They're Back

Dust off the spandex and stock up on your VHS tapes, because American Gladiators is back. Yes, you read that correctly. The Assault, Gauntlet, Joust, and your other favorite events are back and better than ever.

A friend of mine had the genius idea of starting a contest amongst us guys to see who could guess the names of the new Gladiators.

This of course sparked a flurry of emails, as all other issues, whether work, personal, or political in nature, paled in comparison.

A sample of what we've come up with...
Onyx, Bruiser, Shiloh, Falconer, SlamDance, Hail, Brick, Hurricane, Tsunami, Lynx, Steroid, Human Growth Hormone, Fireball, Canon, Dynamo, Comet, Axe, Vegas, Retro, Crash, Slam, Flame, Zeus, Volcano, Lars, and Tito.

What names would you pick?

Rappers are Role Models

Over Thanksgiving my nephew was asked me if I had an iPod, and then proceeded to ask if I happened to have any 50 Cent, Chris Brown, Chamillionaire, and others on it. I was shocked -- I consider myself fairly in-the-know when it comes to music, and I've hardly heard of Chamillionaire. How did an eight year old know about him then?

I guess it's the phenomenon known as the internet. Oh yeah, and MTV. It's too bad that MTV has become the Us Weekly of television. I still remember the first time I saw Thriller on MTV. Man, was I in awe (and a little scared too). Whatever happened to those days?

Can you say Product Placement?

NBC's The Office is my favorite show on TV. Tonight's episode was excellent, but it also contained possibly the most blatant product placement of all time.

One scene had Kevin Malone (played by Brian Baumgartner) shredding office documents with this shredder shown at the left. He talked about how great it was, and proceeded to shred papers, a CD, and one of his own credit cards.

Then they cut to a commercial. And surprise, surprise, it was a Staples commercial for the exact same shredder. Wow. Go marketing. What's even more, when I went to Staples.com to get a picture of the shredder, I came upon this page titled "Staples MailMate shredder and The Office". I bet they sell a million of these.