Alright, not all of these songs actually honor the movement - some have a little fun with it.
From Elvis to Alabama, maybe you'll know a few of these. If you do, or even if you don't, please to enjoy. And be sure to make the most of your holiday weekend.
You worked hard for it.
The old printer was a HP Photosmart C8180, and it served us well for a long time. But as it got older, it would occasionally freeze up under the stress of all the work it had to churn out. Something I can definitely relate to.
Then there was that obsolete thing. With the advent of Apple AirPrint, which was not one of its capabilities, it was only a matter of time before it was taking the big dirtnap.
The good news is the price of printers has continually come down, and the technology loaded into them has steadily increased. The bad news is - and this is an odd complaint - is there are too damn many to choose from. HP. Cannon. Brother. Epson. Lexmark (never a contender). Each company making at least ten to choose from, running the gamut from inexpensive to need a co-signer.
The determining factor on price is features. Paper feeder? Yes please. Automatic double side printing? Twice the fun. 12 pages per minute? If you say so. AirPrint? How did I ever live without it.
I didn't have the cash on hand for both the new MacBook Pro I need and the new iPhone being announced next week. But I did have the $99 bucks for a new HP OfficeJet 5740 (actually I just poured a little more gas on the American Express card).
So I feel like I at least got to upgrade something.
The setup however didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. It had trouble connecting to my wireless network. I thought it'd automatically say, "Oh, Jeff's network, where you been all my life?" Not so much.
Seems I was running on a 5Ghz network, and the printer is only 2.4Ghz capable. With the help of HP Tech Support I was chatting with, who at one point told me I needed to be patient (I got your patient right here...), I created a new 2.4Ghz network for the printer to hook up with. I know, right?
Now everything's working swell, and the new printer's spitting out paper like it just took a swig of Zima.
I wonder if it'll let me print out the loan documents I'll need for the ink cartridges.
As I understand it, through an app on your smartphone you let Uber know you need a ride.
Then, they let a complete stranger, who's somehow managed to pass a cursory background check while hiding the fact he killed three kids in Jersey, know where you are and what you look like.
They pull up in their personal car, which may or may not have been serviced or inspected since they've owned it ("Brake pads?! That's just crazy talk."), and you get in.
That thing you heard through your entire childhood about getting into cars with strangers? Yeah, not so much.
Google "bad Uber experience" and you'll get thousands of pages detailing horror stories. On the flip side, there's a website called Diary Of An Uber Driver, written by an anonymous driver, who appears to work in Australia, about the nightmare customers he's picked up. It's quite funny, although not as funny as this blog or Round Seventeen.
Fortunately, I sat still for a few minutes, the urge passed and I thought of something else to write about.
As far as I can tell, being an Uber driver does have a few things in common with freelancing: you work when you want. You can take long gigs (drives) or short ones. And you have to make a good impression each time out so they'll ask for you again (passengers get to rate their driver through the app).
On the other hand, when I'm freelancing at home or in an agency, rarely does anyone throw up where I'm working, leave their purse or wallet on my desk, fall asleep in the chair next to me (unless we're in a status meeting) or scratch my upholstery with their keys. Then expect me to clean it up.
Which is $20 I don't have to spot him, so sign me up.
The catch is he doesn't get the credit until I take my first ride. Around the block counts, right?
So my friend and art director extraordinaire Kurt Brushwyler and I kicked around escape plans for a while, and came up with a business idea we could both get behind: t-shirts.
Alright, so it wasn't the most original idea. But we were going to do it in a way that managed to combine two things we loved - t-shirts and Vegas.
I forget the name of it, but for a while there was a little newsletter/brochure you could pick up at any restaurant, usually near the restrooms by the sponsored post card rack and outdated copies of the L.A. Weekly. It listed all kinds of bizarre classes that not only reinforced every stereotype about L.A., but also that no legitimate institution of learning would ever offer.
One of them was How To Get Into The T-Shirt Industry. Coincidence? I think not.
So one night after a long day freelancing at Chiat (is there any other kind?), Kurt and I hopped in his Prius and drove over to the world-famous, two-star Marina Del Rey Marriott for a three-hour class taught by guys who'd hit it big making t-shirts and selling them to Paris Hilton for $95 a piece at Kitson.
It was actually an interesting and educational evening. Needless to say the part about having to go to Vegas at least once a year to hawk our wares at the Magic Fashion Convention was quite appealing.
Our master plan was to get those cart/kiosk things you see in the main promenade of The Forum Shops at Caesar's and sell the t-shirts off of them. It was going to be our test run. If they did well, we'd approach each of the casinos and holding companies about making exclusive t-shirts for their gift shops, with funny lines tailored specifically for each hotel.
I wrote about a couple hundred Vegas/hotel lines, and Kurt started working on designs for them. It was ours, and it was fun.
Right up until I called The Forum Shops to find out about the carts. Come to find out - and if I'd thought about it for a second I would've realized it - that Caesar's owned all the carts in their mall. They didn't rent them to outside vendors.
But since we both come from advertising, and are used to rejection, adversity, broken dreams and plans going awry on a daily basis, we knew exactly how to handle the situation.
Every once in awhile, when Kurt returns a phone call (my hair was black when I called him) or when I see him, we kick around rebooting the idea. But then we move on to more important things, like which sushi place to go to for lunch.
We still own the URL and still have the lines. Plus there are a whole slew of casinos that weren't there the first time around we could approach. So I'm not ruling anything out - we might come back to the idea at some point.
All I know for sure is if we do, there'll definitely be a lot of research involved.
For years, Jared just looked like a nerdy guy who lost a ton of weight and struck it big by eating Subway sandwiches.
But now, instead of nerdy he looks evil. And at Subway he's referred to as "Jared who?"
That they'll get in trouble, wind up in the middle of a scandal or die mid-campaign has always been the chance you take when you use a celebrity as a spokesperson. Or create one.
What Jared did was particularly despicable. And the fallout was quick and predictable: Subway severed all ties with him minutes after the first story broke and he hadn't yet been formally accused of anything. Then they hired a new ad agency to give them a fresh campaign and a new start. To which I say, "How's that working out for you?"
Ad agencies are never more optimistic than when they get a new piece of business. And Subway is a big account. I wish them luck, but this particular kind of tarnish keeps coming up like onions on a Black Forest Ham sub. Jared will be associated with Subway for campaigns and years to come, regardless of what they do. Not fair, but true.
Some celebrities, like Tiger Woods, manage to recover from scandal. But because of the repulsiveness of their transgressions, the Jareds and Bill Cosbys of the endorsement world aren't ever coming back.
Using a spokesperson is always a crapshoot. It's borrowed interest, but unlike a lot of people in the business I'm not necessarily against it as long as the person is right for the product and the message.
The problem that you run into is often all the A-list celebrities you want are taken. Then you wind up with a spot like this:
At least the only thing Loggia was ever guilty of was being in a bad commercial.
If Jared was smart, he kept the giant jeans he used to hold up in the early commercials.
When this is all over, they're all he's going to have left.
This startlingly beautiful baby is my boy. It's always been one of my favorite shots of him. It was taken at our great friend Michelle Purcell and her husband John's former house in San Clemente, just before he gave a piano recital of Rachmaninoff's piano concerto number 3 (I recall he was pretty accomplished at number 2 as well - BAM!).
I don't remember how old he is here. I only know he's sure not that age anymore.
We just got back from dropping him off at his dorm room in Austin where, if you don't know by now, in between going to all-night movie festivals, eating barbecue brisket by the pound and locally-sourced quinoa salads, he's majoring in film.
And I don't mean dropping him off in the "here's your hat what's your hurry" sense. More in the "we're going to take six days, fix up your dorm room, buy even more things for you at Bed Bath and Beyond, take you out to eat for every meal and let you stay with us in our nice hotel until you absolutely have to move in" sense.
I won't go into what it was like to say goodbye before we had to leave for the airport yesterday. As I'm sure you've surmised by now from the other posts I've put up on the subject, suffice it to say I was a mess (I know, I'm as shocked as you are).
But twenty-four hours later, you'll be glad to know, it's not one iota easier.
I'm lucky in that I have a kid who wants us to text, call, FaceTime and Skype with him all we want. Or so he says. We won't drive him crazy, but we will be in touch on a regular basis. But he's grown up and he's growing up, and we're going to let him do it - no matter how much it hurts or how counter-intuitive it is.
It's been said they're leaving you from the moment they're born. Maybe, but for sure he's been leaving faster and faster as he's gotten older.
And now, in the blink of an eye, he's off becoming the man he's meant to be.
I'm so lucky, because I can't remember a time when my son and I ended a conversation without saying "I love you" to each other. And I'm not about to start now.
I love you buddy man.
Now I have to go help your sister move into your old room.
No matter how you slice it, if you know nothing about cuts of meat when you get to Austin you will by the time you're heading out.
The Salt Lick. Franklin's. Lambert's. There's no shortage of bbq places here and everyone seems to have a favorite. So far mine is Lambert's, but only because I haven't had five hours to kill waiting in line at Franklin's.
Sure Austin's a town known for its music, restaurants, art community and, as my checkbook knows all to well, its university. But it's also known for the fact you can look as far as the eye can see, and you won't find an iron-deficient person anywhere.
I've had more brisket, pulled pork and ribs in the last five days than I've had in my entire life - each bite more delicious than the next. I'm sure some of you are thinking that's a lot of meat to be eating. Don't worry. I've been wielding my Lipitor almost as much as my steak knife.
Others might be saying I don't have to order meat every time. I could order something healthy like a salad. Well, in case you forgot, this is Texas. That's just crazy talk.
My love of smokey meats (by the way, Smokey Meats - one of the best jazz musicians ever) won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows a few years ago, my good friends Tena Olson, Alan Otto and I were going to start an ad agency called The Beefery. We had t-shirts and hats made, and used the butcher chart you see above as our logo, only instead of labeling the cuts, we replaced them with snappy ad-related items.
After a lot of meatings at Starbucks about how we were going to get the agency going, we finally put the idea out to pasture. We did however continue the meetings at Starbucks, you know, because why not.
Anyway, I've decided to cut way back on my meat consumption starting tomorrow.
In fact I just may cut back on food consumption in general before that picture of the cow has my face on it.
