Happy New Year! It’s the Year of the Dragon, so a baby boom is expected. Taiwan is expecting a 30 percent increase in the number of babies born in this auspicious year.

1-800-578-7453
This phone number was posted to the rec.music.a-cappella Usenet group. It’s a tobacco company and they have a very amusing serenade for you. Listen and (I hope) laugh.

I was drooling while reading this NY Times article on the goody bags Hollywood socialites receive at ritzy parties. To promote products, marketers weigh down favor bags with pounds of free stuff: cosmetics, photo frames, leather purses, spa gift certificates. It’s getting so celebrities are now conditioned to expect these good will gestures and demand extras for “sick friends”. Leonardo DiCaprio got a Motorola phone as part of his loot. But Jennifer Tilly complained that she didn’t receive even a ballpoint pen at the Star Wars premiere since the gift bags were for the kids. “If there’s no gift bag, you get very bummed out.” Ohhh poor thing. It’s such a sad life to be a Hollywood star.

On 11/21/99 I mentioned the Sony Memory Stick and wondered how we would exchange data with each other in the future (bandwidth or “sticks”?). A competing technology is being developed by a group of companies including Matsushita (Panasonic) and Toshiba. According to Wired, this new memory card will be the size of a postage stamp, leading me to wonder how people will store them and keep from losing them!

Here’s a wonderful FEED article about the phenomenon of tunes getting stuck in your head. It contains fascinating facts about where memories are stored in the brain, and how remembering a tune in your head is more like singing than listening: “Imagining something, for the brain, is almost the same as really doing. All you subtract out are some low-level processes, in this case, the coordination of motion and breath. Your left brain might be activating representations of the words of the song and what they mean, while your right brain is calling up the tones, musical structure, and most likely your feelings and further associations — your whole brain lights up like a Christmas tree.” Tunes that, for better or worse (usually worse), stick like glue to my internal ears: anything by ABBA, the various themes from Star Wars, and the downright evil “Song That Doesn’t End”.

This Atlantic article by James Fallows describes what he learned about Microsoft culture during a six month stint helping to design Word. Summary points: The people are nice, the pace is slow, the culture is meeting-centric, the planning process is radically “bottom-up” and surprisingly nonpolitical, people do talk about money (as in having lots of it), it is like the military (in a good way), and they understand exactly who their most important customers are. It’s a fascinating look inside the enclave. And it’s definitely an outsider non-geek viewpoint — I mean, I don’t see anything strange about rigging up a camera so you can see what your cats are doing while you’re at work! (thank you Landon)

In response to my entry about the $1 coin, Passerby (bonjour!) wrote a nice description of how the $1 and $2 coins in Canada led to generous tipping. Read the January 31 entry.

From the “no duh!” department: my favorite Super Bowl ad was, of course, EDS’ cat herding narrative. I often use the extreme phrasing of “herding white cats through a snowstorm”, but I suppose that would’ve been more difficult to film!

I have little brain left for original musings; had a very challenging meeting today at work. So instead I will let someone else do the thinking. William H. Calvin, a favorite thinker of mine about things having to do with, uh, thinking, has the entire contents of his book “The Throwing Madonna:
Essays on the Brain” online. He intersperses his books with wonderful quotes. I especially recommend the essays “The Lovable Cat: Mimicry Strikes Again” wherein he examines the similarities between cats and babies, and “Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains“.

Ways I have horrified male friends:

• Shown them my collection of ~50 bottles of nail polish.
• Described how for five years I did all my computer hardware maintenance with a metal nail file since I didn’t own a screwdriver.
• Tried to learn how to use a tire pressure gauge. Well, there was some air left in the tire when I was done.
• Had no idea who was playing in this year’s Super Bowl.
• Asked for directions. In a mall.