Oh the difficulties of using sarcasm online! How are you supposed to get across the fact that you are being sarcastic when you can’t alter the tone of your voice, give a little wink-wink, or nudge-nudge? Anyone with a sense of humor that instant messages has surely encountered this problem first hand.

This week I was fooled once again. CNN published an opinion article on why Stephen Colbert’s bid for presidency must be stopped. Here is a sample that quotes Colbert and explains why he would be horrible running our country.

America’s role in world: “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Under a Colbert administration, it appears America would just attack other countries for no valid reason.

The whole time I knew that Colbert’s candidacy and stances are simply a joke, but I thought the person writing the opinion article was taking it seriously. Apparently I was wrong. Upon closer inspection, that little blurb at the beginning introducing the author can be quite important. Usually it just toots the person’s horn and gives you links to their other material, but this time it actually contained something of real value. “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian”. And in case that isn’t evidence enough, if you take a look at the Story Highlights in the sidebar, you will see “he channels Colbert, satirically calls his candidacy a threat to our way of life ”

So the author was being sarcastic and I had no idea. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone. This is an obvious problem. And when there is a problem, we need a solution. Enter sarcastext.

Sarcastext is a idea for a specific font to be used whenever you are being sarcastic. The font itself alerts the user to the sarcasm, just as bold, italics, and capitalization are used for emphasis. Thus, whenever the reader encounters sarcastext font, the joke will not go over their head, which we have seen can have embarrassing consequences.
 

The article even makes some Hitler references, as previously mentioned in my post on Godwin’s law.

Photo: ManyLittleBlessings

The last decade has seen increased attention paid to what a brand stands for, beyond the product they sell. No longer do consumers simply want a good product – they want to stand for something they believe in at the same time. Tom’s Shoes gives a pair of shoes to the less fortunate for every pair purchased. Patagonia represents sustainable manufacturing for outdoor gear. American Apparel says no to overseas sweatshops and child labor. Apple designs products that push the status-quo and embrace the elegance of simplicity.

What a wonderful world it is. Unfortunately, there is one problem with all of these brands – they are all quite expensive. You have to pay a hefty premium to buy an iPod rather than a Zune, an American Apparel v-neck rather than Hanes, a Patagonia rain jacket rather than one from Walmart, and a pair of Tom’s Shoes rather than a pair from H&M. Not everyone has the luxury of expendable income to pay a 2x markup, but I’m sure they would still like to stand for something through their purchases.

Let’s forget about clothing and technology for a moment and examine a much smaller scale. Can the same stances be taken for highly commoditized goods as well? The definition of a commodity is that you don’t care which one you have because they are all the same. One brand’s iodized salt is identical to the next. But instead of looking so closely at the product, let’s look at the brand itself.

Let’s say you have two brands selling salt. Bradley’s costs $1.00 and Chuck’s costs $1.05. You know that they sell identical products, so logically you would choose the cheaper option. Now for the twist. Bradley’s ships their salt to the store on sleighs pulled by puppies and aren’t shy about using their whips to get moving faster. Chuck’s is a brand that came about to provide a direct foil to Bradley’s – they ship their salt by truck and donate 1% of all profits to PETA. Now which brand would you buy?

Of course, a 5% premium doesn’t sound so bad now! But even more importantly than the fact that it is a 5% premium, it is a 5 cent premium – something that is accessible for everyone who buys salt (which cannot be said about premium brands like Patagonia and Apple).

Some questions come out of this thought experiment. Is there a margin for any commoditized product that can be successfully taken by a “righteous” brand? Is it only an option when the established brands are bad? What about neutral? Can these “righteous” brands come into existence without a marketing budget that would kill their narrow margins above commodity prices?
 

Photo: collective nouns

This blog is largely composed of writings intending to teach or explore a subject I finding interesting. Some posts are about subjects I know quite well, like nerdy ratios. But the vast majority of posts are about subjects that I want to learn about, like how check-sum digits work on credit cards. The beauty of having a blog with intelligent readers is that I have an excuse to research the subject, internalize it, and output a concise explanation.

Unfortunately, I’m finding that it is going to be difficult to produce research-based posts while traveling. With limited internet access, I simply don’t have the opportunity to explore a new subject to the level required to write a blog post on it.

I could react to this in one of two ways. The first is to simply stop writing blog posts while I’m traveling since I can’t write the heavily researched posts I love so dearly. But a far better solution is to see this as an opportunity to explore alternative types of posts.

So stay tuned for new posts that might be a little bit different. Rather than being so factual, they will be of a nature that can’t be argued with (and thus doesn’t require supporting data) – things like personal beliefs and observations of the world. Do you have any other ideas?

Photo: Amy Lenzo

Baseball is the most polarizing sport – you either love it or can’t understand how people could ever like it. Sports like basketball and football, you still have the die-hard fans, but it doesn’t seem to have the opposition calling it boring and refusing to watch that baseball has.

It’s been said that to be a baseball fan, you have to appreciate history, numbers, and statistics. It’s not so much that any given pitch is exciting, rather it is what happens over the course of an entire at bat, game, season, and many decades.

ESPN finished their year in review, in which they look at everything unbelievable that happened in major league baseball in the past year. I think this is a good litmus test to determine whether or not you have the potential to like baseball. If you are fascinated by any of these blurbs, you are in danger of becoming a baseball fan:

• In an Aug. 30 game against the Padres, Andre Ethier did something that ought to be impossible: He got the Dodgers’ first AND second hits in the same inning. How’d that happen? It wasn’t easy. In between Ethier’s hits, those other Dodgers helped make this nugget possible by going walk, strikeout, walk, walk, sacrifice fly, walk, walk, walk.
• Eugenio Velez went 0-for-37 this year, the most hitless at-bats in a season by any non-pitcher Zero Hero in the history of baseball.
• The Mets went 299 games without hitting any grand slams – and then hit two slams in a span of six hitters.
• In an Aug. 14 game against the Cubs, Braves rookie Arodys Vizcaino marched out of the bullpen, faced three hitters, struck out all three and still, somehow, succeeded in A) blowing a save and B) pitching only 2/3 of an inning. Those strike-three wild pitches make all sorts of strange-but-true feats possible, don’t they?

And the postseason was even a little crazier:

• The Cardinals have played 19,387 regular-season games in their history. Not once had they won a game in which they trailed five times. But that’s the mess they overcame to win Game 6 — when all that was riding on it was losing the World Series. That’s all. The Cardinals trailed in this game by scores of 1-0, 3-2, 4-3, 7-4 and 9-7 — and won. Unreal.
• Never had both teams homered in extra innings at any point during an entire Series. Then, naturally, each team homered in extra innings just in GAME 6 (Josh Hamilton in the 10th, David Freese in the 11th).
• In back-to-back-to-back at-bats in Games 6 and 7, David Freese hit a game-tying triple, game-winning homer and game-tying double. How incredible was that? Only one other time in World Series history had a player gotten game-tying or go-ahead hits in three consecutive trips to the plate. And naturally, it was Allen Craig, earlier in this same World Series.
• In Game 1s of this postseason, the Yankees, Tigers, Rangers, Phillies, Cardinals, Brewers and Diamondbacks started pitchers who had been around long enough to make a combined 1,469 regular-season starts in the big leagues, plus another 30 postseason starts. But the Rays had other plans (as always). They started Matt Moore in Game 1. How many big league games had he started in his life before that game? That would be one. So, naturally, Moore went out and threw seven shutout innings (giving up two hits), the first time any rookie starter had done that in a postseason game. So it took 107 years for it to happen once. It then took four days, of course, for it to happen a second time — thanks to Arizona’s Josh Collmenter.
• Finally, there was Albert Pujols’ picturesque little box-score line in that very same Game 3: 6 AB, 4 R, 5 H, 6 RBIs, with three majestic homers and 14 total bases tossed in there just for fun. Feel free to stare at that line for as long as Albert stared at his long home runs, because in the entire live-ball era — all nine decades of it — there has been only one regular-season 6-4-5-6 three-homer game, by Dave Winfield against the Twins on April 13, 1991.

Head over to ESPN.com for the full articles on the regular and post-season 2011.

Photo: Shutter Daddy

Merry Christmas to all! I know exactly what you should ask for next Christmas – a pet reindeer! There are three reasons why a reindeer would be a great pet.

Antlers

Reindeer lose their antlers every year and grow them back. This means each year you have your pet reindeer, you’ll have another set of antlers to hang in your den. Couple this with that facts that reindeer have the largest antlers to body size ratio of any deer and both males plus females have antlers, and you have a hell of a pet.

Milk

Pretty much all we drink is cow milk, and maybe occasionally some goat milk, but there are many other animals that product excellent milk, including reindeer. Compared to cow milk, reindeer milk has 3 times the protein, 6 times the fat, and half the lactose. Sounds pretty good, but be warned – it is pretty labor intensive as it requires someone to hold the antlers while someone else milks. Probably worth the effort though.

Santa Costume

How legit would it be to have a live reindeer to go along with your Santa costume? Can you imagine a reindeer pulling you down Lombard Street at SantaCon next year?