{"id":551,"date":"2011-03-31T06:42:02","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T11:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2011\/03\/31\/110331-randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2024-09-11T18:17:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T23:17:23","slug":"110331-randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/03\/31\/110331-randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some sightings around the interwebz while giving a big shout out to the A&amp;M women&#8217;s basketball team for thumping the world-class Baylor team and advancing to the NCAA Final Four for the first time in school history. (The only partial downer is that all the quotes I&#8217;ve seen have the Lady Bears blaming their loss on an &#8220;off night&#8221;; gee, do ya think the Ags had anything to do with that? Huh?)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Of course, A&amp;M&#8217;s foe on Sunday night is Stanford, the only team to beat Connecticut since the Ming Dynasty.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 2em;\">According to <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/developments\/2011\/03\/30\/russian-investor-buys-silicon-valley-mansion-for-100-million\/\">this report<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal, a &#8220;Russian investor&#8221; just paid $100 million for a house in Silicon Valley. That works out to more than $3,000\/square foot. Our mansion has 10% of the square footage, but cost under 0.5% of that price and we don&#8217;t have to worry about falling into the Pacific Ocean. Of course, they probably have baby angel statues peeing into a pool, so they&#8217;ve got that going for them.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 2em;\">I never worked in an office where lunch thefts was a problem, but I&#8217;d be tempted to leave one of these in the fridge just on general principle. (Via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neatoshop.com\/product\/Lunch-Bugs-Sandwich-Bags\">Neatoshop<\/a>, only $5.95 each. Sounds steep, but what is lunch peace of mind worth to you?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/neatosandwichbugbags.jpg\" alt=\"Sandwich bags with embedded fake insects\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m not even a Disney fan, but this video is mesmerizing. I can&#8217;t imagine how long it took to make it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Zp1BYzIVi0U?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"349\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>More from Neatorama: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neatorama.com\/2011\/03\/30\/hilarious-paper-street-signs\/\">Hilarious Paper Street Signs<\/a>. This is one of my favorites:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/lostcatposter.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Cat poster with photo of mountain lion\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I might be able to rationalize paying $100 million for a mansion, but\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bornrich.com\/entry\/at-820000-vo-falcon-edition-is-the-world-s-most-expensive-rifle\/\">more than $800 thousand for a <i>rifle<\/i><\/a>? And that&#8217;s a rifle that doesn&#8217;t even have any sights. I guess if you can afford a gun that expensive, you can afford to pay someone else to aim it for you. If you&#8217;re wondering what the market is for handmade firearms of this caliber (ha! awesome pun intended!), here&#8217;s a hint: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vovapen.com\/\">the manufacturer&#8217;s website<\/a> is in English and Arabic.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 2em;\">And last but certainly not least, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.petitelapgiraffe.com\/\">this site<\/a> has been making the Facebook rounds lately. Someone went to a lot of trouble to create the faux Sokoblovsky Farms, billed as &#8220;Russia&#8217;s Finest Purveyors of Petite Lap Giraffes.&#8221; And, of course, PLGs (as the cognoscenti refer to them) are the true stars of the DirectTV ads featuring the opulent lifestyle of a Russian billionaire (say, you don&#8217;t suppose he just bought a house in&#8230;nah&#8230;surely not). You know, <i>these<\/i> ads:\n<p style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 2em;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rkB9OT2XVvA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/544gFFfuJBM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"left\">Did you notice the PLG in the second video? It&#8217;s a throwaway effect, which makes it even more special. Anyway, DirecTV&#8217;s ad agency (or one of them, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grey.com\/\">the Grey Group<\/a>) created the website to supplement the broadcast ad campaign. It&#8217;s purely a buzz-builder, as DirecTV is never mentioned in the site&#8217;s text (and I had to do a WHOIS query to confirm that Grey owns the domain name and is hosting the site). However, if you click over to the Photos section and scroll down a bit, you&#8217;ll see the two preceding ads embedded in the page. The strategy is working; 442,786 people before me have click on the &#8220;I Want One&#8221; button and were added to the waiting list to get their very own PLG. I plan to name mine Jerry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some sightings around the interwebz while giving a big shout out to the A&amp;M women&#8217;s basketball team for thumping the world-class Baylor team and advancing to the NCAA Final Four for the first time in school history. (The only partial downer is that all the quotes I&#8217;ve seen have the Lady Bears blaming their loss&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/03\/31\/110331-randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14141,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/14141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}