From the New York Times:

Can a Dead Brand Live Again?
By ROB WALKER
Published: May 18, 2008

Do you remember Brim?

The coffee brand? Perhaps you recall its advertising slogan: “Fill it to the rim — with Brim!” Those ads haven’t been shown in years, and Brim itself has been off retail shelves since the 1990s. Yet depending on how old you are, there’s a fair chance that there’s some echo of the Brim brand in your brain. That’s no surprise, given that from 1961 to around 1995, General Foods spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to get it there. But General Foods disappeared into the conglomerate now known as Altria, which also acquired Kraft, maker of Maxwell House. With much smaller sales than that megabrand, Brim soon disappeared — except, perhaps, for a vague idea of Brim that lingered, and lingers even now, in the minds of millions of consumers.

What’s that worth? A small company in Chicago, called River West Brands, figures that it’s definitely worth something, and possibly quite a lot. The firm did its own research a year or so ago and claims that among people over the age of 25, Brim had 92 percent “aided national awareness.” What this means is that if you ask people anywhere in America if they have ever heard of Brim, about 9 out of 10 will say yes. If true, that’s potentially a big deal. Building that level of recognition for a new brand of coffee — or anything else — from scratch would involve an astronomical amount of money, a great deal of time, or both.

Marketers like to talk about something called brand “equity,” a combination of familiarity and positive associations that clearly has some sort of value, even if it’s impossible to measure in a convincing empirical way. Exploiting the equity of dead or dying brands — sometimes called ghost brands, orphan brands or zombie brands — is a topic many consumer-products firms, large and small, have wrestled with for years. River West’s approach is interesting for two reasons.

One is that for the most part the equity — the idea — is the only thing the company is interested in owning. River West acquires brands when the products themselves are dead, not merely ailing. Aside from Brim, the brands it acquired in the last few years include Underalls, Salon Selectives, Nuprin and the game maker Coleco, among others. “In most cases we’re dealing with a brand that only exists as intellectual property,” says Paul Earle, River West’s founder. “There’s no retail presence, no product, no distribution, no trucks, no plants. Nothing. All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.”

The other interesting thing is that when Earle talks about consumer memory, he is factoring in something curious: the faultiness of consumer memory. There is opportunity, he says, not just in what we remember but also in what we misremember.

River West is a young company, and few of its ideas have been directly tested in the marketplace. The revival of Brim, for instance, has yet to crystallize into a plan with real manufacturing and distribution partners. But River West is starting to bring some familiar names back into the consumer realm. It is thanks to River West that you can buy Nuprin again at CVS. The firm has also played a role in the return of Eagle Snacks to some grocery-store aisles. In late January, Drugstore.com began accepting orders for Salon Selectives, which is also making its way into 10,000 stores, including every Rite Aid in America and grocery chains like Winn-Dixie and Pathmark. And by way of a deal with River West, Phantom, a Canadian hosiery manufacturer, is pushing a new version of Underalls to department-store and boutique clients in the U.S.

Whether these brand-reanimation efforts pan out as a successful business strategy or not, they offer an unusual perspective on the relationship between brands and the brain. By and large, examinations of successful branding tend to focus on names like Harley-Davidson, Apple or Converse, which have developed “cult” followings. Such cases are misleading, though, because they are not typical of most of what we buy. A great deal of what happens in the consumer marketplace does not involve brands with zealous loyalists. What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories — and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.

River West’s offices, on the 36th floor of Chicago Board of Trade Building, are sprinkled with the bric-a-brac of obscure products: a Quisp cereal box, Ipana toothpaste packages, Duz detergent bottles. On a wall of Paul Earle’s office is a framed, five-foot-by-three-foot sheet of uncut “Wacky Packages” stickers — those 1970s trading-card-size brand-parody images that rendered the word Crust in the style of the Crest logo, for example. Earle has a Midwestern everyman quality about him: he’s compact, with a big and friendly let’s-get-along voice and a penchant for deadpan jokes. Only his designer-eyeglass frames deviate from his overall demeanor.

Earle loves brands. They are not mere commercial trademarks to him, but pieces of Americana. He seems not just nostalgic but almost hurt about the fate of the “castoff brands” of the world. “If commerce is part of the American fabric, then brands are part of the American fabric,” he said to me on one occasion. “When a brand goes away, a piece of Americana goes away.”

Earle’s professional entanglement with branding began at Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was a cog in a gigantic ad agency working for gigantic clients, like General Mills and Johnson & Johnson. That was in the mid-1990s, and he saw what happened as conglomerates merged: brands that didn’t have the potential for global scale got squeezed to the bottom shelf, or out of existence. He was attracted to the idea of working with “noncore” brands, but when he figured out that big-agency economics made it impractical, he left Saatchi and went to the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and then took a brand-management job at Kraft.

At Kraft he observed the same mergers-and-consolidation process from a different angle, and he seems to have found it equally frustrating. “These are American icons with loyal consumers,” he says. “It’s not their fault a $40 billion company doesn’t like them anymore. Consumers like them.” He sees reviving brands as “a civic mission” of sorts. “If it weren’t my job,” he said, “it would be my hobby.” He says this in a way that sounds not just plausible but hard to doubt.

Even so, he has set out to make this particular civic mission turn a profit. While he recognizes that a given brand might not be able to survive in the portfolio of a multinational, different sorts of business models might work to sustain it. As surely as the ownership of brands has consolidated through one megamerger after another, the consumer market seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with an individualism-fueled demand for almost unlimited variety. Earle’s theory is that such demand means room for brands like the ones River West owns, and his idea is facing its most significant test to date, by way of the reanimation of Salon Selectives.

Helene Curtis began selling this line of shampoos in 1987, and sales shot past the $100 million mark within a year or so. It was, one Wall Street enthusiast claimed at the time, “probably the most successful hair-care launch in the history of the universe.” Heavily advertised, the brand was a pioneer of the sales pitch, now routine, of a “salon” product available for home use. Unilever bought Helene Curtis in 1996, acquiring a new batch of cosmetic, shampoo and deodorant brands that had to be integrated into those the conglomerate already offered.

It’s often hard to pin down the exact moment a brand disappears, because a product can linger on retail shelves for quite a while before it’s sold down or otherwise liquidated. But by the early 2000s, Salon Selectives had become a casualty of brand-portfolio consolidation. A few years later, River West acquired what was left of it: intellectual property like the trademarks and the original formulas.

River West’s partner in the Salon Selectives effort is called SSB, which has five full-time employees coordinating the efforts of various subcontractors (manufacturers, package-makers) out of River West’s offices. Selective Beauty is run by Gene Zeffren, a former top executive at Helene Curtis with a Ph.D. in chemistry. Earle and Zeffren are partly motivated by the belief that there is a core of Salon Selectives fans out there who miss their product and are eager to buy it again. You would think, then, that the goal would be to give those consumers their old brand back, just as it once was. And sure enough, when I visited Anne West, the chief marketing officer of the new Salon Selectives, there was an array of pink plastic bottle samples in her office, part of an attempt to match the old color as closely as possible. She showed me a video in which a surprising number of randomly confronted Chicagoans, asked if they remembered Salon Selectives, responded by singing the jingle.

Then she showed me storyboards for new Salon Selectives ads, which were not much like the original ones at all. She went on to explain that while the bottle color would be the same, its shape would be different. The reintroduced line also includes a number of new products, and the products are now more aggressively marketed as “customizable” (by hair length, thickness, texture, etc.) than they were in the earlier incarnation. Then there’s the apple scent. West said fans of the brand in its heyday frequently cited that signature smell as one of the things they missed most about the shampoos. So the new version will have an apple scent — but even that was being tweaked and “updated.” The bottom line is that Salon Selectives isn’t coming back just as it used to be, but sort of as it used to be.

West figures that fans of the brand who are nostalgic for their long-lost product just need to know that it’s back. But the real point now is to attract younger customers who probably never used the stuff. The name “Salon Selectives” might sound familiar to them, so the strategy must balance that familiarity with something that makes the product seem fresh and novel. Later West sent me the new Salon Selectives ads, now running on VH1, Lifetime and other cable networks. The spots do not announce the return of a favorite old brand, or even allude to the fact that Salon Selectives was ever gone. In one, a woman escapes from prison and immediately washes her hair. The cop who confronts her admits that she doesn’t look like an escaped con but (punch line) as if she “just stepped out of a salon.” This is followed by glimpses of the (pink) bottles and a quick “mix and match” pitch and then, at the very last second, a snippet of the familiar old jingle, rerecorded. West calls this snippet a “button,” and it clearly aims to function as the slightest mental nudge: this is something you know about.

Among River West’s various projects, this is actually one of the more conservative in testing the boundary between the positive associations of a familiar memory and the attractions of novelty. There’s less room to test that boundary because Salon Selectives hasn’t been “dormant” all that long: At least some fans of the old apple scent are going to have opinions about the “updated” version. Much will depend on specific associations with a product — which is not the same thing as a brand. Brands aren’t quite so tangible, so quantifiable. That’s what’s interesting about them.

One of Paul Earle’s professors at Kellogg was John F. Sherry Jr. (now at Notre Dame), who has devoted some study to “retromarketing” and “the revival of brand meaning.” In 2003 he wrote an article (with Stephen Brown of the University of Ulster and Robert V. Kozinets of Kellogg) on the subject for The Journal of Customer Behavior. “Retromarketing is not merely a matter of reviving dormant brands and foisting them on softhearted, dewy-eyed, nostalgia-stricken consumers,” they asserted. “It involves working with consumers to co-create an oasis of authenticity for tired and thirsty travelers through the desert of mass-produced marketing dreck.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but Sherry turned out to be more straightforward in conversation. “There’s no real reason that a brand needs to die,” he told me, unless it is attached to a product that “functionally doesn’t work.” That is, as long as a given product can change to meet contemporary performance standards, “your success is really dependent on how skillful you are in managing the brand’s story so that it resonates with meaning that consumers like.”

The holy grail example of brand reanimation is the Volkswagen Beetle, which a few years ago rose from dormancy and became a hit all over again in an updated form that was both nostalgic and contemporary. The reintroduced Beetle layered “nostalgic reassurance” over modern functionality. “It’s a brand that’s memorable for a lot of different reasons,” Sherry said. “But largely because it evokes this past that never was — that was morally superior or simpler, an era of better craftsmanship. That kind of thing.”

Such abstract notions are much on display at the Licensing International Expo, an annual event at which the owners of cultural properties — TV shows, movies, cartoon characters — meet with makers of things and try to negotiate deals granting them a paid license to use the properties to add meaning and market value to whatever things they make. It is a good place to contemplate the business potential of “the brand” in free-floating form, unmoored to any product or company that may have actually created it. A surprising number of the symbols represented at the expo held last summer in New York were simply brand logos. Spam, for instance, had its own booth. IMC Licensing was there on behalf of its clients Oreo, Altoids, Dole and Oscar Mayer. At one point I encountered a person dressed up as a can of Lysol, which is represented by the Licensing Company.

Another firm that represents a number of consumer brands is the Beanstalk Group, which staked out a rather large chunk of floor space at the expo, complete with a coffee bar and about 20 tables. Owned by Omnicom Group, Beanstalk is the licensing firm for a wide range of cultural properties, from Harley-Davidson to Andy Warhol to the United States Army. None of these are dead brands, of course, but Beanstalk’s track record with converting brand meaning into revenue is the reason Paul Earle was at the licensing expo. Beanstalk was exploring strategies to revive the Coleco and Brim brands as, essentially, licensing fodder.

Michael Stone, the president and chief executive of Beanstalk, has a refined sense of the licensing business, and how consumer brands fit into it. He knows what many people think the business boils down to: I make plastic lunchboxes and you own the rights to reproduce images of Spider-Man. How about a Spider-Man lunchbox? Stone cheerfully explained to me that this is merely a “decorative” form of licensing, and that’s not his game. As a point of contrast, he told me about Beanstalk’s involvement with Stanley Works, the venerable maker of hand tools.

Stanley hired Beanstalk about nine years ago. Stanley conducted “consumer permission research” to try to determine where the Stanley brand could go. “I remember looking through the focus-group tests, and there was a guy who absolutely swore that he had a Stanley ladder in his garage.” Stone paused. “Stanley never made ladders.” This is an excellent example of what “brand equity” really means in the marketplace.

In contrast to the fanatical-devotion theory, part of the point of most branding is very specifically to circumvent conscious thought. Psychologists use the word “heuristics” to refer to the mental shortcuts and rules of thumb that allow us to resolve the various routine problems of everyday life without having to make a spreadsheet for every trivial decision. Brand owners want a way into your purchase heuristics. Often it is not so much a matter of, say, a Stanley Works fanatic seeking out all products bearing that trademark; it’s a matter of looking for a product and choosing one with a particular trademark that, for whatever reason, we find acceptable. This is not brand loyalty. It’s brand acquiescence.

We’ve all seen the Stanley name, for instance. And by and large, we trust it. We have a general idea of Stanley that fits into our hardware-store purchase heuristics. But there is a great deal of imperfection and vagueness in these thought processes, and that is good news for a licensor. It suggests that there’s potential — or “permission” — for the Stanley name to migrate onto new products.

What Beanstalk did not do when it took on Stanley as a client was recommend investing in a ladder-production facility and hiring a bunch of workers, plus a sales force to blitz potential retail channels. Stanley Works, as a company, has actually been moving in the opposite direction, closing factories and outsourcing its manufacturing since the 1980s. Instead, Beanstalk worked out a licensing deal with Werner, which was already the biggest maker and distributor of ladders in the country. “They needed another brand because they couldn’t expand the Werner brand anymore,” Stone said. So Werner started making and selling ladders with the Stanley name on them. This gave Werner a way to get more shelf space, reach more consumers and make more sales. What it gave Stanley was its name on a new product and a licensing fee. Beanstalk has worked out many such deals, hooking up the Stanley brand with manufacturers of work gloves and boots, power generators and a variety of other things that Stanley never made (and does not make now).

Too many such deals, or the wrong kinds, can boomerang: this happens with some regularity in the fashion world, when a famous designer name gets spread over so many products, with so little regard to quality, that the entire image of the brand sinks. Still, if you see a ladder made by Stanley, you may well think, Well, there’s a name I can trust. What you’re trusting, though, isn’t Stanley workers in Stanley factories upholding Stanley traditions and values under the watchful eye of Stanley managers. What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.

We circled back around to Beanstalk’s ideas for River West’s brands, particularly Brim. Stone mentioned White Cloud. White Cloud is a brand of toilet paper once owned by P.& G. also owned the Charmin franchise, so eventually it let the trademarks on White Cloud expire. These were then acquired by an entrepreneur, who worked out a licensing deal with Wal-Mart to make White Cloud an exclusive Wal-Mart product. It became, essentially, a store brand, but infused with equity of mass-market familiarity. It’s very doubtful that the typical White Cloud buyer is aware that the product is available only at Wal-Mart. It’s also very doubtful that P.& G. (which would surely prefer that its Charmin didn’t have to compete against a brand that P.& G. itself created) will let anything like that happen again if it can possibly help it.

This is essentially the situation that River West brokered with the Nuprin brand, which was a dead line of ibuprofen painkillers (once upon a time backed by the widely known “Nupe it” ad campaign). Its trademarks were acquired by River West and sold to CVS, where it is back on the shelves as a stealth store brand. (And presumably enjoying better margins than it would if, like a traditional store brand, it competed solely on low price, not trustworthy-brand familiarity.) My read was that this is what Stone thought should happen to Brim — and that Earle had mixed feelings, believing, perhaps, that Brim could come back as something bigger. Even Stone seemed at least somewhat intrigued with the possibilities of licensing a brand that was familiar but dead. “With Stanley we have to be careful — this is a famous brand; we have to do everything right and mitigate all the risks,” he says. “But with Brim, the risks. . . .” He paused. “There really are no risks.”

This brings us to Earle’s ideas about the potential upside of faulty consumer memory. Maybe, for instance, you’re among those who remember Brim. But do you also remember that it was a decaf-only brand? That’s actually why you could “fill it to the rim.” River West’s research found that many who recall the Brim brand have forgotten the decaf detail.

The relationship between brands and memory (faulty or no) is a specialty of Kathy LaTour, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In one of her most interesting studies, she worked with Elizabeth Loftus, a memory specialist and now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a third researcher, Rhiannon Ellis, to take the issue to its logical extreme: What if, for example, an advertising campaign “implanted memories into consumers of things that never happened?”

The researchers found that subjects presented with a fake <a title=”More information about the Walt Disney Company.” Disney World ad inviting them to “remember the characters of your youth: Mickey, Goofy . . . ” were significantly more likely to say they recalled that as children they had met “a favorite TV character at a theme resort” than those who didn’t see the ad. The fascinating thing was what happened when they repeated the experiment, tweaking the ads to include Bugs Bunny, who, of course, is not a Disney character at all. About 16 percent of subjects subsequently claimed that, as children, they shook hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney theme park. Repeated fake-ad exposure apparently led to higher false-memory rates. In a separate study, Loftus asked subjects with Bugs in their memories what, exactly, they recalled about this incident; of these, 62 percent recounted shaking Bugs’s hand, and more than a quarter specifically recalled him saying, “What’s up, Doc?”

Earle says that this imperfection of memory can be used to enhance whatever new Brim he comes up with. This is “a benefit of dormancy,” he says. The brand equity has value on its own, but it can be grafted onto something newer and, perhaps, more innovative. “Consumers remember the kind of high-level essence of the brand,” he says. “They tend to forget the product specifics.” This, he figures, creates an opening: it gives the reintroduced version “permission” to forget that decaf-only limitation as well and morph into a full line of coffee varieties. “ ‘Fill it to the rim with Brim’ stands for full-flavored coffee,” Earle says, with a chuckle. “Fill it to the rim — it’s great stuff!”

Finding the deceased brands that consumers are likely to remember — sort of — is a process that can begin, of all places, in the library. Earle spent hours going through old issues of People, Time, Glamour and other magazines, “looking for brand names that sounded familiar but that I hadn’t seen lately.” This results in many, many possibilities that don’t work out for one reason or another. But every so often the process yields an Underalls.

Earle was intrigued with Underalls. Produced by Hanes from about 1975 to the mid-1990s, Underalls was once a prominent brand, advertised aggressively. (“O.K. America — show us your Underalls!”) It spawned “flanker” brands like Summeralls, Winteralls and Slenderalls. It was unique and memorable: a good brand. “You see the memorabilia on eBay,” Earle says. “That’s usually a good indicator.”

By way of MarketTools, a research company, River West asked 1,000 women ages 25 to 54 to answer an online survey about hosiery brands. About 850 did so, and among these, 72 percent had heard of Underalls. Among those who recognized the brand, about three-quarters remembered the “Show us your Underalls” tagline. Promising. But River West needed a partner to actually manufacture and distribute whatever the new version of Underalls might be.

It found that partner in Phantom, a hosiery maker based in Toronto. Phantom’s main product line is called Silks, the dominant hosiery brand in Canada. The company also manufactures a number of store brands. Phantom wanted to get into the crowded U.S. hosiery market, says Svetlana Sturgeon, vice president of sales and marketing for Phantom, and it made a certain amount of sense to leverage a name far more familiar to American consumers than Silks would be. Sturgeon jokes that, at first, she did not want to admit at meetings that she remembered the brand (“I’m much too young for that!”). But she did.

The point of the original Underalls was that they combined panties and stockings into one undergarment. (“They were the pioneers in the whole idea of eliminating panty lines,” is how Sturgeon puts this.) In early brainstorming sessions, Phantom and River West tried to come up with “the most expansive but credible definition” of the brand, Earle says. In this case that turned out to be “intimate-apparel solutions,” which means anything you wear under something else that’s “functional and fashion-forward,” Sturgeon says. This includes camisoles and bras and other things the original Underalls never sold. The San Francisco design firm Thinc came up with a new graphic identity and packaging ideas that referenced classic elements of the old ads, but radically updated them. New slogan: “Lovely underneath it all.” With the prototypes complete, Sturgeon has begun the process of meeting with boutique and department-store buyers, in the hope of getting products into stores, at least on a test level, in the fall.

Brand familiarity alone guarantees nothing. Sears owns several well-known brand names — Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, the Sears name itself — and is viewed by Wall Street as a basket case. Multinationals routinely go through cycles of acquiring and creating brands and then paring back when, inevitably, some underperform. A tiny number of hard-core loyalists not only doesn’t mean a whole lot when reviving a brand, it might be a problem because those people do remember. A number of the more cultish devotees of the VW Beetle, in fact, forthrightly rejected its reanimated version as a fraud. In that case, those consumers were marginalized by a far wider buying public who weren’t such sticklers.

And really, something like the Beetle is actually a special case: it wasn’t just a well-known product, it was a cultural icon on a level that very few products or brands ever achieve. River West is trying to reanimate brands that are sort of familiar but don’t have anything like a VW level of built-in cultural capital to draw on. If there is a cult of Brim out there somewhere, it’s pretty small and very quiet.

What River West really wants is to bring back these brands in a way that not only builds on their former popularity but also manages, via the skillful management of what we do remember and what we don’t, to transcend it. This would be quite a trick. A few months after he returned from the licensing expo, Earle more or less dropped the strategy of turning Brim into a glorified store brand. These days he’s talking about finding a “really innovative” coffee-manufacturing partner who could make the Brim brand an umbrella for groundbreaking (but unspecified) coffee advances that would work in the general market, not just one chain. He sounded almost protective of the Brim idea, and possibly a bit frustrated that he hadn’t hit on the way to bring it back. “Brim is, within our company, one of our best-known brands,” he said to me at one point. “In fact it’s our absolutely best-known brand. So expectations are high.”

Later he added: “The strength of a dormant brand is we can remake this however we want. The challenge is we can remake this however we want.”

Eventually, Earle introduced me at his office to Scott Lazar, chief executive of another River West partner, Reserve Brands, which is overseeing the revivification of Eagle Snacks. I’d never heard of the brand, but I was assured that plenty of Midwesterners knew it. Eagle had once been owned by Anheuser-Busch and was the beer maker’s way into the salty-snack market dominated by Frito-Lay. Its most well known product, it seems, was the honey-roasted peanut, particularly in tiny bags given out as snacks on airlines. Anheuser-Busch eventually pulled the plug, selling its equipment to Frito-Lay and the trademarks to Procter & Gamble in the mid-1990s. Lazar said that while the new Eagle has acquired those trademarks, the new and expanded product line consists largely of snacks that the old Eagle never made, with names like “Poppers!” and “Bursts!” These are rolling out in a variety of grocery stores across the country. Lazar tried to give me about six large bags of samples, but I demurred on account of limited luggage space.

I ended up with two bags, which Earle and I took downstairs to the bar at the Ceres Cafe. It was crowded and loud, filled with big Chicago men who in some cases had spent the day screaming on the Chicago Board of Trade floor and who in all cases were not shy. We found a place to sit, plopping the Eagle snacks in front of us. And one man after another leaned into our space and pointed at the bags and boomed, “Eagle!” Big hands reached toward the bags to get a scoop of snacks that the old Eagle had never made, and at the time were not in stores, and big voices declared, “I remember those!”

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine. His book, “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are,” will be published by Random House next month.

I’ve been searching for this for a few years, and I finally found it on YouTube.  When I was a kid, Buffalo had some of the best television around.  The most fun station to watch was WUTV Buffalo 29, and independent station that became one of the first FOX affiliates in the country.  When I was young, channel 29 just showed an endless stream of reruns that to a young person were endlessly more entertaining than anything else on the air.

The funny thing, is that my friend Lauren’s dad was the “voice” of WUTV.  Here are two promos one with his voice and one with a brief shot of him toward the end (after the lights come on).

The graphics — considering that these are from the early 80s and well before computers — are excellent.

Wow.

When ReadyMade magazine came out, I was psyched.  Finally a magazine that celebrated creativity AND sustainability AND is well designed.

About a year or so ago, I subscribed to ReadyMade, I checked “Bill me later” on the subscription form, and eagerly awaited my first copy.  It never arrived.  Neither did a bill.  I phoned the customer service number on the ReadyMade site, and the operator promised to send out my first copy and a bill.  It never arrived.

Fool me once, shame on you.

So this past February, I received an offer in the mail to subscribe to 18 issues of ReadyMade for $19.95. Like an idiot, I sent a check back with my subscription form.  A fool, I am, a fool.  The check cleared lightning fast–3 days later (literally)–but guess what?  6 weeks later, still no ReadyMade in my mailbox.  There have been two copies on the news stand since I sent in my check.  

So today I phoned the customer “service” line again.  After 3 attempts, I finally got though to a representative named Brenda.  She was angry from the second she picked up the phone.  So like an idiot, I’m sickeningly sweet on the other end of the phone.  The phone call quickly devolved into Brenda yelling (yes yelling) at me that the label hadn’t been printed in time, and that I’d get my first issue “sometime” in July.  

Um, July?  This IS May, isn’t it?  I paid for my subscription in April!  What is this the 1600s?

Fool me twice, shame on me.

I mean, come on, if I’m 3 months behind the curve for Ready Made, I’ll be making coffee tables out of discarded sleds in August and outdoor cabana tents in February.  Now that doesn’t sound too “ready” does it?

Oh wait, and that’s not the best part.  Even though my check cleared on April 3, I’ve received 7 “Past Due” notices.  All mailed after April 12.  Wow.

So here’s my advice:  Clearly the folks at ReadyMade have some house cleaning to do when it comes to subscriptions.  I say, call and cancel your subscription until they get their house in order.  I dumped them like a hot rock today.  Too bad too, because it’s a great mag.

Some older woman said to me recently: “you’re not a real doctor unless you can write prescriptions.”  I thought it was pretty funny, that in a sentence, she could totally discount my entire academic career.

In any regard, it started me thinking, about the whole academic journey, and how much work it is.  I’ve been thinking a lot about my students lately, and worrying about what they’re going to do after graduation, and how they’ll find jobs in a less than stellar economy (note: every time I graduated, with my Bachelors, Masters, and PhD, the economy TANKED — so don’t worry, it gets better.)

Each year around this time in the academic year, I give my 3rd year students a little talk about what’s going on in their life.  Many of them are looking at the very beginnings of very promising careers.  Most are about a year away from confronting the beginnings of a quarter-life crisis: the realization that summers off aren’t a given, and that it’s no longer a 30-week on/20-week off cycle, but a 50-week on/2-week off (if you’re lucky) cycle.  That fact along is tough for most recent  grads to swallow (and brings many back to grad school a few years later).  

But… they still have one summer left.  It’s important — especially in this economy that they use that summer wisely.  I’m all for taking a week or two off to do a whole lot of nothing, but time is precious. The next 10 weeks will define the next 10 years of your life.  The time to plan is now, so here’s my prescription (FWIW) for the summer:

1.  Game plan:  NOW is the time to start thinking about what happens in June 2009.  What do you want to do?  Where do you want to work?  What opportunities are knocking at your door now?  What opportunities do you want to be knocking at your door?  Are you going to stay here or move?  Where’s the rent money going to come from?  All those (and many more) questions are fair game.  The answers are scary, but it’s not time to freak out.  It’s time to grow up, and take control of YOUR life.  If you have a plan, the rest will fall in to place.

2.  Read Suze Orman’s Book: The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke (or listen to the audiobook — you can do that whilst flopped on the beach.)  It’s a must read for any graduating (or soon-to-be graduating) student, and explains all kinds of things about money management, managing your credit score, student loans, etc.

3.  Read Keith Ferazzi’s Book: Never Eat Alone.  Then… start building your network (and no, not your Facebook network).  Your professors aren’t your only conduit to the outside world.  Get out.  Meet people.  Take names.  Follow through.  After your degree, your professional network is the most valuable asset you will cultivate.  It’s not easy, but the payoff will be huge.

4. Check out professional organizations like AIGA, SEGD, GAG, and many others.  They’re great for building your network, and many have summer events.  You have the time, now’s the time to get started and get your feet wet.

5. Start working on your portfolio.  Don’t wait another day.  Do it.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, or “da bomb” it needs to be done.  A good portfolio isn’t a done deal, it’s a flexible system that will grow and change over time, but you need to start somewhere, and fast.

6. If you’re watching TV, you’re not building your future.  If you have time over the summer to watch reruns of the OC, I Love New York, or any of the other shows on TV, you have time to develop work for your portfolio.  Remember, if you have only the work you’ve completed as assignments in studio, you have a portfolio that is remarkably similar to that of 300 of your closest friends.  Show your design skill, and do a few projects that YOU create from scratch.

That’s it.  No magic formula, just a little hard work.  Remember, you’re an adult now, and though it might be scary and overwhelming, YOU are in control of your professional development.  If you set your mind to it, you’ll be fine, in fact, you’ll make it because you HAVE to.

:-)

When I lived in Spain and Costa Rica, I used Ariel for laundry.  I don’t know why P&G doesn’t sell Ariel here in the U.S., but it’s a superior product.  Clothes smell fresh, and are much softer.  I found a bottle yesterday at Big Lots (which… is quickly becoming my favorite store).  Come on P&G, get on the stick and start selling Ariel in the U.S.!  O.K., I’m off my soap box.

About a year ago, I was interviewed by an energetic woman writing a book about life after graduation (from college.) She asked a bunch of really interesting questions, and I thought: “wow, this is going to be a neat book.” It is, and it’s out. Ramen Noodles, Rent, and Resumes: a guide to life after college was just published and is available at Amazon and other fine retailers. Check it out, and let me know what you think of my soundbites.

From:

Excerpt: ‘Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?’
“Supersize Me” Producer Sets Sights on Terrorist
April 16, 2008 —

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock first tackled the fast food industry and the country’s expanding waistline, but now the producer is on the hunt for America’s public enemy No.1 — Osama bin Laden.

His new book’s title says it simply, “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”

He has a movie by the same name scheduled to hit theaters Friday. The father-to-be wonders why the United States can’t catch bin Laden if he is behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other chaos worldwide.

Spurlock bones up on his bin Laden, Islam and the War on Terror knowledge before zigzagging the globe in hopes of finding the elusive one.

Read an excerpt of his book below.

CHAPTER 1 TERRORIZE ME

Ever since I was a kid, seems like every time I turn on the TV it tells me that I’m supposed to be afraid of something. Growing up in the waning years of the Cold War, it was the Russkies with their great big bombs and funny marching and their hatred of the American way. By the time I was old enough to notice, nobody seriously worried anymore about “nucular combat toe to toe with the Rooskies,” as Major “King” Kong put it in Dr. Strangelove. Still, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, I thought we were in the clear.

But it wasn’t just the crazy freedom-hating Russians that we were told to be afraid of. They topped the hit parade for years, but in my lifetime we’ve been told to panic about all kinds of things. Here are some of them, in no particular order: 

Soviet nukes, North Korean nukes, suitcase nukes, nuclear power plants, dirty bombs, shoe bombs, guns, assault rifles, semiautomatic weapons, sarin, anthrax, Ebola, E. coli, Lyme disease, Legionnaires’ disease, smallpox, salmonella, dengue fever, Asian flu, bird flu, swine flu, yuppie flu, West Nile virus, the pesticides sprayed on the mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus, breast implants, AIDS, SARS, SIDS, ADD, ADHD, PTSD, TB, Y2K, EMP, WMD, illegal aliens, drunk drivers, road rage, asbestos, mercury, lead, oil shortages, the national debt, inflation, stagflation, hurricanes, twisters, tsunamis, asteroids, earthquakes, killer bees, killer canines, mad cows, global warming, the hole in the ozone, flesh-eating bacteria, stem-cell research, Frankenfood, Halloween, poisoned Tylenol, sex addiction, identity theft, secondhand smoke, Crips, Bloods, neo-Nazis, Satanists, pagans, cults, serial killers, postal workers, Catholic priests, heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, club drugs, ecstasy, Special K, day-care centers, retirement homes, hospitals, an epidemic of obesity, an epidemic of teen drug abuse, an epidemic of teen murders, an epidemic of teen suicides, an epidemic of teen gambling, an epidemic of teens having sex, an epidemic of teens having babies, an epidemic of child pornography, missing children, workplace violence, violence against seniors, violence on TV, violence in movies, violent video games, rap videos, rap music, heavy-metal music, Dungeons & Dragons, snuff films, Internet porn, high-voltage power lines, cell phones that explode, cell phones that cause brain cancer, drivers on cell phones, pedophiles on MySpace, the air, water, soil, eggs, ham, fish, peanuts, spinach, and dog food. 

And in 2001 fear got a new mascot?a glorious rebranding featuring the godfather of fear, the hardest-working man in terrorism: Osama bin Laden. The attacks of September 11 ramped us up to levels of fear and paranoia I’d never felt in my life. Some of it was justified; I mean, it was the first time since Pearl Harbor that outside aggressors had attacked us on our own soil. But all the media-fanned panics that followed were even scarier than the actual event. 

The odd thing is that when you look past the terror of the headlines Americans actually live longer, healthier, safer lives than ever before. Our average life expectancy is 60 percent greater than it was at the start of the twentieth century. Medical science has conquered all sorts of diseases that were once common killers. Violent crime has plummeted in every major city. We’re safer in our homes, in our cars, on planes, trains, and bicycles than ever before. And globally, since the end of the Cold War no great military power has really threatened us. As shocking as 9/11 was, it wasn’t nuclear war. 

But we don’t feel safer, do we? In poll after poll, we express our belief that times are more frightening now than they used to be, that people are more dangerous and the world is more violent, that we’re so close to the apocalypse that you can smell the brimstone. We’re afraid of strangers, we’re afraid of our own teenagers, we’re afraid of insects, we’re afraid of the food we eat and the water we drink and the air we breathe, we’re afraid of TV and movies and the Internet, we’re afraid of the weather, and we’re afraid the earth itself is dying. 

Fear is a biological survival mechanism. But there’s rational, useful fear, and then there are phobias?illogical, unwarranted fears of imagined or highly exaggerated threats. Take the fear of flying. Flying is a much, much safer form of transportation than, say, driving. In 2004, a representative year, almost 43,000 Americans died in car accidents. That same year, only 600 Americans died in aircraft crashes. Your chances of dying in an aircraft are around one in 10 million, versus one in 7,000 in a car. Statistically, you’re far safer during your flight than you are driving to and from the airport. (Your luggage, however, is another story.) 

Now, take terrorism. Since 9/11 we’ve been kept on a constant state of alert?i.e., anxiety?about terrorists. Depending on who’s doing the math, the average American civilian’s chances of being a victim of a terrorist attack are minuscule?about one in 9 million, according to one estimate. According to the National Safety Council, you have an equal, if not greater, chance of being struck and killed by lightning (6,188,298 to 1) or of being bitten to death by a dog (9,089,063 to 1). Yet the National Weather Service doesn’t make you leave your golf clubs at the door when it starts raining, and the NSPCA doesn’t have color-coded threat levels for German shepherds. 

Let me put it another way: From the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 through 2005, about 3,200 American civilians died in terrorist attacks, 2,973 of them on the single day of September 11, 2001. In that same period, in round numbers: 

about 700,000 Americans died of heart disease 
 roughly 600,000 Americans died of cancer 
 nearly 500,000 Americans died in car accidents 
 about 200,000 died in homicides 
 nearly 150,000 died after falls 
 almost 40,000 people drowned 
 and more Americans were killed by police officers?almost 4,000?than by terrorists. 

Despite the infinitesimal chance that the average American will be the victim of a terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden, “the terrorist threat,” and the Global War on Terror have turned our entire society upside down and inside out. We’ve started two wars that we can’t seem to end, in which thousands and thousands of people are dying. The United States has committed what many see as war crimes and human rights abuses. We’ve made a lot more enemies around the world than friends, and by the fall of 2006 more Americans had died fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq than were killed by terrorists from 1995 to 2005.

So why, if the threat is so exaggerated, do we feel so much dread? Partly because we’re told to, over and over and over. We live in what sociologists call a “culture of fear,” in which the media, the government, and various special-interest groups keep us in a constant state of anxiety about wave after wave of supposed new threats to our health and well-being. Since Machiavelli’s time politicians have known how to use fear to keep people distracted, cowed, and obedient. Bureaucrats use it to justify their budgets and their jobs, TV newspeople use fear as a way to keep our eyes glued to the screen, and special-interest groups use it to keep our donations pouring in. 

But since September 11, the government hasn’t just kept us in a panic; the government itself has been in a panic. In 2002, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, whose very name invokes insecurity, not to mention the odd sound of that word “Homeland.” Maybe it should have been called the Department of We Hate You, Osama, and You’ll Never Catch Us with Our Pants Down Again! Because the DHS is nothing but a massive restructuring of the same old federal bureaucracy. It’s an interdepartmental Frankenstein stitched together from existing agencies, including Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FEMA, and various parts of the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the departments of Defense, Transportation, Energy, and Agriculture. 

With an annual budget upward of $40 billion, the DHS defends us from terrorists, illegal aliens, drug smugglers, hurricanes, earthquakes, and epidemics. It guards our seaports and coastlines, our farms and reservoirs, and protects us in cyberspace. See, it really is the Department of Disaster Movie Plotlines. It’s the DHS that issues those colorcoded threat-level advisories and makes us take our shoes off at the airport. And the DHS is charged with ladling out hundreds of millions of dollars every year in antiterrorism grants to the states. Having few legitimate terrorist targets in their districts but knowing pork when they smell it, many local bureaucrats have gotten very creative. On the list of 77,069 potential terrorism sites nationwide were “1,305 casinos, 163 water parks, 159 cruise ships, 244 jails, 3,773 malls, 718 mortuaries and 571 nursing homes.” Specific targets included “the Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo near Huntsville, Ala., a bourbon festival, a bean festival and the Kangaroo Conservation Center in Dawsonville, Ga. . . . the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified ‘Beach at End of a Street.’ ” Ice-cream parlors, check-cashing joints, and tackle shops also made the list. 

Meanwhile, the DHS spends about $5 billion a year screening us at airports. But the reality, as The Atlantic Monthly noted, is that it’s “largely for show. . . . ‘The inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe about flying,’ says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State.” 

Only it doesn’t make us feel safer, does it? Take off your shoes! Empty that baby bottle! At Dulles Airport, security personnel ordered a woman to peel her banana. Banana bombs! When fruit and baby formula become potential WMDs, what’s next? And who really feels safe? That nursing mother and her child in the seat next to you could be terrorists. She could be carrying liquid explosives in her breasts. How do you know she isn’t? Don’t rough her up when you arrest her?she might explode. 

You think I’m joking? I met a woman who was ordered by an inspector at Newark International Airport to remove the gel inserts from her push-up bra! Just because she’s a member of the IBTC (that’s the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, for those of you who aren’t or don’t act like you’re twelve), she’s a terrorist threat. You’d never see Pamela Anderson getting stopped. Why? Because Pamela Anderson loves freedom, 36D times more than that other girl. 

These were the thoughts that were running through my head as I sat in front of the TV in January 2006. I flipped through the news channels, hearing all about the dread and despair, thinking about how unsafe everyone felt (a few weeks before this friends of mine canceled a trip to New York because they had heard about potential New Year’s plots on New York City), and about how I got cheated out of the relief I felt entitled to when the Cold War ended. Who was to blame for all this fear? Whom could I confront and say, “Enough already. We get it. The world’s a scary place. Leave us all alone.” Whom did I have to smack to get some peace around here?

And on the news there he was?the man anointed as the father of all our fears these days. The man who torments and inspires millions around the world from an undisclosed location that even Dick Cheney can’t find from his undisclosed location. The most wanted man on the planet: Osama bin Laden. 

This was the guy who wrecked the carefree, post-Communist party the twenty-first century was supposed to be. The one guy who screwed it all up for the rest of us. If this guy is such a big deal, why haven’t we caught him? Why haven’t we found him? Is he a nine-foot-tall ninja with mind-control powers? Why haven’t we spent every resource and hired every person we can to turn over every rock on earth to find him? I mean, who is this guy? Why does he like to terrorize us? What does he want? Why do people support him? 

Despite all the face time he got in the media, I bet most Americans really don’t know much about Osama bin Laden. Be honest. Would you pick him as a category on Jeopardy!? He’s the Most Wanted Man on Earth, the man who single-handedly terrorized the entire United States, and I bet most of us know more about Britney Spears than we do about bin Laden. 

Sure, there isn’t an American alive who doesn’t know what he looks like. With his narrow, sharp face and long nose, his dark eyes and scraggly beard, emerging from a cave in long robes and head wrap with an AK-47 dangling from one hand, he was the very image of the evildoer I’d heard so much about. The poster boy for fanatics. If he hadn’t made himself the global enemy of the West, we might have created him. 

But what did I really know about him? What did I know about his life before September 11? Where did he come from? Where did he get his ideas? Why did he decide to start Al Qaeda? Why did he make us his enemy? Was he married? Did he have kids? Did they run and hug him when he came home to the cave after a hard day of global jihadism? (”What did you do at work today, Daddy?” “Oh, I terrorized the West.” “Cool!”) And what was he doing living in a cave, anyway? Wasn’t he, like, a multimillionaire? What drove him to give up the cushy life in favor of waging jihad? For that matter, what the hell is a jihad? What’s a fatwa? What do other Muslims think of Osama? Do they all hate us, or is it just a lunatic fringe? 

I wanted to know. And I really wanted to know how we got to this point where the United States, one of the most revered and respected countries around, is now one of the most hated on earth. I needed some answers, and I figured other people might, too. So there it was. At that moment, in January of 2006, I decided that I would do what no one else could. I would take my complete lack of knowledge, experience, or expertise and put it to good use by looking for the most wanted and most dangerous man on earth. And to sniff him out I thought I had to try to figure him out. Like Sherlock Holmes getting inside Moriarty’s head. Or that chick in Profiler. 

Maybe I could fix this mess. Maybe not. Maybe he’d agree to a mano-a-mano cage match to settle this thing forever. Maybe not. At the very least, I’d try to tackle the one question no one else could answer: Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? 

Four months later. April 2006. Morning. I opened my eyes to see a beautiful blonde staring at me. It was my girlfriend, Alex. She smiled at me as she came into early-morning focus. I believe I smiled back.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she said. 

I closed my eyes and said to myself, “You’re going to open your eyes and find that this is all a dream.” 

I opened my eyes and there she was, still smiling. 

“How do you know?” I asked her. I was pretty awake now. From the groggy borders of deep REM sleep to a heart-pounding post-marathon dry-mouth sweat in 0.24 seconds. 

She pulled one of those little plastic urine sticks out from under the covers and showed me the plus sign in the little window. 

“But that’s only one test,” I said. “You can’t be sure with just one test.” 

She reached under the covers again and pulled out five more little EPT sticks, fanning them out in front of my face. My eyes jumped from plus sign to plus sign to plus sign to plus sign to plus sign, then back to her eyes, glistening and anxious. 

I couldn’t speak. It felt as if I’d swallowed one of those EPTs. I closed my eyes again, and had another quick conversation with myself: “Pull yourself together, man. What did you think was gonna happen? You’re getting married in a month anyway. This is what married people do. Well, this and get very out of shape.” 

I opened my eyes. 

“What do you think?” she asked. 

“I think we’re going to have a baby,” I said. I smiled, rolled over, and hugged and kissed her. 

But inside, ten thousand questions and ideas and fears had all started welling up inside me. Me. A dad. What kind of father was I going to be? I just got really good at taking care of myself! I mean, I’d made it through all the pre-planning test stages of responsibility that determine parental aptitude. Stage 1: The plants in my apartment were all still alive. Great sign. I could water and care for greenery. Stage 2: The cat. He was still alive and kicking! He didn’t look malnourished or neglected or unhappy. He still slept in the bed with me, so he must like me! Stage 3: The dog. Dammit! I missed the dog stage. This is the most important stage, especially in New York, because dogs are a real responsibility. You gotta walk them and play with them and pay attention to them and pick up their doody off the sidewalk. Great preparation for a kid, and I’d missed it. Crap! 

“It’s okay,” I told myself. “You got two outta three. Still very good signs that you can actually handle some responsibility.” Only now this little old-person-space-alien-looking thing is going to be coming into my life, and it’s going to be completely dependent on me. Me! Scary. 

Fudge. I’d already started the ball rolling on my quest for Osama. The ball hadn’t rolled far yet, but I was doing extra push-ups, wearing more sensible shoes, and prepping to leave the country in a few months. What should I do now? Stay home with Alex and discover my nesting instincts, or stay on the path to finding His Scariness? 

Double fudge! Being a dad meant that I couldn’t just think about what was best for me, or my girlfriend. I had to consider the big picture. And what, exactly, was the big picture? I thought . . . I squinted . . . I started to see something. . . . 

Now, suddenly, it came into focus. What kind of a world are Alex and I bringing this kid into? He or she will be our responsibility for at least the next eighteen years. It’ll be our duty to nurture her, educate her, protect her. Children are like little sponges, soaking up everything you do and say, everything in their environment?all the good and all the bad, from toxic chemicals to toxic emotions. What sort of world will our little SpongeBob see and hear? 

A pretty screwy one, to judge by the news. We’d just marked the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. We’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, but we’d been caught completely by surprise in the aftermath of his removal?and had compounded the chaos with extraordinary blunders of our own. 

The cost of our occupying the country had risen to nearly $10 billion a month. Ten billion dollars! A month! How would I explain that to my kid? You could house all the homeless people in America with what it was costing us to be in Iraq in April alone. And what was all that money buying us? Every morning I looked in the papers and saw more slaughter, more chaos. 

How was our other war, the one in Afghanistan, going? 

Don’t ask. Though we’d just passed the fourteenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s final retreat from Afghanistan in 1992, the place was still a mess. In March, President Bush had made a “surprise” visit to Kabul, where he promised that we would “help Afghanistan grow its democracy and defend those who . . . can’t stand the thought of terrorism. . . . Our desire is to see this country flourish.” But all that had flourished in Afghanistan was the Taliban insurgency, Al Qaeda recruiting and training operations, and the poppy harvest. 

Iraq and Afghanistan were being called “the frontlines in the Global War on Terror” (also known as the GWOT, pronounced Gee-wot, as in “Gee, wot a predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into!”). But there were a lot of sidelines in the news. Countries like England, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan paid for being our allies in the GWOT by becoming targets for terrorists. Pretty much the entire Middle East had seen even more terrorist violence than we had. Israel and the decades-long issue of the Palestinian refugees were still sources of rage for Muslims around the world, and a handy recruitment tool for groups like Al Qaeda. France, where people seem to hate our culture as much as Osama does, had become a major recruiting zone for young extremists. 

Was all this trouble really caused by one guy? Or, at least, by the ideas he’d come to symbolize? Somehow, the fact that I had a little bundle of joy (and fear) on the way made it seem even more important that I get out there and try to find some answers. I had to do this?for me, for my family, for the child I was about to have. I had to face the terror. I had to know what kind of world I was about to bring a child into. What kind of father I could be. What hope we had for the future. You know, all that light and fluffy stuff. 

And so, with the tentative blessing of my wife-to-be, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime?a trip that would take me around the world in search of someone people say is the Devil himself. As I stared into Alex’s eyes after we’d agreed that I wouldn’t give up this quest, I remembered something my grandmother used to say to me: Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.

Hey wow. I’m impressed. One of my former students, Seth Eshelman who is the creative force behind the emerging design beheamoth Staach, recently was tapped to do some of the furnishings for the Dwell home. The entire Staach product line is available online at Design Public. Good stuff, looks good, is sustainable, well designed, and well fabricated. Check it out.

Various web reports are being posted that the days for Project Runway and Bravo! are numbered. Apparently, the company that produces and distributes the program has negotiated a deal with Lifetime to move the program after season 5 to Lifetime. That means that the next season will be Bravo’s last stand.

Could be interesting, as the “talent” for the series is contracted year to year — so it could mean that starting in season 6, we could see a whole new bumper crop in a revised Runway. We saw what those types of production changes did for the once unstoppable afternoon mega-hit Trading Spaces…it knocked the show so far off the radar that it’s nearly in the next galaxy.

Words of advice to Lifetime and Co.: Make it work.

Some food for thought, vis a vis the poor economy:

If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00 investment.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 remaining.

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left.

However, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer (or soda) one year ago, drank all the beer (or soda), then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, You would have had $214.00.