Fritinancy

To Die For

I'm not so sure about this testimonial for the Manduka High Performance Yoga Mat:

" ... the Taj Mahal of yoga mats!"

The Taj Mahal may be a lovely building but, as Colleen (Communicatrix) Wainwright correctly points out, it's a tomb.

On the other hand, what better way to get in the mood for Savasana, the yoga position that concludes every class?  Literal translation: "Corpse Pose."

More yoga enigmas here. And more wacky comparisons in Mark Peters's The Rosa Parks of Blogs.

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According to the website, Manduka was named in honor of the frog pose, Mandukasana. 

Image of Corpse Pose from My Yoga Online.

Hauntrepreneurs

 You probably know about my fascination with the productive -preneur suffix ("Enterprising Language," Sept. 1). Everyone, it seems, is a specialized entrepreneur these days—a mompreneur, solopreneur, warrior-preneur, or journopreneur.*

Here's a new-to-me -preneur, just in time for Halloween: Hauntrepreneurs International (tagline: "Haunted Attractions for Sale!").

That's a dandy coinage: It's witty, it echoes the sound of entrepreneur, and it instantly communicates its meaning.

The website, however, is short on wit and long on get-'er-done:

Hauntrepreneurs® International is the only broker specializing in selling previously owned Haunted Houses, Haunted Hay Rides, Haunted Trails, Dark Rides and Haunting Equipment for the Haunted Attraction Industry. Formed in 1987 the company has sold hundreds of attractions to Amusement Parks, Family Fun Centers and individuals all over the country.

Working as a middleman Hauntrepreneurs® International hammers out price negotiations, prepares contracts and makes sure that both parties act in good faith throughout the process. In addition, Hauntrepreneurs® International can provide services to the buyer/seller including Installation Assistance, Event Consulting, Refurbishment and Attraction Redesign.

“We put our reputation on the line each time we bring a buyer and seller together, and strive to create a ‘Win win’ opportunity for the clients!”

"Win win"? Ugh, ugh.

Which is not to say there aren't treasures to be found here. Do, for instance, take a few minutes to check out the "attractions" for sale. Here is a very partial list of the props included with the Haunted Estate (15,000 square feet; "only $175,000"):

20 Tiki Torches
1 Old Style Dryer
1 Body Bag (real)
1 Stretcher/Gurney
3 Medical Back Boards
10 Soft Stuffed Bodies
2 Oscilloscopes
1 Resuscitation Annie
1 Defibrillator (real)
1 Wheelchair
1 Electric Typewriter
1 Exercise Bike
1 Trunk
2 set Funeral Parlor Curtains
1 Electric Leaf Blower
1 Electric Sparking Chain Saw

Check, check, check ... hold on: Exercise bike?

Hauntrepreneurs International is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Operators are standing by, no doubt cackling ghoulishly. 

Hat tip: Erin McKean. Image from Buried.com.

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* I have searched in vain for manurepreneur, a coinage in search of a business plan.

Undeath Takes a Holiday

There's never been a better time to be undead, what with True Blood, Twilight, and The Vampire Diaries infusing fresh blood into the vampire genre and zombies taking over banks and companies. For your Halloween shopping enjoyment, Comics Alliance has unearthed the worst of this year's vampire-themed products—which, depending on your perspective, may also be considered the cream of the crop. 

Not only can you buy a Buffy the Vampire Slayer wooden stake—yes, an actual piece of wood—for $100, but you can also own a preserved pig heart (very similar to a human heart, anatomically) with a stake through it. The latter trinket will set you back $225, but you do get a wooden display chest in the bargain.

I learned a new word from the Comics Alliance people: "reborning." It refers to the practice of painting a doll to make it look more like a real baby. Combine reborning with undead and you get this winsome keepsake:

Wook at the cute widdle fangs!

I have no idea how much it cost, because it's sold out at the Wicked Little Things Etsy store. However, the same vendor still has a different OOAK (one-of-a-kind) Reborn Vampire Horror Fantasy Doll in stock for $60 (shipping extra).

For sheer weirdness, however, you can't beat the Sexy Vampire Menstrual Goddess XL/Postpartum Cloth Pad, which bears the welcoming image of a suspiciously healthy-looking undead dude.

It too is an Etsy item, but you'll also find it on Regretsy, an unaffiliated site whose name speaks for itself. (Tagline: "Handmade? It looks like you made it with your feet.") I'm in awe of the simple perfection of Regretsy's title for the SVMGXL/PCP: "The Curse."

(Hat tip: Mr. WordsWorth on Twitter.)

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Check out my previous posts about Halloween branding:

- The pumpkin festival in my local cemetery (2006).

- A few of my favorite necro-brands (2007). 

- Vampire wine (2007).

How Amoeba Music Got Its Name

The San Francisco Chronicle recently posed three questions to Mark Weinstein, co-owner of independent music retailer Amoeba Music. Here's Question No. 3:

Q: Where did the name "Amoeba" come from?

A: We wanted to name our company "something-something" music. The word "amoeba" came up because it sounded good with "music." We just wanted it to be a psychedelic kind of name that students would relate to. As it turns out, it's a great name for who we are and what we do. First of all, amoebas split into two, and we've done that, too, with our most recent stores. And there's an amorphous nature to music, and (the name) just takes a quality of being a great metaphor for music, our growth and who we are.

By "'something-something' music" I'm supposing that Mr. Weinstein meant that the owners (a) wanted "music" in the name and (b) wanted to modify "music" with another word or words. By "psychedelic"-sounding I'm inferring he means neither corporate nor tech-y. And by "split into two" I imagine he means "split in three." Amoeba, which calls itself "The World's Largest Independent Record Store" and which was founded in Berkeley in 1990—many years after the psychedelic heyday—now has stores in Hollywood and San Francisco in addition to the original Telegraph Avenue location.

(If I'd been in charge, I'd have created a more rigorous naming brief.)

Is Amoeba "a great metaphor" for "who we are"? Let's look at the Who We Are page:

Amoeba Music began at a time when the huge chain stores were mercilessly swallowing up independent stores and local chain stores, depriving communities across the country of a personal relationship with their music outlets, and destroying the opportunity to discover a whole world of music beyond what corporate retailers wanted them to see.  Amoeba arose out of that community of music lovers that wanted a better place for music than a corporate chain store -- one with the widest possible selection, better service, and more respect for people's ideas and lives.

Personally, I don't get "large," "independent," "personal relationship," "better service," and "more respect" out of "Amoeba." I get "microscopically small," "elemental," "devoid of consciousness," and "shapeless." The name does succeed in suggesting "non-corporate," though. And it's sorta psychedelic in a lava-lamp way.

The business has survived for almost 20 years, so the Amoeba name is evidently not a serious liability. "Amoeba" is fun and easy to say (if not to spell), it's nerdy enough to suit its origins in the heart of academia, and the blobby logo has a freeform, how-Berkeley-can-you-be flavor. Best of all, the owners were lucid enough to snap up the very desirable domain Amoeba.com before anyone beat them to it.

Word of the Week: Minisode

Minisode: An abbreviated adaptation of a television show for the Internet that retains the original show's characters and narrative arc. The word is a portmanteau of miniature and episode.

The pioneer in the fledgling minisode format is Sony Pictures Television, which launched its Minisode Network in June 2007. In October 2007, the New York Times reported that Sony had condensed 18 "vintage" TV series, including "Bewitched" and "Charlie's Angels," from their original 30- or 60-minute episode length to 4 or 6 minutes. "The minisodes are not excerpts or clip jobs," wrote Times reporter Stuart Elliott; "they are edited in a way that compresses the story lines and enables the viewers to follow the plots from beginning to end."

According to an earlier Times story, the minisode idea first occurred to Sony Television's president, Steve Mosko, and the company's head of distribution, John Weiser, when they saw "Seven-Minute Sopranos," a condensed version of the entire 77-hour "Sopranos" series that played on YouTube.

In February 2009 Sony launched minisodes of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Television Specials.

The minisodes can be viewed on several websites, including Hulu, Crackle, and Joost. Sony also maintains a Minisode Network profile, sponsored by Honda, on MySpace.

The Crackle shows have been sponsored by Pepsi. However, there's no word about whether the soft-drink maker plans to introduce mini-sodas to accompany the minisodes.

Hat tip: Ad Broad.

Bad Brand Names: Teenflo

Here's a little quiz. I say "Teenflo," you say:

A. "For those really hard-to-wean babies!"

 Evenflo bottle-feeding products.

 

B. "For that time of the month ... with wings!"

Carefree thong liners.

C. "For chic, contemporary Canadian fashion!"

Image from BetseyJenney, Boston and Newton.

Give up? The correct answer is "C." Teenflo: the most misleading brand name in retail.

A Passion for Satire

"Passionate about sofas"? British comedian David Mitchell has a few questions about that slogan:

It can't help but make you wonder what it would be like to experience sexual congress with these people. Are they exactly as passionate with their partners as they assure us they are about sofas? Or have they even more left in the tank?

I hadn't heard of David Mitchell before discovering this video—thanks for the tip, Shawna!—but I'm now a fan. You can watch more David Mitchell videos here, on the Bulldog Natural Grooming website. Bulldog, by the way, says it's "passionate about the ingredients we use in our products." Naturally.

Read a few of my own rants about corporate passion here ("Our Passion Is Your Problem"), here ("Your Slogan: It's Not About You"), and here ("And the Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity").

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ScS, the "Passionate about Sofas" company, is only lukewarm about spelling, if its job advertisement is any indication ("We hope you will be to").

A Nook for Your Vook?

Yesterday I told you about Vook. Today, as chance and rhyme would have it, bookseller Barnes & Noble is introducing a new electronic-book reader called the Nook. It will cost $259, the same price as Amazon's Kindle.

I can understand how B&N arrived at Nook. It rhymes with book and suggests a cozy corner in which to curl up with ... well, a luminous battery-powered appliance. It's a venerable English word (as is kindle) that came into the language around 1300, with the sense of "a corner of a thing regarded as a separate portion," although its earlier provenance remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, Nook is not without problematic associations, of which "racial slur derived from nanook" and "pacifier/binky/sucky toy" are among the least worrisome.

P.S. On Twitter, writer/book critic Sarah Weinman suggested: "Maybe if they called it a Mook, it would reach a certain highly desired demographic?"

UPDATE: The Nook reader is now up on the B&N website.

What the Vook?

My latest column for Visual Thesaurus, "Don't Judge a Vook by Its Cover," was inspired by Vook, a name that led me to consider other new-media word mashups like blawg, blook, and diavlog. Here's how the column begins:

You can read it. You can watch it. You can talk about it online with your friends. It's a sort of picture book — or, more precisely, a moving-picture book — but its inventors call it a Vook. That's Vook as in video + book.

It's also Vook as in a business (headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area), and Vook™ as in a trademark-registration-in-process, which explains the capital letter. Well ... sometimes explains the capital letter. Vooks from Vook (hello, Dr. Seuss!) are only one segment of the vookosphere: In a September announcement of its own text/video mashup, Simon & Schuster used "vook" as a generic term. That's the sort of thing that gives trademark lawyers insomnia.

 

And trademark confusion isn't the only problem with vook (or Vook). For starters, the word doesn't look like English. (In my English-language dictionaries, the only words that start with voo- are voodoo, which came into English from an African word, and voortrekker, an Afrikaans borrowing.) On the other hand, if you're a native Spanish speaker you'll pronounce it book — "v" and "b" are interchangeable in Spanish — and wonder why the word's misspelled. Nor is it apparent how the /oo/ vowel is supposed to be pronounced. (Aha! According to a video on Vook.com, the word rhymes with shook, not spook.)

In Dutch, the V in Vook would be pronounced as F. Draw your own conclusions.

To read the rest, go here. Full access is restricted to VT subscribers for three months; an online subscription is only $19.95 a year. Do it!*

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* An excellent gift idea, too.

Word of the Week: Sitzfleisch

Sitzfleisch: The ability to endure or persist in an endeavor through sedentary determination. A borrowing from German, it literally means "sit-flesh"; a comparable English idiom might be "chair glue." 

Two illustrations:

Sitzfleisch: a term used in chess to indicate winning by use of the glutei muscles--the habit of remaining stolid in one's seat hour by hour, making moves that are sound but uninspired, until one's opponent blunders through boredom. — Frank Vigor Morley, "My One Contribution to Chess", Chess Notes, Faber & Faber (1947). (Source: Wiktionary.)

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I worked in the Hallmark public relations department for a man named Conrad Knickerbocker, the public relations manager, who had already begun publishing book reviews and fiction. After I got to know Knick a little, I asked him timidly how you become a writer. ... He said, "Rhodes, you apply ass to chair." I call that solid-gold advice the Knickerbocker Rule¹. — Richard Rhodes, How to Write: Advice and Reflections (1995).

Other sitz- words that have been adopted into English include sitz bath (a shallow bath taken in a sitting position, with only the hips and pelvic region immersed); sitzkrieg (warfare characterized by lack of aggression or progress; the opposite of blitzkrieg); and sitzmark (the impression made in snow by a skier falling backward, a k a butt-plant).

Image from Zazzle.

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¹ I never knew Knickerbocker, so I call it sitzfleisch.