Cowboys in Manhattan

Impossible is not the same as never been done before

1. This is great marketing for NorthFace. This is NorthFace doing to running and life/motivating/fitness/inspiration what DeBeers did to Diamonds and Engagement/Marriage/Romance
   
2. But it is still very much real and very powerful in its message. Is every man a Dean? No!, But is it good for the country if people watch less TV and do more running, you bet it is.
3. What do you do if meet your goal of a 50x50x50. Running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days, you run a marathon backward, then what? You decide to run from NYC to SF. This is the story of Dean Karnazes.
   

Blog link here.

Kia Austin commercial - 2

What is going on with Capitol Kia in Austin. It has that commercial featuring Bill Dickason. I blogged about it earlier here. Last night, Kim and I saw their ad again and this time the kitten was replaced with a shot of a cow chewing cud contentedly. I am not sure how a contented cow is relevant to me buying Kia but it sure is making the dealership look pretty darn amateurish.

If anybody can point me to a video link of the Kia commercial that would be great :)

Shopping made easy

Riya launched like.com today. Blog post here
This is a really cool technology driven innovation from a company I admire a lot. I have no affliation and do not know anybody at Riya but have thoroughly enjoyed reading Munjal's blog.

Check it out.

If you are a woman who does not like sharing your bathroom with men who claim they are women....

then you probably want to stay away from NYC. From an article in the NY Times (might not be available for viewing without membership by the time you click),

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also agreed last month to let people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the men's or women's bathrooms.

Apparently NYC has taken it upon itself to re decide gender. Some more "thought provoking quotes" from the article.

Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said the changes amount to progress, a move away from American culture's misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one's gender identity.

“Its based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

....................

But some psychiatrists said that eliminating identification difficulties for some transgender people also opened the door to unwelcome advances from imposters.

“I’ve already heard of a ‘transgendered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a woman in a man’s body but a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there,” Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. “He saw this as a great injustice in that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he claimed for himself were all ‘official’ and had legal rights attached to them.”

...................

So don't assume that she is a she or he is a he just based on their prominent anatomical features. Especially if you are in NYC ;-)

Capitol Kia advertisement is broken

Umm.. am I the only one who sees the kitten hissing between the fence posts in the middle of a Kia commercial (saw it on Bravo/Time Warner cable/Austin) . I saw this last night and pointed this out to my wife and she just saw it again now (almost 24hrs later). Hello.. I know you are selling Kia's but that is no reason to let your ad run screwed up :)!

Life is too short not to appreciate talent like this

Is this what Detroit should do?

well, they cannot since they never built the prestige to begin with. But here is what got me thinking about this.

First some initial thoughts, from this BW article written in 2000 (bubble days).

Car sales may be sluggish in Europe overall, but German carmakers are gearing up for high times in the ultrapremium niche. Even Volkswagen now wants a piece of the action. The profit margin can be as dreamy as the new models: 30%, six times the industry average.

The article goes on to say

Even with the high margins, the market is so small that the contribution to a carmaker's bottom line is negligible. Analysts estimate that the Maybach, for example, will generate minimal profits for DaimlerChrysler.

So here we are in 2006 and my blog reading today lead me to this,

The star car is their $450,000 SLR McLaren which was beast on the race track (0-60 in about 3.5 secs)...photo of yours truly in the drivers seat. I asked how many they were making of the "limited" release. Given the price tag, I would have assumed a couple hundred cars. They are making 7,000. That's right. They are planning on selling 7,000 $450,000 cars. G

Do the math.... Yup you read it right. If there was no typo in the original blog post, then Mercedes plans on making 3.15 Billion $ from the sale of the SLR Mc Laren. Granted I don't know if this is a 5 year/10 year plan on what... But this translates to 1 Billion $ in profits for Mercedes, conservatively speaking. Heh... so is there a Detroit manufacturer that can ride the Bubble like this? and more importantly what have we learnt from our 2000 experiences?...

Of course we need the gratuitous picture ;)