemed like a harmless online promotion was supersized by the net.
I love how they try to pretend the mistake wasn’t theirs by saying “seized.” Read the whole thing here:
Ha ha ha ha! It’s too easy to tap the wrong contact or hit the wrong key, not just on the iPhone but on everything. Somebody needs to create applications that save you from embarrassment.
The deepest know note in the universe is B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C; so say astronomers observing pressure waves moving through gaseous clouds surrounding a black hole 250 million light years away. The waves show up as concentric rings of x-rays emitted by the colliding particles. A new pressure wave is emitted every 10 million years.
The 53 hours of Chandra observations revealed a note that is more than a million billiontimes deeper than what you can hear.
Nothing like Wikipedia, quite the opposite of Dickipedia, but probably catering to a similar audience, it’s Chickipedia! With features like “Random Chick” and attributes like “Dudes she has worked with” or “Assets,” you probably get the idea. You’re guaranteed to find people you’ve never heard of or may not expect to find here … not that I spent much time looking or anything.
Remember Muzak … that pabulumous, insipid version of music most associated with elevators? I recall an SNL skit where Sting gets stuck on an elevator listening to a Muzak version of Roxanne, only to find out his deal with the devil (John Lovitz) is up and he’s going to be on that elevator for eternity.
Anyway, sometime after the eighties elevators got slightly better music, and malls sometimes got good music … the kind that might put a little extra bounce in your step. This article from the Miami Herald sheds a little light on why:
As the company shifted its focus to retail settings and from workers to consumers, it still touted the power of its music to influence human behavior. A host of studies, some financed by the company, suggested background music encouraged consumers to spend more time in stores and made them feel less crowded while they shopped and less antsy while they waited to pay.
By the late ’80s, Muzak was customizing its product to individual companies. It was a natural move in an era when firms like Nike were learning that the images and ideas of their brands had as much or more value than the things they sold.
Every song in the Muzak catalog is analyzed for about 80 different parameters like harmony, melody and rhythm, and for hard-to-measure qualities such as lyrical content and whether the vocals float on top of the music or tend to get buried.
Just as the ubiquity of digital cameras has brought the third wave of democratization in photographic (the first being the Brownie and the second being the Polaroid), the ubiquity of MP3 players has made music even more an integral part of our daily soundtrack. Muzak, it would seem, is as relevant as ever.
And … just because I said the word Polaroid … here’s a video of House MD’s Hugh Laurie in an old Polaroid TV advertisement: