Unimpressed octopus(?) lawn sculpture

The eye/face expression seems... unimpressed. As if to say, "really? this is all you want me to do? sit on your lawn?"

This post's theme word is quaggy (adj), "marshy; flabby; spongy." Amongst invertebrates, "quaggy" is more complimentary than we vertebrates usually consider it.

Tomatoes

Many thanks to the nameless supermarket designers and employees whose choices in lighting, display baskets, and arrangements of tomatoes resulted in this delightful spread.

Anyone for some sphere-packing practice?

The addition of other vegetables for variety in color and visual texture serves to emphasize the red, rounded, Platonically-ideal tomatoes.

This post's theme word is bleb, "a bubble," or "a small blister or swelling." If your rash of blebs resembles this pile of tomatoes, seek immediate medical attention.

A tale of excellent customer service

I recently had a series of excellent customer service experiences with Swatch.

I bought a watch -- very brightly colored -- and after wearing it a little, decided that I needed that bright color to be green. The friendly Swatch employees -- so friendly that this must be a prerequisite in the hiring process -- helped me pick a much greener watch. Still brightly colored.

Yet, alas! For reasons unknown (but excess verdure suspected), this excellent watch stopped running. I took it back (to my 3rd store), and they tested the battery (fine), so they simply replaced the watch. This entire interaction took about 5 minutes.

So I'm on my third watch in as many weeks, but I like it. All my interactions at Swatch stores and kiosks across the continent were very easy and positive. Look at me digitally/virally promoting a brand I like social-mediated-ly. Thanks, Swatch!


This post's theme word is sidereal, "relating to the stars," or "measured with reference to the apparent motion of the stars." This timepiece marks sidereal time.

Set-your-own-price reverse marketplace

Amazon will let vendors -- who own items -- post those items for sale at a fixed price. Ebay lets vendors post items for sale by auction, where buyers have some power over the price they pay. On Kickstarter, speculating vendors attempt to rustle up (financially) committed customers before spending movey on overhead and setup costs. This business model makes some amount of sense, because the market
for your fantastic idea may not exist. It's a way of crowdsourcing market research, pinned to a method of getting startup money from a mob.

I dream of a reverse marketplace, a sort of backwards kickstarter (but not kickstopper, as amusing as that is). It would be a website with a huge inventory (possibly borrowed from Amazon's databanks, like swap.com) where buyers can post offered prices. Then the vendors can browse this collection of data and determine if, e.g., there are millions of dollars to be made if they decrease the price of that CD from $10 to $5. (This still provides more control than the pay-what-you-can and pay-what-you-want models used by JoCo and AFP.)

A secondary benefit of such a site is to reverse-kickstart things. There are books, music, and games that I _would_ buy -- at their present prices-- if they were availabe WITHOUT DRM. So I'd reverse-bid on those. But they're currently only available WITH DRM, which is a no-go and worth $0 to me. This would show vendors, publishers, and creators how many sales they are MISSING because of DRM. It could also show publishers other data about formatting (this movie is in high demand on DVD but not Blu-Ray; this music will sell as vinyl but not CD, etc.).

Think about it as voluntary market research data. I am willing -- WILLING -- to give advertisers, publishers and vendors this data. This VALUABLE DATA ABOUT MY SPENDING PREFERENCES AND HABITS.

Do you hear me, online sellers?


This post's theme word is samizdat, "an underground publishing system used to print and circulate banned literature clandestinely. Also, such literature."