American Madness

Are you a fan of Hot Chocolate?

I admit, I am. Love the stuff. In the winter I can’t get enough of it, around the holidays we actually went and checked out a bunch of 5th Avenue Store windows with a thermos full of hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. As far as I am concerned there are few things better to warm you up on a cold day then sipping on hot chocolate (hot apple cider is up there, as are some teas… Coffee just doesn’t do it for me).

Anyway, City Bakery has declared February the month of their Hot Chocolate Festival. Every day in February City Bakery will be featuring a different type of Hot Chocolate. Starting tomorrow head over to City Bakery to help celebrate February as Hot Chocolate Festival Month.

This by far represents the most work I have done for a single post.

Before I bore you with the details of what I did I will give you the actual post:

We are all familiar with big brand logos, for the most part we are aware that there is some mass-marketing machine behind them that has conducted massive amount of research and focus groups to get just the right shade of blue to use for the new at&t logo. Now what is interesting is the design work that goes into logos we are all familiar with that are not associated with major brands and how they were developed.

This week there has been the story going around of the Biohazard symbol. Apparently it was developed in the 1960s and it was developed by the folks at Dow Chemical for use by everyone. And yes, it turns out there were focus groups used to create it along with some other guidelines and the color was chosen for visibility (that would be Blaze Orange).

Okay, that was the post I was going to write. Now the work I did to get to this point:

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Have you ever wished that you could look up a whole bunch of reviews for a restaurant at one location? Well, now you can. Urbanspoon acts as a Meta-Review site for restaurants, collecting reviews from various sites like New York Magazine, the New York Times, Time Out New York, New York Sun, CitySearch, even Michelin. Plus bloggers can even link reviews from their blogs to the site (as we are working to do now with our restaurant reviews).

Of course there is also the requisite spot for user reviews as well. Currently UrbanSpoon is available for most US cities and, of course, the more you participate in the site, the more definitive it becomes and the more useful as a tool. What is clearly missing are the Zagat’s reviews.

* Remember that bank account you had when you were a kid? You are probably wondering now ‘whatever happened to that?’ Well, with any luck it was a savings account and the bank has been acquired by three or four other banks over the years and it is still sitting there making money.

The real question is how to find that money. May I suggest MissingMoney? MissingMoney is a website that works in most of the fifty states, simply type in your name, hit enter and it searches for all unclaimed finds in your name or in a name similar to your name (like M. Cipriano instead of Matt Cipriano).

Pretty nifty (until you make your claim on the funds and discover that you are owed less then the price of a postage stamp) and could be worth checking out. And if you all of a sudden discover that you have millions in an account that you had forgotten about remember who told you about the site I am totally willing to accept gifts, the more generous, the more willing I am to accept them.

* I specifically chose the dancing dollar because I knew Josh would be bothered by it

Oh my lord, this will change my life.

What do you do when you find something that you want to read online but you don’t have time? Bookmark it and hope you’ll come back later?

Create a note on paper or in a word document?

Leave that tab open on your browser even though it will clog up your screen?

Print out the article?

Now you can just click “Read Later” using http://www.instapaper.com and find the article later at the site waiting for you. Awesome!

Classmates.com is not content to just be irrelevant, now they want to be incorrect.

The social networking dinosaur known for their annoying Web ads has now decided quote fabrication is the way forward.

As I was checking my Yahoo! Mail via My Yahoo! Homepage (now with bigger display ads), I noticed the latest Classmates.com display advertisement. I am afraid to report there are no interchangeable faces on the circa-1986 school book photos, nor are they proclaiming this man is now married to that woman. Rather, they decided to jazz up their decades-long banner campaign of data farming by including a photo of William Shakespeare (you may’ve heard of him) inserted into the mix. I suspect this is to insinuate that Bill went to school with you, and put his profile up on their site. Wacky hi-jinks ensued.

But the picture wasn’t enough. Above his smiling school book photo is a quote from the ever quotable man:

“I count myself in nothing else so happy in a soul remembering my good friends.” William Shakespeare.

Being the victim of a liberal arts degree, and having spent a lot of time with 500 year old English plays, the quote immediately sounded off. (more…)

There was a time when I would have loved this. I used to come up with fabulous excuses as to why my paper was not in on time, and I am sure that by this point professors must be tired of hearing about crashed computers. In fact the amount of time that excuse has been used probably would lead people to believe that computers are the most unstable machines ever.

Now, instead of claiming your computer crashed you can simply make it seem like you file has been corrupted. File Destructor 2.0 does this job for you beautifully. Just title a file with what ever is appropriate, choose the right file size and the type of document you are suppose to be handing in to your professor or boss and poof, File Destructor creates a new file filled with gibberish and page and column breaks for you to email to your superior and then feign ignorance when they report back that it was corrupted and, if you can, start to cry when you “realize” you have to “rewrite” the entire report.

Chardonnay drinkers are a breed apart. They seem to defend their grape of choice regardless of the failings of many. Poorly made Chardonnays drove me away from white varietals for years. Fortunately, my tastes have matured, and I’ve come to enjoy many, many white varietals. But I’ve stayed away from Chardonnays mostly. Until now, when as a service to AmericanMadness readers, I begin an odyssey down the Chardonnay aisle at FreshDirect.com.

Winery: Hope Estates
Grape: Chardonnay
Region: Australia
Year: 2005

Source: FreshDirect.com
Price: $13

Color: Gold

Nose: Butter, apple, banana came forth in a big way when I popped the cork on this one. After some time out of the bottle, grass, oak, watermelon and pineapple notes were evident.

Taste: Remember those long road trips as a kid and your mom would pack individual fruit juices in a can. Well after the initial big buttery and wildflower entry to the wine, the taste is unmistakable Dole pineapple juice served from a tin can. Fortunately for this medium bodied wine, the tin can subsides, and lets tastes of honey, peach and mango dance with the pineapple. I’m greeted at the finish by structured oak; whom is joined by his friend lingering butter. (more…)

While we are all aware you can head down to Canal Street in Chinatown and pick up some fake designer bags and other such knock-offs, the most recent item to be knocked-off are apparently delivery trucks. Now I am guessing there is not a large market for knocked-off delivery trucks unless you are running drugs, trafficking illegal immigrants or doing something equally as nefarious and illegal.

Apparently Wal-mart, FedEx, Direct TV and even the US Border Patrol are the targets of truck cloning. Basically, ‘bad guys’ are creating trucks that are essentially duplicated company vans and trucks in hopes that they will look less suspicious traveling on highways and across borders then, say, an old rusty white van with blacked-out windows. Apparently this is a great way to transport contraband, but there is also a concern (at least according to ABC News and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement) that these vehicles might gain access to places they shouldn’t be: “Termed ‘cloned’ vehicles, the report also warns that terrorists could use the same fake trucks to gain access to secure areas with hidden weapons.” (more…)

I apologize for the harsh language in the titled, but not only does it seem fitting for this but saying “This is Really, Really Messed Up” doesn’t quite get the same message across. And frankly, this is Fucked Up.

CNN reports that Ryan Wittman, 21, was sentenced to only 4 years in prison for using a 100,000 volt stun-gun on his son to toughen him up so that he could be the best cage fighter ever. Now that is pretty messed up, the really fucked up part is that his son is 18-months-old.

Fortunately the trial was pretty much open and shut and it took only 20 minutes to send him to jail for 4 years. Unfortunately his son will only be five and a half when he gets out of jail and not yet big enough to beat the shit out of him like he deserves. Hopefully some kind folks locked up in prison will take it into their own hands to “explain” to him the wrongs of his ways.

And after watching the video, if you let the next one role you will find out that apparently it is fucked up news week on CNN… I got a follow up video about “a class room fight turned into a riot.” Apparently two kids were fighting when the teacher tried to break it up, god forbid. This caused other students in the class to lose it and 18 Seventh-graders attacked the teacher. There is something very, very wrong going on.