James Lileks has an hilarious piece in his Backfence column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He riffs on snack foods and mentions the new Doritos Torengos. What is it with ad-men and daffy product names? What the hell is a Torengo? It's obviously meant to be Latinesque. From my (actually quite extensive, preen) knowledge of Spanish, I think I can safely say that there is no such word as 'torengo'. It looks to be some sort of portmanteau word deriving from 'tortilla' and 'tengo' (Spanish for 'I have'). How many hundred man-hours of brainstorming, PowerPoint doodling, focus-grouping and product placement went into this? Just mind-boggling. And that's before sales and marketing would even have gone into high gear to shift the product.
I don't really have a point, except to say that the activities of those who are involved in the fluffier regions of commerce will forever remain a mystery to me.
By the way - read the Backfence. It's vintage stuff - I've cried with laughter at some of the lines before. It's all the scrummy Lileks goodness you're gonna get 'till Monday anyway.
I think it's hilarious that the sole vote against James Traficant's expulsion came from Gary Condit. As Jay Leno said in his monologue last night, "Who says there's no honour among thieves?"
- posted by David @ 7/26/2002 09:46:00 AM
I see that the INS has finally relented and is allowing British 9/11 widow Deena Gilbey to stay. Good. But the thing that burns me is it took a huge outcry to get this to happen in the first place. Do the INS apparatchiks feel no sense of compassion? Has it been purged from them by the dead hand of bureaucracy?
If the organisation was even marginally competent, that at least would be a saving grace. But to be simultaneously so inept and so heartless is unforgiveable.
There's an horrendous story in the current issue of The Spectator about how Robert Mugabe is destroying Zimbabwe. It's hard to fathom the evil of this man - he seems bent on the sort of Gotterdämmerung that Hitler envisaged as the Third Reich fell about his ears. Something has to give. I just hope Mugabe lasts long enough for the mob to put his head on a pole.
- posted by David @ 7/25/2002 03:59:00 PM
It's Annexation of Guanacaste Day here in sunny Costa Rica (slightly overcast Costa Rica actually) so we have the day off. Yay! In order to make the most of this I got immemorially sloshed last night. It seemed like the thing to do.
- posted by David @ 7/25/2002 03:55:00 PM
Here is a great quote from an interview with Ann Coulter in the Daily Telegraph:
- posted by David @ 7/21/2002 11:06:00 PM
Coulter's approach is not so much take no prisoners as capture one's opponents, string them up with piano wire, machine-gun them until all movement has ceased and then fire a celebratory volley into the air.
