Sunshocked

Having realized the power of branding, the public health folks have set their sights on taking all logos off of cigarette packaging. A creative solution. Too bad logos and branding are not the same thing.

Popularized by Joseph Campbell in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“, the concept of the Hero’s Journey or Monomyth suggests a hidden structure to the obstacles that every hero must face. Out of curiosity, how well does Barack Obama fare?

Vital systems, from the U.S. economy to the global food market, are failing all at once… according to the “glass is half empty” crowd anyway. The “glass is half full of yummy lemonade” perspective is that we’re merely going through some market corrections.

Have you seen Giuliani’s latest television spot? It’s almost a commercial for an upcoming action movie in the Middle-East, but it teeters precariously on the edge. So I gave it a push.

Our nation is less than two weeks away from the arrival of the iPhone, but all is not well. Apple’s exclusive partnership with AT&T makes the iPhone a very difficult purchase to reconcile with nerd values.

When I lived in Indiana, I dreamt of San Francisco as a Bohemian paradise of art, love, and radical politics. Though my fantasies lacked specifics, I could have easily been thinking of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which begins today.

My favorite Van Jones quote is, “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.” Where does this leave the Muse concert I saw Monday night?

Having grown up in northwest Indiana, the very epicenter of the SuperBowl, I would be sorely remiss if I did not mention it at least in passing. But now that I have, let’s talk a moment about a much larger game being played, with much higher stakes.

The cover of Friday’s Chronicle reported a flurry of comments from GOP leadership (among which I’m including O’Reilly) on “San Francisco Values”. These three words are intended to scare voters into voting Republican, keeping SF Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker position.

This weekend I finally bit the bullet and jumped into Ruby on Rails. The experience blew the dust off old memories of writing BASIC programs with my dad on our Commodore, which inevitably got me thinking about human evolution.