As gas prices pass $3.50 a gallon nationally and the economy teeters on recession, independent used car dealers like Hoyos and massive chains like AutoNation Inc. are having trouble selling used SUVs as buyers prefer smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles likes hybrids and crossovers (CUVs). Crossovers such as the Ford Edge, Honda CR-V, and Toyota RAV4 have more interior room and more rugged styling that the average car, but with a lighter chassis and generally better gas economy than an SUV.
Used SUV sales in March were down 14 percent nationally compared to last year, according to data compiled by CNW Marketing Research. That follows drops in used SUV sales of more than 8 percent for the first two months of the year, compared to the same months in 2007.
That trend has sent used SUV prices plummeting, giving owners a shock when they try to trade theirs in and find out how little they can get.
I get increasingly irritated when I see the besuited corporate jackasses driving their Escalade ESVs around blithering away on their cell phones with nobody else in the car. From my former life, I know 90% of these morons don’t need a car that size for any reason except to somehow show others they’ve arrived. Then I realize that they’re dropping close to $100 each time they need to fill those beasts up, and that makes it all go away.
True story: just today, as I pulled into my office, I see a late-model Ford F350 Supercab and a Denali XL in a nearby parking lot, for sale by owner. Yeah, good luck with that. I have a feeling those will be on the market for quite some time.
The coming wave of small is upon us. Before long, we will be mirroring European driving habits, which is a good thing.
Here’s a somewhat puzzling video of four Saudi Arabian people in a car driving down the highway at a reasonably high rate of speed. The twist is that three of them are on the outside of the car and seem to be skating on the concrete surface. In some sort of weird sandal, no less.
Dale and Leilani Neumann refused to seek medical attention for their 11-year-old daughter, who was suffering from acute untreated diabetes. Eventually her condition, called ketoacidosis (a lack of the proper amount of insulin in the body), became fatal. The parents refused medical help because they thought their daughter was being attacked spiritually and that prayer was the answer.
Family and friends had urged Dale and Leilani Neumann to get help for their daughter, but the father considered the illness “a test of faith” and the mother never considered taking the girl to the doctor because she thought her daughter was under a “spiritual attack,” the criminal complaint said.
Even more gruesome is what happened after the girl died. When told that the body would be taken away the next day for autopsy, the parents replied,
“You won’t need to do that. She will be alive by then.”
The two parents are being charged with second-degree reckless homicide. Anything less than a full conviction is not justice in my book.
Look, if you want to adhere to some stupefyingly twisted view of religious dogma, be my guest. But in the process, you have no right to bring up a child in this world. When your ridiculous beliefs affect an innocent life, then you’re no less insane than the guy who takes a chainsaw to his neighbor because the voices in his head told him to. You are the same criminal.
Ready? Troy Hitch, 37, and Matt Bledsoe, 39 — the guys responsible for YSAP and its sequel — met a few years ago while producing a radio ad in Cincinnati, which is 10 minutes from Covington. Bledsoe was the ad’s creative director and Hitch, a polymath, was doing the voice-over (he’s also the voice of Donnie and a real Photoshop expert). They quickly became buddies, started writing funny bits together, and partnered up at a creative agency Hitch later started, Big Fat Institute.
Enter Rob Barnett, a show biz guy who had worked at MTV, VH1 and was president of CBS Radio. In 2006, Barnett had decided to become a web video impresario and was looking for someone to design his site. A friend suggested he look at a number of hot sites — including Big Fat Institute. “It was hysterical,” he recalled recently. “I was instantly engaged and emailed them ‘WHO are you?’ In 38 seconds, I get a response: ‘Who are YOU?’ We started flirting.” The email led to phone calls and an invitation to visit Barnett: “A few days later, they jumped on a plane to Newark and we fell in love.” The guys built Barnett’s website, MyDamnChannel, and started doing comedy videos for it. Maybe you’ve seen “Itty Bitty Liddy,” about a 6-inch-tall Gordon Liddy? Or Tim after Tim about, er, something else? Probably not.
Anyway, one night, they found themselves facing a deadline, with no content. They had long nurtured an idea for a character they thought of as “the Angry Photoshop Guy.” Explained Bledsoe: “We had both been in the agency business so long that after a while we’d seen every kind of person in the advertising world.” One of those stereotypes, he said, was the “insane designer, basically. He has horrible social skills and horrible things going on in his life and the only thing he has going for him is he can out-Photoshop the guy in the cube next to him.”
Two and a half hours later, they finished the first episode. Hitch did most of the work, admitted Bledsoe. “The vast majority is improvised by Troy,” he said. “I hate him for that.”
There was some speculation on the net and here in my office that Dane Cook was behind the YSAP series. Wrong.
Clay Shirky provides a fascinating answer to “Where to people find the time?”, a question asked routinely by people who don’t understand how society is trending away from television (which is an accepted pastime) and towards more constructive “cognitive heatsinks” like the internet (which is still considered frivolous). If you’d rather have your TV commandeered than your computer, this video is for you.
Dell will be offering Windows XP to its customers beyond the June 30 cutoff date by taking advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. This option, called a “downgrade” license, essentially will let customers purchase XP under a Vista wrapper. The beauty here is that when customers purchase XP under this program after June 30, Microsoft can tally the sale as a Vista license, not XP.
Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a “downgrade” license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale.
I predicted a couple years ago that CERN would eventually be met with some socio-political pressure to stop its work with the Large Hadron Collider, and it appears I was right. CERN scientists admit that their work is a huge leap for particle physics, but, ah, what they’re trying to do nobody really understands.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
I can’t tell if the weatherman is just slow in processing the host’s comment or is being sarcastic. I’m guessing he’s just overreacting for the sake of theatrics — which, if that’s the case, I guess works rather well.
Maybe it’s because of stupid, racist local advertisements like the one below, running in South Oak, IL.
For the record, I have a Dodge Charger R/T and the thing is a galactic piece of shit and I hope it gets stolen every single night. I will never again buy another Chrysler product, and quite candidly, I will think long and hard before pulling the trigger on another American car, period.
Mac maker Apple Inc. enjoyed strong retail sales during the first calendar quarter of 2008, boosting its share of the US personal computer market above 6 percent, according to a report released Wednesday by market research firm Gartner.
In total, the Cupertino-based company is said to have shipped over 1.01 million systems nationally, representing 32.5 percent growth and a 6.6 percent share of the US PC market, up from 762,000 systems and 5.2 percent share during the same three-month period last year. In addition to its strong retail performance, there were indications that Apple showed decent growth in the professional market as well, Gartner said.
I’ve never before seen such an embarrassing internal marketing video. It’s nearly impossible to get much worse than this, and if you didn’t know better, you’d swear it’s a bad YouTube joke.
It’s not. It’s real, and supposed to be clever.
Microsoft marketing is officially dead. Notice all the suits in the video: that’s Microsoft’s remaining stronghold. That’s their lifeblood, and here’s your tacit admission of such. Problem is, this is so stupidly campy that it won’t resonate with anyone, let alone enterprises or MS enterprise sales reps.
The video is so bad that I refuse to embed it. If you want to see it for yourself, see here and keep the bad juju away from me.
My grandmother passed early this morning. She was 91. Her quality of life had been quite poor for the last three or four years, so on one hand I’m glad her suffering has ended. On the other, the world lost a person who had such character that I’d be proud if my son grew up with the same virtues.
I remember her peanut butter cookies and the instant coffee she insisted my mom allow me to have. She was a grandma I wish everyone could have.
More later.
“When we honestly ask which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face us with the reality of our powerlessness…..makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present for each other is what really matters.”
