entirely safe and fun

15 Sep ‘07, 7.10pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

It is in my hairs.

12 Sep ‘07, 8.09pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

He is a baby. Says so right on the package.

10 Sep ‘07, 3.21pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Two for two today. This one was especially nice looking, even if I do say so myself.

A kind of funny story: Punam and I were in Bangalore on New Year’s Day. We went to the Leela Palace for the brunch buffet, which, to my delight, offered pork and sauerkraut per the German tradition. I happened to notice that one of the bussers had a bottle of cleaning fluid which bore a most auspicious name…

And then, during an episode of the drama Parrivaar on ZeeTV, I couldn’t help but notice a familiar bottle in the hands of a servant. I wasn’t even watching it full-screen, just in a PiP window while I figured out which football game was likely to be most enjoyable.

It is astonishing how, given just a few pixels, smeared out by JPEG artifacts, I was able to pick out a weak brand identity to which I was exposed just once. In the screen grab on the left, the enhanced portion was created by applying edge detection, probably replicating what my retina had to work with (once you add the colors back in), and you can see it’s not the kind of data you’d want for an OCR project, yet my recognition was instantaneous and thoughtless.

The clear corollary to all this: everyone needs a recognizable, colorful brand to maximize their memorableness.

Like this, maybe. People are really sensitive to primary colors. That red, in a region of high contrast, is good for getting attention, right? It worked for the red lettering on a yellow background on the bottle of Colin cleaner.

And now, robot dancing! There are some excellent new pictures of Dante up, tagged with “week five”. You need to see them! Dante is bathed, his hair is temporarily tamed with the application of water, and he has an encounter with a robot (or maybe not — this, after all, is “コレジャナイロボ: IT IS NOT THIS!”, a sort of Engrish antinomy with the Pentateuchal “I am that I am.”).

Update: I was finally moved to do some research on this robot, a gift from some of our East Coast friends. I am a very, very poor and very, very slow reader of Japanese, so this was a painful process. It turns out that Zarigani Toy Works, in Japan, produced this highly generic and yet crappy toy robot to ensure that when an adult gives it to a child, that child will be disappointed that it isn’t the right robot, already a likely a priori outcome due to the large number of robots from which a Japanese adult would have to chose. The small child might, in fact, say, “kore ja nai!” — “This isn’t it!” (or more poetically, “IT IS NOT THIS!”). I’ve turned to Google’s machine translation engine for a doubly hilarious crib to share with the world…

“As for wanting this - it is!!” The scream of sad it is given out from the child who opened the present. Christmas of pleasant expectation suddenly, in the shambles. Is there such experience? If possible, it is something which we would like to avoid. But life, many risks as for the how story which enters into the dying hand so there are no desired ones. In order to obtain desired ones also it is good to know that in a some opportunity also effort is necessary, probably will be.
As for “[korejiyanairobo]” the exquisite copy impression, with parenthesis trick, the it probably is to convey to the child with the effect of trauma class.
Please try by all means as a sentiment education toy.

8 Sep ‘07, 3.31pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

The cutest thing ever.

4 Sep ‘07, 11.47pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Dante in his car bucket as Santa Clara’s By Th’ Bucket, where they left the ‘e’ on the dealer’s lot and they’re passing the savings on to you.

And in the Guinness Book for longest elapsed time between birth of twins? Kim Jong-il photo from public domain source, found via Wikipedia.

I’ve been thinking about whose hair Dante really has, lately. His tonsorial resemblance to North Korean head-of-state Kim Jong-il is remarkable.

Transitively, I guess, so is mine.

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged with “day thirtyone”. My parents have joined us for a week, and feature prominently in/took many of the photos you’ll see there.

1 Sep ‘07, 12.28pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Da es heiß war, und hatte seine Arme über das Gesicht gelegt. (hat tip: Nietzsche)