Omega Point

Failed slogans: “Woodbridge: the wine that takes 2 hours to choke down”

So there I was, wait­ing to meet a friend for sushi, when she called to let me know she was run­ning a lit­tle behind. What to do, what to do? Why hello, Liquor Store!

This par­tic­u­lar BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classi­est shop­ping estab­lish­ment, Kings­gate Mall. Home to the Worst Wash­room in Canada,¹ Kings­gate also fea­tures stores that sell knock­off swords, hooker boots and hos­pi­tal scrubs, as well as a Shop­pers Drug Mart, which is usu­ally the sole rea­son I go in there.² Also, some­times Pay­less stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buy­ing a replace­ment bot­tle of vodka–my pre­vi­ous one hav­ing gone to a good cause: low­er­ing the col­lec­tive IQ of Vancouver’s Twit­ter com­mu­nity by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than any­thing likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shop­per, I gen­er­ally avoid buy­ing alco­hol in the evening because, well, who wants to be wait­ing in line for 15 min­utes? Exactly: bored peo­ple.

While stand­ing there, being told by a vari­ety of drunk, jonesing, tooth­less and urine-smelling peo­ple that my hair, hat, paint­brush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a dis­play in the “impulse pur­chase” rack pro­mot­ing Wood­bridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this dis­play was not that it was posi­tioned where the gum and Archie comics are sup­posed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other peo­ple in line with me had been given a copy of Corel­Draw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actu­ally not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art direc­tor, pho­tog­ra­pher, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears some­thing hap­pened on the way to the print­ers’. (“I said ‘cre­ative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Pos­si­bly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoy­ing ham and pineap­ple with root beer floats is not the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inex­plic­a­bly wordy “Enter to Win” bub­ble com­mu­ni­cates its rela­tion to the prizes men­tioned in the ad’s footer by totally over­lap­ping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effec­tive, right?

In fair­ness to Wood­bridge, Robert Mon­davi, and their staff of tal­ented media pro­fes­sion­als, the “ENTER TO WIN the fol­low­ing prizes!” bub­ble does impli­cate the importer, Vin­cor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its rep­u­ta­tion besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shad­ows. How­ever, I don’t think I can for­give the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion
1 bot­tle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not ter­ri­ble. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actu­ally. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bot­tle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actu­ally comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a lit­tle con­fused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall shar­ing a sin­gle bot­tle of wine with only one other per­son. Maybe I am an alco­holic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s coun­ter­part to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “stan­dard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bot­tle as con­tain­ing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes fur­ther, pro­vid­ing a handy “Party Cal­cu­la­tor” that esti­mates a more rea­son­able vol­ume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writ­ers: you’re clearly there any­way. Make sure you run your mar­ket­ing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. Dur­ing my sole visit, I was able to accu­rately dis­cern the height of one of the pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors to the stall. Think about that. [↩]
2. Shop­pers Drug Mart is awe­some. [↩]
3. Inter­ven­tion averted! [↩]

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: Fortified with essential caffeines

When I worked at the Great North­ern Way Cam­pus, there existed an unwrit­ten but very offi­cial decree: under no cir­cum­stances was any­one to allow me to have any Red Bull.

So… yeah, we’ll see how that goes tonight.

Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”

After hear­ing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restric­tions being applied — in par­tic­u­lar, to the “pedes­trian cor­ri­dors” being estab­lished here in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics, I’m con­cerned about the impli­ca­tions for free speech, as well as the poten­tial for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended.

I’ve been con­vinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st cen­tury is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but rather, intel­lec­tual prop­erty encum­brances. The idea that VANOC can trade­mark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclu­siv­ity of the brand that they’ve threat­ened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say noth­ing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I whole­heart­edly sup­port the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trade­marked by VANOC.

But I’ve been think­ing about sit­u­a­tions where The Author­i­ties have con­fis­cated mem­ory cards or deleted pho­tos and so, I’m won­der­ing about tech­ni­cal workarounds to this: I would con­sider using an EyeFi card in my cam­era to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jail­bro­ken iPhone or pos­si­bly some­thing with rea­son­able bat­tery life.) to auto­mat­i­cally upload my pho­tos to my web­site or Flickr so that I wasn’t actu­ally stor­ing any pic­tures, I was post­ing them live. Short of jam­ming or Iranian-scale net­work mon­i­tor­ing and packet inspec­tion, there would really be lit­tle any­one could do, assum­ing the images them­selves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is dis­tri­b­u­tion of that photo a trade­mark or copy­right vio­la­tion? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Win­ter”, or “Games” in this post action­able? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of some­thing involv­ing one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seri­ously con­sider myself at risk for hav­ing the last name “Win­ters”, or for writ­ing under that name, but it’s so impor­tant to explic­itly affirm that I have the right to do so when propos­ing –or pass­ing!– any law that pur­ports to restrict speech.

Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy

So I’m a giant typog­ra­phy nerd, as any of my friends can attest:

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every sin­gle other per­son I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analy­sis of the fonts and brand­ing fea­tured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugeni­cist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Get­ting Paid”: finally, the reli­gious right and “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” peo­ple can agree on a slo­gan to print on currency.

A quick syn­op­sis of Idioc­racy: stu­pid peo­ple out­breed the yup­pies and nerds. Con­se­quently, the aver­age IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sex­u­al­ized mod­els as anchors, all enter­tain­ment is lowest-common denom­i­na­tor, and cloth­ing is cov­ered with cor­po­rate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an enter­tain­ing movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Star­bucks, home of Exotic Cof­fee for Men.

Any­way, I ref­er­enced Vancouver’s own typog­ra­pher Ray Lara­bie above because many of the design choices in Idioc­racy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idio­cratic Design at Under­Con­sid­er­a­tion now!

Catherine Winters in… The Case of Too Many Catherine Winters!

Recently, there’s been a lot of media inter­est in a woman named Melissa Huck­aby — though not that Melissa Huck­aby — and what it’s meant for her to be con­fused with an accused mur­derer and sex­ual preda­tor: media atten­tion, van­dal­ism, death threats, etc, etc. Scary stuff.

I, on the other hand, share my name with a num­ber of mod­er­ately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be ser­ial killers or skin­heads or any­thing ter­ri­ble like that at all. That said, the most promi­nent ones tend to be fairly embarass­ing. So who are they? A cou­ple other Cather­ine Win­ters have writ­ten embar­rass­ing books, but that’s thank­fully a lot bet­ter than it could be. No, my fel­low Cather­ine Win­ters are pretty harmless.

The first Cather­ine Win­ters’ story is pretty tragic, however:

Nine-year-old Cather­ine Win­ters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A fam­ily friend named Dan Mon­roe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her New­cas­tle, Indi­ana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an out­break of measles and Cather­ine had spent the morn­ing play­ing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked ging­ham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.

They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mys­tery — was she kid­napped by gyp­sies? Did she run away? Her dis­ap­pear­ance was cov­ered in a 1913 silent news­reel.

Of course today, we can all guess what hap­pened and it’s pretty hor­ri­fy­ing. I really can’t fault her for hav­ing the same name, par­tic­u­larly when she met such a tragic end.

Sec­ond to her is a Cather­ine Win­ters who is also pretty hard to be irri­tated by. Cather­ine Win­ters of Lin­don, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I fig­ure she doesn’t need crazy peo­ple pick­ing at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego link­ing to any of the sites that list a lit­tle too much per­sonal info.

Cather­ine, if you ever read this:

• Tell your par­ents to think about pass­word pro­tect­ing some of those pho­tos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
• Don’t let high school get you down in a cou­ple years. In my expe­ri­ence, Cather­ine Win­ter­ses don’t like high school.

So, with the excep­tion of Cather­ine Win­ters who dis­ap­peared in 1913 and Cather­ine Win­ters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:

There’s Cather­ine Win­ters, who in 1983, wrote a sin­gle entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Impor­tant Peo­ple. I’ve had peo­ple ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a pub­lished author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly sus­pect that this is the Cather­ine Win­ters who wrote for Young Miss mag­a­zine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writ­ing for Health.com and is not as lame as pre­vi­ously asserted. Either way, it’s sur­pris­ing that some­one as pro­lific as this Cather­ine Win­ters could be eclipsed online by a book writ­ten 25 years ago.

[Update: May 28, 2009: Cather­ine Win­ters good-naturedly con­firms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Cather­ine Win­ters have wor­ried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]

There’s a “Kather­ine Win­ters Hair Salon” in Irv­ing­ton, New York. I’m not actu­ally sure of the spelling of her first name, but appar­ently, the pro­pri­etor isn’t actu­ally named Cather­ine Win­ters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writ­ing, there’s only one extremely neg­a­tive review avail­able on Google:

“If she didn’t give me a bunch of atti­tude for leav­ing and offered me a dis­count to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”

Finally, there’s the Cather­ine Win­ters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Sin­gle and Lov­ing It. In the author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I had expe­ri­enced some short­com­ing also in the area of being sin­gle and pray­ing for the right mate to come my way after my jour­ney on being sin­gle I am now hap­pily mar­ried to a won­der­ful hus­band but if I had not stood still just for a sec­ond I also would of miss my bless­ing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to con­sider while your wait­ing on God and soul search­ing for what you want your mate to be.

You know, a lot of peo­ple look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legit­i­mate’ or because you don’t have ‘edi­tors’ or ‘proof­read­ing’ and can have ‘prob­lems’ with ‘gram­mar’, but to them, I say, balder­dash! I’m order­ing this right now.

So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even count­ing the myr­iad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a cou­ple enter­tain­ing ones.

• In 2008, New Orleans res­i­dent Mary Cather­ine Win­ters, a nurse at Omega Hos­pi­tal, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clin­ton.
• In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Win­ter won gold at the inau­gural World Junior Fig­ure Skat­ing Cham­pi­onships. At two sen­tences in length, she has the short­est Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
• Kathy Win­ters, NASA Shut­tle Weather Offi­cer, gets quoted in the press all the time and appar­ently has the author­ity to scrub shut­tle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
• Dr. Kathryn Win­ters, a pedi­a­tri­cian from New Mex­ico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s par­ent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.

Inter­est­ingly, Cather­ine Win­ters have a ten­dency to be fictional!

• “Cather­ine Win­ters”, “Cate Win­ters” and “Kate Win­ters” are all pop­u­lar names in a vari­ety of fan fic­tion: Twi­light, (Damn it.) Smal­l­ville, Harry Pot­ter, Boy Meets World, Doc­tor Who, and so on. The most bla­tant one of these, a Star­gate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
• Hilary Swank played Pro­fes­sor Kather­ine Win­ter in the 2007 film The Reap­ing, which I have not seen. With a Rot­ten Toma­toes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seri­ously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Incon­sis­tent. Career. Ever.)
• Kate Win­ters is the pro­tag­o­nist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coy­ote Sky, cur­rently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial les­bian romance list. Unlike The Reap­ing, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that rank­ing is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Cather­ine Win­ters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
• One of my per­sonal favourites: “Cather­ine Win­ters” is the alias cho­sen by the pro­tag­o­nist of het­ero romance novel Indis­creet by Mary Balogh.
  

  Lady Cather­ine Wins­more, a hero­ine of quiet courage, refused a forced mar­riage when rape left her with an ille­git­i­mate child. Exiled by her fam­ily, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Cather­ine Win­ters. An inno­cent smile brings the unwel­come advances of another rake, the Vis­count Rawleigh, Rex Adams.

  That’s super. Not only do I appar­ently have a name that makes me sound like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.

Who shares your name?

#Amazonfail

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by hav­ing it shipped to her address in Wash­ing­ton to take advan­tage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offer­ing to US-based cus­tomers. I ended up sav­ing some­thing like $60. Sweet. Deal.

So, my first Ama­zon sale com­pleted, I was feel­ing pretty pos­i­tive about them. Until yesterday.

Sun­day morn­ing, I was alerted to news of a some­what poorly-planned deci­sion at Ama­zon: to bet­ter cater to America’s “moral major­ity”, Ama­zon decided to excise the pop­u­lar­ity rank­ings of LGBT books, delist­ing them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by search­ing for an unre­lated title and click­ing on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selec­tions have been delisted.

Accord­ing to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer com­mu­nity, Ama­zon has de-ranked such titles as Broke­back Moun­tain, Tip­ping the Vel­vet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the ques­tion: what on earth are these shel­tered, big­oted Ama­zon cus­tomers search­ing for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon dis­cov­er­ing those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spit­tle fly­ing forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay his­tory of Broke­back Moun­tain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the sub­ject, Raul (Hummingbird604) com­pares the move by Ama­zon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” deba­cle. He also raises the ques­tion, is Easter Sun­day a good time to be orga­niz­ing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sun­day an okay time for Ama­zon PR to take the day off? Obvi­ously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult con­tent” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demon­strated any cohe­sive strat­egy to man­ag­ing their response, and con­tinue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since break­ing Sun­day morn­ing, the #ama­zon­fail and #glitch­myass hash­tags on Twit­ter con­tinue to trend highly a day later, invit­ing responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of sug­ges­tions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Pow­ells Books’ Twitt­ter account notes that they will def­i­nitely not cen­sor the pres­ence of LGBT mate­r­ial on their site.

@cin­e­mae­stro That cer­tainly is dis­turb­ing. For­tu­nately, Powell’s will never cen­sor this mate­r­ial #ama­zon­fail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zenti­nal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is some­thing we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Mon­day morn­ing, the main­stream media was already report­ing on the issue:

• Ama­zon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rank­ings, CBC
• ‘Gay writ­ing’ falls foul of Ama­zon sales rank­ing sys­tem, Guardian.co.uk
• Ama­zon web­site cen­sor­ship row, Chan­nel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Ama­zon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, repro­duced by the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Ama­zon­fail as “an embar­rass­ing and ham-fisted cat­a­loging error for a com­pany that prides itself on offer­ing com­plete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books out­side of the Gay & Les­bian cat­e­gories were der­anked and that they’re in the process of rein­stat­ing them.

So what hap­pened? Did some mid-level man­ager enact some crazy new pol­icy? Can Amazon’s rank­ing and report­ing mech­a­nisms be gamed?

Catherine Omega Teaches You DVORAK

How to write a US Political Thriller: Start with the Secret Service codenames.

So the most press­ing ques­tion of the post US-election period, beyond “did adults seri­ously come up with the name ‘labradoo­dle’?” and “will Team Obama need to buy their own key­boards?” is clearly, “what is Sasha Obama’s Secret Ser­vice codename?”

Appar­ently, it’s Rose­bud. I find that a lit­tle weird on its own, but par­tic­u­larly so in light of the oth­ers assigned to the Oba­mas, Bidens and Bushes. Accord­ing to the Chicago Tri­bune:

President-elect Barack Obama: Rene­gade
Michelle Obama: Renais­sance
Malia Obama: Radi­ance
Sasha Obama: Rose­bud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
Pres­i­dent George W. Bush: Tum­bler
First Lady Laura Bush: Tempo

Aside from Bush’s code­name, which I assume means that some­one has a sense of humour, these all sound like cars. Crappy, marketer-named cars.

“This fall, test-drive the 2009 Chrysler Capri and dis­cover an auto­mo­tive expe­ri­ence that demon­strates why no one wants to buy Chrysler. Act now before the recall!”

Also, as an aside, I love the names-that-start-with-the-same-letter bit and all, but seri­ously, you guys are pos­i­tive every­one can hear the dif­fer­ence between “Radi­ance” and “Renais­sance” over an ear­piece, right? I ask because the sit­com viewer in me thinks this is going to end with some­one get­ting fired by an enraged Pres­i­dent Obama.

To My Web 2.0 Valentine…

This is what we came up with at Social Sig­nal for Valentine’s Day this year. It’s the per­fect way to say “I love you” to that spe­cial some­one with 800 pic­tures on Flickr. See? It’s not such a bad hol­i­day after all!