A&W

On the way to Bloomington yesterday we stopped at an A&W for lunch.

I have a very clear memory of eating at an A&W with my Mom and my Aunt Char on Cape Cod when I was a kid. Why no one else was with us I do not remember, but I remember really liking the food.

I have told this to Rachel on our visits to the Jug etc so she is the one who spotted the A&W. This one had to have been one of the originals, since it was made to be a drive up.

Overall it was not as good as I remembered, the burgers were good (but nowhere near as fresh as the Jug) and the root beer was actually terrible (tasted like diet).

But it was nice to revisit a good memory.

Be Kind Rewind

Rachel and I rented Be Kind Rewind last night (A).
She said some of the remakes reminded her of stuff her and her brother's would have done, I said it looked a lot like the movies the kids on our street made.



Link to their other Sweded movies

Their version of Lord of the Rings didn't even make the movie but it is outstanding.

I was lucky to grow up on a street with a lot of kids. Our bus stop was packed (that is Tom on the left) to the point where it required organization.
You dropped your bag off in the order of your age, played some tag, then got on the bus. (Me and most of the people I played with growing up are to the left and out of the picture).


Some of our old neighbors created a facebook group for our street and posted some old photos and movies similar to Be Kind Rewind.
Here is my brother Mike from 1985.


I don't think kids grow up like this anymore.

Canada Trip #5

Toronto is a great city to visit during the summer.
Downtown was packed unlike Cincinnati.
Too bad I'll be spending weeks there in Oct once it starts to get cold.

Seeing the price of gas in liters ($1.22/l currently) does not confuse me too much.
What does confuse me is how they calculate our version of fuel efficiency (mpg).

In the newspaper ads for cars they use the number of liters it will take to drive the car 100km. So a good car is under 9 l/100km while a bad car is over 12.

30 mpg is about 8 l/100km.

Presentations

This week on National Geographic is Earth: The Biography (A-). The series is hosted by Ian Stewart (the host of "Hot Rocks") who is quirky yet interesting. I really like this series because it is somewhat filmed like Planet Earth (maybe not as good) but it also contains some of the most recent scientific data and insights that are missing in a lot of the older specials still on TV.

So far the most interesting part for me was during the Atmosphere show. I have never considered skydiving because I think it would be a minute of pure terror, however I never knew that at the start of the space program around ~1960 someone jumped out of a special balloon 90 miles above the earth. It took them 15 minutes to fall back to the ground and they were so high that when they jumped there was no wind resistance of any kind blowing on them until they reentered the lower layers of the atmosphere.

The series has reminded me of the importance of a good presentation. More impressive to me than the HD images has been the sequence of the presentation. If you had to do 1 hr on Ice, what topics would you cover and how would you flow between them?

The book Made to Stick should be required reading before being able to install Power Point at work. I would grade the avg presentation at work to be a D with some of the better ones a C or C+. It does take a lot of time to create a good presentation and it makes some of the best, like An Inconvenient Truth, so interesting to watch.

Here is a great presentation on 3rd world myths.

Flipping Out

NBC, ABC and CBS are terrible (except for the office).

Cable, specifically A&E and Bravo have some great shows.
Flipping Out we've discovered through watching The Soup.
It is about an OCD guy who flips houses for a living. At first I thought he was part of a big team like Landmark, but it's just him.
He does have 3 full time personal assistants to take care of him and his home.

Enjoy some of these clips...

Good Morning...

This week, the battery in the remote of our Bose alarm clock died.
It is impossible to shut of the alarm without the remote, so I have been using a travel alarm.

This has ended my streak of over 2 years of waking up to this song:



Any new suggestions?

I'm writing about Coach purses...

In Toronto, I read a great article about Coach (purses, etc.)

Most luxury goods hold up well during a recession because recessions don't impact the highest earners to the same degree as everyone else.

Coach looks to be an exception to that. The article talked about how terrible their sales were this year. (Only Jim may be interested in this) Sales have been impacted to the point where they no longer report separate results for their main stores (expensive) and their discount outlets, they now lump those sales together. (Jim Cramer would say Sell, Sell, Sell).

I think what was missing from this article is what the company's performance says about those who actually buy their products.

If Coach can't hold up during a recession it means their target shopper isn't really the luxury segment, it was those aspiring to be or giving that appearance.

I think this is a great case study of how to ruin a brand by running a public company that has to report to the street.

I'm not into fashion, Coach may have been a luxury brand at one point. Somewhere they started using tricks from Trading Up to broaden their buyers from just affluent to those who are aspirational and willing to trade up beyond levels they could afford in other categories. Now they are impacted by a bad recession and respond by increasing sales at their outlet stores which will only dilute the value of the brand.
They claim to be responding this fall with a premium bag collection that has a lot of "bling" on it.

The only question is which Brand will replace Coach as the next luxury purse to have if you and your friends happen to be on The Hills?